Guadalajara

Strategies

– 1 –

As soon as the examiner opens the door, the distinctly pale-skinned candidate slips through the crowd of other candidates who are clogging up the doorway. He walks with a spring in his step and takes the first empty chair he finds. The desks are made of light green formica with wooden sides. The tops are covered in pen-ink graffiti and scored by knives; two of the etched phrases are obscene. The din (made by the grating of desks and chairs and the chitchat) increases as the candidates walk in; the examiner asks them to please (it is a drawn-out, imperious “please”) sit down without making a sound. The candidates fleetingly pay him some attention; the noise dips for a few seconds, but soon returns to its previous intense level. The examiner turns his back on them: he erases the sentences that were left from the class before from the blackboard and turns around (the noise dips again), and when they are all seated, he walks down from the dais, goes over to the door, shuts it, wipes off the chalk-dust from his hands (a gesture that silences the last whisperers), and calls out two surnames. Two candidates get up from their desks and walk over to him. He gives each of them a pile of stapled sets of paper, which they begin to distribute. As they proceed to put a set on each desk, the pupils strain their eyes trying to read the questions (they are in very small print), but nobody attempts to pull the set of papers towards him or glance deviously at the top sheet. They don’t touch anything until they’re all given out and the examiner says that they can start. Almost fifty sets of paper rustle in unison around the room. The distinctly pale-skinned candidate takes a deep breath, pulls his set across his desktop so they’re right in front of him, and calmly starts to read. He has spent the weekend cramming, and now that the examination has finally begun, he feels a mixture of exhaustion and disinterest. He’s spent weeks preparing for this exam, which will determine whether he can progress or not. Years ago he’d have said it was a crucial exam, but over time he has learned that all exams are crucial, to the point that an exam that wasn’t crucial wouldn’t seem authentic. He has just read the five questions and is feeling relaxed. He knows four of the answers perfectly. Consequently, he can already conclude that he has passed, at the very least. He suddenly realizes he’s been tapping on his desktop for quite some time: ratatatat, ratatatat, ratatatat. He glances at the other candidates and sees how stressed they all seem. Most are writing in a rush, as if they were going to run out of time, filling one sheet after another, their faces blank. Two are thinking really intensely. That’s obvious because they’re frowning and staring at the ceiling; what’s more, one of them is chewing the end of his ballpoint. Another has lowered his head in order to drop out of the examiner’s field of vision and say something to the boy in the next desk: he moves his lips, slowly vocalizing a word, but the student can’t hear; he responds by putting his bottom lip over his top lip and shrugging his shoulders. The whisperer silently repeats the word time and again. They carry on like that until the examiner begins to walk up and down the aisles between the three rows of desks. The one stooping down straightens his back, reacting over-seriously and suspiciously. As if he too might be caught in the act, the distinctly pale-skinned candidate also straightens and finally decides to get started. He takes the top off his pen and writes his name. He begins to answer the first question, in clear, even writing, one word flowing after another, in straight, compact lines. When he’s finished the first, he starts on the second. But after writing a few lines he feels faint again and stops writing. He is tired. The last few days of intense studying can’t have tired him that much; perhaps he’s exhausted by the succession of exams he’s had to face, year after year, ever since he was a child . . . If only he could see an end to it all . . . But after this exam there will be another and then another. He knows that the preparation requires an effort, that one never knows enough, that one can never properly show how much one knows, whether it’s enough or not. However, this knowledge doesn’t stop him from wondering whether there will ever be a final exam. He starts to write again, reluctantly. He knows he will pass, as he always does. Everyone always does. Not because the examiners are generous. They are harsh; nevertheless, he hasn’t known (and nobody he has known has ever known) anyone to fail. Everyone passes, always: because everyone revises conscientiously. The fact everyone has always passed means that the panicking over possible failure is curious, at the very least. Has anyone ever failed? And what’s the point of sitting for the exams, if everyone always passes? Because if exams didn’t exist, people would stop revising as carefully as they currently do?

The question he’s been considering over the last few exams buzzes around his head again: What if he decided to fail on purpose? He’s increasingly sure that nothing really serious would happen. If he passed yet again, tomorrow he’d simply start the routine all over again: store away the books he’s just studied, open up a new set, and memorize thousands of pages. The walls of his house are covered in books. At first he put them on shelves. Then he ran out of walls and began to pile them up on tables, under his bed, on top of his bed. Now there were books everywhere. It would be a mistake to get rid of the oldest to make space for new ones, because the new exams often referred to explanations you could only find in books you had studied years earlier as a child preparing for the first exams. Four or five exams ago he realized that he couldn’t remember anything about his first exam; the first exam he remembers taking only took place one or two years ago.

Why continue sitting for exams? In fact, what use are they or will they ever be? Wouldn’t it be best to give them up now? Just as he can’t remember his first exams, he’s also forgotten their ultimate goal, beyond turning yourself into a short-lived examiner. He knows that the examiners (who have overcome the hurdle of the exams he’s now facing) also sit for exams, but doesn’t know why. In order to turn into an (also short-lived?) examiner of examiners? He’s not even sure he’ll know if he becomes an examiner. Just as he didn’t know, when he started as a child, that the first objective (the one he thinks he’s on the brink of now) is to become an examiner. He began, he thinks he can recall, because his parents (like absolutely all parents) wanted him to study. But his parents died years ago in a biplane accident, one afternoon when he was sitting for an exam. He tries to recompose the fragments of his childhood and adolescence that he remembers. Has anything he studied ever interested him?

He’s bored by the idea he might pass yet again. He’s been taking exams and passing without fail for years. Why does he need to show the examiner that he can answer four out of five questions? And how many exams has the examiner had to pass to become one? The very fact there are examiners must prove that there is a final exam. However, can that really be true? Perhaps things are rather more complicated (or more straightforward) than he imagines? Is he close to that final exam, or are there still years to go? And the only way he can challenge his string of passes is, in his opinion, by failing. During the last few exams he’s had a strong suspicion that his fellow candidates have or have had the idea that’s been buzzing around his head of late: give the wrong answers. He can’t possibly be the only one who finds passing one exam after another (eternally) to be quite stupid. Initially his pulse races, but soon he grows in confidence: He answers the questions one by one, in clear, even writing, one word flowing after the other, in straight, compact lines—incorrectly, on purpose. When he finishes, he will get up from his desk, hand his papers to the examiner, and (this is what he’s thinking to himself) will fail.

– 2 –

Irrespective of the time he finally gets to bed, on the eve of election day the candidate always sets at least one alarm clock, and two or three if he is very tired or is afraid his usual alarm clock will let him down at the decisive moment. The candidate must be sure he will wake up early enough, although the electoral campaign has in fact finished and theoretically he can allow himself to rest, after weeks of going from one meeting to another and sleeping only two or three hours a night. He must get up early because he knows that on the final straight there are few things that make a worse impact than the candidate who gets to the polling place late, looking sleepy-eyed and unkempt. A candidate who places his vote at noon is a thoughtless fellow that the electorate will dub a slacker: the day his immediate future is at stake, as is, presumably, the city’s, his head seems stuck to his pillow. The thinking behind that is clear enough: if he lets laziness rule when he isn’t mayor, what will he be like when he is?

