Anyway, like many others on the street, I was curious to see how that pursuit would end and I joined forces with a chorus of circumspect bystanders, and the whole thing ended in the worst way possible, for it was no longer merely unliterary in tone, it was also utterly uncivilized. A short, sharp karate chop brought the Colombian to the ground, where he lay motionless, having hit his head on the edge of the curb. Was he dead? His aggressor, who showed no interest in stealing his Havana cigars, turned to see what was going on behind him and, pausing for the briefest of moments, he scowled menacingly at us onlookers. That set my mind off again, although only for a second, allowing me to notice that, despite his youth, he could equally well have passed for an old man, because his nose ended in a bulbous white tip, as if it were making a foolish attempt to match his white outfit.
As tends to happen in real life — and as I see all too clearly in this diary as well — events come and go, usually with no great dramatic twist, however cataclysmic they might seem at the time. And thank goodness, because this stops me having to behave, in my diary, like certain novelists who insult the reader’s intelligence by filling their stories with spectacular events, inventing great fires, for example, or getting their characters to go around killing each other, or having the nice guy win the jackpot, or someone drown in the sea on the happiest day of his life, or having a twelve-story building come crashing down, or for seven shots to ring out on a blissfully peaceful Sunday. . . .
Some novels even overdramatize events, which, in real life, happen in a far more unassuming and inconsequential way; they happen, then they’re over, they run into one another, floating like clouds scattered by the wind between the odd deceptive pause that turns out to be impossible, because time — which no one understands — stops for nothing. This “flaw” in certain novels is another reason why I tend to prefer short stories. Of course, I do sometimes come across excellent novels, but that doesn’t change my overall opinion, because the novels I like always resemble Chinese boxes, containing tales within tales.
Short story collections — which can seem very similar to personal diaries, made up as they are of days that resemble chapters, chapters that, in turn, resemble fragments — are perfect machines when, thanks to the brevity and concision demanded by the form itself, they manage to appear in every way more closely linked to reality, as opposed to novels, which so often dance around it.
Not unusually for me, in the midst of that crazy incident involving the man with the flashy belt and the possibly deceased Colombian, my mind wandered off and I ended up pondering the tension between the genres of the short story and the novel, the friction that existed in my own diary. Nor was it unusual for me, despite the apparent importance of that sudden fracas on the street, to see the whole thing as utterly insignificant, and by the time the ambulance arrived, I’d almost forgotten all about it, the proof of this being that I calmly turned on my heel and went home as if nothing had happened. Carmen was back by then, having returned from the movies, where I was sure she’d seen less “action” than I had on my stroll around Coyote. Idiotically, I somehow failed to notice the surly look on her face. Had I noticed, I wouldn’t have asked if she’d found the heat unbearable; I wouldn’t have asked her anything, because I know how badly she reacts when she’s in a bad mood and is asked a question, any kind of question.
She replied furiously, demanding to know why my shirt was drenched in sweat. I just narrowly escaped death, I said. And I told her about the chase and the karate chop and the possible corpse in the midst of it all. . . .
“You can’t go on like this,” she cut in authoritatively.
She then started saying how I do less and less each day — as if, once again, she were making a concerted effort to ignore the existence of my diary, and as if my having witnessed a possible murder were proof of my idleness — and she asked what I’d done that morning, wanting to know — as she put it — if I’d spent it sitting on my hands. I considered how fickle a thing falling in love can be and how it can flare up or die down in a moment. My hands were kept pretty busy, I told her. And if plates didn’t fly, that’s only because they happened to be out of Carmen’s reach.
Later on, when things had calmed down, Carmen asked, apropos of nothing, when I planned to give her my shirt so she could sew on its missing button. I asked if she meant the sweaty shirt I’d been wearing. And in the middle of our absurd and increasingly heated argument — in which I repeated several times that none of my shirts had a button missing — she called me Ander.
“Ander!” she said. Sánchez’s name. I heard it as clear as a bell. Everything in the house froze, even time itself seemed to stop. There, right in front of me, was the unexpected evidence that Carmen was in the habit of arguing with Sánchez and calling him by his given name, which meant not only was she lying when she said that she never had any contact with him, she also seemed accustomed to arguing with him in the same familiar tones as she did with me.
But the strangest part of all this is that Carmen denied the whole thing. She repeated over and over that, at no point, had she called me Ander. She even swore on her mother’s life, and then — quite unnecessarily — on His Holiness the Pope (this one and the Pole, she said). In the face of her adamant denial, there wasn’t much I could do apart from begin to doubt myself and accept that perhaps I had misheard, even though I knew I’d heard perfectly well.
And now, at this very moment, along with a sense that today has been a less than felicitous Sunday, I realize again that she did, without a shadow of a doubt, say what I heard her say. I can’t change things, because it is what it is; I can’t rewrite in my mind the fateful moment when “Ander!” escaped from her lips.
