Mac's Problem

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  When he heard this, Walter would start to believe, there and then, that his son was a complete and utter monster, and begin to feel an urge to kill him. Strange though it may seem, his own son would have given him that idea, which is pretty much what Walter would say, although not in so many words:

  “What’s wrong? Are you so very delicate? You just have to put up with it. You are a being made for death.”

  And then his son would completely lose it.

  “You’re really getting on my nerves, you know. I’m a poet, and you, on the other hand, are a second-rate, out-of-work ventriloquist, a failure with a foul temper, full of resentment for all the ventriloquists who you sense are better than you. Because everything has to be centered on you, isn’t that right? You’re a complete egocentrist.”

  “You mean egocentric. No one would think you were a son of mine, you haven’t even learned to speak properly. I’m beginning to suspect that you rather dislike the idea that you’re mortal.”

  Shortly afterward, the insolent son and the “egocentrist” father would fall silent, at which point I would begin to feed in elements that would doubtless become central to the slender plotline of the ventriloquist’s memoirs; one of those elements — which only appears to be an insignificant detail — would be the Javan sunshade, which, just as in Sánchez’s novel, would turn out to be important because of its suggestion of criminality, but also perhaps because it would be useful, at various points in Walter’s indirect autobiography, to have him simply wave it around and thus frighten away the ghosts roaming about in his mind.

  I can see it now, the misanthrope Walter shooing away flies during his argument with his son and, tragically, blindly hitting out with the sunshade, thus signaling his real intention: to murder his chief enemy — himself.

  What I see with utter clarity is the absolute need — if, one day, I do end up rewriting the story — to preserve intact the scene in which Sánchez describes the duel of grimaces between father and son. With that same clarity, I think I can also see the need to add to that scene a series of footnotes — one per grimace — in pure David Foster Wallace style: footnotes that would create a huge creative contrast between two powerful and totally contrasting styles (Schweblin and David Foster Wallace); footnotes capable of unleashing a perfect storm.

  There’s no point in denying that I adore the enormous, mad, limitless extravagance of Foster Wallace’s obsessive footnotes. I see in them a kind of troubling, irrepressible impulse to keep on writing, to write until you’ve written everything, and to transform the world into one great perpetual commentary, with no final page.

  That’s why I’d love to parody or pay homage to the recalcitrant tone of those notes, and I’d do so by writing several long footnotes that would establish a direct link between Walter’s duel with his son and an actual episode from the history of Polish literature: the face-duels held, in the winter of 1942, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, in the houses, respectively, of Stanisław Witkiewicz and Bruno Schulz.

  According to Jan Kott, it was common in both households, in the bedroom or the corridor, to see two people in face-to-face combat, each seeking the complete destruction of their opponent by coming up with a grimace so horrifying that no better counter-grimace was possible.

  Kott explains that their faces were the best game of ping-pong at their disposal. He writes: “Strange sounds reached me from the next room. I opened the door a crack and found two geniuses of Polish literature kneeling opposite each other. They were banging their heads on the floor, and then, on the count of three, they raised their heads and mimicked each other, grimacing in the most sinister way. It was a duel of grimaces until the opponent had been completely wiped out, until a face was made against which there could be no counter-face.”

  My long footnotes — a duel of grimaces between Schweblin’s Argentinian style and David Foster Wallace’s more expansive style — would expound on whatever needed expounding upon, although, inevitably, my neighbor’s novel would not emerge unscathed from such an intervention, which would be, at once, strange and amusing or perhaps tireless and tiring, or else just plain tiresome.

  I said “strange and amusing,” but perhaps it wouldn’t be so very strange. You just have to remember what Foster Wallace once said, when he shed both light and enigma on the probable meaning of his inexhaustible glosses, explaining that they were almost like “a second voice in his head” (something in which I believe myself to be an expert).

