The state of mind is born with the novel and ends with it. It is a house that feels like your own but where you will never live again, a music that will cease to exist when you stop playing. The book will remain, of course, the printed word, like a recording, but the product will begin to feel alien, and a painful emptiness will weigh over you for some time, as if you had been conned.
Every day of work is sustained by the anticipation of the end, its promising proximity. You sit to write, hoping to rekindle the fire of creation, see your soul at the white heat, as Emily Dickinson says. You fear the trance is not going to happen that day; distractions, chores, laziness, depression, the venom of insecurity—any of it can prevent you from sustaining the requisite state of mind. Because a novel is like an ember that must continue glowing beneath the cool ashes after the flames have died, an ember that you must carry in secret, while you get through everything else that occupies your life besides writing—the seven hours at the office, the time preparing dinner and putting dishes away, taking the children to school, preparing their lunch, giving them a bath, driving to see family or run errands.
The more days you let pass before returning to the novel, the deeper the fear becomes. You fear that when you finally get to sit down and write, the ember has extinguished, the state of mind that fuels the novel has been dissolved. There will be regret for all the pages left unwritten, a negative and impossible accounting of all the words that would now exist on paper if only you had kept working instead of taking the child to the pediatrician or giving in to some social event.
I returned to Granada with my wife and children after the Christmas vacation, and the manuscript was exactly where I had left it before going to Lisbon and Úbeda, next to the covered typewriter.
The images I had visualized so vividly while in Lisbon now seemed to lack all color and sense of reality. I had to punch my card in the office every morning and stay there until three. We were not sleeping well because the baby woke up constantly. For one reason after another I kept postponing the day when I would resume my writing. On my desk, in front of the window, I now had not only my typewriter, the two stacks of paper, and a pack of cigarettes, but also the notebook with all my notes and photos from Lisbon.
I have yet to experience the day when the task of writing does not feel impossible and overwhelming. That’s how it was twenty-seven years ago in that apartment in Granada, and that is how it is at this very instant, an evening at the beginning of February 2014, as I write in front of a window facing a snowy street in New York.
The fifty-eight-year-old man and the troubled young father I was back then have only that in common: the uncertainty that never goes away, the despair that must be overcome with equal effort, but also, quite often, the gradual flow that begins to wash over the depression, the return of that state of mind in which a story can grow on its own like an organism, sometimes in small spurts, and other times in spasms, flash floods that make you forget time and even yourself, like a runner who achieves such a level of focus he forgets he is even running.
Once I dove back into the novel, I could no longer get out. I recovered my discipline and rhythm, and the transition from depression to euphoria, from the blank stare to the rapid-rain drumroll on the keyboard, became easier and faster each day. I remember evenings and nights of domestic calm, a familial and conjugal sweetness; Sunday mornings strolling along the Paseo del Salón and the Paseo de la Bomba with our elder son in one hand and the little one in the stroller. Writing without interruption was soothing. Work has always been my most powerful remedy against angst. The birth of our second child had awakened in our elder son, the three-year-old, a certain self-sufficiency and protectiveness. After a partial, yet firm, attachment to his baby bottle—a friend once noted that he handled it with the panache of an adult drinking a gin and tonic—he abandoned it overnight. Seeing his baby brother drink from the bottle must have made him think it was no longer appropriate for a boy his age.
Every night, I read him a story before tucking him in. The light from the room where I worked filtered into his, and he asked that I leave both doors open until he fell asleep. I read him old Spanish stories, which we knew by heart. But repetition did not dull their spell. The knowledge of what was about to happen intensified the suspense instead of weakening it. Any variation, caused by my oversight or boredom, was unacceptable. In the room next door, I was spending hours every day developing a plot that could hold a reader’s attention and curiosity with a compelling tale of the unexpected. My son was overwhelmed by the anticipation of what he already knew.
He preferred tales I made up to the storybooks, and he asked me to tell them again and again, always attentive that I did not change any details. The characters were part fantasy, taken from his favorite movies and cartoons, and part reality: a boy with a different name, but clearly him, with parents like us, who occasionally had superpowers, a friend who was identical to the neighbors’ daughter, and a little brother who, for some mysterious reason, did not speak yet.
With little more than three years, my son could already calibrate the connections and differences between reality and fantasy, and distinguish fixed elements and random variations in a narrative system. He expressed his wishes about possible arguments, but also intuited that a story would lose all its value if it adapted entirely to his whims and demands. A narrative is not convincing if it doesn’t give you the impression that it could exist on its own, unfolding with the chance and spontaneity of life, even if at the same time there is a clear set of rules at work under the surface.
Fiction had a visible, physical effect on him. It was addictive. A story stoked his desire for more, instead of satiating it. Halfway through a tale, the boy would fall asleep with the calmest of expressions on his face, just like his little brother after breast-feeding. I would tiptoe out of the room and start writing.
* * *
The closer I got to the end, the faster the rhythm of the novel became. The speed of the writing corresponded to the urgency of the characters’ missions. The slow, ballad pace of the first few chapters accelerated toward a bebop-vertigo; toward that moment when the hands of a musician begin to move so fast, it is no longer possible to follow them or imagine that there is any control in what they are doing, when they throw their heads back and squint and smile as if inside a dream.
