And, as she would have done with a child, she leaned toward him and slowly took off his jacket. Jasper Gwyn did not resist. He seemed reassured by seeing Rebecca fold the jacket in the proper way and place it carefully on the floor. Then she unbuttoned his shirt, leaving the buttons of the cuffs for last. She took it off, and again folded it in an orderly way, placing it on the jacket. She seemed satisfied, and for a little while she didn’t move. Then she moved back, and leaned over to unlace Jasper Gwyn’s shoes. She took them off. Jasper Gwyn drew his feet back because all men are embarrassed about socks. But she smiled, and took those off, too. She put everything in order, as he would have done, taking care that it was all lined up.
She looked at Jasper Gwyn and said it was much better this way.
“It’s much more precise,” she said.
She got up and went to sit in the chair again. It was stupid, but her heart was pounding as if she had run a race—it was exactly as she had imagined it, at night, when it had occurred to her.
Jasper Gwyn began looking around again, went back to making small gestures in the air. Nothing seemed to have changed for him. As if he had suddenly become an animal, Rebecca thought, however. She looked at his thin chest, his skinny arms, and returned to a time when Jasper Gwyn was to her a distant writer, a photograph, some interviews—entire evenings reading him, rapt. She remembered the first time Tom had sent her to the Laundromat, with that cell phone. It had seemed crazy to her, and then Tom had paused to explain a little what sort of person Jasper Gwyn was. He had told her that in his last book there was a dedication. Maybe she remembered: To P., farewell. He explained that “P.” stood for Paul, who was a child. He was four, and Jasper Gwyn was his father. But they had never seen each other, simply because Jasper Gwyn had decided that he would never be a father, and for no reason. He was able to sustain it with great sweetness and determination. And he told her something else. There were at least two other books by Jasper Gwyn that circulated in the world, but not under his name, and certainly it wasn’t he who would tell her what they were. Then Tom had pointed a blue ballpoint pen at his head and had made a noise with his mouth, like a puff of air.
“It’s a destroyer of memory,” he had explained. “You don’t know anything.”
She had taken the cell phone and gone to the Laundromat. She remembered him very well, that man, sitting in the midst of the washing machines, elegant, his hands forgotten on his knees. He had seemed a sort of divinity, because she was still young, and it was the first time. At a certain point he had tried to tell her something about Tom and a refrigerator, but she had had trouble concentrating, because he spoke without looking in her eyes, and in a voice that she seemed to have known forever.
Now the man was here, with his thin chest, his skinny arms, his bare feet placed one on top of the other—an elegant, princely animal relict. Rebecca thought how far one can go, and how mysterious are the pathways of experience if they can lead you to be sitting on a chair, naked, observed by a man who has dragged his folly here from far away, rearranging it to make a refuge for him and for you. It occurred to her that every time she had read a page by him she had been invited into that refuge, and that basically nothing had happened since then, absolutely nothing—maybe a belated alignment of bodies, always late.
From then on Jasper Gwyn, when he worked, wore only a pair of old mechanic’s pants. It gave him something of the air of a mad painter, and this didn’t do any harm.
37
Days passed, and one afternoon a light bulb went out. The old man of Camden Town had done well. It went without a flicker and silent as a memory.
Rebecca turned to look at it—she was sitting on the bed, it was like an imperceptible oscillation of the space. She felt a pang of anguish; it was impossible not to. Jasper Gwyn had explained to her how it would all end, and now she knew what would happen, but not how fast, or how slowly. She had long ago stopped counting days, and she always refused to ask herself how it would be afterward. She was afraid to ask herself.
Jasper Gwyn got up, walked under the bulb that had gone out, and began to observe it, with an interest that one would have called scientific. He didn’t seem worried. He seemed to be wondering why that particular one. Rebecca smiled. She thought that if he wasn’t afraid, she wouldn’t be afraid, either. She sat on the bed and from there saw Jasper Gwyn walk around the studio, his head bent, for the first time interested in those pieces of paper he had pinned to the floor and had never looked at again. He picked up one, then another. He took out the thumbtack, picked up the piece of paper, put it in his pocket, and then put the thumbtack on a windowsill, always the same one. The thing absorbed his attention completely, and Rebecca realized that she could even have left and he wouldn’t have noticed. When the second bulb went out, they both turned to look at it, for a moment. It was like waiting for shooting stars on a summer night. At some point Jasper Gwyn seemed to remember something, and then he went to lower the volume on David Barber’s loop. With his hand on the control knob, he stared at the bulbs, seeking a mathematical symmetry.
That day Rebecca went home and said to the shit boyfriend could he please leave, just for a few days—she said she would like to be alone, for a while. And where should I go? asked the shit boyfriend. Anywhere, she said.
The next day she didn’t even go to work for Tom.
It had occurred to her that something was ending, and she wanted to do it well, she wanted to do only that.
Jasper Gwyn must have had a similar idea, because when she arrived at the studio the next day, she saw the remains of a dinner, in a corner, on the floor, and understood that Jasper Gwyn had not gone home at night—nor would he before it was all finished. She thought how exact that man was.
