Come On Up

by jordi Nopca

  Before handing the volume to the journalist, he solemnly recited the words of his dedication to her: “To Jenni, with affection and admiration, after a very interesting interview. In the hopes that we meet again very soon.”

  Victòria found herself incapable of pointing out Mr. Auzina’s moniker mix-up. She thanked him and he let out a resounding laugh.

  “Come, I’ll walk you to the door,” he said as she continued surveying, mouth agape, one of the dozens of shelves in the library.

  He turned off the light before she had time to leave the study. The room’s generous dimensions allowed her to make her way out without bumping into anything.

  “I have much work to do these days” was Mr. Auzina’s apologetic excuse as they returned to the living room. “They palmed off this master’s course on me that requires me to reread too many things. If I’d have known, I’m not sure I would have agreed to it. Six hours a week.”

  “Six hours.”

  “Six hours of class! I need three times that to prepare them.”

  Victòria gathered up her tape recorder, put on her coat, and grabbed her helmet as Mr. Auzina rummaged around in the bar cabinet. He didn’t go so far as to serve himself the thimbleful of whiskey he was planning to drink.

  “Allow me to accompany you to the door,” he said.

  Halfway there, he turned down a hallway that went in the opposite direction. At the end of it were about twenty stairs that led up to the second floor of the duplex.

  “Come, I’ll show you Heidegger.”

  Victòria obeyed the order and followed him to the master bedroom. The man turned on the light immediately, to ensure she wouldn’t misread his intentions. The dark wood of the bedroom furniture matched the contents of an enormous glass tank near the wardrobe. The scorpion observed them with its pincers raised, and when Mr. Auzina approached, it advanced a couple of steps toward the glass that stood between it and its owner.

  “No, Heidegger. Today is not feeding day,” he said. “He’s handsome, isn’t he?”

  The scorpion paced in its cage with its pincers aloft while Victòria looked at it and tried to camouflage her horror with a nod. When it was about to reach the confines of its prison, the arachnid took on an alert stance, its tail high in the air.

  “Heidegger,” shouted Mr. Auzina. “I told you this is not feeding day.”

  He lifted an arm to threaten the scorpion, which hid behind the decorative tree trunk that filled the middle of its glass prison.

  “We have a girl who comes on Monday and Thursday afternoons to feed him. She brings him spiders and his favorite dish, crickets. My wife and I try to be here to watch.”

  On other occasions, the writer had added, “It’s quite a spectacle, much more intense than the bullfights.” But he caught himself in time, because Victòria was utterly failing to mask her fear and repulsion.

  “I see you aren’t a big fan of Heidegger.”

  “Sorry.”

  After saying good-bye to Mr. Auzina, Victòria didn’t take the elevator. She preferred to walk, and halfway down the stairs, she stopped to empty out her bag; she wanted to make sure the scorpion wasn’t inside. If it had fallen out, instead of stomping on it, she would have just run away.

  ###

  The feature story on Biel Auzina was a success. The head of the culture section congratulated her, as did the media liaison at the house that had published the book, who also conveyed Mr. Auzina’s compliments. A couple of weeks later, Victòria got a message from the writer on her cell phone, again praising her article and hinting at the possibility of having a coffee some afternoon. She answered, thanking him but ignoring the invitation, since she was busy with the two double-page spreads she had to have ready that same week.

  Six months later, the paper rewarded her strong work ethic, sacrificing Saturdays and Sundays to finish all the articles she’d committed to writing. They offered her an entry-level contract. The salary was twelve paychecks of eight hundred euros each. Considering what she’d made up until then, it seemed like a small fortune; that would allow her to buy a dishwasher—with a small contribution from her roommates—and a new helmet. She couldn’t wait until her first paycheck to purchase them, although Graziella and Ciccina refused to chip in on the appliance, saying they wouldn’t use it. They claimed to prefer washing dishes “all’antica maniera.”

