Had they invited me to walk with them up Calle Calvet and back down along Rector Ubach? No, I’d gotten myself into that fix by wanting to play along, and, who knows, perhaps out of an eagerness to learn how to write, and get to know the man whose forgotten novel I would one day copy, with the aim of improving it.
I parted company with the couple when we reached Calle Aribau. I was worried that, at any moment, Sánchez would ask me to explain myself and tell me to leave his things well alone. And I knew that if this happened I’d feel like a ridiculous snoop, a meddler, and that my head would, quite literally, hang in shame.
“Goodbye, Mac,” he said as if he’d known me all his life, as if we’d always been on first-name terms.
“See you around,” Delia said.
And I walked away from them thinking how little I knew that more northerly part of Coyote, a place I’d secretly reinvented in my head over the previous few years, transforming it into a terrifying place. I don’t know why, since it wasn’t very different from the southern part of the neighborhood.
[Whoroscope 6]
“Try to cultivate relationships relating to a project which, though slow to get off the ground, shows great promise.”
Peggy is referring, perhaps, to the great promise of my secretly repeating Sánchez’s novel, and also to the fact that tonight, Saturday, I have cultivated an important relationship.
Since the newspaper provides an email address alongside Peggy Day’s column, I had a sudden burst of daring and, in a moment of restless impatience, of curiosity to know if she had caught wind of what I’d said about her not long ago in public — a moment of gin-soaked weakness — I wrote this to her:
“My name is Mac Vives, perhaps you remember me. S’Agaró, some forty years ago. When it rained, we would listen to the rain. And to the thunder. When it wasn’t raining, we would show up barefoot at the Flamingo Club and dance as if there were no tomorrow. I wanted so much to protect you from the world when you probably didn’t need protecting. I walked out of your life like someone walking out of a sentence. Forgive the idiot that I was. And know that today you correctly predicted what was about to happen to me. Because it’s true, I’ve just begun to cultivate a relationship that will lead to great things for me. Yours, Mac.”
After sending the email, it dawned on me that I might well have avoided such madness, but it was too late. And so I began pacing the house, half asleep, as if the error of having sent the email had left me much more than just disoriented. In an effort to fend off my growing unease, I decided to go to bed without turning off the house lights — that is, wasting energy, and not just squandering it willy-nilly, but because it seemed to me that excess itself can feel like life and, in a strange way, make us feel more alive.
&
I wake up and get out of bed to note down a detail I remember from the end of my nightmare. Someone was saying to me over and again:
“The thing is, it’s just really weird wanting to write your neighbor’s novel.”
7
Carmen has had to rush off to her furniture restoration workshop, which, though extremely buoyant, can also be a bit of an annoyance, because she seems to have to work ever longer hours, often at a moment’s notice. And as if that weren’t enough, she now has too many new customers, which could end up being a problem, because, at this rate, she’ll have to work on Sundays as well. I asked if she’d be back soon and discovered — because she told me so — that I have a rare ability to irritate her. Despite years of married life and bringing up three children who have all now flown the nest and are doing very well for themselves, I had no idea I possessed the rare skill of irritating her simply by asking her what time she’d be home.
I went down to the garage with her and, cautiously, given how touchy she was, got into her car and asked if she could drop me off at the newsstand.
“But it’s just around the corner,” she protested.
I didn’t even respond, fearing another explosion of that dangerously bad temper of hers.
Once at the newsstand, I was annoyed to find that there was a line, as there is every Sunday, and I had to wait my turn. I was particularly annoyed because most of those who buy a Sunday paper never read any other paper all week. They go to the newsstand on Sundays in the same way we used to go to the bakery — at least I did as an adolescent — where there were often equally interminable lines. In Coyote, of course, there is an added incentive to buy the Sunday papers: that is, the opportunity to ogle the news vendor’s breasts.
Every district has its specialty.
Sitting in Black Bar, I kept thinking about how, since I can see no imminent end to my status as a beginner, I would fit very comfortably into the same niche as Macedonio, the Duchamp of literature.
I had three newspapers to read, but, instead, I passed the time pondering that thought and also something else I’ve been noticing lately: how so many writers think they have it in them to write a novel; they feel so utterly confident of this that, in their inexhaustible vanity, they’re convinced that they will write one and will do it very well too, because they’ve spent years training to do just that, because they’re intelligent and well-read, because they’ve studied contemporary literature, and, having noticed where other novelists fall short, they feel ready for anything, especially now that they’ve invested in the perfect home computer and a really good chair that won’t do their back in.
Later, when they fail to write the novel of which they had so platonically dreamed, some go mad. For the essayist Dora Rester, writing a novel means writing the fragments of an attempt at a novel, not the whole obelisk: “The art lies in the attempt, and understanding what’s outside us by using only what we have inside us is one of the hardest emotional and intellectual tasks anyone can undertake.”