  I just know that I would have such fun writing those apparently endless footnotes; I would use impossibly long sentences, which, for all their exquisite style, would demand a huge effort on the part of the reader. I would so enjoy the infinite joke of those footnotes that I’d like to believe I wouldn’t shy away from including more digressions than were strictly necessary, each apparently more unnecessary than the last, and almost all included out of sheer malice, because I would try to find the most convoluted way possible of fitting them in, that is, I’d try to be even more “ponderous” than usual in my attempt to experience the pleasurably scandalous impunity achieved by David Foster Wallace each time he lingers over his “very Germanic” footnotes; after all, Schopenhauer did say that the true national characteristic of the Germans was ponderousness.

  I’ve always been fascinated by that German quality. More than that, I’d like to spend one day of my life, or at least part of a day, just being a German writer of deeply tedious prose, the most incredibly boring German writer ever, a German who would take real delight in the pleasure it would give him to write those boring, knotty sentences, in which one’s memory, without any help at all, would, for five whole minutes, follow the lesson being taught, until, finally, at the end of that protracted Teutonic sentence, the meaning behind what is being said would appear like a lightning flash and the puzzle would be solved.

  The motto of many German writers was always this: may heaven grant the reader patience. And now that I think about it, the same motto could also suit me, because I love the very idea of being able to live for just one day as a truly sleep-inducing German author. I also love the possibility that in my version of “The Duel of Grimaces,” just when it seems that those footnotes would never end, they could come to an abrupt halt and leave the field open for the end of the story, a dénouement in which we would find the defeated son wandering aimlessly through dark, cheerless landscapes. The son, a dead man walking. Having lost the duel with his father. Grave fodder. A corpse already snug in his coffin. A corpse preparing for the cold of the long winter nights to come, for the terrible German nights that surely weigh heavier than lead: the endless nights now free from all excess and in which no one would lay chrysanthemums on his grave, and where, no longer able to hear, he wouldn’t hear a single goddamned prayer.

  32

  Tidying up back issues of magazines this morning, I came across a Sunday supplement whose cover I recognized at once — Scarlett Johansson at a Zebda concert — but which I’d forgotten contained an interview with Sánchez. Banal questions and correspondingly banal answers. I felt a flicker of joy when the female interviewer asked if he had any intention of ever giving up writing. Sánchez said he found the question amusing, “because just an hour or so ago, in my local bookstore, I was told my work was going through a particularly good phase, and I found myself replying, speaking from the heart, that I was going to retire. My reaction reminded me of a time, back when I was twenty, and, standing in the last bar of the night, just before heading home, I told the old gang that I wasn’t going to write anymore. But you don’t write now, they reminded me. You see? I hadn’t even begun to write and already I wanted to quit.”

  He must have enjoyed himself describing Walter’s retirement from the stage in “The Whole Theater Laughs.” Because Sánchez seemed to love parting gestures, farewells of all kinds. In the final story, where there is also a goodbye of sorts, we read about the ventriloquist’s departure for distant Arabia: a journey both slow
and beautiful, in search of the origin of oral storytelling, although in reality Walter is hiding the true motive behind his escape. He tries to cover it up, but the reader knows he’s hiding something, because it’s hard to believe that he’s traveling to the Orient purely in the hope of finding there the first voice, the source from which all stories spring. . . .

  Every ventriloquist knows that if there’s one thing that characterizes a voice, any voice — including the first voice — it’s the knowledge that the voice will not last; it emerges, shines brightly only to fade again, consumed by its own brilliance. A voice has something in common with a falling star with none to see it. There is no voice that doesn’t eventually burn out. You can recapture it, but you never truly find it again; to think otherwise is as naive as thinking that a time machine could carry us back to the beginning of everything.

  You can imitate a voice, or repeat what a voice has said, and in that way prevent it from disappearing altogether, but it will no longer be the voice, nor will it say exactly what that voice said. Repetitions, versions, perversions, interpretations of what the extinguished voice said will inevitably produce distortions. Voices are the building blocks of literature, which, for me, is a way of keeping alive the flame of tales told around the fire since the dawn of time: a way of turning around the impossibility of accessing something that is lost by at least reconstructing it, even when we know that it doesn’t exist and that the best we can hope for is an imitation.