  Even though Victòria worked an average of ten hours a day, she managed to find a boyfriend at a literary prize ceremony. That evening, she dressed as if she were going to a wedding and ended up stretched out in a deck chair by the pool at the hotel where the ceremony was held, in the arms of Ferran, a translator of some renown. The excess of gin and tonics had relaxed her to the point where she took off her shoes and left them standing at attention like two sentries beside the improvised bed where she kissed that boy she’d just met but already believed was the one.

  Ferran had never read any of Victòria’s articles. And she, none of the translations, mostly of American authors, he’d published with independent presses.

  “I really like American literature, but I like you more,” she said as she ran her hand through his beard—before Ferran, excessive facial hair had been a deal breaker for her.

  Along with the smaller projects he occasionally took on to improve his earnings, Ferran had done some translations under the table and even rewritten the occasional book by one of “those authors who are said to be great stylists but who don’t know how to write two decent sentences in a row.” If Victòria hadn’t been so distracted by the kissing, she would have heard that among the authors he criticized—and quite harshly—was her beloved professor of aesthetics, essayist, and poet, Biel Auzina.

  Four months after they met, Victòria and Ferran had their first real argument, which was over Ciccina. Victòria had always noticed how he looked at her roommate whenever she brought him to the apartment, but she’d taken it well, because, after all, Ciccina hooked up with somebody different every weekend. They were all aware of her promiscuity, whether they wanted to be or not: Not only was Ciccina a screamer but she would often steal her lover’s underwear and show it off triumphantly the next morning when the guy left, grumpy after searching for and not finding his most intimate piece of clothing.

  After fighting for almost two hours, Victòria and Ferran agreed not to go to her apartment when the Sicilian woman was there. From then on, Victòria spent more time at his place, where he lived with Xavi, a guy from Girona who wore leather, worked for parks and gardens, and had the disgusting habit of refilling with his own urine the bottles of beer he guzzled down each night, for one reason only: He was too lazy to leave his room to go to the bathroom. Xavi’s lack of hygiene was one of the powerful reasons that Victòria and Ferran decided to take the next step and move in together, into a small apartment near Virrei Amat.

  “Welcome to the other side of the world,” she joked to her parents the first time they visited.

  Her mother complimented their quite spacious interior terrace, and noted the silence of living in a place that didn’t overlook the street. Her father took almost immediate advantage of that placidness: He fell asleep on the sofa while Victòria was making coffee. At 4:00 P.M. on the dot, Ferran begged off and went into the study, where he worked. He was translating the latest novel by Tom Wolfe. He was more than halfway through—he had three hundred pages left—but he had to have it done in a month’s time.

  “They treat you like slaves,” murmured Victòria’s mom when he had vanished.

  Her daughter didn’t respond. Her husband continued napping on the sofa.

  ###

  The next encounter Victòria had with Biel Auzina was the most complicated of them all. The staff took turns working Sundays at the paper, and once, when it was her shift, the arts extension rang while she was walking back to her desk, her two lunch containers knocking against each other in her bag. She arrived in time to hear the manic screams of the digital editor, who had just heard on the radio that one of the countr
y’s most important philosophers had died. Victòria was unfamiliar with the name, but she jotted it down, thanked the editor—who had already hung up—and hurriedly started writing the online version of the news. The information wasn’t yet available from the news agencies, so she had to do a little bit of research on Google. It had been so many years since the philosopher had published a book that there weren’t many traces of him on the Internet. There were a few pdfs of doctoral theses, half a dozen feature stories around his eightieth birthday, and a lot of opinion pieces where he was used as a prop to boost the author’s self-esteem. Victòria found a photo from the seventies, in which the philosopher was sitting at a table with Santiago Carrillo. They were both laughing and holding lit cigarettes. The mirror above them revealed that there were little more than ten people in the bar, most of whom had sullen expressions.

