All Men Are Liars

by Alberto Manguel

  Two figures rise up like columns, winding around each other, her and him, the ones that matter. They appear, growing larger in front of my eyes, in front of what would have been my eyes if I could see. He, with his spurned retinue of women, he who wanted to be with her, he who was chosen by her. They remain there, erect, united, two in one. Because, even when she is no longer there, she is still with him. I can’t manage to detach them.

  Onward.

  The presentation, a ceremony to honor his book. The book he wrote. The idiots talk to him, men admire him, women desire and protect him. He is silent, like a king. Why speak, when the world rushes to celebrate you? Almost without surprise, among the crowd I spot my Cuban and his wife—she of the ubiquitous hat, she who ought to be dead. If I can manage to corner the three of them, what a ceremony I’d prepare, what a presentation, what a bonfire for the Devil and Christ the King.

  Him, at the front. Him, still not saying a word. Him, suddenly frightened. Him, running toward the street. Everyone perplexed, astonished, embarrassed. I decide to follow him. He comes to a door. He goes in. I see a light go on. I wait. The Cuban and the hat woman arrive. Quita arrives, a flustered busybody. Quita comes out again, crying, poor cow. Then I decide to go in. I ring the bell. He answers the door. I step into the hall. We argue. I try to open the door behind him and he tries to stop me opening it. I see the repugnant Cuban. Hello, Chancho, I say, and I place my bag on a chair, as if this were a homecoming, a long-awaited return to a familiar place. And hello, señora, I say to the resurrected one, his scrawny girlfriend.

  The Cuban looks at me. I can’t read his expression. The woman makes a face, somewhere between disparaging and flirtatious. We were about to leave, she says.

  Sit down, I answer. Or I order her—it’s all the same. And I tell them that I was about to ask the other one how they were planning to share out the money hidden in Switzerland. To make them aware of it, I suppose. To frighten them. To make him, my prey, quake.

  But he pretends not to understand, he says he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I suggest he ask his fat friend for some explanations. In fact, it doesn’t really matter to me whether he knows or not. That is not the guilt that interests me.

  Then I feel as if I’m suffocating. I need air. I go to the balcony doors and fling them wide open. He tries to close them. I stop him. He struggles. Meanwhile the Cuban and his flamingo make their getaway, petrified, no doubt. Before leaving, they tell him that his book is very good. Even in these last words, they lie. Who cares? He doesn’t even look at them. He’s looking at me.

  From the foggy depths, a pair of thin, hairy arms reach upward. The arms encircle me and grow longer, wrapping around me. The arms become embedded in my body. Little roots burst out of the hands and grip my skin, sinking tiny tentacles, boring through the flesh to the bone’s marrow. The arms envelop me and I have the impression of disappearing beneath their ramifications.

  I want to open the balcony doors. He wants to close them. We struggle. A light goes on in one of the houses opposite. Then I gather all my strength and shake off his arm and I feel him swing himself over the balcony’s low railing. A vacuum in the air, a fall that seems like a jump, and the horrible thud of a body dashed against the pavement. For a long moment I don’t know whether it’s him or me who has fallen.

  I close the doors, pick up my bag, go out to the staircase, and run. Up the dark street I run, almost without drawing a breath. At the top, in front of a lit-up theater, I pause, euphoric. This is it, I tell myself, this is the end. He’s not here anymore, she’s not here, only I am here, still standing, finally liberated, ready to begin again, the old skin shrugged off, scrubbed clean, back in the starting blocks, turning over a new leaf. Because I won’t ever run into him again, I told myself, because he’s gone forever. He’s out of reach now, in a place beyond the horizon that I can’t make out, and which keeps retreating as I advance.

  In Madrid, everything is cloaked in damp, as though the bricks themselves exhale it. At night, in the lamplight, the air turns rusty. I walked through the damp mist to my house, unable to distinguish the trees from the men. I reached my door, went upstairs, and sat down at the table. I needed to get some sleep before the morning came, and everything changed.

  I poured myself a large glass of Urquieta’s sherry. And then another. And one more. I finished the bottle and started on the other. Urquieta had been kind enough to open them before the event began so that the public could help themselves. But there had been no event. The star had fled. What shame she would have felt to witness the flight of her pusillanimous paladin. What remorse, what anguish. Now I was the artist, the victorious hero, the flame, the beau. I felt what great actors must feel when the curtain falls after a stellar performance. A rejuvenating exhaustion, an overwhelming euphoria. A lump in the throat.

  A burning. A drowning. Something claws at the back of my throat, ripping the veins, tearing into the flesh. Everything is fire, everything is smoke. I need water, air. Now my guts are bursting into flames. Beneath the nails, my fingers are glowing red, black. My lungs struggle like two great headless birds, their scaly wings thrashing to survive. Nothing can fill them, nothing but blood that is warm as lava. I want to stop the invasion, the burning; it has to stop, such a pain cannot continue, it’s an animal devouring me from the inside, drowning me in sand, mud, blood.

