The most famous ventriloquist ever — at least according to the multivolume encyclopedia I inherited twenty years ago from my father and which, at the time, despite Carmen’s fierce opposition, was a fine addition to my study — was probably Edgar Bergen, a Swede, but born in Chicago. When he was still only an adolescent, he began to go about accompanied by a puppet made for him by a carpenter friend: this puppet represented an Irish news vendor called Charlie McCarthy, who became his regular companion on stage. Bergen always wore a smart tailcoat, while his puppet wore an elegant monocle, a top hat, and a dress suit. Charlie was a mouthy creature and would lash out at all kinds of people, aiming his mordant comments at the powerful and the proletarian alike. In the mid-1940s, when Bergen was at the height of his success and popularity, he married Frances Westerman and they had a daughter, Candice, who went on to become a famous actress.
As soon as the child was born, Charlie McCarthy turned into an absolute monster. Years later, Candice Bergen told the whole traumatic story in a television interview, explaining how awful she felt when she became aware that her “wooden brother” was always insulting her and coming between her and her father. Charlie McCarthy had a bed in the same room as Candice — or perhaps it was the other way around, and Candice was put in spiteful little Charlie McCarthy’s room — and she recalled how, as a girl, she’d had to get used to falling asleep at night with the puppet’s inert body lying in the next bed — a pure corpse — staring up at the ceiling with grim fixity.
This morning, while I, too, was staring up at the ceiling — in this case in my study — I couldn’t help wondering how I would go about rewriting “The Whole Theater Laughs” (if I ever do make up my mind to rewrite it). Why would I want to change the one story in the book that I really enjoyed? What’s more, it contained a very attractive “exit stage left,” a fascinatingly dramatic interruption to the life of the artist. I realized then that I only needed to change the Borges epigraph — which was completely inappropriate anyway, since in the story Borges’s easily detectable style is nowhere to be found — and to replace it with one by Pierre Menard, that creative repeater par excellence: “There are as many Don Quixotes as there are readers of Don Quixote.” Everything else could remain the same, without changing so much as a single comma.
And so I decided that, in Pierre Menard style, I would simply repeat the whole story, for it seemed to me that, as a reader, I, in some way, identified with the ventriloquist and his crime. I fancied acting the story out, even if only in the privacy of my study. I fancied creating an imaginary audience and repeating the touching moment when Walter sang, almost sobbing: “Don’t marry her, she’s already been kissed. Kissed by her lover, back when he loved her.”
To sing that song well would, paradoxically, mean singing it as badly as Walter did, revealing the full tragedy of that poor humiliated man, who, in front of his Lisbon audience, desperately sang a song of jealousy and love, only, at the last moment, for his voice to crack, thus ending the song on a shrill wrong note, as tragic as it was ridiculous. To achieve this, I would have to think myself into the role of the ventriloquist, which I could probably do in the solitude of my study, imagining my nonexistent audience breaking into a loud, unanimous guffaw.
Since this very special performance would take place only in my head, and given that I’m free to do whatever I like in my own head, it would hardly come as a surprise if I nominated Ander Sánchez as the ideal candidate to share the murdered barber’s fate.
I laughed when I thought of this, for it was what one might call the symbolic murder of the author. But he did, on balance, deserve it. It may have all happened in the dim and distant past, but there was no denying that the great writer had once been Carmen’s boyfriend and had, as such, placed his grubby paws on her. And I certainly hadn’t forgotten how, as I’d heard only a few days ago, he had captivated Ana Turner, and I found that even more unforgivable.
“Death to Sánchez, death to the author!” I cried out to myself in the solitude of my invented theater.
And I did, then, perform that third chapter before an imaginary audience. I acted in what you might call Petronius style, because all I did was bring to life what had previously been written — in this case, thirty years before — and, in a sense, what was written for me alone.
I began to identify so closely with Walter that I even found myself wondering whom I might one day hire as a hitman to murder the author and, with a single bullet, lay him low on some local street corner. The antagonistic nephew, I decided, would make the perfect hitman.
How easy it is sometimes to persuade someone else to commit a murder, I told myself, especially being safe in the knowledge that you would never feel guilty.
I said as much this morning, out loud, standing in the middle of my study:
“No one would ever think I was the culprit.”
And the whole theater laughed, and asked me to repeat it.
No problem, I said, repetition is my strong point.
I felt so good that I even looked out of the window to see if, by chance, I might see the murdered Sánchez strolling by, alive and kicking. If I did, I would probably have shouted down to him:
“Hey, what do you think you’re doing down there when I paid good money for someone to kill you? Can’t you see you’ve been bumped off?”
To my surprise, Sánchez wasn’t in the street at all, but in my study, eyeing me indignantly, reproachfully.
“Look, it isn’t what it seems,” I said to him, frightened. “It wasn’t me. It’s all a mistake. How can I possibly be guilty if all that is happening is fiction?”