  Once she’d posted the news item, she waited for the assistant editor in chief to arrive so she could tell her about the death. She suspected she’d have to change the layout of one of the pages she’d already finished, in order to include a small obituary—she was imagining a brief item, at most one column, but still a lot of work. She continued looking at editorials on the Internet, and then, after jotting down half a dozen sentences that were convoluted yet empty of content, she came upon an article by Biel Auzina, published twenty years earlier in a Majorcan newspaper, where he defended the philosopher’s “moral force” and “unshakable convictions.” Victòria transferred those comments to her notebook, along with an arrow that pointed to the last name—written in all caps—of the senior professor of aesthetics, essayist, and poet.

  The assistant editor in chief came back from lunch with her cell phone glued to her ear. As she spoke into it, she nodded and looked at Victòria, who had come over to give her the news as soon as possible and receive instructions.

  It turned out she had to open the section with that death. The editor in chief wanted a “real showy” double-page spread with at least half a dozen declarations taken from phone interviews and a box containing the philosopher’s most important books. Since the assistant editor in chief had until recently been the head of the literary supplement of a newspaper in Madrid, she gave Victòria the contact information of some essayists, thinkers, and professors in the capital who could comment on the philosopher’s contributions and who might be willing to offer anecdotes about their personal relationship to him, if they’d had any.

  “When you speak to them, ask them if they want to write a brief opinion piece.”

  “Okay.”

  “And if they don’t ask you what the rate is, don’t offer anything; it can be a selfless contribution.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can you think of anyone else we could speak to?”

  Victòria closed her eyes, pretending to think, but she’d had the response prepared since the conversation with the assistant editor in chief had begun.

  “Biel Auzina. I found an article where he talked about his relationship with—”

  “Good idea,” said the assistant editor in chief, interrupting her. “It’s four-thirty now. Let’s talk again in two hours and you’ll tell me what you were able to get. Sound good?”

  ###

  Victòria left the call to Mr. Auzina for last. She wanted to talk to him when she had as much information as possible. That way, maybe during their conversation she could drop the name of one of her prior interviewees. Rather than asking for general impressions, as she’d been doing all evening with the essayists and professors, she would pose questions to Biel Auzina about the philosopher’s three most important books. Online she’d found a couple of quotes from Foucault that she could casually mention during the interview, after having drawn a connection between the French thinker and the philosopher who had just passed on.

  Biel Auzina picked up right away, but his voice sounded as if she’d awakened him.

  Victòria explained who she was, where she was calling from, and why she wanted to ask him a few questions. She said she was very sorry to bother him, especially on a Sunday, but the double-page spread she was preparing had to run the very next morning. Since she had already assigned the short opinion piece to a professor emeritus from the Universidad Complutense, she didn’t offer it to him, but despite that, Mr. Auzina informed her that he was unwilling to write anything.

  “I’m not asking you for a text. Perhaps I wasn’t clear,” she said half apologetically. “I only wanted to ask you a few questions for a tribute article I’m preparing. …”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “What do you mean?” Flustered, Victòria opened her eyes very wide.

  “Can’t be bothered. Good-bye.”

  Then Biel Auzina hung up on her. When she spoke with the assistant editor in chief, she had to swallow her pride and admit that the only contact she hadn’t been able to get a statement from was the one she’d suggested.

  “I don’t understand. I did a feature story on his most recent book not that long ago. I spent an entire afternoon at his house.”

  “Biel is a bit special that way,” said the assistant editor in chief.

  “I can’t understand it. He couldn’t just talk to me for five minutes?”

  “Don’t worry about it; we can do without his statement.”

  This wasn’t the last she heard from Mr. Auzina. When it was a quarter to ten and almost time to wrap up the philosopher’s obituary, the arts extension rang, the same phone from which Victòria had called the string of interviewees.

  “Hello?”