It wouldn’t matter if his lethargy showed itself afterwards: tonight or tomorrow, once election day is over and done with. But the reports showing the candidates casting their votes will be on the midday television news. And midday is still hours away from when the election stations close, and that makes these reports the last act in the election campaign, although that officially isn’t the case. The law rules that the campaign must finish at midnight on the day before the election. However, many potential voters (the people who always leave everything to the last minute, the ones who get to the cinema after the film has started) will see the reports at midday, and the way a candidate comports himself when he votes may in the end make him decide to get up from his sofa and go vote. And even (and this is what’s crucial as far as he is concerned) vote for him. That’s why his attitude at the polling place is so critical, as are the exchanges with the members of the electoral table, his vote, and his subsequent appearance back on the street. A serious, thoughtful expression may have a positive impact on the don’t-knows who believe that this candidate has been too lighthearted or arrogant during the campaign. Though others might conclude that this sudden seriousness reflects fear of possible failure, a conclusion that would persuade them not to vote for him. Conversely, a frivolous, facetious attitude, that might appear positive to those who felt he was too distant during the campaign, could be counter-productive if it was interpreted as presumptuous, that he thought victory was already in the bag. It would be unseemly to whistle your way into the voting booth. Bad vibes if you cry and bad if you laugh: and equally bad if you don’t cry or laugh.

To compensate for this via crucis to the town hall, the candidate has the ultimate advantage: at least theoretically, he is the citizen who should be in the least doubt when it comes to placing his vote. Even family and collaborators could (out of conjugal boredom, envy, or internal intrigue) vote for someone else: to fuck him up or, in their heart of hearts, to feel like schoolboy hooligans once again. But he wasn’t allowed any doubts. It’s an unwritten law. The possibility of puncturing that particular bubble has indeed been buzzing around the candidate’s brain for some time on the way to the polling place, and when he gets out of his car, smiles into the flashes of the photographers, enters the voting hall, and walks through the crowd of voters. And what if he didn’t vote for himself? They say that any candidate who is really honest and believes in the program he is putting forward is duty-bound to vote for himself. If he reflects on this dispassionately, however, isn’t this vote for oneself, to a certain extent, a kind of spell, a propitiatory magical ritual? He recalls the first time he was able to vote (long before he became a professional politician), the overwhelming emotion, the doubts about whom to vote for and whom not to, his exhaustive scrutiny of the election programs of each of the candidates, his leap of faith. He takes a voting slip for each party, enters the booth, and closes the curtain. The journalists smile and think it’s one big joke. He doesn’t need to pick up a slip for each party and hide in the booth to decide his vote. Everyone knows whom he is going to vote for, and he doesn’t need to keep any secrets.

Alone in the booth, the candidate reviews the slips and thinks that maybe one could formulate the proposition in the opposite way: that a candidate who is so confident of his honesty and the value of his program has no need, at any stage, to be in thrall to superstition. On the contrary: confidence in himself and the power of his arguments should allow him to make a gift of his vote, to present it to his rival—his own arguments are so clearly right they are bound to win over the hearts and minds of the majority, who will ever cast their votes for his opponent? Too bad then if victory is finally decided by his wretched vote. He seals the envelope, opens the curtain, exits the voting booth, smiling broadly and flourishing the envelope containing his vote. In the history of humanity has there ever been another candidate who (as a result of a sudden attack of sincerity, or of schizophrenia), under the protection of the sealed envelope, has voted for his rival?

– 3 –

The curtain rises. The stage set is a dining room. The walls are covered in blue and green flowery paper. In the center, a large redwood table, on the top of which are a vase of flowers and a heap of musical scores (that the theater-goers in the stalls simply see as a heap of paper). On the right, a sideboard; on the left, a fireplace with a plastic log and fake flames. Above the fireplace, a painting of an ugly woman wearing a tiara. The actor strides confidently in and walks towards the table, but he stops halfway. He clicks his tongue and turns around, stops and clicks his tongue again, walks back towards the table. This is his way of trying to communicate a sense of bewilderment, indecision, and grave concern. He places his right hand on the table and, finally, after waiting for the necessary seconds to pass, launches into his monologue. He speaks unhurriedly, in a clear, deadpan tone, and at a brisk tempo. It is a long monologue; the author wrote it so that the character can reflect on the harshness of existence, the dubious life he has led to that point, and his bitterness at the realization of having made so many mistakes and wasted so much time. All these reflections mean that every day the actor inevitably (as he continually repeats his lines) thinks that it is indeed a bitter pill to acknowledge one’s mistakes, and (while he lists those his character has made) he reviews in parallel those he himself has made throughout his life, the last being precisely his agreeing to take on this role in a play he finds increasingly awful. Even though he’s an experienced actor, he doesn’t find it easy to simultaneously maintain the flow of words in his speech and allow his own thoughts to wander. In fact, he ought to concentrate exclusively on what he is saying and defer his own meditations. But he finds that quite impossible. He is getting more bored by the day, finds the play drearier; he’s never had such a boring part. It is of no help to him whatsoever that the play has been so successful. He knows the play is a con. Initially, he’d not thought that, had believed passionately in the work. He was thrilled with the role! He remembers the day they called him, the evening he read the play, from beginning to end in one sitting, his return call to the director that same night, enthusiastically accepting the role. But now with each performance he realizes there is nothing behind the glitter of the words. However much the critics analyzed the play, and (in a rare show of unanimity) all had praised it, however much the audiences packed the theatre every day, and there’d been a flood of invitations to tour the play abroad, it had gone flat as far as he was concerned. No one knew it as well as he did. Not counting the rehearsals (that lasted months), he had performed it nine-hundred-and-twenty-three times. Today was number nine-hundred-and-twenty-four. And after nine-hundred-and-twenty-four performances one knows a work back to front. One knows that, if it were any good, one would have reached that number without any problems: after the nine-hundred-and-twenty-fourth or fifteen-thousand-and-thirteenth, he would have continued to find new insights. When it comes to bad plays, on the other hand, each performance reveals a new crack. After nine hundred and twenty-four performances, the cracks win out and the play falls flat. No matter that nobody, except him, notices. Like this obediently laughing audience, laughing precisely in the silence marked out for laughter. As soon as the laughs end, he resumes the monologue and, speaking all the time, sits on a chair, puts his elbows on the table, and places his head in his hands. He has repeated this action so often . . . Instead of sitting down and placing his head in his hands, why doesn’t he, one night, go to the curtain and smell it, or lift his foot up and examine the sole of his shoe? He has repeated it all so often he could perform the play (from the first to the last scene) in total darkness, on a stage that had been turned into a minefield. A suitably mined stage would be no problem for a methodical actor—he could tread fearlessly there, confident he’d never step on a mine, every movement would be etched on his brain, to the last millimeter. Today’s actors are undisciplined; they modify their movements from one performance to the next, not to improve them (no problem, if improvement were the aim) but because of their lack of discipline—they’d be blown up after taking a few steps. Hah! He simulates a coughing attack, spits out the last sentences of his monologue, hits his fist against the blue and green flowery wallpaper (gently, even though the sound echoes round the auditorium), and sits down again. When he finishes the monologue, with the words “If it weren’t for that, all would have been in vain!”, the actress will makes her entrance (she is thrilled by the work and will never, however many years pass, realize that it is completely devoid of substance), will simulate surprise and say: “Hi, Lluc. I didn’t expect to find you here.” The actor hears footsteps, feigns surprise, stands up, and concludes: “If it weren’t for that, all would have been in vain!” The actress immediately makes her entrance and says: “Hi, Lluc. I didn’t expect to find you here.” The actor walks over to her, not exactly gracefully, embraces her, she rejects him histrionically, he retreats to the sideboard and decides to abandon ship: to make an announcement that very day, as soon as this performance is over, to the effect that he no longer finds the play fulfilling, that he needs fresh, intelligent challenges. But what excuse can he give? He can’t say, just like that, without further explanation, that he’s abandoning a work he has performed, without interruption, for years, the work which has finally, after decades of struggle, brought him fame and recognition. He can’t confess that he’s gradually discovered that the work he was so proud of performing, nine-hundred-and-twenty-four times, is complete garbage. If he pretends to be sick (actor and actress now kiss passionately), the performances would be suspended. But how long could he pretend to be sick before the impresario started to suspect something? A fortnight? A month? If his fake illness lasted any longer, the impresario (despite himself, even though he doesn’t suspect foul play) would look for a replacement. The play has reached its climax. It can’t be suspended just like that. After the kiss, the actress ostentatiously cleans her lips on the back of her hand and rebukes him; he insults her, imagines his substitute playing the role he has made famous (not for a moment does he consider the possibility he might do it better); the very thought makes him shudder. He also shudders when he thinks that’s the only reason he doesn’t leave and continues performing the role day after day, and when the curtain falls and he hears the audience applaud, he gives a routine wave, full of pride.

