“Fucking sports.”
“You only say that because we don’t have baseball here.”
“I hate baseball! My father was obsessed. I was a good hitter, I just didn’t like running.”
“You were a sedentary child? You don’t say….”
He must weigh around one hundred kilos, it’s easy to imagine Roger as a child of a similar build. He still has a childish look about him, with his rounded face, his blue eyes that easily get red when he drinks too much Budweiser. Sandy hair from Wisconsin.
“Have you written the interview with the fat cat?”
“I’ll finish tonight, at home. I want to read some articles first. I don’t know how to approach it yet.”
“You shouldn’t take work home. It’s a bad habit to keep working on the bus…You should learn to separate your life from your work. Another round? A Budweiser and a Voll-Damm, please.”
“I don’t know how you can drink that beer.”
“A habit from my youth; it reawakens the memories of the States that are stuck to my palate, bad habits die hard…What was that thing…about that bird?”
“Orhiko txoriak Orhira nahi.”
“That’s it. The Orhi bird wants to return to Orhi.”
“In any case, I don’t know if you’re right: we’ve always been a country of immigrants.”
“Yeah, immigrants like the Chinese: thank God you’re not a thousand million people…You build your own Basquetown, wherever you go…the txistu goes with you.”
“Not necessarily. We’d have to check who, where, and when.”
“You say that because you’re a Basque separatist…”
“And proud of it…”
“If only the bosses in Madrid knew…they’d give Pilar the intern your job.”
“And how would they know? Will you tell them? I’m good at pretending, don’t you think?”
After spending three days and three nights crying and listening to opera, Fede determined that the naked truth of what fate had in store for him was too horrible and led him straight to the abyss. I’ve dedicated my life to books, I’m five years from retirement, this is how far I get, it’s over for me. Without a speck of drama and in a completely cerebral way, he decided to end his own life. He filled the bathtub with water and brought out one of those big flat razor blades, the kind he used to shave his beard when it was more than three days old, and to contour his sideburns, an old-school blade, double-edged, with an identation in the middle, fit for double-edged razors. The hot water soon steamed up the bathroom mirror. Force of habit, he had poured bath gel into the water too and the bathtub was overflowing with bubbles. He closed the tap and carefully placed the razor on the side of the tub, mindful of not cutting himself up too soon. Wait until the bubbles disappear, Fede; as far as his memory allows, he can’t recall anyone killing themselves in a bubble bath. At least not in the movies he’s seen. Despair is not compatible with the rise of bubbles. Or maybe the truth is that they did do it, but the bubbles had disappeared completely by the time they found the corpses bled to death?
Be that as it may, in the end Fede fell asleep in the bathtub. Until he heard someone rapping her knuckles on the door: it was Yolanda, the Ecuadorian woman who came to clean his house once a week.
“Can I come in?”
“One second!”
You learn something new every day, Fede, but I had you for someone with a stronger will, he berated himself, and afterward he thought that it was really the bubbles’ fault, while his mental press chose big capital letters for the headline: SAVED FROM SUICIDE BY HIS ECUADORIAN CLEANER.
It wasn’t that easy to plan a suicide, and Fede thought for a moment that he should write some instructions for the purpose. In the list of contingencies to take into account, the first one would be: if you’re going to kill yourself at home, make sure it’s not on the day your cleaner comes to clean. If he hadn’t considered that detail, how many other even more important ones may he have missed? Having made the decision to end his life with a well-executed suicide, he was embarrassed to see the razor on the edge of the tub. Before doing what he knew he had to do, it’d be advisable to leave everything well tied up; he didn’t want to give too much work to his poor niece, and he didn’t want to make orphans of his authors in the publishing house all of a sudden either, although many of them deserved to be left without an editor.
He was going to go blind, true. But he had a few months left before that happened. He had to make good use of those months. An absurd title for an absurd book in an absurd series that was already in existence came to his mind: 1000 Things You Should See Before You Go Blind. Or, more dramatically: 1000 Things You Should See Before You Die.
In his mind, being blind and being dead were the same thing.
He had to write that list. See those thousand things and then take his own life. Or maybe he’d develop such an enriched imaginarium after observing those thousand things that, thanks to those thousand icons branded into his memory, he would manage to renounce suicide and find reason to keep living. Therein lies your challenge, Fede.
Staring at Yolanda, he thought her shortness and chubbiness seemed more vivid than ever: he excused her from all cleaning duties for the week, and, handing a book over, asked her to read it out loud instead. As was to be expected, Yolanda was puzzled by such a request, momentarily even a little frightened, and was close to saying no to her employer’s potential perversion; her job had its limits, she thought, she wasn’t willing to do just anything, and simultaneously pondered what other perfidious perversions people who ask to have books read out loud to them might request. Once she overcame her initial mistrust, however, Yolanda turned out to be a lively, gifted reader. Pity she doesn’t speak Basque, thought Fede, because it was beautiful to hear her Ecuadorian intonation as she read Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” in Spanish.
