Twist

by Harkaitz Cano

  “At least they‘ll increase your wages.”

  “A symbolic increase.”

  “How much?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “And you didn’t ask?”

  “No…”

  “Why not? Are you nuts?”

  Roger moves his hands wildly, expressing his despair at his friend’s hopelessness. For an American, it’s impossible to envision not speaking frankly about financial terms; Idoia’s inability to freely speak about money seems incomprehensible to him, an attitude that, he’s noticed in these past few years, abounds among Basques, so much so he believes the tendency could be subject to a complete Freudian treatise: Be generous and don’t worry about money, it’s in bad taste. “From now on you’ll have to become complete journalists,” Roger mumbles, imitating Virado’s voice. He manages to get a smile out of Idoia.

  “I have a New York Times journalist at home, would you like me to introduce you? He might offer you a job, who knows…He’s writing an article about the Basque Country. We could eat a burger together…”

  “I’m sorry but Diego is waiting for me. I have to catch the bus.”

  “Your relationship with that guy is too absorbing, you know?”

  Idoia has just left her husband, after many years together, to go and live with an ex from her youth. A writer. He knew that she’d had a really bad time while they were separating, but Roger estimated that the period of quarantine during which it was better not to joke about the subject was now over.

  “Don’t start, Roger. We live together.”

  “As I said, too absorbing.”

  Fede woke up at six o’clock in the morning every day. He always had breakfast in a café, the only place open at six thirty a.m. in the neighborhood: he liked to accompany the small Swiss roll with a black coffee, no sugar, and on the days when they didn’t serve his coffee in a glass, he felt something bad would happen. By eight fifteen a.m., and after a half-hour swim in the swimming pool, he was sitting at his table at the publishing house.

  That day, fortunately, no authors were due to visit. A quiet morning, for a change. Instead of that, he had an appointment with Lucio, the typesetter. For a while, he had been trying to persuade him to buy the new version of the Garamond font, he was going to show him the possibilities the typography had to offer, the different new options available for the typesetting of their collections: his hope was to narrow the box and slightly increase the space between lines and between letters. People in their sector spoke a lot about different typographies, but in the end they all used the same: the damn, overused Times Roman, or, at most, Garamond, illegally downloaded to make matters worse, they never paid for that license; those very same editors that complained about terrible financial losses and fervently defended copyright laws for writers were the first not to respect typographers’ rights. What was to be expected from such a gang of daylight robbers? Lucinda, Bembo…Fede always felt stimulated by all those fonts with women’s names. He’d go through the pages of volumes bought in France or Italy with jealousy; they were much better bound and typeset, they breathed the air of a better tradition and oozed a special kind of grace. Each country – each language – had its own characteristics and tastes when it came to font types and sizes, even when it came to the white spaces that should be left between them. Some liked the spaces between words to be more evident, and to narrow the distance between the letters that made up the words and keeping those tighter, to clearly delineate – too clearly, according to Fede – where each one of them started and finished. Such a disposition of the words and letters seemed to Fede to amount to an insult to the reader’s intelligence; he much preferred the tendency that leaned toward keeping the white space between words without piling up the letters on top of one another, to afford them certain levity and harmony.

  “The difference is almost imperceptible, but when lower case f and l follow one another there is more white space, a small void between the two letters. See? They make a beautiful shape: that curve at the top of the f stretches out and touches the tip of the l, but still leaves a lot of white space in between. Unaccustomed readers might feel there is a typo and the space is too wide. What do you think?”

  Lucio observed the pages and the aforementioned spaces with true devotion, as if he were admiring a sculpture. For Fede, to receive his visit was like having a piano tuner at home. Someone who belonged to an old, charming profession that was at dire risk of extinction.

  The lower case l and the capital I will be distinguishable at last, right?”

  “This time there are no problems with that.”

  The common mortal wasn’t aware of the vital importance of separating letters and words with the right amount of space. Added to that were the typographical battles, each font with its baggage, long history, and development: there was always an artisan behind it, whether it was Claude Garamond or Sir Aldus Manutius, guardians of good taste. The main battle was always about the roundness of the letters: on the one hand were the sans serif fonts, which tended to be more sticklike and rigid, and on the other, the ones that tended toward a curvier, more rounded style. In between both tendencies, infinite possibilities. There were even those who detected a battle of the sexes between those two groups. Both Fede and Lucio were firm supporters of the Bembo family of fonts, but they never dared use it in the books they published, fearing that stepping too far away from predominant currents could disconcert readers. Yes, even in that sense they were dependent on the mainstream.

  With the same passion with which others argued about motorbikes’ cylinder volume or car models, they spoke about font types and small typographic variants that were imperceptible to the untrained eye. Lucio thought it was strange that Fede had agreed with him on everything without hardly questioning him.

  “Is everything all right, Fede?”

  Fede nodded, although as soon as he did so he realized that Lucio had doubled up, that he had two Lucios in front of his eyes, and two doors, two telephones, and two right hands and two left ones. He was seeing everything in duplicate.

