Twist

by Harkaitz Cano

  “Come,” she whispered. It was the first word she’d pronounced in weeks.

  A word that emerged from a sigh.

  Shame stopped her from watching the video she’d recorded for three or four days. When she did, however, instead of being ashamed, she felt excited again. She was persuaded by the authenticity of her fake sighs, those fake sighs that were followed by others that were brought on by true pleasure. She couldn’t stop pleasuring herself. What was the sexual drive if not the search for a continuous repetition of familiar pleasures containing surprising variations? Was it maybe the lack of such surprising variations that spoiled the passion of many couples and drove them to idiotically fall into the arms of others? As she started to imitate what she saw on the screen, her real moans began to overlap her recorded ones. She started to depart from the recording then, to mumble words in search of her own variations: “Take your clothes off for me, take it out, pump it for me, faster, faster, here, on my belly.”

  She watched the video over and over before taking the step, to make sure that when she kissed the camera and the lens steamed up her face was still out of view. No one would recognize her. After checking that, she uploaded her onanistic exercise to one of the web pages with free menus. Each video had a clicker: a scoreboard that showed the number of visitors. She was amazed to see that by midnight, her video had already had fifteen hundred cybervisitors from all over the world, giving it an overall score of four stars.

  As if her porn addiction wasn’t enough, she was overwhelmed by a pathological and egotistical curiosity and kept eagerly and frequently checking how many people were watching her masturbatory performance, incapable of holding back her need for popularity. Since she’d uploaded the images online, only in the first twenty-four hours, twenty thousand people had downloaded or streamed the video. After a week, the numbers went up to one hundred thousand. The score was still four out of five.

  How many young and adult women with their eyes on her all over the world. How many adolescent boys pumping it nonstop. She imagined Roger, Julio Virado, Diego, or even her ex, Mikel, doing it. Men and women, desperate and not-so-desperate beings, sighing over a moment of peace and oblivion – the petit mort – from their work.

  She had achieved what she never had in her almost thirty years working in newspapers: to capture people’s attention. Audience, some called it, and hers was enormous. Before, no one read what she wrote; now, so many were trying to read her skin.

  But Idoia was aware that she needed to get out of the hole, leave behind her winter refuge, get out into the world and find a job.

  She remembered the conversation she had with Diego before breaking up the relationship:

  “Fede always needs readers at the publisher’s house…”

  It had been months since then, but you never know. She decided to call him. She knew it was demented, but there was nothing to lose, she could talk to the grumpy old man. She needed money.

  To say that Fede had vision problems was to be overly optimistic. He took a taxi from his home to the publishing house and, once there, he felt his way around with difficulty, barely able to find the way to his office, following an automated sense he’d developed through force of habit. The first time Idoia visited the publishing house she was astounded: the corridor was filled to the brim with shopping carts stuffed with envelopes piled up without rhyme or reason, no one bothered to classify them as they came through the post. At the bottom of some of those carts were some increasingly colorless, postmarked A4 envelopes that no one would ever open.

  “That would be your job,” Fede explained. “Let instinct be your guide, choose one, open it, and read the first page. Most times one page is enough. I would ask you to do that for half the day, after midday it becomes irritating…I would discard Ulysses itself. I know it’s not a very thankful task, but if you could stay to put things in order in the afternoons, I would be able to offer you a fulltime contract for six months. Fifteen hundred euro per month.

  It was only a little bit less than what she’d earned at the newspaper.

  “Since I’m half blind, I’d pay you cash in hand.”

  Idoia didn’t understand his comment.

  “It’s a blind man’s joke, don’t listen to me.”

  “Don’t you want to hear me read?”

  “You’ll do. I heard you on the radio.”

  On Radio Maria? Idoia blushed so deeply even Fede noticed it, despite his growing blindness. At least it seemed so to her. She had always held on to the hope that no one was listening to her radio utterances.

  Idoia walked through the corridor filled with shopping carts.

