Guadalajara

A Day Like Any Other

The compulsive liar has spent an hour on his terrace, soaking up the sun. It’s a pleasant feeling after a cold winter, but a moment comes when all that sun makes him feel queasy. He puts a hand over his eyes, gets up from the lounger, goes inside, slips on a shirt and jacket, and walks out into the street. While he’s crossing the esplanade, he stares at the abandoned car that’s been parked by the football ground for two years and now has neither wheels nor doors. Why the hell don’t they move it and turn it into scrap metal? A heron flies low over the cemetery. He turns left and takes the long, sloping road.

He walks past the bar that’s halfway down the road; he stops when he’s about to leave it well behind. He wonders for a moment whether to go in or not and finally decides he will: he pushes the door open and lets out a general, Good day, to the owner and some customers who are playing dominos. He leans on the bar and orders a beer. The waiter serves him and, inevitably, asks how life’s treating him. The liar says, Well, and gulps his beer. His mustache is coated white. A poorly tuned radio is blaring out a melody punctuated by sounds that usually express pain. He watches the dominos game for a while. One of the players asks him if he wants to join in the next round, and he waves a hand to indicate that he doesn’t. He turns round, takes another gulp of beer, and gazes at the Russian salad under the glass cover. The golden-brownish hue of the mayonnaise makes him feel like ordering some. The owner sees him looking its way and asks him if he wants some. The liar says he doesn’t, because if he eats something now he won’t want dinner and his wife will nag. The owner smiles because it’s a standard joke: the liar isn’t married, he lives alone and always uses his imaginary wife as his excuse. When, for instance, he wants to leave and the others insist he has one for the road, or when they say he should play football with them on Sunday, and he doesn’t feel like it. He sometimes adds in children for good measure: a girl who, depending on the day, is between three and seven years old, and a boy who initially didn’t exist and is now even older than his sister. The owner washes a glass under the tap and is about to follow their ritual, extending the liar’s joke about the would-be wife by asking him whose wife, given he doesn’t have one. But before he can open his mouth, the liar asks him loudly—so everyone can hear—if he’s seen the circus they’re setting up on the esplanade. The owner is now drying the glass. Nobody answers. The liar turns to face the dominos players and continues in the same vein: There are three trailers, one of them huge and cage-like. One of the players raises an eyebrow, looks at him, and says, Of course there are. The liar pretends to be indignant: What does he mean “of course”? Is he implying it’s not true? He swears they’re setting up a circus on the esplanade. He’s seen the letters on the ground; they’re made of bulbs that will soon light up on the signboard on the tent: RUSSIAN CIRCUS. The tent, he now adds, is almost erected. There are four trailers. No, five, not four. And six cages: with lions and tigers. And three elephants: big as houses. The dominos players have finished their game and stare at him in astonishment: How can he be trying to make them believe yet another of his lies? However much goodwill they might feel toward him, how could they believe a man who always lies, who lies even when there’s no need to lie, when he won’t reap any benefit from lying? Their disbelief doesn’t waver for a moment or give way to doubt, but, as always happens, the liar speaks so convincingly and so heatedly that, as usual, they don’t believe him, but they are fascinated by the passion with which he tells and elaborates his lie. The elephants, for instance, soon become twelve rather than three; the tent is a triple, not single, affair; and the trailers, parked beside it in serried ranks, soon occupy an area the size of a football pitch. As he listens to what he is saying, one of the dominos players (they’ve finished the game and haven’t yet started another) feels his eyes begin to blur. No circus has come to town in thirty years, and he’s sure, at the rate things are going, that no circus will ever erect its tent on the esplanade again. None of them misses having the circus (not even the liar, although he’d argue the opposite if need be), and if a circus ever did come, they wouldn’t be at all interested: circuses belong to bygone times, and even then people weren’t interested. However, their lack of interest doesn’t stop them from listening, fascinated by the way he unrolls the canvas sails and erects one tent after another, how he makes the drums roll and multiplies the number of acrobats with such conviction—even though he never thought any of them believed him, let alone that, by virtue of his persistence, he himself would believe his own story. Only one (on the deaf side) asks in an unduly loud voice if anyone wants another game. But nobody answers: someone else has already suggested immediately going to the esplanade. He doesn’t need to twist their arms. They now harangue each other, put on their coats and scarves, and are in the street, walking next to the liar, who’s describing a pyramid of thirty-six tightrope artistes riding eight unicycles and a horse that can juggle. The last to leave is the owner, who puts on his jacket, pushes out the guy who’s on the deaf side, locks the door, and breaks into a run in order to catch the group of men who are hurrying along the road.

Life Is So Short

The man runs towards the third elevator that has just started to close; he manages to stick his right foot into the small space that’s still open, which is enough to make the two sides of the door immediately shoot open. He steps inside and greets the woman who is there already with a “Hello!”; she is very beautiful, with cascading tresses of hair and chestnut colored lips. The man (inhibited by the thought that he’d glimpsed a censorious glint in her eyes, because he’d re-opened the doors and stopped the elevator) stands to one side, looks at the buttons, sees 9 is lit up, takes a step forward, presses 12, that lights up, and goes back to where he was standing. The door closes slowly. He tries not to look at the woman too brazenly. But he can’t stop himself from looking at her out of the corner of one eye. Her eyes, chin, legs . . . The door closes, the elevator begins to go up. The numbers light up on the indicator: 1, 2 . . . Piped music plays a sanitized tune. The man looks at his wristwatch. It stopped a while ago. He shakes it, as if shaking will bring it back to life; that used to work with wind up watches, not with the battery kind. It’s a slow elevator, and the slowness helps underline the impression of safety suggested by the thick, protective walls. The clean state of the interior also reinforces this impression. A dirty elevator seems abandoned and, hence, unsafe. This one isn’t: it is spick and span and new. 5 has already lit up on the indicator and now it will be 6’s turn. When 6 lights up, the elevator stops, the doors open, and a bespectacled old man wearing a small hat pokes his head inside.

“Going down?”

The man says they aren’t. The old man wrinkles his nose and disappears to the right, index finger at the ready, clearly intending to summon the second elevator, unaware it’s out of order and being repaired on the ground floor. The door closes again. For a second, the woman glances at the man, and their eyes meet. He smiles. She averts her gaze. They can see 7 light up on the indicator and then 8. They are midway between the eighth and the ninth floors (8 is still lit up on the indicator and 9 has yet to show) when the elevator stops. The man looks from the woman, to the button panel, to the door (“Here we go again!”). The woman looks at him, the button panel, and the door. The woman is the first to express dismay (“Now what?”) and the man the first to try to act as if everything is under control (“Above all, we must not panic.”). The woman presses 9, 12, and the ground floor buttons, and when none responds, she asks the man if they should push the button sporting the image of an alarm bell. The man agrees. So they press the alarm button, and the bell immediately rings loud and clear, as if it was on the other side of the elevator walls. Where on earth is it? On the ground floor? In the concierge’s office? Is there more than one? From time to time they stop pressing the bell and listen hard, to see if they can hear any noise, someone who’s heard them and started the rescue operation or, at least, is nearby and shouting to them reassuringly. But they hear nothing, except for the piped music that churns out song after song, quite oblivious.

A few minutes afterwards the woman introduces herself (“Since it looks as if we’re going to have to coexist a while . . .”), the man follows suit and tries to bring a touch of humor by asking if she suffers from claustrophobia. The woman smiles: No, she doesn’t. He doesn’t either (“We must consider ourselves fortunate. If one of us did, it would be horrible for both.”) She’s still smiling, and he thinks her smile seems promising. Obviously, trapped inside the elevator as they are, in between floors, in the few minutes they’ve been stuck there, each has had time to reflect, if only fleetingly, on the so-called urban myths that exist about their situation (two people trapped in an elevator that has come to a halt between two floors), that parallel equally bright ideas about what a man and a woman do on a deserted island, absolutely alone and isolated from the world, though heaven knows for how long. He recognizes that he indeed feels attracted to her, but is she attracted to him?

