Mac's Problem

by Enrique Vila-Matas

  “What has my wife got to do with the tailor?” I asked.

  “Oh, don’t tell me you suspect the tailor, too? You’re terrible, Mac.”

  &

  The Effect of a Story

  Shortly afterward, I arrived at Bar Tender, still feeling quite shaken up, because what I’d taken to be my friend’s jokey remark in Bar Congo has turned out to be true. Carmen must be cheating on me with the tailor. The affair surely started months, possibly more than a year ago. Who would have thought I would ever write such a thing? I suddenly learned that, for some time now, I’ve been living a long betrayal.

  This would explain various things; for example, why, the other day, I came so close to dying in that lousy tailor’s changing room.

  “Still out of work?” asked Julián from the other side of the bar.

  I’d told him about my situation last month, and he’d clearly remembered.

  “No, Julián, I’m working as a modifier now.”

  “A modifier of what?”

  Julián was confused and so was I; then, at that precise moment, a nasty-looking fellow with a huge beard came in, a middle-aged man who said his name was Tarahumara, and who went from table to table begging in an unusually bullish manner. He appeared to be demanding what he considered his due. As soon as Julián heard the visitor’s insolent tones, he shot out from behind the bar and hustled the man back out into the street. I didn’t really follow what happened very closely, because I was still too troubled by what I’d just learned about Carmen. I had no idea what to do, although it seemed likely that I would have to follow in Walter’s footsteps and head off to Arabia Felix, or somewhere similar. One thing is certain, I have never felt so lost, even though, to be honest, I’ve spent months unconsciously hoping Carmen was deceiving me so that I would then have a genuine reason to leave, to escape Wakefield-style.

  Meanwhile, Julián was yelling at Tarahumara and trying to manhandle him out of the bar. Good grief, I thought, the lengths he’s willing to go to just to protect his customers’ peace and quiet.

  The financial crisis is worsening by the day, and yet the television — which is controlled by the corrupt party currently in power — tells us that, economically speaking, everything’s just fine again. And while they cynically feed us this load of crap, there’s still no sign of an actual revolution. Nevertheless, revolution is stealthily creeping its way along Coyote’s streets, where the crisis sticks to everything, impregnates everything, ensuring that nothing is as it was before, and urging the Tarahumaras of this world to hold out their hands and demand what’s theirs.

  43

  The Visit to the Master

  I was visiting the master, the fearsome Claramunt, and it felt like being in one of those bad dreams where you’re strolling through a munitions dump carrying a lighted candle. It was clear, just from the way I was walking the streets of Dorm, that I’d embarked on the initial stage of a long journey of escape: as if I’d killed our local tailor and suddenly been transformed into a freshly blood-spattered Walter, and had no choice but to run away.

  I knocked three times on the door of the rambling house, and it was opened by the man whose daily routine was his finest work. He cut a very sinister figure: he wore a dark corduroy suit and was wrapped in various scarves and shawls; he hadn’t shaved for several days, and his one good eye was terrifying. Outside the house, enclosed in a fenced-off area, his furious dogs were jumping up and barking.

  “I keep them for the noise,” Claramunt said again, referring to the dogs.

  But on that visit, as so often happens in dreams, I knew more than I could be expected to know. I knew, for example, that, despite appearances, this man was not as frightening as people said, and that his finest work was his daily routine. Was that detail so very important? Yes, it was, because in order to make a successful escape after committing my crime, I needed a routine as open and flexible as that of my admired master. Given that I’d killed the tailor, it was absolutely crucial that I leave myself plenty of time to make my getaway.

  I sat down with Claramunt and spoke to him about his dogs, about the extraordinary noise they were making and what a useful job they did guarding the house. Claramunt fidgeted in his chair and said he was utterly opposed to any noise that might be deemed aggressive. This was clearly a contradiction, but I wasn’t particularly shocked. It was followed by another contradiction, for Claramunt told me that he greatly admired the sudden sound, which, in Antiquity, must have broken the silence of the original chaos of the universe; and he added rather emphatically that he also admired the grandeur and portentousness of humanity’s first sages, who invented — wherever it was they did invent it — the most extraordinary of all works of art: grammar. They must have been real marvels, he said, those gentlemen who created the different parts of the sentence, those who separated out and established the genders and cases of nouns, adjectives and pronouns, as well as the tenses and moods of verbs. . . .

  “When you write,” said this grouchy and deadly boring Claramunt, “you should never tell yourself that you know what you’re doing. You have to write from the place inside you that harbors your own personal chaos, for the first sentence must be born out of that place, as happened when the first meaning appeared: the Song of Solomon.”

  “Meaning? Solomon?”

  I soon realized that the “Song of Solomon” could mean many things at once, but here it referred to the story that he imagined had sparked all subsequent oral narratives, that is, the world’s first story. What you need to do, he said, is to continue writing your memoirs. I am, I said, albeit in an indirect way. And escape, Claramunt added, you must run, flee. I am, I said.

  “Mac, Mac, Mac.”