I remember it perfectly, including the particular way in which she shouted it out, then stopped short when she realized her blunder. But I just told her, yes, perhaps I had misheard and maybe she had actually said “And another thing!” or even just “And er . . . !” And then came the strangest part of my Sunday. She looked at me, incensed, and said: “For crying out loud, Mac, I didn’t say either of those things either.” And I said: “Oh, really?” “No,” she assured me with such a beatific look that I was stunned. And I replied: “No, it turns out you didn’t say anything . . .” “Exactly, I didn’t say anything,” she said, and if her composure was merely a front — it had to be, it simply had to — it was a masterpiece of pretense.
29
In the late afternoon, still shaken by what happened yesterday, I tottered wearily round to see the local tailor and ask if he could let out the pants I bought last year and which I can now barely do up.
On the way, despite the extra nine pounds I’m carrying around, I felt so frail that I was sure the slightest breeze would knock me down.
The tailor could not have been nicer, but he only has one changing room in his very cramped shop and he’s chosen to furnish it with not one, but two full-length mirrors and a tiny stool. It’s terribly confined, like a tomb. Feeling flustered behind the curtain, I almost lost my balance and risked falling and breaking one of the two mirrors. Then I felt an overwhelming fear that I might die in the very moment I slipped my foot into the narrow pant leg. And shortly afterward, having overcome my fear of losing my balance just as I breathed my last, everything grew still bleaker: I felt very alone and, for a few seconds, couldn’t even see myself in the mirror.
I broke out in a cold sweat and realized I was alive. Lucky me. When I went home, I recalled the story I’d heard some time ago, about a wife who left her husband for another man. The husband placed a naked statue of her in the garden of a friend. Was this a kind of “Renaissance revenge,” or did he simply give it to his friend because it was no longer of any value to him?
30
I spent the whole morning telling myself that there wasn’t a moment to waste.
By the afternoon, nothing much had changed. Once again, I obsessed over not wasting a minute while wasting them all.
>
“Just get up and leave the house,” the voice said.
(The voice of death.)
But I didn’t want to leave my apartment. I was paralyzed by a sudden insight into the most contradictory aspect of the artist’s condition, however much of a beginner he might be, namely, that when going out onto the streets, he must observe whatever he sees there as if he were oblivious to it all, but then he must do something with it, make a carbon copy of it at home, as if he had understood absolutely everything.
Paralyzed. And on top of this, the day seemed determined to be the shortest I’ve known in all my days on this planet, probably a decision made by that devious bunch from the Adjustment Bureau.
I watched the clouds racing by, but still couldn’t make up my mind to do anything. I spent the entire day eager to get myself into gear before the day ended. Carmen came into the study to let me know it was getting late. I looked out of the window, and, lo and behold, night was falling, and there I was, having done nothing all day, knocked senseless by jealousy, by my suspicions about Carmen, by my wretched state of mind.
Now, as I think about heading to bed, I can see that the only thing I should have written today is the following: “Death speaks to us in a deep voice only to say nothing, nothing, nothing. . . .” I should have read this and then written it out a hundred times and in that way gone to bed believing that I had at least written something today. And then this, another hundred times (as an homage to the dark parasite of repetition that lies at the heart of all literary creation): “We know far less than we think we know, but we can always know more, there’s always room to learn.”
“Mac, what are you doing?” Carmen calls, or almost bellows, from the living room.
In response, I cover my mouth with one hand, while with the other I remove my pajama pants, put them away in the closet, and, standing there stark naked, I reply:
“Nothing, darling, still just repeating the neighbor’s novel.”
And I imagine Sánchez, also naked, forty years, or who knows, perhaps only a couple of hours ago, standing ready before Carmen as I am now, ready for anything.
31
If it came to it, the first thing I’d change in “The Duel of Grimaces” would be the epigraph by Djuna Barnes. I’d replace it with a piece of dialogue taken from Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin:
“‘Carla, a child is for life.’
‘No, dear,’ she says. She has long nails and points one finger at me, level with my eyes.”
The epigraph would then chime fully with the contents of the story.
Schweblin is an Argentinian writer who doesn’t necessarily see madness as a disorder, perhaps because she feels that the strange and anomalous make most sense. She particularly admires the short stories of Cortázar, Bioy Casares, and Antonio Di Benedetto, and that, I think, gives a really good clue as to where she’s going with her writing, because those authors are three of the finest practitioners of the kind of Argentinian literature that inhabits gray, disquieting, everyday worlds and which someone has named “the literature of disappointment.” I’ll never forget Di Benedetto reaching the old wharf and saying: “There we were, all set to go and not going.”