I wouldn’t go that far. Or would I? I’m not sure, but it is true that when approaching this business of writing a novel, it’s best to go step-by-step, to move with extreme caution; after all, I’m only aspiring to rewrite Sánchez’s novel. . . .…
&
When I went to pick up Carmen from work at lunchtime, I found her still in a foul mood, although she did make some effort to lighten the atmosphere that she herself had created between us. This effort, however, proved short-lived, and battle soon recommenced. I did my best to give way on everything and to put an end to the argument as quickly as possible, but she wouldn’t even let me do that, which then led me to try and get her to recognize that since she is prone to these sudden fits of depression, she should take steps to deal with it. I also tried to make her see that if she continued moaning on about the apartment and proposing alterations (a new kitchen, etc.), she should also bear in mind that, as she well knows, while I may not be flat broke, nor am I in a position to fund such refurbishments.
As you would expect, this only made matters worse, and she continued screaming at me all the way down the street. Finally, when we reached Bar Tender, and just when I was considering separation as a real possibility — I’d be left with no financial support, of course, which is why, although I do sometimes fantasize about leaving her, I nearly always almost instantly abandon the idea — a massive summer storm broke, and, in my agitated state, it seemed to me that the wind had changed direction twice.
The rain invaded everything, and I have, perhaps, never felt so emotionally trapped as I did today. Worst of all, I was far from my study and from my diary, which made me realize that, in the space of just one week, both have become indispensable to me.
I was suddenly overwhelmed by a very simple anxiety: was I becoming another version of that “piece of boneless flesh” that Sánchez said he became when he was away from his study? Or perhaps I was starting to inhabit the skin of John Cheever, the writer whose presence — although his talent is sometimes buried in the darkest of thickets — can be felt in the first story in Walter’s Problem, “I Had an Enemy.”
In that first chapter
of my neighbor’s book, the narrator adopts a voice very similar to that of Cheever in his fraught diaries, where he holds forth about mundane matters and, after each potent sip of gin, considers getting a divorce.
Lately, when I think about separating from Carmen, I wonder why I don’t just drop round to see Ana Turner at her bookstore. Yes, just go for broke and stride in, throw caution and reserve to the winds, and suggest to her that we run away together. It would end badly, I know, because she’s not in the least bit interested in me, and besides, I can’t afford to run away or whatever, but I do like to entertain the idea so that, just for a moment, I can forget about my latest row with Carmen and feel a little more at peace with myself.
In “I Had an Enemy” — in which the narrator does a very good imitation of Cheever’s voice — the ventriloquist himself begins his partial memoirs by telling us that, for some time now, he has been stalked by someone named Pedro, a kind of “gratuitous antagonist” who, very persistently and sometimes successfully, tries to eat away at his morale, like a kind of homespun Moriarty.
Since the stalker is at the root of all his problems, Walter ends up blaming this entirely gratuitous enemy for the sad fact that he has only one voice, which is making work with his dummies, with his puppets, extremely difficult. Misfortune follows misfortune with astonishing regularity until one amazing night when, not only does his enemy suddenly disappear — setting off for the South Seas beneath a perfectly full moon, never to return — but the ventriloquist also loses his voice completely.
Walter doesn’t just lose his voice, he is literally struck dumb, and believes, moreover, that this is the end of everything, that he’ll never speak again and won’t be able to earn his living at all. A few days later, though, his aphonia begins to wane and the ability to form words gradually comes back, and he finds, to his surprise, that, with the slow return of the power of speech, he also retrieves the great variety of voices he once had and which he’d lost because of that tenacious dissident, that obstinate personal enemy, that tedious gratuitous antagonist, that braggart Pedro.
Having overcome this particular obstacle — the enemy who obliged him to have only one voice, “the voice that writers so yearn to find” — the ventriloquist with Cheever-like stylistic airs concludes the story thus:
“The disappearance of my enemy allowed me to recover all my voices, which is why I hope he stays in the South Seas for a very long time and never ever comes back; that Pedro fellow is doubtless living on some remote, grubby Pacific isle, in a thatched hut with four fawning Marist Brothers for company, and he keeps my voice stashed away in one of those little silver boxes of which collectors of baseless loathings are said to be so proud.”
While I was pondering all this, I had the feeling that there, in Bar Tender, the wind had changed direction for a third time. Then, almost miraculously, the rain stopped, just like that. The intense heat began creeping back, confirming that this is the hottest summer in Barcelona for a hundred years.
Tempers cooled, especially mine. And so as not to continue the argument with Carmen, I devoted myself to the absorbing but impossible task of capturing all the different shades of green in each of the raindrops lingering on the leaves of the trees.
“So you admit defeat, do you?” Carmen asked.
“Of course, I never like to win.”
I said this while thinking about something quite different: getting the hell out of there and going somewhere, anywhere; anywhere but here.
“To what was once Arabia Felix,” said the voice.
It was the voice of the dead man inside my head, suddenly reappearing.
“Hell, no,” I said. “These days it’s just one big minefield.”
