No World Concerto

by A. G. Porta

  It’s an old discussion we revisit on occasion: “let’s imagine twelve-tone music had never been invented,” except now pertaining to literature. The girl’s father dismisses it as a mere catchphrase of hers and her friends, something they repeat insistently, but which has little to do with any real concerns. The girl watches him from the small dining area of the apartment while he dresses at the foot of the bed. Consider, he says, the author who writes about solitude, jealousy, and the passage of time; or the writer who revolutionized twentieth-century literature. No other writers have contributed as much as these, which is why we can’t describe any others with these same epithets. It’s not for our sakes they became great writers, nor for the sake of the market. The girl watches him with great interest as he takes the gun from the holster that’s hanging from the bedpost, clicks off the safety, and returns it to the holster again. They’re important for other reasons than just being great storytellers, he continues. Perhaps neither was the best storyteller there ever was, and perhaps neither had the greatest skill as a writer, or maybe one of them did, but the point is that’s not why we remember them, he says as he takes his jacket from the back of a chair and dons it before the mirror. He looks sideways at his daughter. Let me see if I can explain. The girl takes a seat. Their contribution was not necessarily different in degree, but rather in kind, to what had come before. And so considerable was their contribution, they couldn’t be thought of as mere exponents of some ephemeral movement, members of a literary circle preaching some common aesthetic gospel. What they did went beyond the mere quibbling flimflam of coffeehouse cabals. Their achievement was to look farther than even the political flimflam dividing nations. The girl’s father says all this standing at the door, getting ready to go. That’s why they’re the only two writers with these particular epithets. Then he excuses himself because he’s in a hurry, and the girl’s left alone with her thoughts. To write. Contribute something new. Hypnosis. She walks around the room, looks at herself in the mirror. She doesn’t smoke habitually, but she lights a cigarette and looks out the window at a nondescript landscape. She certainly prefers the view from the hotel in front of the Grand Central Station. She sits in front of the laptop and resolves to write, to conquer the paralysis she believes was visited on her by the hypnotist. She still can’t accept that a mere change of mindset is all she needs to break the spell. She dabbles without success with one of the scenes featuring the old philosophy professor. Perhaps she should write the ending first; she has a good idea how her story’s going to end. Bad idea, she says to herself. Nothing that starts badly can be expected to end well. Perhaps she should change her approach. If she could write with the same daring, the same ingenuity she displayed at the piano. . if her writing was different, in degree and kind, to use her father’s words. . perhaps that’s what’s been missing, she thinks while trying to ignore the persistent ringing of the telephone. Her mother wants to know if she’s alone. She’s always alone. Her father’s still conducting his vigils, although she doesn’t know where they are this time. Her mother wants a meeting with her old teacher. But what’s the point? the girl asks. Her mother says, although unconvincingly, that she wants to come to a financial agreement with him. The girl doesn’t think it will be necessary. The mother then insists, but the girl refuses to comply with her. There’s no point, she says. There is a point, says her mother, and I have to see him. Why do you have to see him? Because he’s murdered his wife, her mother confesses. He gave her a horrible death. How? the girl asks. He tied her to a bed and just left her there to die. The girl gives her mother the address of the hotel where she used to visit him. He checked out of there days ago, says her mother, or rather, was kicked out for starting a fracas with a neighbor. The old teacher’s been keeping a pretty big secret, perhaps it’s more than one, thinks the girl, smirking, on entering the police station with her mother. The whole world has its secrets. Some people may not even be aware of the secrets they harbor. Perhaps we’re aliens without knowing it. But then that wouldn’t be a true secret, she considers, for a secret is something we deliberately conceal from others. One of the police officers shows them photographs of the screenwriter’s wife. There’s a passport photo, but mostly shots of the crime scene. Is it possible her death was part of some game? asks the officer. As far as she knows, the game only ends once the young conductor climbs into her mother’s bed, replies the girl. Her mother slaps her, humiliated. The girl looks back to the police officer. Apparently the game has already ended, she says coldly. Her mother moves away and takes a seat behind them, the shot blurring her in the background to focus on the girl and police officer. Who found her? she asks. Her son, he says. The girl is shaking when she gets back to the apartment. Her father’s still out, and she resolves to write the scene. Hypnosis is no longer a concern. The only thing that has her in a trance is the knowledge that someone so close to her could be capable of something so cruel. The game continues. Indeed, perhaps there are only two people in the world who know this to be true, that the game still lacks an ending. The girl gets down to work, finally exorcised of her obsession with hypnosis, of her self-doubt, or whatever it was that paralyzed her before. As novels with various stories moving in parallel must bring them all to an end, so it is with the game, and very few players seem to realize the difficulty of dealing with so many interrelated stories that diverge from one another and get lost before finally discovering their own endings. She’s now writing a scene she’s been struggling with for some time: the one in which the old professor’s arguing with his wife about the anonymous letter, about his relationship with the female student, with all the mutual threats, and the screaming and shouting. She thinks about the scene, not knowing how to approach it. It’s not the right words she lacks, but a focus for the scene, a resolution, and nothing that comes to mind strikes her as very original. She does have a clear image of the old guy in her mind, though, sitting in front of the bed, drained, as if after a great ordeal, looking at his wife as she slowly regains consciousness. She moves her mouth to say something, but finds her words are muffled by a gag. The discovery brings her to like a splash of cold water, and her eyes become as expressive as they’ve ever been — darting here and there, trying to take in everything around her, to ascertain whether he’s really followed through on his threats, and on discovering he has, as if trying to escape the fleshy tether binding them to the woman’s sockets. He watches her to ensure she’s properly secured. Then, without saying a word, gets up and goes. The girl lights a cigarette and leans out the window to smoke it. She’s not looking at anything, but her mind’s eye is focused on that image of the woman lying dead in the bed, for she’s entranced by the notion that the old guy committed such a despicable crime. He probably justified it by convincing himself she was an alien. How else could he have eased his conscience, been able to live with himself? Then she wonders if, years later, in the City in Outer Space, while seated on a chair in the control room, looking through the windows at the stars, the old professor could deal with the return of those memories; if, between dreams, while stumbling through deserted streets, familiar to him because he sees them daily, because the ravages of war have endowed each with its own unique aspect, he’ll be hoping for something to happen, something he’s been waiting for years to happen, a resolution, something for which the hope becomes an end in itself to make his situation more tolerable, so he can make sense of it. The girl writes: “When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist.” This isn’t the ending, but the end’s right there. It’s always been there. Just a few more lines.