  He realized that morning that something was wrong with his eyes, as he as usual fixed his eyes on the dark blue line at the bottom of the swimming pool to avoid slipping out of his lane: he had a sense that the glassy blue line was moving slightly and, while it took on the color of alabaster, just like it was happening now, it had doubled up in a curious aquiferous split that he hadn’t paid special attention to and had even found slightly funny.

  Lucio noticed that the secretary’s table was empty.

  “You lost your assistant again?”

  “They say it’s difficult to work with me. Can you believe it, Lucio? Difficult, me? What’s hard is to fulfill people’s work expectations: they want to fill up their pockets without breaking a sweat, that’s what they all want. They don’t understand that this is a cultural enterprise. That, usually, we lose money. That it’s a miracle to survive.

  “You should reconsider the option of digital publishing.”

  “No way. That’s out of the question.”

  “It’s getting more and more difficult to distinguish between offset and digital, Fede.”

  “The day they manage to make them indistinguishable, I might change my mind. Meanwhile…”

  “I mentioned it because of the cost, it’s quite a bit cheaper…Many publishing houses have switched already, and the readers haven’t realized.”

  “They can go fuck themselves. I’m not in this business for the readers.”

  The first job she had to do on the radio was to read the submission guidelines for a competition the Spanish army organized on International Armed Forces Day. The Spanish army organized artistic competitions? Disconcerting, but true; and, of course, the subject wasn’t completely free: “Particular value will be placed on pieces that highlight the values of the army.” Idoia never identified herself in those chronicles, but the mere thought that one of her old colleagues from Egin might hear and recognize her voice gave her goose bum
ps. This is worse than working on Radio Maria, she’d tell herself.

  That was only the beginning. She still hadn’t had to confront the inexcusable coverage of the pro-virginity movement in the United States and the chronicle they asked her to prepare about the influence such a trend could hypothetically have in Spain.

  Because of her sense of professional responsibility and, why not deny it, a certain degree of masochism, she began to develop an interest in the radio she worked in, something she’d never done before. She listened to it all the time. The degree of manipulation was so obvious and unsophisticated that she almost popped a vein every time there was a news bulletin. Soon she realized that given the state of the citizens’ purses, the in-house editorial line of defense was focused on associating financial fraud with everything the shareholders ideologically disagreed with. They had thought of every last detail, nothing was left to fate: they were against abortion, and the first item of news they highlighted was the apparent multimillion swindle carried out by abortion clinics on the public purse. As if that weren’t enough, it turned out not to be true that her segments could be carried out from the newspaper offices; the radio was on the outskirts of the city and she spent half her days traveling between the newspaper and the radio offices.

  The day she reached rock bottom, however, arrived when they forced her to record commercials: one in praise of the Pope’s visit, a short advertising break about the importance of ticking that box on the tax form that signals you agree to allocate a percentage of your taxes to the Catholic Church…After complaining that those sorts of jobs went beyond the scope of her job description, they accepted her request to assign the recordings to professional voice actors. It was Diego who reminded her of La Bella Ines, “she works in a tollbooth in Biriatou.” When she called her, a man let her know that she was not at home. Finally, La Bella Ines agreed to record a commercial for a telephone company. After the recording session, they had a few beers and mentioned how things had changed since the days when they used to throw Molotov cocktails at the Telefónica headquarters. It’s just the way of the world, they told each other to finish the conversation. It had rained a lot since then.

  Idoia leaves the radio and returns to the newsroom without any break in continuity, from and to, through and for work and without the possibility that the dark rings under her eyes might lessen. She leaves her skin. She draws up a list of possible PSOE candidates for the general elections: in truth they’ve asked her for the profile of a single candidate, the Basque candidate, Fontecha, although she is certain that he doesn’t stand the slightest chance. A Basque in the Moncloa presidential palace? The thought of it makes her laugh. Tanned and with thick hair, with a neat side parting, charisma and a poker face, Fontecha was photogenic in the eighties; he had the talent to avoid the anger and sudden irascibility that had proven to be the downfall of so many politicians, he had of the gift of gab, of a flexible waist and the sort of thick skin that allowed him to draw up gentlemen’s pacts with his political adversaries that he had no intention of fulfilling. And no less important: he had an admirable ability to control his facial muscles. But, after a long banishment in the European Parliament, he had lost his ability to swim against the currents and surmount the pull of the eddy, qualities that were so prominent in him during the stormy days of the Ajuria Enea Pact. Fontecha, the candidate? Hard to believe. Even putting aside his often mentioned but never sufficiently proven association with the dirty war, Idoia sees weak spots in him.

  Javier Fontecha Alberdi, born in Bilbao, divorced and remarried to a cardiologist from Getxo, fifty-eight years old, father to three children, all three from his first wife, born before he was thirty (What wouldn’t I give to interview his ex). A law graduate. He worked at Fontecha and Company, his father’s offices, for two years, before he was voted to Bilbao’s municipal council. Later on he cut his teeth in Biscay’s Provincial Council, and after that he was named delegate of the Spanish government in the convulsed eighties. Having fulfilled his years in exile, he took the mandatory rest, spa, and hydro-massage break in Strasbourg, and returned to the parliament of the Autonomous Community.