  It’s impossible to shout, impossible to give a voice to this extreme agony. So much pain doesn’t fit into this crumbling flesh, this shattering head, these limbs which are falling to pieces and turning into embers. I feel my face falling off in chunks, my skin peeled off alive, my organs hurled at my feet. I am coming apart, but the pain remains. I am disappearing in a storm of burning ashes.

  Then, suddenly, there is no pain. There is no body. There is nothing, except the contents of my memory.

  I want my dreamer to wake up. For this to be over.

  I see nothing.

  I hear nothing.

  I feel . . .

  5

  Fragments

  If God offered me, in His right hand, absolute truth and, in His left hand, only the quest for truth, stipulating that I should always fail in that quest, and if He said to me choose!, I would humbly take His left hand and say Father, give me this one! Absolute truth belongs only to You.

  —GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING,

  WOLFENBÜTTLER FRAGMENTE

  The story ends here. The true reader has no need to pursue this any further. This is it. All that matters has been said. To know who killed whom, how and why, are questions that interest only bureaucrats or the police inspector, and they will not read these pages. The character I came to know through other voices is almost inexistent; he travels from hypothesis to hypothesis depending on the fit of his profile with certain data and preconceptions. His appearance changes like one of those garden statues which alter imperceptibly as the light changes during the day. But this, as a truth, is inadmissible. It isn’t even journalism.

  And although my vocation may be modest, there is no reason not to follow it faithfully. Not all those different Bevilacquas are the ones pursued by the journalist. Not all the facets of a reality interest him. Only one, if he is sincere, or perhaps none. That is why he writes. To show things from one particular, personal point of view. Now I think that it was that desire that prompted me to be a journalist. To see my name at the foot of a column of newsprint. To declare my ownership. To say what I feel, what I believe. To give my vision of a world that secretly enthralls me.

  Perhaps that is what defines a journalist, rather than the false objectivity we’re supposed to take pride in. My grandfather, who escaped from the war, used to tell me to look at the dark underside of stones, where the hardness yields to earth, moss, and insects. My grandfather was Spanish, from a coastal town I shall never visit called Sant Feliu de Guíxols. My father forbade us to ask our grandfather about those years, but my sister and I used to whisper in his ear, “Grandpa, did you kill anyone in the war?” or “Gran
dpa, is it true that you had to eat rats or die of hunger?” And he would smile and say yes to everything. My father had brought him to live with us after my grandmother’s death, because he had tried to end his life twice. We never left him alone.

  In spite of being with him all the time, we knew very little about his life. Then two years ago, by chance, thanks to an old teacher from the Victor Hugo High School, I discovered the reason why he had come to Poitiers. When he heard my name, this teacher told me that he had known a Terradillos in 1939, during the years of Spanish exile, when they were both about eighteen years old. I found out then that my grandfather had worked as a builder in Barcelona, and that he had joined a group of Franco’s Nationalists, though I don’t know under what circumstances. I don’t believe, however, that my grandfather had any real political convictions. I imagine that he was drawn in by strong voices, easy dogma, and a certain superstitious faith that accompanied him to the end of his life, prompting him to make the sign of the cross every time he walked past a church.

  When it was known that the Nationalists were about to enter the city, my grandfather and his friends came out of their hiding places and waited, like victors, at the Hospital Clínico, where, miraculously, they managed to get hold of meat, sausages, and wine. For weeks they had been eating nothing but rice. My grandfather drank himself into oblivion.

  The next morning, he woke up almost naked, in a garden behind the hospital. A long procession was slowly moving past, some people on foot, others in carts pulled by mules, or carried by their companions. At first, in his dazed state, he thought that these were the Nationalists arriving. Almost immediately, he realized that they were Republicans, fleeing toward the border. He was frightened that they might recognize him, so he draped himself with a blanket and joined them. The distance between Barcelona and the French border is not great—to my grandfather it must have seemed interminable.

  When they finally saw the French soldiers coming to meet them, those that had held on to their weapons threw them onto the ground. The French boiled up milk in great earthenware jugs and, as the Spaniards passed by, gave each one a steaming mug and a hunk of bread. The men were separated from the women and children, and sent to different refugee camps. My grandfather did as he was instructed.

  That night he began to cough and struggle for breath. A French nurse recognized the symptoms of pneumonia and asked him his name. My grandfather told him and, with an insistence that must have seemed suspicious, claimed to have belonged to one of the International Brigades, which, before their disbandment in the autumn of 1938 (so the teacher told me), had been led almost exclusively by Spaniards. Without batting an eyelid, the nurse, who was no older than my grandfather, noted down the information in an official document. Weeks later, under his new identity of Republican refugee, my grandfather was taken out of the border camp and sent to a center close to Poitiers. There he met my grandmother, who was working on one of the surrounding farms. My father was born three years later.

  My grandmother’s and the teacher’s families were neighbors, and the story of the recent arrival was shared, but kept quiet. Poitiers has a long tradition of secret stories, doubtless since that morning when Charles Martel vanquished the Moorish army and dozens of exhausted men put down Moorish roots to become Moreau and Morisette.

  I don’t know if such approximations explain who we are. I don’t know if my grandfather’s story is to blame for my interest in the doubtful, in the indefinable, the ambiguous aspects of certain personalities. What is true is that I was going to write the story of Alejandro Bevilacqua as a multifaceted character whose many parts would be converted, through my reading, into one Bevilacqua, coherent and my own.