The woman asks if anything important or urgent brought him to the office block this morning. He says it is relatively important (“Work issues.”) and remarks how strange it is to be trapped in there (for three quarters of an hour by now) and feel that nothing is, in fact, important any more. She too finds it most striking that the urgent matters bringing them to the building can, all of a sudden, cease to be important because of something quite untoward. An hour ago, she continues, her time was all mapped out and she couldn’t have afforded to waste a second. Now, suddenly, she can assume the whole day’s been wasted. At the very least, the morning. Will they take much longer to extricate them? The man dares to say she certainly appeared to be in a rush, because when he stuck his foot in between the sides of the sliding door, he thought she seemed peeved. The woman smiles and admits she can’t stand people who, when elevator doors start to close, poke their foot in, never thinking that, as far as the individuals inside are concerned (who want to go up or down as quickly as possible, and who in fact have already begun the process one way or the other and are totally within their rights), such a gesture seems extremely inconsiderate. The man is about to say that, at least, putting his foot in the door has had one positive outcome: they have met. But fortunately he nips that banality in the bud. She mentions a Woody Allen film in which an elevator plays a central role. Brian de Palma has one too, starring his wife, what was her name? She is so pretty. He says he once read a novel in which an elevator goes through the roof and flies into the sky.

The elevator, she tells him, is the most important means of transport over the last few decades, even though most people don’t think of it as a means of transport. The relationship between elevators and the tall buildings that are being built now provides much food for thought. It’s not so much that buildings have had elevators installed because they have grown taller and taller; on the contrary, they have grown taller and taller because elevators have become increasingly efficient and safe. She removes her high-heeled shoes and arranges them in a neat line in the corner, under the button panel. Every now and then, one of them presses the alarm bell for several minutes. When one is tired, the other takes a turn, but in the end they both get fed up and sit on the floor side by side. (“They’ll get us out of here soon. They can’t leave us here forever.” “Perhaps we’ll end up eating each other like shipwrecked sailors in order to survive.”) The woman thinks it is significant that they are sitting side by side.

For a moment while they are waiting, they lose all notion of time. “Don’t look at your watch,” says one. It is relatively easy for them to count, second by second, to thirty, and do a half-minute. It’s more difficult to count, second by second, to five minutes or half an hour. If they were to count second by second for a few hours, their margin for error would skyrocket.

Later, they fall asleep. They wake up simultaneously (“Did you hear a noise?”) in a half embrace, one head on the other’s shoulder, their eyes so close that, when one whispers an unintelligible sentence, the other opens his or her mouth and says “What?” and one set of lips draws near the other, although, suddenly, they come to a halt (six millimeters from their objective) because, at that very moment, the elevator moves, accelerates quickly, stops (with a final judder), and reaches the ground floor, where the concierge and one of the repair mechanics are waiting (“You both all right?”). The man and woman look at each other. They should say something, arrange to meet . . . But she thinks that, even though he’s staring at her, he’s not in a hurry to suggest any such thing, and he reflects that though she’s staring at him, she heads straight to the fourth elevator, the one furthest away—not interested, he’d say. Now that their situation in the elevator is all over, is everything all over? The man heads out into the street, thinking that he shouldn’t have left without fixing a date, or at least exchanging phone numbers. At the precise moment he hits the sidewalk, he wonders why on earth he is walking out if he was supposed to go to the twelfth floor. He half turns round, opens the door into the building, crosses the lobby, avoiding the mechanic and concierge who are observing another mechanic, high up in the ceiling of the new elevator that has broken down, wielding an enormous torch and checking the traction, brake cables, and the guides. The man runs towards the fourth elevator; it has just begun to close, but he manages to stick his right foot into the small space that’s still there, thus prompting the two sides of door to slide open immediately.

The Power of Words

While they set his table, the man waiting at the restaurant bar talks to himself. As a kid he’d heard it said thousands of times: a man who talks to himself is mad. He is now of the opinion that this isn’t true. He is quite aware that talking to himself doesn’t prevent him from being completely sane. He talks quietly. He whispers sentences, in animated, exciting conversation with another person, or several others, who are all invisible, are all him. He’s doing it now, at the bar, and does it driving his car, and at home, and at the office. He talks to himself even when he’s with somebody else. Sometimes this somebody hears him whispering and thinks he’s said something to him and asks him what he’s just said. He says nothing, because in fact he does say nothing (he doesn’t even know exactly what he says; rather it’s the buzz that interests him, the sonorous effect, the blah-blah-blah, the appearance of a conversation), and whatever he does say he’s not saying to the person who’s trying to talk to him but to this other invisible person (or persons) with whom he is conducting an on-going conversation. He can’t remember when he started talking to himself and would find it difficult to establish the frontier between a before, when he still only talked to other people, and an afterwards. He sometimes thinks that, one way or another, he has always talked to himself; the only thing that has changed is that he’s increasingly casual about the whole business and does it quite spontaneously, unthinkingly, quite unaware, never holding himself back. Depending on how you look at it, he sometimes tells himself, these conversations are simply the continuation of the imaginary conversations he pursued when he was a kid, with that friend of his he invented (whose name he can’t remember, curiously) and with whom he experienced adventures full of palm trees and lianas every night in bed. The conversations he has with these non-existing others are as interesting as the ones he engages in with real people, when he has no choice. What does he talk about when he seems to be addressing his glass? About nothing in particular and about everything under the sun. He might be talking about tennis or philosophies of life. He might be rambling, be aspiring to reach sophisticated levels of argument, or be totally vacuous. This is often the case: he’s been debating with himself a good while and realizes that everything he says to this other person is completely vacuous. Then, rather than shut up, he changes the subject.