  She’s asked Pilar, the new intern, to look for a photograph: the most recent ones she finds archived are two weeks old, but not one of them is a close-up. The intern has to trawl through six months of news to hit on a portrait that doesn’t lose much quality when magnified. Cut the head, copy the head. The photograph was taken during a press conference for the Human Rights Tribunal. Even though he still parts it the same way, his hair has turned almost completely white. Add to that a swollen countenance and the look of someone who’s abused some legal or illegal substance – cortisone? Cocaine? Both? “That’s not the face of a candidate, not by a stretch,” agrees her intern.

  Apparently it was going to be a matter of time. A sort of variant of retinitis pigmentosa. The sickness was related to pigments and the neuronal interpretation of images, reception problems, transmission, decoding, and who knows what else. He didn’t pay as much attention to the details in the beginning as he did to those three adjectives: chronic, progressive, irreversible. Having heard those words, the rest was unnecessary for Fede. How quickly would he start to lose vision? They couldn’t be specific. “Everyone is different.” There was no cure or possible treatment, that much they said pretty clearly. Likewise with the bitter ending: almost complete blindness, able to perceive at most some isolated shadows here and there. But science keeps moving forward and someday there would be a way of stopping the progression of the illness, “look at what happened with AIDS,” but for the moment all that they had to offer was some general advice regarding the health of his eye: plenty of vitamins, better to give up alcohol completely, a monthly checkup to control the illness’s advance.

  “What do you do for a living, Mr. Epelde?”

  Fede remembered the years when he worked in that big publishing house: how energetically he opposed the launch of a collection of audiobooks. His reasoning: that they would end up becoming an unnecessary luxury for the blind, a whimsical purchase for the blind and the lazy that would never pay off; his opinion was that such inventions only worked in the United States because people often undertook long car or bus journeys. They didn’t follow his advice, but time showed that he was right: the project failed and the collection was abruptly interrupted when the bosses decided that they’d wasted enough money on it. But it’d been a long time since he’d been under the umbrella of that big publishing house, and, what was worse, under their insurance coverage.

  He took a slow, deliberate glance around the massive amounts of books piled up on the shelves over the decades. New, old, deteriorating. Inch by inch, those books revealed the true progression of his moods, the wide spectrum of his anxieties, year after year. It was the catalog of his worries and tendencies, the reason and the cure for his sleeplessness, his alibi for going out so little, the unrepentant reverse of his nonexistent social life, the symbol of his squandering, his deadly financial investment.

  A whole life in books. So much deadweight moved from place to place to place, so many assaults on his wallet. So many missed meals he’d renounced when he was young and poor, back in the day when, forced to choose between a book or a meal, he chose the former. His soul cracked when he thought that soon that entire library would be absolutely no use to him. He switched the light off and put a Puccini opera on the record player. Would he manage to find a reason to go on living? Would he be able to renounce to his lifelong passion to become, for example, an expert in opera, which he always liked but never approached as anything other than a run-of-the-mill aficionado?

  The ophthalmologist mentioned a word he didn’t want to hear under any circumstances much sooner than he’d hoped: Braille. Of course he could learn that new language and keep reading and rereading multitudes of examples of universal literature with the tips of his fingers…but, what about the originals? Writers never sent manuscripts written in Braille to publishing houses! He would have to close down the publis
hing house. Or, alternatively, be victorious in the area where he’d been an abject failure so far: he would need to hire the best assistant ever, someone outstanding, whose virtues now would need to include the ability to read out loud every manuscript he ever received.

  Idoia fought with Roger over the computer graphics. After a heated exchange, and just when they’ve come to an agreement at last – “not so colorful, it’s easier to understand if it’s more muted” – Victor arrives, the sports editor: he demands an additional page because a Basque cyclist has had a positive drug test during Le Tour. It’s not like he’s asking for an additional page, he’s insisting on it. Apparently he’s got priority. Idoia and Roger are dumbstruck, stumped for words in the face of the miraculous appearance of this superior dictator, someone capable of crushing the layout designer’s small dictatorship: with or without the graphics, there is no room for Idoia’s article.

  So Victor stays behind, with the phone stuck to his ear; for once, he’s going to close the newsroom. He seems to be enjoying it, however. The reason? They found a dose of Celesemine in the urine of a cyclist. We are all slaves to our emotions.

  “C’mon, I’ll buy you a beer.” Roger’s tone is conciliatory.

  “Oh, now you want us to be friends? No, thanks.”

  “Fuck, please, I just want to bitch about Victor.”

  Idoia sighs: all right, she needs that too.

  Roger is an American, that’s why he can drink flavorless Budweiser beer, but he’s been living in Bilbao for years. He came like many others, during the Sanfermines, met a girl in Pamplona and ended up living with her in Arrotxape. When Arrotxape and the Basque girl disappeared from his life, he found a job in Bilbao. He belonged to the first batch: he joined the newsroom at the same time as Idoia, when the newspaper pushed a more open and combative editorial line and the newsroom was still worthy of that name, but things had declined quite irritatingly. Image had gained importance in the past few years, while the written word had gradually lost it. Whether we like it or not, that’s they way of the world now.