Mac's Problem

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  The apotheosis of repetition. Words written on words written on top of more words. It’s begun to look like the work of performance artist Tim Youd, who types up classic novels on a typewriter, but without ever changing the sheet of paper, so the transcription of the novel ends up as “a sheet of paper saturated with ink.”

  I was engrossed in this very task of saturating a sheet of paper with ink when Carmen arrived home from work. Believing that I couldn’t see her, she chuckled to herself. I couldn’t resist asking her why she was so chipper.

  “Because I see that I’ve come home in time to give you a hand,” she replied. “I’ve always wanted to help, but you don’t let me. You’re making a fine mess of that piece of paper. I mean it, Mac Vives Vehins. I’m pleased for you and your blottings, your paintings, but, don’t you think it’s time you did something else?”

  When she calls me by my full name, it never fails: Carmen thinks I’m a lost soul. And there’s nothing to be done about it. I don’t know how many times I’ve told her about my happy role as an apprentice writer, as novice diarist, and yet today I saw that she still thinks my cruel dismissal from the law practice has me locked in the grip of depression. And that’s simply not the case, or at least it hasn’t been for some time now. But she’s stubborn and won’t believe me. Thank goodness she doesn’t know about my occasional flirtation with the fascinating topic of suicide, although I have no intention of going down that route myself. And how fortunate that she doesn’t know about those times I entertain myself by weighing up the pros and cons of the two possibilities Kafka spoke of: either making myself or simply being infinitesimally small. And what a stroke of luck, too, that she’s oblivious to those nights when I think dangerous thoughts, although I doubt mine are any different from those of other mortals familiar with the anxiety that comes from knowing oneself to be simultaneously both dead and alive.

  39

  What’s next isn’t the point.

  — Bernard Malamud

  In his final days, in early 1961, Hemingway — whose heroes had always remained so rough and tough and elegant in the face of heartbreak — traveled from the sanatorium to his house in Ketchum, Idaho. In an attempt to lift his spirits, his friends reminded him that he’d been asked to contribute a note to a book intended as a gift for the recently inaugurated president, John F. Kennedy. After laboring for hours, he had produced nothing, not a word, and all he could write was: “No, I can’t. I’m done with that.” He’d suspected as much for some time and now his suspicions were confirmed. He was finished.

  As for elegance in the face of heartbreak, it can’t be said that he showed much sign of it in his final days. Fragrant with the alcohol and the deadly nicotine of his life, he decided one morning to wake everyone up with the sound of the gunshot signaling his divorce from life and literature.

  “Last week he tried to commit suicide,” says an old waiter of a customer in what is arguably Hemingway’s best story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

  And when Mac, the younger waiter, asks his older colleague why, he receives this reply:

  “He was in despair.”

  A heartbroken Hemingway had left Cuba for a house in Ketchum, which was clearly a house made for killing yourself in. You only have to see a photo of the place. One Sunday morning, he got up very early. While his wife was still sleeping, he found the key to the storage room where the guns were kept, loaded a twelve-gauge shotgun that he’d used to shoot pigeons, put the barrel to his head, and fired. Paradoxically, the work he left behind — inhabited by all kinds of heroes who prove stoic in the face of adversity — has had an influence beyond literature; because even the worst Hemingway story is a reminder that in order to commit yourself to literature, you first have to commit yourself to life.

  40

  What would I modify in “A Long Betrayal,” that short story in which a certain Mr. Basi — although everything seems to indicate that Basi is Baresi, Walter’s father — has a monumental mix-up with a grave? First of all, I would leave Malamud’s epigraph as it is, a heartfelt tribute to his “What’s next isn’t the point”; but I’d describe the episode in a Kafkaesque way, setting out the story’s hidden narrative plainly and clearly while, conversely, obfuscating the main narrative until it became the most enigmatic story in the world.