  I didn’t know what the voice of the dead man was telling me, but it was obviously warning me about something.

  “Why have you got your head hunched down inside your collar?” Claramunt asked.

  His voice sounded strange.

  “Why are you doing that?” he asked again.

  I had been aware for a while that there was something strange about his voice, but it had become far more obvious: his voice was identical to that of the dead man inside my brain.

  Run as far as you can, Claramunt was telling me, leave the city behind you before they can accuse you. I asked him what he thought they could accuse me of. Run, he said, and become more people, speak to all the other people inside you. Escape, let no one persuade you that you won’t one day be all the voices in the world and, at last, become yourself by merging with the voices of everyone else.

  Then I realized that my master didn’t have the same voice as the dead man, he was the dead man.

  “Mac, Mac, Mac.”

  44

  To leave with just the clothes on my back, or to leave with the clothes on my back and a small leather satchel, Petronius-style, setting off to live out — for real — what I have written or read. The idea of simply leaving everything you own reminded me of the story my father used to tell about the occupation of a large estate during the Spanish Civil War. The owners had been hiding in the cellars of the house for a long time, until, finally, they managed to escape. One morning, after my father and the other soldiers had taken control of the estate, a soldier from his own army turned up. He said he was the brother of the estate owner and asked if he could have the small portrait in oils of his sister, which was hanging in the main bedroom. That soldier’s request made my father ponder the meaning of property and how, when everything falls apart, we return to our home, and all we want to salvage is one small painting; nothing else matters.

  Leaving with just the clothes on my back, and saving only a small volume by Charles Lamb containing his essay “On the Melancholy of Tailors,” in which he speaks of a melancholy common among tailors, a fact that “few will venture to dispute,” not even Piera, who, an hour ago, was cutting my hair while I was thinking about all this, about leaving home wit
h only the clothes on my back, but including the “elaborately worked” death I always carry with me, the death stitched to my very self, as if it were — as it is — “my personal problem,” my most personal problem.

  Wasn’t it Rilke who talked about each person having “his own personal death” — the supreme problem?

  Even as I was thinking this, about leaving with just the clothes on my back, I got drawn into an article about last night’s Sevilla-Barça match in Tbilisi. While I was thinking about “escaping in my nightshirt” and, at the same time, engrossed in that article, I became mesmerized by the small bottle of Floid hair tonic that Piera had suddenly produced as a finishing touch. The smell of that tonic has always reminded me of my grandfather, who was addicted to the stuff, and so I quickly turned the pages, simply to avoid that thought, and found myself in the Culture section, where I was surprised to find an article by Joan Leyva, which began by saying that Ander Sánchez, of course, needed no introduction, or perhaps he did: “. . . or no more than any other real person whose books we can read, whose every move we can follow online, and whose voice we can even hear. And yet it still seems necessary to describe him, because he is also an unreal person, constantly appearing and disappearing in the books he invents. His typical protagonist is someone who is there in order not to be there, rather like an exhalation that hangs in the air.”

  I laughed when I read “an exhalation that hangs in the air,” because that really sums him up. An example: for years now, Sánchez has been going on about leaving Barcelona, but he always gives the impression that he’s trying to disappear using the paradoxical method of staying put. Julio, on the other hand, never teased anyone with the idea of disappearing, and yet, for some days now, no one has seen hide nor hair of him. He’s vanished from the neighborhood, his very shadow has melted away since his cover was blown. Who is he, then? Now that he’s evaporated, we can’t ask him. Perhaps our only hope of learning something about him is to read the unforgettable words of Daniele Del Giudice in Wimbledon Stadium: “Maybe he had noticed that he’d failed, but then he had always been a failure.”

  About an hour ago, I began hearing the sound of suitcases being trundled around in the apartment above the barber’s shop: presumably the tenants moving out. It lasted a few seconds, and then I wondered if I was just imagining those noises in the attic of my brain, if it was me trundling around the suitcases of my own being.

  “Mac, Mac, Mac.”

  The voice of the dead man was quick to put me right. The only thing you’re trundling around, it said, is your indecision about whether or not to kill the tailor, but it really doesn’t matter if you don’t commit the perfect crime or if you don’t commit a crime at all; if I were you, I’d get out all the same.

  While I was listening to these words, I had the impression that, on the other side of the far wall in the barber’s shop, there was a man sitting on the floor: he had long legs, was wearing a plain pair of boots, and his face oozed vile envy.

  Had there been a small hole in the wall, I would have been able to see that poisonous man, who was always pretending he didn’t mind not being one of life’s creators, but who contaminated everything around him precisely because he wasn’t a creator, and he did so by intervening directly in other people’s lives with a kind of terrorism of negativity disguised as the critical spirit.

