Mac's Problem

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  Capuchins? I realized that I hadn’t heard that word for fifty years. As a child, my mother once told me about the capuchins she’d seen in Brazil: monkeys who were far more sociable than chimpanzees and took turns speaking when they talked among themselves.

  As the heat appeared to rise several degrees, Julio himself, with his wild gesticulations and his banal, unstoppable chatter, reminded me momentarily of a rather whiny capuchin monkey. All he lacked was a rotten banana in place of the chair he was sitting on.

  He must have sensed that I’d already gotten his number and thoroughly disapproved, because he again changed the subject and fell back on his old hobbyhorse, his uncle’s sterility as a writer, perhaps because he thought he’d be on safer ground. And there we were, trapped in what I thought was a scene of the utmost banality, when something happened that changed everything once and for all, because, almost out of nowhere, came the thing that had remained invisible up until then, like a silent background presence, the reality underlying all that apparently trivial chitchat.

  The revelation arose as a consequence of a chance movement of Julio’s mouth, which lasted, at most, a few fractions of a second, but long enough for me to capture the very essence of his being, or, rather — because that might sound rather pretentious — to capture exactly the something in his mind at that moment.

  It was the merest twitch: his fleshy mouth opened and then closed, as if he were about to articulate a vowel or else say something that would require a great effort on his part. And for a few brief seconds, I could read precisely what was on his mind: he had focused all of his loathing for humanity on me; he wanted to see me crushed. This was, of course, irrational and capricious on his part, but his failed attempt to utter a single sound made me realize how much he hated me, perhaps because it bothered him that I was going to write a novel, or simply because he belonged to the tribe of those who think: since I’m never going to be happy, I don’t want anyone else to be happy either, because that would really grate on my nerves.

  It reminded me of a shitty trick played by a young poète maudit, who lived in Barcelona in the 1960s and spent his time discouraging his friends from writing. If he didn’t have enough talent to create anything himself, he didn’t want others to either. Now he lives saddled with debts and with women who once admired his bad-boy ways.

  And I thought: what I imagined to be Sánchez’s haughtiness, eccentricity, perversity, and craziness was infinitely preferable to what we might call “petty, sordid malice,” which, I believe, is pretty much the driving force behind Julio’s poisonous moral ugliness.

  Sometimes, strange though it may seem, all it takes for us to discover the unknown is the faintest curl of the lip, a tiny random gesture, the briefest flash of insight, and we discover it — as Rimbaud said — “not in some far-off terra incognita, but in the very heart of the present moment.”

  [OSCOPE 35]

  It would have been so easy for the antagonistic nephew, in the face of his uncle’s brilliance, simply to have remained patient, and — like the husband in Ray Bradbury’s “The Picasso Summer” — waited for the tide to come in. In that story, an American couple go on holiday to a seaside resort, somewhere between France and Spain. It’s the husband’s idea, because he knows Picasso lives there and sometimes visits the beach. He doesn’t actually think he’ll see the artist, but he wants to at least breathe the same air as him. After lunch, while his wife chooses to stay in and rest, he decides to go for a walk. He strolls down to the beach and along the shore. He spots another man walking ahead of him. He can see him from behind: he’s an old man, very tanned, almost naked, and completely bald. In one hand he carries a stick, and every now and then he bends down and draws something in the sand. The husband follows him and his drawings, which are all of fish and flora from the sea. Then Picasso walks off into the distance, getting smaller and smaller until he disappears. The husband crouches beside the drawings and waits. He waits until the tide has erased everything and the sand is smooth once again.

  36

  Books that leave their mark forever. 53 Days, for example, George Perec’s unfinished novel. Indeed, I think it has been surreptitiously influencing this apprentice’s diary. Well, I don’t so much think it has, I’m now certain of its influence, although that thought only just occurred to me today. I particularly love the title of Perec’s book, a direct reference to the number of days Stendhal took to dictate his masterpiece, The Charterhouse of Parma.

  Perec didn’t get the chance to finish his book. He died in the middle of writing it. But perhaps that needs some qualification. Ever since I read 53 Days a year ago, I’ve been trying to make sense of the strange fact that the manuscript, which ended up in the hands of his fellow Oulipians, Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud, was found practically ready to go to the printers. How do we explain that? The manuscript comprised two separate sections, the second of which explored alternative solutions to the detective story narrated in the first, even modifying the story itself. These two sections are followed by a series of curious “Notes on the Text,” which, as well as offering a new twist on the modifications already made to the first part, seem to reveal the following: Perec’s novel was not prematurely interrupted by the author’s death, thus rendering it unfinished; instead, Perec had finished the novel some time prior to his death, but in order to be considered truly complete, it required a problem as momentous as death — which Perec had already incorporated into the text itself — even if, on the face of it, the book appeared interrupted and incomplete.

  A “finished” and perfectly thought-out novel, therefore, which Perec planned down to the very last detail, including the final interruption.

  Every time I go back to 53 Days, I want to believe that Perec really wrote it in order to have a laugh at Death’s expense. For isn’t he mocking arrogant Death by concealing the fact that he’s been playing with him all along and allowing the poor vain creature to believe that it was him and his ridiculous scythe that brought 53 Days to an untimely end?