  Fede had rolled up his sleeves, as if he were about to introduce his arm into a lobster tank. He remained sitting on his chair, however. It was Idoia who was about to go fishing.

  Idoia didn’t know where to start: after two weeks of intense work, she had managed to classify the manuscripts by order of arrival, but new envelopes arrived every day, which inevitably created new tectonic layers of potential literature in the shopping carts. It was amazing how much people wrote, as amazing as their eagerness to see what they had written published. Should she start from the oldest envelopes, following a strict chronological order? That didn’t make much sense: some manuscripts had been submitted three or four years ago, their authors must have given up, they could hardly still be waiting, cross-armed, for an answer from the editor. Either those aspiring writers had found another publishing house to call home, or they had changed their calling. At any rate, what was a logical and reasonable waiting period for an editor’s response? Was it fair to make an author wait a whole year? Idoia estimated that six months was more than enough and, with the wisdom of Solomon, decided to start there. She was very sorry for those who had sent their manuscripts before that.

  She chose half a dozen manuscripts at random and started reading them out loud, one by one.

  Fede discarded the first three after hearing the titles.

  “What? No way! What did you say? Forget about it!”

  The fourth was cast aside because of the author’s quote the book started with.

  “There’s no way he can write well when he’s not even capable of stealing a quote properly.”

  The remaining two were sent to the pyre before Idoia finished the first page. He shouted like a quack dispensing snake oil:

  “Next!”

  Or otherwise:

  “Where are all the true writers hiding, good God!”

  Or otherwise:

  “Plagiarize Cheever, that’s right!”

  Or otherwise:

  “Oedipus? Again?!”

  Or otherwise:

  “Please send her a copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.”

  Or otherwise:

  “Why don’t they read something before they start writing?”

  Or otherwise:

  “Why don’t they spend some time living before they start writing?”

  Or otherwise:

  “That’s not literature, it’s karaoke! A pure copy! He’s just whistling over a melody someone else composed; if at least he did it well…”

  Or otherwise:

  “Garbage!”

  Or otherwise:

  “Bring me a bucket, please, I beg you! I’m going to puke!”

  After two weeks of hard work, Idoia read Fede a short novel by a young, unknown author from beginning to end. She had heard that there was such a thing as professional readers in Cuba; in cigar factories, a woman would read whole novels to the other women as they rolled cigars. She identified with that professional Cuban reader as she read herself. The novel’s title was The Bodyguard Who Read Moby-Dick.

  “Did you like it?” Fede asked her.

  Idoia felt it was a trap. She’d loved the novel, but she was afraid to say that yes, she’d liked it. She decided to answer indirectly, leaving room to backpedal from her statement if necessary.

  “I was hooked from the start…”

  “Ring the aut
hor, then. What did you say his name was?”

  They were in luck: the author hadn’t contracted his manuscript to any publishing house. He was ecstatic about their call.

  In the following six weeks they weren’t as lucky. In a heartbreaking way, with insults and wild gesticulations, Fede rejected dozens of works after hardly ever getting beyond the first chapter. The initial reservations Idoia had turned into sympathy: that editor, Fede, was like a character out of a book.

  The joke was too easy: editorial faith. Blind faith. A faith he didn’t place on anything apart from literature.

  “Would you walk me to the entrance? Call a taxi, Ines can’t pick me up today…they changed her shift in the tollbooth.”

  “Of course.”

  She took his arm to guide him outside.

  Fede was silent for a while. He adjusted the lapels of his raincoat and straightened up before the Dürer etching tacked to the wall as if it were a mirror. Melencolia. It happens sometimes: a sudden sadness overwhelms us at completely unexpected moments.

  “Tell me the truth, Idoia, do you feel pity for me? I don’t want to be working with anyone who feels pity for me.”

  “Pity? None at all. I’m very happy here.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, because I don’t feel pity for myself at all. Do you know what? Vision is overrated, it’s much worse to go deaf.”

  Idoia found the comment strange, coming as it did from a man of letters who had practically scorched his eyebrows between books and documents.