The Lisbon that belonged to the real world was being distilled into an abstract city, a model made to the dimensions of the plot unfolding within it, like the sets of Rimini or Rome built by Fellini in Cinecittà, or the gloomy New York of black-and-white thrillers filmed in Hollywood. The anonymous narrator had never been to Lisbon, so this was an imaginary city. Parallel to the worlds of real cities are those that belong to their counterparts in literature and cinema or music or photography or painting. I wanted my readers to imagine Lisbon as vividly as I imagined Brussels when listening to Paquito D’Rivera’s “Brussels in the Rain”; I wanted this imaginary city to reveal itself like the spectral Vienna of The Third Man: a hallway, a cemetery, a road, a nightclub, a sewer, a crumbling stairway on the hillside of a ruin.
I have not opened that novel in many years. I think I would feel embarrassed and puzzled reading it, much like I would if I could observe the young man who wrote it: in the flesh, not through the filter of a distant past, with the adjustments and forbearance of memory. I remember flashes, images, takes of a camera in motion: the last one of them all, a sidewalk on Madrid’s Gran Vía seen from above, perhaps from a window two or three stories up, the Telefónica Building is lit and rain glistens on the open umbrellas, a woman in a white coat is seen from behind, disappearing in the midst of a crowd by the metro entrance, vanishing suddenly, definitively, like only fictional characters can.
* * *
I typed the final period and pulled the sheet from the machine. I placed it facedown on the stack of paper that had been growing, one millimeter at a time, over the past five months. It is not guaranteed that you will reach the end of a book with an unam
biguous sense of relief at having completed a stubborn and lonely task that has taken years, or a few months at the very least. The moment you have anticipated for so long arrives and nothing happens, you feel almost nothing, except fatigue. The room is the same, the window, the desk, the noise coming from the street. Suddenly, an inkling of futility and error dawns on you, and exhaustion turns into distress at the thought that you will have to review the manuscript from the beginning, and will probably find all sorts of unacceptable weaknesses in the plot, inconsistencies and gaps, words repeated too many times.
But that time I felt a great lightness, a quiet happiness. I left the room and my wife was feeding our elder boy dinner. The little one was sound asleep in the crib. I took out a beer from the fridge and sat down to drink it at the table with them and have some dinner, even though I wasn’t hungry. She saw my face and with a smile asked if I had finished. It seemed unbelievable, but yes. It always seems unbelievable.
16
He would not do anything else if they gave him up for dead and stopped looking for him. He would not care if they thought he was that corpse in the Atlanta airport or the one in that beach in Mexico who could not be identified because the crabs had eaten its fingertips. He would stop but first he needed money, he needed to rob a bank or jewelry shop and get just enough money—say twenty or thirty thousand dollars—to live the rest of his life in complete anonymity somewhere far away. That would be more than enough because he was used to getting by with very little. From the moment he started making money, he had learned to keep track of every expense, and he never spent more than what he could afford. He had a strict budget for basic necessities and small treats here and there; his rooms were always in cheap boardinghouses and he only bought simple food. The rest were small expenses: radio batteries, the occasional book or pornographic magazine from a secondhand shop, a newspaper or two every day, a few beers to drink at night in his room, and women, of course, mostly prostitutes, but always the least expensive, as he had told a cellmate once, the ones who were ready to do business even if there was a language barrier, after all, only a few words are necessary, words that are similar in any language, universal gestures, the universal language of love, like the blond woman at Maxime’s had said while laughing. She was different from the other one, the first one, the one he had met at the Texas Bar and gifted a bathing suit. He had promised her that they would go to the beach together, but he ended up deciding against it. He liked her but he could not afford to take any risks, and it was always safer to meet a person only once, man or woman, it did not matter, you could not give anyone the opportunity to form a memory of you, to become so familiar with your face that they will recognize it right away if they see it in a newspaper or on the TV.
He asked her to come to the hotel at nine in the morning, the day after his arrival in Lisbon, May 9. Sometime before that, however, after returning from breakfast, he asked the receptionist to tell the lady he had to leave town in a hurry for an urgent business matter. He sat close to the balcony, behind the curtains, and waited for her to appear. A few minutes before nine, he saw her walking from the direction of the square with the king statue. It was a bright morning. She was wearing a light summer dress, a cardigan and a shoulder bag, flat shoes. No makeup.
She glanced at the balconies of the hotel but did not see him. He remained still on the chair, dressed in the dark suit and black tie, with his eyes fixed on the street below, until he saw her again, this time from behind, walking away slowly. He would continue going to the Texas Bar for the remainder of his time in Lisbon, but he would never see her again.
