* * *
The more messages I received from Tancredo, the more I was convinced that our roles were being reversed, and now he was the one going deeper and deeper into the madness of William Howard, the drunk gringo Tancredo had met in the Caribbean, the one who was convinced that islands could be collected like stamps or coins. I feared Tancredo was moving deeper into a borderless world, where the limits of humor threatened to blur with those of terror. Tragedy or farce? The question was repeated again with nightmare insistence, while the first day of the trial grew inexorably closer. I thought about Giovanna and repeated to myself that patience was the trick: someday the joke would break out of its shell and show its mocking face.
* * *
In the margins of a tedious discussion of Brancusi v. United States, Esquilín found a quote that caught his attention. It said: “To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.” This time a source was given, one Oscar Wilde, whose name he vaguely remembered from his high school English classes. He’d read very little back then and worked even less, so most likely he hadn’t even read the book in question. A second hungover memory surfaced: he remembered having seen the name mentioned in the list of literary court cases that the defendant had mentioned. He spent the next half hour searching through the dozens of open documents on his computer, until he finally found the quote in a document he’d titled “Random thoughts.” There was the name, lost among so many others that likewise sounded vaguely familiar but whose works, to his embarrassment, he’d never read: “Baudelaire, Flaubert, Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Brecht, Burroughs, Nabokov, Brodsky, Onetti, Pasolini, Bernhard. In each of those cases, literature before a judge.” Reading Wilde’s phrase again, Esquilín told himself that maybe this was what the defendant was after: a final dwelling where she could sit down to do nothing, a private monastery in which to chisel boredom into intellect. He thought of Wilde, of Gramsci, and what came to his mind was something he’d heard about years before on TV: a Buddhist monk who had spent the last fifteen years of his life meditating and waiting for that final instant when his spirit would express itself in a perfect gesture. A minimal gesture, a kind of swimmer’s stroke, in which a whole life would be concentrated. Perhaps, Esquilín thought, Virginia McCallister had imagined her life as a pure effort that was leading to a final gesture, a judgment that would redeem her not only in the public’s eyes but also in her own. To do nothing, and then do it all. Or better yet, he thought, to do it all, give everything, and have it all lead to a marvelous nothing. To reach, at the end of life, a marvelous oasis of boredom where she could sit and pronounce a final word. An irrefutable truth brought his speculations to a halt: the date of the trial was approaching, and she still wouldn’t admit her real name. It was time to get to work.
9
The trial had been scheduled to start on July 15. Three days before, the foreign journalists decided to get together for a few drinks, perhaps thinking that the trial would be long and they should make some friends. Or maybe they were only hoping to share information. When it came time to choose the venue, someone commented that no one knew the island better than Tancredo. He chose an outdoor bar full of bohemian students, on a corner of the university city where the local intelligentsia convened to the pulse of music and rum. Accustomed as they were to the tourist areas, the other journalists found the suggestion dangerous and exotic, a satisfactory serving of adventure before the arduous days of work that awaited them.
* * *
That night they saw a face of the city very different from the one they’d experienced around their hotels. Here they found little of the shrill splendor of the lobbies full of women in high heels and salsa orchestras playing for tourists. They felt a different panorama opening up before them, an authenticity that had little to do with the folkloric costumes of the servers who waited on them in the traditional eateries of the old colonial city, or with the countless restaurants that claimed to have invented the piña colada. Here, authenticity was an atmospheric murmur, an entropy different from any other chaos. It was, as Tancredo said, a delicious hive where a multiplicity of voices, shouts, and laughter accumulated, ultimately weaving a great filigree full of life. In one corner of the bar, surrounded by empty beer cans, a group of locals danced to the beat of an old jukebox. Songs by Ismael Rivera and Héctor Lavoe, salsa rhythms that very few of the reporters knew but that still made them feel strange heartache and brief joy. Captivated, they watched the dancers turn. They commented on everything, described it all.
Observing the scene, Tancredo thought that aside from the color of their skin, their overly flowery clothes and their unmistakable accents, it was their gaze that ultimately betrayed their irrefutable foreignness: tourism was, more than anything, a way of looking. Description, he thought, was the worst trap of the costumbristas. If they wanted to go deeper into that world of which he already felt a part, they had to break through the anthropological barrier. He disappeared through a little door between two murals, and when they next saw him, he was carrying a generous round of Cuba libres. After that came a second and a third. By the fourth, Tancredo could sense tongues loosening, and the gossip started to flow. That was how he learned the rumors circulating among the journalists. Rumors about a possible romance between the defendant and a local youth, about the real reasons behind her trip to Latin America in the mid-seventies, about her possible ties to certain Peruvian radical leftist groups. Between one drink and the next there were also jokes about Esquilín, his horn-rimmed glasses and his look of a defenseless little novice. But it wasn’t only his appearance that seemed to earn the journalists’ mockery. There were also rumors about the witnesses the defense was preparing: an Italian journalist claimed to have information saying that they were to call none other than Yoko Ono, whom, she said, the defendant had met on a spiritual trip to the eastern Amazon. It would be a circus of celebrities, they said. A clown parade orchestrated by a demented old woman. With every Cuba libre, the laughter and speculation grew. A French reporter even said he had sources claiming Yoav Toledano was still alive. The other journalists denied that possibility: according to them, Toledano and the little girl had died a long time ago, on that fateful journey they knew so little about.
