Vampire in Love E-Book

Enrique Vila-Matas

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 432

Beschreibung

Gathered for the first time in English and spanning his entire career, Vampire in Love offers a selection of the Spanish master Enrique Vila-Matas's finest short stories. An effeminate, hunchbacked barber on the verge of death falls in love with a choir boy. A fledgling writer on amphetamines visits Marguerite Duras's Paris apartment and watches his dinner companion slip into the abyss. An unsuspecting man receives a mysterious phone call from a lonely ophthalmologist and visits his abandoned villa. The stories in Vampire in Love, selected and brilliantly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, are all told with Vila-Matas's delightful erudition and wit, and his provocative questioning of the interrelation of art and life.

Leseprobe

First published in English translation in 2016 by And Other Storieswww.andotherstories.org

First published in English translation in the US by New Directions Books

Copyright © 2016 Enrique Vila-Matas English-language translation copyright © 2016 Margaret Jull Costa

These stories have been selected from a number of books in Spanish by the author. This edition is published by arrangement with Enrique Vila-Matas c/o MB Agencia Literaria S.L.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher. The right of Enrique Vila-Matas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-1-908276-86-5 eBook ISBN 978-1-908276-87-2

Proofreader: Sarah Terry; typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London; cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is supported in part with a subsidy from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport of Spain and in part by public funding from Arts Council England.

Contents

A Permanent HomeSea SwellTorre del MiradorI Never Go to the MoviesRosa Schwarzer Comes Back to LifeIn Search of the Electrifying Double ActDeath by SaudadeThe Hour of the Tired and WearyThey Say I Should Say Who I AmGreetings from DanteIdentifying MarksThe Boy on the SwingAn Idle SoulInvented MemoriesThe Vampire in LoveModestyNiñoI’m Not Going to Read Any More EmailsVok’s Successors

For Paula de Parma

‌A Permanent Home

I never knew much about my mother. She was killed in our house in Barcelona, two days after I was born. The murder remained a mystery, until I thought I had solved it on my twentieth birthday, when my father, on his deathbed, demanded to see me and told me that, now the moment was fast approaching when he would be permanently silenced, he wanted to tell me something before that happened, something he felt it was important I should know.

‘Eventually even words abandon us,’ I remember him saying, ‘and that’s all there is to it really, but, first, you should know that your mother died because I arranged it.’

I immediately imagined a hired killer and, once I’d recovered from the initial shock, I began to believe my father’s confession. The image of a bloodstained axe was enough for me to feel as if the ground were swallowing me up, leaving behind, like so many pathetic doodles, all the scenes of joy and plenitude that had made me idealise my father and create the mythical figure of a man always up before dawn, still in his pyjamas, a shawl around his shoulders, a cigarette between his fingers, eyes fixed on the weathervane on some distant chimney, watching the day begin, and devoting himself with implacable regularity and monstrous perseverance to the solitary ritual of creating his own language through the writing of a book of memories or an inventory of nostalgias, which I always assumed would, when he died, become part of my tender, albeit terrifying, inheritance.

However, on my twentieth birthday, in Port de la Selva, any tender feelings that had previously attached to said inheritance vanished, and I felt only the terror, the infinite horror, of thinking that, along with that inventory, my father was bequeathing me the surprising tale of a murder, whose origins, according to him, could be found in early April 1945, a year before I was born, when, despite having already experienced two resounding matrimonial failures, he nevertheless felt he was still young and emotionally strong enough to embark on a third such adventure. He therefore wrote a letter to a young woman from the province of Ampurdán in Catalonia, whom he had met by chance in Figueras and who, he felt, had all the necessary qualities to make him happy, for not only was she a poor orphan – which made things easier for him, since he could offer her security and a not inconsiderable fortune – she was also beautiful, gentle and had the most sensual lower lip in the entire universe; above all, she was extraordinarily naive and docile, which is to say that she had a proper sense of woman as man’s subordinate, a quality he particularly valued, given his two previous hellish conjugal experiences.

You have to bear in mind, for example, that my father’s first wife, in a freak attack of rage, had bitten off part of his ear. He had been so very unhappy in his two earlier marriages that it should come as no surprise to anyone that, when he considered finding a third wife, he wanted someone who was both gentle and docile.

My mother possessed both those qualities, and he knew that all it would take to entrap her was a carefully drafted letter. And so it proved. So passionate and so skilfully written was his letter that, shortly afterwards, my mother turned up in Barcelona, in the Barrio Gótico’s labyrinth of narrow streets, where she knocked on the door of the old, soot-begrimed mansion owned by my father, who, it seems, either could not or chose not to disguise his emotion when he saw her standing there in the rain, clutching a small blue suitcase, which she put down on the carpet before asking, in a tremulous, humble orphan’s voice, if she could come in.

‘I could never forget that rain,’ my father said from his deathbed, ‘because when I saw her cross the threshold, it seemed to me that the savage rain was actually there in her hips, and I was filled by the most intensely erotic impulse I have ever felt.’

That impulse seemed to know no bounds when she told him that she was an expert at dancing the tirana, a long-forgotten medieval Spanish dance. Beguiled by this slightly anachronistic hobby, my father ordered her to perform the dance immediately, and, eager to please him in every way possible, my mother danced until she dropped, ending up, exhausted, in the arms of a man who, without a moment’s hesitation, affectionately ordered her to marry him at once.

