Granta 131

by Sigrid Rausing

  so what’s she like

  she talked all the time about Jean-Paul Sartre

  why

  she met him

  so what’s he like

  she said he talked all the time about John Huston

  why

  Huston invited Sartre to his house to work on some movie but Marilyn Monroe cancelled so they spent two weeks in Galway alone together in the rain

  how’d that go

  they fell immediately and deeply in love

  you’re kidding

  yes I’m kidding Sartre called Huston a heap of ruins and Huston said Sartre had a face like an omelette

  oh look there’s Louise

  where

  straight ahead of us about four rows

  is that Louise oh you’re right new haircut is she still seeing that kid

  I think it’s him next to her

  I thought you were going to have a talk with her about that

  chickened out

  how much younger is he

  last week he was writing her eulogy

  what do you mean

  she came into his room he was bent over the page really puzzling what to put in what to leave out

  all those loose bloody ends

  I suppose

  did you ask her what they talk about the two of them

  no

  did you ask her if waiters make a point of saying hello madam how nice you’re out with your son today

  no

  should do that

  you’re so judgemental

  I’m just concerned for Louise

  oh sure

  you get that parchy tone

  parchy isn’t a word

  yes it is

  no it isn’t

  I met a parchy guy in Taos once his name was Larry Littlebird

  great name

  he had a bus tour business

  you took a bus tour why

  he looked nice I don’t know he used to hang around the hotel lobby no one else took the tour we went to different pueblos mostly I remember him telling me you live a room service life all white people are carrion

  I’m seeing why no one else took the tour

  after that I felt odd paying for his orange juice

  why were you paying for his orange juice

  we were at the pool

  what’s this got to do with Louise

  nothing I was just thinking about who looks down on who

  whom

  whom

  so you fired Mr Bird

  no actually after that he got to like me

  part of his hustle

  took me to his mother’s pueblo we talked all afternoon I still think of her sometimes it was a blazing silver afternoon

  does Louise still have her dog

  Philip Larkin yes

  something wrong with calling a dog Philip Larkin

  there’s that tone again

  [2nd]

  she started doing the bones when

  few years ago

  where’d she get bones do you know

  Dave told her where to get them

  can I ask her about that do you think

  be careful

  or the bathtubs

  be careful asking

  Dave says he never met a more raw person

  I saw her once on TV

  the cracked teeth the dyed red hair the big black Reeboks

  yes and they showed her studio

  I’m supposed to go there tomorrow for the interview

  just her in a big studio all these objects in rows and her on a stool in the midst

  doing what

  working

  shit

  what

  I’ll be interrupting the work she’ll hate me

  are you scared

  I’ve no idea what to say to her

  say tell me about the vests Betty the bones the bathtubs

  tell me about your son dying ping ping ping is this an interview she’ll hate me

  on TV her hands would go up and down when they asked questions

  up and down

  grappling sort of

  she’ll hate me

  they just wasted away she said

  who

  I don’t know she said it a couple of times they just wasted away people just wasted away

  might as well not even take my notebook

  they asked about the bones and she laughs

  laughs

  oh the bones she says oh the bones meant something to me and she laughs or more like caws as if

  as if what

  as if I don’t know what

  as if anybody knows how to talk about art

  well there’s that

  I’ll skip the bones

  they say she’s kind-hearted

  that makes it worse you have to drink tea and split a kind heart apart at the same time

  push push push I remember she said push push push

  in reference to what

  some question, her working method or what’s next for you now Betty something like that

  I won’t ask questions

  you could just sing

  sing

  she’s a haunted person

  why do you say that

  from seeing her on TV maybe not haunted wrong word

  what then

  non-exempt

  non-exempt from what

  life

  the rest of us are exempt

  yes

  news to me

  blind deaf dumb same thing

  this is your theory of art

  this is my theory of her awake all night worrying about little wild animals active in the dark to which the rest of us are paying not very much attention at all

