Twist
Page 24
“I’ve written thousands of pages in these past twenty years…in Soto’s folder there were hardly two hundred pages. You’re being unfair with me. There isn’t…I don’t really have…anything to hide.”
“That’s why you won’t mind if the newspapers find out your real source of inspiration…”
“I haven’t said that, Fede…I took it…I took it as a starting point…”
“Of course, now you’ll explain to me what cocreation is…Picasso said it: mediocre artists copy, real ones steal. Or what good old Foster Wallace said: that modern artists are kleptomaniacs with good taste, all of that bullshit; Google, hypertext…”
“Fede…”
“Perhaps it’s because of my obsolete humanist education, Lazkano, but I have to confess that this is very difficult to understand for me. Soto is a martyr for your people, and what you’ve done, what you’ve done is the worst thing you can do to a martyr: you’ve desecrated his tomb, you’ve taken his relics, and as if that weren’t enough, you’ve used them for your own personal interest, you’ve made money off of them, without ever acknowledging that you were using relics…you’ve made money at his expense! I can’t get my head around what you’ve done, to be honest…”
“You’ve made money too, indirectly, thanks to me.”
“They’ll take us to court!”
“I was tortured too, I too know what it’s like…”
“You all say that.”
“But it’s true. It’s pointless to try to explain hell to someone who’s never been there…”
“What is that thing they say…? Oh yeah: an eye for an eye…”
“They tortured me, that’s the truth. And the people who tortured me continue to exist with impunity, God knows where.”
“Are you trying to convince me that your actual sin was atoned for before you committed it? Is that what you’re saying? That the fact that you were tortured excuses you from any and all subsequent desecrations? Please! Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you?”
“I’ve worked hard. I…I know very well what it means to suffer.”
“And you think you deserve a compensation for that suffering: to appropriate someone else’s life. We are exactly where we were; I understood your point of view from the word go.”
“I never stole someone’s…”
“You are a plagiarist, a usurper, a parasite: not only did you appropriate his writing, you tore the skin off his back when he didn’t even have it.”
“What was I supposed to do? What would you have done in my place, Fede?”
“Are you asking me as your editor? As your friend? As your confessor? Tell me…what am I supposed to do now? Go on as if nothing had happened? Do you realize the position you put me in?”
“How could you…?”
“It’s not like I ever had much faith in humankind; not in humankind and not in people…As a general rule I only ever believe in exceptions, but…I just can’t believe this, that’s all. After everything you’ve done, tell me at least that you don’t have the gall to say that you’ve done it as an homage to your friend…”
“If you’ve thought it, it can’t be so completely absurd…”
“To have the head to think something doesn’t mean that such thoughts aren’t absurd when we speak them. Diego, I know you well, I’m very capable of entering your moronic head. And, believe me, it’s a terrifying place.”
“I’m going to ask you again: what was I supposed to do?”
“Easy: you could have polished his works and published them in his name, for example, allocating five minutes of glory for yourself in the prologue…That’s what Max Brod did!”
“Soto wasn’t Kafka, and I’m not Max Brod.”
“And neither am I Gaston Gallimard, needless to say…”
“The way I see it, I did something to rekindle his embers. I improved on his works…”
“Your modesty knows no limits, Lazkano.”
“Publishing everything the way it was would have been a mere archaeological exercise. Don’t you realize? I didn’t want that.”
“No, you wanted to live at his expense.”
“Not at his expense, it’s been a way of living next to him! We were thick as thieves, so close, we had a special bond…You can’t imagine. He and I. We’ve walked this path together. All these years.”
“You haven’t published anything in five years. Let me guess: has your imagination dried up…or have you reached the end of the contents of the folder?”
“You’re right in that there may not be any more novels coming from Diego Lazkano’s pen. But I’m going to write a chronicle, the chronicle of the Soto-Zeberio court case…it’s going to start soon…I’m going to declare, as a witness.”
