Mac's Problem

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  I very nearly asked the question out loud from my side of the glass screen.

  Then something curious happened. Seamlessly following on from his declaration in favor of those who write nothing, an ambulance came hurtling down the street with its siren blaring. By the time I could hear the nephew’s voice again, it seemed to me that everything had changed.

  “People do ask me that,” he was saying in a soft, sad voice, “but I’m not afraid of showing my true colors. I really can’t stand people who pretend to be reasonable, polite, and all that. When I say something, I’m not worried about the consequences. I don’t give a damn how I come across. Although, having said that, I did make the effort to shave today. I’d like that put down on the record, I did shave,” and he laughed, or so I thought, a singsong, rather inane titter. “I’m happy as I am and wouldn’t want to be any different. Nothing fazes me, you know what I’m saying?”

  No one answered, and their silence helped move the conversation on. The nephew finally revealed his real reason for being there and began talking at length about the party he intended to throw in the little hovel where he lived. Then it all became excruciating, because I found myself inadvertently eavesdropping on his cringe-inducing attempts to get those two girls in the sack. At a certain point, I stopped listening, and then, when I reconnected, I heard one of them say:

  “Yes, but we’d still like to interview your uncle. You will help us, won’t you?”

  I preferred not to hear any more. It was clear what was going on: he wanted to get laid, and they wanted something he couldn’t provide. And I needed to go home, because there was nothing to keep me there. I headed for the door, paying on my way, and left. Then, as I began walking slowly back up the street, I decided that I’d heard enough from the antagonistic nephew, on two separate occasions, to know that the odious, stupid side of his personality was compensated for by the other side, still unknown to me but occasionally glimpsed in the odd flash of talent. In other words: given that I didn’t know what to make of him, the best thing, I told myself, would be to opt for the more favorable impression, because if he had, at some point, displayed signs of genius, it was probably fair to assume that he was a genius, or a potential genius. Nevertheless, I had to acknowledge that he had an extremely pathetic, not to say base, side to him, because using his obsessive tirades against his uncle, even as a means of getting laid, really wasn’t nice, and that’s putting it kindly. But it seemed to me that, despite this, when compared with his uncle, he came out on top, because his uncle was a puffed-up peacock, on top of being a fickle, insufferable urbanite, and he had a past life as a former boyfriend of Carmen’s, a fact I still hadn’t fully digested.

  I liked the nephew, mainly because he was perfectly happy to exhibit a kind of genuineness that was, in many respects, prejudicial to him, but which allowed him to be himself. Basically, this uninhibited, extremely foulmouthed individual was saying that not writing and refusing to kowtow to the system had at least as much value as scribbling a few pages to produce a cruddy, sellable novel. The nephew didn’t know it, but he was simply showing me that I had done well in choosing the writing path furthest from the madding crowd; the path of never publishing; the path of writing for the pleasure of learning to write, of trying to find out what I would write if I wrote.

  The nephew aroused conflicting feelings in me, but we had something in common: he seemed to enjoy being a bit of a vagabond, whereas, although I did not, I couldn’t deny that a part of me was also attracted to that life, proof of which was my sympathy for Walter’s idea of traveling to Arab countries in search of the original story, that is, the very first story. Also the idea of escaping, born of necessity in Walter, was, in me, merely the idea of a vagabond life, which I felt I could fulfill in the pages of this diary.

  &

  “It’s completely unimportant. That’s why it’s so interesting,” said Agatha Christie’s detective, Poirot. And as I recalled those words — I was by then about five minutes away from Bar Treno — I thought of that poor antagonistic nephew. And suddenly I decided to turn round and go back to the bar. I walked for one long minute alongside some Chinese people who were going at exactly the same speed as I was, which meant that I couldn’t overtake or saunter comfortably along behind them. They seemed to be a replica of myself, a sophisticated parody of my way of walking, and that made me remember that yesterday, Carmen, perhaps prompted by her joy at seeing our love renewed, invited me to go on a long trip with her. To China, she said, but then said nothing more about China or about anything else, and nor did I. The word “China” hung there, floating in the air, alone and strange. When I asked her about China a few minutes later, she denied ever mentioning it. It was as if she had suddenly remembered something that would prevent her from going. Anyway, she flatly denied that we’d ever spoken about China.

  Before reaching that street, I stopped off at another bar, the Amorós, where I downed a G&T, not, mind you, with any intention of getting all ponderous and heavy, but of arming myself with a drop more Dutch courage than usual. When I reentered grubby Bar Treno, I raced past the long, old-fashioned bar, past the smoked glass screen, and planted myself in front of the nephew at the very moment when he — more repetitively repetitious than ever — was repeating that his uncle had nothing more to say. Earlier on, I hadn’t been able to see him, but only hear him from behind the screen. Now, before me, he seemed rather better groomed than the last time I’d seen him, his shoulders even broader, probably the effect of the particularly large shoulder pads in the red jacket he was wearing, which gave him a more boyish, almost healthy look.

