In a dream or in something that now, in his memory, took on the texture of something dreamed—in one of his last dreams before the insomnia—he arrived to the site that’d inspired the Onirium to document it for his project.
And Ella was there.
As if waiting for him.
Ella had been, without knowing it, the inspiration for his project. A project that wasn’t his but that of someone known professionally as ScreaMime or The Mime Who Screams. An individual with avant-garde pretensions who’d started out as a street artist, then got picked up by one of those incomprehensibly popular and supposedly cutting-edge end-of-the-millennium midnight TV shows (hidden cameras, improvised improvisations, tits and asses, cokehead-college-student tone), and was subsequently featured on an album of silent rap music, by a band named Los Autistas Chocadores, and later he made a small fortune creating a ringtone that, without emitting a sound, mimed the ringing of a telephone. The type of individual troubled now by the need to be recognized as a serious artist (he had the idea of exploring the condition of speaking through dreams, another form of the speaking mime, he claimed) and who, on one blank and white and powder-fueled night, had come across one of his books. And he believed he’d found his soul mate and perfect partner and sharer of visions: the book’s author, him. And he’d agreed to do whatever, of course. It’s not like he was particularly busy. And the extra money could always be turned into the perfect way to make some impossible whim come true (the key to entering into these pacts of more or less Faustian vulgarity had to do with attempting to do what you always wanted to do at the expense of whatever mediocre individual was passing through).
And at that time, he—already come to the idea and the age of rereading—had returned to Vladimir Nabokov. He hadn’t revisited Nabokov since his proto-writer adolescence and only now did he discover, between amazed and proud and a little unsettled, the radioactive influence of the Russian throughout all these years on his own work. As if Nabokov’s thing had been like the prompting voice of someone whispering vital instructions to you, barely hidden behind the curtain just offstage. And, with his rereading, he’d also achieved, unwittingly, one of the most overused customs of writers at the beginning of the twenty-first century: to write a medium-sized book more or less one’s own at the expense of the extra-large work of another. To scramble, with auto-fictional agility, up onto the shoulders of some giant and benefit from their long and powerful shadow, like those small parasitic fish that stick with sucker mouths to the backs of leviathans and feed off their excretions.
And he wasn’t the only one; and more than one of the most popular and best-selling and well-regarded names of the contemporary literary panorama availed themselves of that strategy. A serious model of a not-so-serious writer with the ability to satisfy readers who them made feel far more intelligent than they actually were. Readers who’d already passed—obedient and evangelized and ever so anxious to be enlightened and to receive their next dose of revelations—through professionals like Milan Kundera and W. G. Sebald and Paul Auster and Emmanuel Carrère and somebody else, and one more. The fault, it’d almost always been clear to him, wasn’t so much of these writers as it was of the kind of reader they attracted: a reader with an almost compulsive need to have them read to him first and explain to him after and, in the end, make him feel so well read. The reader like one of those tourists who learns guidebooks by heart and rarely takes the risk of leaving the routes pre-established by his or her host country.