  “Sergio? Listen: I’ve got the article. I’ve written a little more than the forty-five hundred characters you asked me for, but I’m sure you can make my text fit with a slight adjustment to the layout. You cannot cut anything. If you knew how much work it took me to condense Juan Ignacio’s ideas … You know what they say: It’s harder to cut than to write.”

  Victòria recognized Biel Auzina’s voice from the first word, but she let him go on, among other reasons because she wanted to find out how much he would butter up “Sergio,” the arts editor at the most widely read newspaper in Barcelona. After hearing his attempt at an aphorism, she’d had enough. She couldn’t stifle her laugh, which she managed to disguise as a cough.

  “Sergio? Sergio? Are you all right?”

  “Mr. Auzina. You dialed the wrong number. I’m Vicky. We spoke earlier, remember?”

  She had to repeat her name, adding the last name and, finally, mentioning the newspaper she worked for. Only then did Mr. Auzina put two and two together and hang up the phone without another word.

  “Idiot,” said Victòria.

  Then she continued writing her double-page spread.

  Mr. Auzina, who was at the door to a restaurant in Pedralbes, smoking a cigarette, tossed the butt on the ground and crushed it beneath one of the leather shoes he’d bought on his last trip to Milan. He had written his article a month ago, when a friend had called him up to let him know that the philosopher had been admitted to the Teknon clinic, with cancer.

  “He’s not going to make it, Biel. It’s for real this time,” the informant had assured him, his voice cracking with emotion.

  The professor of aesthetics, poet, and essayist had jotted down the four ideas he would expand on if the newspaper where he was a contributor wanted to buy the piece. He spoke with one of the assistant editors, who was enthusiastic, while also lamenting the future loss of “the heir to Ortega y Gasset” (an idea that would be proclaimed by most newspapers’ headlines or subheadings the day after he passed). Mr. Auzina’s article, on the other hand, recalled his friendship with the philosopher, based on three meals they’d shared at different moments in their career trajectories. At the last one, it was made clear that they’d grown apart: “Artistically and aesthetically, we were perhaps incompatible, but we always understood each other with the same tacit fluency that a father’s tired eyes devote to his son’s incomprehensible ideology.”

  ###

  Four days after t
hat double-page spread dedicated to the philosopher, the executive secretary, for the first time ever, came over to the desk where Victòria worked and, kindly and obligingly, asked her to come to the head office for a “quick second” when she’d finished her article. The journalist wrapped up what she was working on, grabbed her bag and motorcycle helmet, and went to the anteroom of the editor in chief’s office, where the secretary had her desk, as well as the only Nespresso coffeemaker in the office, for the higher-ups and special guests. When Victòria got there, she was surprised to see the editor in chief himself, who remained standing as he handed her a couple of papers to sign, terminating her contract. Victòria stammered out the start of what could’ve been one or two baffled sentences, but the editor in chief cut her off, informing her that the decision was “irreversible” (which she heard as “irresistible”). As she looked at the papers, her eyes bleary with tears, she asked why she was being let go, but all she received were a couple of pitying looks accentuated by the secretary’s heavy makeup and a repetition of the editor in chief’s words while he put on his jacket and nodded in farewell.

  “Good luck,” he said, about to pop a piece of gum, which he’d unwrapped without anyone realizing, into his mouth.

  Victòria walked down the stairs of the newspaper for the last time, holding her helmet in both hands as if it were her favorite teddy bear or a sick pet, and when she got to her motorcycle, she had a harder time than usual getting the key in, because her hands were shaking.

  At home, Ferran had to console her with kind words as she wondered aloud whether someone could have done her wrong.

  “Think back to if you’ve had any problems in the last few days,” he repeated insistently, until she eventually explained how poorly Mr. Auzina had treated her the Sunday before.

  “He made me feel terrible,” she said, concluding her account.

  Then she locked herself in the bathroom to cry alone, and when she came out, Ferran told her that he’d once translated an essay by Auzina into Spanish. The experience had been hellish, because the two editions had to come out simultaneously, and the original was very badly written.