  When the time comes, writing in the clearest possible way, I will describe the lush, green grass that grows inside the grave where Basi buried his wife, and also the parched turf growing on the outside, around the grave. And I will then relate, in the most convoluted way, the interminable bureaucratic red tape that Basi’s wife’s lover had to cut through in order to obtain a judicial order to transfer the deceased’s remains to another grave.

  I wouldn’t change a thing about sad old Basi. I’d leave him exactly as he appears in the original story: as the likely father of Walter and, as such, as the man from whom our ventriloquist inherited the Java sunshade. When his turn comes to do the paperwork for his wife’s exhumation, I will meticulously document every last process and procedure. And I will devote an inordinate amount of time to describing the tedious pacing of the bureaucrats along the galleries and pavilions of the vast, sordid Palace of Justice.

  Life, seen through the lens of the most cumbersome administrative procedures, will be — as, indeed, it already is — brutally depressing, a hostile labyrinth of interminable galleries and pavilions, red-taped up to the eyeballs; endless rows of offices and millions of corridors linking together seemingly countless galleries, each with its own sinister distinguishing feature, except perhaps the remote “Chamber of Writing for the Unemployed,” where a group of clerks, in their most elegant hand, will copy out addresses and redirect undelivered mail. Duplicating texts, transcribing texts . . . these men and women will appear to belong to another time and will prevent that knot of galleries and pavilions from being even more depressing.

  But few people, despite their constant toing and froing along those cold corridors, will know how to find that final bastion of life as it once was, that bastion that gathers together all the lost and forgotten things, all those things that are still apt — precariously so, but nonetheless apt — to remind us that there was once a time, a bygone age, in which writing moved within parameters quite different from those in which it moves today.

  As I tell myself all of this, I think I glimpse one of the clerks — tucked away in the most hidden corner of the remotest gallery and having finished his work — write down some words on one of the pages of a stack of one hundred and three loose sheets, which, it seems, no one has been able to bind together due to a lack of resources:

  “No, I can’t. I’m done with that.”

  41

  This morning, in the middle of a trivial conversation with my friend Ligia in the watchmaker’s store owned by the Ferré brothers, I happened to find out that, the other day, Julio — flirtatiously and apropos of nothing — said to Ligia, with a confidence she found surprising in such a shabby individual: “When you learn of my death, that will be my moment of triumph! You will never have loved me so much, and I will never have occupied so much space in your life.”

  Ligia mentioned this to Delia, Sánchez’s wife, who was utterly astonished. Her husband, she said, has no nephews.

  “Are you sure, Delia?”

  “Positive.”

  &

  Early this afternoon, I tried rewriting “Carmen,” but managed only a fragment that I will probably insert toward the end of the story. I pretended to myself that I wasn’t in the least surprised to have written it, but, actually, I could have burst with happiness:

  “She was still as beautiful as ever, but had spent far too much time — a whole decade — traipsing off to pointless parties, dancing to rock music with idiotic fury, sometimes swaying back and forth on her powerful legs, keeping hold of her spent cigarette until she found an ashtray, and then, without missing a beat, stubbing it out. She was st
ill as beautiful as ever, but she’d wasted the best years of her life. Nevertheless, most of her charms were still intact, especially her nonchalant gait. There was something odd, though, about her black suit, perhaps because she’d been wearing the same one for four years, not to mention the tattered silk stockings. In the holes in those stockings — which apparently had the same power to read the future as coffee grounds — one could see that, in the future, some sad hick would fall in love with poor Carmen and she would marry him, and, two years after the wedding, he would die, his body bloated with the rat poison he’d swallowed.”

  I didn’t get beyond this fragment, but I was aware of the leap I’d made, because, for the first time, I wasn’t writing in order to rewrite, but I was going a stage further. Well, I thought, still astonished at my own prowess, you have to start somewhere. But the real surprise came when I realized that actually writing something meant finding out what it felt like to write a fictional fragment rather than a diary fragment. And it almost makes me laugh to say this, but I am, of course, going to say it anyway: it feels exactly the same in both cases. Really? Yes, the same. This only confirms that, as Nathalie Sarraute said, writing is trying to find out what we would write if we wrote. Because writing, real writing, is something we will never do. That’s why I felt exactly the same as if I’d merely been speculating and writing about how I would write about something if I did write about it.

