“Yes, there’s the United Nations and the Prado, and …”
“Well, there you have it,” he said.
“Have what?”
“There you have it: I want to be like the Prado.”
I couldn’t help laughing and telling him, “Professor, no one doubts your great merit, you truly are illustrious, but I wonder if that might not be a lot to ask, especially while you’re still alive. Maybe once you’re dead they’ll have a bust made of you.”
“Don’t play the fool with me, young Marías,” he answered in feigned irritation. “You know perfectly well what I mean. You’re going to call the Prado Museum the Prado Museum in your novel; I don’t suppose you’ll be writing that someone went to the Meadow Museum or the Field Museum or the Leap Museum.”
Why the Leap? I asked myself.
“No. Why the Leap?” I asked him.
“Who cares, the Leap, the Jump, what does it matter? Therefore, just as the Prado is the Prado and not the Leap or the Jump, I must be Professor Francisco Rico with all of my attributes, distinguished professor at the Universidad de Bellaterra and member of the Real Academia Española de la Lengua”—his candidacy had been successful—“and not Del Diestro or Del Fieltro or any other fabrication or illusion, understand? I want to appear as myself. Otherwise not at all, nothing, take me out, I withdraw.”
There was an element of reciprocal ribbing in all his huff and bother, but it was clear that the professor, protected by our friendship, was stipulating futile conditions with which no one could ever comply. In fact, nothing can ever be imposed on a writer of fiction, who doesn’t need to ask permission to introduce any real person or sequence of events he happens to know about into his fiction; if he decides to, then nothing and no one can prevent him. We aren’t trustworthy people and some of us are heartless, though I don’t think I am. The professor was a friend and I wasn’t about to go against his express desires. I tried to convince him, mainly for my own comfort and convenience. It’s not easy to alter a character in a novel once he’s been imagined and described, there’s a price to pay, you feel what is called regret in English, or rimpianto, in Italian; there’s no Spanish word that says it exactly, maybe we’re not much given in these lands to lamenting what has or hasn’t happened, what we did or failed to do; we know more about rancor. Even changing a character’s name isn’t easy. (You never forget the first name, the one you took away and no one else ever knew, as a mother never forgets the name she chose for the child who was born dead, before she could ever speak it aloud to him, the child no one else ever knew.) The professor in A Heart So White already was who he was, and what was more I would have to retype the whole chapter with the new surname, I love marking up a page but hate having any marks on the final version, and I neither own nor use a computer. Therefore a tedious task.
“Then it will have to be nothing at all, because what you’re asking for won’t work, Professor, and I’m the first to feel it.”
Paco Rico said nothing, exuded silence. Maybe he was hoping I would give in. He was undoubtedly irked, but fortunately everything passes quickly with him — no, not everything, his romantic passions last, as I’ve seen over the years — he isn’t a tenacious man and doesn’t brood. He did not mutter.
“Well, in that case, he can’t be called Del Diestro either,” he ordered, and this second and even more futile demand gave me much to think about. It wasn’t simply that he wanted to get back at me. He was not Del Diestro because he was Rico with all Rico’s attributes, and he wanted to appear in the novel as such, making the distinction. Yet to his mind the name Del Diestro alluded to him, that character could be understood as Rico without in fact being him, as if the precedent of All Souls had impregnated or contaminated him and it would no longer be possible to evade or deny the identification if the character and name were repeated: the proof was that he assumed the authority to prohibit me from using Del Diestro. I had invented Del Diestro, he didn’t belong to Rico, but Rico was taking him over, seizing him. He no longer wanted to be recognized in someone else or to have a replica, he still wanted to figure in a fiction but not as fiction: as an inroad of reality into fiction — an intruder. Perhaps he was now experiencing the fear of being entirely fictitious, of returning to and forever inhabiting a terrain in which all is immutable to the end of time or of literature. In life, you can compensate or fluctuate or rectify, as long as the story hasn’t yet ended — either in death, which arrives to bring everything to a close, or, above all, in the telling of life and death. What’s attributed to you in a work of fiction, however, has little or no remedy, there’s no debate about it, no amendment. Thus it is written and thus it is repeated, identically, without compassion or hope — this is the story and these are its words — telling the same thing in the same way every time it’s read or leafed through or consulted, just as the action of a painting, once it’s “chosen and frozen,” never moves forward or recedes, and we’ll never see the face of the person who was painted from behind, or the nape of the neck of the one whose face was portrayed, or the hidden side of the one in profile. Thus it is written: the frightful, immemorial threat. I said that what truly brings closure isn’t the end but the recounting of that end, and of what transpired before it, the story of life and death, be they fictional or real, though if the life is fictitious then death isn’t necessary: writing takes its place. Telling the story is what kills, what entombs, what secures and delineates and solidifies our face, profile or nape; being told in a story can be the equivalent of seeing oneself immortalized, for those who believe in that, and, in any case, of being dead; I am burying myself by this writing and in these pages, even if no one reads them; I don’t know what I’m doing or why. (It doesn’t matter if anyone else sees them, it’s enough that I narrate myself a little, my own reading is enough.) Maybe that’s what Professor Rico was intuiting: what I might be doing to him by entombing him in my book.
The name had to be changed and the chapter retyped, and Professor del Diestro of A Heart So White came to be named Professor Villalobos, which was the surname of a grouchy teacher at my school, the Estudio, at number 8 calle de Miguel Angel in Madrid, in the 1970s, just as Del Diestro was chosen because it was the surname of another teacher, this one light-hearted, Carmen García del Diestro, or Señorita Cuqui, as she was known, who wore lots of make-up and smoked incessantly in class, or rather, her cigarettes with their lipstick traces slowly burned down between her fingers as she read the classics to us with theatrical enthusiasm, juggling a heavy bracelet that she would take off, put back on and occasionally throw to the floor, denting them both (bracelet and floor), and attempting a bejeweled balancing act to keep her cigarette’s ashes from falling, though in the end they always did, on her jacket or blouse, when the work she was reading drove her to make some violent gesture, for example when she made a vicious stab into the air or the shoulder of some favorite student — sack of flour, sack of flesh. What a delightful woman, she must be a hundred years old now and she writes me from time to time, with affection and a cigarette in her hand, most often to congratulate me when I publish an article in defense of tobacco.
But the character was already composed out of elements of Rico, or rather of Professor del Diestro, from the previous novel. I didn’t feel capable of changing or giving up much of him so Rico may still be in there somewhere nonetheless — or prowling around outside — though at the end of the chapter I said, to stave off any notion of a resemblance, that when Professor Villalobos “fell into disheartened silence” he looked a little like the actor George Sanders, one of my favorites, whom I once called “the man who seemed not to want anything.” Rico bears no resemblance whatsoever to Sanders. I don’t know if that sufficed to liberate him. Now I’ve spoken of him here, by his name and with his attributes. But this is not a fiction, though it has to be a story.