That night, they slept together for the first time, and my father, afflicted by the sentimentality that accompanies certain infatuations, had a sense that, just as he had imagined, making love with her was like making love with a bird, for in bed she trilled and sang, and it seemed to him that no other voice could possibly match hers, and that even her bones, like her lower lip and her songs, were as delicate as those of a bird.

‘And you were conceived that very night, beneath the murmuring Barcelona rain,’ my father said suddenly, his eyes very wide.

A long, slow sigh, always so troubling in a dying man, preceded a brusque demand for a glass of vodka. I refused to give it to him, but when he threatened not to continue his story, I was so afraid he might carry out his threat that I raced into the kitchen and, making sure Aunt Consuelo wasn’t looking, filled two glasses with vodka. I realise now that I need not have taken these absurd precautions because, at that moment, Aunt Consuelo was entirely absorbed by her desire for a particular painting in the living room, a dark picture representing some angels flirting celestially as they climbed a ladder; she lived only for that painting, and her obsession doubtless distracted her from another: the constant anguish of knowing that her brother was dying, laid low by a gentle, but implacable illness. And he, at that moment, was entirely absorbed in feeding the illusion of his story.

Once he had slaked his thirst, my father went on to explain that they had honeymooned in two cities, Istanbul and Cairo, and that it was in Istanbul where he noticed the first anomaly in the behaviour of his sweet, docile wife. For my part, I noticed the first anomaly in my father’s story, in that he was confusing those two cities with Paris and London, but I preferred not to interrupt when I heard him explain that my mother’s anomalous behaviour wasn’t exactly a defect, but more of a strange obsession. She collected bread rolls.

Right from the start, visiting Istanbul’s bakeries became a kind of strange sport. They sampled various bread rolls, quite needlessly as it turned out, because they weren’t destined to be eaten, but only to add to the weight of the large bag in which my mother kept her collection. My father protested and asked rather irritably why she was so enamoured with bread.

‘The troops have to eat something,’ she replied succinctly, smiling at him like someone humouring a madman.

‘What do you mean, Diana? Is this some kind of joke?’ my bewildered father asked.

‘I think you’re the one who must be joking by asking such absurd questions,’ she replied absent-mindedly, adopting the gentle, dreamy look of the myopic.

According to my father, they spent a week in Istanbul and by the time they arrived in Cairo, my mother had about forty bread rolls in her bag. Since it was late at night, he knew he was safe from the bakeries of Cairo, and walked happily along, even offering to carry her bag. He did not know that those would be his last moments of conjugal bliss.

My father and mother dined on a boat anchored in the Nile and ended up dancing and sipping pink champagne by the light of the moon on the balcony of their hotel room. A few hours later, however, my father woke in the middle of the Cairo night and discovered, to his great surprise, that my mother was a sleepwalker and was standing on the sofa frenziedly dancing the tirana. He tried to remain calm and waited patiently until, utterly exhausted, she came back to bed and fell into the deepest of sleeps. Once asleep, however, she gave him still more reason to feel alarmed, for my mother began talking in her sleep and, turning to him, said something that sounded for all the world like a categorical, implacable command:

‘Fall in!’

My father still hadn’t recovered from the shock of that first command, when he heard her say:

‘Right turn. Break ranks.’

He didn’t sleep for the rest of the night and began to suspect that, in her dreams, his wife was deceiving him with an entire regiment. The following morning, my father had to face reality, which, as far as he was concerned, meant accepting that in those last few hours, she had danced the tirana and behaved like a deranged general, whose sole concern seemed to be issuing orders and handing out bread rolls to the troops. He took consolation from the fact that, during the day, his wife reverted to her usual gentle, docile self. Not that this was much of a consolation, though, because, while on their remaining nights in Cairo there was no repeat of the sleep-dancing episode, the issuing of orders only increased in regularity and in vigour.

‘And reveille,’ my father told me, ‘became a real torment, because every day, minutes before your mother woke, her snoring appeared to be imitating the unmistakable sound of a bugle at dawn.’

Was my father delirious? No, on the contrary, he was perfectly aware of what he was saying, indeed, it was impressive to see how, at the very gates of death, he still retained his usual sense of humour. Was he making it up? Possibly, which is why I tried fixing him with an incredulous stare, but this didn’t seem to put him off in the least. Grave-faced and impassive, he continued his story.

He described how, on waking, my mother would instantly become her usual gentle, docile self, except, occasionally, near a bakery, or when she was simply strolling down the street, she would shoot strange, melancholy glances at the soldiers standing guard behind barricades erected on the banks of the Nile (at the time, of course, Cairo was on a war footing). One morning, she even tried out a few dance steps in front of the soldiers.

More than once, my father was tempted to confront the problem directly and speak to her, saying, for example:

‘You appear to have at the very least a dual personality. You’re a sleepwalker and, quite apart from standing on sofas and dancing the tirana, you’ve turned the marital bed into a military parade ground.’

He said nothing, however, because he feared that if he did broach the subject, it might work to his disadvantage and he would succeed only in revealing to her a hidden aspect of her character: a certain talent for giving orders. But one day, while they were out riding camels near the pyramids, my father made the mistake of telling her the plot of a short story he was planning to write:

‘It’s the story of a very well-matched, even exemplary couple. However, like all happy stories, this would be of no interest at all, if not for the fact that, at night, in her dreams, the woman turns into a soldier.’