  We didn’t write to fill a sheet of paper with symbols, but to know, or rather to try to know. It’s a matter of simply creating. And, contrary to what some frustrated haters of creativity think, in order to take on these imaginative challenges, you don’t have to renounce humility. Creativity is one’s intellect having fun.

  In my own case, trying to know has accustomed me — during the writing of this diary — to the charm of the obscure, and, day by day, I’ve become a contented reader, who sometimes enjoys the invisible, the veiled, the clouded, the secret, and who sometimes even likes to powder his face with gray talc in order to seem even grayer in the eyes of other people, were that possible.

  &

  I wake up feeling confused and retreat here to note down the one thing I can remember from the end of the nightmare, in which someone kept repeating over and over:

  “Look, in the original first edition, Moby Dick had twenty-five pages of epigrams.”

  I decide to find out if this extraordinary fact can be true, and when I discover that it is, I stand frozen to the spot, as if I’d been parachuted into Greenland. I probably did know it once and had forgotten. And then I laugh just to think how worried I was that I’d overdone the epigraphs.

  42

  I took a long stroll around the neighborhood, trying to find out if anything was going on between Carmen and Sánchez, despite finally feeling sure that there wasn’t.

  And yet, I set myself this task because, notwithstanding the absurdity of carrying out such an unnecessary investigation, and notwithstanding the implicit danger — being seen as a cuckold or a madman — I reckoned it would be time well spent if I could come away with a good tale to replace Sánchez’s stupid story, “Carmen.”

  After all, I told myself, you have to be prepared to take risks if you want to find a good story. Every writer knows this, just as he or she knows that every story runs the risk of turning out to be completely meaningless; and yet without that risk, it would be nothing at all.

  I’ll pause there a moment to include a detail I know will please the diary itself: when I speak of a “writer,” I tend, for reasons unknown to me, to imagine a man removing his scarf and gloves, remarking on the snow to his pet bird, rubbing his hands together, smoothing his hair, hanging up his overcoat, and then settling down to dare all.

  If he doesn’t dare all, he will never be a writer.

  Over the years, that is the most enduring image I have of “the writer,” probably a result of my seeing, in the late 1960s, Jean-Pierre Melville’s movie Le Samouraï, in which a hitman lives in the most complete and utter solitude. The image has stuck. A lone man and a bird, possibly some kind of parrot, I can’t quite remember. The whole scene is imbued with the bitterest of solitudes, but — for reasons that escape me, perhaps it’s the gloves and the man’s arrival home — it has always seemed rather cozy.

  The writer as hitman. That could explain why, the other day, when I saw the bogus nephew — in his role as undiscovered talent and as-yet-unrecognized-best-in-the-world — I offered him the chance to become a contract killer.

  I set off on a long walk around the neighborhood in search of a story that would fit well with the fragment of “Carmen” I’d already written and of which I secretly felt so proud: “She was still as beautiful as ever, but had spent far too much time . . .”

  I set off convinced that it wouldn’t prove very difficult to find things to blend in with that brief passage. Whatever happened, it would be enough to paint a portrait of the present-day Carmen, as seen by the locals.

  I set off, fully aware that I was taking a gamble, but aware too that this was the best thing to do, daring to take a risk and becoming a provocateur of stories, seeking them out on my patrols of Coyote, during which I could remove my imaginary scarf and gloves and observe the lay of the land down there on the street, all the while asking my bizarre question.