In her stories, Schweblin usually tries to make some of the things she describes happen inside the reader. If, one day, I do rewrite “The Duel of Grimaces,” I’d like to achieve the same effect, or at least try. I could choose other writers who place the reader in a similar position, but I would take Schweblin as a reference point for “The Duel of Grimaces,” because I’ve read her only recently and still feel very much under the spell of Fever Dream, with its atmosphere of rural drought mingled with herbicides and the poison some mothers exude. I still haven’t gotten over the shock. When I finished reading the book, I felt as if I’d been transformed into a mother who harbored murderous feelings for her children, and that Schweblin really had succeeded in making that story happen inside me.
That’s why, if, one day, I do rewrite “The Duel of Grimaces,” I would make a point of imitating her way of writing, although I’m sure that in order to do that, I’d have to spend years steeped in the sadness and the difficult art of those Argentinian writers.
In my story, the egotism of the ventriloquist would be the determining factor, especially as regards his relationship with his only son. Walter would be a jealous man — as I have been these last two days, terribly jealous, despite having no evidence that Carmen is deceiving me, and convinced, too, that I’m making a complete fool of myself; it’s as if I wanted her to betray me, so that I would then have a reason for running away — yes, Walter would be neurotic, self-absorbed, egotistical, with a very real feeling of physical disgust for his only son, a disgust that would, in a way, already have been announced in that quote from Schweblin and would lie at the center of everything.
My rewrite of “The Duel of Grimaces” would be totally different from Sánchez’s original: the father would, quite simply, want to do away with his son, to kill him. We wouldn’t, then, be faced with just the horror of someone who discovers that his son and heir is as vile an individual as he is, but of someone with the entirely unnatural desire to murder his thirty-year-old son, whom he judges to be unacceptable and monstrous. Needless to say, I don’t identify in the least with Walter’s criminal desire, among other things because I don’t desire the death of anyone, and mainly because I adore my three lovely sons. In fact, only yesterday, Miguel and Antonio, the two oldest, phoned from Sardinia, where they’re having an amazing time on vacation near the ruins of Pula, which is where Carmen and I spent our honeymoon thirty years ago. Love you, I said. And then, wanting to let them know that their mother and I were currently basking in the glow of a second honeymoon, I added: “We both do.”
It’s the sort of thing I only ever dare say over the phone, and never to their faces. And yesterday, I didn’t hold back.
“We love you, too!” cried Miguel, the most affectionate of my three sons, and possibly the most intelligent, although that doesn’t really come into it if you love your three children equally.
“But I love you more!” I said.
And Carmen told me off for joshing with them like that. To which I replied: They’re grown men, they can take a bit of joshing.
“Love you!” we could hear Antonio saying, so as not to be left out.
They have their own lives to lead. Far from us. If we’d had a girl, she would probably have stayed closer to home. I think sons tend to do their own thing — they like to be free, and ours are no exception. Our third son is an aeronautical engineer; he has found a very well-paid job in Abu Dhabi, and we speak to him now and then on Skype. I couldn’t be prouder of all three of them. If, one day, I were to commit suicide or disappear, I’d like them to know that they have my unreserved admiration. I haven’t seen any of them for a while now and haven’t had a chance to tell them that I’m working hard every day on this diary, but I don’t think I really need to tell them what I’m up to, however much it bothers me that they might think me stupid and idle, not to mention an old fool, an idle retiree or still worse: a lawyer who was dismissed because he wasn’t up to the job and hit the bottle too hard. Let them think what they like. It’s enough for me to love them and feel proud of them, and also to know — this is rather more prosaic, but I have to include it — that they could help me out financially if I were to split with their mother and needed their help. When they were little — when their tender ages required it — I spoiled them rotten, and Carmen was a perfect mother, affectionate, impeccable. I keep thinking about fatherhood now, and I can’t deny that when we give life to another being, we should be conscious of the fact that we’re also giving them death.
Do we give them death? If I were to rewrite “The Duel of Grimaces,” that would be the son’s gripe with his ventriloquist father. I’m already practicing putting myself in Walter’s shoes in order to be better equipped to write that story. Not that I actual
ly believe we do give our children death; I believe we give them life. And that’s an idea, a conviction if you like, over which almost nothing can cast a shadow, apart from once — a while ago — when, as I strolled down to the port of Barcelona, I thought I saw — my imagination doubtless playing tricks on me — a shape floating in the water that came and went and that appeared to be — how can I put this clearly? — a dead monkey.
While I was imagining seeing this, I stood for quite a long time, asking myself if it really was a monkey and, if so, was it a whole monkey.
I just want you to explain one thing, the son would say in “The Duel of Grimaces,” why did you tell me so early on, when I was only fifteen, that everything would end in death and that after death there was nothing? As I explained at the time, his father would say in reply, I couldn’t bear to see that — just like a dog — you had no concept of death.
“But that was a terrible thing to do. Are you sure it wasn’t because you were already wanting to see me dead and buried? And wasn’t it true that you hated having a son and wanted to live your own life and have no paternal commitments?”
Mac's Problem Page 17