Tancredo let them talk, half an ear on their alcoholic speculations and the rest of his attention on the dozens of young girls coming in and out of the bar. That night, however, it wasn’t beauty that caught his interest, but the silhouette of a skinny drunk he’d seen around the bar circuit before. Always cheerful, always drunk, he was eternally open to starting up conversations with the young patrons. Until then, perhaps because of his thinness, perhaps because of the backpack he seemed to always carry, Tancredo had thought this was just one more eccentric student, but that night, when the man passed by the journalists’ table and smiled, he realized this was no youth. His graying hair gave him away, his missing teeth, his wrinkled smile: the marks of a passionate life. He watched him disappear into the crowd and told himself that someday he would talk to that mysterious man.
He didn’t have to wait long for his chance. When he went in search of another drink, he found the man belly up to the bar, fairly tipsy, trying to explain the plot of his new novel to the barman. You’ve got to be kidding me, Tancredo thought. The guy’s a writer. Before he could decide if it was really a surprise or not, he felt a hand clap his back and heard the man address him: “Man, I feel like I’ve seen you before. You look like you want to hear about my novel.” Before Tancredo could utter a word, the man began to narrate, in impressive detail, the project that had occupied him for years. Convinced that this discourse would be more interesting than his colleagues’ conversation, Tancredo bought the man a drink, and, after making a toast to island women, the author went on with his diatribe. At their table, his colleagues alternated gossip with drinks, in a sequence that would soon carry them to the dance floor.
* * *
The writer called himself Juan Denis, and acco
rding to him, the novel, as understood since Cervantes, was an outdated artifact. No one cared anymore about the adventures of senile old men. He downed his drink in one gulp, ordered another, and went on: no one cared anymore about one man’s experience. Any man. Or woman, or transvestite, whatever, he said. The novel was about to enter a new phase: an inhuman phase, as he liked to call it, in which human experience mattered little. “Just think,” he said, “the human being has only existed for two hundred thousand years, while the universe has been around for over fourteen billion. And the novel’s ambition shrinks even more when it narrates from the perspective of one life. Thirty, forty years, sometimes a day: the novel’s scale has shrunk until it’s disappeared.” Denis’s idea was to return the novel to the scale of the stars: to write novels of multiple layers, novels that could be read the way you read the passage of time on the surface of rocks. “Hermano, have you ever been to the Grand Canyon?” he asked. Tancredo gave a slight nod of assent. “Then you know what I’m talking about: the idea is to make a novel as badass as that. An empty novel, full of dust and air, a geological novel that depicts in an instant the monumental passage of time. An archival novel, that’s what it is,” he finally blurted out, seeming not to care whether his interlocutor understood what he was saying or not.
Tancredo felt a strange complicity. Drunkenness, he thought, meant feeling the world’s energy as a great embrace. He liked the man’s theory, the way with just a snap of the fingers Denis dispensed with centuries of tradition and empiricism, betting on a greater epic, cold but strangely moving. He was about to issue a critique when Denis, a new drink in hand, his voice shaking and stammering more and more, interrupted him again. He wanted to tell him more about his project. Something “badass,” he repeated, intermingling profanity with all his conceptual jargon. He said that for years he’d been planning a novel about the history of fire: a novel where fire was the true protagonist, a novel that would start with the chemical equation of combustion and then spread over all the continents and all the ages, a novel that would cross history like a field in flames. He had spent years excited about the idea but unable to carry it out. He was lacking the form. “Form”: he repeated it three times, showing his yellowing teeth each time, stinking of rum, and then he explained how two weeks before, after a weeklong binge, he had found the solution. Talking with a retired physics professor, he had learned that in different parts of the world there were sometimes underground fires so voracious that humans could do little to quench them. Some of them had been burning for more than a thousand years. Denis spoke with a singular emotion, with joy that verged on euphoria and that many would call the ravings of your typical alcoholic. Listening to him, Tancredo understood that anyone else would have shown him less patience. He’d seen it with his own eyes: how night after night the students were bored or scared by the delirium of that unlikely genius. He also knew that, ultimately, what this happy drunk was really after was a patron who would go on paying for his drinks. It mattered little: theories were always worth more than drinks, and this one had made him think of the small town where Yoav Toledano was hiding. A pang, cold as déjà vu, immediately pierced his back. The very idea that this man could know the details of the case, including that secret that supposedly only Tancredo and I knew, brought on an intense terror. He tried to talk about it, ask the writer if he knew about Toledano’s small town, but when he finally got his question out, it was met with an unequivocal response: “Enough with the theories, let’s find some ass. The girls are pretty around here, aren’t they? What do you say, gringo?” Denis gave him a slap on the back that resembled a hug, and with a fresh beer in hand he disappeared among the dozens of students now filling the place. Tancredo didn’t know what to do. He felt that paranoia was winning out, forcing him to find connections everywhere, linking signs no one else seemed to see. He ordered another Cuba libre and told himself that this was the true joy of thought: the implosion of the universe in a theory equally gorgeous and mad.