The Lives of the Prophets

– 1 –

The man gets up, eyes sparkling, breathing feverishly, with one aim in mind: to reveal to the world what has just been revealed to him. He rubs his eyes; the revelation is still crystal clear. Until this moment, he would have found it difficult to accept that he could suddenly become a prophet. Now, on the contrary, he discovers he can assume the role with the requisite faith and sang-froid. As he hurries downstairs in his pajamas (his mission is too momentous to worry about trivial details like finding his pants, shirt, and jacket), the trumpet blasts still echoing round his head, he sees his wife in the kitchen getting breakfast ready and their child bawling in his cot. His wife is surprised to see him up so early. She tells him so, but he doesn’t hear her because he’s already opening their front door and stepping out into the street, determined to divulge his revelation. He reaches the square, sees a green Volkswagen Passat parked next to the bakery, and climbs on top. It is the perfect pulpit. The four individuals who have come out to buy bread, savory pastries, or milk for breakfast (wrapped up tight, wearing scarves and hats pulled down over their ears) look at him bleary-eyed. He is sporting sky-blue, gray-striped pajamas; the wind sears his skin and freezes his bones. Wasting no time, he takes a deep breath, stares at the glazed faces of the four individuals staring up at him (one man’s nibbling the crust of a baguette he’s carrying under his arm), and goes blank. What was he supposed to be prophesying? He can’t remember.

The more stressed he gets, because he can’t remember, the blanker his brain becomes. Time rushes by. People look at him, rooted to the spot, and he finds that even more stressful. Was what he had to prophesy good or evil? It was mind blowing, for sure: he can remember how he reacted. But was it a mind-blowing reaction to good or to evil? And hadn’t he felt quite shocked? Had it perhaps fallen to him to prophesy the horrific end of the world? No, it wasn’t anything like that. Was it the opposite, a new dawn of hope? Too grandiose. It was no earth-shaking prophecy. Perhaps it was more modest. But what was it? He can hear the sound of a TV from a nearby window. A dance orchestra is playing a musical interlude on the morning program. He tries to concentrate and remember at last what it was. But it’s not coming. Seconds pass as if they were minutes, the four people who were looking at him drift away (one by one), and he’s left standing there with his finger sticking up and his mouth open, speechless. Until the owner of the Volkswagen appears, surprised to see a man on top of his car, and angrily bawls him off the hood; then he grabs the prophet by the lapels and slams him up against the wall, while the prophet tries (in vain) to remember whether that was what he had to prophesy, being knocked against the wall, being in a state of uncertainty, being unable to remember.

He ruminated for days. He was absolutely clear on one front: he had not deceived himself into thinking he had something to prophesy when, in fact, there was nothing. His gut feeling was right. He had been summoned to prophesy an extraordinary occurrence. But was it extraordinary for the world? Or simply for him? That was why he had run downstairs and into the street, so he could bring it into the open. But could he still remember what it was when he was on his way downstairs, or did he come down awestruck, remembering nothing, yet obsessed by the need to tell everyone?

How can one forget a revelation? One can forget something normal that any mortal might know, a simple piece of information or an item one has discovered or got by paying cash: a name, the plot of a film, or an umbrella. But not a prophecy. This makes him realize how deceptive one’s memory can be and forces him to contemplate the possibility that it was not so much a prophecy as a dream. A dream that had seemed so real he had mistaken it for a prophecy. But he knows it wasn’t a dream. And also knows that if he doesn’t manage to remember, he will feel eternally mortified. His wife taunts him at every opportunity: “What kind of prophet are you? If you can’t remember the prophecy, there was no such thing. Ezekiel and Isaiah would never have been prophets if they’d forgotten what they were supposed to be prophesying. That would have been hilarious, for sure. Can you imagine them saying they’d forgotten?”

“What if a prophet suffered from memory loss? That’s hardly his fault. I can even agree that I am a bad prophet, a clueless or mediocre prophet. But in either case I am a prophet. A truth was revealed to me. I know that is the case and I’m not deceiving myself. That fact isn’t belied by my lapses of memory. I will remember some day. But even if I can’t, it’s nothing unusual. Nobody can deprive me of my role simply because there’s never been an absent-minded prophet before. There’d never been a prophet who flew off in a chariot of fire until one did just that.”

The prophetic state can be a spontaneous happening or be prompted by a variety of techniques: meditation, magical or mystical formulas, movements or punishment of the body. Also by music, particularly drums. Or by dancing or ingesting narcotics. Maybe, thinks the prophet, he should stimulate himself, take recourse to one of these methods. He is increasingly clear that what’s really serious is not that he has forgotten what he should be prophesying, but his inability to put it all behind him. This makes him feel even more exasperated, sinks him into a mood of deep despondency, and makes him finally suspect that the revelation that caused him to get up, eyes sparkling, breathing feverishly, was exactly that, after the initial epiphany, he wouldn’t remember anything at all when he was out in the street.

A few years later, out of the blue, the prophet feels another revelation coming on. The trumpet blasts, the dazzling flashes of light, the words intoned clearly and slowly by a solemn voice. He had read that prophecies can be repeated, particularly in the case of prophets who feel reluctant to assume their role. To ensure this prophecy doesn’t elude him, he switches on his bedside lamp and looks for paper and pencil in his drawer. He can’t find either. He jumps out of bed. He can’t find either in his whole bedroom. He rushes into the kitchen; there’s a notepad hanging on the wall, in the shape of a chef wearing his hat: the pad is his apron. But when he gets there he sees that the pad is used up and the chef is displaying an obscene hole rather than an apron of sheets of paper. He’d forgotten. The pad had run out days ago and he hadn’t remembered to buy a new one, precisely because there hadn’t been any paper left to jot down a reminder to buy a new pad. This lack of coherence really winds the prophet up. Shouldn’t notepads have an end paper, where one can jot down a reminder to buy a new notepad? Sure enough the pad’s last page should, to a certain extent, fulfill this function. But how can we know that we’re writing on the last sheet if nothing identifies it as such? There could very well be one underneath. To ensure users know it’s the last one, at a glance, the solution would be to make it a different color: yellow, pale green, bluish, light enough to write on with the usual pens or pencils but distinct from the last white page, so one realizes it is the end sheet and jots down: “Buy another notepad.” They could even carry a message, like those calendars that tell you in mid-December: “Buy this or that new calendar,” understanding by “this or that” the brand of the calendar in question. Evidently this last sheet would increase the item’s price (because of the different color or extra printing), but this increase would be easily offset by the advantages of having the sheet. This final sheet would be similar to the sheet one finds in a checkbook, the one that indicates the checkbook is almost used up and that one should ask one’s bank for a new one.

