I was thinking along these lines — rehearsing what I might finally transpose onto the computer — when, right in the middle of Avenida Diagonal, I spotted a woman who had caught my and Carmen’s eye when our Cisalpino train broke down at Kirchbach station on a trip we made years ago. It seemed so implausible, not to say impossible, that this was the same woman we’d watched elegantly smoking a cigarette against that snowy backdrop and about whom we knew not even her name, that I wondered whether, in my eagerness to record run-of-the-mill episodes in my diary and distance myself from the threat of the novel, I might be looking for things that weren’t there.
I moved closer and, as one would expect, it wasn’t the woman from Kirchbach. In that exact same spot on Avenida Diagonal — a pedestrian crossing leading to Calle Calvet — only some months earlier, another woman had had the same troubling effect on me. And no doubt it was this coincidence that led me to think that this particular spot had something peculiar about it, which I ought not to lose sight of. On that previous occasion, a few months ago — just days after my business went under — this young stranger, who was talking on her cell phone a few yards ahead of me, let out a sudden cry, breaking down in such sobs that she bent double and dropped to her knees.
So this is real life, I thought to myself that day. And that was my sole, cold reaction on seeing that young woman fall to the ground; a reaction in slow motion, perhaps because, since my business folded, I was spending much of my time distractedly roaming the streets, immersed in my own world, parallel to the real one.
Going over the events of that day — I later learned that the young woman had just been told of the death of a loved one — I’ve come to understand that that passing stranger existed in real life and had feelings, and that I, too, existed in the same reality, but with less capacity to feel, to truly feel. Perhaps I only knew how to feel with my imagination. And not only has that encounter led me to this conclusion, but I have also begun to admire or even envy that young woman, because she had just one life, just one, which is perhaps why she felt her pain so intensely, while I went around sketching the hazy wisps of a parallel world that left me somewhat detached from real life.
To tell the truth, I literally stepped back, almost in fear, when it became clear that the woman on Avenida Diagonal was definitely not the woman from Kirchbach. But I really don’t know what I’d expected. Did I honestly think she would be the very same woman I had in mind? I realize that, lately, there are days when I only have to think something and my whimsical side expects it to appear instantly, right there, wherever I might be, as if I believed myself capable of shaping reality.
A brief note: this sudden heightened attachment to reality might be the upshot of having now spent six days on these writing exercises. In any case, I’ve decided to include the incident with the woman from Kirchbach in the diary. I had the impression that it was the sort of episode I’d end up forgetting before I got home. And, indeed, I would have forgotten were it not for the fact that it became closely connected with the sudden appearance this morning of Sánchez in my field of vision. My illustrious neighbor was leaning against a wall beside a clothes-store window on Calle Calvet, smoking and staring vacantly into the distance.
As I approached, it didn’t take me long to realize that he was waiting for Delia, his wife, who was inside the store browsing clothes. On seeing me, he forced a smile and made a show of flicking away his cigarette with a hint of disgust, as if to let me know that, although he smokes, he no longer takes any pleasure in it. I got the impression that he wasn’t too happy about his wife leaving him waiting on the street, becoming, as he did, an easy target for any passersby who had read his books. Passersby like me, as it happens.
His scowling face and haughty air notwithstanding, he spoke to me with the same ease and openness he had displayed the other day outside La Súbita. He began by saying how awful Saturdays were. I immediately wanted to know why.
“Because they invariably involve having conversations,” he said.
Initially, paranoid as I am, I thought his response was related to the fact that he’d bumped into me again and that perhaps he didn’t feel as gracious today as he had last time and feared that I might lure him into a conversation. But that wasn’t what he meant; it turned out that his Saturdays were dedicated to Delia, who only allowed him to work from nine to eleven, on his regular Sunday newspaper column. As per the terms of their agreement, come eleven it was time for a walk and to engage in social life, conversation, the gateway to the outside world. He rather blurted all of this out and thus, in a way — and as if we’d known each other our whole lives — he opened his heart to me.
He knew, he said, that he simply wasn’t cut out for weekends. And yet, he recognized that those two days of freedom must represent a real luxury for normal people. (He looked at me as if, although I belonged to that class of normal people, he was letting me off.) In fact, Sánchez went on, he had always envied other people their weekends. For him, Saturday and Sunday were a torment of tedium and frustration, to which was added the painful struggle to pass for a human being. When he wasn’t sitting at his desk, he felt empty, “like a piece of boneless flesh,” he said. And I believed him, even though it seemed to me that no one, not even he, could really believe that.
I asked him what tomorrow’s column would be about.
“Fascination,” he said.
A laconic, mysterious answer.
“Fascination in general?”
“The fascination we feel for the parts of books and films that we don’t understand. For example, tomorrow’s column is about The Big Sleep. There’s one scene in particular where Lauren Bacall sings in a casino lounge, and it’s never been clear why. It’s about things that happen in movies and books that don’t make the least sense because they’re entirely extraneous to the context.”
