The Musical Brain: And Other Stories

The All That Plows through the Nothing

THERE ARE TWO LADIES AT THE GYM who talk nonstop, occasionally to other people, but always to each other. They seem to be lifelong friends, with everything in common: the same dyed-blond hair, the same clothes, the same reactions, and no doubt the same tastes. Even their voices are similar. They’re the kind of ladies who, having turned fifty and reached middle age, feeling they should take care of their bodies, decide to start going to the gym together, because they wouldn’t go on their own. Not that these two need much extra physical activity; they’re slim and active and seem to be in good shape. They’re local housewives, with nothing to set them apart except for their chattiness, which is hardly an exceptional quality. It’s not as if the gym’s the only place they can talk, because they’re already talking when they arrive. If I’m on one of the bikes near the entrance, I hear their voices as they come up the stairs; they talk in the dressing room while they’re getting changed; then they work out together on the bikes, the treadmills, and the various machines, without interrupting their conversation for a moment; and they’re still talking when they leave. I’m not the only one to have noticed. Once when they were in the women’s dressing room and I was in the men’s, I could hear them talking, talking, talking, and I said to the instructor: “They sure can talk, those two.” He nodded and raised his eyebrows: “It’s scary. And the things they say! Have you listened to them?” No, I hadn’t, although it would have been easy, because they speak loudly and clearly, as people do when they have no secrets or concerns about privacy. They conform to a stereotype: housewives and mothers who are sure of themselves and their normality. Once, years ago, in a different gym, I came across a similar but different case: two girls who talked all the time, even when they were doing really demanding aerobic exercises; they were young and must have had tremendous lung capacity. One day when whey were on facing mats, doing the kind of sit-ups that take your breath away, talking all the while, I pointed them out to the instructor, who said, excusing them: “It’s because they’re good friends and they both work all day: this is the only time they get to spend together.” But it’s not like that for the two ladies, who are clearly together for a large part of the day: I’ve seen them shopping in the neighborhood, or looking in store windows, or sitting in a café, always talking, talking, talking.

I didn’t really think about this until one day, by chance — they must have been on bikes near mine — I heard what they were saying. I can’t remember what it was, but I do remember that it made a strange impression on me, and though I couldn’t articulate that strangeness at the time, I resolved in a half-conscious and somewhat halfhearted way (after all, what was it to me?) to get to the bottom of it.

At this point there’s something I should explain about myself, which is that I don’t talk much, probably too little, and I think this has been detrimental to my social life. It’s not that I have trouble expressing myself, or no more than people generally have when they’re trying to put something complex into words. I’d even say I have less trouble than most because my long involvement with literature has given me a better-than-average capacity for handling language. But I have no gift for small talk, and there’s no point trying to learn or pretend; it wouldn’t be convincing. My conversational style is spasmodic (someone once described it as “hollowing”). Every sentence opens up gaps, which require new beginnings. I can’t maintain any continuity. In short, I speak when I have something to say. My problem, I suppose — and this may be an effect of involvement with literature — is that I attribute too much importance to the subject. For me, it’s never simply a question of “talking” but always a question of “what to talk about.” And the effort of weighing up potential subjects kills the spontaneity of dialogue. In other words, when everything you say has to be “worth the effort,” it’s too much effort to go on talking. I envy people who can launch into a conversation with gusto and energy, and keep it going. I envy them that human contact, so full of promise, a living reality from which, in my mute isolation, I feel excluded. “But what do they talk about?” I wonder, which is obviously the wrong question to ask. The crabbed awkwardness of my social interactions is a result of this failing on my part. Looking back, I can see that it was responsible for most of my missed opportunities and almost all the woes of solitude. The older I get, the more convinced I am that this is a mutilation, for which my professional success cannot compensate, much less my “rich inner life.” And I’ve never been able to resolve the conundrum that conversationalists pose for me: how do they keep coming up with things to talk about? I don’t even wonder about it anymore, perhaps because I know there’s no answer. I wasn’t wondering how those women did it, and yet I was given an answer so unexpected and surprising that a terrifying abyss opened before me.

