6
I’ve just looked at the clock and it’s almost one. Then I’ve thought how in those years, the image of reading in the middle of the bar came to be for me the reflected image of my own insomnia. I’ve thought a little about mirrors, and the strange feeling that overcomes a child when, in a moment of distraction, he relaxes his hand and sees his helium balloon fly through the air with inimitable lightness. I feel something of that inverted vertigo now, as I remember that year I spent immersed in a project whose logic escaped me, but over which I felt a certain growing sense of ownership. I felt, in a way, that my fictional ancestor was attending my steps, legitimizing them and lending them meaning.
* * *
Almost one, and the envelopes are still unopened. Outside, the street is empty; there’s the occasional drunken shout, but in general, total calm reigns. I’ve walked around the room, a little bored, made a cup of coffee, and decided to turn on the fan. With a little white noise as background music, a cup of coffee to revitalize the early morning, everything hums along better. I look again at the envelopes and say to myself, “The dog will have his day.” Then I open the computer again in search of anything that could distract me. After a while I find myself reading one of the obituaries. Another photo of Giovanna, this time on the runway in one of her last shows, and then a summary of her work. What catches my attention, however, is a piece of information I’d almost forgotten: in a brief phrase, the obituary mentions the terrible fear Giovanna felt in crowds. Just a line, but that fact jumps out at me unexpectedly alongside the image of the fragile designer in a crowded hall: the way she had of distancing herself from it all, creating her own space as if her life depended on it. Something in her expression tied her to the woman who read newspapers, something made her complicit in that sect of strangers who try to hide from their dreams in the middle of the night. She never mentioned her fear to me, but part of her would withdraw into hiding and I could see it clearly. Then I think it all makes a little sense. Her obsession with the mimetic tricks of the praying mantis, with thinking about fashion as an art of camouflage and hiding. Her hair dyed utterly blond and those false contact lenses through which she smiled shyly, like a person stepping backward. One didn’t need to see her in the middle of a crowd to know that her place was elsewhere. As if, when everyone else had decided that fashion was an art of pageantry, she had proposed the opposite, to think about fashion as the art of anonymity in the jungle. I notice now that though we met in various places, of which the apartment in that industrial building was the first, the spaces tended to be enclosed, as if the city caused her a terrible dread. I notice now that in the many houses where we met, the furniture was arranged in such a way that she could disappear into it without any need for closeness. I take a sip of coffee, and the image of her shielding herself becomes so alive and real that for the first time tonight I feel a little sadness.
The envelopes are starting to tempt me.
* * *
It all started with the usual jokes, to later degenerate into realer possibilities: What if you sleep with her? Could it be that the quincunx has a crush? That maybe in secret, deep down, you love her? Tancredo’s questions extended out over the table as unexplored possibilities. Giovanna was attractive, there was no doubt about that. Something in her false blue eyes forced one to care for her. But then, as soon as intimacy was insinuated, she cut all ties, and suddenly the distance was such that the very possibility of seeing her again came into doubt. She would disappear for months without leaving a message. Then I’d read in the newspapers that she was in London, Milan, Munich. Some part of me felt betrayed, and I again accepted my place at the museum, with my catalogs and beers, with the schoolkids who came through in noisy packs. Weeks passed and I would almost forget her and her project, except that I couldn’t bring myself to give up on it so easily, especially when its nature still wasn’t clear. “Tragedy or farce,” Tancredo would say, and I knew I’d have to follow the plan to its final conclusions if I wanted to know the punch line. And the next week a call would come, and hours later I’d be back in the greenish car on my way to the city, in a new season, different weather, but willing to participate in the same enigma. For months I was saved by the idea that no matter how much time passed, I could always count on the fact that in a small bar in the city, hidden from everyone, a woman was reading newspapers. Constancy has its tricks, however, and the day it fails, a whole world seems to collapse.