  When I first thought of writing about his case, I imagined a long, complex, well-documented essay, a biography with novelistic touches for the sensitive reader and essayistic asides for the more erudite. My intention was to compose an anecdotal portrait of that mysterious man which would go back to his origins in La Rochelle at the end of the nineteenth century, and which would detail the saga of the Guitton family, of the little girl, Mariette, of the arduous journey from Europe to South America, of their meeting with the provincial Bevilacquas, ending, hundreds of pages later, with the publication of the masterpiece and the death of the false author.

  But that was before. Now that I know (or believe I know) the story of Alejandro Bevilacqua, I also know that I shall never write it.

  Partly because it does not exist as a story, as something that the readers of In Praise of Lying might be looking for—a prologue or coda to this phantom book, a biography of that almost anonymous specter, usurper of the author’s role in the libraries of our world. Partly, also, because I fear not doing it justice, through a lack of skill and intelligence. Partly, finally, because, even if I could do so, I would never know which of the versions that have come to me, including the combination of them all, is the real one.

  This is the paradox that overwhelms me. An honest journalist (if there is such a thing) knows that he cannot tell the whole truth: the most he can aspire to is a semblance of truth, told in such a way as to seem real. In order to achieve that, a biography must give the impression of being incomplete, stopping before it reaches the final page, refusing to reach a conclusion. But, even if in real life we accept that our impressions are uncomfortably vague and inconsistent, in a journalistic book, especially one that pretends to depict a man of flesh and blood, such a timid style would be unacceptable.

  Any good student (at least, any student from the Victor Hugo School) knows that the general theory of relativity explains all the major questions of the universe, out there where matter bends space and time. Quantum theory explains the small stuff, where matter and energy divide into infinitesimal particles. In their different areas, both theories are immensely useful. But if we attempt to use them together, they are shown to be absolutely incompatible. We lack one solid theory capable of explaining the world in its totality. So, how could I propose one that could completely account for that little piece of the world that was Alejandro Bevilacqua?

  But my reasons are not merely literary and scientific. There is another, deeper, and more intimate reason. I’ll explain what I mean.

  I have always liked toys, old toys above all. Things made of wood, with their cubes, arches, and columns painted in faded red and green; little lead animals, pleasingly weighty in the hand, placed in lines on the rug; the noble game of snakes and ladders with its dizzying climbs and falls; the fantastic tumbler doll which seems to defy the law of gravity; the kaleidoscopes which try to give coherence to a fragmented and luminous cosmology. My grandfather used to find these rare and lovable objects, made by pensioners in their long afternoons at the sawmill, in shops that have long since disappeared; he never tried to tempt me with flashier toys.

  One toy in particular has always fascinated me—a sort of puzzle called a Tangram. It came in a small, square box, on the lid of which was a Chinese-style landscape. The game consisted of seven geometric pieces in black Bakelite which one had to arrange on a squared paper template, where shaded areas depicted various figures: a mandarin, a rabbit, a tower, a lady with a parasol. It looked easy, but it wasn’t. The outlined shapes had to be covered precisely with the black pieces. I rarely succeeded in matching the two exactly.

  Bevilacqua’s case was one of the times I failed. I can perfectly see the shaded silhouette of the man in my imagination, but I still need one or two pieces of information to cover it all. No matter how I reorganize the testimonies, however I try to trim them or turn them around, there is always one which does not fit with the others, which overlaps or doesn’t meet what I would call the exact version.

  Of course, it isn’t the first time I’ve failed in an investigation of this kind. And on such occasions a journalist worth his salt should know how to concede defeat. There is no shame in defeat. It doesn’t hurt me to admit it: a faithful portrait of Alejandro Bevilacqua is going to require more skillful hands than mine.

&nb
sp; If, however, I were obliged to defend my case, or to justify my attempt at depicting a figure like him, so mysterious and somber, I would say that, otherworldly as he was, Bevilacqua embodied for me a certain human spontaneity. Nothing heroic or intrepid, nor even passionate, but something less pompous, more commonplace. A quality that falls somewhere between equivocation and desire, between the things we say accidentally and what we contrive to say. Not lies, which require deliberation and skill, along with a recognition of the truth in order to betray it. It’s something more serious, more tragic and subtle, more essential. This quality I’m talking about is the same one which, on hot afternoons, makes the asphalt shimmer like water, or which prompts us to put a hand on the shoulder of a woman whose back reminds us of a long-lost friend, or which leads us up to a flat we believe is ours, to knock on a door behind which an unknown person is about to take some irreparable step.

  I’ve said that I’m looking for, or was looking for, a singular, exact version. Perhaps, in the case of Bevilacqua, that version was unwittingly revealed by one of the various witnesses to his life who confided in me. But, in order to recognize it, I (whether journalist or confessor) would need to be capable of identifying it, of knowing beforehand which are these qualities, like a blind man intuiting the shades of a certain color or a deaf man the tonality of a piece of music. I mean: I would need to know who Bevilacqua was before I could know whether the portrait offered me is authentic or not.