Apart from all of them he set—placing him an immeasurable distance from that lot—the Spaniard Enrique Vila-Matas. A writer whom he envied down to that hyphen-bridge in his surname. Vila-Matas was the only one who seemed to him authentic and honest in what he felt when it came to reading and writing and writing about what he was reading. An obvious ecstasy that sent him turning and revolving like a centrifugal evangelist indifferent to all issues of so-called “reality” (oh so different from his contemporary and conational colleagues, always so “committed”), matters to which he almost never devoted public words or columns in periodicals. Vila-Matas lived off and for and with and through literature. Vila-Matas, who’d attained that privilege of transforming himself into one of his own influences. Vila-Matas, whom he ran into every so often in one of the bookstores of that city, a city that not only believed itself to be, but also proclaimed to the four winds that it was, welcoming to writers of the world (in addition to feeling itself directly responsible for the genesis of great books and the pistol shot inaugurating long and lauded careers). A city that, when it came right down to it, only paraded out those foreign writers as a kind of folk troupe or as prestigious finalists for awards that always ended up being given to the local fauna. To tell the truth, the only real and irrefutable literary virtue of that city for those who wrote was that of having on its shores and in its heights a placid sea and low mountains; which freed writers of a sedentary nature from thinking they should leave and go to the mountains or the sea. Besides, the city had a handful of good bookstores. And there, in one of them, every so often, he and Vila-Matas ran into each other, never exchanging a word, just a conspiratorial glance, like members of a masonic secret society. Though he wasn’t kidding himself, their difference of rank was quite clear to him: Vila-Matas was Supreme Master Inspector General of the Order, 33rd Degree. And he, at most, Private Secretary (6th Degree) or—those mornings when he woke up in an absurdly good mood—Prince of Mercy (26th Degree). Vila-Matas, who’d fought in the shadows for years before finally being recognized, was for him an exceptional writer in ever sense. And, as such, he was also aware of the fact that, as it relates to that exception, the Spaniard had received, deservedly, the singular and only available seat of honor he’d once dreamed of for himself. A place that, as such, he would never now access (in his most cerebral and disheartened moments, he couldn’t help but think Vila-Matas was the evidence that the good guys could win and, for writers like him, lay waste to the comfortable perspective of convincing themselves only the bad writers were victorious). But that was a unique place, for one person alone. And so he’d opted not to approach him except in his books and in bookstores where he sometimes saw him conversing with that other referential-maniac writer. That guy who he often saw at the supermarket with his young son and wife. That guy who looked like a Ringo Starr impersonator who’d been left outside overnight, but who, nevertheless, always appeared and seemed to feel so happy and satisfied; and the truth is things weren’t going too bad for that guy or, at least, better than they were for him (and he spied on them from behind a column, a family, could that be the key, the secret? Could you write better being a husband and father or, at least, write something?). There he was: another foreigner. A foreigner like him and one who was born in the same place he was and who seemed to be everywhere writing about everything he was interested in and about which he no longer wrote: another form of torture, another deforming-for-the-better reflection of himself, another perfected clone.
That was why he preferred to never make contact, no matter how much he thought he was receiving sympathetic signals, with Vila-Matas. Because—aware that no beneficial contagion was possible—he couldn’t risk that a writer of such enormous curatorial power might wind up with the few microorganisms he had left, barely alive and wriggling, of his literary vocation. Of that home forever, yes; but, in his case, a home falling to pieces under the roof of his head, riddled with cracks and leaks.
Also, his young and perpetual nemesis had made a successful career for himself among that collection of inteligentista writers in just that way: the younger and far more ambitious writer he’d supported when he was starting out. IKEA. A writer who now was succeeding here and there and everywhere with truly absurd and supposedly transcendent books, with “good ideas” that seemed to him almost unthinkable.
But the difference between IKEA’s thing and that other guy’s thing and so many other people’s thing was that he never came up with that kind of awful excellent idea. No: he was like one
of those spectators who has perfect knowledge of the truth behind the illusion and, for that reason, could never feel magical or like a magician. The trick of those products was perfectly clear to him and maybe that’s why he couldn’t create them with enough conviction to convince the reading public. And so, maybe, that was why nothing came to him and his prayers—begging for a lightning bolt of inspiration to strike (the miracle in two movements that Nabokov had divided into the initial vorstog or initial rapture, the “hot and brief” but not entirely clear movement in which time seems to dissolve, and the subsequent “cool and sustained” vdokhnovenie in which you understand how to recapture that fleeting instant and turn it into something that endures) and allow him to, over one weekend, bang out something quite noble and dignified yet simultaneously very commercial and easy to digest—went nowhere. Something like, for example, Silk by Alessandro Baricco. The literary equivalent of a fortifying or rejuvenating tonic. A miracle that would let him start over, to be someone else without ceasing to be himself: ancient history, passionate love, subtle metafiction, but all of it made entirely suitable for all audiences.