Suddenly, in the ceaseless flow of their dialogue, one said to the other: “They gave my husband the results of his analysis, and he has cancer; we asked for an appointment with the oncologist. .” I took that in and began to think. Naturally my first thought was that I’d misheard, but I hadn’t. I don’t know if I’m reproducing her words exactly, but that was the gist, and the other woman replied, in an appropriately sympathetic and worried manner, but she wasn’t overly surprised; she didn’t cry out or faint. And yet this was really big news. Too big to crop up casually in a conversation, as if it were just one among many other items. I was sure that the two of them had been in the gym for at least an hour, and they’d been talking all that time; also, they’d arrived together, which meant that their conversation had begun a fair while before. . So had they discussed ten, twenty, or thirty other topics before they got around to the husband’s cancer? I considered a number of possibilities. Maybe the woman concerned had been keeping this momentous disclosure in reserve, in order to drop it “like a bombshell” at a particular moment; maybe she’d been gathering the strength to tell her friend; maybe she’d been inhibited by some kind of reticence, which had finally given way. Or it could have been that the news was not, in fact, all that important: suppose, for example, that the man she was calling “my husband” (for the sake of convenience) was an ex-husband, and they’d been separated for many years, and there was no longer any bond of affection between them. More daring or imaginative explanations were possible too. Perhaps they were talking about the plot of a novel or a play that the woman was writing (for a writing workshop they attended together, just as they exercised together at the gym); or it could have been a dream that she was recounting (although the verb tenses were wrong for that), or whatever. And there was a further hypothesis, which was barely less improbable: that the women had been dealing with more important and urgent matters since they’d met two or three hours earlier and had just got around to the cancer when I overheard them. Absurd as it might seem, this was in the end the most logical and realistic explanation, or at least the only one left standing.

In the course of these reflections, I remembered the previous occasion on which I’d heard them talking and the vaguely strange impression it had made on me. Now I could bring that impression into focus and understand the strangeness retrospectively. It was the same thing, but to enter fully into my consciousness, it had to be repeated. The first time (now I remembered) the news had been less amazing: one of the women was telling the other that, the previous day, the painters had started on the inside of her house, and all the furniture was covered with old sheets; it was utter chaos, the way it always is “when you have the painters in.” The other woman sympathized and replied that, although it was terribly inconvenient, repainting was something that had to be done; you couldn’t go on living in a flaky old ruin, and so on, and so on. The little puzzle that I hadn’t been able to formulate was this: how could such an upheaval in the existence of a housewife simply crop up in the middle of a conversation, instead of being announced at the start or, indeed, discussed for days in advance? The matter of the husband’s cancer had opened my eyes because it was much more shocking, but the same fundamental mechanism had been at work in both cases.

From then on, I began to pay attention. I have to say it wasn’t all that easy, for physical as much as psychological reasons. The main physical difficulty was that the gym is a very noisy place: the machines clang when the iron weights are stacked, the pulleys squeak, there’s a high-pitched beep every fifteen seconds to regulate the time spent at each station, the electric motors of the treadmills hum and moan, the chorus of exercise bikes can be deafening when several are being used at once, everyone talks and some people yell; and, of course, there are music videos on the TV all the time, with the volume up high, and usually, on top of that, there’s the much louder music of the aerobics class in the back room (it makes the windows shake). The two women, as I said, speak loudly — they don’t care who’s listening — so it’s easy to hear that they’re talking, but it’s not so easy to hear what they’re saying unless you’re very close. My exercise routine gave me plenty of opportunities to get close to them because it kept me on the move, but it also meant that I couldn’t stay close for long without provoking suspicion.

Even so, what I heard was enough to nourish a growing perplexity. Whatever the time and whatever they were doing, whether they were coming or going, halfway through their routine or in the dressing room or on the roller massage tables, they were always reporting some important piece of news and discussing it with due zeal. And if, by stepping up my surveillance operation, I managed to hear them two or three or four times in a day, there was always something new and important, far too important to be coming up after hours of conversation — except that their conversation consisted of nothing else. “In the storm last night the tree behind our house fell down and crashed right into the kitchen.” “Our car was stolen yesterday.” “My son’s getting married tomorrow.” “Mom died.”