The prophet is thinking all this while searching anxiously for a scrap of paper to jot down his revelation. But even before finding one (he finds a notebook in his son’s briefcase and tears a sheet out), he knows that when he finally has that sheet in front of him, and his pen (he takes one from the pencil case in the same briefcase), so much time will have passed and he will be so stressed out that he’ll forget what it was yet again. In effect, when he has the sheet in front of him and a pen at the ready, he can’t remember the revelation. Only shards, fragments, and vague ideas remain. But he finds it impossible to reconstruct. Besides, he’s wracked by doubt. Was this revelation the same as the last one or were they two distinct revelations? Has God repeated the message he’d not been able to remember, or did He decide it was a lost cause and send him a new one?

The day after he decides to put a notebook and pen on his bedside table, just in case, the revelation is repeated. Obviously he regrets forgetting it again, but he finds the fact he has had another revelation hugely encouraging; we can assert that he’s never been as optimistic as he is today. Because this second revelation confirms he is a genuine prophet. His only idiosyncrasy is that he has a bad memory. Another source of hope: if the revelation has been repeated once, it can be repeated again.

He buys a small cassette-recorder in an electronics shop; he always carries it with him and puts it on his bedside table at night, ready to switch it on as soon as he has another revelation: if he sees it’s going to elude him yet again, he’ll record it rather than write it down. Even so, he keeps the notebook and pencil nearby, in case the cassette recorder doesn’t work or the batteries run out, even though he checks them every week, and he throws them away and inserts new ones long before they run out.

The years go by, but all his precautions are in vain. He has no more revelations. That son who was in his cot when he had his first one is now twenty-eight years old. His father has alerted him: You could get a surprise at any time, and you must always be prepared. When he was seven, his mother died; father and son wondered for several days whether that could have possibly been the prophecy, that his mother would die and he’d be half-orphaned. But it didn’t strike any bells with his father. Even so, they kept wondering. Whenever a war broke out or there was a disaster somewhere in the world, father and son wondered whether that might not be what had been revealed.

The father is now on his deathbed and calls for his son. His son is sitting outside on a chair, head bowed. The doctor leaves the bedroom, tells him to go in and to be sure, above all, not to tire him. The son enters the bedroom in a highly emotional state. The prophet’s eyes sparkle; he tries to talk, but is exhausted. He tries to say something, is breathless, takes a deep breath, closes his eyes for a moment, as if keeping them open was a struggle, but then re-opens them immediately. He says: “Son . . .”; his son leans over, clasps his father’s right hand in both of his. “Before I die . . .” the prophet whispers. But he immediately goes silent again. He looks away and stares at the opposite wall. His son looks where his father is looking, in case there is some special sign, some thing to indicate what he is trying to say with those quavering words, evidently the last words he will ever say, his final farewell. The son squeezes his father’s hand even harder. “Rest. Don’t try to say anything.” The prophet suddenly feels a breath of energy. “I mean that . . .” The door opens, and the nurse clatters in on her heels. The voice of the dying man is lost in the racket. The son puts his ear to his father’s mouth, hopes he will repeat himself. The nurse changes the bottle on the drip that enters one of the dying man’s veins through a tube. The son is literally lying on top of his father. Once she has changed the bottle, the nurse leaves, trying to ensure that her heels don’t clatter as much as they did when she came in. The prophet opens his eyes again. When he yawns, there are grayish folds at the corners of his mouth. “That’s why . . .” “Don’t force yourself . . .” “. . . I didn’t know how to . . .”

The old man closes his eyes and breathes with difficulty. What is he trying to tell him? Could he have remembered the prophecy on his deathbed? “Now I want to tell you . . .” The dying man opens his eyes wide, opens his mouth wide, and stiffens. His son sobs. He leaves the bedroom and looks for the doctor. The doctor certifies that he is dead. He lowers the eyelids with tweezers. The son leaves the bedroom. Other relatives in the dining room stop him and embrace him. One scene of grief follows another. He receives condolences, hugs shoulders, shakes hands, and wipes away his and other people’s tears. Throughout his life, the family had rarely talked about his father’s status as a prophet, and at that moment the son intuits a vague glint of curiosity in the occasional look, an interest in whether his father had remembered any of his revelations in the last seconds of his life. Someone had made coffee in the kitchen. The son pours himself a cup. He takes small sips because it’s burning hot. His relatives keep hugging him. He looks for a place where he can be alone. He decides to hide in the lobby. Nobody will see him in the darkness there, and he can be by himself for a few moments. As he heads that way, a cousin sees him from afar, walks over, gives him a hug, and inquires after his mental state. When the cousin goes back inside, the son opens the door on to the landing, walks out, and shuts it behind him, trying not to make any noise that might alert the others. He walks down the stairs and out into the street.

– 2 –

He finds work in another city. It’s a good idea to move and live in another city. They sell his father’s house, and he leaves. He establishes his own business a few months later with two work colleagues. He has a reasonable standard of living, is relatively happy, and plays cards with friends on Friday nights.

He wakes up one cold winter’s morning with a vision of a city in flames, its buildings in ruins, its roads full of deep fissures and people fleeing, panic-stricken. The images speed by at an unlikely rate and are accompanied by trumpet blasts. It is a very short, intense vision, and he strives to remember what’s written in white on a green and blue sign: PLACE LACHAMBAUDIE. The sign is the size and color of a Parisian street-sign. If he had a guide, he would check whether a square called Lachambaudie existed in Paris.

The next day he goes to a bookshop and buys a street guide to Paris: Guide general de Paris. Répertoire des rues. Éditions L’Indispensable. As he’s taking the guide out of the bag in the shop doorway and looking for Lachambaudie on the alphabetical list of squares, he hears the word “earthquake” on the lips of one of the girls walking into the shop at that moment. He turns around, goes over to them, apologizes for intruding, and asks which earthquake they are talking about. One of them says the earthquake that hit Paris two hours ago. The prophet’s son breaks into a run. He stops in front of an electronics shop and sees a Paris that has fallen victim to an earthquake, that not even the detectors had foreseen, on a dozen televisions.

He feels guilty that he said nothing. He watches them pulling corpses out of the rubble a thousand kilometers away and thinks he made a big mistake not telling any of the powers-that-be and wasting a regrettable amount of time looking for a street guide to check whether a square by the name of Lachambaudie existed in Paris. He only calms down when he realizes that if he had, nobody would have believed him and all those people would have died anyway.

A year and a half later, also in the early morning, he sees (for tenths of a second, also with trumpets blasting) a terrible epidemic that in a matter of weeks ravages a country he can’t identify (he thinks it’s in Asia). He immediately speaks to the health authorities, so as not to repeat his negligence over his vision of the Paris earthquake. He tells them about the precedent of his father, how he foresaw the Paris earthquake, and how that tragedy took place because he’d said nothing. They say thank you very much and take notes, but he knows they’re only humoring him; basically they don’t believe a word.

A week later, the newspapers are filled with nothing else but reports of mortality rates in Laos and Cambodia. Ninety-eight percent of the population of Laos and twenty per cent of Cambodia’s have already died. Months later, by the time the epidemic is under control, Laos, Cambodia, and half of Thailand have been devastated.

A year after, he wakes up one morning and (the same few tenths of a second and usual trumpet blasts) sees a school bus tumbling off of a cliff. He knows which school it is because the name’s written in large spindly letters across the top of the windshield. He rushes off to talk to the school’s headmaster. He describes his vision: the bus, the road, and the bend with the ravine. The headmaster is impressed; the bus always drives along the road he saw in his dream, and around the bend with the drop into a ravine. He calls the driver in and tells him. When the prophet’s son sees him (a prophet now, indeed, on his own merits), he whistles. It’s the man who is driving the bus when it tumbles into the ravine. The headmaster is really impressed yet again, and very grateful. But on which day did it happen? The prophet can’t say for sure. The headmaster takes a decision: the bus will follow an alternative route for a time, and a new driver will replace the usual one.

Two months later, as the predicted calamity hasn’t happened, the usual driver returns, but as a precaution, he will follow the alternative route. After six months, given it is impossible to continue taking the much longer, costlier route, he returns to the traditional one. When he is close to the bend by the ravine, the driver takes even more care than usual. Weeks and months pass without any problems. At the very beginning of June, the bus hurtles into the ravine.

People look at him maliciously, as if he were in some way guilty. One evening, the police had to stop the relatives of the dead children from lynching him. The prophet tells them time and again that they are confusing prophesying an event with causing it. The headmaster agrees. And he too feels vaguely, unjustifiably guilty. What should he have done? Change the route for all time? Fire the driver without good reason? Nothing tangible indicated that the accident was inevitable.

The prophet reproaches himself. Months later, one morning when the trumpets and dazzling lights reveal to him that the British Air-ways flight 5397 from Barcelona to Birmingham will crash, he decides to say nothing. However much they try to stop it, the accident is bound to take place. If he predicts it, people will think he is in good measure responsible. But he finds it difficult to have that knowledge and keep it to himself. Besides, in this case, the solution seems simple enough. If the Barcelona-Birmingham flight that is going to crash is the 5397, all they have to do is change the number 5397 and give the flight a number than nobody uses (for example, 7612): numbers can’t be in short supply. However, is it possible to short-circuit a prediction? He can’t sleep knowing deaths could be avoided by taking such a simple step as changing the flight number. If the company would listen to him, the problem would be solved. He informs the company, tells them his record of prophecies and the vision he has had about flight 5397. The directors of the company give him a pleasant welcome and tell him that if they paid attention to everyone who claimed they had a presentiment that such and such a flight will be involved in an accident, they wouldn’t be able to fly anywhere. Years ago they took the decision to ignore them systematically.

Now that the situation is out in the open, the prophet tells a newspaper (the only daily, a sensationalist rag, that will listen) what has happened, his record of prophecies and the precedent of his father, and warns that, if the company persists in ignoring him, the 5397 flight from Barcelona to Birmingham is going to have an accident. The daily, it’s short on space, publishes the news (bottom half of the left-hand page) and calls the prophet a half-mad lunatic. When the plane crashes three days later, the disaster brings him public recognition. Opinion champions him and turns against the air company. How could they have scorned a prediction that was so clear, that would have made the accident so easy to avoid? The newspapers that hadn’t showed the slightest interest in his story before the crash now want to interview him. In every single interview, the final question is about whether he has new predictions to make. A journalist on the country’s second most important daily makes fun of the fact that people keep talking about prophecies when it is obvious they are simply visions. A prophecy is much more elevated and transcendent. The prophet emphasizes that the importance of what is being revealed to him doesn’t warrant any divisive pigeonholing. It is no less crucial if it is of worldwide or simply individual interest: it is a revelation of a future event, and this is all that matters. Indeed, perhaps his father never remembered his revelations because he persisted in trying to discern something that was universally valuable, an element of redemption.

The prophet is now so famous that when he has his next revelation (that a particular cruiser on a Christmas cruise around the islands of the Aegean is going to sink), the authorities decide to believe him. They don’t cancel the cruise, but they don’t allow any passengers on board. And when the vessel shipwrecks, it does so in the glare of television cameras that are broadcasting every moment of the ship sinking and the rescue of the crew by helicopters that were accompanying the ship expressly for that purpose. Immediately afterwards, he prophesies a new war between two countries in South America, but not even the big powers can do anything to prevent that, and war breaks out. He predicts a tsunami that will bring destruction to Chile, Hawaii, and Japan. He predicts trains will collide near Bologna and the imminent death of the king of Norway. When he foresees the eruption of a volcano near the island of Mexcala, in Lake Chapala, the authorities quickly evacuate the area and the loss of human life is nil, although nearby villages are devastated by the lava. He’s now being asked to predict everything: if such a day would be good for elections, if such a place is ideal for building a new airport, what the future holds for such and such a prime minister. He feels he is being treated like an oracle. People stop him in the street and ask him what the weather’s going to be like on the weekend or the number that’s going to win the next lottery. Time and again he has to make it clear that he knows nothing about most things, that he can only prophesy what has been revealed to him. The journalists who imagine him making predictions à la carte find this most disappointing.

When a bomb explodes in the train station for the Berlin zoo (seventy-nine fatalities), the news is on every front page and all eyes are turned on him. Why didn’t he foresee it? Once again, he has to remind people that he has no power over which events will be revealed to him and which won’t, and no way of intuiting beyond what he is shown in the revelation. Nevertheless, however often he tells people, from then on, some individuals (including the journalist who believes he is more a visionary than a prophet) reproach him for every event he doesn’t predict, particularly if it’s a catastrophe. “Perhaps we shall never know what his hidden reasons for not predicting this event were,” one article on the bombing of the Berlin station concluded, almost accusing him of conniving with the terrorists. The headline was: “A prophet when it suits.”

The prophet goes on predicting: peace between the two countries warring in South America, the murder of the Dutch prime minister, the fall of such and such an African dictatorship, the imminent creation of a definitive vaccination against the new lethal strain of hepatitis that appeared three years ago. The same trumpets are blasting, but the revelations are completely random. One day in September it’s even revealed to him which team will win La Liga. Criticisms rain down on him for being trivial and frivolous and “abusing his prestige as a prophet.” The frequency of his revelations increases. Until he can’t avoid predicting almost everything and knowing what will happen at any moment. He meets a girl, and before he’s spoken to her, he knows it is going to end badly for one reason or another. With one it’s because he can’t stand being jealous (it’s especially gruesome, because the girl’s repeated infidelities are revealed to him in all their gory detail). With another, it’s because she’s soon sick to death of so many visions. The gift of prophecy prevents him from leading a normal life. When he meets Marta he knows (the next Saturday, in an early morning revelation, with Marta by his side) that he’ll marry her, that they will have son and will separate a few months after he is born. He also knows that, before that, time will move on, they will buy a green Rover, license plate 4436 BKR, six months later their neighbor will have an accident at home, three years later they will eat Christmas dinner in Can Nofre, his sister-in-law will unexpectedly drop by the day after, and he will be bored to tears for the rest of his life.

His son is a month old. He gives him his bottle, puts him in his cot, gets into bed, and, before falling asleep, suddenly hears, like almost every morning, the sound of trumpets. They have become so routine they no longer excite him. He opens his left eye. He is so sleepy; the last thing he feels like right now is another revelation—he’d give anything to be able to ignore it and get some shut-eye. Nobody gets a decent night’s sleep when it’s bottle-time every three hours. But he can’t do anything: the bright lights are flashing before his eyes, and slowly and solemnly, a totally unexpected revelation appears: he will never have another revelation.

It leaves him cold. Better that way, he thinks. At last he will be able to relax, at last he will be the same as other people, at last he is going lead a normal life, like the rest of humanity. He falls asleep hugging his pillow but wakes up before dawn, panic-stricken. What will he do with his life from now on? Not having any more revelations is all well and good, sleeping in the early morning, or relaxing in a bar, without having a visitation from trumpet blasts or dazzling lights. He now has to face the fact that, without noticing, he has been constructing his life around this special talent of his. Without the gift of prophecy, how will he confront a world that expects him to make new prophecies every day? What will he do, if he ceases to be a prophet?

He decides to pretend. For a time, he says nothing to anyone. He predicts nothing. He forecasts nothing. Months fly by and people begin to complain that he is no longer making prophecies. He first uses his child as the excuse: young kids are lots of work and you can’t do anything else. Then he tries to pass off obviously inevitable events as prophecies events. On such a day in such a place the sun is going to vanish. But the ruse doesn’t work: because everyone knows that on such a day in such a place there will be an eclipse.

One morning he opens the picture windows of his house (there’s always a group of journalists below, armed with cameras and cassette recorders, ready to record his every word), and in a grandiloquent tone he says he has just had a revelation: the world will come to an end—he has seen a vision of a barren, lifeless, devastated planet. The revelation doesn’t stir even the most ardent believers in the apocalypse. “We know the world will end one day or another. Pompous assertions like this are no use to us,” writes a journalist, who had previously reproached him for his simplicity and the downbeat nature of his revelations. People gradually start to make fun of him and come out with pithy put-downs. “He’s lost it.” This happens at a time when Marta tells him he’s never been a good husband and has always been obsessed by his visions, by his petty, egocentric world as a prophet, a world that’s now evidently coming to an end. She tells him she’s reached a decision: she’s leaving him and taking their son with her. This is the last prophecy to be fulfilled. The prophet had foreseen it, but regrettably never said anything to anyone, not even Marta. If he did so now, he would still retain a minimal, threadbare credibility.

After seeing how soon people forget, oblivion takes him by surprise. He’d never have imagined, when the moment came, that he would miss people’s (should he say the public’s) warmth so much. He opens his window, and there aren’t any journalists waiting, cameras and cassette-recorders at the ready. He had wanted to lead a normal, anonymous life, but now he misses the limelight and wants to defer the dreadful moment, in whatever way possible. If only he could tell them the truth . . . That he’s had a revelation: he will never again have another revelation. It’s not a bad idea. But it’s too late now. If he’d told people when it came to him, it would have made the front pages, and he could have beat a dignified retreat. Just imagine the headlines: “His last prophecy before bidding a definitive farewell is that he will never have another revelation.” But it’s too late. To reveal that now would be an admission of failure. And to avoid admitting that he is a complete failure, to deny that he’d been one for years, he takes the plane to Berlin one day, checks in at a hotel (the Berlin Steigenberger, near the zoo), and immediately goes out for a stroll. The next day he will let it be known he has another prediction to reveal. He’s greeted with skepticism. “Wonder whether it’s going to be ‘in two years time June 23rd will fall on a Wednesday’ kind.”

Like in the old days, the prophet is back in a press conference. He says hello to a journalist who interviewed him years ago, when there were seventy-nine fatalities. He declares he’s had a revelation. The train station for the Berlin zoo is going to be blown up. Some people protest: That’s no prophecy; it happened years ago when, in fact, he didn’t foresee it. The prophet says this is a completely new revelation. They ask him when it’s going to happen and how. He replies it will happen that afternoon. The authorities react immediately. Like in the old days, they don’t doubt the veracity of what he’s said for a second and take the necessary security measures. Shortly before two o’clock, at the head of a crowd of police and journalists, the prophet enters the train station to show them where the most frightening devastation and flames occurred in his revelation. That very instant the bombs explode, one after another.

During the War

War broke out mid-morning. At half past eleven the situation was confused, and by midday the sense of uncertainty was (depending where and how one was situated) absolute; the lack of clear demarcations between the factions (and the various, often ideologically opposed groups that were behind each of these factions that were sometimes at loggerheads, thus creating new splinter groups) contributed to the confusion, as did the fact that a certain percentage of the population that had cottoned on (the war, so often anticipated sotto voce, was now a reality) didn’t know exactly what attitude to adopt. There was another percentage (overwhelmingly the majority) that acted as if nothing had happened and everything was completely normal, though their motives weren’t entirely clear; the nature of the conflict encouraged their stance: equivocal and oracular poses that meant they didn’t express themselves as exuberantly as usual. There were no troops on the streets or barricades in the avenues. No parades or harangues. Military garrisons maintained a (ostensibly ostensible) calm, concealing, it wasn’t difficult to intuit, a state of high agitation. The nervousness of military command was clear in their hastily given orders, which were imbued with an excessively heightened sense of conviction, and the wave of orders and counter-orders that was so complex it revealed their underlying insecurity. All that calm (if one could use that word), all that suspicious normality simply indicated the hostility in the air.

At midday, though summoned by nobody, simply moved by their civic instincts and anxiety, those citizens who were conscious of the situation started to head towards the square, wanting to find out what was really going on. According to some, the trigger had been a revolt (it was unclear whether it was military or civilian) in a distant province (it was unspecified and varied from mouth to mouth: it was this or that depending on the speaker), a revolt that had been seething for months. Its distance from the centers of power was one of the reasons why no untoward developments were in evidence in the capital (said those returning from there). According to others, in principle it involved a confrontation between two factions (that weren’t openly antagonistic) within the army, an army that in the past had won victories and accomplished feats that had become legendary and that, until very recently, had enjoyed a generous budget, though a degree of unease had been generated in the higher ranks that resulted from the economic restrictions they now faced, inactivity, and restrictions encouraged by the absence of bellicose conflicts of any significance, whether inside or outside the country. However, according to others, there had been a coup d’état in the capital (led by whom?), kept under wraps as much by its instigators (convinced that the most effective coup d’état was the least noticed) as by its victims, who considered that their best option, given that the coup leaders weren’t intending to glory in it, was to maintain a prudent silence, thus sparing themselves from having to admit defeat. So they acted as if nothing had happened, which meant they ensured that most of the population and diplomatic missions continued to be in the dark (or at least acted as if they were), to such an extent that if anyone decided to publicly insinuate that something was wrong, they would point to the calm on the streets to support their case. The coup’s leaders and the deposed leaders were then theoretically, and paradoxically, in accord. The fact that the pact of silence was supported equally on both sides meant that other people, who were even more devious, imagined that the coup’s leaders and the deposed leaders had planned everything down to the smallest detail, so the coup would go completely unnoticed. Given the silence, that seemed to have no apparent fissures, how could the engaged citizens properly evaluate the facts? The radio wasn’t broadcasting only classical music, as was usual in such circumstances, and the television continued with its planned schedule. At that very moment a film was coming to an end—part of the Elvis Presley cycle that had begun three weeks ago: Elvis Presley dives into the water, people applaud, Elvis swims to the cliff, climbs up, dries himself on a towel, and gets dressed. A crowd of men carries him on their shoulders back to the hotel. Everybody congratulates him; Ursula Andress says: “Bravo,” they kiss, are surrounded by a mariachi band, and Elvis breaks into song. Following the Elvis film, the program schedule continued as planned (this was particularly significant) and no reference was made to any conflict. Consequently, the engaged citizens found themselves deprived of the data that was necessary to evaluate the real situation; a lack of orientation that only increased their doubts and caused misgivings and rumors to spread like wildfire. Such a tenuous basis in fact precipitated a moment when people quickly flitted from one supposition to another, leading to a third that opened the way to a fourth, each as impossible to prove as any of the preceding ones yet accepted as readily as any accomplished fact. And had there been lots of casualties, as someone claimed? Was the situation changing drastically, as another reported? And, besides, was changing drastically in relation to which previous situation? The tensions between the engaged citizens heightened, fanned by their different perspectives and inability to prove a thing, which prevented them from reaching any decision, specific or not. In demonstrations in front of the military government building, the tension caused by this dearth of data would often seethe to a metaphorical boiling point, and the most incensed citizens had to be pulled apart from the most phlegmatic of the citizenry. There were those who even questioned whether it was necessary to take a decision. Why should they? Wasn’t it better to carry on as they were? (Obviously, with their ears to the ground. They could all agree on that.) The arguments became so acrimonious that at 2:00 p.m. it was finally decided to defer any decision till after lunch, so they could debate more calmly. Everyone went home, except for three citizens who always went out for lunch; they headed to a nearby restaurant. The situation was no less tense inside: whispering around every table, averted gazes, and dissimulation.

In mid-afternoon, troop movements were detected in front of the military government building. However, right away, those who question everything made their voices heard: Was there any indication, any particular sign of aggression in those movements? Could one deduce that something really serious was afoot, or were they simply routine drills? Barely accustomed to army maneuvers, the engaged citizens (who’d now lunched, met in the café, and made their leisurely way to the military government building) hadn’t a clue how to interpret them; they could all agree on that. A black car, with a black pennant, drove up at 4:32. An officer got out. From that distance, most of the engaged citizens, who’d been conscientious objectors, were unable to define his exact rank. Was he a general? A captain-general? A lieutenant-general? Or a mere lieutenant? Would it have given them a clue, had they known? It obviously wouldn’t have, and this made them even more irate—anger they directed at themselves on this occasion. They thought that the two sentries (doing their duty on either side of the main entrance, in concrete boxes with green-tiled domes) saluted him particularly respectfully, but people weren’t unanimous about that. Once the officer had entered the building, the car drove off. Did its immediate departure denote anything serious, or on the contrary, was it a positive sign? At 6:32, a demonstration of engineering workers in overalls walked up High Street and into the square. The demonstration had been called the previous week, complied with all the legal requirements, and was, thus, totally authorized. Once again, the rumor mill found fresh proof in the fact that none of the powers-that-be (whether civilian or military) had banned it: if it had been banned, it would have been a sign, an acknowledgement of the anomalous situation. They could agree on that. Consequently, they let the demonstration go ahead, and some 150 individuals (a hundred, according to the report filed by the municipal police) marched to the West Bridge, without hindrance: there they dispersed peacefully, heading home or to the nearest watering-holes. Suddenly, at 7:13, the same officer who had alighted from the car a few hours earlier came out of the military government building. However, he was now in the company of another officer of a different rank, but again those present couldn’t determine what his rank was due to the aforementioned gap in their knowledge. The car (the same one from earlier in the afternoon; a citizen with a fine memory had memorized the license plate number) was waiting for them.

It would be a tense night. The hours passed slowly. The engaged citizens twisted and turned sleeplessly in their beds. How could they sleep when they felt so anxious? Radio stations still weren’t broadcasting classical music and the television kept to its scheduled programs: a competition with couples who’d broken up and the next chapter in a television drama, which that night revealed that one of the characters was a homosexual.

Calm in the night. Carousing in bars, the early morning din of the trash collectors. At half past six the shutters at the kiosks started going up. At 10:00 a.m. (barely twenty-four hours after this had all begun!), the first cannonades were heard. Twenty-one, to be precise. There we go. The engaged citizens immediately went out into the street; some sought shelter in the nearest subway stations, mingling with less conscious citizens who were apparently continuing their normal daily lives. After the twenty-one cannonades, silence. The midday television news reported that the prime minister of an economic, political, and military power of the highest level had arrived in the city that morning. This visit provoked contrary opinions among the aware citizenry. Some believed the visit was an excuse to cover up the cannonades they had heard that morning (on the pretext that they were in his honor). Others reckoned the visit wasn’t gratuitous or innocent (nothing is, never ever) and that the great power was attempting either to mediate in the conflict (sheer effrontery) or help one side (absolutely intolerable interference, whichever side they were trying to help). In the afternoon, the first casualties were announced: a five-a-side rugby game in the Olympic Stadium ended with seven injured when supporters of both sides fought a pitched battle on the terraces. Shortly afterwards, it was evening, anguish, and nighttime. The pattern was repeated, day after day, for weeks, with small variations that introduced fresh doubts, fresh evidence, and fresh uncertainties. The drama didn’t lie in the number of deaths (so well concealed as to seem non-existent), the distraught families (these were few in number, prompted by motives unrelated to the conflict), the homes abandoned, or hunger (these had been a factor for years) as much as in the withholding of breath, the wild hypothesizing, and the futile attempts to find out what was really happening. They spent months weighing up new hypotheses and finally found themselves back where they had started: awash in what they themselves ironically dubbed a sea of disinformation. And not the slightest expression of solidarity from any other country, far or near. They found this cold-shouldering by the outside world even more depressing.

Would that war last forever? There’d been one that had even lasted a hundred years that the history books still debated with a sickening indifference. They needed another ninety-eight to equal that war. Humanity’s ability to adapt is admirable. Faced by these rather bleak prospects, parents opted to enlighten their offspring and prepare them for life in such conditions. Generation followed generation, and the parents of the engaged citizenry passed the arguments that were necessary for survival in that unending war on to their children, the first being to keep quiet and adopt an outlook of complete indifference, like every other citizen.

Until, one day when the younger element among the aware citizenry couldn’t agree which year everything had begun (obviously encyclopedias and history books were silent on the matter and portrayed those years as a period of peace and splendor). There was one particularly independent, iconoclastic youth who kicked open the door of the cafeteria, where they met each Tuesday and Thursday to find out about the latest state of play, walked to the table where they were all prevaricating, and told them the news: the war had finished as unexpectedly as it had begun—that afternoon at 5:34. The most cheerful, ingenuous citizens gave a sigh of relief, but the most aware of the aware lowered their heads in sorrow. Because, if a war is hard enough, the post-war period that inevitably follows is even harder and that peace (signed in unimaginable conditions with unimaginable burdens for the citizenry that the media obsessively concealed) was an ineluctable indicator that the post-war period had started.