“One thousand things I must see before I go blind (I mustn’t just see them, it’d be more accurate to say that I should see them and lock them into a corner of my brain, so I can resort to them and see them again once I’m blind, with absolute clarity, as if they were in front of my eyes).” He begins the list: “Dürer’s etchings, Tiziano’s Pietà, Vermeer’s milkmaid, Goya’s Black Paintings, the canvases from Rothko’s darkest period.
“Rodin’s The Thinker in the Rodin Museum. It’s no good to look at reproductions, it’s imperative that I travel to Paris. I want to see his chin and cheeks, I must memorize the nooks and shadows sculpted into the bronze, process the just pressure of the locked jaw, check the length of the fingers.
“The scene in Body Heat where Kathleen Turner and William Hurt have sex in a cabin by the river, a scene that excited me so much when I first watched it, I must try to see it again on the big screen, no matter what. I’ve never been too concerned with cinema, most of the films I love I could enjoy just as much by listening to the dialogues alone (any Marx Brothers, Wong Karwai’s In the Mood for Love). There are exceptions, however: Fellini’s films (especially La Dolce Vita), Dreyer’s films (especially Ordet).” He must consider what to do with silent film movies: it might be enough to watch them again paying close attention to their soundtracks…
“One last hike up Mount Aralar, memorizing the texture of the blankets of leaves. The nervation of each fallen leaf. To observe the density of the smoke coming out of the sheds, to consider whether such density could be compared to something else.
“To focus special attention on the rusty stains that blossom on the skins of reineta apples.
“To focus special attention on women as they paint their nails, that hyperfocused gesture when they coat the surface of their nails with a little brush, with a steadfast stroke, never failing.
“Never forget to scrutinize the worry-free walk of adolescents who seem unaware of their beauty. How they take their high-heeled shoes off in the middle of the night as they board the elevator, returning home late from one of their first nights out in town.
“To glance at fas
hion magazines, at different kinds of haircuts. The texture of tweed.
“The sea in stormy days from Paseo Berria. Photographs I took in Buenos Aires and Hong Kong. Photos of my classmates and my ex-girlfriends. My ex-wife’s photos. Photos that show my niece’s every age. Photos of the child that I was.
“To memorize my home. To memorize my own face. To memorize every step from my house to work and from the swimming pool to my house, to try to walk those steps then wearing dark sunglasses, eyes shut. To learn to confront situations. To train for my life as a blind man.”
To train for my life as a blind man.
He’d come up with a hazardous list, slightly nonsensical. It was frustrating. Was that really all he wanted to see and do? Wasn’t there anything else? No, there wasn’t. Maybe his blindness was just a means to stop being a tourist to himself. A means of leaving aside all the expendable bullshit and holding on to the essentials. Why not say it, this was an opportunity. That morning, on the way to the swimming pool, he took longer than usual standing in front of the fire station in Amara. Like a child, he visually gobbled up the trucks, their shiny red paint, their silver mudguards. That’s it, I got it all in my head, or I’ve memorized all of you, he told himself after five minutes, as if he’d stamped an image into his retina with a burning iron. Afterward, when he arrived at work, he closed his eyes to make sure he hadn’t forgotten any details. No, he hadn’t forgotten anything. It was all there. The firemen’s truck, with all its accessories. In his retina. In the black box in his head.
To memorize every single thing you will never see again. To learn by heart every piece, so that you can effect infinite combinations of them afterward. The way we learn the letters in the alphabet, a Letraset set in Garamond. But with eyes always shut.
Idoia found a message from a friend in her inbox congratulating her on her recent radio program about the European elections.
She couldn’t believe it. Her friends never wrote to her about work, even less so to congratulate her about anything. Astounding. Finally, when someone did, she wrote to congratulate her on a job she didn’t do: Idoia didn’t cover election night, her intern Pilar did. She hated her friend and was convinced it was a deliberate mistake, as if she’d congratulated her on purpose, to harm her self-esteem.
She turned the radio on with curiosity, to check if her voice was really that similar to her intern’s. She listened for a whole hour, while she ran around the house doing this and that, with the radio on at full volume. And she had to confess that yes, coming from the radio, the two voices were more similar than she’d like to admit. It wasn’t as much a matter of timbre – Pilar’s was softer – as a matter of tone. More than her way of speaking, it was her way of pausing between words, her way of staying silent to gather impetus, the cadence of her sentences, her way of laughing, her pet phrases – “we’re telling it like we’re hearing it,” “so that our audience understands,” “Okay, let’s wrap it up” – even her welcome and goodbye formulas were exactly the same. None of those turns of phrase were terribly specific, but together they were identifiably Idoia’s. What that girl was doing required cold blood: nothing was her own, not even the smallest trace of her own personality, she had borrowed everything from her. It didn’t seem something that could have happened unintentionally, she could have only done it consciously, premeditatedly. This was someone who had listened to her attentively for weeks, someone who had rehearsed for many hours before becoming her shadow clone. Or was that not the case? Was she becoming too suspicious? In Idoia’s opinion Pilar’s attitude didn’t demonstrate admiration or a desire to learn at all, what she saw in it was a clear intention to erase her from the scene. Her twin voice started to feel like a very disagreeable threat. It turned her stomach and suddenly she felt exhausted, as if a leech had been sucking her blood.
