Because She Never Asked

II. Don’t Mess With Me

1

I wrote the story “The Journey of Rita Malú” for Sophie Calle. You could say I did it because she asked me to. It all began one afternoon when she called me at my home in Barcelona. I was flabbergasted. I revered her and considered her out of reach. I’d never met her in person and didn’t think I ever would. She had called to say that a mutual friend (Isabel Coixet) had given her my phone number, and that she wanted to propose something, but couldn’t do it over the phone.

Her words carried a strange, mysterious charge to them, however much she didn’t intend them to be that way. I suggested an encounter in Paris at the end of the month since I planned on spending New Year’s Eve there; 2005 was drawing to a close. We arranged to meet at the Café de Flore in Paris at noon on the 27th of December.

On the appointed day, I arrived in the neighborhood a half hour early, a little anxious over our encounter. Sophie Calle had something of a reputation for being capable of practically anything, and I was well aware of her eccentricities and audacity, partly thanks to Paul Auster’s novel Leviathan, in which Sophie is a character named Maria Turner. Auster’s dedication at the beginning reads: “The author extends special thanks to Sophie Calle for permission to mingle fact with fiction.”

I was already aware of all this, but I knew a lot of other things, too. For example, I recalled reading how once, when Sophie was young, she had felt lost in her home city of Paris after returning from a long trip through Lebanon. She wasn’t familiar with anyone anymore and felt compelled to follow people she had never met, so they would decide where she was supposed to go. I recalled this and some of her other famous “actions”: how she invited strangers to sleep in her bed as long as they let her observe and photograph them and answered her questions (The Sleepers); or how she had pursued a man one time after she found out purely by chance that he was traveling to Venice that evening (Venetian Suite); or how she got her mother to hire a private detective to follow her around and take photographs of her (knowing the whole time that she was being trailed) to have him profile her in his reports with the fake, naked truth of an objective observer.

On the way to our appointment at the Café de Flore, I was reminded of what Vicente Molina Foix had said about Sophie Calle, how she belonged to the realm of the verbal imagination. Considering the models that inspired her and the fact that words were always at the origin of her visual projects, considering her earnest personal accounts and the strong prose she used to tell the stories in which she established herself as the protagonist — victim and subject of an omniscient narration — Sophie Calle stood as one of the greatest novelists of our time.

I came to the appointment feeling uneasy, and asked myself what she could possibly have in store for me, if it might be something bizarre or dangerous. To buck up my self-confidence before our meeting, I ducked into the nearby Café Bonaparte and threw back two shots of whisky in less than five minutes, standing at the bar Wild West style. I left Café Bonaparte walking slowly (it was ten minutes to twelve) and stopped to have a look in the window of La Hune bookstore, which is only ten meters away from the Flore. The French translation of one of my novels was on display, but I didn’t pay much attention to it; I was too busy questioning myself about what Sophie Calle was going to say.

Suddenly, a little man with North African features asked very politely if I had a minute to talk. I thought he was going to ask for money and was irritated that he had pulled my concentration away from Sophie Calle.

“Pardon me, but I’ve been observing you and would like to offer my help,” the man said. He handed me the address for Alcoholics Anonymous, written on a piece of paper that was torn from a small notebook. He had been following me since the Bonaparte. I didn’t know how to respond. I considered telling him that I wasn’t an alcoholic, or anonymous. I thought of explaining to him that I didn’t drink as much as might appear and also that I wasn’t exactly an anonymous person, and then drawing his attention to my book on display in the window. But I didn’t say a word. I pocketed the address and tried to walk into the Flore without slouching or seeming complex-ridden.

I recognized Sophie Calle immediately from among the others. She had arrived early and got a table in a good spot. I asked her permission to sit down in a show of respect. She smiled and extended it, explaining that we would speak in Spanish, she had lived in Mexico for a year and knew my language well. I sat down, curbing my shyness by starting to talk immediately. I told her the story about how I had been spied on and pursued just a moment before by a recovering alcoholic; both the man and the chase seemed like something straight out of one of the wall novels Sophie was so addicted to. Might she have been responsible for putting him up to it?

Sophie smiled slightly and almost without further ado pointed out an excerpt from my most popular novel. The excerpt, she said, related directly to what she wanted to propose. I could hardly recall that particular episode in my book. It recounted a story that Marcel Schwob tells in Parallel Lives: one about the life of Petronius, who when he turned thirty, it’s said, decided to narrate his forays into the seamy side of the city. He wrote sixteen books of his own invention and when he had finished, read them aloud to Sirius, his accomplice and slave, who laughed like a lunatic and applauded ceaselessly. So the two together, Sirius and Petronius, came up with the scheme of living out the adventures he had written, taking them from parchment to reality. Petronius and Sirius dressed up in costume and fled the city, taking to the open road and living out the adventures Petronius had composed. Petronius abandoned writing from that moment on, once he began living the life he had imagined. “In other words,” I ended saying in the excerpt, “if the theme of Don Quixote is about the dreamer who dares to become what he dreams, the story of Petronius is that of the writer who dares to experience what he has written, and for that reason stops writing.”

What Sophie suggested was that I write a story, any story. That I create a character she could bring to life: one whose behavior, for a maximum of one year’s time, would be contingent upon what I wrote. She wanted to change her life and what’s more, she was tired of having to determine her own deeds; now she preferred to have someone else do it for her, to allow somebody else to decide how she was supposed to live. She would obey the author in everything. There was a brief silence. Everything, that is, except killing, she said.

“In short, you write a story, and I’ll bring it to life.”

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2

We remained silent for a few long seconds, till she regained her voice and explained to me that she had made the same proposition to Paul Auster some years earlier, but he had considered it too great a responsibility and declined. She also mentioned her more recent offer to Jean Echenoz, who also ended up declining the invitation.

It seemed to me that the intention behind Sophie’s proposition was to make the author disappear, which is precisely what I claimed to desire so much in my latest writing. But I hadn’t dared follow through with it, I’d only blurred my personality into the text a bit. Sophie was aware of my concerns, I told myself, and surely that’s why she had chosen me now, to bring my literature to life once and for all.

She explained that her mother had only two or three months left to live, it was important for me to keep this in mind; that was the only thing that might temporarily delay our common project, given, of course, that I was willing to accept her proposition.

“I haven’t responded yet, but I’m happy to accept,” I said.

Sophie smiled. I’ve always thought that a smile is the perfect form of laughter. She seemed happy that I had hardly doubted a second before accepting. But I shouldn’t forget, she reminded me again, that everything depended on the state of her mother’s health.

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3

Half an hour later, I was back in the Hotel Littré on rue Littré, where my wife was waiting for me. I excitedly explained this strange assignment to her. I was satisfied and even impressed with the prospect that had just opened in my life, although perhaps it would be better to say in my work, since the life bit was Sophie’s task. The problem now was figuring out what kind of story to write. At first, all I came up with were stupidities: making Sophie travel to Barcelona, for example, and sign up to take Catalan classes. Truly asinine things like that. My wife suggested that I make more of an effort. “You’ll come up with something. You always find a way out when you get stuck,” she told me.

I returned to Barcelona with my wife the next day. I figured the sooner I wrote the story, the better. I had a burning curiosity to clarify things as soon as possible; in other words, to find out as soon as I could how things would play out and to calculate whether I was truly interested in being involved in this attractive, though strange and uncertain, project. I worried that if I let too much time go by, Sophie Calle might back out or maybe even forget her proposition. So I went straight to work as soon as I returned to Barcelona and wrote “The Journey of Rita Malú.”

I emailed “The Journey of Rita Malú” to Sophie precisely on January 12. I was confident that she’d try to bring the story to life (and I was eager to see how she would go about it. Would she find the ghost, for example, who was my own self, only fifty years older?). Her answer by return email was slow to arrive. Days went by without a word from her, not a single message. I obliged myself to write something every day in my diary (I had been keeping a sort of diary in a red notebook since September), so I noted that she hadn’t yet given any sign of having received my story. Had my story not appealed to her? Could she have figured out that it was really an exploration of mental geographies in pursuit of a ghostly writer, who was in fact my own self, though visibly older?

The lack of a response certainly provoked in me a sense of uncertainty. It wasn’t that I thought the work was poorly written. My story was in keeping with what she had requested. What’s more, it was an elastic narrative that could either be a complete short story or otherwise the first chapter of a novel. So it offered a level of freedom: to climb aboard the story and live it out as a complete novel, or settle into the piece merely as a first chapter, a short story, and then step off early in the journey.

The days went by with no news from Sophie, until one afternoon I realized that her strange silence was crippling me as a writer. For the first time in my life, I was depending on someone else to be able to write: I needed this other person to move into action, I mean she had to start living out what I wrote and then ask me to continue the story if the occasion called for it. Obviously, what I couldn’t do now (which is what I was accustomed to doing when I wrote novels) was continue writing about the ghost of the Azores on my own; I couldn’t write anything else until she acted on the story, discovered the ghost, and asked what happened next, if in fact she wanted to follow the story onward.

Sophie’s silence made me anxious. What’s more, her lack of an answer left me vulnerable, literally paralyzed and incapable of writing. I was poised for a new book that couldn’t go anywhere because it wasn’t in my hands to make it happen. I began to wonder whether one of the intentions behind Sophie Calle’s project wasn’t to do me in as a writer.

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4

I had warned Sophie when we met at the Flore that I would be traveling on January 23 to a literary conference in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. She seemed to make a mental note of the information, because when her long overdue answer finally arrived, it came on the very 23rd of January (eleven days after I sent my story to her), precisely and peculiarly on the same day I left Barcelona for Colombia. My wife, worried over how uneasy I’d become over the whole affair, called my hotel in Cartagena to let me know that Sophie Calle had finally responded and that the email went like this: “I haven’t received anything from you yet, although no rush. I’ve had problems with my Internet, broke down last week. I’m afraid you might think (in case you sent me something) that I’ve been keeping silent.”

I realized we’d practically have to start all over. So upon my return from Cartagena, I resent “The Journey of Rita Malú” to Sophie. And that’s when it got worse. Once again, days of a newfound, strange silence passed. My angst expressed itself in troubled notes, written in my diary or red notebook.

Finally, a message from Sophie arrived on February 3rd: “My mother wanted to see the sea one last time before she died and we’ve traveled to Cabourg. As to what concerns us, I finally found out why I never received your emails or your story: it all went into my spam box, including poor Rita Malú. I will begin to read your story very soon.”

I remember dreaming that night that Cabourg was the capital of one of the Azore Islands. But the dream was much calmer than the previous ones. As if Sophie’s promise to read my story had a soothing effect on me.

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5

Remember to distrust.

— Stendhal

The next day I went to Girona to present at a conference. Later, I had dinner with some friends, where I outlined a few details of the project I had gotten involved in with Sophie Calle. I had been drinking, and the alcohol had put me on edge. I felt the need to explain everything to them, as if I were writing by proxy, since I couldn’t do it for real. I had to cross my arms and wait for Sophie to decide to make a move. Naturally, I could begin a story or a novel that had nothing to do with Sophie’s scheme, but I was incapable of setting off on a parallel venture.

“I’m paralyzed,” I told them, “because I can’t wish for the death of Sophie’s mother in order to resume work on my novel. I can’t do anything, I can’t even write her an email. Nor can I show polite interest in her mother’s health, since it might seem as though I wished for something critical to happen to her that would allow me to get back to working on the project.”

I ended by invoking the pathetic case of Truman Capote in In Cold Blood: the writer who suffered unspeakably from not being able to finish the book without the execution scene.

When I got back from Girona, I couldn’t stand the inactivity any longer and was overcome by a suicidal urge to press the send key and shoot over to Sophie a beautiful image of the volcanic Island of Pico, which looked vaguely reminiscent of Roberto Rosellini’s movie Stromboli. Something had to happen, anything, if only a slight breeze, I remember saying to myself.

She answered with surprising briskness that same day. The picture she sent frightened me, because it was her elderly mother’s face with a severe look in her eyes, as if she were reproaching my obscene impatience to see her dead.

Sophie had written below the photo: “I’m sending a picture of my mother. It’s the one she picked to decorate her grave, and the epitaph will read: I was getting bored. I’m sending it to you because in a way she’s what’s standing between me and Pico Island. I’ve heard that you’ll be in Paris on the 16th of March. Perhaps we could see each other then.”

In fact, I did have to be at the Salon du Livre in Paris on the 16th of March. But the date was so far away. It seemed way too long to have to wait for another encounter. It seemed to me as if the two of us were doomed to communicate in fits and starts. But what else could I do? The lack of action had me feeling restless, but I couldn’t very well murder Sophie’s mother in order for Sophie to kick into gear and get started with the journey.

In my red notebook, I jotted: “Someone in Paris wants me to reveal the fact that I no longer want to write. And she’s going about it in infinitely perverse ways. I must write about it in order to continue writing.”

A few days later, I dared myself to send Sophie a new email that might break this deadlock, though I tried not to get my hopes up. I wrote:

“All life is a process of breaking down” (Francis Scott Fitzgerald).

I pressed the send key. There was no way back now. It was irreversible. The sentence about breaking down had already traveled to Sophie’s inbox. Minutes later, again with surprising speed, Sophie answered with the photo of a grave that read Don’t expect anything.

I took it very hard. As if that Don’t expect anything was meant for me. I responded immediately, desperate to defend my self-respect. I sent her a quote by Julien Gracq that went: “The writer has nothing to expect from others. Believe me, he writes only for himself!”

Once again, silence fell over our correspondence. A silence that reigned for days. One afternoon at the end of February, I ran into my friend Sergi Pàmies and vented my frustration by conveying the whole story of Sophie Calle and the strange labyrinth of emails in which I had gotten lost. To keep him interested, I absurdly reminded him that just like Sophie, he had been born in Paris. Obviously, there was no need to dwell on such a thing. Sergi listened to me with his customary kindness and curiosity, and after thinking it over a while, insinuated something rather dreadful, something that had already occurred to me, too. He said that perhaps Sophie’s mother wasn’t on her last legs after all, and the point of the game was in the exchange of emails, which Sophie Calle would turn into a wall novel, a study of my ethical behavior during the silent wait for the supposed death of her mother.

“You might just find all the emails you’ve been writing to Sophie reproduced someday in large format on the walls of some museum,” Pàmies told me. “Be careful what you write from now on, because you might be reading it through a magnifying glass in the near future.”

When I described how the relationship between Sophie and me had taken on the structure of a love story (the jealousy of one person not knowing what the other was thinking, which is really what lover’s jealousy has always been about: not knowing what the other is thinking; read Proust to understand it better), Sergi preferred not to wax transcendent and instead mentioned a French song called “Les histoires d’amour,” sung by the Rita Mitsouko Duo. “Love stories generally end badly,” Rita Mitsouko sang.

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6

When I got home later that day, I was surprised to find Sophie’s response to my Julien Gracq quote. This time there was no text, only the tiny photograph of a funerary cross. Irritated by the mute and solitary cross, I decided to banish the image by resending it to Sergi, who had just emailed me the full text of the song by the Rita Mitsouko Duo.

“Sergi, look what that Sophie sent me,” I wrote. But oh, horror of horrors, I hadn’t been paying enough attention and in my haste, I actually resent the message to Sophie herself. It wouldn’t be long before she found out that I had referred to her somewhat disrespectfully as “that Sophie,” and, what’s worse, that I was forwarding her emails to someone named Sergi.

As soon as I realized my mistake, I was mortified.

The days went by in ominous, strict, horrendous silence. Surely, it was all over.

One afternoon, suddenly, when I least expected it, an email arrived: “I hope you didn’t think my plurien meant anything.”

Did this plurien refer to her Don’t expect anything? Her sentence came accompanied by the image of a road leading into a town called Faux. I understood there was clearly a message here for me: she was calling me a “fake.” And even more obvious, or what seemed to be finally confirmed: it was over between us; I had proved that I was a pig.

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7

I spent several days in a daze, writing down small, ridiculous notes in my red notebook. Crushed. Until one morning, carried away by the alcohol-infused bliss of the previous night, I began telling myself that I had nothing to lose by trying to reconcile with Sophie, so I dared send her an email: “I will be in Paris from the 16th to the 21st of March, at the Hotel de Suède, on Rue Vaneau. Since they don’t always inform their guests of missed telephone calls, I wanted to advise that if you’d like to reach me, it would be best to communicate by fax.”

My real motive, should Sophie decide to answer, was to see whether a fax would be admitted into the collection of emails that were probably en route to becoming one of her hypothetical wall novels. I sent the message, and, as my mother said when my father went off to do the lengthy military service required in their day, bracing for the duration with no idea when he would be coming home, I sat down to wait. That’s just what I did over the following days: I sat down to wait, nesting at my desk at all hours without writing a thing, nothing more than waiting and thinking, thinking about a variety of subjects. I ruminated. I calculated, for example, how long it would take for spring to arrive and I remember telling myself things like: With the arrival of spring, one must be ironic; and I know that only by so being, I will survive the next season. Things like that, sometimes without much sense. Until the 16th of March came around, and off I went to the Hotel de Suède on Rue Vaneau, in Paris.

I had only been at the hotel a few hours when a fax from Sophie arrived, encouraging me to call her at home. My first reaction was a combination of happiness and annoyance. On the one hand, there was nothing I wanted more than her forgiveness, but, on the other, I thought of how aggravating the rebirth of this complicated relationship might be.

After much hesitation, I finally made up my mind to call her. The telephone rang three times. Someone picked up.

“It’s me… I’m…,” I babbled.

A brief silence. Followed by Sophie’s voice:

“Oh! You got my fax?”

“Yes, I’m here in Paris. Is everything well, Sophie?”

Another brief silence. And then she whispered these words:

“My mother died yesterday afternoon.”

It’s the last thing I expected to hear. I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. It seemed too much of a coincidence that her mother should wait until I got to Paris to die. I was at a loss. Finally, I mumbled a few words of condolence.

“Oh, come on,” she interrupted.

Another phone rang in Sophie’s house, probably her cell phone, and she asked me to “excuse her for a second.” I heard part of her conversation with the person who had called. She pronounced the word “funeral” several times, and it made me think that however unlikely it seemed, the truth about the death of her mother (which seemed like a beastly farce) was actually confirmed.

She hung up her cell phone and came back to our conversation, telling me the funeral would take place two days later in the cemetery of Montparnasse, and that it would be nice if I could come. The obituary would appear in Liberation on the day of the funeral. In any case, she added, now she had the time to see me. If I wanted, we could meet somewhere in Paris within the hour. In the Hotel de Suède, for example.

An hour and five minutes later, Sophie walked into the hall of the Hotel de Suède with a video camera and a broad smile. I was in the hall waiting for her. She ordered two coffees in reception, and although I didn’t want to see them, she showed me recent pictures of her dead mother and a copy of the peculiar obituary that would appear in Liberation two days later.

It didn’t take long for her to explain that following the experience with her mother, there was still one more obstacle between her and Pico Island. She had been invited to the Venice Biennale and needed time to prepare her show in this noteworthy exhibition. She was so sorry, but our project would have to be postponed. She had studied maps of the Azores and was also drawn to the idea of returning to Lisbon, a city she wasn’t very familiar with after all. It wasn’t a lack of interest in Rita Malu’s journey, on the contrary, she was very engaged with it, but the Venice Biennale was, as I must perfectly understand, of paramount importance to her.

Of course I understood perfectly, but there was a question hanging in the air that I didn’t hesitate to ask:

“When will you have time to live out ‘The Journey of Rita Malú?’”

“May of next year,” she said, without blinking.

My God! May 2007 seemed so far away. What was I going to do in the meantime?

“I’ve been waiting a long time, over eight years, to tackle this experience of living a story and I don’t mind waiting another year,” she added by way of explanation.

“Eight years?”

“Yes, eight years have passed since I first proposed the idea to Paul Auster. I can wait a little while longer, don’t you think?”

It seemed the perfect occasion to stage a break-up, to convey to her that by no means would I wait fourteen more months; so be it, our imaginary contract had come to an end. No way would I wait such a ridiculous amount of time!

But instead I was all smiles and resignedly docile.

We said our goodbyes at the door of the hotel an hour later and arranged to see each other again the following day, at the Salon du Livre, Porte de Versailles, where I would be signing copies of my latest novel. She would come to see me, she said, since it was near her home. I took my leave, and we both headed to our respective appointments, walking in opposite directions. I went to a friend’s party near Bastille Square, where I described a few details of my recent encounter with Sophie. A journalist from a magazine dedicated to rock music and literature heard my story and blurted: “Oh my God! She approached you about it, too?”

I didn’t really want to know what she meant by “you, too.” But I ended up saying, “Yes, she approached me, too.” Then I asked if she had approached anyone other than Paul Auster or Jean Echenoz. And yes, she had suggested the idea to two other writers. And, she had also approached Olivier Rolin.

The next day, I found out that there had been not just three more writers, but at least four. Just before I left Littré for the Salon du Livre, I received a call from a good friend of mine who was in Segovia, the writer and filmmaker Ray Loriga, who invited me to Madrid to participate in Carta Libre, an hour-long program on Spanish public television, on which he interviewed artists from his imaginary tribe. He wanted to invite Sophie and me as his guests, to talk about our project, he said. I asked him how he had found out about it, and he told me that Sophie had told him herself, they were longtime friends. She had made the same attractive proposition to him three years ago. He’d almost gone mad, he said, working relentlessly to move the seductive proposal forward; he’d come up against all sorts of peculiar glitches, including Sophie herself. Luckily for him, he hadn’t gotten so far as to write the story. My case was definitely much worse, since my story was already written and nothing had come of it.

How aggravating to discover that there had been more people invited to do the project before me, and I’d never been told about them. But I didn’t speak out and kept my anger to myself. I accepted Loriga’s invitation to his program, figuring that at least it would give me another opportunity to see Sophie, and more material to put into writing about my relationship with her, this holding pattern that was threatening to become eternal, as I awaited her decision to embark on the adventure: Rita Malú’s journey toward the encounter with my ghost.

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8

Two hours later, I was signing copies of my novel in the Salon du Livre, when Sophie showed up with a friend whom she introduced as Florence Aubenas, that is, the famous journalist of Liberation, who had been kidnapped and then freed in Iraq. Though I had signed the petition for her release in Barcelona, I hadn’t seen photographs of her. So, inevitably, I doubted that this woman was the real Aubenas. Inertia led me to suspect that everything Sophie did was a bluff; she had lied to me about her mother and now she wanted to poke fun at me by introducing me to the fake Aubenas.

“Stop pulling my leg,” I said to Sophie.

It came from the gut. I uttered it spontaneously; it just burst out as a result of all these ambiguities. Now I was getting overly familiar with her.

“What do you mean, stop pulling my leg? Do you mean that you don’t want me to play with you?” Sophie asked in very good Spanish.

“Exactly,” I smiled. “Don’t mess with me.”

That seemed to me a good title for a novel.

But Florence Aubenas was in fact Florence Aubenas. Everyone around me confirmed it. Even Aubenas confirmed that she was herself; she invited me to her stand where she signed a copy of her recently published book, La méprise. So I went back to mine, to my stand that is, and continued signing books. Every once in a while, Sophie would show up, walking back and forth between Florence’s and my publisher’s stand.

Sophie would appear and stare straight at me, then laugh in an infectious way. I would end up laughing too, my expression distorted after uselessly trying to keep a straight face, or to express anger.

“Don’t mess with me,” I told her again.

I giggled. That was it. The next day, I returned to Barcelona, and Sophie attended her mother’s funeral. It seemed silly to reproach her for having propositioned so many men to bring a written adventure to life, having so many broken friends. It seemed grotesque to criticize her, and what’s more, I had no right whatsoever.

The idea was hers, after all, and she could perform it with whomever she pleased, whenever she pleased. I convinced myself (so as not to lose my wits) that it was all beyond reproach. I had no reason for feeling so apprehensive. Why not wait until May? But… it was May of next year! I was peeved, annoyed, over having been so submissive the whole time, about our agreeing that I would control what was to be done and what had to be lived out. I couldn’t understand why I was being so docile. Anyway, I thought, I would have another chance to rebel against the situation on my friend Ray Loriga’s television show; at least I’d be able to pound the table a little with my fist. I was hostage to the strange sensation of gripping a rock-solid hammer in my hand, but not being able to use it because its handle was in flames.

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9

Back in Barcelona, I received an email from Sophie letting me know that she would arrive in Madrid to tape the show on the 6th of April, as long as Ray Loriga confirmed that I would be on the show too. She had to say that she didn’t see much sense in a televised encounter, though, since the question remained: what was there for us to talk about if the project hadn’t begun yet?

On the 6th of April I showed up in Madrid and taped the show with Ray Loriga, explaining what had happened so far with Sophie. Not much had occurred, but I knew how to find water where there was no fountain to speak of. Sophie never showed up at the studio. She missed the appointment in Madrid, alleging a mix-up over the date and time, and Loriga decided to turn her into the program’s invited ghost. When I got back to Barcelona, in an attempt to hold my frustration in check, I sent Sophie a picture of a clock with a Portuguese caption: CONTAGEM DECRESENTE.

The message was meant as a moderately furious protest and even the seedling of a rupture, expressing that the clock of my patience had entered countdown mode. Sophie answered immediately. She explained that she was preparing a wall novel on the subject of “the missing” for the Venice Biennale, and would be traveling the next day to the south of France, where she would spend a stretch of time with Florence Aubenas, the renowned “missing person” who had disappeared in another era in Iraq. She bid adieu for a few weeks and asked me to remember that we could take up our project again in May 2007.

It seemed to me that while in the beginning it was I who played the part of the ghost, things had taken an unforeseen turn of events, and now the ghost — in Rita Malú’s story — was she. Surely, I said to myself, the spirit of the red house on the hill on Pico Island had done a good thing by closing the door on her softly.

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10

I traveled to Buenos Aires at the beginning of May, ostensibly to promote my novels, but more than anything else just to disappear for a few days. I ended up hospitalized in Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron clinic when I got back. No longer did I feel the urge to go missing in an Argentine hotel room. The peculiar thing is that in Buenos Aires, I boasted about building my strength in the hotel room in Recoleta, of not setting foot at all in the streets of the city, except for the two hours I spent in a public appearance at the Book Fair. The audience smiled when I said that I had turned into a shadow, and how, like the character in one of my books, I hadn’t stirred from the hotel since arriving in the city. But speaking in the style of Journey Around My Room was really no more than the desire to cover up a private secret: just walking down the hall was enough to make me fatigued. That was the only reason why I hadn’t gone to see Recoleta Square, for example, which I remembered from previous visits. It was only two hundred meters from my hotel.

I wasn’t yet aware of the worst part: I was experiencing severe kidney failure and heading toward an irreversible coma. But how could I possibly imagine something like that? How could I know that I was dying? Days went by before I fully realized what was happening. I returned to Barcelona and walked through El Prat airport like a somnambulist (a poisonous current of uric acid was reaching my brain and I didn’t notice it). I answered bizarrely when they asked why I didn’t have a suitcase, and my eyes rolled to the whites:

“Life has no idea what kind of life it lives.”

I had spent four full days holed up in that Argentine hotel room, observing a solitary, funereal landscape (almost as if it were a premonition) outside my window: I watched the tombs of the neighboring Recoleta Cemetery, full of the pantheons of some of the Argentine homeland’s national heroes. Flowers lay atop Evita Peron’s mausoleum. It was an obsessive, sickly, fatal view. How was that for taking a trip?!

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11

I remember W. G. Sebald’s obsessive view from the hospital window, which he describes in the beginning of The Rings of Saturn: “I can remember precisely how, upon being admitted to that room on the eighth floor, I became overwhelmed by the feeling that the Suffolk expanses I had walked the previous summer had now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot. Indeed, all that could be seen of the world from my bed was the colorless patch of sky framed in the window.”

Sebald recounts how over the course the day, he felt overwhelmed by the desire to look out the hospital window, draped strangely enough in black netting, to make certain that reality, as he had dreaded, hadn’t vanished forever. By dusk, the desire had grown so strong that he contrived a way to slide over the edge of the bed to the floor, half on his belly and half sideways, crawling to the wall on all fours and raising himself up despite the pain. He strained to hold himself upright for the first time against the windowsill. Like Gregor Samsa, or any garden-variety beetle.

Anyway, in my case it took three days to reach the blind, insensate spot of my window on the tenth floor and to contemplate, incredulous, the surprisingly lively view extending from Vall d’Hebron to the sea. So, the world is still there after all, I told myself. It seemed amazing to me, that anthill of people I observed from way up there, feverishly crossing avenues and streets: the same mad human stream that didn’t alter when the young man from Kafka’s “The Judgment” threw himself out the window of his paternal home.

How far away and yet how near everything was, I thought: my hotel in Recoleta, Sophie Calle, the tombs and mausoleums with their funerary flowers, Rita Malú, Eva Perón, me myself as a dangerously missing person overseas.

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12

I remember how, whenever I would finally feel optimistic, I’d end up suspecting that optimism was just another form of sickness.

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13

By my fourth day in the hospital, I was able to begin reading a little and I asked for a book by Sergio Pitol. I remembered there was a shocking sentence in it that had always caught my attention—“I adore hospitals”—and I couldn’t recall what came afterwards. What Pitol wrote couldn’t have been closer to my own experience: “I adore hospitals. They bring back the security of childhood: all nourishment is brought to my bedside punctually. All I have to do is push a button and a nurse appears, sometimes even a doctor! They give me a pill and the pain disappears, they give me an injection, and I fall asleep on the spot…”

Nighttime was the most difficult part of all. Pain became more of a blind, insensate spot than my window became a spot of life and the sea. I remember spending time the last night there, exploring the word hospitality. It seemed as good a way as any other to scare the anxiety away and forget I was in a hospital. Luckily, there was a male nurse from Guinea on the night shift, who caught my pensive mood and came to my aid, asking what was on my mind, hoping to calm my disquiet. I told him I was meditating on the word hospitality. First he fell quiet, but then he broke his silence, telling me never to forget that everything was relative. For example, the French had a great reputation for being hospitable people, and yet nobody dared go inside their homes. That made me laugh, and I felt at ease for the rest of the night. But come sunrise, when the first rose-tinged light entered that blind and insensate spot of my window at Vall d’Hebron, the anxiety came back with remarkable strength, and once again I coveted some movement in the air, just one, a single wisp of it: anything that would prove that I was still alive and waiting.

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14

As I wait for the operation scheduled in a few weeks’ time that is going to fix all my problems, I have to wear an uncomfortable medical device, which hampers my ability to move around: a catheter in my penis. I can go outside if I want to; the catheter empties into a little bag where the urine gathers. It’s tied discreetly around my right leg, under my trousers. It’s well hidden, but for the time being, the only thing I do outside is take a cab to the medical center on Aribau Street for tests, or to the hospital to see the nephrologist or urologist who are caring for me, or sit on the terrace of the café on the corner. Even though the doctor said I’m able to lead a normal life, I only go out when it’s strictly necessary, and then I never stray very far from home.

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15

I read in a note on the Internet that “the third section of Sophie Calle’s Double Game arose from the invitation she extended to Paul Auster: to become the author of her acts, to invent a fictional character that she would try to resemble; she would try to live out whatever he wanted her to, for a period of one year maximum.” Apparently, Paul Auster didn’t want to take responsibility for what could happen to Sophie, so in exchange, he sent her a few Personal Instructions for S. C. on How to Improve Life in New York City (Because She Asked…). Sophie followed his instructions, and the result was a project titled Gotham Handbook. The rules of the game were: smile at all times, talk to strangers, distribute sandwiches and cigarettes to the homeless, and cultivate a spot of your choice. It lasted for one week in the month of September, in 1994, and the epicenter was a phone booth located on the corner of Greenwich and Harrison. According to Sophie Calle, the result of the operation was as follows: 72 smiles received for 125 given, 22 sandwiches accepted and 10 rejected, 8 packs of cigarettes accepted and 0 rejected, 154 minutes of conversation.

I read it all, and it felt as if years had gone by since I got excited about Sophie’s proposition. My physical collapse had put my health before everything else, and the concerns of our project had been relegated to sixth or seventh place in my life. So much so that Sophie Calle — her first and last names — had become dissociated from what I jotted down daily in my red notebook (I’d been making things up a lot since December).

Every so often, of course, the memory of that note I had read on the Internet returned, and brought to mind the title Paul Auster had given his work, especially the part in parenthesis, Because She Asked. I wasn’t sure why, but I would reminisce about Sophie Calle at the most idiotic moments, and muse obsessively over the phrase, Because She Asked.

Whenever that happened, I couldn’t help but go over everything that had ensued with Sophie, and confirm to myself once again that the ghost of the house on Pico Island had done very well to close the door softly on Rita Malú.

My catheter seems bent on personifying, as is happening as we speak, one of those sneering Harlequins that interrupt the drama developing on stage and untangle the plot.

In fact, the only thing the catheter, the illness, the collapse — whatever you want to call it — did, is doing, is disentangle the plot of my story with Sophie and carry me, softly, ever farther away from her.