And thereby set aside so many preoccupations and occupations. But it was more than clear that, in the religious and sanjuanina and crucified dark night of his soul—a time the martyr-writer Francis Scott Fitzgerald located at three o’clock in the morning—nobody is listening to his prayers. And the thing is, between three and five in the morning-night/predawn, when there’s neither forgiveness nor apology, all these unthinkable things are thought. Before two and after five it’s licit to be still awake or already waking up. But at three, there’s no going back and nothing to be done; and an old friend of his sang once that “Los que no podemos dormir de noche siempre vamos de a dos por la vida,” in other words, “Those of us who can’t sleep at night always go through life as two people,” but he’d never made clear those two people could turn out to be you and your shadow.
So, in the dark, once, the idea came to him there and from there, then, thinking of whatever thing, to write a Nabokovian and experimental and, of course, oneiric short film.
Something that, right off the bat, ScreaMime found impractical and not “cool” or “trendy” or “hip” enough and abandoned it to its ill fate. But he’d grown fond of his project: to put images and precision to that never-entirely-written-and-described murky waking dream that came at the end of a story in its day inexplicably rejected by the New Yorker and ultimately accepted by the Hudson Review.
One of his two favorite stories (along with its twin opposite and other favorite, “Signs and Symbols,” both originally written in English) by Vladimir Nabokov. Not a ghost story, but something far stranger: a ghostly story. A story whose own plot and writing were bewitched by the actions of two very vivid dead women.
The Nabokov story was titled “The Vane Sisters” (the subject of sisters, yes, always arousing in him a strange but inevitable hypersensitivity to straight and curving lines in letters that always appeared to him in the florescent colors of guilt and synesthesia). And it was, for him, perfect and spectral (the only story that was at the level of his other favorite in the genre, “Los milagros no se recuperan” by Adolfo Bioy Casares, almost its accidental and distant twin). And the story closed wide-openly with an acrostic awakening in the final paragraph. There, at the end of the story, the narrator refers to two types of darkness (that of the solitude of absence and that of the solitude of sleep) and confesses that he cannot “duplicate” the second in writing and settles for making a list (like someone counting translucent sheep) of treacherous ectoplasmic phenomenology. Until, at dawn (he’d always liked that, in the precise poetics of the English language, the noun “dawn” was also a verb used to mean “to realize, to understand, to be enlightened”), the man at last manages to close his eyes and enter into “a dream that somehow was full of Cynthia,” one of the Vane sisters. A “disappointing” dream he analyzes in all possible ways and from all possible directions to end up confessing his failure in a couple of final sentences where the first letter of each of the words ends up forming a coded message sent by the dead sisters from the other side, from the so-called eternal sleep. And thus reveals that they’d been the true “authors” of the story, narrating their deaths and lives after death by putting into practice a “theory of intervening auras.” Thus, the living not only remember the dead: the living also read the dead, the dead writing so the living can read them. Thus, putting into practice and putting in a story the immortality of literature: not only does the work outlive the life, but it comes back from the dead again and again. The reconfirmation that death is but a second, life is long, the work of art is eternal.
The last paragraph of “The Vane Sisters” reads: “I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies—every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowy blurred, illusive, lost.” And when you extract the initials of each one of the words, with Ouija voice and cadence, you discover: ICICLES BY CYNTHIA. METER FROM ME, SYBIL.
Nabokov would build on all this—the whole supernatural maneuver—even more in the subsequent and brief yet immense Transparent Things: his own copy autographed by the author’s trembling and pale signature beneath the opening credits and, perhaps, his favorite of all his favorite Nabokovs; because it was the most functionally re-readable and dream-like of Nabokov’s books.
Transparent Things, which opens with a condemnation of the future as a figure of speech and a eulogy of the past, as a tool to concentrate on multiple variations of what could or could not have been, and, paradoxically and playfully, interrupts this hypothesis with a, coming up, “More in a moment.”