  37

  If I were to rewrite “An Old Married Couple,” a story whose style is reminiscent of almost anyone else in the history of world literature except Raymond Carver, I would very likely replace the epigraph with a quote from another American writer, Ben Hecht, whose style is more suited to the story of Baresi and Pirelli. Unless, of course, I decide — in homage to Nietzsche’s ridiculous “Maupassant, a true Roman” — to keep the Carver epigraph, leaving the story with two epigraphs, neither of which bears any relation to the plot.

  If I did decide to change the epigraph, I would take one from Hecht’s story “The Rival Dummy,” the basis for Erich von Stroheim’s The Great Gabbo.

  Ben Hecht was a brilliant short-story writer and an extraordinary screenwriter, whose style, as legend would have it, emerged out of what he had learned from his fruitful early reading of Mallarmé — yes, that most difficult of French poets — although this was an influence that gradually waned and is barely noticeable in Hecht’s best-known book, I Hate Actors!

  The epigraph by Hecht would be the rather shocking line I remember from the von Stroheim movie.

  “Little Otto is the only human thing about you.”

  These words were spoken by Mary, the Great Gabbo’s assistant, who was very much in love with him, even though she couldn’t understand why the ventriloquist had to say everything through his dummy Otto.

  This is why she ends up speaking those terrible words to the Great Gabbo — who is anything but great.

  When I saw the movie, I was so struck by those words that they stayed with me, perhaps because I would hate anyone ever to say the same about me. And who knows, maybe they were the indirect cause of last night’s nightmare that featured Otto, or, rather, the one particular scene from the movie in which Mary speaks those words. The rarefied atmosphere of my nightmare was the same as in the movie, but instead of Mary it was Carmen standing in the middle of the amorp
hous space separating dressing room from stage and saying:

  “The thing is, it’s just really weird you writing Ander’s novel.”

  “What’s even weirder,” I retorted, “is you talking to me as if you were talking to yourself. Are you a ventriloquist now?”

  Still dazzled by a spotlight, I looked at her more closely and saw that she had indeed become a ventriloquist, complete with impeccable black tuxedo, and I was her dummy, her servant and puppet, and I was also — let it be said — the only human thing about her.

  &

  If I were to rewrite “An Old Married Couple,” I would keep the bare bones of the story, but not the conversation between Baresi and Pirelli at the bar of a hotel in Basel. Because I wouldn’t make those two gentlemen the embodiment of the tense relationship between reality and fiction, but between the simple and the complex in literature. The simple, in this case, would be the conventional, which takes no narrative risks. The complex would be the experimental, which presents difficulties for the average reader and can become extremely convoluted, as was the case, years ago, with the nouveau roman, and as is still the case with the so-called School of Difficult Writing, a trend that suggests we should see all significant developments in our cosmic history as leaps upward to ever higher levels of complexity.

  Among the representatives of the nouveau roman — whom I read at the time with interest and a serene belief that I understood it all — were Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The writers of the School of Difficult Writing whom I found most interesting were David Markson and William Gaddis. This latter movement is still alive and well, full of authors who, without actively seeking consensus, share the idea that the narrative is a process with no end point, no destination. And I couldn’t agree more. On the other hand, its departure point is clearly the deliberate abandonment of the traditional ideas on which the concept of the novel is built. The aim is to create a whole program of renewal for the genre of the novel, a transformation in line with the need to give the novel a form that fits with our current historical circumstances. Throughout my life, I have felt a great deal of empathy — sometimes more intensely than others — with that now old-fashioned American school that never denied that it was still possible to write great novels, but always acknowledged that the problem for novelists — not only now, but a century ago — is how to avoid simply continuing with the genre as it emerged in the nineteenth century and, instead, find new possibilities.

  I remember Mathieu Zero saying that the novel is a medium that needs to adapt itself to the essential ambiguity of reality. In order to place “An Old Married Couple” within that tendency, I would keep in mind what one of the theoreticians of the School of Difficult Writing once said, someone whose name I’ve forgotten, but who I referred to as Zero at the beginning of this paragraph. Yes, I think it was Zero himself who called for the modern novel to achieve the same level of complexity as modern music and contemporary art. And he took as an example the Beatles, who, when they released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, were criticized for suddenly introducing so much complexity into their songs. According to Zero, if the Beatles had stuck to their initially simple style, they probably wouldn’t be the cultural icon they are now. And given that even their older fans applauded this evolution, he wondered why literary authors don’t allow themselves to do the same as pop musicians.

  Of course, were I ever to place “An Old Married Couple” within that now outdated literary fad for difficulty, I would need to gain a lot more experience as a writer, something that would take time, always assuming I ever do acquire the necessary experience.