He had hardly finished speaking when my mother asked to be helped down from the camel and then, shooting him a defiant glance, ordered him to carry the bag full of Turkish and Egyptian bread rolls. My father was absolutely terrified, because he realised that, from that moment on, not only would he be condemned to carrying around that nightmarish collection of foreign baked goods, he would continue to receive order after order.

On their return to Barcelona, my mother was already issuing orders with such authority that he began to think of her as a general in the Foreign Legion, and the oddest thing of all was that, right from that very moment, she appeared to identify totally with that position, for she would go into a kind of trance and say that she felt she was lost in a universe adorned with heavy Algerian rugs, with strainers for making pastis and absinthe and hookahs for marijuana, and she was scanning the desert horizon from an oasis village in the luminous night.

When they arrived in Barcelona, back in my father’s mansion in the Barrio Gótico, any friends who visited were astonished to see my mother smoking like a man, with a lit cigarette hanging from one corner of her mouth, and to see my father, his features hard and blunt as pebbles polished by the waves, half-blinded as if by the desert sun, and transformed into an old legionnaire flicking through ancient colonial newspapers.

At this point in the story, the only thing I understood completely was that – quite astonishingly for someone on the verge of dying – my father, true to his constant need to tell tales, was continuing ceaselessly to invent. Not even the proximity of death could take from him his taste for making up stories. And I had the impression that he wanted to bequeath to me the house of fiction and the pleasure of taking up permanent residence there. And that is why, springing onto the running-board of his carriage of words, I said:

‘You are clearly confusing me with someone else. I am not your son. And as for Aunt Consuelo, she is merely a character I invented.’

Before responding, he looked at me with a degree of unease. Then, deeply moved, he squeezed my hand and gave me a broad smile, that of someone who knows his message has reached safe harbour. Along with the inventory of nostalgias, he had just bequeathed to me the house of eternal shadows.

My father, who had once believed in many, many things only to end up distrusting all of them, was leaving me with a unique, definitive faith: that of believing in a fiction that one knows to be fiction, aware that this is all that exists, and that the exquisite truth consists in knowing that it is a fiction and that, nevertheless, one should believe in it.

‌

‌Sea Swell

I had a friend once. Indeed, at the time, I only had one friend. His name was Andrés and he lived in Paris, and, much to his delight, I travelled to that city to see him. The very evening of my arrival, he introduced me to Marguerite Duras, who was a friend of his. Unfortunately, that evening, I had taken two or three amphetamines. This was my regular daily dose, for I was convinced they would help me to imagine stories and become a novelist. I don’t know why I was so convinced that this was true, since I had never written a word in my life and the amphetamines were largely to blame for this. They were also to blame for me losing all my money in secret gambling dens in Barcelona.

I was completely bankrupt when I travelled to Paris, and my friend lent me some money and introduced me to Marguerite Duras. Andrés was one of those people who believes that the company of brilliant writers helps to improve one’s own writing.

‘One of my attic flats has just become vacant,’ Marguerite Duras said as soon as we met.

If I hadn’t taken those wretched pills, I would have responded at once and said that I would very much like to rent it. However, the amphetamines always had a bad effect on me. I would fix people with mad, staring eyes, as bright as fog lamps, and there seemed no point in giving expression to any of my thoughts because I had already thought them. On top of that, they made me lose my appetite and, needless to say, any desire to write.

We were standing opposite the Café de Flore. Hearing me babbling a few syllables that stubbornly refused to cohere into words, my friend Andrés made a series of friendly gestures in my direction and came to my aid in his curious, heavily accented French, making clear that I would love to rent that attic flat situated in the highly desirable location of Montparnasse. And so it was that, without my having uttered a single word, Marguerite expressed her willingness to become my landlady. The rent was very reasonable and additionally she invited us to dine at her house the following evening. In fact, the rent was purely symbolic. Marguerite liked to help young writers in need of accommodation.

I went to the supper with Andrés, and with two or three amphetamines inside me. This was an act of sheer youthful recklessness, since behind that invitation lay Marguerite’s desire to get to know me a little and find out if I would make a suitable tenant. Unfortunately, I only realised this when it was too late. Andrés told me when we were already standing outside her house. I panicked and roundly cursed the amphetamines. But, as I said, by then, it was too late.

The person who opened the door was Sonia Orwell, who had also been invited to supper. We went into the kitchen and said hello to Marguerite, who was embroiled in an unlikely struggle with some baby squid being cooked in their own ink, which – although I never knew why – were leaping and dancing around in the frying pan. With a cigarette clamped in one corner of her mouth, Marguerite seemed entirely occupied with these rebellious squid. One of them leapt out onto the kitchen floor and, quick as you like, Marguerite bent down and immediately restored it to its proper place in the pan. In doing so, her cigarette fell in among the squid and was instantly fried to a crisp.

We went into the living room, leaving Marguerite to finish preparing supper. Sonia Orwell offered us a cup of coffee, and I wondered if it was the custom in Paris to begin suppers at the end. Sonia Orwell soon cleared up this mystery by explaining that she was feeling really exhausted and hoping the coffee might perk her up. In an attempt to be nice, I made a supreme effort and said:

‘Thank you very much. I love coffee.’