  “Even assuming that’s true and he does have nothing more to say,” I broke in, “I would like to have a conversation with your uncle, your illustrious uncle. I need to interview him right away.”

  He looked at me, terrified. And his two female companions — who were, as I’d imagined, extremely young, and looking quite the intellectuals in their tortoiseshell-framed spectacles — appeared to be equally alarmed, although they both ended up laughing, indeed, they laughed so much that one of them even dropped her glasses, then herself collapsed onto the floor.

  Having first been given a fright from my outburst, they’d then got the giggles. I must keep my cool, I told myself. But then I realized what an unnecessary mess I’d gotten myself into. The antagonistic nephew was drunker than I’d thought and seemed about to get to his feet and rip into me, or perhaps even punch me. Then, rather timidly, but lying through my teeth, I told him I was a reporter from La Vanguardia. And I pointed vaguely in an easterly direction, where that newspaper had its headquarters, having moved out of the center of Barcelona a few years ago into the Coyote district.

  I immediately realized how crazy it was to have suggested wanting to meet Sánchez. What would he think if he found out? I beat a hasty retreat on all fronts and apologized, trying to give the nephew the impression that I was just another passing nutcase. I even quite enjoyed pretending to be crazy. I quoted Horace, as if I were talking to myself: “You have amused yourself, you have eaten and drunk enough; it is time for you to depart. Tempus abire tibi est.”

  “You’re not trying to muscle in on our interview, are you?” asked one of the girls rather cheekily.

  In fact, I’d only wanted to take the chip off of that muscleman’s shoulder, the chippiness that he uses to his advantage in all situations; I was aware that the less time I stuck around, the less likely he was to remember my face.

  “No, I don’t want to muscle in on anything, but you watch out for Mundigiochi, he’s a real leech,” I said.

  I didn’t hang around to be laughed at, or for the nephew to punch me in the face, and I skedaddled at top speed — like Petronius fleeing at night from Nero’s palace, with my little leather satchel — almost flying past the long, old-fashioned bar, where a baldheaded waiter, who hadn’t been there earlier, was idly washing dishes. He reminded me of someone. I thought I heard him cal
l out my name, but I didn’t stop. No, no, I wasn’t going to stay a second longer in that bar. As I went out onto the street, though, I looked back, and saw that he really should have been called Mac, too, because he was the spitting image of the bartender in the John Ford movie, the man who had always been a bartender and never been in love. These things happen, I said to myself, somewhat bemused. These things happen, I said again. But repeating the line did little to help me understand what that other Mac was doing there.

  22

  Since Carmen insisted that, ultimately, I was really just vegetating — she refused to accept that writing this personal diary, with all the work that entails, amounted to doing something — and since she also insisted on telling me that spending all day twiddling my thumbs was so dangerously dull it could even lead to suicide — “We didn’t fall back in love only for you to go and die on me,” she said, with enough sarcasm to knock me off my perch, and why the snide tone if she really was back in love with me, too? — I decided that the time had come today, over lunch, to explain to her that although I write my diary by hand and always somewhat impulsively, afterward I painstakingly edit what I’ve written — hence all the hours spent in the study — as if viewing it through a magnifying glass, before transcribing the copy onto the computer, printing it out, reading it through again on paper, making more changes, and so on, until, finally, I copy and paste it into another Word document, which only yesterday I entitled “Diary of a Washed-Up Contractor.”

  “Why a contractor?” she asked.

  “I see, so the word ‘contractor’ alarms you, but never mind that I consider myself washed up.”

  “All of it alarms me. To start with, your insistence that writing a diary constitutes actually doing something. Am I in it, by the way?”

  “Of course, and I write the most wonderful things about you, but you won’t ever get the chance to read them.”

  I might have worded that better, but her extreme indifference regarding my work as a beginner — notwithstanding her avowed contempt for all literary endeavors — was starting to get on my nerves. Such is her disdain for my diary that she didn’t even ask why she wouldn’t get to read it, not that this stopped me from explaining it to her anyway.

  “It isn’t that I’ve anything to hide,” I told her, “I merely want to write in total freedom. And even so, I do occasionally speak to a hypothetical reader. I don’t search him out, but I find myself speaking to him anyway.”

  As I might have expected, she still had a “this isn’t squaring with me” look etched on her face. Her aversion to books stems from a childhood trauma, which she’s never wanted to discuss with me, but which I know is related in some way to her dyslexia. This trauma is doubtless related to the fact that her parents were also dyslexic, and, as time went by, it even developed into a phobia of the printed page — mild at first, but ultimately uncontrollable.

  “Yes, I write wonderful things about you,” I told her, “wouldn’t you like to hear some of them? You don’t have to read them yourself, I know you won’t want to do that, but I can read you some right now.”

  Not even this made her take an interest in my diary.