  I’ll just have tea and leave

  also you could ask Dave he used to know her

  she was a patient of his once wasn’t she

  before my time it was Darly on the desk then

  who’s Darly

  don’t you remember Darly, Darly was a hoot she still calls Dave now and then to give him the low-down on the man upstairs

  upstairs where

  Dave’s other building she says about ten every night he’s dragging a

  piece of heavy furniture across the floor

  who Dave

  not Dave the man upstairs then he drops pins or walks around in high heels or has a lot of other people walk around in high heels tap tap tap Darly’s pretty sensitive to noise

  got that

  you ever meet him the man upstairs Dave says to Darly no says Darly and Dave says someday you’ll meet him you’ll say what was it with all the pins he’ll say those weren’t pins and tell you some weird inside physics fact you never heard of

  well you can’t help but fantasize a man upstairs

  [3rd]

  where’d you get that shirt

  Dave lent it to me for the dinner party

  what dinner party

  last week

  lucky you it’s vintage

  he said skip the lecture just go to the party half the people do that he says

  have any fun

  I end up talking to this Berlin journalist who translates crime fiction on the side or did

  nice life

  until he couldn’t find a non-obscene German equivalent for ‘she crossed her legs’ and got fired

  stop snapping that button

  it was the dinner where I met the actress

  what actress

  Isabelle Huppert I thought I told you

  you met Isabelle Huppert

  sat across from her anyway

  and

  weird chick

  why

  lots of really white make-up like a doll and four red tears down one cheek

  stage make-up she must have come from the theatre

  and she ate mostly salt

  salt

  this poor waiter serves her dinner gives it a big shake of salt starts to leave the table she waves
him back he pours on more salt then I guess it’s her husband takes the shaker pours salt all over finally she grabs it herself no let-up on eating fork in one hand salt in the other she finishes that plate without lifting her head

  stress

  her husband winks at me as if to say what a treasure

  d’you wink back

  I told him that proverb Han told me

  who’s Han

  Ken’s girlfriend

  oh the Chinese one

  you marry a chicken you follow a chicken she says

  you said follow a chicken to Isabelle Huppert’s husband

  it’s more nuanced in Chinese

  I suppose

  Dave always says why go to these parties if I don’t like the people but it’s not that I don’t like the people

  Dave’s not into celebrities

  true but he did get obsessed with that guy from his high school

  who wasn’t even famous

  just outed for doing a job no one else can imagine doing

  oh boy

  change of subject

  what’s it like do you think being salt and having Isabelle Huppert come down on you with her big red lips

  you’re in a weird mood

  did Dave tell you about when he went to that guy’s house

  you know I went with him

  you’re kidding

  we were just driving around one night

  and

  was Dave’s idea to knock on the guy’s door it being Christmas Eve

  what’s Christmas Eve got to do with it

  nothing really but Dave says well I went to high school with him what the heck so we knock the guy comes to the door in a sweater and one look at his face I’m thinking this is a bad idea Dave whispers pretend we’re carollers but neither of us can sing the guy offers us a twenty

  you take it

  we have no basket or anything so he puts it back in his pants not suspicious yet just kind of sunk in himself and all of a sudden he says you got to be tougher you want money you don’t want money say so and his voice is a shock

  why

  maybe it was the Christmas thing, guy had this Christmas music on inside his voice made me want to cry I don’t know

  Dave does get you into things

  and I said to him after we’re in the car again I said you’re still curious aren’t you

  and

  and he admits he’s interested to see how the guy did his tree

  shit

  but then just after Christmas he gets a call from the guy or could have been his manager

  torturers don’t have managers

  no well who knows but they want to make a movie of his life a documentary these two women from LA

  movie of Dave’s life

  no the torturer’s

  but he didn’t recognize Dave at the door you said

  not at the time

  he took you for idiots panhandling

  I guess it came to him later

  so Dave’s in the movie

  no I doubt he’ll do it

  hmm

  but I bet he’s curious

  Dave’s always curious

  concept is these two women from LA want Dave to be the interviewer talk to the guy reminisce about high school see where it goes

  Dave couldn’t interview a block of cheese

  my view exactly

  but that’s what we thought about Darly and then she joined the army

  you mean we thought it a poor choice on her part

  yes

  but she turned out to be fully capable

  and happy enough from what I hear still I can’t imagine Dave in a movie I can’t imagine Dave as an interviewer

  Dave says the guy’s retired now

  as if that makes sense as if you can retire from torture

  it’s very physical work Dave says

  I can just hear him say that

  in his next-slide-please voice

  first thing you know he’ll be bringing the guy to the clinic for treatment

  don’t even think it

  [4th]

  old words make me sad

  like what

  carhop

  I’ve never said carhop in my life

  what about cardigan

  my aunt wore cardigans my aunt Nell and she was sad

  well there you go

  or not sad but kind of bluish kind of dusky she always showed up at

  our house at dusk with her mysterious blue luggage and sat beside me on the couch

  why

  you mean why on the couch

  yes

  so she could teach me the sleeper hold

  what’s the sleeper hold

  you can totally paralyze your enemy with the sleeper hold

  show me

  she also taught me the word confidential

  wasn’t that a magazine

  when I see the word confidential even now a whole atmosphere like a Humphrey Bogart movie comes out around it

  just put your lips together and blow

  then one day she wasn’t there any more she didn’t visit maybe she died it got all hush hush you know how they whisper together in the kitchen and stop when you come in

  the family shadow

  no one ever said

  aunts have a longitude

  yes

  unlike uncles

  uncles come in groups my uncles I remember always grouped around the stove on winter nights passing the whiskey watching the fire

  storytellers were they

  actually no they were mostly silent big silent men side by side sort of rustling not much talk