I actually disliked coffee intensely, but saying these words cheered me up, even though I felt that I would find it as hard to drink coffee as to utter another word. Fortunately, Andrés again came to my aid, proving what a good friend he was. Knowing the deleterious effect amphetamines had on me, he began speaking for both of us. He did so by embarking on a discussion of the huge advances made by feminism in the modern world. (I merely nodded now and then.) Then he spoke about General de Gaulle and how fed up he was seeing him governing France. Then, suddenly, he began to talk about me. He explained that I had only been in Paris for one day and that he was the only person I knew there.

‘The thing that has surprised him most about the city is seeing so many Japanese people,’ Andrés said, with a smile on his lips, indicating that while he considered me to be a friend, he also thought I was a complete hick.

Then he told Sonia Orwell about a strip club. He explained that, as soon as I had arrived in Paris, I had headed straight for the Quartier Pigalle, where I spent the little money I had staring at naked women and feeling bored.

‘On the other hand,’ said Andrés, ‘a whore from Alsace told him that he was very handsome and complimented him on his sweater and, above all, on the colour of his trousers.’

I felt pretty embarrassed but, at the same time, unable to correct anything he had said, because I was incapable of speech.

‘Speaking of whores,’ said Sonia Orwell, downing her second cup of coffee, ‘Marguerite suggests that we go to the Bois de Boulogne tonight. She wants to find out if it’s true what they say in the newspapers.’

‘And what do they say?’ asked Andrés.

‘Oh, nothing much, just that some of the prostitutes there are dressed as if for their first communion.’

Marguerite came into the room and said that we would soon be able to sit down to eat and that she just had to finish making the curry sauce. I thought this odd. Octopus doesn’t need any sauce. What was I thinking? It was squid not octopus I’d seen in the kitchen. I realised to what extent those wretched amphetamines were addling my brain. I glanced at Andrés, hoping he would continue to help me out and speak for me, but he clearly wasn’t up to doing that just then. He rather resembled a coffee pot. A few words that appeared to be coming to a boil immediately behind his eyes were bubbling up towards his brain. Suddenly, his head began bobbing frantically up and down, as if it were about to explode, until, pointing at me, he said to Marguerite:

‘Do you know, until he came to Paris, he had never seen a Japanese person?’

‘Not even at the movies?’ she asked.

I swallowed hard, recalled several movies about Hiroshima that I had seen, but was incapable of saying anything.

‘But how is that possible?’ she insisted. ‘Are there no Japanese people in Barcelona?’

I cursed the fact that Andrés occasionally forgot that I couldn’t speak. And since he again failed to rescue me, I made a supreme effort and, attempting to be comical, I said:

‘No, Franco has banned them.’

Instead of accompanying these words with an ironic smile, my face became fixed in a harsh, horrific grimace. To conceal this, I tried to take a sip of coffee, but my hand was shaking so much that I nearly spilled it over Sonia Orwell’s skirt. They all pretended not to have noticed, and I listened to them talking for a while. Then, Marguerite announced that she was going back to the kitchen to finish making the curry sauce and carried the coffee pot away with her. I understood this to mean that she would be adding coffee, not curry sauce, to the squid. So much for squid ink, I thought. God, I was in a state. I shot Andrés another pleading glance, a cry for help, but, instead, my face creased into a crazed scowl, which Marguerite saw as she left.

‘We don’t eat people here, you know,’ she said, coming back into the living room and this time bearing a tray containing a dish of rice with curry sauce, which was, apparently, to precede the squid cooked in their ink. I felt Sonia Orwell’s eyes fixed on me, and had the distinct impression that she was beginning to view me as if I were a Martian.

‘Help yourselves,’ said Marguerite.

When it was my turn, I piled my plate with rice.

‘You’re obviously hungry,’ said Andrés, knowing full well that I had no appetite at all. I thought this was because he wanted to draw attention to me and my piled-high plate. I forgave him, though, because it seemed to me that he was actually trying to draw me out and, like any good friend, was worried about what would happen if I didn’t start behaving more normally – and soon. I knew that, deep down, he was acting out of the best possible motives.

I tasted the sauce and could barely keep from pulling a face. As for the rice, I knew, right from the start, that I wouldn’t be able to eat it. When they had all cleared their plates (even soaking up the sauce with a great deal of bread), all eyes were turned on my plate, which remained scandalously intact. Luckily, this time, Andrés rode to my rescue. He said that only half an hour before, I had succumbed to the charms of some Tunisian cakes.

‘You’re making all kinds of discoveries,’ said Marguerite. ‘Eating Tunisian cakes, seeing Japanese people for the first time.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ I replied laconically.

I assumed I had lost any chance I might have of renting that attic flat. I couldn’t have been less charming. However, just then, someone rang the doorbell. Sonia Orwell suggested it might be Louis Jacquot, an actor who wanted to adapt one of Marguerite’s books for the stage. He was, I learned, a poor wretch who had played so many different roles that he no longer knew who he was. We heard Marguerite talking to someone in the hall, and when she returned to the living room, she confirmed that it had indeed been the actor.

‘He’s gone now,’ she said.

‘That was quick. What did he want?’ asked Andrés.

‘Oh, nothing. The usual thing,’ Sonia Orwell said. ‘He wanted to know who he is.’

There was a brief silence, then Marguerite poured herself a glass of wine and declared:

‘Poor man.’

Andrés took charge of the bottle of wine and drank four glasses one after the other, almost without pausing for breath. Marguerite was obliged to open another bottle of Beaujolais.