  The essence of construction, recalls the screenwriter, is for the builder to have the outcome in mind before he begins, and then to proceed upward, step by step. He feels he’s only a few steps away. He’s had more than enough time to read about it in the girl’s No World and then write it down. His only regret is that he didn’t figure it out a lot sooner. He’s come up with the endings in the same way as s
omeone who feels he’s finally understood the rules of a game, gained control of the board. He’s even read about how he’s going to die, although perhaps he’s always known how this would happen, he thinks, smiling. Still, he’s left with a bittersweet feeling inside. A bittersweet work: that’s what she’s written: a mixture of flavors, though nothing to do with dodecaphony. He’s not sure if her work is good or bad, for he’s lost the aesthetic distance he needs to make this judgment. Neither good nor bad, just a reality that repeats itself, he says, before proceeding with his bittersweet result, a result that may not be expressible in such language, that may have nothing to do with his own language, that sounds strange, foreign, that may be better expressed in another language, the language in which masterpieces are most often written. Who better than the author of jealousy and lost time to announce at the end of a novel to those who deemed him an invalid, incapable of completing a monumental work, that the story has come full circle, closing in on itself, that the work is the place where criticism begins and ends, that the reader has assisted him, step by step, in its construction? Well, this is an idea he’s stolen from the girl’s father. The screenwriter needs to think of something more humble. The recovery of lost time, which is the primary goal, wouldn’t be too harrowing if, in the process of writing, he also manages to recover himself — a bonus, as it were. He can’t decide if either recovery is even all that important — or perhaps they’re only important to him. No one else would care, and they might even prefer a different outcome altogether. Some of his colleagues in the movie business think getting to the end should take precedence over every other concern the writer might have during the writing of his story. The screenwriter takes a seat at his usual post in the back of the café and asks the waitress for his usual coffee. In front of him, a mountain of pages is begging to take its leave, his screenplay imploring to be completed and sent away — from him, from this world. Before entering the work, perhaps he needs a moment of repose to get the right perspective, the right aesthetic distance — the very things he’s never bothered about, which he never thought mattered. At the end of the day, all that matters is to be in the moment. After making a last call from the café telephone, he returns to his table and lights a cigarette. “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills,” he whispers to himself. The beginning of a novel the girl’s father would surely recognize. The screenwriter doesn’t know why, but the words are reassuring. “I had a farm. .” he repeats, imagining the girl’s father speaking them, taking another look outside the café: at the plaza and the fountain, at the people walking back and forth, at the tables and chairs on the terrace withstanding the passage of hours and days, and he takes his first drag, long and deep, and waits a few moments before exhaling a dense lungful at the ceiling with a sigh, as though satisfying a multitude of cravings at once.