That wasn’t small talk, not at all. But I don’t really know what small talk is. I thought I did, but now that I’ve begun to doubt its existence, I’m not sure anymore. If those two women are representative, maybe people always talk because they have something to say, something really worth saying. I’m starting to wonder if there’s such a thing as “talking for the sake of talking,” if it’s not just a myth I invented to disguise my lack of life, that is, basically a lack of things to talk about.

Or is it the other way around? Maybe those two ladies are the myth I’ve invented. Except that they exist. And how! I see (and hear) them every day. And their existence is not confined to the “magnetic field” of the gymnasium. As I said, I’ve seen and heard them in the street as well. Just yesterday afternoon, as it happens. I’d gone out for a walk and I ran into them; they were coming out of a perfume store, in the midst of an animated conversation. I managed to catch a couple of sentences as I went by. One was telling the other that she and her daughter had argued the day before, and the argument had ended with the daughter declaring that she was moving out to live on her own. . It was seven in the evening, and they’d been together and talking all day (I’d seen them at the gym that morning). I’m leaving aside the possibility that they say these things “for my benefit,” not just because, as a practical joke, it would be too complicated, but also because they haven’t even noticed I exist, nor is there any reason why they should.

One way to solve the problem would be to make a list of all the topics they cover in a day, and see if there’s a basically plausible progression from more to less important. I would be better placed to undertake this task than almost anyone because I have access to them first thing in the morning, at the gym, for two long hours. But I haven’t done it and I won’t. I’ve mentioned the physical obstacles already, and I said that there were psychological difficulties too. These come down to one thing, in the end: fear. Fear of a certain kind of madness.

There’s a bylaw in Buenos Aires that forbids the transportation of animals in taxis. Like all laws in Argentina, this one can be bent. In these hard times, if a lady wants to get in with her lapdog, ten out of ten taxi drivers are going to let her. But the law is still in force, exerting a pressure on the conscience, giving chimerical grounds for caution. According to one of those tenacious urban legends, one day a woman got into a taxi carrying a capuchin monkey dressed up as a baby, with a little coat, slippers, a nappy, and a pacifier, and the driver didn’t notice the ruse until the monkey bit off half his ear. Embittered and coarsened by a life chained to the wheel, he’d probably been thinking (if anything): “Gotta pity her, with an ugly kid like that!”

Someone once told me you can even take a goat in a taxi, as long as you promise to hold it down on the floor and give the driver a tip. That shows just how flexible the laws of our “autonomous” province can be. And yet a taxi driver can turn away a passenger who’s carrying a plant. Amazing but true, as anyone can verify. I’m not talking about a tree or a rhododendron with a six-yard circumference: just a regular little plant, in a pot or a plastic bag, an oregano seedling, an orchid growing on a piece of old tree trunk, a bonsai.

And the drivers can be intransigent, if they feel like it. There’s no point objecting or trying to argue. Convinced that they’re acting as designated agents of the law, they’ll leave a passenger standing there with his or her little plant, even if it’s an old man, or a mother with small children (and pregnant to boot), or a disabled person, even if it’s raining. The law, of course, says nothing about plants; it mentions only animals, and extending the prohibition to the vegetable realm is a clear and indefensible abuse of power.

But that’s the way it is. What is and what should be the case are superimposed. Although they’re contradictory, both continue to exist in reality at the same time. The same “simultaneous superimposition” is more clearly apparent in the following attempt to answer the question: How many taxis are there in Buenos Aires?

The number is huge — as you can see just by stepping out into the street. If you really wanted to know how many there are, you could ask, or do some research, for example by checking the city’s list of registered automobiles, which I guess would be in the public domain. But there’s a way to work it out that doesn’t involve any asking or talking or even getting up from your desk. All you have to do is apply your powers of deduction to something that’s very widely known.

From time to time, remarkably often in fact, there’s a story in the papers about an honest taxi driver who finds a briefcase on the backseat containing a hundred thousand dollars and returns it to the rightful owner, after a more or less difficult search. It’s a classic news story. It might be a bigger or smaller sum of money, but it’s always enough to solve all the problems a taxi driver might have (or an average, middle-class newspaper reader). That’s what gives the story its impact: the exorbitant cost of honesty. Let’s suppose — this is the first in a series of minimal estimates that will, I hope, enhance the credibility of the calculation — that such an event occurs in Buenos Aires only once a year.