‘So you’re from Barcelona?’ Marguerite asked, as if giving me one last chance to say something.

Then, as if the question had been addressed to him, Andrés stepped in and said:

‘Yes, he’s from Barcelona, whereas I, on the other hand, come from Atlantis.’

At first, one might have guessed this was the result of those four glasses of wine, but he hadn’t really drunk that much. Knowing Andrés as I did, it was more likely that he had finally decided to behave as the most heroic of friends should behave in the most difficult of circumstances. It could be that he had chosen to adopt a diversionary tactic, which involved behaving like a mad eccentric in order to focus attention on himself and thus divert those dangerously perplexed and probing looks away from me. If so, it must be said that Andrés was a very good friend indeed.

‘So you’re from Atlantis, are you?’ asked Sonia Orwell, with a smile on her lips.

‘I am,’ responded Andrés succinctly, and tears welled up in his eyes. When we saw this, we all froze. A heavy silence fell. For a while, as we ate the main course, we listened to him talking about that lost continent. Gesturing dramatically, he summoned up certain marine images, which, according to him, were ancient memories from when he used to live in his real homeland. I had never heard anyone describe with such precision the unknown world of the sea bed. He spoke of paths carved out of the rocks, of the giant skeletons of fish, of shells and stones as pink as mother-of-pearl. He talked and talked, oblivious to the food on his plate, oblivious to the evening and to us. At one point, Marguerite suggested that he had perhaps drunk too much.

‘I read somewhere,’ he said, ‘that when you’ve drunk a little, reality grows simpler, you can leap over the spaces in between things, everything seems to fall into place and you can say: yes, that’s it. Well, that is what has happened to me tonight. You might think me mad or that I’m making it all up, but you’re wrong. For me, tonight, everything has suddenly fallen into place. Ever since I was a child, I’ve always had a sense that, in another life, I used to live in Atlantis. Now, at last, I feel absolutely sure I was right.’

And with that, Andrés finished off the second bottle of Beaujolais.

‘Everything you’ve told us – and you told it very well indeed – is curious in the extreme,’ Marguerite said, ‘but it’s very hard not to think that you’ve either drunk too much or are simply having us on.’

Andrés did not bat an eyelid.

‘And would you believe me,’ he continued, ‘if I were to speak to you of a sea that was always so calm that its waves barely rippled when they touched the foot of the cliffs? I remember, too, flocks of seabirds resting on the bluest waters that have ever existed. I remember the profound happiness of all my compatriots, because we lived on the very margins of history or, rather, entered into it only very superficially. We conserved so much energy in our cities that the cosmos itself threatened to be transformed into pure energy. I remember vividly the pieces of white tinplate with the top painted in red lacquer that we used to catch the sumaje fish, our only enemies.’

He did not appear to be inebriated. True, he had drunk quite a lot, but he spoke with utter serenity and with a nostalgia that appeared genuine.

Perhaps trying to change the subject, Sonia Orwell pointed at me, still locked in my rigorous silence, and said:

‘Your friend is so shy. Not only has he barely uttered a word all evening, he hasn’t even dared to open his mouth to eat.’

‘My friend,’ said Andrés furiously, ‘is not in the least bit shy.’

His sudden fury seemed to indicate that he wanted to keep their attention from falling on me. However, what he said next didn’t exactly confirm that impression.

‘My friend,’ he added, ‘has taken a few amphetamines and is constantly thinking about his novel.’

I was horrified. He had just produced out of nowhere a novel that did not exist and about which I was probably going to be obliged to talk. This proved unnecessary, however, because Andrés went on to explain that I was writing ‘the memoirs’ of a ventriloquist.

‘Unfortunately,’ he added, ‘this very evening, he lost the manuscript. He left it in a taxi. The memoirs could be read as a novel, although the plot isn’t in any way conventional; it is a fractured, uncertain thing and, unlike nineteenth-century plots, is in no way tyrannical, making no attempt to explain the world, far less embrace a whole life, but only a few episodes in a life.’

‘And what kind of person was this ventriloquist?’ asked Sonia Orwell.

‘I don’t know,’ Andrés went on, ‘the kind of man who is always considering leaving everything behind, saying goodbye to Europe and following in Rimbaud’s footsteps. I think, in the end, he did leave Europe, but the real cause of his departure does not appear in the memoirs.’

‘Why not?’

‘Before he fled, he committed a murder, and he could hardly confess to that. In the Lisbon night, having bade an unexpected and final farewell to the stage and to his public, he went in search of the barber who had stolen from him the woman he loved, and in a deserted alleyway in the port, he stabbed him through the heart with the sharpened point of a beach umbrella from Java. He could not, of course, write about that in his memoirs and so he fled Europe. In his memoirs, though, what is repugnant and cowardly is disguised as something beautiful, cultivated and literary.’

I was lucky in that, once Andrés had invented this story, he promptly forgot all about me and plunged back into his eager search for his origins. He spoke about certain still, hot summer days in his childhood, when the torrid heat weighed on the waters of the river, and it was easy to fall into a sleep so deep it resembled death and thus to retrieve that most distant of past lives on Atlantis.