They’ve stolen my voice, she told herself.
What to do when someone who is as similar to you as your own self – even more so – tries to supplant you, when they copy your way of doing things to the letter and they do it well, even better than you? Who can you talk to about this kind of thing? It’s embarrassing; you have to be careful, people might accuse you of having an obsessive ego bursting with vanity. “Do you think yourself that different, that unique or inimitable? You’re not the center of the world, that girl who you see as your imitator drinks from the same sources you used to drink, you both copy and supplant equally, it’s not just her,” someone could tell her. How to prove it? Who could she tell this to? Who could she talk to about these things without sounding ridiculous?
On her way to work, just before she entered the newsroom, she saw Victor walking ahead of her. He was distracted, reading the sports section, and for once Idoia thought she saw something attractive in her annoying colleague. When she decided to walk faster to catch up with him, she noticed that Victor had done the same after taking his eyes off the newspaper. It looked like he was trying to catch up with someone ahead of him.
She heard him shout the name of the person he was chasing after:
“Idoia!”
His call-out paralyzed her. “I am Idoia and I am behind you, you cretin, not in front of you.” The girl walking three or four steps ahead of Victor turned around, puzzled. It was Pilar, Victor had confused her with Idoia. “I am Idoia,” she wanted to scream…She realized that the haircut and clothes the girl had been sporting lately weren’t very different from hers. She perceived Victor’s momentary embarrassment when Pilar turned around, but Idoia decided to save him from further discomfort, from the humiliation of showing him she’d witnessed his mistake. Instead of approaching Victor, Idoia hid behind the door to the cafeteria.
But, what was she afraid of, really, wasn’t she the original one after all?
Picking or trashing the manuscripts as they were read to him was the easiest thing. To tell the truth, when manuscripts were read out loud Fede could clearly see – more clearly than ever – which ones were unpublishable. Mediocre texts were intolerable to read out loud. If only he’d known, he would have set that system in motion much earlier. Many pseudowriters deserved to receive a recording of someone reading a couple of pages from their novels with a note attached: “Listen to this, do you really think this shit can be published? It’s embarrassing.” His main problem was with the manuscripts that survived the cull, once he started to perfect them: although he was able to immediately detect convoluted or obscure sentences, Fede found it hard to propose syntactical and word order changes by ear. It wasn’t enough to have a reader by his side for that; he needed someone who could not only read, but who could also write.
After losing four secretaries before their trial week was out – three left of their own volition, only one was fired – he decided to call Diego Lazkano, in hopes that he might find the woman of his dreams.
“Does it absolutely have to be a girl?”
“You know full well that the number of men with whom I can work side by side is limited to zero. It’s bad enough that I have to deal with myself, that’s hard enough…”
“Let me think about it, I’ll call if anyone comes to mind.”
“I would pay her well.”
“That’d be a new development.”
“It’s either that or I close the business. By the way, forget the offset in your next book.”
“Are you finally taking the step?”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“Don’t worry: you can’t see a difference.”
“I can’t at least…I promised myself that if the day arrived when I couldn’t spot the difference I would leave the offset behind and switch to digital. What I didn’t expect was for that day to arrive so soon.”
When he hung up, Lazkano thought of La Bella Ines. She wasn’t exactly a great writer, but the job as a reader fitted her like a glove. She had a great voice. When he called her, just as he feared, she mistakenly believed that his call wasn’t strictly professional.
“I’m calling you about a work matter.”<
br />
“You’re coming for dinner, right?”
Lazkano felt cornered and had to say yes.
During dinner he tried to quickly shift the conversation toward Fede, apologizing about a prior commitment that would force him to leave very soon, but it was in vain. Before he realized it and not knowing very well how it’d happened, he found his cheeks between Ines’s thighs and two hungry hands were feeling for his belt buckle. He couldn’t deny that their reciprocal licking was more pleasant than making love, although Lazkano’s septum required a few days to return to its usual position.
“Are you interested in the job, then?”
“I would have to meet the famous Fede, right? And you say he’s almost blind?”
Lazkano didn’t know what to say. Was he almost blind? Fede behaved as if that wasn’t going to happen; he liked to tell everyone that he had limited vision, but Diego was convinced that he was on his way to becoming a full-blown blind man, if he wasn’t already on the threshold of that bitter moment.
“He still sees a bit, but it’s getting harder and harder.”
“And you say he used to be an incorrigible womanizer?”
“I hope that’s not a problem…it was a very long time ago, he’s pretty old now.”
Ines started putting her work uniform on.
“If you don’t mind, I have to go to work…”
Lazkano felt offended. “No one is more ready to leave than I am.” But the truth was that Ines got ahead of him when she said she was due at her evening shift in half an hour. And Diego, half naked still, felt more comfortable than he’d like to admit in that damp bed that smelled of lilacs.
Said and done. Ines and Fede’s story was love at first sight – puns aside. The man who hated social engagements so much started turning up everywhere with Ines on his arm.
Lazkano visualized Ines’s soft butt perched on top of Fede’s nose, and he felt pity for his septum.
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