  If, one day, one distant day, I felt capable of rewriting “An Old Married Couple,” I would keep the bare bones, but I would transform it into a comic piece of “written theater.” The simple (Baresi) would converse with the complex (Pirelli). While Baresi would tend to a simplicity that was as astonishing as it was, occasionally, touching, Pirelli, for his part, would provide nothing but healthy doses of complexity. Baresi would be all too comprehensible, while Pirelli would try to make everything as infernally complicated as he could and find himself permanently conspiring against the poor simpler-than-simple gentleman sitting beside him at the bar.

  The play would be profoundly comic and grotesque, because it would be clear that the author was as ignorant of experimental literature as he was incapable of parodying, in the most tedious, meaningless way, what he, in dull, pedestrian fashion, believed to be a story from the School of Difficult Writing transposed to the stage, when, in fact, it barely constituted a feeble example of the theater of the absurd.

  Some readers would be in stitches from the very first scene, because, bathed in a light reminiscent of a Hopper interior and on a stage bereft of all human movement, two static figures, Baresi and Pirelli, would be visible leaning on the bar of a hotel in Basel, near a window through whose half-drawn curtains a neon sign could be seen changing from red to violet and illuminating a few sheets of dull white paper lying on the bar. Now you might imagine those sheets to contain the dialogue about to take place between those two motionless gentlemen, each with a very different role to play: one of them rooted in the world of the simple in terms of narrative, and the other in the world of the complex. But that is only how things appear, because there’s nothing as yet written on those sheets of paper — hence their dull white appearance — and the two unmoving characters are simply preparing themselves to move as soon as they receive instructions from the prompter.

  However, the prompter — someone who has traditionally been there to help or direct the actors when they forget their lines or make a wrong move — would not be a person at all. It would become clear at once that the text of the dialogue — basically an exchange of Baresi and Pirelli’s respective experiences of love cut short — would be dictated from offstage and would reach them via the constant drip-drip of water falling onto a piece of oilcloth placed beneath a leaky but otherwise inconspicuous radiator in one corner of the bar. That dripping would replace the usual figure of the prompter. This would not only provoke gales of laughter, it would be the drop that made the cup of the absurd run over. And things would only become more ridiculous when it was revealed that the leaky radiator was in reality a backstage computer making the drops of water appear to be dictating the whole dialogue between the simple (Baresi) and the complex (Pirelli); the computer would be playing a hugely important role in the play, because its hard drive contained a complete ethnographic document capable of summing up our entire age with all sorts of signs and details.

  Everything would spring from that initial frozen snapshot — Baresi and Pirelli both motionless and preparing themselves to perform that erroneous, grotesque parody of Difficult Literature — and there would be no hint of the hidden aggression that would erupt later on, toward the end.

  There would have been violence inflicted by Pirelli, with entirely base intentions, in his eagerness to rape Baresi, who would end up simply and meekly accepting the gift of the Java sunshade, going up to Pirelli’s room, and allowing himself to be penetrated with undisguised glee by a completely off-his-head Pirelli, who, after the act, still had enough breath left to inform his poor, shafted friend — in the purest, discursive, most casual fashion — of the complexity of existence and of the many and various uses of a sunshade, as well as the many and various types of marital relationships, which — as Pirelli would say in a voice that was at once weary and euphoric — “have existed, do exist, and, believe me, Baresi, trust me when I say this, will exist, you just wait and see.”

  Editor’s note: I feel I must intervene here, because that notorious old married couple — fiction and reality — was waiting for me this afternoon on the porch when, after pausing in my revision of Mac’s diary, I drank two espressos one after the other and, under their caffeinated influence, began reading Paul Klee’s notebook about his journey to Tunisia. He went to North Africa in 1914, in order to both paint and discover new
places, in the company of another great painter, his friend and rival, August Macke. They spent their days there eating and drinking. What I gleaned from my reading was that Klee’s favorite color was orange. And I particularly remember this sentence: “Here, too, the vulgar reigns supreme, although that can probably be put down to European influence.”

  Only when I reached the end of Klee’s notebook did I discover that it also contains the travel diary of August Macke, although this must have been apocryphal, given that Macke died in the Great War, shortly after returning from Tunisia, and he left no African diary.

  In Macke’s notebook — which, as I found out later, had, in fact, been written by Barry Gifford, who supplanted him — certain episodes described by Klee are modified or corrected. And a curious thing happens, a phenomenon I was thinking about just last week. If Mac ever carried out his “remake” of Walter’s memoirs, would it end up seeming more authentic than Sánchez’s original? Something similar happens in the book I read today. Macke’s diary seems more credible and truer to life than Klee’s, perhaps because the latter only tells us what he would like to have happened, whereas in Macke’s diary everything seems very real, as if it had actually been lived. I found Macke’s diary far more amusing too. “My irrational dislike of Klee begins with his pipe,” he writes. And elsewhere: “At supper, Louis and Paul ate like pigs, but I outdid them both.”

  38

  At noon, having, hours before, returned in my mind to the distant past, I wound up feeling utterly exhausted and writing out — thirty times, with spaces in between them — the nine letters of the word “Wakefield,” writing them in a meticulous hand on a sheet of graph paper, and then copying out, also thirty times and on the same page, immediately on top of what I’d just written, the nineteen letters — four of them capitals — of the title “He Who Absents Himself.”