Because my neighbor’s novel — written thirty years ago — ends in the Yemen, when it was a country you could still quite happily visit, when it still had certain idyllic touches, and where, according to friends who traveled there at the time, you could spend a few days in the extraordinary city of Sana’a and feel as if you were living in a place that still retained a few luminous traces of Arabia Felix, the ancient paradise where, in the age of the classical Greeks, they exported coffee and incense from the port of Mocha.
[Whoroscope 7]
“This is a difficult period economically, especially as regards matrimonial finances.”
Peggy Day really hit the nail on the head in today’s oracle. She may as well have written — a little birdie must have whispered as much in her ear — that while I may not be completely broke, in the long run, I might well end up having to live off Carmen, when I’ve always assumed that the opposite would be the case.
I’d like to believe that this is Peggy’s chosen formula for responding to my email of yesterday. She replies with a double-edged message, very rudely in fact, because what she’s really saying is that she knows I’m in some way dependent on my wife. It could also be that none of this bears any relation to what is going on, and Peggy may not even have read my email. Indeed, there was a moment this afternoon when I decided to think no more about the matter, to think about something else entirely and so I spent the evening reading reviews of Bob Dylan’s performance last night in Barcelona. His first number was “Things Have Changed,” a song he wrote for the movie Wonder Boys, and it seems that, as he sang it, he didn’t move a muscle.
8
I went over to my sister Julia’s for lunch, repeating one of my most routine outings. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been for lunch at my sister’s house. But today’s visit was slightly different. First, because of this repetition syndrome dogging me that now seems to form part of my very nature, and which, once I was inside her house, made me feel the weight of all the gatherings that have taken place there over the years. And second, because I noticed something that had always escaped me in the past: my big sister doesn’t write, nor does her husband, still less my other sister, Laura, or my three children — all of whom are too busy running thriving businesses — and my parents and grandparents never wrote either. Indeed, not a single close relative of mine ever succumbed to any literary temptations.
And that made me realize that, having spent just one week on this diary, I’ve already begun to pick up on ideas that, before, would have meant nothing to me. For instance, it occurred to me that my repetition syndrome is closely linked to the genre we might call “the fiction of repetition.”
This isn’t the sort of thing I used to think about. I was already at Julia’s house when I pictured her asking me what I devote my time to now that I’m a man of leisure, to which I would have answered:
“Fictions of repetition.”
Julia would have been none the wiser, but in a way, nor would I, since I still didn’t know exactly what this new genre consists of.
But my sister isn’t the kind to ask “what do you do now that you don’t do anything,” so my thoughts quickly turned to something apparently more trivial, but which is actually very important: the extraordinary quality of the soups she has made for me over the years, even now, in the height of summer (like today, when gazpacho is on the menu). Never a truer word spoken: they really are very good. Delicious. They always have been. As the great Wisława Szymborska once said when speaking about her family (a family of nonwriters like mine), they are also “extraordinary soups, which one can eat safe in the knowledge that there is zero risk of them spilling onto some precious manuscript.”
I drank too much in the house of the literatureless; that is, at Julia and her husband’s place. By the end of my visit, I verged on the ridiculous, although, luckily, I didn’t make a complete fool of myself and was able to bite my tongue and not tell Julia — in somewhat rambling terms, which I hope to be able to reproduce here now — that I saw her as a great river, and that this new condition of hers — as a powerful rushing stream and not as a sister — was transforming her, in my eyes, into the most fitting and precise image of the course of my own life. It was as
if she and her waters encapsulated both my past and my destiny, so closely were both these impressions linked to our favorite childhood holidays: to our summers spent in the Pyrenees, when we would row along the Garonne, in the days when I was so repelled by the mere sight of meat that even a few scraps left on a plate were almost enough to make me faint. . . .
Luckily, I realized in time that saying all of this to Julia in an attempt to “literatize” my visit was as insane as it would be baffling. What’s more, it betrayed both how unbalanced I am in the wake of losing the family business, and my increasingly excessive tendency to drink when I’m at her house, not to mention my tendency to spout long, rambling sentences which, for a few days now, I think I’ve been saying out loud in order to commit them to memory and record them in the diary, something which, fortunately, hasn’t yet happened.
I contained myself, and our habitual sibling lunch passed peacefully, if a little eccentrically, because I really did drink an awful lot.
I can picture myself as I left: mute and stiff, saying a silent goodbye on the landing, then waiting for the metal doors of the elevator to close, and then, fueled by the vast amount of alcohol inside me, crying in silence as I tell myself: we’re siblings, and yet my words will always be a kind of metaphysical phenomenon that she can never fully understand. And vice versa. It doesn’t matter how many years pass, or how dearly we love each other, we are permanently confined to our respective selves. That’s true for us, and we’re siblings. . . .
[Whoroscope 8]
“Now is not a good moment to make proposals or establish important relations, for you will meet with obstacles,” Peggy Day says.
Is she trying to discourage me from establishing relations with her so soon? Is she referring to that person with whom I began to cultivate “a relationship that will lead to great things?” Is Peggy trying to tell me to wait awhile before bothering her, and thus save myself a whole lot of problems?
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