Books

There are four books on the passionate reader’s table. All waiting to be read. He went to the bookshop this afternoon, and after spending an hour around the new releases tables and reviewing the covers of his favorite authors on the shelves, he chose four. One is a book of short stories by a French writer; he really enjoyed a novel of his years ago. He didn’t like the second novel he published that much (in fact, didn’t like it all) and has now bought this book of stories in the hope of re-discovering what had fired his imagination so many years ago. The second book is a novel by a Dutch writer whose two preceding novels he had tried to read, but with little success, because he’d had to put both of them down after a few lines. Strangely, this didn’t lead him to abandon the idea of a fresh attempt. Strangely, because usually, when he can’t stand twenty lines of the first book by a particular writer, he might try the second but never the third, unless the critics he trusts have singled it out for special praise, or a friend has recommended it particularly enthusiastically. But this wasn’t the case now. Why did he decide to give him another try? Perhaps it’s the beginning. The beginning that goes: “The bellhop rushed in shouting: “Mr. Kington! Mr. Kington, please!” Mr. Kington was reading the newspaper in the lobby of the Ambassade Hotel and was about to raise his hand when he realized that nobody, but nobody, knew he was there. He didn’t even look up when the bellhop walked by. It would be the most intelligent decision he had ever taken.”

The third book is also a novel, the first novel by an American author he has never heard of. He bought it because in spite of the initial quotation (“Oh, how the tiles glinted in the blossoming dawn, when the roosters’ cry broke the silence with the sound . . .”) he had leafed through it and felt drawn in. The fourth book is a book of short stories, also by a Dutch writer, one who had been unpublished to that point. What attracted him to that book? If he were to be sincere, it was the rich abundance of initials: there are three (A., F., Th.) before the three words that make up the surname. A total of six words: three for the surname and three for the forename. What’s more, the first word of the surname is “van.” He simply adores surnames that begin with “van.”

Why, out of the four books that the passionate reader has on his table, are two (50% exactly) Dutch? Because the Book Fair held in the city was this year devoted to Dutch literature, and that meant, on the one hand, that publishers have brought out more writers in that language recently and, on the other, that the main bookshops in the city have created special displays, piling tables up with these new books as well as books by Dutch and Flemish authors that had been published years ago, that are no longer new and were gathering dust in the distributors’ warehouses.

The passionate reader has all four books in front of him and can’t think where to begin. The stories by the French writer whose novel he liked several years ago? The novel by the young American about whom he knows nothing? That way, if (as is very likely) he finds it immediately disappointing, he will have eliminated one of the four at a stroke and will only have to choose from among the other three. Obviously the same may happen with the novel by the Dutch writer whom he has had to put down on two previous occasions, after merely one page. The reader opens the second book and leafs through. He opens the third and does exactly the same. And follows suit with the fourth. He could choose on the basis of the typeface or kind of paper . . . He tries to find another aspect of the books that could decide for him (an isolated sentence, a character’s name). Page layout. Or paragraphing, for example. He knows that many writers struggle to create frequent paragraphs, whether the text calls for it or not, because they think that when the reader sees the page isn’t too dense, he will feel better disposed toward the book. The same goes for dialogue. A serrated text, with lots of dialogue, is (according to current norms) a plus for most people. This may generally be the case, but has the opposite effect on this reader: he finds an abundance of new paragraphs irritating. He is prejudiced against, and mirrors the prejudice felt by lovers of abundant paragraphs, who find a lack of paragraphs extremely monotonous or arrogant.

Where should he begin? The solution might be to begin them all at once, as he often does. Not simultaneously, of course: but going from one to another, just as you never watch six TV channels at the same time but flick from one to another. Obviously there must always be a book he opens first where he reads a paragraph, a story, a chapter, twenty percent of the pages before moving on to the next. The problem is not knowing where to start. He gets up and lights a cigarette. Why is lighting up a solution when one doesn’t know what to do? Lighting up shows we are thinking something through, are meditating intensely, are remembering, are waiting for someone (every so often we will draw back the curtain and look down the street) or are losing patience (in a maternity hospital waiting-room, its floor covered in cigarette butts). One enjoys a post-coital cigarette; one lights a cigarette to extinguish it in the groin of a masochist lover and increase their arousal. One lights a cigarette in search of inspiration, because the nicotine helps to stop us from dozing off, or so we don’t eat when we are hungry and can’t or don’t want to. The passionate reader has one last drag and goes back to the table. The four books are there and, next to them, the plastic bag bearing the bookshop’s red logo. Night falls; a car drives by; a radio blasts out. Do you hear a lot of radios in novels? If the four books were to disappear all of a sudden, his problem would disappear with them: where to begin? He picks up the novel by the American. He opens it to the first page. He sticks his finger forcefully between the two leaves, to keep it open, and reads: “At the very moment the nurse pulls the sheet up to cover his face, the dead man opens his eyes and whispers incoherently. The nurse screams, drops the sheet, says the patient’s name, and takes his pulse. She runs out to find the doctor. ‘Doctor, the patient in 114 isn’t dead!’ ‘What do you mean, he’s not dead?’ ‘He’s not dead. He opened his eyes. I took his pulse . . .’ The doctor tries to hide the unease that this piece of news provokes in him.”

The reader closes the book. The first sentence, the first paragraph, the first page. The possibilities are immense, as ever. Everything still has to fan out, gradually, as the paths at the beginning fade until finally (that is, on the final page) only one remains, that is generally predictable. Will the writer keep us entranced to the last page? Won’t there ever be a time, from here to the fifth, eighteenth, or one-hundred-and-sixty-seventh page when his spell will be broken. But a narrative is never as good as the possibilities that fan out at the beginning. Anyway, it’s not about the reader foreseeing every possible development and improving on the ones offered by the author. No way. How would he continue the story of the man reading the newspaper in the lobby of the Ambassade Hotel who doesn’t react when they shout out his name? It is that moment of indecision, when the chips are down, that attracts him. The exposition vaguely reminds him of that Hitchcock film when Cary Grant is mistaken for another man in a hotel lobby. But he’s not interested in taking that thought further. To write the next scene, whatever that might be, would open the way to imperfection.

Writers err when they develop their initial expositions. They shouldn’t. They should systematically set out their opening gambits and abandon them at the most enthralling point. Isn’t that so with everything? Of course it is! Not only in books, but also in films or plays. Or politics. If you are ingenuous enough to believe any of that, isn’t a party’s political program a thousand times more interesting, positive, and stirring than its execution once the party is elected to govern? Everything is idyllic about the program. In practice, nothing is respected, everything is falsified; reality imposes its own corrosive cruelties. And (in life outside of books) isn’t the beginning of love, the first look, the first kiss much richer than what comes later, that inevitably turns everything into failure? Things should always begin and never continue. Isn’t a man’s life enormously rich in possibilities at the age of three? What will become of this boy who is just starting out? And as he grows, life will wither everything: few of his expectations will be fulfilled, and that’s if he is lucky. But just as a passionate reader cannot stop life unless he decides to cut it short, he can stop his books at their moment of greatest splendor, when the potential is still almost infinite. That’s why it is never-ending. He only reads the beginnings, the first pages at most. When the forking paths fanning out at the start of a story begin to fade and the book is beginning to bore him, he puts it down and places it on the corresponding shelf, according to the alphabetical order of the writer’s surname.

Disappointment can come at any time. In the first paragraph, on page thirty-eight, or on the penultimate page. He once reached the last page of a book. He was about to begin the last paragraph (a short paragraph, about a third of a page), and hadn’t yet been disappointed, when he took fright. What if that book didn’t disappoint—even in the last line? It was altogether improbable; you simply know disappointment had to set in, if only with the last word, as it always did. But what if it didn’t? Just in case, he quickly looked away, five lines from that final full stop. He closed the book, put it back in its place, and took a deep breath; that demonstration of his willpower allows him to continue fantasizing that sooner or later (on the most unlikely day, the moment he finally does decide), he will have the courage to stop eternally deferring a decision that is final.