  First, I went to interrogate the clerk in Carson’s patisserie, but on my way, as I passed the ATM in Villaroel, I came across the beggar with the fair, curly hair, whom I’d met the other day dragging along a supermarket cart and who had rejected my offer of more money. The door to the ATM place stood open, and there he was, lying on some sheets of cardboard, draped in blankets (at the height of summer too!). As soon as he saw me, he asked with exquisite politeness if I could possibly spare any change. I again had the feeling that we’d known each other in the past, possibly because of the familiar way in which he always addressed me. Do I perhaps see in him a kind of amiable version of the antagonistic Julio, the obverse of the bogus nephew, and is that the reason I like him better with each encounter? I gave him three euros, and he advised me to give him less next time.

  “Don’t be so extravagant,” he said.

  He seems more concerned about my welfare than anyone else at the moment, I thought. And I thought, too, that this ghostly beggar could easily have come straight out of that Ana María Matute piece in which the short story is described as having an old vagabond heart and how, after wandering into town and telling its tale, it withdraws, but always leaves its mark in the form of unforgettable memories.

  “Don’t be so extravagant,” I repeated to myself, uncertain as to whether what I’d heard was laughable or rather touching, the gesture of someone worried about my finances, which, contrary to appearances, were in a very precarious state.

  As I turned the corner, on my way to the patisserie, I met a very old tramp whom I’d never seen before and who was clearly mad. He was singing, which rather took me by surprise and made me think that you never hear anyone singing these days, not even in the inner courtyards of apartment blocks around the neighborhood. When I was a child, singing was a deep-seated tradition in Barcelona, and whether that made the city a happier, more spontaneous place, I don’t know, but people definitely sang. Tramps form part of another very special tradition, since the modern hero of Barcelona is a tramp — the architect Gaudí — who was rather despised in his day, his clothes the object of all kinds of mocking comments. The city’s great genius was run down and killed by a tram and, because of his ragged appearance, he was mistaken for a tramp, so much so that the tram driver merely got out, removed the body from the track, and continued on his way, and not a single passerby went to help the man who is now the city’s great hero. Needless to say, the secret, unconscious reason why Barcelona remains such a fascinating place to all its visitors is the spirit of that tramp, the most brilliant tramp the city has ever produced.

  I finally arrived at the patisserie, where I carr
ied out my first interrogation. After that, I kept on asking questions and digging around, although, in most cases, I avoided doing so too directly. Indeed, I sometimes asked in such a circuitous way that I didn’t even seem to be asking a question. Rather than the whole neighborhood thinking me crazy, I’m sure they simply presumed I was letting it all hang out for a day, throwing some kind of private party to mark my forty years in Coyote.

  The point is that, in the end, I managed to question — or perhaps merely bamboozle — Carmen’s baker friend, the crazy flower seller (a real character), the couple who run the tobacconist’s, Piera the barber, Ligia, Julián (of Bar Tender), the Ferré brothers, the news vendor’s dimwitted stand-in (for one day only), the lawyer with whom I’ve been friends since we studied Law together, three local pharmacists, the taxi drivers at the stand in Calle Buenos Aires, the box office clerk at the Caligari. . . .

  No one knew anything about Carmen and Sánchez, no one had ever seen them together. I realized that this conspiracy of silence — these sealed lips — was of no use to me, because it didn’t provide enough material for that possible story entitled “Carmen.” And yet this was all there was, this suspiciously silent neighborhood. Clearly no one knew anything, and it would, of course, have been very odd if they had. Worse, almost everyone I questioned assumed I was joking, apart from the stand-in at the newspaper kiosk, who refused to speak to me because, he said, he didn’t give information to the police.

  The heat was unbearable, and I was annoyed that someone should have addressed me as “the police.” In the end, I sat down outside Bar Congo and had a drink with my lawyer friend, whom I trust and often confide in, perhaps because I’ve known him since we were young. With his habitual good humor, he asked if I was trying to find out if it had all been a case of “imaginary giants,” sleights of hand, fleeting moments of madness on my part, like the other day when I thought I might die in the tailor’s tomb-like changing room.