Last Evenings On Earth

DAYS OF 1978

One day B goes to a party organized by a group of Chileans exiled in Europe. B has recently arrived from Mexico and knows very few of the people there. He is surprised to discover that it is a family gathering: the guests are united by blood ties as well as ties of friendship. Brothers dance with cousins, aunts with nephews, and wine flows in abundance.

At one point, possibly at dawn, a young man starts quarreling with B on some pretext or other. The argument is regrettable and predictable. The young man, U, shows off his crackpot erudition: he confuses Marx with Feuerbach, Che Guevara with Frantz Fanуn, Rodу with Mariбtegui and Mariбtegui with Gramsci. It is not a good time to start an argument, to say the least: in Barcelona the light of dawn can drive people mad if they've been up all night, or turn them cold and hard like executioners. That's not my idea; that's what B thinks, and consequently his replies are icy and sarcastic, more than enough provocation for U, who is positively spoiling for a fight. But when the fight seems imminent, B stands up and refuses to have it out. U insults and challenges him, hits the table (or maybe the wall) with his fist. All in vain.

B ignores him and leaves.

The story could end there. B hates the Chilean exiles who live in Barcelona, although he is one of them and there's not a thing he can do about it. The poorest and probably the loneliest of them all. Or so he believes. The way he remembers the incident, it was really like a schoolyard confrontation. But Us violence bitterly disappoints B, because U was and possibly still is an active member of the left-wing party to which he himself, at this point in his life, is most sympathetic. Once again reality has proven that no particular group has a monopoly over demagogy, dogmatism, and ignorance.

But B forgets the incident, or tries to, and gets on with his life.

Periodically B hears U mentioned, in a vague sort of way, as if he were dead. B would really prefer not to know, but when you regularly see certain people, you can't avoid hearing what has happened in their circle of friends, or what they think has happened. In this way, B discovers that U has become a Spanish citizen or that U was seen with his wife at a concert given by a Chilean folk group. For a moment, B even imagines U and U's wife sitting in a theater as it gradually fills with people, waiting for the curtain to rise, revealing the folk musicians, guys with long hair and beards, more or less like U, and he imagines U's wife, whom he has seen only once and remembers as beautiful but with something odd about her, a woman who is absent, elsewhere, who says hello (as she said hello to B at that party) from elsewhere; he imagines her looking at the curtain, which still hasn't been raised, and looking at her husband from elsewhere, from a shapeless place dimly visible in her large, calm eyes. But how, wonders B, could that woman possibly have calm eyes? There is no answer.

One night, however, an answer presents itself, though it is not the answer that B was expecting. Over dinner with a Chilean couple, B discovers that U has been committed to a psychiatric hospital after having tried to kill his wife.

Perhaps B has had too much to drink that night. Perhaps the Chilean couple's version of the events is grossly exaggerated. In any case B listens to the story of U's misfortunes with considerable pleasure, which imperceptibly gives way to a feeling of triumph, an irrational, small-minded triumph, hailed by all the shadows of his bitterness and disenchantment. He pictures U running down a vaguely Chilean, vaguely Latin American street, howling or shouting, while smoke begins to emerge from the buildings on either side, steadily, although at no point can any flames be seen.

From then on, whenever B sees the Chilean couple, he makes a point of asking about U and that is how he discovers, little by little, as if the news were being served up to him once a fortnight or once a month for his secret delectation, that U has left the psychiatric hospital, that U is out of work, that U's wife has not left him (which strikes B as truly heroic on her part), that sometimes U and his wife talk about returning to Chile. Naturally the Chilean couple find the idea of returning to Chile attractive. B finds it horrific. But wasn't U a revolutionary? he asks. Wasn't U a member of the MIR?

Although he doesn't say so, B feels sorry for U's wife. How could a woman like her fall in love with a guy like that? At some point B even imagines them making love. U is tall and blond and his arms are strong. If we had fought that night, he thinks, I would have lost. U's wife is slim; she has narrow hips and black hair. What color are her eyes? B wonders. Green. Very pretty eyes. Sometimes it infuriates B to think of U and his wife, and if only he could, he would forget them forever (after all, he has only seen them once!), but the image of the couple against the background of that awful party has a mysterious purchase on his memory, as if it held some meaning for him, an important meaning, but one that B, though he keeps coming back to it, cannot decipher.

