Mac's Problem

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  We soon learn that Baresi lost his Italian bride soon after marrying her, having discovered that she belonged, at least in her heart, to another man. We also learn that, for his part, Pirelli discovered on the island of Java, after twenty years of peaceful marriage, that his wife still hadn’t forgotten her first love, a young man who took his own life.

  Baresi and Pirelli carry on sharing the details of their respective and almost identical sentimental failures, and you can see that, while Baresi delights in giving his monologue, embellishing his dreadful true story with fictional flourishes, Pirelli, narratively speaking, does the opposite, keeping strictly to the facts and inventing nothing. In other words, much as it pains him to do so, Pirelli tries to stay within the limits of what he deems to be the truth.

  This turns the two lovelorn, jaded, and incurably lonely Italians into something more than two discarded old husbands. It means that one of them, Baresi, seems to embody the world of fiction writers — the world inhabited by those who believe that any work that tells a true story is an insult to both art and truth — and the other, Pirelli, represents those who think that reality can be reproduced exactly as it is, and that, as such, it should never be placed between quotation marks, given that there is only one truth.

  Fiction and reality, an old married couple.

  At the end of the story there’s a scene which, under normal circumstances, would have made me raise an eyebrow and perhaps even look away, but that didn’t happen because, deep down, the beauty of that perfect connection between the two bitter drunks propped up at the bar of that hotel in Basel seems to me just faultless. Baresi and Pirelli emerge as a single human subject in which fiction and reality fuse so intensely that, at certain moments, it seems impossible to separate them. In some way, for want of a closer comparison, Baresi and Pirelli remind us of the bull and the matador and how, when in the ring, and if the splendor of the bullfighting ritual is there in full force, they become a single, indivisible figure in which man and beast merge, making it hard to tell one from the other. Michel Leiris described the beautiful and tragic effect of this unity thus: “Insofar as the torero, slowly moving his red cape, manages to keep his feet still during a series of measured, fluid passes, he and the animal will form that prized configuration in which man, cape, and horned beast appear to be engaged in a game of reciprocal influences.”

  “And I, Signor Pirelli,” we hear Baresi say between muffled sobs, “finally understood that whatever I did would be pointless, that I was going to lose her, and I also understood that, deep down, she had never been mine, that she belonged to another man, and that, with that other man, she formed an old married couple whose tense relationship dated back years, impossibly far back in time, or at least further back than the night when reality and fiction first paired up: an old married couple locked in an endless nightmare, with the same anguished obstinacy as a whore and her pimp. Do you understand now, Signor Pirelli?”

  Pirelli does understand, but, somewhat mysteriously, he doesn’t respond. And in the moments that follow he makes Baresi a proposal which, besides drawing their long conversation to a close, casts a shadow of doubt over their nocturnal meeting:

  “And now, Signor Ventriloquist, allow me to invite you to my room. I would like you to believe in my story and for you to know that, from time to time, the dead man himself appears at my back. And in order for you to see that I really was in Java, allow me to give you some typical artifacts from the island. I keep them in my room. Come, come up with me. I want to offer you some souvenirs from Java. I would like to give you a special sunshade with a hidden spring that transforms it into a very sharp weapon, a kind of bayonet. Who knows, it might prove useful to you one day. And I would also like us to forget our woes by going to bed together. Don’t you think we’d have more time then to put the world to rights à deux?”

  So now we know where the Javan sunshade came from, which leads us to think that Baresi, who accepts the gift, might well be the person who gave Walter that murderous sunshade.

  Special mention must be made of the inevitable “dizzy spell,” to be found in every chapter of Sánchez’s book, “An Old Married Couple” being no exception. This lumbering “dizzy spell” comes toward the end of the dialogue between the two drunks, in a section of the chapter which suddenly becomes incredibly dense. You can tell a mile off that the story is going belly up, as if the two interlocutors had suddenly come down with terrible headaches that reduced them to idiocy.

  And yet, despite this brief, leaden, fizzing-aspirin section, this story in particular — because of its atmosphere and the way it conveys the metaphysics of marital angst — is perhaps the most accomplished of the first five. “The Whole Theater Laughs” is more moving, but “An Old Married Couple” feels more polished. Indeed, perhaps its worst defect is the epigraph, taken from Raymond Carver’s book Cathedral: “But I made a point of getting him to mention his wife’s name. ‘Olla,’ he said. Olla, I said to myself. Olla.”

  What’s Carver got to do with all of this? What’s Carver doing in a run-down hotel in Basel? It’s also unclear why Sánchez chose such an inconsequential quote. Did he mean for the reader to read the marriage between reality and fiction as if it were an “olla,” that is, a pressure cooker? Surely not. The story has a Carveresque feel, but it’s much more sophisticated than the rough, everyday world Carver depicts. Now I’m the one with a head like a pressure cooker, and I really should call it a day. I ought to face facts: the booze I’ve been drinking has badly affected my intellectual faculties. I no longer even know if I’m Pirelli or Baresi.

  Lou Reed is playing in the background.