* * *
He would stay in Lisbon, if only he had a way of getting money. Lisbon was better than Puerto Vallarta. It was safer. Puerto Vallarta was too close to the United States, and although it was quite secluded, it was also very small and an American did not go unnoticed. Also, American tourists came to Puerto Vallarta often and they would recognize him; they would surely hear about him in the bars and in the brothels. Lisbon was better. All one had to do to disappear was go up one of those narrow stairways to nowhere, or get a room in one of the big, gloomy buildings that lined the side streets, or get a room in one of those boardinghouses tucked in the small, quiet squares, like the one he had seen by the Texas Bar as he got in the taxi with her, feeling more fatigued than aroused, nodding off as they sped through those narrow and winding streets, harsh sunlight followed by shade, women yelling in the background, clothes hanging on lines from the balconies above, yellow trolleys appearing and disappearing around the corners.
The taxi came to a stop in a small square under the imposing shadow of a tree. He paid the driver while she waited outside. She was standing by the entrance to a house. He could hear her speak in her incomprehensible language, aided by gestures and a few English words here and there, room, cheap, clean, bath, money.
The stairway was illuminated by a skylight. He followed her up the steps. They were painted blue like the railing. He watched her hand slide on the wooden surface. No nail polish. He was trying to keep up with her, but the steps were steep and he was running out of breath. He was also starting to feel anxious, impatient to get what he wanted, always the same, the woman on her knees, her head moving faster and faster between his hands.
* * *
He could stay in a room like that, with an open window overlooking the tiled roofs and a big tree filled with birds whose song would drown out the noise of the city, making it feel so remote, a bay or a lake of silence at the end of the world. It would be like reaching the end of a tunnel that stretches all the way back to the prison cell, after a long journey that required crawling through sewers, squeezing through the narrowest passages, digging into the ground with one’s bare hands, like a mole.
* * *
He would not do anything else if he was safe, if he wasn’t running out of money so quickly. He would be content just to watch others, without fear, without being seen. Every day he felt more and more confident in his ability to dissolve in the fog of the crowds and never stand out. He would be able to watch others with curiosity instead of envy or contempt, passing along all the places where people remained bound by their schedules, their obligations, their kids, their women, the tasks they would have to repeat until the day they died.
He would stay in the room of the boardinghouse and enjoy the view from the window, or lie in bed reading novels, scanning newspaper articles, searching for possible clues about the hunt, or, even better, he would sit at a cafe, a table in the back and facing the entrance or maybe close to the back door, or perhaps on the terrace of the Pastelaria Suiça, under the shade of the awning, sipping a coffee all morning, enjoying the breeze and the sound of the water fountain.
There were still some evenings and nights when he managed to relax in the bars of Cais do Sodré. He would choose a quiet corner and drink one beer very slowly. Sitting by himself, he felt like a diver at the bottom of the sea, watching all the reds and blues that propagated through the mirrors and liquefied in the cigarette smoke; a diver who is protected behind the glass of his helmet, and is free to watch all the animals and aquatic plants, plants that are actually animals and fish that swim with their mouths open, silently, leaving a trail of air bubbles.
He watched faces and lipsticked mouths floating in the smoke, in the aquatic darkness of the bar, the glow of lit cigarettes, the hum of laughter and words in foreign languages. He watched others get drunk with alcohol and lust, men and women, courting each other like exotic animals. The rumor was out that he was stingy with money, so women left him alone.
As far back as he could remember, he had observed the world and the lives of others like a three-dimensional film that plays around him but of which he has no part, like the full-color ads in magazines that he liked so much, the ones with happy, fictional lives, unashamedly laden with promises, because behind the cars, alcohol, menthol cigarettes, air conditioners, color TVs with remote control, tanning lotions, there was something else all these people see
med to believe in: unabashed happiness, adventure, the immediate gratification of desire, sexual fantasies.
* * *
It all fascinated him. On the full-page spreads of Life magazine everything was bright: a shiny sports car, photographed from an angle that accentuated the shape of its nose, like a shark, and a background of palm trees under a blue sky, a helicopter, and a name in bold letters, Pontiac Firebird; a spray to stop feet from sweating; a businessman or insurance salesman who smiles with all the confidence of someone who will never let you down, Always with you when you need us; a young, attractive couple drinking J&B whiskey; a happy family around a breakfast table raising their big glasses of orange juice; a double page featuring the new Chrysler models, including not only cars but also rockets, tanks, trailers, excavators, school buses; an overabundance that multiplies the pages of the magazine, almost overflowing from them; tall glasses of blond, foamy beer, with beads of condensation on the glass; a Volvo with a metallic shine; an air conditioner from Frigidaire offering a cold breeze in the middle of a hot summer for all the happy people who gather around it; Redwood aftershave, which is all man to make a woman feel all woman; the twenty-six flavors of Crest toothpaste; tobacco and alcohol, the distinguishing qualities of masculinity; the smoke from Marlboro cigarettes, which expands the lungs and invigorates the rugged cowboys in the pictures; a frosty Four Roses whiskey sour in a tall glass is the new summer cooler. It cools you off from the inside out; a man in a blue blazer stepping down off a plane with a bag of golf clubs, welcomed by a stewardess who offers him a flask with Old Crow whiskey; cars have names that allude to fire and thunder: there’s the Pontiac Firebird and, a few pages later, the Ford Thunderbird.
Like a Fading Shadow Page 18