One night as B is walking down the Ramblas, he happens to run into his Chilean friends. They are with U and his wife. U's wife smiles and greets him in what could be described as an effusive manner. U, by contrast, barely says a word to him. For a moment B thinks that U is pretending to be shy or distracted. Yet nothing in his behavior indicates the slightest hostility. In fact, it is as if U were seeing him for the first time. Is it an act? Is this disinterest natural or a result of the psychotic episode? U's wife talks about a book she has just bought at one of the newsstands in the Ramblas, as if she were trying to attract B's attention. She takes out the book, shows it to him, and asks what he thinks of the author. B is obliged to confess that he has not read the author in question. You have to, says U's wife, adding: If you like, when I finish it, I'll lend it to you. B doesn't know what to say. He shrugs his shoulders. He mumbles a noncommittal yes.

When they say good-bye, U's wife kisses him on the cheek. U gives him a firm handshake. See you soon, he says.

When they are gone, it strikes B that U is not as tall nor as strong as he remembered from the party; in fact he is only slightly taller than B. His wife, by contrast, has grown and taken on a singular radiance in B's imagination. For reasons unrelated to this encounter, B has trouble getting to sleep that night and at some point his insomniac ruminations return to U.

He imagines U in the Saint Boi psychiatric hospital; he sees him tied to a chair, writhing in fury while doctors (or the shadows of doctors) attach electrodes to his head. Maybe that sort of treatment can make a tall person shorter, he thinks. It all seems absurd. Before falling asleep he realizes that he has settled his score with U.

But that is not the end of the story.

And B knows it. He also knows that the story of his relationship with U is not the story of a banal grudge.

The days go by. At first, impelled by a somewhat self-destructive urge, B tries to find U and his wife, and to that end he starts visiting the Chilean exiles he knows in Barcelona far more assiduously than before, and he listens to their problems and commentaries on daily life with a mixture of horror and indifference. But U and his wife are never there; no one has seen them, although everyone, of course, has an anecdote to recount or an opinion about their dreadful situation, which can only get worse. After a string of such visits and monologues, B is obliged to conclude that U and his wife are avoiding the company of their compatriots. B's urge to see them wanes and dies, and he goes back to his old ways.

One day, however, B runs into U's wife in the Boqueria market. He sees her from a distance. She is with a young woman he doesn't know. They have stopped in front of a stall selling tropical fruit. As he approaches them, B notices that there is something different about U's wife, a new depth to her face. She is not just a pretty woman anymore; now she is interesting as well. He says hello to them. U's wife responds rather coldly, as if she didn't recognize him. Which is what B thinks has happened at first, so he proceeds to explain who he is. He reminds her of the last time they saw each other, the book she recommended; he even mentions the ill-fated party at which they first met. U's wife keeps nodding, but it is clear that she is increasingly ill at ease, as if she were wishing she could somehow make him vanish. Although he is disconcerted, and knows deep down that the best thing to do would be to say good-bye immediately and go, he stays. What he is really waiting for is something — a signal, a word — to make it quite clear that his presence is unwelcome. But no such signal eventuates. U's wife is simply trying not to see him. Her friend, by contrast, is observing him carefully, and B clings to her gaze as if it were a lifeline. Her name is K and she is Danish, not Chilean. Her Spanish is bad but comprehensible. She hasn't been living in Barcelona for long and hardly knows the city. B offers to show her around. K accepts.

So that night B meets the Danish woman and they walk around the Gothic Quarter (Why am I doing this? he wonders, while she is happy and slightly drunk — they have visited a couple of old taverns), and they talk and K points out the shadows their bodies are throwing on the old walls and the paving stones. These shadows have a life of their own, says K. At first B thinks nothing of her remark. But then he observes his shadow, or perhaps it is hers, and for a moment that elongated silhouette seems to be looking askance at him. It gives him a start. Then all three or four of them are swallowed up by the shapeless dark.

