Mr. Gwyn

by Alessandro Baricco

  When Robert came home, passably drunk, she was still awake, but sitting on the sofa. Scattered on the table were all those folders.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  66

  Then she could have done many things, and one certainly: discover where Jasper Gwyn was hiding. It wouldn’t be difficult to track him down, by going to Rode’s publisher or the publisher of Three Times at Dawn. Surely in exchange for silence they would give her an address, or something.

  Yet for several days she lived her normal life, only allowing herself from time to time some secret thoughts. Every so often she lost herself in imagining a scene of arriving in some ridiculous place, and sitting in front of a house, to wait. She imagined never returning. Many times she wrote and rewrote in her mind a short letter, handwritten, in an elegant script. She would like him to know that she knew, nothing more. And that she was delighted by it. Every so often she thought of Doc, and how wonderful it would be to tell him about it. Or how wonderful it would be to tell everything to anyone, over and over again.

  While in the meantime she lived her everyday life.

  When she felt that it was the moment, among all the things that she could have done she chose one, the smallest—the last.

  67

  She arrived in Camden Town, and had to ask quite a few people before she found the shop of the old man with the light bulbs. She found him sitting in a corner, his hands still. Things must not be going too well.

  “May I?” she asked, entering.

  The old man made one of his gestures.

  “My name is Rebecca. Years ago I worked with Jasper Gwyn, do you remember?”

  The old man pressed a button and the shop was lighted by a soft, weary light.

  “Gwyn?”

  “Yes. He came here for light bulbs for his studio. He got eighteen every time, always the same ones.”

  “Of course I remember, I’m old, I’m not an idiot.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  The old man got up and approached the counter.

  “He doesn’t come anymore,” he said.

  “No. He doesn’t work in the city. He closed the studio. He went away.”

  “Where?”

  Rebecca hesitated a moment.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” she said.

  The old man gave a hearty laugh, less old than he was. He seemed happy that Jasper Gwyn had managed to disappear without a trace.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “I have a weakness for people who disappear.”

  “Don’t worry, so do I,” said Rebecca.

  Then she pulled a book out of her purse.

  “I brought you something. I thought it would please you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  She placed Three Times at Dawn on the counter. It was the copy she had read, she hadn’t been able to find another one.

  “What is it?” the old man asked.

  “A book.”

  “I see. But what is it?”

  “A book that Jasper Gwyn wrote.”

  The old man didn’t even touch it.

  “I stopped reading six years ago.”

  “Really?”

  “Too many light bulbs. My vision is ruined. I prefer to save it for work.”

  “I’m sorry. In any case, you don’t really have to read the book, you just have to read one line.”

  “What is it, a game?” the old man asked, now a little angry.

  “No, no, nothing of the sort,” said Rebecca.

  She opened the book to the first page and moved it toward the old man.

  The old man didn’t touch it. He gave Rebecca a suspicious glance, then bent over the book. He had to get really close, with his nose almost touching the paper.

  There was just the title and the dedication to read. It took a while. Then he raised his head.

  “What does it mean?” he asked.

  “Nothing. It’s a dedication. Jasper Gwyn dedicated the book to you, that’s all. To you and those bulbs, it seems to me.”

  The old man lowered his head again in that extreme way and read it all again. He wanted to check carefully.

  He got up again and took the book out of Rebecca’s hands, with a care that he usually reserved for the light bulbs.

  “Does it talk about me?” he asked.

  “No, I really don’t think so. He dedicated it to you because he admired you. I’m sure of that. He had a great respect for you.”

  The old man swallowed. He turned the book over in his hands for a while.

  “Keep it,” Rebecca said. “It’s yours.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Of course.”

  Smiling, the old man lowered his gaze to the book and stared at the cover.

  “The name of Mr. Gwyn isn’t there,” he pointed out.

  “Every so often Jasper Gwyn likes to write books under a pseudonym.”

  “Why?”

  Rebecca shrugged her shoulders.

  “It’s a long story. Let’s say he likes to make himself untraceable.”

  “Disappear.”

  “Yes, disappear.”

  The old man nodded, as if he were perfectly able to understand.

  “He told me he was a copyist,” he said.

  “It wasn’t completely false.”

  “Meaning?”

  “When you knew him he was copying people. He made portraits.”

  “Paintings?”

  “No. He wrote portraits.”

  “Is that something that exists?”

  “No. That is, it began to exist when he began to do it.”

  The old man thought about it. Then he said that light bulbs made by hand also didn’t exist before he began to make them.

  “At first they all thought I was crazy,” he added.

  Then he said that the first person to believe in him was a countess who wanted in her living room a light exactly like the light of dawn.

  “It wasn’t at all easy,” he recalled.