“Good question,” said Sánchez, “but that, as you know, is precisely what guilty men say.”
[OSCOPE 33]
If I were to disappear and my diary were found by someone who didn’t know me from Adam, but who, for whatever reason, had access to my computer, that person, should he take the trouble to read these pages, might get the idea that — given my fascination with falsification, and given that, for days, I concealed my true identity as a lawyer and pretended instead to be the owner of a construction company — I might also have been lying when I said I was a beginner at writing. However, that reader, that person, who would be quite within his rights to think I’m not a beginner, would not only be making a big mistake, he would also be grossly underestimating the long, hard hours I put in every day editing this text, a task made meaningful by the reward of seeing the progress I’m making in this diary, where I try out different paths each day, always eager to know more, always hoping to find out what I would write if I wrote: each day stitching together my imaginary world, weaving a structure that I may or may not finish; each day building a repertoire that I sense will be as finite and perpetual as any family lexicon: a diary on which I could work for a long time, making tiny changes to every passage, every sentence, repeating the whole thing in so many thousands of different ways that I would eventually exhaust my repertoire and find myself gazing out at the limits of the never-before-said or, rather, at the gates of the unsayable.
34
When, the day before yesterday, Julio repeated, again, that he was the best writer in the world, I was reminded of an unfinished tale by Dostoyevsky, which I’d read in an old anthology I lost years ago. In this story, a young Russian violinist from the provinces, who considers himself to be the greatest musician in the world, travels to Moscow because, he thinks, he has outgrown the town where he was born. In the capital he finds work in an orchestra, but is soon dismissed. He is hired by another, but again he gets fired, either because of his excessive vanity or sheer musical ineptitude — or perhaps several things at once. We never learn the exact reason why he keeps being rejected by the working world. No one appreciates his gift, apart from a poor, ailing maidservant who is so besotted with him that she doesn’t dare to contradict him when he says that he’s the greatest violinist in the world. The girl, unbeknown to her masters, le
ts him stay in her attic room, gives him money, what little money she has, so that he can continue his quest for recognition. When the poor maid can no longer finance his aimless drifting (and boasting), we see the “greatest violinist in the world” roaming Moscow’s harsh winter streets, pausing before all the posters publicizing the city’s musical program, posters that never feature the name of the best violinist in the world, the unsurpassable genius whom no one notices. This, thinks the violinist, is rank injustice. And there the story ends abruptly, or, rather, Dostoyevsky stops writing. Perhaps there was no need to go on. Perhaps everything had been said.
[OSCOPE 34]
I opened my inbox and found it filled with spam and mortifying messages from the bank: notifications about loan interest rates and commissions, and my expenditure over the course of this year. And in among all that digital mulch, I found a message from Damián, a close childhood friend who was in the middle of an intentionally solitary “journey of introspection” — that’s what he called it — on the near-deserted island of Corvo, in the western Azores: a kind of experiment, living in a cabin Robinson Crusoe–style, fully immersing himself in the experience of being alone in deserted places. Corvo Island boasts fewer than four hundred inhabitants in winter. Damián’s previous email had reached me from there: in it, he described his “primitive” lodgings and the complete absence of any social life, apart — he told me — from his contact with some adventurous botanists who had come to Damián’s rescue when, shortly after he arrived, he broke a finger on his left hand.
In today’s email he told me that he was on the island of Pico, in the central Azores, and that although the island had more inhabitants — some fourteen thousand — he was feeling far more alone than he had on Corvo. He described the volcano with its snowy peak, which took up the best part of Pico and was the tallest mountain in Portugal, and he also explained how the island had once been very economically robust, thanks to its magnificent vineyards. The next island on his list, and to which he was thinking of moving in a couple of days, was São Miguel, the largest in the archipelago, with more than a hundred thousand inhabitants.
His email set me thinking about desert islands and, after searching on Google for some witty, amusing comment on the subject to include in my response to my friend, I stumbled upon Gilles Deleuze’s short text “Desert Islands,” written in the fifties but not published in his lifetime, although he did include it in the bibliography of his book Difference and Repetition.
It had never occurred to me that while every island is unique, and different from all others, at the same time it is never alone, because it has to be framed in something like a series, in something which, paradoxically, is repeated in each island.
The reappearance of the theme of repetition led me to think more deeply about Deleuze’s book and, in full research mode, I came across an observation by Marcelo Alé, which really hit the mark: “It is because there is no original that there is no copy, and, as a result, no repetition of the same.”
A very good point, and yet, it didn’t help me with my reply to Damián, who had no idea that I’d spent longer than a month mulling over the theme of repetition. Coming from me, Alé’s comment would have unsettled him, so I opted, instead, to reply that if he felt more alone on Pico, with its larger population, than he did on Corvo, he had better prepare himself to feel even more alone on São Miguel. It’s quite likely, I told him, that on São Miguel he’d find that he craved an island even more deserted than Corvo, Crusoe’s island, for example, in order to finally stop feeling so alone.
