I thanked him for his confidence and felt like a trafficker in false immortality.
I won’t say what I asked for, only that he thought it was a reasonable enough request for a try-out, agreed to do it, and never did. When the time came, he frivolously claimed that while gratified by certain sartorial details and two or three adjectives, he had been thoroughly displeased by the character’s behavior and degree of resemblance to him and the amount of space he was allotted. (Nevertheless, I learned from other sources that he was happy and even proud, particularly because people he knew mentioned the brief appearance or cameo to him in apparent envy: Toby Rylands really was onto something.) I didn’t hold it against him, after all he had had the kindness to grant me some credit in a hypothetical posterity, I had enjoyed myself, and the character in question — an incidental character — was only partially inspired by him, though there were many people who wanted to see in my Professor del Diestro a dead-on portrayal of Don Francisco Rico Manrique, which wasn’t the case either (he never visited Oxford during my stay there). I had the character appear in a discotheque and the text describes him as, “the famous Professor del Diestro, the greatest and youngest Cervantes expert in the world, according to himself, invariably known in Madrid as Dexterous Del Diestro or Del Diestro the Sinister (depending on the level of antipathy), who, invited by our department, was to give us a dexterous and virtuoso lecture the next morning. I recognized him from his photographs.” Then the text adds some farther description: “The professor, a distinguished and disdainful man of forty-odd years, in a shirt by Ferré and with a hairline in advanced retreat (‘A distinguished Spanish professor,’ I thought in astonishment when I saw him, and immediately understood his success), was already nuzzling and allowing himself to be nuzzled by one of the fattest of the girls.” As the reader can verify, I made him distinguished, famous, young, hated, successful, a wearer of Italian designer shirts, erudite and a seducer. The professor shouldn’t have had any complaints, even if in the end I did not allow him to inaugurate the academic year, in his bad English, before the entire University of Oxford, at Michaelmas or rather Míkelmas.
A few years later, while I was writing my next novel, which was ultimately titled Corazón tan blanco or A Heart So White, I spoke to him over the phone one morning and mentioned the new book. He immediately asked, “Am I in it?”
His brazenness was so funny I saw no reason not to make him an immediate offer, this time with no strings attached.
“Do you want to be?” I asked. “There’s still time. I’m getting close to the end, but I’m just starting a chapter that includes a character who could easily be transformed into you, I mean into Professor del Diestro. All things considered, I think you’d be just right for me in this scene.”
“I’d be just right for you? I? For you? Don’t flatter yourself, I can’t be just right for anyone. Why? What kind of malicious scene is it?” He’s a wary man.
“Well, let’s say I could slip you in without the book’s being at all the worse for it; on the contrary, it might gain something.”
“But this time I have to show my good side.” His request had already become a demand. “What are you going to say about me? Let’s have it.”
“All right, maybe I can read you something now.” The scene was partially written, so I picked up a page and read, “Let’s see, here it says: ‘Suddenly over dessert he fell silent for a few minutes, as if overwhelmed by fatigue from all the frenzy and exaltation, or as if he were immersed in dark thoughts, perhaps he was unhappy and had suddenly remembered it.’ ” I paused. “So. Interested?”
Professor Rico didn’t answer right away, then conceded, “It’s not bad, it doesn’t displease me. I liked the part about exaltation. Is this character melancholy? I think he must be, since he’s immersed in thought, isn’t he?
“Yes, professor; immersed.”
“In dark thoughts, right?”
“Yes, professor, very dark thoughts.”
“Go on, read more.”
Professor Rico is not, shall we say, much inclined toward melancholy, perhaps that was why he was interested in appearing melancholic in a work of fiction.
“All right, but only two sentences more: ‘In any case, he must have been a man of some ability in order to go from self-satisfaction to dejection so suddenly, without seeming affected or insincere. It was as if he were saying ‘What does anything matter now.’ ” I broke off. “Well, are you tempted?”
“The part about ability is very perceptive,” he answered. “But you could change it to ‘genius.’ Might as well, don’t you think?”
“Genius is harder to recognize, Professor Rico, and the narrator barely knows this guy.”
“Don’t call him a ‘guy,’ ” he chided. “Go on, read more.”
“Professor, I’m not about to read you the whole thing right now. Tell me if you want to be in the book or not. This is the only available role, and I’m warning you I could give it to someone else.”
Paco Rico was silent for a few seconds. Then he wanted confirmation. “ ‘As if he were saying,” What does anything matter now. “ ‘That’s what you said, isn’t it?”
“Yes, professor: ‘What does anything matter now.’ ”
“That part I liked. And I do sometimes think that, in moments of dejection. Yes,” he said, in a tone that wasn’t the least bit dejected. And he added, as if the idea and interest of including him in the novel were entirely mine, “Go ahead, I’ll give it my immediate authorization.”
So for a few days I went on writing my scene with Professor del Diestro now in it, his name and characteristics all consistent with the Del Diestro of All Souls. The character was more fully developed this time — no longer incidental, but now, at the very least, episodic — speaking at some length over the course of a dinner, which he dominates; I thought Paco Rico would be well pleased. But as I was about to finish the chapter I had another call from him, he was in Barcelona, where he lives.
“Hear me out on this, young Marías,” he said without preliminaries. Though a few years had gone by, we still hadn’t retreated from our ironic manner of addressing each other. We did so only after the death of the mutual friend through whose eyes we had managed to see each other with some sympathy, Don Juan Benet. “I’ve decided I don’t want to appear in this little novel of yours as Professor del Diestro or what-have-you or anything else. If I’m in it I want to be in it as myself.”
At first I didn’t understand. “Yourself? What do you mean?”
The professor grew impatient. “Myself, Francisco Rico, under my own name. I want Francisco Rico to appear, not a fictional entity who acts like him or parodies him.”
“But Del Diestro doesn’t act all that much like you, he’s not identical to you and I’d have to change him. Rico might not say or do the things he says and does, not all of them, and the character and his role are already fully drawn. I’m not going to change the story to make him more like you, I suppose you can understand that. Besides, how can a single real person appear among all the fictional entities, as you call them. That wouldn’t look right.”
The professor clicked his tongue a couple of times in irritation. I heard it very clearly, it almost ruptured my eardrum.
“And why not? That’s nonsense. There are real places and institutions in your novel, aren’t there? There must be one or two, no?”