38
Every so often as she walked she passed through the patches of darkness, as if to try out disappearance. Jasper Gwyn watched her, waiting for something from the shadows. Then he returned to his thoughts. He seemed happy, tranquil, amid the remains of his dinners, his face unshaved, his hair disheveled from nights on the floor. Rebecca looked at him and thought he was irrevocably charming. Who knew if he had found what he was looking for? It wasn’t possible to read in his face any satisfaction or a hint of distress. Only the traces of a feverish but peaceful concentration. Some pieces of paper picked up from the floor—then he crumpled them up and put them in his pocket. His gaze on the light bulbs, the instant they gave up.
But at a certain point he came and sat next to her, on the bed, and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he began talking to her.
“You see, Rebecca, there’s one thing I seem to have understood.”
She waited.
“I thought that not speaking was absolutely necessary, I have a horror of chat, I certainly couldn’t think of chatting with you. And then I was afraid it would end up as something like psychoanalysis, or confession. A terrible prospect, don’t you think?”
Rebecca smiled.
“However, you see, I was wrong,” Jasper Gwyn added.
He was silent for a moment.
“The truth is that if I really want to do this job I have to agree to talk, even just once, twice at most, at the right moment, but I have to be capable of doing it.”
He looked up at Rebecca.
“Just barely talk,” he said.
She nodded yes. She was sitting completely naked next to a man in mechanic’s pants, and it seemed to her utterly natural. The only thing she wondered was how she could be useful to that man.
“For example, before it’s too late, I’d like to ask you something,” said Jasper Gwyn.
“Go on.”
Jasper Gwyn asked her. She thought about it, then answered. It was a question about crying and laughing.
They went on talking about it for a while.
Then he asked her something about children. Sons and daughters, he explained.
And something else about landscapes.
They talked in low voices, without hurrying.
Until he nodded and got up.
“Thank you,” he said.
Then he added that it hadn’t been so difficult. He appeared to say it to himself, but he also turned toward Rebecca, as if he expected some sort of response.
“No, it wasn’t difficult,” she said then. She said that nothing, there, was difficult.
Jasper Gwyn went to regulate the volume of the music, and David Barber’s loop seemed to disappear into the walls, leaving behind little more than a wake, in the fragile light of the last six light bulbs.
39
They waited for the last one in silence, on the thirty-sixth day of that strange experiment. At eight o’clock, it seemed to be taken for granted that they would wait together, because the only time that counted anymore was written into the copper filaments produced by the mad talent of the old man in Camden Town.
In the light of the last two bulbs, the studio was already a black sack, kept alive by two pupils of light. When the last remained, it was a whisper.
They looked at it from a distance, without approaching, so as not to defile it.
It was night, and it went out.
Through the darkened windows came just enough light to mark the edges of things, and not right away, but only to eyes accustomed to the darkness.
Every object appeared finished, and only the two of them still living.
Rebecca had never known such intensity. She thought that at that moment any movement would be unsuitable, but she understood that the opposite was also true, that it was impossible, at that moment, to make a wrong movement. So she imagined many things; some she had begun to imagine long before. Until she heard the voice of Jasper Gwyn.
“I think I’ll wait for the morning light in here. But you can go, of course, Rebecca.”
He said it with a kind of tenderness that might also seem to be regret, so Rebecca came over to him and when she found the right words she said that she would like to stay and wait there with him—just that.
But Jasper Gwyn said nothing and she understood.
She got dressed slowly, for the last time, and when she was at the door she stopped.
“I’m sure I should say something special, but, truthfully, nothing really occurs to me.”
Jasper Gwyn smiled in the darkness.
“Don’t worry, it’s a phenomenon I’m very well acquainted with.”
They shook hands as they said goodbye, and the gesture seemed to them both to have a memorable precision and foolishness.
40
Jasper Gwyn spent five days writing the portrait—he did it at home, on the computer, going out from time to time to walk, or eat something. As he worked he listened to Frank Sinatra records over and over.
When he thought he had finished, he copied the file onto a CD and took it to a printer. He chose square sheets of a rather heavy laid paper, and a blue ink that was almost black. He laid out the pages in such a way that they looked airy without seeming trivial. After long reflection, he chose a font that perfectly imitated the letters made by a typewriter: in the roundness of the o there was a hint of blurring in the ink. He didn’t want any binding. He had two copies made. At the end the printer was noticeably worn out.
The next day Jasper Gwyn spent hours looking for a tissue paper that seemed to him appropriate, and a folder, with a tie, that wasn’t too big, or too small, or too much folder. He found both in a stationer’s that was about to close, after eighty-six years in business, and was getting rid of its stock.
“Why are you closing?” he asked at the cash register.
“The owner is retiring,” a woman with nondescript hair answered, without emotion.
“Doesn’t he have children?” Jasper Gwyn persisted.
The woman looked up.
“I’m the child,” she said.