  They were silent for a while, then Rebecca said that she really had to go.

  “Yes, of course,” said the old man. “You were too kind to come here.”

  “I did it happily, I was there in the light of your light bulbs. It’s a light that is very difficult to forget.”

  There might have been tears in the old man’s eyes, but it was impossible to say, because the eyes of the old are always a little weepy.

  “You would honor me if you would accept a small gift,” he said.

  He went to a shelf, took a light bulb, wrapped it in tissue paper, and gave it to Rebecca.

  “It’s a Catherine de Médicis,” he explained. “Treat it with care.”

  Rebecca took it with great attention and put it in her purse. It was as if he had given her a small animal. Alive.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It’s a beautiful gift.”

  She went toward the door and just before opening it she heard the old man’s voice pronouncing a question.

  “How did he do it?”

  She turned.

  “Excuse me?”

  “How did Mr. Gwyn write portraits?”

  Rebecca had heard that question dozens of times. She began to laugh. But the old man remained serious.

  “I mean, what the devil did he write in those portraits?”

  Rebecca had an answer that she had practiced using for years, every time someone asked her that question, to cut it off. She was about to utter it when she felt that soft, weary light around her. So she said something else.

  “He wrote stories,” she said.

  “Stories?”

  “Yes. He wrote a piece of a story, a scene, as if it were a fragment of a book.”

  The old man shook his head.

  “Stories aren’t portraits.”

  “Jasper Gwyn thought so. One day, w
hen we were sitting in a park, he explained to me that we all have a certain idea of ourselves, maybe crude, confused, but in the end we are pushed to have a certain idea of ourselves, and the truth is that often we make that idea coincide with some imaginary character in whom we recognize ourselves.”

  “Like?”

  Rebecca thought for a moment.

  “Like someone who wants to go home but can’t find the way. Or someone who always sees things a moment before others do. Things like that. It’s what we are able to intuit about ourselves.”

  “But it’s idiotic.”

  “No. It’s imprecise.”

  The old man stared at her. It was clear that he wanted to understand.

  “Jasper Gwyn taught me that we aren’t characters, we’re stories,” said Rebecca. “We stop at the idea of being a character engaged in who knows what adventure, even a very simple one, but what we have to understand is that we are the whole story, not just that character. We are the wood where he walks, the bad guy who cheats him, the mess around him, all the people who pass, the color of things, the sounds. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “You make light bulbs, has it ever happened that you saw a light in which you recognized yourself? That was really you?”

  The old man recalled a Chinese lantern above the door of a cottage, years before.

  “Once,” he said.

  “Then you can understand. A light is just a segment of a story. If there is a light that is like you, there will also be a sound, a street corner, a man who walks, many men, or a single woman, things like that. Don’t stop at the light, think of all the rest, think of a story. Can you understand that it exists, somewhere, and if you find it, that would be your portrait?”

  The old man made one of his gestures. It resembled a vague yes. Rebecca smiled.

  “Jasper Gwyn said that we are all a few pages of a book, but of a book that no one has ever written and that we search for in vain in the bookshelves of our mind. He told me that what he tried to do was write that book for the people who came to him. The right pages. He was sure he could do it.”

  The eyes of the old man smiled.

  “And did he?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did he do it?”

  “He looked at them. For a long time. Until he saw in them the story they were.”

  “He looked at them and that’s all.”

  “Yes. He talked a little, but not much, and only once. More than anything he let time pass over them, carrying off a lot of things, then he found the story.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “There was everything. A woman who tries to save her son from a death sentence. Five astronomers who live only at night. Things like that. But just a fragment, a scene. It was enough.”

  “And the people in the end recognized themselves.”

  “They recognized themselves in the things that happened, in the objects, the colors, the tone, in a certain slowness, in the light, and also in the characters, of course, but in all of them, not one, all of them, simultaneously—you know, we are a lot of things, and all at the same time.”

  The old man sniggered, but in a nice way, politely.

  “It’s hard to believe you,” he said.

  “I know. But I assure you it’s so.”

  She hesitated a moment. Then she added something that she seemed to understand just at that moment.

  “When he did my portrait, I read it, at the end, and there was a landscape, at one point, four lines of a landscape, and I am that landscape, believe me, I am that whole story, I am the sound of that story, the pace and atmosphere, and every character of that story, but with a disconcerting precision I am even that landscape, I have always been, and will be forever.”

  The old man smiled at her.

  “I’m sure it was a very beautiful landscape.”

  “It was,” said Rebecca.

  The old man, finally, moved toward her, to say goodbye. Rebecca shook his hand and realized she was doing it cautiously, as years before she had been accustomed to do with Jasper Gwyn.