  It was cold outside, they both buttoned up their coats and raised the lapels to their noses. Idoia felt comfortable in the company of her boss. They waited.

  “Your taxi is here, Fede.”

  Idoia felt Fede’s hand rest tenderly on her shoulder.

  “You have eased things for me so much, the year has ended very well.”

  He handed over an envelope. The Bodyguard Who Read Moby-Dick had saved their year. Not only this one. Part of the next one too.

  “We’re going to have to look after this young lad. Let’s hope he doesn’t send his next book to a big publishing house, like they all do.”

  Idoia opened the envelope. There were only a few bills, but she wasn’t used to seeing any of that color.

  “There’s a lot of money here…”

  “You have managed what no one else does: to stay in the company after six months.”

  Company seemed too pretentious a word for that dump of an office, but she wasn’t about to correct him.

  “I can see you smiling from here, you know?” he said jokingly, with his back to her, from inside the taxi, as if he truly was capable of such witchcraft.

  Maybe he was.

  The envelopes she’d taken so long classifying all over the floor, books taken from bookshelves and stomped on everywhere, unplugged lamps strewn over tables, Klimt and Dürer’s reproductions torn off the walls…Idoia found their office in a mess. At first sight it didn’t look like anything was missing, if it was money they were after, they had come to the wrong place. Did they hope to find any in a publishing house? Professional thieves would have known that such a thing was impossible. And they hadn’t even touched the computers. She was in doubt as to whether she should call Fede before attempting to bring some order to the mess. She didn’t want to upset him more than was necessary. It occurred to her that maybe it made more sense to leave things as they were and file a report with the police. Fede should make the decision, what the hell. After all, the publishing house was his.

  “Don’t get upset, Fede, but we’ve had visitors in the office. Some vandals I think. It doesn’t look like they’ve taken anything.”

  She decided to play it humorously, so that Fede wouldn’t get angry.

  “I wonder if they were looking for a manuscript. Do you think it might have been our competitors?”

  Fede was still silent. Idoia could hear him breathe rapidly.

  “Are you okay, Fede?”

  “Listen: I want you to open the first drawer in my desk.”

  That was the only drawer he locked with a key. He never opened it in front of her. Idoia was familiar with this type of paranoid behavior: Diego did the same.

  “You know that I don’t have a key.”

  “Go and check all the same, try to open it.”

  Although it resisted initially and it looked like the drawer was closed, when she pulled the handle it opened softly: it was empty. Someone had forced the lock and emptied the drawer.

  “There’s nothing here. It’s empty.”

  “Isn’t there a salmon-pink folder in there? An old folder?”

  “There’s nothing here, Fede. What was in that folder? Was it important?”