  I wonder are we better off with all our talk

  any stories they had were stories about snow

  the snow was mythic in those days

  and I remember that icy path from the kitchen to the outhouse, no one on it snow on it mother-of-God spotless in the moonlight show me the sleeper hold

  I can’t

  ah

  she never got around to it

  ah

  I didn’t know how to ask for things

  the whole trick isn’t it

  no one knew how to ask each other anything

  families are a mystery

  shot of whiskey for the boy not much else ever said

  you often mention the outhouse why is that

  no I don’t

  yes you do

  some Freudian thing is what you’re implying

  not implying anything I merely wonder why you always mention the outhouse was it a two-seater

  ours was a two-seater yes

  so you could sit and shit alongside somebody else

  theoretically

  did you do that

  never if I could help it

  you preferred to be alone

  I went there to read

  lots of reading material in the outhouse

  usually newspapers but I took my book with me

  I can just see you heading down the path with a volume of Proust under each arm

  I hated it but those were happy days

  golden age

  it burned down the summer of the fires

  you crazy fuck don’t look so sad

  she never got around to it why do you think that was

  is it important

  yes

  so maybe that’s what it was

  what

  and I wonder where she got blue luggage in those days

  I’m going to ask Dave

  about luggage

  no the sleeper hold he’s a medical man he may know it

  I wouldn’t be surprised, unrelated question do you keep a journal

  yes why

  just curious why do you

  the light is so remarkable some days I have to put it away

  put what away

  stop it bothering me the light

  what kind of light would that be

  I can’t say

  is it o
nly light does this

  I screen out the rest

  Dave says that guy from his high school kept a journal they’re using a few pages of it in the documentary

  I don’t want to know

  Mr Matt Talbot liked to record materials and durations

  I don’t want to hear about it I don’t want to know his name

  Dave says

  not interested

  don’t be a coward

  language is a curse

  didn’t Beckett say that

  okay yes I’m ridiculous

  he has a recurring stage direction ‘brief laugh’ Beckett I mean

  what about Mr Matt Talbot how funny is he

  I was trained to do what I do in accordance with my training I’m quoting Mr Matt Talbot

  a tautology

  an extinction

  you see how language betrays us

  is that Beckett again

  oh piss off

  parchy

  what are you staring at now

  the shadow of your hands on the table it looks like –

  a coffin

  no, celery

  well there we are then

  yes there we are

  THE ARCHIVE

  A visual data study project

  (based on a story by Sebastià Jovani)

  TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY NICK CAISTOR

  What follows is the result of a painstaking work of interpretation and recoding of a literary text, namely the short story ‘The Archive’, which author Sebastià Jovani was kind and unselfish enough to allow us to use for the purposes of the present analytic study.

  The aim of this study is to offer and to visualise a means of understanding the essential aspects of a literary text, avoiding the possible confusions, or a proliferation of diverging interpretations, to which a conventional approach (whether a formalist or a subjective-hermeneutic one) could give rise, with the resultant added difficulty of accessing the fundamental nucleus of the text and its basic taxonomy.

  From this starting point, the text was submitted to different externalised readings, which were in turn parameterised as a series of categories and data sets, previously established as fundamental to any textual-literary process of analysis. Namely: the author’s aesthetic and contextual reference points (in the case of those whose traces could be detected in a more or less objective manner, without the need to incorporate further readings to disentangle such influences); the narrative structure (understood here as a temporal sequentiality and a typology of voices); the relations and characterisations of the protagonists of said story; and the evolution of the intensity of the storyline (incident-arcs surpassing the narrative-descriptive average of the events narrated).

  The data thus collected was then adapted into a series of visual images and diagrams, accompanied by their corresponding labels. The results displayed on the adjacent pages therefore constitute a reading of ‘The Archive’, which also provides a translation of the story into strategic coordinates that combine data analysis with a graphic synthesis in tune with the requirements for interactivity with cultural objects and phenomena that our media environment increasingly demands. In addition, we hope to offer the most objective possible portrait of the creative process and indeed of the figure of the author.