“You’ve plundered his tomb down to the last bone. Pity that there was only one folder…”
“Are you going to give me up? Are you going to hand the folder over to the press?”
“Tell me: what else can I do?”
“Don’t do it. I beg you. They’ll sink us both.”
“Wake up once and for all! Whatever I do, my hands are tied…that guy…the red-haired guy…he may well have copies of everything.”
She was going to earn her right to eternal life by working as a sports journalist, it seemed to Idoia: working hours were never ending, every day lasted a century. Basque handball pelota players’ press conferences, item selection, soccer training sessions…Seen one, seen them all. Did Victor hate culture as much as she hated soccer? Probably. Sports and culture journalists had to exercise different parts of the brain, there was no other explanation. The cross she had to bear wasn’t as much the fact of her syncopated pilgrimages between the radio station and the newsroom. The worst part started when she had to write the chronicles or transcribe the interviews. Each word was more tiresome than the previous one, she needed twice as much time as she’d need to write up a cultural chronicle to produce a sports commentary half its size, and she always ended feeling profoundly ridiculous, like what she had written was worthless hogwash.
Idoia had never followed Victor’s work – she’d never followed the work of any sports journalist, as a matter of fact – and she secretly looked down on him, the vain editor who always did what he wanted and whose assistant she had the misfortune of being for the next two weeks.
“I never understood you guys: your adherence to certain colors, to a nation…Can one be a sports journalist without being ultranationalist?”
Victor stared at her in puzzlement.
“It’s all pretense, Idoia…you need to create some tension to narrate a soccer match, I thought you knew that. They are just cheap tricks; to create morbid excitement, to feed the idea of the rise and fall of the hero…Shakespeare in its purest form.”
Shakespeare! What? Victor was giving her lessons on drama, talking about playing a part? Was she really supposed to believe that Victor had the smallest idea about Shakespeare’s plays?
“Come on, Idoia. Readers always want the same roughage; the names change but everything else is the same. Who will survive the lions today? Who will be crowned emperor? All you need to do is listen to what our competition says on the radio every morning.”
“As I understand it, then, your advice to me is not to overcomplicate things.”
“You guys in the culture section add a comma in the morning and remove it in the afternoon. This is a newspaper, for God’s sake! Diagonal reading, a couple of spicy headlines for the reader to consume with his coffee and that’s it, that’s all!”
Roger hadn’t been any luckier than Idoia, they’d burdened him with a segment for English-language lessons, a learn-over-the-airwaves language-learning method. The fact that he was North-American sufficed, pedagogy wasn’t really the point. Idoia often asked herself what would her life be like if she’d continued working for Egin. Would she be happier? Probably not. These days, what put food on her table were people and ideas diametrically opposed to her ideology and her lifestyle. It was painful to
admit it, but it was true. How long had she been deluding herself? What next? Would she start to sympathize with her newspaper and radio station’s editorial line?
The exact opposite happened. And it happened on the first day she had to take over the news reports on the radio to cover for Pilar during her holiday – life lessons: she was her substitute’s substitute now. She was reading, on air, a news item about of a group of Somali militias who, after stealing uniforms from the Blue Helmets, had pretended to be UN soldiers, taken over a village, shot every single member of its community, and then set everything on fire. She froze in front of the microphone, went mute. It was a long, suspenseful silence that lasted half a minute, one of those silences that are explosive during live retransmissions, and that lasted up until the technician made use of his quick reflexes and put on a song.
She requested a leave of absence for depression and when they refused to extend it any longer, asked for voluntary unpaid leave. She spent weeks without leaving the house, without reading the papers, desolate, broken, living in a small attic that a friend who was away from the city had lent to her. She cried all the time. She carried a bottomless well of sorrow inside. Roger called her often at the start, but when he realized she wouldn’t pick up the phone, his calls gradually came less often, and eventually he gave up.
One morning, she found an old newspaper on a paper pile her friend hadn’t bothered to take down to the recycling point.