  Olla, I say to myself, and I repeat it until she hears me. . . . Who? Olla or Carmen? Why does Carmen pretend not to know that I’m writing this diary? What does she think I do in this study all day? Goof around online? She loathes the literary world, and I accept that. The sciences make her feel superior, even though she actually makes her living restoring furniture. Why does she feel the need to turn her nose up at books just to distance herself from me? Why that aggressive aversion to the printed page? She won’t even let us keep the phone directory in the living room!

  Oh well, tomorrow’s another day. . . . Curse that gin.

  In my head, only memories of past ravages. And this ebb and flow that lulls and dulls the mind.

  17

  At midday, I went out for a stroll and was pleasantly surprised when I bumped into Sánchez’s nephew, who, despite having shaved off his beard, was even scruffier than before; he wore the look of someone who hasn’t been to bed and he eyed me as if he were thinking: I know this guy from somewhere.

  Although I had only observed him surreptitiously recently, he may have noticed me, which explains why he was staring at me like that. However, my pulse remained perfectly steady as I said to him:

  “Excuse me, you’re Sánchez’s nephew, aren’t you?”

  “I will be tonight,” he said. And with that he raced off, almost vanishing into thin air as he turned the corner.

  The little creep.

  &

  The sad hero of the sixth story, “A Long Betrayal,” is a gentleman by the name of Basi, about whom we are told in the second paragraph that “he had always been a late bloomer.” The story starts off at a steady pace, suggesting that its writer must have been, at least that day — the day he began the story — perfectly sober and at no risk of suffering one of his frequent “dizzy spells”:

  “One night, woken by the sound of rain against the windows, Basi suddenly thought of his young wife lying in her damp grave. This was a new experience for him, because he hadn’t thought of his wife for so many years that remembering her now made him feel almost embarrassed. He imagined the open grave, the threads of water snaking in all directions, and his wife, whom he had married when there was a considerable age difference between them, lying alone in the midst of that ever-encroaching dampness. Not a single flower g
rew on the grave, even though he could have sworn he had paid for the grave to be maintained in perpetuity.”

  When I began rereading the story today, I realized that I wasn’t, in fact, rereading it, for this was the story which, thirty years ago, I abandoned halfway through before promptly abandoning the entire book. I didn’t continue the memoir — I remember this as if it were yesterday — because that same day I’d read in a review by Ricardo Ragú in El País that “A Long Betrayal” was an almost exact copy of a short story by Malamud. When I read this, I realized, among other things, that there was, therefore, nothing odd about the fact that Sánchez had chosen as the epigraph for this sixth story a quote from Bernard Malamud: “What’s next isn’t the point.” And I also remember that, perhaps influenced by that epigraph, but also by what Ragú had said, I decided not to read on.

  Today, on the other hand, I did read on.

  The story describes how old Basi wakes one night to the sound of heavy rain beating on his bedroom window and lies there thinking about his young wife in her damp grave. The following morning, he goes in search of the grave, but cannot find it. He admits to the director of the cemetery that he and his wife never got on very well and that she had already been living with another man for years when, quite suddenly, death carried her off. Days later, the director phones Basi to tell him that he’s found the wife’s grave, except that her body isn’t there: her lover had applied for a judicial order to have her moved to another niche, where he, too, was buried when he died. So, thinks Basi, his wife can now betray him eternally, lying, as she does, next to another man. But, says the director, the grave is still your property and, remember, you have the grave for future use: it’s empty and that space belongs entirely to you.

  It seems to me that Sánchez deliberately intended this story to look like a chapter that Walter had, on a whim, added to his memoirs. Having said that, it’s also possible that Sánchez included it out of sheer laziness and as a neat way — thanks to a piece of blatant plagiarism — of instantly increasing the page count. Perhaps he added it to this partial autobiography because he was in such a hopeless, drunken state that he didn’t realize the gravity of what he was doing. Or else — another hypothesis, mine and, I think, the most plausible — Sánchez simply dashed off the story in order to include, in an almost secret and doubtless very indirect way, an episode from the life of the autobiographer’s father. Because I think Basi’s unfortunate relationship with his wife recalls Baresi’s painful marital relationship as described in “An Old Married Couple.” It’s therefore worth asking if Basi is a contraction of Baresi. Could it be that Baresi was also the surname of someone who went by the nom de plume of Walter? And what if Baresi of Basel was the father of our Walter? If he was, we would at least be able to clear up one point: we would know who had bequeathed the murder weapon, the sunshade from Java, to Walter the ventriloquist.

  As for the epigraph: “What’s next isn’t the point,” it really rang a bell, and, although I didn’t know which of Malamud’s books it could have come from, it took only five seconds of googling to resolve the matter: it was in a book of interviews and essays by Philip Roth; it was the answer Malamud had given to the risky question Roth had asked him the last time they had met; he’d responded almost at the end of Roth’s visit to Malamud’s house in Bennington. The previous summer, Malamud had suffered a stroke, and the debilitating aftereffects had left him in no condition to travel or to leave his house. Roth had driven up from Connecticut to see his master in Bennington and realized at once how weak Malamud had become, because, up until then, regardless of the weather, he had always managed to be waiting in the driveway to greet visitors or see them off, and that day was no different, except that although Malamud was waiting there in his poplin jacket and nodded Roth a rather grim welcome, he appeared to be listing slightly to one side, while, at the same time, by dint of sheer willpower, keeping himself perfectly still, as if the slightest movement could bring him crashing down: “. . . he was now a frail and very sick old man, his tenacity about used up.”