7
Soon I found that Giovanna’s terror of crowds was linked to another, greater fear: the terror of illness. It must have been spring when she told me. It had been an intense winter with a lot of snow and wind, and spring had arrived with a certain prophetic air. The call had come the previous day, at the usual hour but with different instructions: we would meet at noon at the designer’s beach house. I remember how the next day I prepared a little backpack and waited with a beer in my hand, looking out the window at the dogs and their owners as they passed. Maybe because of the conversations I’d been having with Giovanna, that morning I found myself thinking how strange it was that there were no stray dogs in those North American cities. As a child I’d always been terribly frightened of them, those dogs that wandered the streets ungoverned by owners or laws, symbols of a latent violence that could lunge and bite at any moment. I would stay inside and watch them go by, happy to have a barred window in front of me. Modern cities, I thought, sublimate their violence with skyscrapers. Modern cities erase their borders with construction cranes. I was deep in these thoughts when I saw the car arrive. I gulped my beer, and when I went down I was met by the same driver’s face. I debated mentioning my thoughts, but in the end I decided to keep quiet. We spent the next two hours in silence on the highway, me thinking about stray dogs and cities, dogs and islands, until nature started to win out over the landscape of ruin and I felt that something was approaching. A green sign placed the Hamptons ten miles away. Giovanna had mentioned the house to me during the winter. She’d inherited it at a very young age, and since then had spent long periods there every spring. I wanted to ask her about her parents, but something told me it was better to hold my tongue. And so, when I arrived, I confined myself to a cordial greeting and a discreet comment. Two hours later we were lying on the terrace in bathing suits, holding glasses of champagne, looking out at the waves, and talking about some small insects that play at cannibalism in the jungle. That was when she mentioned her fears. As a child, she said, she’d spent time in the tropics. She had traveled across islands, she’d been on coasts with clear water and intense downpours, she’d trekked through mountains and waterfalls. I wanted to stop her and ask for details, but I knew that when it came to Giovanna, ambiguity was a decision. There, on an island, she’d fallen ill. An insect bit her and she spent torturous months sick in bed, hospitalized in a far-off country. I remember how she knit her brow as she told me details about her long stay in that tropical hospital, and how her speech seemed to shrink away in fear. I remembered the voice I’d heard months before on the answering machine, and I flashed again on the image of those dogs of my childhood.
Her convalescence had lasted two months, during which her only lifeline was a series of children’s books that an old nurse read to her day and night. With my glass of champagne in hand, I imagined the contours of that scene: the little girl just ten years old, brown hair and black eyes—very different from the woman who now furrowed her fearful brow again—lost on a distant island, an unfamiliar language all around her. I listened to the story she was telling me and I could sense the absent silhouettes: the mother and father whose presence she should mention but didn’t. I thought again about stopping her and asking about her parents, but her voice got ahead of me and I felt it would be disrespectful. The worst part, she told me, was the immobility. To lie there motionless like one of those camouflaged insects we could spend hours talking about.
Everything started to make more sense. Just then, Giovanna brusquely changed the subject and went back to our de
bate about mimetic cannibalism. “To devour oneself.” I remember the words precisely because they didn’t harmonize in the slightest with that sunny afternoon in the Hamptons, the ocean pounding all around us. I remember I kept thinking about the story of her hospitalization, but she went on with her theories. She outlined then what for a long time I considered the greatest expression of the whole joke turned farce: “The ideal thing,” she told me, “would be to leave the runway pitch-black, have the models walk it completely naked in the dark. Not just darkness, but the girls walking the runway as they otherwise would, if they were wearing the full collection.” She said these things and part of me wanted to hate her, to expose the farce, but that very same part refused to hate the ten-year-old girl she had been. I wanted to delve into the shadows of those months of convalescence. So I stayed there until the sun began to set and she invited me to spend the night, but I—maybe out of fear or modesty, maybe afraid of loving her—excused myself, saying I had a lot of work at the museum and I’d better get back to New Brunswick. Thinking about the story I’d just heard, though, I decided to head to the Bowery.
