Mac's Problem

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  “Bad night’s sleep, was it?” I asked, trying to pretend I wasn’t afraid.

  “Yes, and when I woke up, I looked like I’d been dragged through a hedge backward!”

  He clearly had a sense of humor, but I thought it best just to get on and give him some money. I felt in my pocket and found a two-euro coin, which I immediately handed to him. Harpo took it at once. Rummaging around in my pocket again, I found five smaller coins and handed him the whole lot. However, he rejected this second gift outright, reacting as if I were a vampire dangling a string of garlic in front of him.

  “No, please,” he said, almost imploringly.

  I even began to doubt that he had actually asked for any money. I made a fresh attempt to give him the coins, and he looked even more horrified. I couldn’t understand what was going on, but, just in case, I thought it best to leave him. In the desert, I recalled, one shouldn’t stop to speak to strangers. But first I took a closer look at him, as if this would provide me with the necessary moment of reflection to help consolidate my precarious grip on what I was seeing. Then, without wasting any more time, I set off again, and when I’d already left him behind, I heard him repeating those same words:

  “No, please.”

  Two hours later, there was more of a breeze on the streets and more pedestrians out and about, so there would be plenty of witnesses to anything that might happen. I felt tired after all my meanderings, stopping off in various bars, walking aimlessly but always in circles, never leaving the more monotonous parts of the neighborhood and always reemerging onto yet another stretch of Calle Londres. In a way, this process reminded me of something a friend used to say, that any road, even the road to Entepfuhl, would lead you to the end of world, but the road to Entepfuhl, if followed right to the end, would lead straight back to Entepfuhl.

  I felt there was no escape, that I was stranded in the circular geography of Coyote, and, at the same time, at the end of the world, knowing that, even if I traveled to the ends of the earth, I would always return to Calle Londres. The truth is that noting down all these incidents or simple details was doing me good, perhaps because I was immersed in the kind of banal activities described in all my favorite diaries. That’s why, for some time, while I walked, I devoted myself to seeking out the irrelevant. I even had a sense that in doing so, I was rebelling in some way against the clerks of the Adjustment Bureau, who might well be imaginary beings, but might also actually exist, in which case I’d be foolish to try and erase them from my mind. And what if those clerks weren’t as brilliant, fierce, and determined as I had imagined, but instead toiled ceaselessly away in a decidedly gray environment? Of course, that didn’t mean they weren’t capable of changing our lives with a single line.

  I had just reemerged, for the nth time, onto Calle Londres — feeling slightly tipsy now — and I was just wondering why they didn’t think to rename that street to which I always returned as Ithaca, when suddenly I caught sight of Sánchez’s nephew or, rather, the back of his flamboyantly shaven neck. No, I couldn’t believe it! There he was again, the hateful hater. It was only what I deserved really, having walked for hours in circles round and round the neighborhood. The ghastly nephew was swaggering along just ahead of me, nonchalant, and, at the same time — for he’d definitely had a few drinks too many — slightly unsteady on his feet. I decided to follow him so as to find out where he lived or who he was going to see and what he had got up to and what he did for a living, always supposing he was capable of holding down a job. I was still wondering whether or not to approach him when he came to an abrupt halt and remained glued to the spot outside the window of a small store. In an attempt to creep nimbly into the shelter of a nearby doorway, I performed a strange kind of pirouette, spun round, then took two very short steps that nearly achieved precisely the opposite of my desired effect, namely, landing me slap-bang in his field of vision.

  When he finally managed to drag himself away from the window and set off again, I followed suit, pausing to see what it was that had so captured his attention. A pair of sneakers. What an anticlimax! I mean, sneakers! I was so overwhelmed by this disappointment that, when I finally recovered from my state of disillusionment, I assumed that the nephew would be out of sight. But as I prepared myself to scan the horizon, I found him right there, staring at me, in the grip of some stubborn thought, until he finally spoke and demanded to know where he had seen me before.