On the other hand, the man sitting at that restaurant table, surrounded by people deep in animated conversation, says nothing. He’s been imperturbably silent for years. Other people’s views about his silence are, by now, accepting. They all respect the fact that he silently watches how they reason, argue, and refine shades of meaning which are themselves susceptible to refinement. Precisely because he keeps quiet, they don’t know that he thinks what they are discussing is banal, but they assume that must be the case. Generally, they also assume he doesn’t have a particular aversion towards them and that his evaluation of their banality isn’t at all contemptuous but is, in fact, agnostic. Agnostic in relation to others and himself. He’s not against them; he simply passes. He feels he is totally banal and dispensable, and that is precisely why he keeps quiet. He’d find it difficult to judge others for being banal when he himself is guilty of banality. He started to keep quiet the day when, in the midst of a conversation that was drifting into a disquisition on the degree of influence the fandango had exercised on the origins of the huapango, he suddenly found he didn’t know what to do. He knew nothing about the fandango or the huapango; they were subjects that had never interested him, and consequently, he had absolutely nothing to say. What was he supposed to do, stick his oar in and participate as expected? Invent an opinion on the matter and defend it? Rather than do that, for the first time in his life he preferred to keep quiet. Until that point he had always joined in, even with genuine interest, and forcefully, in all kinds of conversation and arguments. Although the others all looked astonished, he felt he had done no harm by saying nothing. And he didn’t find saying nothing at all unpleasant. The others didn’t act particularly aggressively towards him. He was used to defending entirely unexpected points of view, and he felt a sense of liberation when he allowed himself the luxury of keeping quiet and not saying a word. He saw how the others kept heatedly debating this or that, and now and again they looked his way, hoping to find he’d had a change of heart and would contribute an opinion. They only needed him to play his part in those ritual nightly conversations. The proof was that he could answer, as a matter of form, with a few predictable words. They found that altogether natural. Because they didn’t expect a really genuine or thoughtful response from him: the most formulaic reply sufficed, if it wasn’t out of place. His present silence, however, challenged the others’ chatter, and this was what upset them, much more than his silence in itself. Finally, a few hours and strange looks later, someone addressed him, asking if he had anything to say. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. The others continued their debate, reckoning that everyone has his day of silence. Nevertheless, he didn’t open his mouth in subsequent conversation. From that time on he has said nothing, ever, anywhere. He knows some believe he is being snobbish, that he is putting on airs and being unsociable. He doesn’t see it like that. He has absolutely nothing of interest to say; hence he says nothing and listens to the others’ heated arguments.

Like, for example, the guy at the other end of the table, who talks fifteen to the dozen, the most talkative of all the people sitting there, the one who won’t let the others get a word in edgewise, the one who rushes to speak first, so nobody can beat him to all the clichés available on today’s topic of conversation. He has an opinion on everything and wouldn’t, for all the tea in China, let himself be caught without a pertinent opinion on any issue whatsoever. He knows (or presumes to know) about economics and art, about stockbreeding and basketball. There isn’t a single subject on which he can’t express four pertinent ideas that may, sometimes, even scintillate. Given the wide range of topics he is obliged to hold forth on, his four ideas generally have to be transferable, polyvalent and sufficiently ambiguous to address a variety of issues simultaneously. It is not difficult to grasp that, as they have to be capable of adaptation to every possible issue, the insights and subtleties contained within these four ideas are hardly complex. The world is full of conversations where the man who talks fifteen to the dozen has to stick his oar in. He always has to be on the alert for whatever opportunity presents itself to allow him to say whatever comes into his head. Consequently, from time to time he observes the silent man at the other end of the table with a mixture of fascination and pity. How can he endure that almost vegetative existence, watching life pass by and never advancing his opinions? And there is so much to be said! Moreover, he can’t help thinking that if he keeps silent it is to make himself seem intriguing, to demonstrate the extent to which he despises everyone around him. On the other hand, he doesn’t pity the man he can see seated at the table who is talking to himself, and in fact feels a mixture of envy (because of the self-sufficiency he displays) and respect for what he deems to be a model of perfection.