* * *
That night was different. I got to the Lebanese bar early and sat down to drink a glass of wine. The woman with the newspapers wasn’t there, so I convinced myself I’d have to wait. Almost reflexively, as if I were filling a void, I called to one of the waiters and asked for a paper. After a moment they brought me one and I caught myself reading the art section. A short article about certain anonymous interventions by a British artist in various cities: graffiti in New York, installations in Berlin, large-scale conceptual art in London. The artist’s identity was unknown but his signature was unmistakable. I thought of Giovanna, of Duchamp’s signatures, and about the story of convalescence I’d heard that afternoon. Somehow that thought led me to a different childhood story: I remembered the vague pleasure I always felt on long afternoons spent fishing. My father and I used to go. He would guide us to some rocks on the coast where he’d start the routine, which was so precise: set the bait, the weights, fling back the rod and cast it. Then watch how the bobber floated there, in that suspended time of another world, a world of patience not so different from insomnia. Feel the flection of the tide on the line, make a game of distinguishing the force of a fish from that of the waves. Between one glass of wine and another, I thought how there was a line that ran through it all, convalescence, midnight newspapers, and those long afternoons spent fishing. A certain inverted gravity. I ordered another glass, and another. I tried, inadvertently, to rid my mind of the image of young Giovanna lying in bed, listening to stories in another language, terribly alone on that anonymous island. I thought about Tancredo and the story of William Howard, the island collector. I thought about that house in the Hamptons, the inheritance Giovanna had mentioned, and I told myself that the whole farce was about family. That it was all a subtle way to justify so much opulence. But there was Giovanna’s face, its distant presence, her unease and her fear. There was something real behind that apparent solitude. That was when the lady of the newspapers came in, accompanied this time by a small man dressed in black, with a long-sleeved collarless shirt that lent him a monastic air. It was the first and last time I ever saw her with another person. They sat down at the same table as always and I wondered if the man knew that there, hours later, a memorable scene would take place. She looked a little different, with her red curls falling perfectly and a long, red dress decorated with blue flowers. Her face no longer held tiredness, but seemed to take on the authority of age. The spring suited her so well that for a moment I thought I could love her. It was then that I thought she noticed me. After long months of spying, I’d finally committed the capital mistake: I arrived too early. As if in that bar one had to respect a secret schedule that regulated visibility and invisibility. I felt terribly present, and I tried to hide behind my newspaper. People were dining and chatting all around us, while I drank one glass of wine after another. I had committed the sin of arriving too early, and the only way out I could discern was to get drunk to the point of invisibility. I remember that from behind the newspaper I could watch her talking with that man, who seemed plucked from a Hare Krishna sect. Somehow I felt betrayed, as if, behind the many nights I spent in that place, there was a pact of shared but unaccepted solitude. Perhaps, I thought, my early arrival had broken that imagined contract between insomniacs. I had arrived early to the bar, but late to Giovanna’s story. The impossibility of arriving on time, I told myself, is another name for insomnia. At the other end of the bar, a blond girl was smiling mischievously at me.
* * *
On the right corner of the newspaper was printed “April 23, 1999.” The new millennium was coming and everyone was talking about total collapse, an informational error in the way programmers had stored dates. I thought about the strange English name for that software error: a bug. I thought again about the insect that had bitten Giovanna, the way our conversations always ended up centering on some bug. And for a moment I saw myself again as a child, swatting at mosquitoes and tripping over my feet until I finally surrendered in frustration to the bites. Insects, there’s nothing so annoying. With insects, the problem was that the slap always came too late or too early. I ordered another glass of wine and then, when the man left and the woman took out her newspapers, I ordered another. I was afraid my strategy would backfire, and it would be my drunkenness that gave me away. I laughed a little, thinking that something or other had bitten us all.