  The girl hasn’t written in a while. She doesn’t smoke habitually, but she lights a cigarette and looks out the window at the nondescript landscape. She still prefers the view from the hotel in front of the Grand Central Station. Her father is reading, surrounded by a number of cell phones. Some things haven’t changed in their environment — the phones, the fax machine, and the interminable waiting to which both of them have become inured. The girl’s managed to write a few lines, but she’s still not happy with them. They’re about the discovery of the woman’s body by her son, and the subsequent police investigation of the female student’s role in the crime, or perhaps even to the philosophy professor’s flight to the City in Outer Space, a city once ravaged by war, far removed from human contact, and certainly inaccessible to those pursuing him, but at the same time a prison to which he’ll have condemned himself forever. But the girl finally decides most of the details are irrelevant and scraps them. Sometimes it’s best to omit certain scenes, not to over-explain, let the reader connect the dots. Isn’t that the way things happen in real life? Isn’t it true that some things only occur in the mind and can’t be shown on the page? She smokes her cigarette, observing a landscape that can only be described as very different from the view from the hotel in front of the Grand Central Station. Now and again, her father receives a call on one of his phones that he answers in a low register. The girl also receives a call she’s been expecting, answers it in a low register both to imitate and mock her father, before grabbing her jacket and satchel and fixing herself up in the bathroom mirror. I’ll be right back, she says. Her father lifts his eyes from his newspaper, which he rests on his knees. His face is expressionless, or perhaps it’s a routine expression that could be interpreted to mean anything. Won’t you be warm dressed like that? he asks. Once on the stairway, the girl hides the gun in the small of her back, behind her jeans. Then she goes outside, looks left and right to check that nobody’s following her — not that anyone could possibly recognize her through her disguise — before hailing the first cab she sees, from which she alights at the corner of the boulevards. She’d prefer to walk the remaining distance, as if this was a long established ritual, to have a few more minutes to herself before confronting her destiny. While climbing the hill close to the place where the famous writer once lived, the one whose name everyone knows, even the people who no longer read his books, the girl once again gets the same feeling she’s had since arriving in the neighboring country’s capital, the feeling that she’s being followed. She stops in front of a window and sees Cousin McGregor approaching from some meters away, barely concealing his presence. The girl decides to ignore him, and continues on her way. Perhaps he’s the one who’s been following her the whole time, she snickers. Perhaps he’s one of those alien hunters who don’t know they’re aliens. When she reaches the café, she stops at the door to look for the screenwriter, who she finds sitting in the same place he’s been writing, smoking, and drinking coffee the past few days. The typewriter, shifted to his left toward the edge of the table, leaves just enough space for the screenplay that rests beside it. For once, he isn’t typing, and there’s no paper in the carriage. The frenetic activity she saw him exhibit the last time has vanished, the determined glower has contorted into a look of serenity. He’s looking through the window at the waitress moving between the tables and chairs on the terrace outside. It’s only now he really feels the loss of opportunity as he sees her smiling. He thinks he could’ve made her happy. He lowers his eyes to count out some change on the table. He feels like calling his wife. Although he realizes it’s pointless, he still likes to experience the satisfaction of vengeance. He no longer hates her, no longer resents her in any way, but he calls her out of habit, and because the feeling of revenge has to be fed. By contrast, when he thinks about the girl, he remembers only lost opportunities. The vague hope to one day run away with her, to travel the world next to that young body that so willingly surrendered to him, next to that soft, perfectly tanned skin, covered in delicate down, which he’d so like to photograph again. But he knows none of it will ever happen. The screenwriter reckons his life is coming to a sardonic sort of end, and he doesn’t even know if it was worth living. Perhaps the writing made it worthwhile, because he seems to believe writing and living are equally important. He knows now that he’ll never be going anywhere with the girl, that there’ll be no voluntary exile, so he’s learning to live his life one day at a time, something they don’t teach in any school, something that isn’t learned in any one place, but everywhere at once. Some people don’t have enough time for it to be otherwise, he thinks. Perhaps it’s just a question of focus. He’d like to know what he meant to the girl, what she was feeling when they made love, when his fingers sought relief in the touch of her skin, and every time he removed her clothes and photographed her. To know, the screenwriter murmurs, crushing his cigarette in the ashtray and raising his eyes, seeing her image appearing and moving toward him, stopping as he repeats the words, to know, as something is repeated because it’s unreachable, because it’s hopeless, to mark with the tip of his tongue the impossible skin of an impossible image, because his fingers cannot rea
ch it, to know. . three ellipsis points taking leave of his mouth at the moment she starts firing one, two, three bullets into his chest. Sometimes, time seems to stand still, he thinks. It’s an absurdity, a false perception, something that cannot really be, like all those things that don’t exist outside the mind, but while experiencing that false and absurd sensation of stillness, the image of the girl remains, her arms hanging loosely at her sides, the gun held weakly in one of her hands, looking at, although perhaps not seeing, the screenwriter slumped on the floor next to the table. There’s a profound silence, no one in the café even budges, although some people in the plaza have heard the sound of gunfire. The waitress slowly places her tray on a table and sits down, covering her mouth with one hand, not believing what’s just transpired, watching the thick dark shadow under the screenwriter’s body spreading like oil spilled on the floor. Cousin McGregor then appears, as if out of nowhere, as if he were an angel from heaven, or the one in the movie the screenwriter liked to remember when he was still alive, the one who heard other people’s voices, their thoughts as well, perhaps those of everyone on Earth, an angel who used to go by the name of Cousin Dedalus. He approaches in an unhurried manner, calmly, with the seamless air of a professional who’s accustomed to scenes like this. Anyone would say he’d always been there, just waiting for the right opportunity. He disarms the girl and checks the screenwriter’s vitals, or lack thereof. Then he stands and flashes his wallet, announcing loud and clear the word police, before taking the screenplay from the table and grabbing the girl and half-dragging her away from the scene of the crime.