Literature

He keys in the last sentence with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. It’s the first of his novels to end with a death. This is remarkable in itself because dead bodies had been notably absent from his books, a rejection of the facile solutions that so many writers resort to when they don’t know how to heighten the drama. Now, for the first time, and driven by the logic of his narrative, he has been forced to change this given and kill his protagonist. He wrenches the page from his typewriter, puts it at the back of all the others, and re-reads the beginning: “That early afternoon, when he was setting the table, the man dropped the salt shaker by chance and some salt fell on the serviettes. He was terrified.”

The writer’s contract with his publishing house obliges him to write a novel a year. He signed it seventeen years ago, and every January he punctually hands over the new novel to his publisher. He has by now published sixteen novels. He doesn’t think writing novels is particularly difficult, and he systematically makes fun of writers who take two years to write one. Sometimes he’s happier with some than with others. Sometimes the story flows, he feels passionate; it almost gushes out and is a pleasure to edit. At others the story is contrived; he writes as if it were a punishment (because, under contract, he must finish, come what may, before the year is up) and struggles to make a few edits. It makes no difference: nobody complains when it’s on the feeble side. Insistence on quality is minimal in this country; a situation that is so notorious its inhabitants like to joke about it. His constancy, then, allows him to earn a living—a precarious one, but he doesn’t have to get up at 8:00 a.m. His only prayer to this God he doesn’t believe in is that he should never have writer’s block. That wasn’t an option.

His publisher gives him some good news on the day the book is launched: They are going to re-issue his first novel in a new collection, and if he wants, as they have to re-set it, he can re-read it and introduce any changes that he thinks are necessary. He does just that. He has written so many novels that he’d forgotten the precise plot of his first effort and could only remember, rather hazily, some of the characters. He knew it was about a writer who is writing a novel, is quite successful, and that this allows him to publish a second novel the next year and a third the one after that. But when he reads it from one end to the other, he is astonished. The plot and the characters anticipate exact details from his life—events that happened months or years after publication. After sixteen years, he can pinpoint exactly which secondary character the protagonist’s wife falls in love with. Because soon after publishing his first novel, he met an identical character, and the woman who fell in love with him was his wife. And the protagonist’s struggle against pressure from the world around him was the very same one he faced after his first success.

Intrigued, he reads his other novels one after another, in the order they were written and published. One accurate prediction after another. He recognizes individuals, feelings, sensations, successes, and failures, always written months before the event. He sees his whole life anticipated from book to book. He presages events, situations, women, dramas, and epiphanies. The almighty power of the character in Green Steppe anticipates his own power a while after. The anguish of the protagonist in Pure Soaked Earth anticipates what he subsequently suffered. And the musician’s awareness of his failure in All the Fire of His Great Sun was his very own a few months later. He also recognizes actual individuals. The woman in Colts in the Corral is Lluïsa, whom he met on the very day of the book’s launch. Teresa appears portrayed with almost photographic precision, in The Spirit, but when he was writing it, he didn’t even know her. He systematically foresaw and wrote things that would happen to him months afterwards.

When he finally comes to his last book, the one he has published a few days ago, he is frightened by the fact that his protagonist dies. He leaves the book on his desk, goes into the kitchen, looks for a can of pre-cooked stew, opens it, pours the contents into a saucepan that he puts into the microwave. He can’t recognize any of the characters or events in the book. On the one hand, it’s obvious sufficient time hasn’t passed for what he’s written to turn into reality. On the other, however, the fact he can’t recognize anything at all is cause for hope: if it’s all about prediction, some of the events should already have happened. That this isn’t the case may indicate that this novel is different from the others. Indeed, no law decrees that the norm has to be eternally realized. He thinks all this while setting the table; he is aware of the situation and is going to try to avoid the inevitable.