  I managed to blurt out that I was the journalist from La Vanguardia who had wanted to interview his uncle. The nephew leaned ominously toward me and seemed even more of a giant. I was, however, saved by the bell, an imaginary bell. Just when things were looking really bleak, I had a brilliant idea and promptly invited him to have a drink with me in Bar Tender, barely two steps away. He accepted at once with unusual enthusiasm, because it seemed — as I would soon find out — he didn’t have a penny to his name and needed a drink, several, he said.

  Not that I was rolling in money myself, because, having given away most of my change, all I had left was a twenty-euro note. But this was, in any case, more than he had, for, as I saw quite clearly, he was one of those creatures who drift through life doing nothing; although, of course, he may have been one of the tragically unemployed, and I was perhaps unfairly dismissing him as a mere idler. Besides, setting aside certain insurmountable differences, he did have something in common with me, because I, too, was unemployed, although I’m very active in my unemployment, and this diary is my apprenticeship, an apprenticeship in becoming a writer.

  “Good God, this just gets funnier and funnier,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean people are falling over themselves to pay me for information about my uncle.”

  Ah, now I understood. He was an out-and-out rogue. Not that I minded. On the contrary, a few doors opened to me when I saw him so ready to talk. But talk about what? I didn’t need him to tell me any more about his uncle — he was far too hostile to Sánchez and would be totally biased; but the first story in Walter’s Problem was entitled “I Had an Enemy,” and, unless I was very much mistaken, the plot of that story — with the presence of Pedro, the ventriloquist’s gratuitous antagonist who disappears off to the South Seas — did, in some respects, resemble what the nephew was up to in the neighborhood, although he would doubtless be unaware of his resemblance to the ventriloquist’s gratuitous enemy from the first story of that book published all those years ago. I could perhaps ask if he’d read it?

  I thought so many things in that moment that, when I glanced up again, I found the nephew staring at me even more fixedly than before. I was about to ask him what he was looking at when he took the initiative himself and asked me what I was looking at. Then, I decided to make an instant enemy of the nephew and told him I was taking in, very carefully, very closely, his indescribable loathing.

  He smiled, but I could see I’d ruffled his feathers, and he eyed me with great hostility.

  “Why ‘indescribable’? What do you mean ‘loathing’?” He had ordered a drink and they hadn’t brought it, he said, and he complained to the bar staff. I asked him his name. Julio, he said. Julio what? Julio, he said. It seemed to me that this wasn’t his name at all, but that of the month we happened to be in. I had to accept it, though, what else could I do?

  As if I’d suddenly turned private detective, I surreptitiously slipped him my twenty-euro note. I was preparing my interview with his uncle, I said, and wanted to know if he’d read a story by Sánchez called “I Had an Enemy.” Julio asked me to repeat this more slowly, and so I did. I was left none the wiser as to whether he’d read it or not, but I did, on the other hand, learn that Sánchez’s real enemy was none other than Sánchez himself.

  “Because Sánchez,” he said, “is a complete neurotic, totally egocentric. He’s spectacularly egotistical, the very epitome of egocentricity. Everything has to revolve around him, he can’t bear it otherwise. That’s why
he’s such a disaster in company, because he can’t always surround himself with enough flatterers to make him the center of attention. Yes, he’s a bona fide egocentric. He can’t see beyond the end of his nose. He’s a fucking neurotic. And the mistake we humans often make is to think that neurotics are interesting, when they never are, because neurotics are perpetually unhappy, self-absorbed, malicious, ungrateful — people incapable of making any constructive criticism, who only ever see doom and gloom.”

  It seemed to me that Julio was painting a pretty good picture of himself here, but I said nothing. And then, while I was thinking all this, something ridiculous happened. Julio, without even asking my permission, took a sip of my G&T. I felt quite disgusted and was about to demand, at the very least, some explanation, when he began telling me to give up on the idea of interviewing his uncle, although he wouldn’t explain why. It seemed more like a subterfuge so that I wouldn’t catch on that he was in no position to act as go-between.