  At the end of the visit, Malamud insisted on reading the beginning of the precarious novel he had begun to work on and which consisted of only a few typewritten sheets. Roth tried unsuccessfully to stop him, but Malamud insisted on reading out loud to him in a tremulous voice. A brutal silence followed. And not knowing what to say, Roth finally asked him what happened next.

  “What’s next isn’t the point,” said a furious Malamud.

  For Roth, hearing what his master had written on that piece of paper was like discovering that “he hadn’t got started, really, however much he wanted to think otherwise. Listening to what he read was like being led into a dark hole to see by torchlight the first Malamud story ever scratched upon a cave wall.”

  Apart from showing off his own skill with words, I have no idea what the point was of Roth’s meticulous description of his much-admired master’s decline. There are times when I don’t like Roth at all. Malamud, on the other hand, has always aroused my sympathies as a reader. Roth comments that Malamud “looked to someone who’d grown up among such people like nothing so much as an insurance agent — he could have passed for one of my father’s colleagues.” I’m drawn to the Malamud who stubbornly circles around the human capacity to better ourselves, incredible though that may seem. And I’m drawn to him as well because he creates all kinds of discreet, gray beings, all of whom have a touch of the insurance agent about them, and who, because of that something they carry inside them, try to get at the truth of the matter and, as is the case with the somber, stricken Russian protagonist of The Fixer — my favorite Malamud novel — become splendidly obstinate, always engaged in the struggle to go ever deeper into everything.

  For a beginner like me, Malamud, so gray and so tenacious, could serve as the perfect model of the writer, never that keen to go anywhere, a writer eager to avoid the fixer’s constant battle to evolve. Malamud is a good model for me, because while his heroes always strive to better themselves, the writer never moves from the same landscape of drab rocks and austere oak trees, never strives to test the limits of his own “modest knowledge” of the art of storytelling.

  For a beginner like me, the gray, tenacious Malamud could prove a blessing. Choosing grayness might be a way of seeing no urgent need to evolve, when evolution is always seen as so absurdly prestigious. Are animals that don’t evolve — like the eagle — not entirely happy with their status? If we hadn’t had parents, teachers, and friends insisting that we improve, we should probably have been much happier. That’s why it seems to me that here, in this diary, I will continue investigating what I call modest knowledge, which implies a knowledge of literary matters, and which allows one to make steady progress without becoming too successful, however paradoxical that seems, even to me. And the thing is, that modest knowledge — available only to a minority, because it doesn’t usually reveal itself — generates its own protection against advancement and contributes to confirming what so many of us have always suspected, namely, that to be too successful can be suicidal.

  “I do not evolve: I travel,” wrote Pessoa.

  In a way, this reminds me sometimes that one can know a man better by what he despises than by what he admires, and it reminds me, too, as I believe Piglia says, that, in literature, what we call progress doesn’t exist, just as, for example, we don’t get better at dreaming over time: perhaps what we learn most from writing is what we would prefer not to do; we advance, rejection by rejection.

  I was thinking about this just a few moments ago, while I was looking out of my window, trying to relive the pleasure I’ve always felt in the very intense drawings made by certain painters, images that spring impulsively out of the moment. These are pictures that emerge from the beauty of this gray day, serenely advancing along the streets of Coyote, and which emerge, too, from my own debutant artist’s world: those mental sketches, always so close to what is actually happening, that are rather cha
rming and, fortunately, rather naive mental engravings; naive, in my case, because the person producing them is still in the initial phase of everything and has no aspirations to go much beyond that, satisfied with the calm state of being the beginner, satisfied with the happy state of the beginner, able to travel from his place at the window, never losing sight of the fact that he is content with the comfortable grayness of his modest knowledge.

  In short: let others advance.

  Or, as Malamud would say: perhaps it would be more useful to settle into the stubbornly modest gray classroom and accept it as it is, like an eternal Monday in nursery school. After all, we don’t know if things aren’t better that way: deliberately insufficient. Yet, depending on which way I look at them from my study, things are increasingly brimming with life. This would confirm my suspicion that being successful in unassuming Malamud style is simply a matter of secretly improving my normal vision, as if I were suddenly equipped with special magnifying glasses and everything I studied, saw, and learned were illuminated by a kind of potent light I can’t identify, perhaps because it’s merely the subtle glow given off by everything that I am starting to learn.

  18

  This morning, beneath an almost literally scorching sun, I wandered the streets of Coyote, so immersed in my search for something remarkable going on that a keen-eyed observer might well have spotted that I was looking for something, however small, to record in this diary — a coded wink, for example, or a dust particle in which, with a healthy dose of imagination, I might see the whole world. If this keen-eyed observer had existed, he or she might have said: