Because She Never Asked

III. The Center of the Tangle

1

I thought about a friend yesterday, who said that at some point we all ask ourselves what might have happened had we approached that woman in a different way, if we’d made some move or other that we hadn’t. I recalled something else he said, too: “We think of our past life as if it were a sort of rough draft, something that can be transformed.”

Maybe that’s a good technique for escaping my life in this prison cell of my catheter. Yesterday, I went through my diary entries of the past few months, all the notes I’d been jotting down in my red notebook since last September. They serve as stimulus for reenacting the tale of my relationship with Sophie Calle in my computer. Since she hasn’t made up her mind yet in this story whether or not to live out what I wrote for her in “The Journey of Rita Malú,” I thought I might as well make the jump from literature to my life myself, particularly since the only thing tying me to her now, or to life, is a catheter. So I suggested to myself that I choose a few fragments from my red notebook and, following Petronius (who dared to live out what he had written), carry a few episodes over into real life, or better said, relive them and correct them if need be. As if certain notes written in my diary up to now had merely been the rough drafts of my own life.

.

2

I go over the first lines that I jotted down last year in my red notebook, on the 1st of September: “The sun is rising in the tall windows of my room as I initiate my red notebook or diary in which I’ll write about Barcelona and other nervous cities, asking myself my name, who it is that’s writing these words, and it occurs to me that my study is like a skull from which I spring anew, like an imagined citizen…”

How the hell can I ever bring to life such deeply literary sentences? I’m in the same study where I wrote them down the first time, but now I find it very difficult to feel as though my study were like a skull from which I can spring anew, like an imagined citizen.

I realize that these sentences inaugurating my diary can’t possibly be translated into real life, they’re pure literature. Can I seriously take a leisurely saunter around my study and pretend I’m moving around the inside of a skull? The thought makes me yawn; I mope, and feel more paralyzed than ever. Then suddenly it dawns on me that by yawning, by opening up my mouth, I’ve found the best way of feeling these literary sentences of mine as something experienced. That yawn worked a small miracle, causing me to expand and splinter like an abyss, to merge with the void. In my imagination, only the skull remains, which I am depositing at this exact moment on top of my writing table, like someone placing his head on his desk at work.

.

3

Still at home that evening, I decide to read the remaining entries in my red notebook all in one sitting and confirm my suspicion that until that December day when I registered Sophie Calle’s call to my home in Barcelona, there was nothing of relevance in the trivial events of my life. Up to then, there was nothing significant in the notes, which are strictly rough drafts. Nothing worth correcting. In fact, it would be best to leave them as they were recorded, as what they are: the grey contours of my own life.

It’s often said that literature carries a considerable advantage over life: one can go back and correct it. But in my case, I’m not interested in going back or correcting anything; I think it’s better to leave it all be, at least till the day in question, when I recorded how Sophie Calle called me at home. The game changed after that. It marked a before and after in my diary, because that’s when I started making the story up. Until then, my notes communicated things that really happened to me. But something changed that day, and I came up with the idea of pretending that Sophie Calle had called me at home to propose a mysterious project that she couldn’t talk about over the phone. After a while, I began elaborating literarily on this quickly jotted, imaginary note, transferring it to the computer and creating a parallel fiction to what I continued crafting in my spirited red notebook of quick notes.

Why did I pretend that Sophie Calle telephoned me at home? And why did I make believe that she had asked me to write something for her to bring to life? Perhaps I made it all up precisely because she didn’t ask.

Sophie Calle never telephoned me at home; that part belongs to my imagination. The same goes for the story of our agreements and disagreements, all make-believe. I guess I concocted the phone call and everything else because I was fed up with my own lethargic existence and needed to describe a more interesting life in my diary.

Now that I think about it, I have a make-believe story with Sophie and it’s all written down. From now on, I can challenge myself to live it out instead of just imagining it. But how can I bring it to life? First of all, how can I get Sophie Calle, whom I don’t know, to call me at home? It would be even more difficult to get her to meet me at Café de Flore to ask me for all these things: like proposing what she had already proposed to Paul Auster eight years ago. It’s a tricky story to bring successfully to life, but nothing’s impossible, and I don’t want to feel defeated even before I get started. I’ll take the necessary steps toward bringing the story with Sophie Calle to life, which I’ve been contriving and writing down. In other words, if Don Quixote is about a dreamer who dares to become his own dream, my story would be that of the writer who dares to bring what he has written to life, specifically, in this case, what he’s invented about his relationship with Sophie Calle, his favorite “narrative artist.”

.

4

Actually, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to get Sophie to call me at home. All I need to do is talk to Ray Loriga. He was responsible for describing to me everything that Sophie had been going through over the past few months. It was he who told me about the slow agony of her mother and the funeral in Montparnasse, the details of the Venica Biennale and her friendship with Florence Aubenas. Ray explained so many particulars about Sophie, that I was able to contrive this little comedy of errors with her. Ray also told me about how, three years ago, Sophie had asked him to write a story that would allow her to bring literature to life. As Ray soon found out, she had proposed the same thing to Paul Auster, Jean Echenoz, Olivier Rolin, and very likely to other writers, too.

In fact, my make-believe relationship with Sophie began precisely on the day when Ray, a friend of hers for many years, detailed the story of Sophie’s invitation for him to write her a story that she would bring to life. Ray said that everything came to a dead end, the same as what happened with Auster, Echenoz, and Rolin. I remember instantly feeling jealous when I learned about it, I would have loved for Sophie Calle to propose or ask me for something like that, especially considering all the years I’ve spent speculating on the relationship between life and literature, rummaging around for a technique to go beyond them, especially beyond literature.

After that, finding a way to get close to Sophie Calle became the only thing that would fetch a little joy into my life. Why shouldn’t I take a stab at getting my favorite “narrative artist” to suggest bringing something that I had written to life? It seemed to me that I had as much right as anyone else to hear the proposal. Didn’t I? Not only was Sophie’s proposition as dangerous as it was appealing, it opened the door to a fascinating, outlandish test to push everything a step further; to go, once and for all, beyond writing itself. In fact, from a certain perspective, the challenge turned writing into a mere rag, reduced it to the condition of being a little crumb, a measly mundane procedure to gain access to life: life, which is so important. Isn’t it? Isn’t that what we always say? Suddenly, I felt overcome with doubt. Life, so primordial. I repeated it to myself: Life, so primordial. So essential, I added. The blood and the liver, so crucial. My doubts increased. Should life be given a place of such preference? Since the very get-go, say since Cervantes, I told myself, this tension between literature and life is what the novel has been developing all along. Truly, what we call the “novel” is nothing more than this ongoing conversation.

A few days later, I recall, I considered similar subjects on Carta Libre, Ray Loriga’s program for Spanish television, on which I discussed my Sophie Calle story, the supposedly professional relationship I had been developing with her, as if it were true, never once letting on that it was all make- believe. Ray, who loves pretending, played along with the mischief, and Sophie became a sort of ghostly guest presence, which if you think about it, was the only way she could be on a show at all where we talked about a project that couldn’t really be talked about, as I had rightly explained to Sophie in the fictional account: “What are we going to talk about on camera if the project hasn’t begun yet?”

.

5

Waking up, I switched the briefcase-bag where the nocturnal urine gathers while I sleep (a torment) for the smaller plastic sack tied around my right leg by day. I showered and wrote down the simple dream I had that night about a woman who never turned the faucets off completely and who always closed doors very softly. I followed her around, doddering with my catheter and a whip, which was actually the shadow of the catheter, and my dream within a dream revealed an unprecedented image of myself: I was smacking her in the ass with that shadow.

Afterwards, I called Ray Loriga and got straight to the point. I told him I wanted Sophie Calle to call me at home as soon as possible, for her to suggest that we collaborate, then tell me that she couldn’t explain it over the phone, that we should find a city, a place to meet. He giggled. I’m serious, I told him. I would appreciate that he get it done sooner rather than later, I said. Sophie had to set a date to meet in Paris, at the Café de Flore, to talk about our secret project. I myself wanted to bring to life our make-believe story that I’d been writing on my computer about our relationship. The story demanded that there be a scene in this specific café in Paris, where I would like Sophie, even if she was faking it, to ask if I would write a story that she could bring to life.

Ray was a little skeptical. He had called a few days earlier to inquire after my acute renal condition that would require surgery. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “Oh, completely,” I responded. “You honestly want to go to Paris half fucked-up, wearing a catheter, to meet Sophie and play this game with her?” he asked, and then he laughed. There was a brief silence. “What for?” It seemed a bit zealous for me to bring up Petronius and explain how I wanted to see what would happen when you live out an adventure that you had previously written, or in other words, when you take the leap from literature to your life, and so I kept quiet. “Answer me,” he insisted. “Why?” Another brief silence. I answered as best I could. “To be in Paris and, more than anything else, to spend time living what I’ve written, instead of just writing it.” Ray wanted to know why I didn’t go and do something else. “Such as?” I asked, feeling more curious than a very curious boy. He didn’t think twice: “You have plenty of other ways to amuse yourself, and none of them include going to Paris with a catheter to live out what you’ve written.” I felt bad, even suspicious that I was acting against my own interests. I had the troubling impression that my desire to reach beyond it all was actually putting obstacles in my own path. I told this to Ray. “Oh the tangled web of the world,” was all he said. I can’t explain it, but his words soothed me, as if for the first time in my life I had shared with another person one of the most quiet and self-evident truths.

.

6

Two days later, I was lying on the hard shell of my back (which is just an expression, what I mean is that I was half asleep, lying naked in bed on my back, which felt very hard due to how long I had been that way; my catheter was showing since I was home alone, and I hadn’t bothered to decorously cover myself with the sheets). The telephone rang, and it was Sophie Calle.

“At last, we speak again. It’s about time, don’t you think?” She spoke in Spanish with a thick French accent. I saw that it was a Paris number, but it hadn’t yet occurred to me that it could be Sophie Calle calling, and I asked, half alarmed, who it was on the other end of the line. “I’m Sophie, I just wanted to talk to you again, so you don’t think I’ve abandoned our project; I’m still on but I have been very busy lately…” My legs trembled slightly, as I abandoned my beetle-on-its-back position and sat up in bed. She acted as though we were a couple making up romantically after having experienced a brief separation. It wasn’t what I had asked Ray for. That it was really her on the phone, the real Sophie Calle, there was no room for doubt. I had heard (and even studied) her voice in a variety of different recordings. It was her all right.

I felt as though I should play along. “Believe me, I don’t expect anything from you. I’ve also been very busy, it’ll work out,” I said. But she seemed bent on clarifying things: “Venice took up a lot of my time, but the worst was the bureaucratic paperwork after my mother passed away, which was and still is utterly exhausting. I just wanted to let you know that despite the interruptions, I still want to bring your story to life…” I let her know that everything was fine, that she shouldn’t worry, and for a few minutes I had the impression that I was speaking to someone familiar, as if we had known each other for a long time. I might have ended up going into details regarding my liver and urethra problems, how I was awaiting surgery, if it hadn’t been for a sudden change in her tone of voice, which turned serious, even slightly aggressive.

“You’re sure everything is all right? I detect a slight hint of disappointment in your voice,” she said abruptly. I kept quiet and inert; I was sitting upright in bed, naked, muddled, with sudden heart palpitations. “Huh?” I asked. “I want to make a proposition, but I can’t do it over the phone. Can we meet? I’d like to know if you will be coming to Paris anytime in the next few weeks.” We quickly arranged to meet on Friday, the 16th of June, which was in four days, at the Café de Flore, to stage the farce. But what if she didn’t mean it as a farce, and she was treating the proposal that I write a story for her in earnest? That was my great expectation. If she proposed the same as with Auster and Loriga, I could surprise her by handing over a copy of “The Journey of Rita Malú.”

I called Ray to thank him for his help but couldn’t reach him. Later, through mutual friends, I found that he had been called away; it had something to do with the movie he had just filmed about Santa Teresa. He wouldn’t be back for a few weeks.

I decided to ask my wife to accompany me to Paris, but she flat out refused to have anything to do with such a ludicrous scheme. First comes surgery, she said. Then, after the catheter was gone, I could spend my time talking to Sophie Calle or whatever trifles I wanted. “By the way,” she asked, “what’s up with you and Sophie Calle? It’s one thing to admire her work or get jealous of her proposals to your pal Ray; but to risk your catheter, your life, just to see her, is another story.”

I knew that her words were sensible, but I also knew that art isn’t, it never has been; in fact quite the contrary: it’s always been an attack against common sense, an effort to get beyond the beaten path. Not only that, my wife was clearly exaggerating, since I had all the necessary medical authorizations for air travel and I wasn’t risking my life by going to Paris. Besides, the adventure of living out what I had written seemed entertaining, and nothing prevented me from returning to Barcelona in time for my appointment with the anesthesiologist in Vall d’Hebron hospital on Thursday, June 22.

“What if the hospital moves the anesthesiologist’s appointment forward? They warned that could happen. What then? Huh? What? You’d postpone an emergency operation because you feel like having coffee at the Flore?” my wife asked, beyond exasperation. I don’t remember how I answered her; all I know is that I couldn’t convince her to come with me.

The fact is that I boarded a plane for Paris early on the 16th of June, lonesome as a rat, and with a pang of self-reproach, bearing in mind my wife’s righteous indignation. Arriving like a wounded bachelor and with a return ticket to Barcelona that same evening, I showed up half an hour early to the neighborhood of Saint-Germain where the Flore is located.To be honest, I had butterflies in my stomach, more than I had expected. Ideally, I should have gone to the Café Bonaparte first and tossed back a few shots of whisky to keep wholly faithful to the story on my computer. But drinking whisky like that would have been nearly suicidal. My kidneys couldn’t process the alcohol. I’d have forced them into working overtime, and in view of my physical condition, put myself at high risk. So I strolled into the Bonaparte and asked for a glass of sparkling water at the bar. I swigged it back in a single shot and asked for another. I shot that one back, too. I looked around to see if my zeal toward the fizzy water had attracted any customer’s attention, but, understandably, the world remained unmoved, continuing its course without a care, without anyone wondering why I did or didn’t drink those glasses of water. I went to the restroom and emptied the urine from the little plastic bag tied to my right leg. I returned to the bar, paid, and left the Bonaparte at a leisurely stride, since I still had twenty minutes before the clock struck twelve noon. I stopped at the window of La Hune bookstore, ten meters away from the Flore, and looked around to see if anyone was following me, but nobody was there. I didn’t want to seem paranoid, so I stopped looking around. But, how silly of me. Who would think I was being paranoid if nobody, not a single person, was watching me?

I turned to glance in La Hune’s window and saw that the books of the writer I most despise in the world were on display. Luckily, they shared space with a magnificent, sizeable reproduction of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, the enigmatic double-glass piece by Marcel Duchamp that was painted in oil and divided horizontally into two equal parts with lead wire. At the top of the upper rectangle (the “Bride’s Domain”), I could see the perfectly reproduced gray cloud that was painted by Duchamp. I’ve always heard it’s the Milky Way. The cloud envelops three unpainted squares of glass, whose function (I’ve always heard) is to transmit to “the Bachelors” located at the bottom half of the glass the Bride’s concerns, possibly her orders, her commands. I paid particular attention to what most fascinated and captivated me about this Duchampian glass: those dots peppered around the far right section of the upper panel. Those dots have always been known as the bachelor’s gunshots.

I had nearly reached a point of ecstasy while contemplating the dots, but my vision betrayed me, and the books by the insufferable writer came back into sight. I considered sending him a bachelor’s shot. Was I to entertain the likelihood that Sophie Calle had put those books there just to irritate me? It was highly improbable. Then I thought of the surgery waiting for me when I got back to Barcelona, and of death, and I don’t know why, but I also thought that I could lose everything.

Death led me to reflecting on life. But what life? It was high time, I told myself, that in the chaos of our days, we start asking ourselves what we really mean by life; what exactly are we talking about when we talk about it? Maybe what we’re always talking about is actually death, after all. Surely we should start trying to qualify the word experience… I, too, have a somewhat distant, rather fuzzy memory of it. Who lives in complete fulfillment? Is anyone truly alive? And come to think of it, what kind of life does life itself live?

I decided to exit the twilight zone into which I’d stumbled and begin speculating on what Sophie might say when we finally saw each other. That’s what really mattered just then. Would she ask me to write a story for her to live, and was I to understand her proposal in the code of farce, as a mere theatrical representation? Or might she be taking it all seriously, and so when she suggested that I bring my writing beyond writing itself, I should hand her a copy of “The Journey of Rita Malú,” whose twelve pages I had folded and placed so carefully in my suit pocket?

As I played it all over in my mind, I realized that I had stopped contemplating the books in the window, or paying attention to what was going on around me, and felt enveloped by a floating cloud. I was slightly startled when someone stepped between the window and me, greeting me in French with a heavy Spanish accent and outstretched hand, politely asking what I was doing there. I’d never seen this young person in my life, with his dark glasses, black suit and tie, and carefully groomed four-day beard. My offbeat sense of humor suddenly came out, and I asked if he was the window decorator. “Because if you are, I have some serious complaints,” I said, letting a little giggle erupt, which made me realize I wasn’t all there. I had been trying to concentrate on my meeting with Sophie Calle, but all these obstacles were getting in my way, from my negative thinking to this guy wearing dark glasses.

“You’ve been following me since the Bonaparte?” I asked to say something, since he was just standing there, completely still, with a strange expression on his face, staring at the little bulge on the inside of my right leg where the small bag of urine was. “Don’t you recognize me?” he asked, peeking again at the tiny protuberance. I swallowed hard. Could it be a drunkard, instead of that “anonymous alcoholic” I’d made up in my story based on my red notebook? “Honestly, you don’t remember me?” he asked again. But suddenly it came to me, I recognized him. The dark glasses had thrown me off a minute. He was a Spaniard who’d been living in the area of Paris for a while, more or less since I started coming back here. He liked to walk around the district, greeting people and politely asking if they remembered him. As long as you said yes, of course I remember you, then he’d leave you alone. But since I had a few minutes to kill before going to the Flore, I decided to respond saying of course I remembered him, but that I forgot what it was he did for a living. He got very serious, pretending to be embarrassed by the question, but clearly the opposite was true, he was delighted to have the chance to respond. He took a deep breath, gratified, and said: “I’m a retired artist and now I wander the world.” Oh perfect, a retired artist. No one had ever portrayed himself to me that way before. I smiled at him. He said: “I used to paint, but nobody seemed to care about what I did. So I got fed up one day and asked myself why I painted, and more importantly, why did it matter to me if anyone cared? So, guess what I did. I retired. And then I went on painting, as if nothing had happened, but only in my imagination. Take this window, for example. To me it’s a still life. There’s a dead crow in it. I don’t think you can see it. There are days when nothing exists outside the world of my imagination. I give you my word as a retired artist.”

His words had far surpassed anything I had expected to hear. But now it was time to get rid of the guy. Sophie Calle took precedence. The retired artist must retire from my sight. “Fine, see you around, I’ll always remember you,” I said. And I slipped away with a lively step, my body slightly inclined and head askew, as if a blustery wind were whooshing me from one side of the Boulevard Saint-Germain to the other, the catheter wild and cavorting from side to side, as I took lengthy strides forward, my hands gripping each other behind my back.

.

7

I entered the Flore five minutes early, but Sophie Calle was already there, and she had gotten a good table. I approached her, trying to control my small panic.

“It’s me,” I said with a level of shyness that was out of this world.

As a grand gesture of respect, I asked permission to be seated, and she assented and then smiled at me. I tried to conceal how difficult it was for me to sit down with the catheter. But trying to hide it only made it worse; the clumsy movement jerked my penis, and the pain lasted almost a whole minute. Unaware of my private drama, she told me we would speak in Spanish, as we had done by telephone, since she had spent a year in Mexico and could speak the language well. I curbed my shyness and anxiety by speaking up straightaway. I got started with the apparent espionage and pursuit story that I’d been subjected to just a moment earlier by an anonymous alcoholic, who seemed straight out of the wall novels she was so addicted to: the man and the chase, that is. She wouldn’t have been the person who hired him to do it?

Sophie smiled faintly. She caressed the video camera perched atop the table and got straight to the point, no further ado. I tried to change my position to accommodate my genital equipment and catheter. But I wasn’t able to improve anything. What she wanted to propose, she said, was that I write a story. That I create a character she could bring to life: one whose behavior, for one year, maximum, would be contingent on what I wrote. She wanted to change her life, she was tired of having to determine her own deeds, she preferred that someone else do it for her now; she wanted to let somebody else decide how she was supposed to live.

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

We remained silent for a few slow seconds, till she went on to explain that she’d already made the same proposition to Paul Auster some years earlier, but he’d considered it too great a responsibility and declined. She had also proposed the same thing, without any luck, to Jean Echenoz, Olivier Rolin, my friend Ray Loriga, and Maurice Forest-Meyer.

“Who’s that last person?” I asked distrustfully and almost unintelligibly; my question was like a humble bullet shooting underwater in a lake, like a ridiculous Bachelor’s shot. But Sophie contended that now was not the time for this question. She refused to clarify who this Maurice Forest-Meyer somebody was, whose name she uttered with a trace of meaning. I realized, moreover, that what I wanted to know was something else, completely different. What I truly wanted to extract from her was whether this was a simple mise-en-scène, or if she was being serious. But why bother asking? Whatever the response, it wouldn’t serve to clarify the situation or orient me in any way. It was a useless question. So I fired another shot, this time with passion: I asked if what she really wanted was to turn me into a retired artist. The initial stupor of her look grew into what seemed to me an ice-cold glare.

I broke a lengthy silence by saying that someone had once alleged that the commanding intelligence of our species — the rich and yet vulnerable result of evolution — finds itself at times before doors that are better left unopened, or that should be closed very softly. Another glacial stare, which, in this specific instance, was accompanied by a look of utter bafflement. I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I just blurted it out, straight from the gut, articulating every word carefully: “I am not particularly interested in reaching beyond literature.”

Did she hear what I said?

“Just in case,” I added, “let me say it another way. I don’t want to jump any deeper into the abyss, I mean, into what lies beyond literature. There’s no life there, only the risk of death. It’s like these medical breakthroughs we’re starting to see and that I think are really ambushes for human beings. That’s why I’ve mentioned that there are some doors better left unopened.”

“I won’t deny,” I continued saying, “that I’ve been tempted to go beyond what I’ve written. But on second thought, I prefer to stay where I am.” No, not another step further into the abyss, the void, and no moving from literature to life. I told her I no longer wanted to abandon my writing to the whim of that sinister hole we call life. I’d been researching, exploring the shadowy abyss I intuited in the uncertain beyond of my writing, and figured it was about time to ask ourselves, especially because of the moment we were living, what were we really talking about when we talked about “life?”

Sophie said that she had to think everything over, camouflaging what seemed like a smirk. I decided to conclude, though, to finish what I had expounded, and let her know that literature would always be more interesting than this famous thing called life. First, it was more elegant, and second, I’d always found it a more powerful experience.

It’s not that I was very sure of what I was saying. What was elegant was what I had said, and life would always be life, I was pretty sure of that much… No, I wasn’t so sure of what I had just said so confidently. Literature is potent, and life isn’t something just following in its wake.

I wasn’t at all sure of what I’d just said, but it was already out there. My behavior had to do with the fact that deep down, I was annoyed because Sophie had never sincerely asked me for a story to live out on her own initiative. But why should she have? Who did I think I was? Wasn’t I a mere ghost?

A song popped into my head, given Sophie’s renewed and awkward silence, that went, “Love stories usually end badly.” I looked Sophie straight in the eye, and it dawned on me that without realizing it, she had the ghost of Pico Island sitting in front of her. All she had to do was film me for a few seconds with her video camera, and “The Journey of Rita Malú,” the story I held so carefully folded in my pocket, would come to an end right then and there.

“Anyway, I’m gone,” I said.

And I took off. Outside on the street, I ran into that famous thing called life and a traffic jam that went on forever. And I crossed the street to the other side, to the other side of the boulevard.