  But perhaps it would be best if I just forgot about the man sitting on the floor. I was telling myself this on my way home, when I turned the corner at the Baltimore and saw a group of classic not-so-very-young-men, the kind who have as yet failed to find their place in society, all three sitting on the ground, legs outstretched. It seemed to me that, given their passive faces and their supine indolence, they clearly didn’t belong to the stealthy revolution. They may have been unacknowledged geniuses, but they didn’t appear to have the kind of energy which, if put to good use, could have formed the basis for a new movement in that area. They weren’t, however, the same ones who had been with the antagonistic nephew the first time I saw him. They were so similar, though, that I almost asked if they’d any news of that terrorist of negativity, the vanished Julio. It only confirmed me in my belief, however, that the economic crisis seems to be filling up the neighborhood with great misunderstood geniuses.

  “Run, Mac.”

  45

  Why all this interest in Mars? It certainly doesn’t interest me. But Carmen has always been crazy about such things. Not that she’s alone in that, of course. Mars intrigues many a lost soul, because it has gravity, an atmosphere, and a water cycle. It’s also older than the Earth, and might contain clues to the origin of life.

  The origin of life! That should be of interest to me, too, given my fascination with the origin of stories. And that perhaps explains why, last night, I agreed to watch an old B movie about Martians with Carmen. First, naturally enough, I was tempted to ask her why she didn’t watch it with that scumbag of a tailor and leave me to my own devices. In the end, though, I bit my tongue and decided to continue pretending that I knew nothing, thus gaining more time to ponder what decision to take, a decision I didn’t want to ruin with some precipitate, hysterical reaction.

  Filmed in 1954, Killers from Space is about a scientist whose work involves testing atomic bombs and who dies in an air accident only to be resuscitated by extraterrestrials who want him to work for them as a spy. We watched it while eating supper. I was feeling dreadful because I could see the tailor everywhere, even in my soup, which, appropriately enough, was cold. I tried my best to control myself, because there seemed no point in confronting her with her infidelity, still less unleashing a litany of devastating put-downs about the tailor.

  We ate our supper in peace, and when the movie ended, we went into the kitchen to do the dishes. Carmen washed, and I dried. Everything seemed absolutely fine, as it always does when I decide to help with the housework. Yes, everything was going swimmingly, with no unpleasant surprises, until Carmen mentioned that volunteers could sign up for the Mars One Foundation, an organization that is planning to send humans to Mars by 2032 and to set up the first permanent settlement outside of Earth. They reckon, said Carmen, that it would take seven months to reach Mars, and once there, they would live in 540-square-foot tents and grow their own food. The peculiar thing about the journey was that it was one-way only, there would be no coming back: you signed up to go, knowing that you wouldn’t return.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, the latter because Carmen was suggesting that she would happily sign up for that one-way trip. Just to check that I’d heard her correctly, I commented that surely no one in their right mind would ever volunteer to travel to another planet, knowing that he or she would never return to Earth.

  “What do you mean ‘in their right mind’?” she asked.

  I saw that I was about to get into very deep water, potentially far more perilous than a three-hundred-foot-high tsunami on Mars.

  “Escape, Mac,” I heard the voice say.

  I began drying the plates more quickly, not even looking at Carmen. She wasn’t looking at me either, but then she suddenly broke the silence to say that she actually intended signing up for the Mars One Foundation. And she went on to explain that, while it might seem absurd to think they would accept someone her age as an aspiring astronaut, she’d discovered that it wasn’t. It had, after all, been her lifelong dream, and she hoped I wouldn’t stand in her way. Her eyes were bright with tears. No, I wouldn’t stand in her way, I said, meanwhile quietly cursing her absurd determination to reassert herself as a woman of science and not of literature, as if, in order to reaffirm her personality, she had to be the polar opposite of me.

  “You really wouldn’t stand in my way?”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  And so as not to get madder still, I thought: I’m Walter, or perhaps I’m just trying to feel that I’m Walter, but there’s really no reason why I should get so upset about my wife’s
spine-chilling idea. I even offered to finish the washing up on my own, an offer Carmen accepted with such alacrity that, only seconds later, I was alone in the kitchen, absolute master of my destiny. I wiped down the table and while I was in cleaning mode, I washed the kitchen floor too. I took the trash out onto the landing and, after hesitating for a moment, carried it down to the street. It was a very humid night and wondrously starry.

  The apartment was in darkness when I came back. Carmen was in the bathroom. I stood outside the shower and told her that I wouldn’t want her to think I was taking my revenge on her for her interplanetary plans, but I, too, had been considering setting off on a journey of no return. I wouldn’t go to Mars, but somewhere nearer, to a village next to an oasis on the outskirts of a desert I’d recently discovered and which didn’t appear to be on any map.

  Carmen asked me what on earth I was talking about.

  “I was just saying that I’m going to an as yet unknown desert, with no return ticket.”

  She didn’t react at all, but asked why my voice sounded so different.

  “Why are you talking in that funny voice, Mac?”

  It was my voice, but it was gradually mutating to sound more and more like the personality I attributed to Walter; however, trying to explain that to Carmen would only have been asking for trouble.

  “Well?” she said.

  I could feel an argument brewing and did nothing to avoid it. Indeed, I said that if we were about to have an argument, would she mind if I took notes, so that I could write it up later and ponder what had happened?