‘Even as a child, I had a sense that I came from there,’ he went on. ‘One day, I fell into the Manzanares river. I was a clumsy boy and didn’t know how to swim, and, to be honest, I’ve never learned. I went right under, and then I noticed I was being transported to remote places that suddenly seemed very familiar, as if I’d been there before. It took three or four minutes for me to resurface, time enough to see, at the bottom of the Manzanares, the old palaces of my true homeland. I remembered them as soon as I saw them. The light had a silvery tinge to it. That was where my real life went on: the streets, houses, stones, the footsteps of my true compatriots. And there I was, too, telling stories to rapt and loyal audiences. I was a storyteller recounting the tales of people who had migrated from their bodies in order once more to inhabit their ancient land.’

Someone commented that it was getting late. We were certainly surprised by what Andrés had said, but also somewhat weary and weighed down, although I was still grateful to my friend for coming to my rescue like that. That’s what friends are for, I thought, pleased with his efforts on my behalf. I preferred to think that he had acted selflessly, rather than assume that he was simply drunk or mad.

‘I would suggest,’ said Marguerite kindly, ‘that we postpone this conversation until tomorrow. It really is very late, and I’m beginning to feel sleepy. I wanted to go to the Bois de Boulogne, but I’m too tired now.’

It really was very late, but Andrés seemed not to notice. He started talking about underwater currents stronger than life itself, currents that dragged one inexorably back to the lost continent.

‘Perhaps the day will come,’ he said, ‘when I won’t return… My old suit is already very worn, I need to change it, I don’t feel comfortable in it any more. I am, I believe, in the same state as a snake just before it’s about to shed its skin: the daylight becomes bothersome and then, like any good snake, it withdraws to its lair.’

He paused so briefly that we didn’t have time to interrupt. He went on to describe the fires that burned in every hearth in his homeland.

‘The flames,’ he said, ‘used to rise straight up and gave off no smoke at all. They were fed by dry juniper branches that exuded an acrid odour. On every mantelpiece in Atlantis there were always shield-like candelabras, whose candles gave out a powerful blue light, like the deep, deep blue of our seas.’

Someone said again that it was getting late.

Andrés agreed to put his coat on over that old suit, but first polished off whatever alcohol was left in the house. I put a friendly arm around his shoulder.

‘Come on,’ I said, leading him gently to the front door.

‘The attic is yours,’ Marguerite said, much to my surprise. ‘I’ll show you around tomorrow. There’s only a mattress, so you may have to buy some more furniture. Yes, I think there’s just a mattress and a poster. A poster of Venice showing a very fine reproduction of a crystal chandelier. That’s what the concierge told me anyway. You’ll see.’

I said goodbye, feeling very pleased at this unexpectedly happy ending. Then Andrés and I went out into the street. All the cafés in Paris were closed and, beneath the starry sky, they resembled silent mausoleums on the moon. It would be a difficult night to forget, I thought. And so it has proved to be. That night, walking home with Andrés, he told me that we would never see each other again, and he kept remembering with irresistible nostalgia a valley of streams and mauve waterfalls. He told me that he wanted, without further delay, to disappear by his own hand.

I didn’t quite understand what he meant by this, but I assumed that ‘by his own hand’ must be some reference to suicide. I thought that perhaps he was talking about a disappearance that belonged not so much to the realm of necessity, but to that of freedom. I was still pondering this when Andrés repeated those same words – ‘by his own hand’ – and, in one bound, leapt into the icy waters of the Seine, vanishing from sight. My first thought was that he really was taking things too far; then I realised that it was up to me to save him, because there was no one else around to help. I took off my overcoat and, without hesitation, jumped into the Seine and soon managed to locate him beneath the waters. He was in a near-ecstatic – I would almost say blissful – state, as if he were allowing himself to be carried by those underwater currents back to his original homeland.

I grabbed him by one arm, but he struggled violently, as if I had interrupted his journey. I had no option but to punch him hard and render him unconscious. Then came the hardest part, because I have never done anything requiring such enormous physical effort. I dragged his body up onto the quay, but there was still no one else around. I covered him with my overcoat and waited for him to regain consciousness. When he did, he looked at me in bewilderment, felt his chin, and asked what we were doing there, soaked to the skin.

‘Can’t you remember anything?’ I said.

‘To be honest, no…’

Feeling confused and exhausted, I thought for a moment. I was afraid I might have caught pneumonia. Deep down, I was very angry. The water had wiped my head clean of the effects of those amphetamines.

‘Do you really not remember?’

‘No, I told you, no.’

‘You mean, you can’t even remember where we’ve come from?’

I immediately regretted asking this question, fearing that he might say: ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m from Atlantis.’ But he really didn’t seem to remember anything. I was glad I hadn’t mentioned Marguerite Duras, a name he might have associated with the lost continent.

‘Let’s go home,’ I said.

Again I regretted my words, fearing that the storyteller might recall his humble home back in Atlantis. But no, he remained in a state of utter bewilderment. The problem was that I couldn’t utter a word, because anything I said might trigger a memory. Alas, I was so upset with him that anger overcame both prudence and silence. Why had he done all that? I asked him.

‘All what?’ he answered with his most beatific smile.

‘What do you think?’ I said very loudly, my eyes wild.

He lay there, half-confused and half-thoughtful, until suddenly he gave signs of having recovered his memory.

‘Ah, yes,’ he said.

I feared the worst.

‘Why did I do all that?’ He was clearly thinking deeply. ‘Well, the truth is, it really doesn’t matter. I would say that I had to do it, do you see?’