That night he sleeps with K. She is studying anthropology with U's wife and although they are not what you would call close friends (in fact they are only classmates), as dawn begins to break, K starts talking about her, perhaps because she is their only mutual acquaintance. B can't make much sense of what she says; it is full of commonplaces. U's wife is a good person, always ready to do you a favor, a bright student (What does that mean? wonders B, who has never been to college), although — and this she states without any evidence, relying solely on her female intuition — she has lots of problems. What kind of problems? asks B. I don't know, says K, all sorts.

The days go by. B has stoped visiting Barcelona's Chilean exiles in the hope of finding U and his wife. Every two or three days he sees K and they make love, but they don't talk about U's wife, or if, occasionally, K mentions her, B pretends not to notice or listens in a deliberately distant, indifferent manner, trying to be objective (and succeeding without too much effort), as if K were talking about social anthropology or the little mermaid of Copenhagen. He returns to his old routines, that is, to his own madness or his own boredom. His relationship with K involves no socializing, so he is spared any unwelcome or chance encounters.

One day, long after his last visit, he happens to drop in on his friends the Chilean couple.

B is not expecting them to have company. B is expecting to have dinner with them, so he shows up bearing a bottle of wine. But on arrival he finds the house virtually overrun. His friends are at home, but there is also another Chilean woman, about fifty years old, a tarot card reader by trade, and a pale, surly girl, about seventeen, who has a reputation (undeserved, as it will turn out) among the exiled Chileans as something of a prodigy (she is the daughter of a union leader killed under the dictatorship), along with her boyfriend, a Catalan Communist Party official at least twenty years older than she is, plus U's wife, who has been crying, to judge from her eyes and the color of her cheeks, while in the living room, apparently oblivious to what is going on around him, U sits in an armchair.

B's first impulse is to take his bottle of wine and leave immediately. But he reconsiders, and although he is unable to come up with a single good reason to stay, he does.

The atmosphere at his friends' house is funereal. The mood and the observable activity suggest a clandestine meeting, and not just one inclusive affair, but rather a series of mini- or splinter-meetings, as if a conversation involving everyone were prohibited by an unstated but universally respected rule. The tarot card reader and the hostess shut themselves in the host's study. The pale girl, the host, and U's wife shut themselves in the kitchen. The pale girl's boyfriend and the hostess shut themselves in the bedroom. U's wife and the pale girl shut themselves in the bathroom. The tarot card reader and the host shut themselves in the corridor, which is no mean feat. With all the coming and going, B even finds himself shut in the guest room with the hostess and the pale girl, listening through the wall to the high-pitched voice of the tarot card reader addressing or solemnly admonishing U's wife, the pair having shut themselves in the rear courtyard.

Meanwhile one person remains quite still, as if the agitation had nothing to do with him or were taking place in a world of illusions: U, in his armchair in the living room. Which is where B goes after being subjected to a flood of vague if not contradictory reports, from which only one thing emerges clearly: U tried to kill himself that morning.

In the living room, U greets him with an expression that could hardly be called friendly, but is not aggressive. B sits down in an armchair opposite U. For a while, they both remain silent, looking at the floor or watching the others come and go, until B realizes that U has the television on, with no sound, and seems to be interested in the program.

Nothing in U's face indicates suicidal tendencies, thinks B. On the contrary, there are signs of what could reasonably be interpreted as a new calm, new to B in any case. When he thinks of U, he sees his face as it was at the party: flushed, caught between fear and malice; or the day they met in the Ramblas: an expressionless mask (although it is hardly more expressive now) behind which lurked monsters of fear and malice. The new face has a freshly washed look. As if U had spent hours or maybe days submerged in a powerful torrent. If not for the soundless TV and U's dry eyes carefully following every movement on the screen (while the house is alive with the whispers of the Chileans, engaged in pointless discussions about the possibility of having him committed to Sant Boi again) B might not feel that something extraordinary is going on.

And then what appears at first to be an insignificant movement begins (or rather emerges), a kind of ebbing or backwash: without budging from his armchair, B watches as all the guests (who up to a moment before were conferring or confabulating in little groups) file toward the hosts' bedroom, all except the pale girl, the daughter of the assassinated union leader, who comes in to the living room (is it rebellion or boredom, he wonders, or is she just keeping an eye on us?) and sits herself down on a chair not far from the armchair in which U is ensconced, watching television. The bedroom door closes. The muffled sounds cease.

This might be a good moment to leave, thinks B. But instead he opens the bottle and offers them a glass of wine, which the pale girl accepts without batting an eyelid, as does U, although he seems unwilling or unable to drink and takes only a sip, as if not to offend B. And as they drink, or pretend to drink, the pale girl starts talking, telling them about the last movie she saw, It was awful, she says, and then she asks them if they have seen anything good, anything they could recommend. The question is, in fact, rhetorical. By posing it the pale girl is tacitly establishing a hierarchy in which she occupies a position of supremacy. Yet she observes a certain queenly decorum, for the question also implies a disposition (on her part, but also on the part of a higher agency, moved by its own sovereign will) to grant both B and U places in the hierarchy, which is a clear indication of her desire to be inclusive, even in circumstances such as these.

U opens his mouth for the first time and says it's been a long while since he went to the movies. To B's surprise, his voice sounds perfectly normal. A well-modulated voice, with a tone that betrays a certain sadness, a Chilean, bottom-heavy tone, which the pale girl does not find unpleasant, nor would the people shut in the bedroom, were they there to hear it. Not even B finds it unpleasant, although for him that tone of voice has strange associations: it conjures up a silent black-and-white film in which, all of a sudden, the characters start shouting incomprehensibly at the top of their voices, while a red line appears in the middle of the screen and begins to widen and spread. This vision, or premonition, perhaps, makes B so nervous that in spite of himself he opens his mouth and says he has seen a movie recently and it was very good.

And straightaway (though what he would really like to do is extract himself from that armchair, and put the room, the house, and that part of town behind him) B begins to summarize the plot of the film. He speaks to the pale girl, who listens with an expression of disgust and interest on her face (as if disgust and interest were inextricable), but he is really talking to U, or that, at least, is what he believes as he rushes through his summary.

The film is engraved in his memory. Even today he can remember it in detail. But at that time he had just seen it, so his account must have been vivid if not elegant. The movie tells the story of a monk who paints icons in medieval Russia. B's words conjure up feudal lords, orthodox priests, peasants, burned churches, envy and ignorance, festivals and a river at night, doubt and time, the certainty of art, and the irreparable spilling of blood. Three characters emerge as central, if not in the film itself, in the version of this Russian film recounted by a Chilean in the house of his Chilean friends, sitting opposite a frustrated Chilean suicide, one beautiful spring evening in Barcelona: the first of these characters is the monk and painter, who unintentionally brings about the arrest, by soldiers, of the second character, a satirical poet, a goliard, a medieval beatnik, poor and half-educated, a fool, a sort of Villon wandering the vast steppes of Russia; the third character is a boy, the son of a bell caster, who, after an epidemic, claims to have inherited the secrets of his father's difficult art. The monk represents the Artist wholly devoted to his art. The wandering poet is a Fool, with all the fragility and pain of the world written on his face. The adolescent caster of bells is Rimbaud, in other words the Orphan.

The film's ending, drawn out like a birth, shows the process of casting the bell. The feudal lord wants a new bell, but a plague has decimated the population and the old caster has died. The lord's men go looking for the caster, but all they find is a house in ruins and a lone survivor, the caster's adolescent son. He tries to convince them that he knows how to cast a bell. The lord's henchmen are dubious at first, but finally take the boy with them, having warned him that he will pay with his life if there is anything wrong with the bell.

From time to time, the monk, who has renounced painting and sworn a vow of silence, walks through the countryside, past the place where workers are building a mold for the bell. Sometimes the boy makes fun of him (as he makes fun of everything). He taunts the monk by asking him questions and laughs at him. Outside the city walls, as the construction of the mold progresses, a kind of festival springs up in the shadow of the scaffolding. One afternoon, as he is walking past with some other monks, the former painter stops to listen to a poet, who turns out to be the beatnik, the one he unwittingly sent to prison many years ago. The poet recognizes the monk and confronts him with his past action, and tells him, in brutal, childish language, about the hardships he had to bear, how close he came to dying, day after day. Faithful to his vow of silence, the monk does not reply, although by the way he looks at the poet you can tell he is taking responsibility for it all, the things that were his fault and the things that were not, and asking for forgiveness. The people look at the poet and the monk and are completely bewildered, but they ask the poet to go on telling them stories, to leave the monk alone and make them laugh again. The poet is crying, but when he turns back to his audience he recovers his spirits.

And so the days go by. Sometimes the feudal lord and his nobles visit the makeshift foundry to see how work on the bell is progressing. They do not talk to the boy but to one of the lord's henchmen who serves as intermediary. The monk keeps walking past, watching the work with growing interest. He doesn't know himself why he is so interested. Meanwhile, the tradesmen who are working under the boy's orders are worried about their young master. They make sure he eats. They joke with him. Over the weeks they have become fond of him. And finally the big day arrives. They hoist up the bell. Everyone gathers around the wooden scaffolding from which the bell hangs to hear it ring for the first time. Everyone has come out of the walled city: the feudal lord and his nobles and even a young Italian ambassador, for whom the Russians are barbarians. Everyone is waiting. Lost in the multitude, the monk is waiting too. They ring the bell. The chime is perfect. The bell does not break, nor does the sound die away. Everyone congratulates the feudal lord, including the Italian. The city celebrates.

When it is all over, in what had seemed a fairground but is now a wasteland scattered with debris, only two people remain beside the abandoned foundry: the boy and the monk.

The boy is sitting on the ground crying his eyes out. The monk is standing beside him, watching. The boy looks at the monk and says that his father, the drunken pig, never taught him the art of casting bells and would have taken his secrets to the grave; he taught himself, by watching. And he goes on crying. Then the monk crouches down and, breaking what was to be a lifelong vow of silence, says, Come with me to the monastery. I'll start painting again and you can make bells for the churches. Don't cry.

And that's the end of the movie.

When B stops talking, U is crying.

The pale girl is sitting on her chair looking at something out the window, perhaps just the night. Sounds like a good film, she says, and keeps looking at something that B can't see. U drinks his glass of wine in a single gulp and smiles at the pale girl, then at B, and hides his head in his hands. Silently, the pale girl gets up, leaves the room, and comes back with U's wife and the hostess. U's wife kneels down beside him and strokes his hair. The host and the tarot card reader appear in the corridor and stand there in silence, until the tarot card reader sees the bottle of wine left on the table and goes to pour herself a glass.

This has the effect of a starting gun. They all proceed to help themselves to the wine. The tarot reader proposes a toast. The host proposes a toast. The pale girl proposes a toast. When B goes to refill his glass there is no wine left. Good-bye, he says to his hosts. And off he goes.

It is only when he reaches the entrance hall (the dark entrance hall and the street awaiting him beyond) that he realizes he didn't recount the film for U's benefit but for his own.

This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature.

B does not see U or his wife again. In fact, B no longer needs U or the radiant ghost he used to imagine when he thought of U's life in ruins. One day, however, he hears of U's trip to Paris to visit an old friend from the MIR. U travels with another Chilean. They take a train. Shortly before arriving in Paris, U gets up, leaves the compartment without saying anything, and doesn't come back. His friend wakes up as the train begins to move again. He looks for U but can't find him. After talking with the conductor he concludes that U got off at the station they have just left. At the same time, in the early hours of the morning, the telephone rings in U's house. By the time his wife has woken up, got out of bed, and walked to the living room, the phone has stopped ringing. Shortly afterward the telephone rings in the house of a friend, who does pick up the receiver in time and is able to speak with U. U says that he is in some French village, that he was going to Paris but suddenly, inexplicably, changed his mind, and is now heading back to Barcelona. The friend asks him if he has enough money on him. U replies in the affirmative. According to the friend, U seems calm and even relieved to have made this decision. So the train in which U was traveling continues on its way north to Paris, while U starts walking through the village, southward, as if he had fallen asleep and set off sleepwalking back to Barcelona.

He makes no more telephone calls.

Beside the village there is a wood. At some point during the night U leaves the path and enters the wood. The next day a farmer finds him: he has hanged himself from a tree with his own belt, not as simple a task as it might seem at first. The gendarmes find U's passport and his other papers, his driver's licence and social security card, scattered far from the corpse, as if U had thrown them away as he walked through the wood or tried to hide them.