Just then, Delia came out of the store; she seemed very happy, radiant, and she wanted to know what we were laughing about. Since neither of us was laughing, we didn’t know how to reply, and both of us stood there a little hesitant and ridiculous, saying nothing for a few long seconds. You could hear the sound of water falling in one of those little Barcelona fountains nearby; an unmusical sound, the sound of splashing or dripping.
“We were just saying, Delia, that your name is straight out of a crime series,” Sánchez said, clearly making it up on the spot.
She then wanted to know if we were thinking of The Black Dahlia, and all I could think of doing was to turn to Sánchez and tell him that Saturdays truly are awful. I said this in an attempt to take my relationship with him — or rather with both of them — to the next level, but I realized at once that I’d put my foot in it, because it was he who’d said Saturdays are awful, going on to explain that the reason for this was that his wife would always drag him out shopping. I stood glumly rooted to the spot for a few moments, and it seemed that Delia was asking me, not her husband, for an explanation.
Saying the first thing that came into my head to cover my gaffe, I asked — as if I were an admirer of his work — which was the best time of year to write. Summer, Delia said. Summer is the least favorable period, Sánchez said, since he tended to get out more, whereas October to February was the time to hunker down, ideal for letting one’s intellectual energies roam free.
Without wiping the dim-witted look from my face, I thought — perversely, because I like to give the impression that I’ve read very little — of a line by Mallarmé.
“Winter, clear winter, season of serene art.”
&
I had no idea where we were heading, but for a few minutes we strolled together up Calle Calvet. A pleasant breeze tempered the already powerful early July sun and I would say, without exaggeration, that it was a perfect morning, although the situation — walking uphill with that married couple with whom I’d never before gone for a walk — made it all rather complicated, not least because I wasn’t entirely sure what
I was doing there, walking and talking so casually beside them, having, at no point, been invited along.
It suddenly seemed the ideal moment to tell Sánchez that I was thinking about rewriting his all-but-forgotten novel. Telling him might provide some reason for my strolling along with them. But I quickly remembered that I’d already decided not to tell him and that, besides, I didn’t have to find a reason for our walk; it was enough to put one foot in front of the other and carry on.
Aware that telling him I planned to rewrite Walter’s Problem would land me in a colossal mess, in the end, I didn’t dare. I didn’t even hint at the idea. I also needed to remind myself that our relationship has never been exactly easy or chummy, despite the many years we’ve spent as neighbors. In fact, it’s always been stonily cordial: the relationship of two people who might make small talk one day and the next avoid each other’s eye so as not to have to say hello. The fact that we were now walking and talking as if we’d known each other all our lives made me feel faintly uncomfortable, perhaps because the whole situation was so out of the ordinary. But I was under no illusions. Sánchez had a significantly vain side to him, and probably believed himself to be superior to me in all respects. I knew very little about him really, or, indeed, about my other neighbors in Coyote, all of whom were perfect strangers; the majority unapproachable, cordial but distant — and sometimes not even cordial.
So, in the end, I opted not to tell him that one day, when I felt suitably prepared, I was going to rewrite his old novel. Instead, I told him that, ever since he’d opened up to me about it a few days ago, I’d thought about finding the time to dig out Walter’s Problem from my library and give it a read.
His face seemed to drain of all color.
“Give it a read? But no one reads that book anymore!” he said, and I think this roundabout recommendation that I leave his flawed work in peace came straight from the heart.
In fact, in telling him that I was going to find the time to search out his old novel, I was telling a lie, since I had found it last night and refreshed my memory by reading the back cover.
Of the ten stories told in the book, nine had been written in each of the ventriloquist’s different voices. Having overcome, in the very first chapter, the problem of having just one voice — clearly an absolutely overwhelming and paralyzing dilemma — Walter then cut loose in as many voices — nine — as there were chapters left for his biased memoirs. The chapters were stories, and the stories were chapters. And what the reader found in this book were Walter’s memoirs, but also a novel which was, at the same time, a short-story collection. At least, that is what was written on the back of the book, and, despite having abandoned it halfway through, I’d had a clear view of the novel as a whole at the time and still did.
Behind the different voices corresponding to each of the stories lay, camouflaged, “imitations, sometimes satirical and at other times not, of the voices of the masters of the short story.” And so, behind the narrator in the first story — the first chapter of the novel — we find a voice and style reminiscent of John Cheever; behind the narrator of the second story, a voice that appears to have fallen under the influence of Djuna Barnes; behind the third, someone trying to evoke the inimitable style of Borges; behind “Something in Mind,” the fourth story, a narrator who takes Hemingway’s very characteristic narrative approach; while in “An Old Married Couple,” one can trace the footprints of Raymond Carver’s rugged style. . . .