I can still remember the hard look in his eyes when, shortly afterwards, he stood up, and walking slowly backwards, as if about to take part in the hundred-metre backstroke, he said:

‘That’s what friends are for.’

And again he leapt into the river, this time taking my overcoat with him, as if he wanted to find out just how far our friendship would go.

‌

‌Torre del Mirador

One morning, I received a phone call from someone saying that he was close to having a nervous breakdown and that he needed to talk to me because he felt so alone since separating from his wife.

‘Why are you telling me all this?’ I said, a logical reaction for someone who has been woken up by a complete stranger.

‘Let me explain,’ he responded. ‘My wife was making my life a misery by going on at me all the time about how ugly I was. She used to say she hated my face. One day, I got so fed up that I decided to rent the flat I’m phoning from now and from which I can see my former home, the villa where my wife still lives, alone and abandoned.’

I thought this must be some friend of mine playing a trick on me. The other man was still talking.

‘I needed to talk to someone and I picked your name at random from the phone book. I’m alone here with my binoculars and the enormous mirror I’ve installed in my bedroom.’

This was either a joke or the man was mad, I thought. I suggested that he stop playing games and go back to his wife.

‘I can’t, it’s too late. She thinks I’ve disappeared and doesn’t realise that I’m spying on her. Haven’t you ever wondered what will happen after you die? In the early days, I watched the procession of visitors, family and friends. My wife, of course, seemed anxious and, above all, confused. She couldn’t understand what could possibly have happened to me, she couldn’t understand why I had vanished in that mysterious fashion. Lately, though, now that everyone assumes I’ve disappeared for good, she seems ever more resigned to her fate, happier. It wouldn’t surprise me if, any day now, she decided to remarry. But that isn’t what bothers me.’

Out of politeness – and a touch of curiosity (it no longer seemed to me that this was a joke or that he was a madman) – I asked if what was bothering him, as he had mentioned at the beginning, was loneliness.

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Loneliness and monotony. I get more and more bored with each day that passes, especially when I have nothing to spy on. For example, when my wife goes shopping, there’s nothing happening in the villa or in the garden. So what do I do? I sit here getting mortally bored.’

‘Go home, man,’ I said, hoping to appeal to his common sense. ‘Whatever made you think of doing such a thing?’

‘It happened, and now I can’t go home again because I’ve gone too far. For some days now, I’ve had a completely different face. Even if I did go back, I doubt that my wife would recognise me.’

Things were getting interesting. I had a rather unimaginative first cousin, who was always on the lookout for ideas for his movies. Perhaps I could pass the story on to him.

‘You say you have a different face?’

‘Yes. My voice has changed too. I took an intensive voice-training course and learned to use different registers. I used to be a doctor. Now I’m no one.’

‘What sort of doctor?’

‘I used to be a cosmetic surgeon. I just got back from Brazil, where some very competent colleagues of mine completely transformed my face. I’m not as ugly as I was before. Sad to say, though, I’m no longer a surgeon, no longer married, and no longer have a future. All I have are a mirror and a pair of binoculars.’

I didn’t know what to say. I could see myself reflected in my own wardrobe mirror, and it occurred to me then to ask why he had put an enormous mirror in his bedroom.

‘So that I can get used to my new face,’ he said.

I fell silent, thinking about what he had said. My silence alarmed him.

‘I know you want to hang up,’ he continued. ‘Everyone does. They think I’m some practical joker or else mad and they hang up.’

‘No, really, I find your story very interesting. In fact, if anything new happens, don’t hesitate to give me a call. Although I would ask that you only do so once a week at most and only when something truly significant has occurred. Otherwise, hold back. Unlike your unoccupied self, I have a lot of things to do.’

‘And may I know what those things are?’

‘If you do have to phone me,’ I said, as if I hadn’t heard his question, ‘do so in the afternoon. I work at night and sleep in the morning.’

‘Are you a baker or an actor or perhaps a fireman?’

I could see he had a sense of humour.

‘No, I’m an interpreter of dreams,’ I said on the spur of the moment.

He then started telling me his latest dream (something about some very discreet creature that wore the mask of pride), but I cut him off as soon as I could. I wasn’t thinking of including any dreams in my cousin’s movie. I again reminded him that I was a busy man, and he finally got it: that if he wanted me to listen to him on other occasions, it would be best to say goodbye.

‘Of course, of course,’ he said, and, after thanking me over and over and saying sorry, sorry, so very sorry, for bothering me, he said goodbye and hung up.

The following day, I was woken in the early hours by the phone ringing. Before I could even say hello, I heard his unmistakable voice:

‘I’ve smashed the mirror and now I really am all alone.’

Calling me at that hour seemed to me deliberately provocative, and it made me think that he had purposely smashed the mirror just to have something to tell me.

‘I no longer exist,’ he declared. ‘All that’s left are various fragments of glass that reflect me in a broken, uncertain fashion.’

With my acknowledged talent for mimicry, I did a perfect imitation of my Aunt Consuelo, who also happened to be my movie-maker cousin’s mother:

‘I’m the cleaning lady, dear,’ I said. ‘The master’s in Rome at the moment. He had to go there urgently and he’ll be away for the next few months. Who should I say called?’

When he didn’t reply, I asked again:

‘Who should I say called?’

‘Damn!’ he yelled and then hung up.