Brilliant, came his almost instant reply.
That, I thought, is direct communication with desert islands.
35
In the fourth story, “Something in Mind,” I would respect Sánchez’s decision to impose a Hemingwayesque stamp on it, indeed, Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory is vital to the story, because the plot of “Something in Mind” is nothing without a hidden second narrative, the untold part of the story.
In the story, the two young party-animal protagonists are very much the worse for wear and both in love with the young woman they never mention, but with whom we deduce they are both obsessed — rivals in love. If they have something in mind throughout the whole story, it is that girl, hence the title.
In the three previous stories, the narrator was the ventriloquist, but the narrator of this fourth chapter is anonymous. If I were to rewrite “Something in Mind,” that narrator would be a double of me — but it would never be me myself, because I consider that impossible: as far as I know, the person speaking (in a story) is not the person writing (in real life), and the person writing is not the person he is — he would be a duplicate Mac who would restrict himself to being faithful to the idea of telling a banal story like the one Sánchez gives us in “Something in Mind,” but I would replace the plot of the two pathetic partygoers with the trivial conversation I had this morning with Julio, when I was unfortunate enough to meet him sitting outside Bar Tender. Everything we talked about then bordered either on the utterly futile or the absolutely inane, but it did reveal an unexpected characteristic in him. One that was unexpected and very dangerous.
This is what happened: I found Julio stationed outside Bar Tender, smoking a cigarette and apparently gazing off into the distance; my first reaction was to hope he hadn’t seen me so that I could slip past unnoticed. But not only had he seen me, he even asked the time, as if time could be of any importance to a despicable bum like him. Was he hoping to pass himself off as a man of action? Some people dread others finding out that they not only have nothing to do, but they also exist in a state of utter vacuity.
Instead of telling him the time, I allowed myself to be carried away by a kind of instinctive meanness of spirit and I suggested that he kill his uncle. To justify this alarming proposition, I immediately invented an excuse and told him I was in need of inspiration for a story that I was thinking of writing, and had hoped to glimpse on his face, just for a moment, the look of an implacable murderer.
“You see,” I said, backpedaling slightly, “for the novel I’m planning I need to imagine you as a hired assassin, but you mustn’t go thinking I’m actually suggesting that you murder anyone. If you’d be so kind as to look at me as if you were an actual lone hitman, that would be quite enough, that would be really helpful.”
“Basically,” he said, “you’re saying you need to believe in what you’re about to write.”
“I wanted to base the character of the hired killer on you, that’s all.”
“Do I look that hard? A contract killer? Shouldn’t I at least earn something out of our contract?”
He then became hostile and smug, and I disliked him even more. To think that the first time I saw him, I’d been deluded enough to see in him a reincarnation of Rameau’s nephew! He began by saying that he understood me perfectly — when he didn’t understand a thing — and spoke to me rather pedantically about the “effect of verisimilitude,” which, according to him, must first convince the author if it is to convince the reader. Yes, yes, he understood what I meant, and he repeated this several times. But, if I didn’t mind, he’d very much like me to invite him to lunch and make him into a real hired assassin, or, even better, just pay him the fee. Otherwise, he said, he’d inform the police. Then he remembered that I’d wanted to interview his uncle for La Vanguardia, and, ever the wise guy, he wanted to know if he should kill him before or after the interview.
Then, out of nowhere, Julio shot me a look of profound contempt — I’d never seen him look at anyone like that before — after which he appeared to become even more self-absorbed than usual, with the unbearable demeanor of a man sunk in perpetual gloom. How relieved his wife and children must be in far away Binissalem, I thought. The two-faced creep. But why was he like that?
“What was that all about?” I asked bluntly.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean: what was that a
bout? Are you even aware of the death-stare you just gave me? Because that really isn’t normal behavior. . . .”
When he realized, as he did, I think, that I was basically asking why he was such a total asshole, he tried to change tack and talk about the weather, mentioning the heat and then global warming. We really should be asking ourselves, he concluded, what’s behind the extreme summer we’re having.
“Why waste time thinking about what’s behind it?” I asked, in an attempt to shut down this pointless conversation. “We just have to accept that it’s a mystery, and one we’re unlikely to solve. Besides, isn’t that what our friend reality is like: inscrutable and chaotic? It’s hot and it’s no one’s fault. Or do you think there’s an Adjustment Bureau manipulating the weather too?”
“A what?”
At last, new avenues were opening up in this suffocating exchange about the heat, but just when I thought I was finally going to be able to tell him about the agents of Fate, he again brought up the tired old topic of the weather and spoke to me about the terrible heat wave in Paris in the summer of 2003 and about the afternoons he wasted at the bookstalls on Quai Voltaire, and about a nearby hothouse of a pet store, where even today, he said, you could still see cartloads of crazy capuchin monkeys wrangling over a piece of rotten banana. . . .
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