  Well into his second drink, he suddenly announced that, although he wasn’t one to boast, he was the best writer in the world, and he was about to give me a perfectly abridged version of what was going on with Sánchez. His uncle’s life, he said, could be summarized easily enough by giving a detailed account of how idleness, fear, and anxiety were gradually dulling a great intellect, and by describing how that intellect was very slowly disappearing, just as all that remains of an object you drop into the ocean are a few ephemeral bubbles.

  He went on to say that, in recent months, things had gotten worse, and Sánchez’s sole ambition was to emulate a certain Norwegian writer whom some misguided critics were comparing with Proust. What saved his uncle was a certain sense of dignity when he put on his public persona at speaking engagements, but little more. On one occasion, back when they were still on speaking terms, he’d heard his uncle say that he intended to adopt a pseudonym and devote himself to criticism, to being implacably honest, especially about his own work; he’d heard him say that he was prepared to analyze his own books in those implacably honest reviews, which he would publish under that pseudonym. These, his uncle said, would be the only really intelligent reviews he would get, because no one knew better than he did where his faults lay. . . . That’s what his uncle had said on that one occasion, and then Julio had put a damper on this rush of self-critical enthusiasm, telling him that, as a good nephew, he was equally aware of his literary faults and could, if he liked, list them right there and then, although perhaps he’d best keep them to himself, in case he wounded his uncle’s feelings. And that was the last time we spoke, Julio concluded.

  Well, I said, I’m not exactly surprised you don’t see each other anymore. But that’s all I said, because I was reluctant to tell him that I’d given him my twenty euros and that I couldn’t, therefore, pay for our drinks. I then pretended that I’d just received a text message (I said this in English just to see if I could manage to impress him at least once) and that I had to shoot off.

  I had interrupted him almost in midsentence. I went over to the bar, where they know me quite well, and said that I’d pay them tomorrow for any drinks we’d had.

  “And what if that gentleman over there orders something else? Should we give it to him?” asked one of the two idle barmen.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you, stranger.”

  I answered like a character out of a Western, as befitted someone called Mac, who’d picked up his name in the saloon of a Wild West town.

  I left with a spring in my step. Armed with the knowledge that Sánchez was his own worst enemy, I could begin planning my remake of Walter’s Problem.

  I left so quickly that anyone seeing me might have thought I was skipping out. At a pedestrian crossing, I came across a beggar, who, if I’m not mistaken, usually sits on the corner of Calle París and Calle Muntaner. I surprised myself at how easily I recognized him. He seemed about to leave and looked just like any other man going home after work. Then I realized that exactly the opposite was true: he was, in fact, heading for his place of work. Under one arm he was carrying a notice saying something to the tune of that he was hungry and had three children to support. He glared at me, and I thought he was about to ask for money. If he did, I had my answer ready: my last twenty euros had gone to another beggar. He said nothing, but merely looked me up and down. That look made me squirm, but I defended myself in a most peculiar way, invisible not only to him, but to anyone else as well. I silently invoked a favorite saying of a friend of mine — a great expert on clochards and on very friendly terms with a fair few of them in Paris — which I repeated as a kind of private prayer: “Born to us will come the man who, having nothing, will want nothing more than to be left with that nothing he has.”

  I thought then of the Jew and his wish to escape dressed only in his nightshirt, and, at the next traffic light, as I left behind the man whose sign said he was hungry, I wondered if the various beggars who appeared to be accompanying, almost punctuating, my walk today weren’t perhaps different versions of my own image reflected in a mirror in continual movement. If so, I told myself, I should kill them off, one by one, at each set of traffic lights; that would be one way of bringing about my own death — or disappearance.

  On the corner of Calle París and Calle Casanova, I saw — and, in the circumstances, I barely felt a glimmer of surprise — the same group of gray, forty-something bohemians I’d seen months before, on the day I’d first spotted Julio. They seemed to be handing around bottles of wine and looked more like clochards than bohemians. They seemed in far worse shape than the last time. Had they gone entirely to the dogs in those few months? I considered telling them that they would find the slanderous nephew in Bar Tender, but then I began to wonder if the economic crisis was driving more beggars into the Coyote neighborhood. Or was this, rather, an invasion of misunderstood geniuses?