“I see.”
“Do you want a gift bag or is it for you?”
“It’s a gift for me.”
The woman gave a sigh that could mean many things. She took the price off the folder and put everything in an elegant envelope fastened with a thin gold string. Then she said that her grandfather had opened that shop when he returned from the First World War, investing everything he had. He had never closed it, not even during the bombing in 1940. He claimed to have invented the system of sealing envelopes by licking the edge. But probably, she added, that was nonsense.
Jasper Gwyn paid.
“You don’t find envelopes like this anymore,” he said.
“My grandfather made them with a strawberry taste,” she said.
“Seriously?”
“So he said. Lemon and strawberry, people didn’t want the lemon ones, who knows why. I remember trying them as a child. They didn’t taste like anything. They tasted like glue.”
“You’ll take the stationery store,” Jasper Gwyn said then.
“No. I want to sing.”
“Really? Opera?”
“Tangos.”
“Tangos?”
“Tangos.”
“Fantastic.”
“And what do you do?”
“Copyist.”
“Fantastic.”
41
That night Jasper Gwyn re-read the seven square pages that contained, in two columns, the text of the portrait. The idea was to then wrap the pages in the tissue paper and put them in the folder with the tie. At that point the work would be finished.
“How does it seem to you?”
“Really not bad,” answered the woman with the rain scarf.
“Be truthful.”
“I am. You wanted to make a portrait and you did. Frankly I wouldn’t have bet a cent.”
“No?”
“No. Write a portrait? What sort of idea is that? But now I’ve read your seven pages and I know it’s an idea that exists. You’ve found a way of making it into a real object. And I have to admit that you’ve found a simple and brilliant system. Well done.”
“It’s thanks to you, too.”
“What?”
“A long time ago, maybe you don’t remember, you told me that if I really had to be a copyist I should at least try to copy people, not numbers, or medical reports.”
“Of course I remember. It’s the only time in my life we met.”
“You said that it would suit me very well. Copying people, I mean. You said it with an assurance that had no nuances, as if there were no need even to discuss it.”
“So?”
“I don’t think this idea of the portraits would have occurred to me if you hadn’t said that phrase. In that way. I’m sincere: I wouldn’t be here without you.”
The woman turned to him and she had the face of an old teacher who hears the doorbell ring and it’s that coward from the second row who has come to thank her, the day he graduates. She made a gesture like a caress, looking in the other direction, however.
“You’re a good boy,” she said.
They were silent for a while. The woman with the rain scarf took out a big handkerchief and blew her nose. Then she placed a hand on Jasper Gwyn’s arm.
“There’s one thing I never told you,” she said. “Do you want to hear it?”
“Of course.”
“That day, when you brought me home… I kept thinking of how you didn’t want to write books anymore, I couldn’t get it out of my mind that it was a damn shame. I wasn’t even sure if I had asked you why, or anyway I didn’t remember if you had really explained why in the world you no longer wanted anything to do with it. In other words, I felt something was still not right, you understand?”
“Yes.”
“It lasted several days. Then one morning I go as usual to the Indian downstairs and see the cover of a magazine. There was a whole pile of that magazine, just arrived, they had put it under the cheese potato chips. In that issue they had interviewed a writer, so on the cover there was his name and a statement, his name nice and big and this statement in quotation marks. And the statement said: ‘In love we all lie.’ I swear. And, note, he wa
s a great writer, I could be wrong but I think he was even a Nobel winner. Also on the cover was an actress not quite undressed, who promised to tell the whole truth. I don’t remember about what stupid thing.”
She was silent for a while, as if she were trying to remember it. But then she said something else.
“It doesn’t mean anything, I know, but you moved your hand a few inches and you could grab the cheese potato chips.”
She hesitated a second.
“In love we all lie,” she murmured, shaking her head. Then she shouted the next sentence.
“Well done, Mr. Gwyn!”
She said she had begun to shout right there at the Indian’s, with people turning. She had repeated it three or four times.
“Well done, Mr. Gwyn!”
They had thought she was mad.
“But it’s happened to me often,” she said. “To be thought mad,” she clarified.
Then Jasper Gwyn said there was no one like her, and asked if she would like to celebrate somewhere together, that night.
“Excuse me?”
“What do you say to having dinner with me?”
“Don’t talk nonsense, I’m dead, restaurants hate me.”
“At least a glass.”
“What sort of idea is that?”
“Do it for me.”
“Now it’s really time to go.”
She said it in a gentle voice, but firm. She got up, took her purse and her umbrella, which was still wet, and went toward the door. She dragged her feet a little, in that way of hers, so that you could recognize it from a distance. When she stopped it was because she still had something to say.
“Don’t be rude, take those seven pages to Rebecca, and make her read them.”
“You think it’s necessary?”
“Of course.”
“What will she say?”
“It’s me, she’ll say.”
Jasper Gwyn wondered if he would ever see her again and decided that he would, somewhere, but not for many years, and in a different solitude.
Mr. Gwyn Page 8