8
During Tancredo’s younger years as an activist, he’d harbored his own obsession: he came up with a way to critique the system using what he called “practical reason.” He lived in New Brunswick but worked in New York, so he took the train every day. It occurred to him to record all the train’s arrivals, the discrepancies in its schedules, to highlight the delays. For him, every delay was proof that something in that supposedly perfect system didn’t work. It all ended up in a little notebook with a red leather cover that was similar to the one where Giovanna would later sketch out her theories. I looked at Tancredo as he told me this, at his mustache with its pointed ends and his red-brimmed hat; I laughed a little and accused him of trying to hide his obsessive nature. You have to learn the art of patience, I told him, citing my grandfather. Maybe seven years have passed since he told me that story, but I feel like something in that whole question of schedules is starting to take on relevance, as my insomnia stretches out past two o’clock and the temptation to open the envelopes is gaining ground. Drink enough coffee, and the timing is always right.
* * *
I watch as a car pulls up and parks outside. Two people get out, a woman and a man. She is carrying a bouquet of flowers and he is dressed in an impeccable suit. Suddenly the woman turns and seems to rebuke the man. Impatient, he starts to yell at her. I don’t know what the argument is about, but its intensity is growing. The window creates a frame, and the sound of the fan re-creates rhythms. I start to think that these kinds of scenes always happen while people are asleep, that certainly my neighbor is sleeping peacefully while, in his front yard, a couple holding flowers is fighting. I can’t distinguish what they say, only the intensity of their gestures and the violence in his voice: the contours of an empty scene. Then I remember that during those months, I started to keep a notebook of possibilities, where I outlined different explanations for the scene I witnessed in the bar. It was a red leather notebook, like Tancredo’s and Giovanna’s, where I gave free rein to my imagination and placed the newspaper reader into broader stories. I had baptized the notebook on the first page with a playful title: Reading Hypotheses. Something in that title sounded like high school to me, like a science fair, a schoolboy’s silliness. Maybe that’s why I liked it. So the thing is that I used the notebook to sketch out possibilities, from the simplest, which was madness, to the most complex, which was that it was all terribly normal and I was the one who hallucinated its strangeness. It was something like a notebook of stories for insomniacs,
narrations skating over the void, like those stories Giovanna had to listen to during her months of convalescence. In some cases I wrote in the first person, but in others the protagonist was that New York ancestor I had created. I would reach the bar after one of my long conversations with Giovanna, open the notebook cautiously, and as I drank, I’d outline a hypothesis: my ancestor would appear suddenly—hat in hand, the face of a man with few friends—and he’d sit down beside the woman and they would start to talk. It was all in the dialogue: that’s where the real hypotheses came into play, from madness to a search for a missing daughter.
* * *
I look out the window again: the couple is still there, but now they’re quieter, embracing in the middle of the street, unabashed. We always ignore the fact that someone could be watching from a window. That’s where the origin of fiction hides. The appropriate thing, then, I tell myself, would be to create empty images: images like little black holes, as Tancredo would say. The image of a pale young Giovanna in a hospital bed returns to my mind, a voice beside her reading fairy tales in Spanish, and around that voice the knot of an absence: her parents aren’t there. From the day she told me that story, I knew, immediately, that nothing would be the same. Nothing can be once one of the players of the game believes he has the crux of the story, the key to filling the void. So after that day on the beach everything changed a little, enough to make me think I was falling into another trap, a more dangerous one, since it made me think that I finally understood something. The prankster’s trick, Tancredo told me once, is making the victim believe he has control over the situation. Only then will he fall hard and unexpectedly. Perhaps I sensed this and it was what made me get blind drunk that night, until I almost went over to the newspaper reader and admitted the secret of my spying. I got lucky, and just when I wanted to approach her, my pen started to leak over the notebook, spilling out a new hypothetical story. Like now, as I look out the window and see that the couple has disappeared, and I start to imagine possible endings.
Natural History Page 3