Transparent Things, where the Past is defined as “revelatory” and “sansgêne,” and the murky narrator or opaque narrators, similar to those Nabokov had already attempted, preliminary close-ups, in the brief novel The Eye (Соглядатай) as well as in stories like “The Visit to the Museum,” is/are never defined. Narrator(s) who seem to tell everything from outside time and space and beyond all things of this world. All of them transparently affirming the darkness by saying things (yes, it’d been Nabokov all along, now he remembers it was Nabokov whom he couldn’t remember at the beginning of this microscopic night) like “Night is always a giant.” And crowning ghosts (the dead were “good mixers,” quite social, and blended in better with the whole from the dust and to dust thing) as redactors and editors and first readers and critics of everything the living live.
And he wanted to write it and dream it and make it into images and project it.
He felt doing that was like a form of atonement.
To ask forgiveness for what’d happened with his sister and his sister’s little son, who was maybe dead or maybe not. Penelope’s little son was now like that “floating boy” he’d been afraid of when they turned off the light in his room, at bedtime. A kind of child-like specter that appeared, hanging in the corners of his bedroom, and motioned for him to follow, and he’d incorporated that “floating boy” into a story, as he’d done with so many things Penelope’s son said. Someone who was no longer there, but who now seemed to be floating everywhere. A little boy, taking up more and more space. And whose figure appeared to him, translucent, as if wrapped in a chrysalis, between dreams and awakenings, in the most unexpected places, making frenetic gestures to him, as if wanting to communicate something of extreme importance, as if he were a little brother of the Vane sisters.
Letter by letter so he could put them in order and make sense of them.
But Penelope’s little son had vanished before learning to read and write.
And with his disappearance, he’d begun to unlearn how to do so many things: to sleep, to write. All he had left was the gift of being able to read others and the curse of being able to write only about them, fewer all the time, closer and closer to being only one.
† Nabokov like the Grand Central Ec
centric. An eccentric (Bob Dylan was another) was someone who didn’t settle for occupying a central position for everyone, but moved out to the peripheries to establish his or her own center, certain that, sooner or later, everyone would be pulled into orbit around it. Nabokov had been an eccentric writer who’d become centric thanks to a great eccentric and central book, Lolita, with which and from there, he gave himself the luxury and pleasure of being more eccentric than ever in Pale Fire or Ada, or Ardor or Transparent Things or Look at the Harlequins! Nabokov as someone who’d come up with his own thing (including, at least from outside, an enviable marriage and an excellent relationship with his son of rather perversely polymorphous vocation, capable of bringing together tragic opera arias with treacherous race cars) without fitting any preconceived mold. A universal foreigner who felt his homeland was everywhere (“I am an American writer, born in Russia, educated in England, where I studied French literature before moving to Germany for fifteen years … My head speaks English, my heart speaks Russian and my ear speaks French,” he said); and all others were his subjects, there down below, lower still, at his feet. A polymorphous and polyphonic and perverse wordplayer who always came out on top in any language. Nabokov was, also, a way of clinging to a he-who-laughs-last-laughs-best; dreaming his exception that proved the rule might someday be repeated; the closest thing to believing God is an atheist. The greatest example to follow, yes, if it weren’t impossible to catch him and ask his advice; because Nabokov began and ended in himself, he’d disoriented his biographers and fans, and he’d burned, with the fire of a mischievous prose, all the bridges behind him, including the one that could end up leading to the Nobel committee, which, many years later, had the delicacy to rebuild them and cross back over them in order to, in Nabokov’s absence, give the Nobel to Bob Dylan. (Search for possible mentions from Nabokov of Bob Dylan and from Bob Dylan of Nabokov and, yes, there are stanzas from the poem Pale Fire that could work on Blonde on Blonde; but there probably aren’t any, because practitioners of the same method of appropriation/re-creation/geniusification—a system that dates back to the beginning of time and finds among its practitioners Homer and William Shakespeare, both more than once invoked by Nabokov and Dylan—tend to avoid one another. And, oh, here I have a perfect specimen and example of the kind of logical thought and senseless idea that tends to grow out on the barren moors of insomnia.)
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