To return to the point, I didn’t dare tell Sánchez that last night, albeit very superficially, I had revisited his thirty-year-old book and was thus reminded that the stories were all headed with an epigraph by the corresponding “master of the short story,” giving each chapter a definite hallmark. And since I didn’t want to tell him that I’d merely flicked through Walter’s Problem, neither did I care to bring up the matter of the ghastly, exhausting, insufferable (when not just drunkenly rambling) paragraphs, which he had justified at the time, saying that they were excruciating because the plot demanded it.
I might be a novice when it comes to writing, but I have many years as an experienced reader under my belt, and it hasn’t escaped my notice that Sánchez should simply have erased those paragraphs altogether. Especially when you consider that there were at least one or two — and sometimes as many as three — such confused passages per chapter. During each one, the narrator — usually the ventriloquist himself, who was the one organizing his memoirs — would become particularly slow and confused, cloying and extremely ponderous, with absolutely no redeeming features, as if his head were about to burst, as if his writing talent had completely lost its way: the sort of prose you might expect to have been written by someone in a lazy, hungover state.
Nor did I wish to tell him that Walter’s Problem reminded me of those times, particularly in France at the end of the nineteenth century, when, for certain writers, the short story represented a genre that somehow worked against the novel, which overtook or sidestepped it; the sign of a new aesthetic.
I didn’t intend to say any of this, so I don’t know how I ended up telling him that the thing I remembered most clearly from Walter’s Problem was the strange matter of those dense, muddled passages. Did he remember them? I waited for his reply, but he remained silent for a long time, as if it pained him to be reminded of precisely that detail.
“Luckily for me, no one remembers it now,” he’d said to Ana Turner just recently. And now I had almost certainly wounded him deeply. I looked at him to confirm his discomfort, and it seemed to me as if Sánchez might even be downright furious. I thought: it’s one thing someone badmouthing one of his books, and quite another if that someone is his neighbor.
&
Turning down Calle Rector Ubach, Sánchez broke his silence to tell me, in a friendly voice almost certainly intended to mask his deep unease, that, back in the day, a critic had described those passages as “dizzy spells,” and that perhaps he’d been right on the money. Obviously, he went on, it was never true that he’d included those dense passages on purpose.
And at this point he began to stumble over his words. I think it had dawned on him that he was paying a high price for having said, in my presence, during his flirtation with Ana Turner the other day, that he had once written a bad novel.
Each one of these “dizzy spells,” he began saying, was, without exception, the product of one of his alcoholic binges the night before. By publishing the book in such a crazy way, without correcting a single word, he’d subsequently had to make up something to justify those “dizzy spells,” which could be found in every chapter, and that’s when he’d told the press that they were intentional errors, put there to show the world that even “the great masters of the short story” — that’s how he described his selection of ten narrators — had their sticky patches. After all, they weren’t gods, but people. The dizzy spells were deliberate imperfections, he told journalists, intended to help readers see that the major works from the last two centuries were flawed masterpieces, since the best authors dealt, within the very structures of their narrative, with the chaos of the world and the difficulty of understanding and expressing it. . . . That’s what he told those journalists, but he was merely bluffing to keep them from focusing on those ridiculously convoluted passages. Of course, he could have corrected those sections, but in those days he didn’t have time to go to such trouble, driven as he was by a boundless desire to publish, an incredible sense of urgency (which he described as ill-advised), a need for money and fame; he thought that by publishing books, he would be displayed in bookstore windows, and find more writing jobs, and thus keep his head above water.
“I was just bluffing,” he said candidly. “You can’t imagine the feeling of peace it gives you, after publishing a book, to put it out there that your stories contain strange passages on purpose, in order to demonstrate that not only are the masters of the short story imperfect, they can also be very tedious. The best thin
g was, it worked. Most people believed that I’d pulled off an intriguing, albeit rather labored, experimental exercise, and no one could take that away from me.”
“Repent, you bastard,” Delia suddenly blurted out.
It took me a second to realize that she was joking. Sánchez froze and very slowly lit a cigarette, as if this might calm her down.
“On your knees, sinner,” Delia said, glaring at him with such hatred that I could only assume she was acting, although it wasn’t at all clear.
The whole time I was thinking: not a bad idea, you publish the book and waste no time in finding an excuse for why you haven’t written something at the level of, say, John Cheever. Or even at the level of Djuna Barnes, or of any of those others who, for you, represent “the masters of the short story.” That way, you’re one step ahead of all the pains-in-the-neck primed to screw you over with their bad reviews. And come nighttime, you might even sleep more soundly.
I also thought about how, all things considered, it was absolutely true that the great masters were indeed flawed.
Delia was now wearing an enigmatic smile on her face.
Why that smile and why so mysterious? Perhaps Delia was simply an enigmatic person and her smile held no mysteries at all.
What did I care about Delia, or any of that? I wasn’t in the mood for enigmas. But, thinking about it, I came to realize that I did care, especially about the extremely tense atmosphere of that encounter, and Sánchez’s somewhat overwrought language, his agitation, the banal small change of his repeated excuses, the awkwardness of the situation.
Mac's Problem Page 4