  In the afternoon, I went out for a while and, right outside Bar Tender, I literally bumped into Julio, who seemed half-asleep, as if he had just returned from some shameful escapade. He was so drunk that I came straight out and boldly asked him if Sánchez had a lover. He knew at once what I was getting at.

  “What matters is the passionate energy behind the thought,” he shot back.

  “Oh, quit fooling around. Does Sánchez have a lover or not?”

  “You mean you don’t know? You know Ana Turner, don’t you? Well, the old goat is crazy about her. Everybody knows they’re an item. They don’t hide it. You must be the only person left who hasn’t caught on.”

  I froze — for want of a better word — in that stifling heat. On the one hand, I felt relieved, because my jealousy over Carmen was driving me to distraction. But on the other hand, I was deeply upset. Upset with Ana. Disappointed in her, for her extraordinary bad taste. Why is it that when a woman falls for someone else, we always think she’s chosen a complete numbskull? What does that ass, that jerk, have that we don’t? we ask ourselves.

  Julio and I took a table outside Bar Tender, and he proceeded to prattle on about matters so utterly moronic that, for a few minutes, I didn’t even listen to what he was saying. After a while, though, I began to pay attention to his murmurings — he was speaking in an ever quieter and more inflammatory whisper — and I did catch one comment in midsentence which I can’t reproduce word for word, but a version of which I include here (duly blushing): “She, admired by so many, languishes in the evenings, a prisoner of her own mind, bound to a place, to a spuriously pleasant Mediterranean city, to an unremarkable bookstore, and to her single’s apartment and the awful tedium of her years, bound to a tiny place, waiting for her lover to visit. . . .”

  It was his tone, above all, that irritated me, and also his frustrated-writer pretensions, his clumsy attempt — if I’d understood him correctly — to tell me cruelly and almost certainly mistakenly that the splendid Ana Turner lived a wretched life as a languishing prisoner of her own mind and of her lover. . . . Or perhaps he meant something else. It hardly mattered either way, because the really unbearable part was his pose as poète maudit. That and his outrageously bad literature, because all that stuff about Ana being “a languishing prisoner of her own mind” was enough to make me cringe.

  That’s why I was even more shocked when, suddenly, in almost insufferably hushed tones, he told me that he was the best writer in the world.

  I decided it was high time I left Julio to his own devices. But beforehand, bursting with curiosity, I asked him if he had a job of some description.

  “I don’t want to fall in love with you,” was his reply.

  I chose to believe that he was merely trying to get to me; perhaps by now he really had had one too many. Given that reply of his, it seemed to me that the best thing to do — or even the proper thing — would be to start making my exit. But even then I held back, because I wanted to know what he had worked as before. He’d been a high school teacher for many years, he babbled, poking around in the pockets of his shabby old jacket, as if looking for a dog-end. They’d fired him, for some serious failure to comply with the authorities. Which authorities? I asked. He carried on talking as if he hadn’t heard me. His sons had reproached him bitterly for getting fired, and his wife had left him. Now all of them — the losers, Julio stressed — lived in Binissalem, in Mallorca. They left him alone. He had no one in the world — he said this so loudly that the whole of Bar Tender turned to look at us, all that we needed was for them to burst out laughing — but he wasn’t about to change, he said, he felt “lucid as hell,” and he survived on tea and alcohol, which helped him to see that the future was his for the taking; one day he’d be a truly incredible poet and the whole world would then bow down to him; and I would be the first, he said, because I was — how could I deny it — far beneath him, a poor wretch whose curiosity had left him covered in oil stains. I couldn’t be bothered to tell him I didn’t understand that last comment. By the way, he said, you’d better give me some more. More what? Oil, he said, almost dribbling. And he asked me for money. I rebuked him for this, but, in response, he laid his head on my shoulder. I realized that, if I let him rest it there any longer, matters could get rather complicated, and soon we’d be the object of all kinds of nasty neighborhood gossip. I didn’t want that, and still less did I want the echoes of such gossip to reach Ana Turner. But don’t worry, he told me, you’re not so very far beneath me, a couple of feet or so.