It was a newspaper from the competition, that’s what she told herself, “from the competition,” and she was annoyed to have thought that, to realize that she still considered that newspaper she’d worked for her own. She was struck by one of the headlines, and felt a bit sad that hardly ever had she seen a headline like that one in her newspaper.
PORNOGRAPHY AS THERAPY.
She remembered Txema Santamaria then – “a true photographer in this world of fake artists” – and that project he had for a series of pornographic portraits. Did he carry it out in the end? She thought the article was a major piece of bullshit at the start, a cheap trick from some second-rate hack who thought that the only thing that sold papers was sex. Pure bait. But she’d taken it.
This article explained how some psychologists prescribed pornography to overcome affective problems and traumatic breakups. It was true that the world of porn had changed a lot. The impossible curves and perfect bodies of yore had been pushed aside in favor of realism and the verisimilitude of “real” bodies and faces, thanks to the amateur and the gonzo genres, which had made available to users online an infinity of gigabytes of domestic and naturalistic sex. Systemically classified, sophisticated menus grouping the most bizarre variants of sexual proclivities down to the smallest detail. If the thing that really excited you was to watch a couple of smokers masturbating on a roller coaster, you only needed to type in your request, et voilà!
“The problem with pornography is that if you develop a habit, it can become addictive, and it’s necessary to know to reduce its consumption in time so that this way of experiencing sex in a univocal and a virtual way doesn’t completely take over your human relationships. A habitual consumer of pornography is used to holding all the power and it can become difficult for them later on to get used to satisfying their partner’s sexual needs; in other words, to remember the fact that we are not alone in bed.” Apparently not all psychologists agreed on this type of therapy. “Although it can be effective in some cases, it is not treatment that can be generally applied. It might be useful perhaps for people who identify love with sex too much, so that they realize that once their desire has been satisfied with pornography they don’t miss the person who rejected them so much, although that’s not generally the case. Using pornography in some measure is healthy, the danger is in excessive use, in believing there’s nothing beyond that.”
She went online and tried her luck on different pages, with curiosity, amazed at people’s lack of prudishness, at the fellatios recorded on cell phones in public transport, at the women of all ages and colors who blindly milked anonymous cocks that protruded from tantalizing holes in dark walls, at the wild adolescents who seemed to rock as if they were bouncing on elastic beds, swaying their breasts and making it look like they were riding the person on the other side of the screen, at so, so many videos that studiously aligned the camera with the eyes of the Internet user being ridden. As was the case in the pornographic magazines she had occasionally glanced at in her youth, at the beginning it seemed to her that the point of view of the domineering macho prevailed on the Internet too, that she would never find anything remotely exciting for her in there, that there was nothing there beyond an enormous quantity of stimuli for horndogs that did nothing but jerk off all day. But, as she navigated from one site to another, she hit on a couple of girls savagely licking each other’s sex, gone from this world, at the mercy of pleasure. The attractiveness of their small naked bodies, beyond their flat, delicious breasts, resided on the glow of their cheeks and in their inability to control their expressions. There was no fakery there, just pure enjoyment. Before she realized it, Idoia’s eyes were glued to the monitor and she’d pressed full screen. She wanted to lick every pink pixel on the cheeks of those girls. She felt like kissing those open mouths. But something was missing; she noticed the audio was off. After she put the volume up, it didn’t take much for her to undo the buttons of her jeans and start caressing herself softly. When the image started to seem too repetitive, she closed her eyes and turned the chair around: the girls’ burning sighs, their screams and accelerated breathing were enough to bring her to climax.
With time she learned to introduce more specific words into the search engine, and although she found it difficult to accept that she was on the brink of porn addiction (“I can stop whenever I want”), she stopped switching the TV on after dinner and started to spend evenings in front of the computer, alternating lovers, one after the other. She didn’t need to meet these ones in hotels (“I’m at the Hotel Orly, call me”; “don’t even dream of hurting me, okay?”). These ones didn’t upset her.