  68

  Recently another book by Klarisa Rode has come out, which is unfinished. It appears that death surprised her when, according to the plans contained in her notes, she still had at least half left to write. It’s a curious text because, against all logic, the missing part is the beginning. There are two chapters out of four, but they’re the final ones. So for the reader it’s an experience that could justly be called unusual, and yet it would be incorrect to judge it ridiculous. Not otherwise do we know our own parents, in fact, and sometimes even ourselves.

  The protagonist of the book is an amateur meteorologist convinced that he can predict the weather on the basis of a statistical method all his own. We can imagine that the first part of the book, the nonexistent part, would consist of an account of the origins of this obsession, but it doesn’t seem so important, after all, when you begin the part that Rode in fact wrote, where she reconstructs the years of research carried out by the protagonist: the goal he had set for himself was to determine the weather every day, in Denmark, for the past sixty-four years. To reach it he had had to put together a staggering mass of facts. Nonetheless, with persistence and patience, he had worked it out. The last part of the book reports that, on the basis of the statistics he collected, the amateur meteorologist was able to establish, for example, that on March 3 in Denmark the probability of sun was 6 percent. That of rain on July 26 was practically none.

  To collect the data he needed, the amateur meteorologist used a method that is in fact one of the reasons for the book’s fascination: he asked people. He had come to the conclusion that on average every human being distinctly recalls the weather on at least eight days of his life. He went around asking. Since each person connects the memory of the atmospheric weather to a particular moment of his life (his marriage, the death of his father, the first day of war), Klarisa Rode ended up constructing a striking gallery of characters, drawn with masterly skill in a few bold strokes. “A fascinating mosaic of real and vanished life,” as an authoritative American critic put it.

  The book ends in a remote village, where the amateur meteorologist has retreated, satisfied with the results he has obtained and only partly disappointed by the faint echo that their publication caused in the scientific community. A few pages from the end he dies, on a day of cold wind, after a starry night.

  For Catherine de Médicis and the master of Camden Town

  1

  There was the hotel, with its slightly faded elegance. Probably in the past it had been able to keep certain promises of luxury and civility. It had, for example, a fine revolving door of wood, the sort of detail that always inspires reveries.

  Through it a woman entered, at that odd hour of the night, apparently thinking of other things, having just gotten out of a taxi. She was wearing only a low-cut yellow evening dress, with not even a light scarf over her shoulders: this gave her the intriguing air of one to whom something has happened. There was an elegance in her movements, but she also seemed like an actress who has just left the stage, relieved of the obligation to play her part, and reverting to some more sincere version of herself. Thus she had a way of stepping, wearily, and of holding her tiny purse, as if letting go of it. She was no longer very young, but this suited her, as happens sometimes to women who have never had doubts about their own beauty.

  Outside was the darkness before dawn, neither night nor morning. The lobby of the hotel was still: clean, soft, its features refined, its colors warm; silent, the space carefully arranged, the lighting indirect, the walls high, the ceiling pale, books on the tables, puffy cushions on the sofas, paintings thoughtfully framed, a piano in the corner, a few necessary signs in a deliberately chosen typeface, a grandfather clock, a barometer, a marble bust, curtains at the windows, carpets on the floor—a hint of perfume.

  Since the night clerk, having placed his jacket over the back of a plain chair, was, in a small nearby room, s
leeping the light sleep that he was a master of, there would have been no one to see the woman who entered the hotel if it weren’t for a man sitting in an armchair in a corner of the lobby—irrational, at that time of night—who saw her, and then crossed his left leg over the right, when before it had been the right that rested on the left, for no reason. They saw each other.

  It felt like rain, but then it didn’t, said the woman.

  Yes, it can’t seem to make up its mind, said the man.

  Are you waiting for someone?

  I? No.

  I’m so tired. Would you mind if I sit down for a moment?

  Please.

  Nothing to drink, I see.

  I don’t think they serve breakfast before seven.

  Alcohol, I meant.

  Ah, that. I don’t know. I don’t think so, at this hour.

  What time is it?

  Four twelve.

  Seriously?

  Yes.

  This night is never going to end. It seems to me it began three years ago. What are you doing here?

  I was about to leave. I have to go to work.

  At this hour?

  Yes.

  How do you do it?

  It’s nothing, I like it.

  You like it.

  Yes.

  Incredible.

  You think so?

  You seem like the first interesting person I’ve met this evening. Tonight. In short, that’s what you are.

  I don’t dare think about the others.

  Frightful.

  Were you at a party?

  I’m not sure I feel very well.

  I’ll call the night clerk.

  No, for goodness’ sake.

  Maybe it would be better to lie down.

  I’ll take off my shoes, do you mind?

  Of course not…

  Tell me something, anything. If I’m distracted it will pass.