  In the ensuing silence, I thought about how, if, under mysterious circumstances — circumstances related to some heinous crime, for example — I were forced to flee with only the clothes on my back — let’s say with a white shirt, a pair of dark pants, and a small leather satchel containing a few bare essentials — and wander God’s earth, the big wide world, and if, in my haste, I left my diary at home, perhaps Carmen would have no option but to take charge of those secret pages — at the request of the police, say — in which someone — perhaps even she herself — would discover just how much I loved her, and how infuriating I found her indifference toward my writing exercises, not to mention her strangely sarcastic attitude, which, for the life of me, I can’t understand.

  What sweet revenge it would be to escape to the Orient and leave her with that diary, forcing her to acknowledge it, even if all that involved was handing it over to the police.

  But this is all just hot air, because I do love her. And yet the urge to disappear, to follow in Walter’s footsteps and run away never to be seen again — in my case without having to murder anyone — really is quite strong.

  What would Carmen do with the pages of my diary in that case? She might just leave them to gather dust for all eternity, or perhaps she’d follow Max Brod’s example and give them to someone from a publishing company to read. “After all, even if he did write only for himself, deep down he was looking for a reader,” Carmen would say piously, but without dropping her apathetic attitude toward all things literary, or, as she would call it, “all that bookish drivel.”

  So she might quickly forget all about the diary, but, equally, you never know, she might turn out to be my very own Brod. And wherever I might be — an errant, roaming vagabond — I would silently applaud its publication and approve of my readers doing with me exactly as I intend to do with Sánchez, that is, reading me and, as they read, modifying whatever I’d written.

  And where would I be in the meantime? Perpetually on the move? This is all just speculation of course, but I think I’d be hiding out in some spot resembling, as far as possible, what the Romans called Arabia Felix — fortunate or fertile Arabia — doubtless because of all the coffee and incense exported out of Mocha; I’d be holed up somewhere resembling that African territory, where happiness reigned for years and which, today, is a place of pure panic, a land plagued by misfortune.

  I’d stay so hidden from view that people would think I was dead. I’d be perfectly untraceable, à la Wakefield, that character from one of Hawthorne’s stories, the husband who walks out of the front door one day telling his wife he’ll be back on Friday at the latest, but then continually postpones his return home and spends the next twenty years living in a mansion down the road, until one stormy winter’s day, he spots a log fire burning in what was once his house, and he decides to go back, and, just like that, raps on his wife’s front door, and is home.

  What anyone reading my diary would find strange is that, despite having been interrupted by some serious problem — the author’s disappearance or death — the diary would have been found to be ready for immediate publication, with no need to touch a single comma.

  The manuscript would be divided clearly into two parts: the second of these would modify the diaristic pages of the first part, which would include the story of the crime.

  It would turn out that, despite appearances, the manuscript hadn’t been interrupted by its author’s sudden departure; nor, therefore, would it be unfinished. Quite the contrary: the whole thing would have been planned so that the all-important disappearance of the author — who either went traveling the world, or actually died, whichever suited him best, because the only requisite would be for him to vanish into thin air — brought to a close the game which the text itself had been engineering in such a way that the death or departure of its author was absolutely essential in order for the diaristic artifact to reach its ideal conclusion, and thus end up perfectly complete, while appearing to be incomplete. This, then, would make it a diary that had been carefully planned to appear to be “unfinished,” and even conceived in such a way that some would find camouflaged among its pages an “unresolved posthumous novel,” always provided, of course, that the author, the Wakefield of our times, removed himself from the picture when the moment came.

  Would Carmen become my Brod? Stranger things have happened. Perhaps she herself would end up publishing my deceptively “incomplete” diary.

  But all of this, I told myself today, is mere speculation on my part, an attempt to satisfy my thirst for revenge for Carmen’s indifference toward my “modest knowledge.” Speculation which, ultimately, sprang from the initial confession made in this diary: my weakness for posthumous, unfinished books and my desire to make my own forgery; one that would only appear
to have been interrupted. . . . If one day I managed to pull off that fake book trick, I would really be doing little more than enlisting it in an increasingly popular contemporary literary trend, that of the so-called “posthumous forgery,” a fairly overlooked genre in the history of literature.

  &

  This afternoon, once I’d heard Carmen put down the telephone after a lengthy conversation, I entrusted myself to the protection of the Kafkaesque clerks from the Adjustment Bureau, begging them, above all, not to accidently hook me up with the Department of Maladjustment (a dark subdivision within the main Bureau); I asked them if — provided that they really do exist — they could give me a hand in achieving the impossible and make Carmen pay the slightest attention to what I intended to tell her about my work as a beginner.

  Believing myself to be protected, or, rather, preferring to believe that I was now protected by the employees of the Bureau’s Kafkaesque Soul (one of the many subdivisions in that place), I marched over to Carmen and, without further ado, told her that nothing I wrote in the diary was made up, apart from my identity as a washed-up building contractor. I waited for a reaction, but it seemed not even this approach was working, and so I then delved back into our recent private abyss and told her that I’d invented that past life as a contractor so that I wouldn’t have to give any more thought to “the drama.”