  READY-MADE

  “EIGHTY GRANDMOTHERS SEPARATE us from the Neolithic. We are eighty grandmothers removed from the cave. To say it differently: there are only eighty grandmothers between us and the cave. Eighty grandmothers, eighty pairs of legs, eighty laps, eighty births. Eighty, that’s what the artist-philosopher Jorge Oteiza used to say. Does that seem like a lot? How many live relatives do you have? Not many more than that, isn’t that true? Fewer, perhaps? Could you count them with the fingers of one hand? Six, eight, only three? So, think of your family differently, think of your dead ancestors, of the close and the not so close ones, think of a lineage made only of grandmothers. They could easily fit under one roof, they would fill the first four rows of a small theater, can you imagine? Only four rows of seats, odd and even numbers, a ball for retirees in the sports center; see, they’re no more than that. Think of those eighty grandmothers of yours, imagine their features, so similar to yours and yet, progressively further from you – truly, we’ve mistakenly adjudicated an origin here, it is you who is departing from them and not the other way around: you are a worn-out photocopy, more of a caricature, you’re simpler, increasingly at the mercy of unknown bacteria; forget Darwin, evolution, and continuous improvement, you are but the blueprint of a faraway hunter, a black mold, something that could be painted with an aerosol can on the wall of any village’s fronton court. Eighty grandmothers, and then this; eighty grandmothers and then you, can you remember eighty names? Really? Seriously? How many women’s names are there in your address book? How many women have you come across along the way? How many have you fantasized of starting a new life with? Many fewer than eighty, although if you were Don Juan, maybe there’d be more. Eighty women’s names? Could we remember them one by one? Let’s make the effort to put a face on each of those grandmothers: Katherine, Ohiana, Elisabeth, Lurdes, Viviana, Tatiana, Begoña, Lide, Laura, Tannia, Larraitz, Karmele, Margarita, Miren, Olaia, Irene, Dolores, Leire, Kattalin, Ursula, Martine, Teresa, Neus, Vanessa, Eneida, Tarsila, Paula, Elena, Lucia, Suzanne, Jennifer, Juana, Aizpea, Julene, Alejandra, Nora, Marilar, Cristina, Maria del Mar, Agurtzane, Lierni, Goizargi, Myriam, Ainara, Koro, Gabriela, Maria, Esther and Maria Esther, Isabel and Maria Isabel, Yolanda, Joana, Visitación, who was Visi to her friends, Ruth, Monica or Monique, Maialen, Reyes, Arantxa, Maite, Ingrid, Rosa, Esperanza, who as a child was Esperancita, Ainhoa, Olga, Monse, Izaskun, Blanca, Zuriñe, Ihintza, Nerea, Amaia, Nagore, Eulali, Lola, Frida, Brigida, Alfonsina, Paz and Mari Paz, Marijo and Marijose, Idoia, Maribel, Luisa, Eva, Asun, Iratxe, Mercedes, Irati, Alaitz, Itziar, Eider, Naroa, Angelines, Olatz, Marta, Marie Ann, Clementina, Anna and Ana and Ane and Anne…and enough. There are more than eighty there, without repeating a single name, and we haven’t even mentioned Marina yet…

  While Gloria told the story of her eighty grandmothers, she and Lazkano reached a photo of one of Marina Abramović’s performances. It was a portrait of the piece Rest Energy. Truth be told, that photograph was the only thing Lazkano remembered about the exhibition: Marina Abramović and her companion Ulay, the taut arch between them, both of them holding the arch and the arrow, a frozen moment of their most renowned piece; Abramović and Ulay dressed in white and black, both of them slightly inclined backward, as if about to fall, Ulay holds the arrow on the taut s
tring and Abramović holds the arch’s frame. They are in front of one another. It is not a game, the arrow’s tip is very sharp and points directly at Marina Abramović’s heart. All it would take would be for Ulay to release the string and the arrow would pierce the artist’s heart and she would die immediately. They stare at one another, both dressed in white shirts; she wears a long black skirt, he, dark pants. The photograph is astonishing. Ulay held the arrow for two hours – they held each other for two hours – and all that tension, the whole avalanche of chained reflections and the insufferable, sustained suspense the exercise demanded. The artists placed microphones under their clothes too, to capture the beating of their hearts and hear how their heartbeats increased as the performance advanced. Unlike with other live artistic events, in this case the photograph perfectly reflected the power and the intention of the performance. It was an image capable of reconciling anyone with contemporary and conceptual art: what’s art for, why write, the answer is there. The question is to keep the arch taut and the arrow ready, to have an objective in sight, to risk death and, despite that, show passion and a desire to live; intelligence and generosity, humility and pride. The arrow, ready, and the target, oneself, with the motto of a Zen archer in memory: May hunter and hunted be one. It’d been years since Lazkano had seen that photo for the first time, and on that occasion Gloria was there too: it was on her fridge, a flimsy newspaper cutout glued to the fridge door with adhesive tape in the apartment Gloria shared with other students. It was during the years of cords and bushy sideburns, the years when bad poems and letters to the editor were duplicated through black tracing paper, and after sending one to the newspaper, the other one was kept in a cardboard folder, to store at home. The years when the first few punks arrived from London with their mohawks and their tight jeans, veritable atomic bombs against uniforms.