According to what she had read, “mirror neurons” were to blame when it came to experiencing analogous emotions to someone whose enjoyment or suffering we’re watching, even if the actions that provoke such enjoyment or suffering are not affecting us directly. Many researchers believe that the fact that some people enjoy pornography more than others is related to their more abundant proportion of “mirror neurons.” Idoia thought she belonged to that group. For once, she felt rich. She should update her profile: ex-journalist, O negative blood type, forty-something, divorced, without children, allergic to house mites, overabundance of mirror neurons, enough to become a donor.
She wanted to talk to somebody. Finally, she decided to phone the newspaper. An automatic message let her know that the number no longer existed.
Later on she found out that they had closed the newsroom in Bilbao and that all her colleagues had been fired.
Lucio finds Fede bent over an Albrecht Dürer catalog. It looks like he’s inhaling it, sniffing it, even, bringing the image of the painting closer to his eyes with a gigantic magnifying glass.
“Look at this, it’s astonishing…”
Fede shows him an etching from the book Melencolia I, from 1514, which some experts say marks the start of the Renaissance. Melancholy is represented by a sitting angel who looks tormented. Behind them, an unfinished house; in front of them, a multitude of objects: an hourglass, a feather, an empty scale, an inkwell, a ladder…objects that speak of a half-finished job. He says:
“Back then melancholia was not what we understand it to be today: it was the least appreciated of the four temperaments…”
“Indeed. It was related to madness, to the color of the earth, to the fall, to the north wind, to cold weather and drought, to Saturn, which seems to influence creative types so much…it was also related with the time in life when men turn sixty years old…”
“With our time in life, therefore.”
“The strangest thing is that we don’t have a Melencolia II or Melencolia III…”
“Lost works of art…”
“I am not so sure…I have always believed that the I is not a number, but an invocation.”
“An invocation?”
“Yes: Go away, Melancholia! in Latin…Out of here! It’s the desire to say goodbye to the dark Middle Ages and embrace the light of the Renaissance…”
“It was around that time that our beloved Aldus Manutius showed the world his first book using the Bembo font….”
“Garamond also emerged around the same time. Do you know what, Lucio, I’ve just realized why I prefer the Bembo font to Garamond: the Garamond font has smaller eyes, as if the eyes of the letters a and e were half closed…”
“As if they’d just woken up from a long sleep…”
“The Bembo font, however, has wide-open eyes…the Bembo font is the first font that remains alert, attentive and vigilant. The Garamond font suits the sleepy, those who haven’t quite woken up yet, who are still dormant…It’s a bleary-eyed font…After looking at this painting by Dürer, I believe my conscience is clear and I am ready to go blind.”
It only takes a small step to go from consumer to creator. It was a much smaller step than it seemed. She activated the webcam and placed it so that her body could only be seen from the neck down – she wanted to make sure her body was in full view, but she didn’t want her face to be seen. In contrast to most of the female masturbatory exercises she’d seen online – they all wore jeans, swim-suits, or simple miniskirts, when they weren’t just naked from the word go – she decided to wear a dress, white and light, and diaphanous enough to allow her dark nipples to show through. She started to touch herself, imagining she had an audience, as if she were in a private theater, in a peep show. She squeezed her breasts hard, crushing the thin fabric, she showed and hid her navel, flouncing her shoulders and hips while keeping her feet in place. She inserted her middle finger between her breasts, caressed her areolas, pressed her breasts together, inviting her imaginary audience to bite them, almost touching the webcam with her lower lip. She started to sigh, issuing exaggerated moans that weren’t a response to pleasure but that, bit by bit, and by virtue of listening to her own sighs, started to excite her: soon other sighs followed, not fake ones this time, but resulting from true pleasure. Was it possible, therefore, to become one’s own conductor? Mirror neurons worked too when the observed actor was oneself. Self-suggestion? Maybe, but there was more than that. She lowered the top part of her dress and brought her breasts closer to the camera again.