  I thanked him for having had the delicacy to whisper as much, and managed to extricate myself from him and his greasy head, the whole weight of which had, for a few seconds, ended up slumped on my shoulder. In order to distance myself from the rest of his body, I pushed him gently to one side, but to no avail, because he didn’t budge an inch, and we looked like two twins attached to the same umbilical cord. Or, worse still, if someone seeing us had paid us any serious attention, he or she might have thought that, in our unwitting reenactment of Sánchez’s story, we had, momentarily, become a father fighting with his crazy son, or — which amounts to the same thing — two loners on a sad, bland, afternoon, poised to do battle in a duel of grimaces, sorehead versus nuthead.

  33

  In the popular imagination, the profession of ventriloquism is often linked with terror, which is why, when Sánchez turned Walter into a criminal, the book’s few readers must have found the plotline perfectly normal, involving, as it did, a ventriloquist’s dummy and a murder. Ventriloquists — or their dummies — are always frightening.

  The first ventriloquist I ever saw, however, was a woman, not a man, and she wasn’t scary at all, nor did she aim to be. Her name was Herta Frankel, and she was Austrian. Fleeing from Nazi barbarism and destruction, she had ended up in Barcelona in 1942 as part of a company called The Viennese, whose cast also included Artur Kaps, Franz Johan and Gustavo Re, all of whom remained in Barcelona for the rest of their lives and became very famous here.

  In the early years of Televisión Española, Frankel — better known as “Señorita Herta” — was well-known as a ventriloquist on children’s shows, working hand and string puppets. Her most famous puppet was an insolent poodle called Marilín, who made a point, whenever she appeared, of announcing to her mistress: “Señorita Herta, I don’t like television.” What Frankel intended to say with these words — or so it always seemed to me — was that Fate had played a nasty trick by having her work on something as
crass and modern as television; she doubtless felt she belonged elsewhere, in some Central European cabaret or a variety theater back in her hometown.

  The other ventriloquists I recall from my childhood were all horribly sinister. Among the most memorable was the one who appeared in “The Glass Eye,” the best episode in Hitchcock’s television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In “The Glass Eye,” a dwarf reverses the usual roles by pretending to be the dummy, when he is, in fact, the ventriloquist manipulating a large and extremely handsome model. The dummy is so convincing that the dwarf manages to make an innocent young woman fall in love with it. According to legend, the actress and the dwarf and seven other actors in that episode all died in mysterious circumstances.

  However, the most unforgettable of all those sinister ventriloquists was perhaps the one who appears in The Great Gabbo, Erich von Stroheim’s deeply troubling movie. Gabbo is someone who works perfectly happily with his dummy Otto until he falls in love with a dancer who doesn’t love him, and Otto has to give him advice — sometimes even on stage — on how to go about capturing the young woman’s affections. The plot becomes increasingly sordid and unsettling, and is clearly going to end badly, in a crude, harsh underworld. It’s highly likely — and I must try to confirm this one day — that Sánchez drew his inspiration from this movie when he came to write Walter’s Problem.

  Among other stories connected to this universe of dummies and terror is one my father used to tell me about an Argentinian ventriloquist, a man who went by the rather odd name of Firulaiz. When his son was born, Firulaiz saw how his favorite dummy became hopelessly jealous, dejected, and dumb. One day, Firulaiz left the bedroom for a moment, and, while he was gone, the baby put the puppet’s hand in his mouth as if it were a pacifier. Noticing that things had gone strangely quiet, Firulaiz burst into the room and saw that his son had turned completely purple, having been strangled by the dummy’s hand, which had closed too tightly about the child’s throat. In his despair, Firulaiz threw the papier-mâché puppet onto the fire, and, overwhelmed by what had happened, crouched over his son’s dead body, weeping bitterly. It seems, though, that, at one point, he glanced over at the fire and saw, staring back at him from among the flames, the ceramic eyes of his dummy, still supported on its fragile wire frame. This final image appears to have driven Firulaiz permanently insane.