The Birthday Buyer

by Adolfo García Ortega

  3

  The life of Pablo Orgambide

  Or else:

  Like Kolunga, Pablo Orgambide, the writer, was handed over to the Red Cross in Auschwitz without a name (or with that strange moniker of Hurbinek) and, just like Farin’s or Kolunga’s, his life could be Hurbinek’s. Today I imagine him on his wedding day: it is a day at the end of November 1975 and Pablo is thirty-three. Two weeks before, a street boy killed Pasolini on the beach in Ostia and Pablo worshipped Pasolini. He is getting married in Madrid, in a country that is experiencing political upheaval under a moribund dictator who signed his last five death sentences a month before. A country that isn’t his, though Pablo doesn’t know that, and when, with the passage of time, there is overwhelming evidence that his real name was something else, it is to seem unimportant, because he has lived a life rich in experience with a name he has been known by ever since he can remember: Pablo Orgambide. They never told him, or made the slightest hint. How he came to be part of that family is a mystery, even for his family. His father, who gave him the name he now lives under and was the only one who knew the secret, died in 1968 and took it with him to the grave, and his mother had died many years before with her lips sealed: she had given birth to three daughters and that boy was to be be the son she couldn’t give him. Then somebody, who perhaps wanted to spread doubts and wreak conflict between him and his sisters, circulated the rumor that their father had brought a child with him from Russia, when they began to allow men who had fought in the Blue Division to return. A child who surely was Pablo. He studied Law at the university where he joined a left-wing party that was clandestine at the time. When Franco was in his final death throes, Pablo enjoyed a comfortable position in society, though his family wasn’t well-to-do, but merely middle class and fallen on hard times. Old man Orgambide, politically conservative and close to the Franco regime, worked as a lawyer in Spain for a Belgian timber company, the Compagnie Nationale des Bois, that owned land in the Congo. The Nationale lost its licence to operate and went bankrupt in 1956. It was the same year that Pablo began to write a weekly society column for the evening newspaper Informaciones where he met the woman he would marry, Esther Rubio. Pablo Orgambide now works for publishers in Barcelona who pay him quite well to write biographies of historical figures. He is thinking of giving the column up to continue with the series on a freelance basis and take on others as they come up. Coincidentally one of the biographies he finished before his wedding, in the summer of 1975, was Adolf Hitler’s. (I think: it’s really a macabre irony that Hurbinek should write a life of Hitler, but there was also a hint of vengeance.) He had gone to Majorca to finish the book. His fiancée’s family owned a very rustic cabin that was called precisely that, Sa Cabana, on the road to Inca. He spent three months surrounded by books on the Third Reich and all kinds of apologias for the Führer. He ended up disgusted, because he thought that character was completely obnoxious. He found his hatred of the Jews abominable. And yet it was never revealed to him how close to that abomination he had in fact lived. When Pablo was in puberty and asked why that number was tattooed on his arm, he would only receive evasive replies, the sincere fruit of ignorance: nobody in the Orgambide family suspected the boy’s real origins. “Don’t tell us you are a Jew!” his sisters exclaimed scornfully, though in an incredulous rather than wary tone. His father got a number tattoo as well so he could tell his son it was an ancient family rite, a numbering that affected various members of the family over generations, an absurd explanation that Pablo accepted, as yet another of the strange ideas that ruled the impenetrable mind of his father, whom he admired but didn’t understand however much the two of them took frequent strolls together along the streets of Madrid in an illusory attempt at sharing affection. Over time, his marriage to Esther would become a stable, happy union, because he found she supported him in his aspiration to be a writer, one that he did in fact fulfill. He wrote novels, history books, and still more biographies (his Life of Hernán Cortés became a classic; his biography of Hitler went through several editions and can even be found to this day on book bargain shelves, where I bought mine; he also wrote a life of Cervantes) and wrote fewer and fewer articles as a journalist until he finally gave up from exhaustion. He and Esther were to have two children. He was to win prizes and collect aquariums with exotic fish, small, elusive fish, and that was to become his favorite hobby, as it was Primo Levi’s when he was a child, when he named each fish after a mineral. But Orgambide died never knowing that they were together, even if only for a very short time, in Auschwitz. Travelling was never a problem, since that limp of his, that only weighed on him when he forgot to conceal it, never stopped him from leading the life he wanted to lead. Neither Esther nor he (come to think of it, he was fated to marry a woman whose name was so significantly Hebraic) thought the rumors about Pablo’s Russian origins were in any way credible. Had they investigated further, those origins would have taken them to very distant places, a world that no longer existed but that once had as a backdrop a city called Rzeszów. The day I am imagining today, the day they wed, Franco died. He was asked to write Franco’s life, but never did. Instead, he wrote a life of Pasolini.