So, if we consider the occupied taxis passing in the street, we can ask, for a start, how many are carrying passengers who have a briefcase containing a hundred thousand dollars in cash. There must be very few. As a result of the widespread use of checks, bank drafts, credit cards, and electronic transfers, handling large amounts of cash has become rather anachronistic. I’ve never gotten into a taxi (or gone anywhere) with that amount of money, nor do I know anyone who has, but there can be no question that such people do exist. Leaving aside illegal or criminal activities, there are people employed by large companies that pay wages in cash, or people doing property deals, trading on the stock market, or whatever. Let’s say, and this too is a very conservative estimate, that one in a thousand passengers is carrying that much money.

Now, considering that limited set, how many of the passengers riding in taxis with a hundred thousand dollars would forget about their briefcases and leave them behind? I know I wouldn’t, no matter whether the money was mine or someone else’s (though I don’t know which situation would make me more vigilant). It really is the height of absentmindedness. No one’s indifferent to money these days, whatever they say, especially when large sums are involved. So we can reckon that of a thousand passengers who take a taxi carrying a hundred thousand dollars, not more than one will leave the money behind. (Though maybe there would be more than one, because a familiar psychological mechanism ensures that the more you worry, the more things go wrong.) And even if it’s fewer than one, the overestimation will be offset by the cautiousness of my previous estimate.

So, given the very restricted set of taxis in which someone has left that enormous amount of money, we still have to work out how many of the drivers would demonstrate a superlative probity by finding the owner and returning it. This is trickier, and I suppose that estimates will vary according to people’s ideas about human nature. Some will say no one’s that honest, while others will consider such a claim to be abstract and theoretical, and prefer to think that, confronted with a real situation of this kind, most people would obey the voice of conscience. Personally, I’m not sure what to think. I’ve never had to make the choice; I’ve never faced the test.

I’m envisaging it as a statistical possibility, and if I really had to choose, I don’t know what I’d do. It’s important to remember that honesty is an abstract concept too (however much I like to think that my own is beyond doubt). No one chooses to be a taxi driver; not for a whole working life, anyway. It’s hard work, and, these days, a hundred thousand dollars must be equivalent to twenty years of taxi driving. Weighing up the pros and cons, I’d say that, faced with a choice of this kind, one in a thousand taxi drivers, on average, would return the loot, and the other nine hundred and ninety-nine would hang on to it.

Having arrived at these estimates, we can reverse the process to work out how many taxis there would have to be for one honest taxi driver to return a hundred thousand dollars to a passenger who happened to leave that amount of cash behind, which is something that actually happens, and relatively often. The result is a thousand million (the product of multiplying a thousand by a thousand by a thousand).

So that’s the answer to our initial question. In the city of Buenos Aires, there are a thousand million taxis. Or rather, there are (as demonstrated by the calculation, which is incontestable) and there aren’t (how could there be a thousand million taxis in a city of ten million people?). It’s simultaneously true and false.

With this apparently paradoxical result (the paradox is only apparent), I conclude the notes that I was intending to make during my trip to Tandil, where I arrived this afternoon. Before beginning the journal of my stay in this pretty hill town, I shall give a brief account of the circumstances that brought me here.

My grandmother turned eighty-five last week. She’s in good health, happy, cheerful, affectionate, and mentally alert, although she has some minor memory lapses, which are normal at her age, and she’s the first to laugh at them. She’s the soul and center of the family, and when she tells us about her forgetfulness, we all have a good laugh, too. It’s not just by telling funny stories that she has acquired and maintained her central position. Her strength gives us the reasons to live that we can’t find within ourselves. We’ve often wondered how someone so full of life could have spawned such feeble progeny. The next two generations (her children and grandchildren) are lacking in vigor, and the same, I fear, will be true of the third, which is just coming into existence. What little energy we have, the meager hope that keeps us going, we draw it all from her, as from an inexhaustible source. We wonder apprehensively what will become of us when she’s gone.

As you can imagine, there’s an undercurrent of worry when we get together to celebrate her birthday. There was a big party for her eightieth, which gathered all the relatives for a kind of grand declaration of our dependence. From then on we began to feel that an ominous countdown had begun. We made a special fuss this year, too, for her eighty-fifth. Though none of us said anything, we were all privately counting and calculating. She looked so well, it wasn’t overly optimistic to imagine that she’d live another ten years. Why not? Ninety-five is not unheard of. And even allowing for her inevitable decline, ten years is quite a long time, long enough perhaps for us to find our respective ways and discover happiness, without relying on her vitality to maintain a semblance of human life.

The day before her birthday, one of my aunts asked if my grandmother was going to use her new age when she played the lottery. My grandmother hesitated for a while, enjoying the attention. They had to insist: “It’s not every day you turn eighty-five!” Which is true, and it’s also true that my grandmother is an inveterate lottery player, who never lets a chance go by. Once, she was hit by a car, which broke her tibia, and in the midst of the commotion and the pain she had the presence of mind to notice the last two numbers of the car’s license plate, and before she was taken into the operating theater, she sent one of her sons to play the numbers, and she won. She spent the next two months with her leg in plaster telling everyone the story.

So the day before her birthday, when she was doing her round of the neighborhood stores, she stopped by the agency to put in her coupon. She’s well known there, a favorite customer; they’re always having a laugh with her. In her usual chatty way, she announced that it was her birthday and said she wanted to play the two numbers corresponding to her age. The lottery man wished her a happy birthday, approved of her idea, took out a coupon and started filling it in as he usually did. So, the number was. .?

“Fifty-eight,” said my grandmother.

It wasn’t a joke. A minor confusion: the numbers had changed places in her head. The man asked her a couple of times, to make sure that he’d heard correctly; at first he thought she was kidding, but she didn’t respond to his complicit giggle. Imperturbably she repeated, “Fifty-eight,” in all sincerity. She left with her coupon, and it was only when she was about to wedge it between two apples in the fruit bowl (that was the Kabbalistic site where she kept her gambling documents) and looked at the numbers again that she realized her mistake. The next day at the party she told us what had happened, with her usual humor. And while the party was still going on, she went to the kitchen for a moment to listen to the radio to find out how River (her team) was doing, and it turned out that 58 had won a big prize.

That’s where the money for my trip to Tandil came from. My grandmother knew I’d been dreaming about it for years; she knew it was important to me. Was there anything she didn’t know about me, and the rest of us? Deeply familiar as she was with the mechanisms of idleness and fear that ruled all her descendants, she knew I’d never make the trip without some kind of prompting, which only she could provide.

I have always felt that I was her favorite grandson. I have lived on that conviction — if evasively skirting around reality, which is what my experience comes down to, can really be called living. My grandmother didn’t hesitate to give me half her winnings, “for your little trip,” as she said. That was all she needed to say; we both knew what she was talking about. But there are many deferred projects of this kind in the family, and almost all of her children, grandchildren, and children-in-law could have benefited, as I did, from her generosity. Had she been obliged to make a choice? What would she do with the rest of the money? I didn’t ask myself these questions at the time, perhaps because they might have led to uncomfortable conclusions. But after all, given my grandmother’s function as our source of life, the fact that she had chosen me could only mean that my need was the greatest.

The trip was (and is) related to what I’ve been claiming as my “vocation” all these years: literature. I know that my grandmother would prefer me to have a life. I’d prefer that too, of course. But I’m stubborn, as the weak-willed often are, and I cling to a profession that’s really no such thing, even though I may not be cut out for it, and haven’t yet shown the slightest sign that I am. I persist in asserting, precisely, that literature does not require proof of aptitude. In my heart of hearts I never felt called to literature, or saw myself doing the work that such a vocation would entail. If I were to reply sincerely to the question of which professions I would have liked to pursue, had I possessed enough vigor to lead a real life, I’d have to list, in this order: ladies’ hairdresser, ice cream vendor, bird and reptile taxidermist. Why? I don’t know. It’s something deep, but at the same time I can feel it in my skin, in my hands. Sometimes, during the day, I find myself unintentionally gesturing as if I were doing those kinds of work and, in a sort of sensory daydream, experiencing the satisfaction of a job well done and the desire to excel myself; and then, as in a dream within a dream, I begin to hatch vague plans to market my skills, build up my client base, and modernize my premises.

What my three unrealized vocations have in common is a certain analogy with sculpture, of which they appear to be impermanent and degraded (or repressed) forms. My observations in this area have led me to conjecture that behind every frustrated vocation lies the desire to sculpt.

If that’s the case, the frustration that I’ve felt with literature up till now must also be related to sculpture. In fact, now that I think of it, the idea of basing my literary project and my attempts to distinguish myself as a writer on the search for “new forms of asymmetry” (to cite the title of my only published book) must have arisen from a twisted analogy with shapes and arrangements in three-dimensional space.

The trip to Tandil has finally confronted me with experience in itself. Before leaving, I put a notebook in my pocket and all the way here on the bus I was writing these preliminary notes. Now, as I begin my journal, I would like to dedicate it to someone. The obvious person, for various reasons — loyalty, gratitude, good manners, simplicity — is my grandmother. But no. A dark urge impels me to write something else, namely this (as a dedication, it’s pretty dull):

“To my beloved reproductive organs.”

It’s nearly midnight; I’m sitting at a little table against the wall in this hotel room in Tandil. The door is bolted, the shutters closed. For once, I don’t have to look for a theme. Because today, as soon as I got here, something extraordinary happened to me, which has not only given me a theme to write about, but has also transformed my very person into a theme. Nothing like this has ever happened to anybody before. I’m the first, the one and only, which obliges me to bear witness, but also simplifies my task, since whatever I say and however I say it, my words will automatically constitute a testimony and a proof (by virtue of the fact that I am the person saying them).

This is what literature really is. Now I can see it. Everything that came before, everything that people, including writers, think of as literature, that is to say the laborious search for themes and the exhausting work of giving them shape, all of that collapses like a house of cards, a youthful illusion or an error. Literature begins when you become literature, and if there’s such a thing as a literary vocation, it’s simply the transubstantiation of experience that has taken place in me today. By pure chance. Because of a fortuitous encounter, and the revelation that followed.

I saw the back of a ghost. Today, a little while ago, shortly after arriving. I came to the hotel from the bus terminal, checked in, went up to my room to leave my bag, and went out for a walk almost straightaway to stretch my legs and get to know the city. Tandil’s not much more than a big town built on the pampa, at the foot of some hills that are among the oldest in the world. It seemed to be livening up a bit at that time: kids were gathering on the street corners, people were leaving work and heading home, or going to cafés, but only in the small downtown area. I returned to the hotel via some streets a bit farther out (just a bit), and they were deserted: I didn’t see a soul for quite a while. By then it should have been dark already. The day’s afterglow was still hanging in the air. All the colors were shrouded in a uniform silver, and a deep silence reigned. The rectilinear streets ran away toward the horizon, and they looked so alike that on one corner I thought I’d lost my sense of direction. I hadn’t, but when I set off again, sure that I knew which way to go, I walked a bit more quickly, paying more attention. To what? There was nothing to pay attention to.

Perhaps because of the pallid absence surrounding me, I noticed a little movement that I would have overlooked in the bustle of a busy street. Not so much a movement as its shadow, the shifting of a minuscule volume of air, or not even that. I was walking past an empty house, whose façade was hollowed out into a kind of loggia with columns: no doubt the whim of a traditional Italian builder, one of the many who left their mark on our provincial towns. Time had darkened the gray of the stucco, and, beyond the arch, the dim light of dusk gave out entirely. There at the back, floating halfway between floor and ceiling, in front of the walled-up door, was a ghost. The movement that had revealed his presence must have been a tic. It was followed by intense stillness. He looked at me, we looked at each other, for barely an instant, no more than the moment it took for fright to imprint itself on his weary features. Before I had time to be afraid, he had turned and gone back in. Clearly, it was a chance occurrence that he could not have foreseen. Decades of habit and boredom would have convinced him that no one went past at that time. But that “no one” didn’t include me. I was a stranger who had just arrived in town, walking about idly with nowhere to go. My presence there took him by surprise, interrupting his “stepping out for a breath of fresh air,” which was perhaps the repetition of an evening habit from the old days, when he was alive. And he reacted to the surprise by turning around and going back the way he had come (through the wall), without realizing that this instinctive movement would show me something no human being had ever seen: his back.

Humans have seen a great many things in the course of their long history; it might be said that, collectively, they have “seen it all.” I thought I’d seen it all myself, even with my limited experience. The individual repeats the “alls” and the “nothings” of the species, but there is always “something” that is extra or missing. Only the unrepeatable is truly alive. That unrepeatable “something” is a single, unique entity, in which the worlds of life and death come together like the points of an inconceivable double vertex. And nobody, until today, had seen the back of a ghost.

I saw it for the very briefest moment, but I saw it. Then, suddenly, the scene vanished, and I continued on my way, quickening my pace, rushing to get back, to shut myself into the hotel room and start writing (the floor plan flashed vividly before my mind’s eye, with the table and chair, and even the notebook open on the table). That was when I said to myself for the first time: Literature. . Or rather I shouted it, inwardly. But there was no need to articulate the word: I could feel it in every fiber of my body. Such was my excitement that I really did get lost this time. I had to summon all my orientation skills to find the way, walking faster and faster. I was almost running. Even so, every few steps I reached into my pockets, took out the ballpoint pen and the papers that I happened to have on me (the bus ticket, the hotel card, a few other scraps), and, barely stopping, scribbled a note, then set off again more quickly than before.

And here I am, at last, writing like a man possessed. As well I might: not even a whole lifetime of adventures and study could have given me more reason to write. And now I come, with a natural ease, to the climax: the description of that back, hidden from the eyes of humanity until now.

But. . I don’t know if it’s my impatience, or the excess of energy that has taken hold of me since the ghost turned around, but there’s a sharp pain in the middle of my chest, and it keeps getting more and more intense, forcing me to grimace horribly. It’s becoming unbearable, climbing to a spasmodic peak, and when it seems about to relent, it doesn’t. I’m finding it hard to write. My vision is clouding over, my eyes are half closed, and I’m clamping my jaws so tightly to stop myself crying out that my molars feel like they’re going to explode.

At this very moment, as I persist in the effort to trace these increasingly distorted letters and words, I’m assailed by the idea that I could die right here, bent over my notebook, before I can describe what I saw. .

Is it possible? Could anyone be so unlucky? Now the pain has eased a little, but it’s worse: I can feel it tearing the chambers of my heart with “a sound of silk being slashed,” and the blood’s gushing inside me, getting all mixed up. My writing hand is shaking and starting to turn purple. . I don’t know how I’ve managed to keep the pen moving. .

My sight is blurred, I’m staring desperately at the lines my hand keeps tracing. . At the darkening edge of my field of vision, I can see the crumpled papers on which I made notes when I was out walking. . But they’re not even notes; they’re no more than cryptic reminders that nobody will be able to understand (because of my pernicious habit of using abbreviations). My death will condemn them to indecipherability forever. . unless someone very clever comes along and by means of meticulous inductive and deductive reasoning (over years or decades) is able to arrive at a plausible reconstruction. . But no, that kind of treatment is reserved for the papers of a great writer; no one will bother with mine. .

Maybe I could leave some kind of key. . but no, it’s impossible. I don’t have time. I can’t maintain the rhythm and the rigor of good prose, the kind of prose I would like to have written, the kind that would have made me a great writer, worthy of serious study. All I can do is use the last of my strength to scrawl a few disjointed, almost incoherent sentences. . I don’t have time because I’m dying. . Death is the exorbitant price that a failure like me has to pay for becoming literature. . The hardest thing for me is that I did, in fact, have time (once), and I wasted it shamefully. The lesson, if a lesson can in some small way redeem my wasted life, is this: you have to get straight to the point. . I should have begun with the crucial thing, which no one but I knew about. . I wouldn’t even have had to sacrifice the flow and the balance of a well-told story, because I could have written the introductory sections later and rearranged it all when preparing the final draft. . This stupid compulsion to narrate events in chronological order. .

DECEMBER 8, 2003