I thought I had rid myself of a potential problem and had no regrets about disconnecting myself from the whole story until, a few days later, my cousin, Cool, came to see me (we called him Cool because that was his favourite adjective), and when I told him about the phone calls, he got really annoyed with me. He protested at me using his mother’s voice to imitate a cleaning lady, but he complained, above all, about my losing touch with a man who, in his opinion, was living through something really remarkable, really cool, the beginning of a story he would have liked to know the ending to.

‘It would have made a really cool movie,’ said my cousin, regretfully shaking his head.

After expressing my doubts that all stories necessarily have to have an ending, I pointed out to him that he could still use the beginning of the story as the starting point for a really interesting plot. I had forgotten that my cousin had no imagination. He paced aimlessly about the room, staring into space, pretending to be thinking. I felt so sorry for him that, finally, I suggested a possible continuation:

‘How about if one day our character discovers that there’s no correspondence between him and his mirror. I can see it now. The angular reflection of our man as he approaches the surface of the mirror: he raises one hand to his slender neck, and, to his horror, sees that there’s no corresponding gesture in the mirror.’

‘You mean the mirror doesn’t reflect the gesture of raising his hand to his neck?’

‘Exactly.’

‘That’s just nonsense.’

I could have cheerfully strangled him. And then he had the nerve to accuse me of not being in touch with the character. I heard a string of wild insults which concluded thus:

‘Party pooper!’

‘All right, all right,’ I said, unable to bear his shouting. ‘If you really want to track him down, I don’t think it will be too difficult.’

An hour later, we were at the Medical Association, passing ourselves off as journalists. We arrived equipped with borrowed raincoats, spectacles, piercing looks, pens and notebooks. We were told that the doctor who had disappeared was not a plastic surgeon, but an ophthalmologist. We both felt this didn’t change matters much.

We were given an address, and we both agreed that if it were a villa, then we would almost certainly have found the right place. We hailed a taxi and, a few minutes later, we were driving through a residential area, where the taxi pulled up outside 27 Calle Tucumán. It was a villa. We smiled. We got out of the taxi, and peered through the railings at a deserted, bourgeois garden in which a single elm stood, dozing placidly. A sign read: Torre del Mirador. There was only one block of flats nearby, but that was some way off. A large tennis club separated the villa from the ophthalmologist’s probable viewing point. His binoculars would have to be very powerful, I thought. Then a woman’s voice behind us said:

‘Have you come to see the villa?’

‘Yes, we have,’ Cool blurted out and, for a moment, I had no idea what was going on. Then I noticed that the villa was for sale, as indicated on a board.

The woman was about thirty and very beautiful, although everything about her was slightly antiquated. Her hair was caught back on either side with combs; she wore a string of pearls, and an old brooch was pinned to the narrow lapels of an old-fashioned grey suit. She had such an extraordinarily mobile face that it was impossible to know for sure what it was really like. It was as if her face were constantly travelling back in time, and she were continually becoming various ladies from different ages. Slightly troubled by this, I concentrated on her voice, which was grave, weary, almost masculine in tone.

‘Please, come in,’ she said. And as we walked into the garden, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I had become binocular fodder. I took off my glasses and shot a furtive glance over beyond the tennis courts, towards the block of flats where the ophthalmologist might be spying on us.

We strolled around the garden and paused for some time by a pool whose waters reflected the solitary elm tree. My cousin seemed very comfortable in his role as potential buyer. He asked the selling price and, when he was told, he stared ostentatiously at the algae in the pond.

Then we went into the house. The living-room walls were dominated by five very brightly coloured paintings depicting the various stages of construction of what appeared to be a Ritz Carlton hotel in some African city. We were looking at these ghastly paintings, when the woman said:

‘Are you there, Leo?’

We thought she was calling a dog and so were rather surprised when we realised that Leo was a person. A curtain was drawn aside, and a man appeared, smoking a Havana cigar.

‘May I introduce my friend Leonardo.’

I quickly realised that their relationship was a recent one and that they were in love. There was no mistaking the way they talked and looked at each other. The man was about forty years old, had a strange, brusque manner, and seemed somewhat irritated by our presence there.

Knowing human voices as I do, I was quick to realise that his rather dull, unresonant voice (what one might describe as ‘gruff’) could easily be fake. I wondered if he was perhaps the ophthalmologist with his new face. Troubled by this thought, I studied that face, which reminded me of a grey paperweight that had belonged to my grandfather. His hideous eyes appeared to be submerged in a dark green ditch. He had protruding ears – the only promontories in that devastating, devastated face – huge ears, which reminded me of the lampshades on two Chinese lanterns of which my poor grandmother had been particularly fond.

He stubbed out his cigar and, after eyeing us rather suspiciously, began reading the sports pages in his newspaper. We left him there while we were shown around the rest of the villa and, after half an hour, returned to find him still reading. My cousin and the woman were already on friendly terms and entered the living room together, laughing. Leonardo, making no attempt to conceal a flicker of jealousy and unease, felt obliged to intervene.

‘Look at this, Lola,’ he said, pointing at the newspaper. ‘Look, there’s an article about Timbuktu. Do you think your husband might have written it? It’s signed by someone called Spacspack, but that must be a pseudonym.’

‘No, I doubt very much that he wrote it,’ she said with a faint smile.

‘Is your husband a journalist?’ my cousin asked rather too familiarly.