  4

  The life of Paul Roux

  Or else:

  Paul Roux. Originally Polish but naturalized in France. He doesn’t know what his name used to be or which city he was born in. He is only sure that he put in a sudden appearance, as if he’d fallen from the skies, in an orphanage in Alsace, that he left in order to enter a seminary of the Brothers of La Salle in Paris. He became very religious, a feature of his personality he never lost, not even when he gave up his vocation to devote himself fleetingly to the cinema. He met Georges Annenkov, the old friend and tailor of Ophuls and Renoir, by chance in a hotel, who introduced him into those circles. He played secondary roles in films directed by Sautet, Bresson, Truffaut, Clément and Chabrol. In the early eighties Susanne Lepape crossed his path. A cheerful, witty woman, she was shortish, robust and full of charm, and owned an opticians in Marseille that supplied lenses to the Gaumont production company. Susanne, like Paul, loved the cinema. They married and Paul began to work in his wife’s business. He left Paris for a life in the provinces and never regretted it. Paul is a good man with simple tastes who likes a tranquil life, and Susanne enjoys the small things of life, the “small everyday pleasures” as she calls them. But together they nurture the passion that unites them: the cinema. On every anniversary, whether it be their wedding, respective birthdays or some personal occasion—given that any is a good excuse to give presents—they give each other items related to their common passion. Paul and Susanne are fetishists and cultivate an extraordinary, irrepressible taste for small myths. Thus they have given each other as presents a gold chain that belonged to Jean Marais (Paul), mother-of-pearl eyeglasses that were Romy Schneider’s (Susanne), an almost new white bootee that belonged to Arletty (Paul), one of Alain Delon’s handkerchieves embroidered with the initials A. D. (Susanne) and a Renoir zoetrope plus the original screenplay of Les portes de la nuit signed by Jacques Prévert (Paul) and Clouzot’s amber cigarette case (Susanne). Valuable items, increasingly sought after by collectors. Year after year, the Rouxs’ tastes become more sophisticated and they now have to go to auctions or involve intermediaries who sell objects belonging to famous actors and directors through the back door. However, Paul Roux’s greatest fetish, one he longs to possess every twilight when he shuts the opticians and takes a stroll through the port of Marseille—the city that Walter Benjamin dreamed was being transformed into a book—and gazes at the yachts moored there, is Marge, Maurice Ronet’s yacht in Á plein soleil. He plays a small role in the final scenes of that film shot in a fishing port on the Adriatic. His love of boats is an impossible love: they are unattainable for him.

  I am afraid Paul Roux doesn’t know who Walter Benjamin was and hasn’t read any of his books. That’s why he doesn’t know that early in the morning of September 27, 1940 he committed
suicide in Portbou fleeing from the Nazis. He would have ended up in a train heading toward Auschwitz. He might have been gassed on arrival, or might have lived long enough to get to know little Hurbinek, to breathe the same pestilent air in that infirmary and die when some anonymous person rescued that child from death so he could become Paul Roux, former actor and optician, bringing them together historically, in a terrible, magnificent museum, a mountain of lost names, of deceased, displaced people, an artificial mountain of encounters and non-encounters.