* * *
When he went back to the table where he’d left his colleagues, they weren’t there. He found them a few minutes later, dancing happily near the jukebox. Among them, eliciting delighted laughter, Juan Denis was contorting his thin body with the clumsy flexibility of a puppet. Farther on, in a corner a little apart from the group, the Frenchman was dancing with a beautiful young local. He looked for the Jewish journalist from New York he had a crush on, but he saw to his sad surprise that she was kissing a local reporter. Love wasn’t his thing. Half an hour was all it had taken to turn a civilized conversation into a happy, alcohol-fueled bacchanal. Still intrigued by what he’d heard, that geological and chemical story, he considered approaching Denis again. But one glance was enough to convince him that little remained of the writer, entirely replaced now by the drunk. Then he had one last Cuba libre, listened to some kids recite poetry to a drumbeat, and walked back to his hotel.
When he got there, he sat down at his computer and searched the internet for information on Juan Denis. He found very little, which made him think the drunk man had made it all up. No Puerto Rican writer used that name. Still, he liked the idea: the most innovative literature, the most avant-garde, was written by an unknown author who had invented it as a simple solution to a personal alcohol shortage. Perhaps, he thought, the ideas didn’t come from Denis. But he couldn’t find any mention of a novel on underground fires, or any geological novels. Just a mention of the concept of longue durée as it appeared in the writings of the French historian Fernand Braudel. In his internet drifting, Tancredo ended up at an article about a literary movement that argued for noncreativity and plagiarism. He read about Kenneth Goldsmith, who championed the disappearance of the genius as an archetypal figure of the writer, and who sought instead to replace it with a more modern figure: the programmer. Since the invention of the internet, he wrote, the world had filled up with texts. The modern artistic gesture, then, was not writing more, but learning to negotiate the monumental quantity of existing texts. The article included examples of texts produced under this new proposal: a typed reproduction of On the Road; a lawyer who had presented her legal reports as poems; a writer who spent his days in the British Library copying the first verses of every English translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy; a printed version—in the form of a nine-hundred-page book—of a single copy of The New York Times. One poet had even transcribed the forensic reports of certain illustrious deaths, like John F. Kennedy’s and Marilyn Monroe’s. The avant-garde, however, was not without risk. The article ended by noting that more than one of these writers had had problems with the law; recently, Borges’s widow had sued a Spanish writer who had tried to rewrite one of her husband’s lesser-known books as a comedy.
Tancredo found it all fascinating. There were, he said to himself, ways of understanding the defendant, of understanding what was at stake in the trial. Then he decided to forget about the case. He thought again about Juan Denis, that magnificent alcoholic with his impossible novels. He wondered if the man had somewhere to sleep that night, if he had some faithful friend who would help him get home. He fell asleep himself a few minutes later. The next morning, while everyone in court was preparing for the trial, Tancredo got up early, walked a few blocks to the bookstore he frequented, and asked about a local author named Juan Denis. The confused bookseller said he’d never heard of him.
10
The night before the trial started, Luis Gerardo Esquilín couldn’t sleep—plagued not by anxiety but by an idea that hounded him. He was afraid that in his eagerness to fulfill every one of the defendant’s wishes, he’d forgotten the other story: the one that traced not just her identity as an artist but her identity as a flesh-and-blood person. It pained him to have left unexplored the family photos and the trip his client claimed not to remember. On more than one occasion, in the story she had given the examining judge, the defendant had managed to omit that fragment from her life, sometimes claiming amnesia and other times simply refusing to admit that she had
lived during that time. With the trial’s start just hours away, Esquilín felt he had become his client’s puppet, the first pawn she would sacrifice in a game that would go on for years.
An email he received that very morning had only deepened his fears. It was from none other than Alexis Burgos, whose name he recognized from the police statements that had led to his client’s capture. He remembered the details only vaguely, but he knew it was Burgos who had glimpsed McCallister’s photo book, and Burgos who, confused by the discrepancy between the names, had started to unravel the enigma. In his first weeks as her defense lawyer, he’d tried more than once to get in touch with the man, but every time the reply had been that Burgos was out, Burgos was sick, Burgos didn’t work there anymore. Knowing the man had left his position, he wasn’t surprised to see that the sergeant was up north, writing from New York—although the logic he gave for the move, which he claimed to have undertaken to combat his insomnia and depression, struck Esquilín as strange: he could think of few places less relaxing. He didn’t linger over the question. The lines he read next seemed to be written precisely to confirm the anxiety that had been eating away at him since the early-morning hours.
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