  &

  I wake up and get out of bed to note down all I can remember of the end of a dream I would very much have liked to continue. Through the open windows of the saxophone school in Coyote came the languid sound of the music classes, a monstrous buzzing in the midst of the pervading summer heat, which mingled with the din of the street performer belting out his carefree song to the rhythm of bamba, la bamba, bamba, his voice reaching every corner of the neighborhood. Everyone was dancing. And I had to agree that Coyote was much improved when transplanted to New York.

  26

  If I rewrote “I Had an Enemy,” the new plot would revolve around the problem of Walter the ventriloquist’s extreme egocentrism, which was doubtless what lay behind his lack of other voices. It would also mention a rehab center for egomaniacs, newly opened right next door, and which, while he would certainly know all about it, he would never consider to be an appropriate place for himself.

  My “I Had an Enemy” wouldn’t begin with the Cheever quote, but with the line from William Faulkner that Roberto Bolaño used as an epigraph in his novella Distant Star: “What star is there falls, with none to watch it?”

  As far as I know, no one has yet been able to locate this line in Faulkner’s work, which suggests that the quote could be made-up, although everything else points to it being Faulkner’s handiwork, and Bolaño experts all agree that he wasn’t in the habit of inventing quotes, and certainly not if he was going to use them as epigraphs.

  Just as we might ask ourselves which star we mean when we speak of a star that has fallen with none to watch it, we might well ask what kind of diary we’re talking about when we speak of a diary with none to read it. Both the falling star’s need for a spectator and the paradoxical need for a reader shared by some personal, private diaries have led me to imagine a diary in which someone writes down his daily thoughts and activities with no intention of ever being read, only for that diary to take on a life of its own and to rebel against the intentional absence of a reader and slowly insist on being seen, on escaping its fate as a fallen star with none to watch it.

  I
’m suddenly reminded of how, four days ago, I had an idea for that fake posthumous book (posthumous and falsely interrupted by death), a book I haven’t really lost sight of for a moment since I began this diary.

  After writing this last line, I took a break from the page as a way of simulating a genuine break in the diary, which meant, in reality, that I cracked open another bottle of Vega Sicilia, the last in the pantry, and drank a toast to a return to the idea of creating an entirely artificial and counterfeit work, consistent with the genre of “incomplete and posthumous works.”

  Wasn’t this the very first thing I thought when I began my diary, and also what ultimately led me to remember the character of Wakefield and to feel a growing need for Carmen, or indeed anyone, to, at some point, acknowledge the existence of this diary? Sometimes, even if it involves us temporarily absenting ourselves, we must fight to achieve something as essential and, at the same time, as simple as having someone acknowledge our existence.

  After that break, I returned to the study, to these pages which I began almost a month ago with no idea where they would lead or what I would talk about, always assuming I would have something to say, but in which a theme soon emerged and so promptly that I felt it must be the theme meant for me. It had come to me sooner than expected, one sunny morning as I was listening to Antonio Lauro’s “Vals Venezolano No. 3, Natalia,” a song I never tire of hearing. The theme was repetition, and I soon became immersed in it, especially in its importance in music, where sounds and sequences tend to be repeated, and where everyone agrees that repetition is fundamental if it works in harmony with a composition’s opening themes and variations.

  I was soon utterly gripped by this theme of repetition, the proof being that I’m now planning the modified and improved rewrite of my neighbor’s novel, a misguided, insignificant book, full of now forgotten sound and fury, but nonetheless one that I’ve chosen to study with a care compatible with my plan eventually to change it. If one day I do rewrite “I Had an Enemy,” the first thing I think I’ll do is replace the Cheever quote with a Faulknerian epigraph, a modification that would not only make Sánchez’s novel perform a triple somersault of thirty years, it would also prevent the narrator telling the story as if he hadn’t read the literary masterpieces produced by Bolaño.