  The Rouxs don’t have children and like to travel through Europe, and they celebrate their love in their journeying. Susanne drives since Paul has a few problems with his legs, where he lost a great deal of sensitivity, though he doesn’t know when or how. Quite simply, he was born that way. But he holds himself up well, and does remember that he used a walking stick in the La Salle Seminary. Whenever they can, they go to the cinema or tirelessly watch films on video, and when they go up to Paris they visit their old friends: Léaud, Chabrol and Denner. In 1982 Susanne is to give him a present, the brooch in the form of a silver arrow that Joan Bennett wears on her beret in Man Hunt. It cost her a fortune, but it will make Paul happy. She was to give it to him in a hotel in Portbou, where they were to stop to break up their journey to Barcelona, on a special fictitious anniversary, when Paul was to turn forty. Or that was what they chose to believe. “But where were you born, Paul, what was the town?” No one knows.

  5

  The life of Ribo Varelisy

  Or perhaps:

  In April 1982, the famous Bulgarian conductor Ribo Varelisy, while on tour in Italy, made an unexpected request of the Uffizi Museum in Florence. He did so via a formal letter requesting permission to spend each night of his five days in the city in one of the rooms in the museum, specifically, the one displaying Boticelli’s Birth of Venus (the greatest work of art ever created by man, in his opinion). He thought they should equip the room in a particular way for his overnight stays. They should provide bed and blankets and perhaps a basin. He made it clear he wasn’t referring to the cubbyholes for security guards and room attendants, or the museum’s administrative offices, but the exhibition rooms where paintings were hung and visited by the general public. He acknowledged that he was suffering from a kind of incurable pathology, one rather neglected by psychiatrists, in which the patient, when suffering anxiety attacks, needed to live in a museum or places with similar characteristics. He added that the pathology was known as shut cage syndrome. Ribo Varelisy suffered a crisis on that tour, one he described as among the worst in his life, and that was the reason for such an extraordinary request. To justify his eccentricity, Ribo Varelisy maintained he was in Auschwitz as a child—though his memory was blank on the subject—and as a result of the harsh conditions he was forced to endure they amputated his legs from mid-thigh down. He moves around in a motorized wheelchair, like a little car, and is world famous because he is the only orchestra leader on the planet who conducts seated thus.

  6

  The life of Augustus Hubbard

  Or else this other possibility:

  The following scene takes place in Bangkok, Thailand, three years after they opened the doors of the most famous museum in Florence to Varelisy as if it were a hotel. Now Hurbinek might be a botanist, a conservationist in Kew Gardens, a man by the name of Augustus Hubbard, whose real profession was that of art valuer, and who is to find out his true origins in 1985. Hubbard had travelled extensively around Asia over the last fifteen years as an agent prospecting for the Antiquities Department of Sotheby’s. His profession, in which Gus—as everyone calls him—is a distinguished authority, has little or nothing to do with botany, Hubbard uses it as a front because it gives him access to houses, villages, plantations and ruins on the excuse that he is searching for a specific flower or vegetable that he wishes to study. That’s why his visiting card says AUGUSTUS HUBBARD – SPECIALIST IN ASIAN BOTANY, KEW GARDENS. The works of art he is obliged to discover and catalogue for his firm, that are sometimes camouflaged as crude deities in hovels in Tibet or as domestic utensils in Vietnam, find a growing market in Europe. He heads the Asian commercial section of the hundred-year-old English antiques auctioneers. He doesn’t do this by himself, as is obvious to anyone who knows anything about Gus Hubbard, since he cannot lift his feet off the ground, and walks or drags himself along very clumsily, as if he were wearing lead shoes or very large sizes of footwear. He has assembled a team of helpers, two Englishmen, a Burmese, a Philippine, and a Taiwanese woman, who do the selection work for him. Gus Hubbard considers himself to be an unusual offshoot of those Californian gold diggers. He is obsessive, always in pursuit of a jewel that is unique of its kind, like a pristine Ming vase, or a Mogul terracotta from the tomb of Genghis Khan, or an ivory screen from Kyoto, or one of the Buddha’s eighty books of prophesy, or Japanese netsukes or sumptuous gold Siamese tapestry from Chiang Mai. Meanwhile, his team finds minor items that are much less fascinating, even commonplace, but that can nevertheless pass as highly valuable because they are so authentic. They fetch high prices in London auctions. Gus keeps his headquarters in Hong Kong, where he has lived all these years, but travels frequently to big cities in the region: Delhi, Calcutta, Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo, Taiwan, Manila . . . He is a business man who looks like an explorer and the best way to define him would be as a laboratory analyst or a maître d’. Because Gus has nothing of the adventurer about him, quite the contrary in fact: he is short and thin, sweats, breaths asthmatically, is short-sighted and quite unappealing. He has never worried about his looks, truth be known, since his passion, ever since he can remember, although he is an adoptive son, has been Asia, and what he has succeeded to do in life is to travel there extensively, to get to know it in depth. And his body has never been an obstacle in that regard. One cannot say he has never enjoyed what life has to offer. No pleasure slips from his grasp; he loves every minute that passes as if some subconscious sense were telling him that everything around him and everything that happens to him exists in a web of time that is a gift, a time that no longer belongs to him, because there was another era when he was dead and part of a nightmare of History which few, very few managed to wake up from and forget. And that is something that Gus discovered today in Bangkok at the luxurious Oriental Hotel, opposite the sloops and motor boats that ply up and down the Chao Phraya River. His high bedroom windows have turned iridescent in the twilight glow from the Noi railroad station. It’s warm and Gus is relaxing after a day spent evaluating remains from small temples in Kanchanaburi. He is listening to the radio, but hearing nothing: somewhere in the Atlantic they have found the real remains of the Titanic. Thousands of miles from there, in the Polish city of Rzeszów, Raca Cèrmik, a woman who is almost a hundred, can now die knowing where her beloved brother Thomas Zelman is resting. But why should that interest Gus Hubbard? A young waitress has brought him something for supper. Gus doesn’t try even a mouthful; he sips whisky while he reads a long letter he has anxiously been expecting. You can hear the noise of the aeroplanes making their descent to the airport. When they pass overhead, the music from the Rim Room, the elegant nightclub on the opposite bank of the river, wafts up to his room. The street lights in China Town glow in the distance, against a black background of tall skyscrapers. He has found out from his step-brothers who’ve been investigating their true identity for several years, at Gus’s expense. He is now holding the long letter from John, his elder brother, in which he tells him about Auschwitz, a place that he, Gus, could never have imagined was linked to his life (or, in fact, to his death, I would suggest). He then mentions a Russian soldier, a frightened young man from Simferopol, in the Crimea, as they discovered. He goes on to talk about a sick, paralytic child at death’s door; and of a black market, just after the war ended, in morphine, of barter, of sales, of an Englishman who sells morphine in that black market among mutually repelling allies who are Russians and Englishmen, disgusted by a frightened Russian morphine addict who is
about to kill a child by putting his hand over his mouth, of an Englishman who is a doctor who offers the Russian from Simferopol the morphine he is demanding in exchange for the life of a child who is dead already, of an English doctor who kept that child with him without giving him too much thought. A Polish child. No doubt a Jewish child. “Look at your arm, and draw your own conclusions,” ends the letter from John Hubbard. What Gus had always thought of as the incomprehensible features of a whimsical tattoo, turned out to be numbers that were hardly legible even if you stretched the skin. Night is falling in Bangkok and suddenly he has ceased to be Augustus Hubbard, art valuer.