6
In the first sentence of this book I said I believed I had still never mistaken — yes, still never, deliberately incorrect — fiction for reality, which doesn’t mean that some retrospective effort on my part is not sometimes required to succeed in avoiding this type of confusion. I want to believe that I’m not much at fault in this; I am not responsible for the fact that certain real people began to behave in real life as if they were characters in All Souls, after it came out, or that a few eminent readers, who can be assumed to have been in full knowledge of the facts, took as valid in reality what was only recounted in a novel full of levity and exaggeration. Particularly notable were the remarks made a few months later by the vice-rector or vice-president or vice-chancellor of Oxford University, who, during a solemn assembly or ceremonious conclave (in which, once again, no ambitious and intrusive professor named Del Diestro or Del Fieltro or Rico had any part), said she was currently reading “a very interesting novel, in order to become better acquainted with and delve into the psychological workings of the Sub-Faculty of Spanish.” Apparently there were murmurs of alarm, slight mockery, and deep and sincere astonishment — no one had been at all aware of the lady’s secret but now presumptive Spanish-language abilities, for my text had yet to be translated into any other language — until my friend Eric Southworth took the liberty of speaking up to suggest to Madame vice-chancellor or vice-president or vice-rector, that, well, if it was her wish to make a close psychological study of the members of the department to which he belonged, it would perhaps be preferable for her to mingle with them personally or have them visited by a group of certified, licensed and officially approved and contracted psychologists, before entrusting so delicate a task to a reading that would surely be “of necessity oblique,”—all said with the characteristic Oxford ambiguity. (“What did you mean by that?” I asked him when he told me about it. “Oh, I don’t know, whatever she decided to take it to mean,” he answered.) “May I, with the utmost respect, remind the distinguished vice-rector,” he went on during that same plenary meeting, “that she has employed a word that is entirely apt and that she should at all times bear in mind? I refer to the word ‘novel.’ And perhaps it would be advisable to bear in mind, as well, that this novel was written by a foreigner,” he added in fun, given that Eric is not exactly the sort to make nationalistic distinctions. As I later learned, the vice-chancellor, after a moment’s consternation, then responded: “Yes, of course, you’re correct, I see your point. A foreigner might wish to malign us, mightn’t he? And all the more so if he is a Continental.” “This particular foreigner, Madame vice-president, is not only a Continental”—Eric played his ace—“he is a Peninsular.” “Yes, I see,” the vice-rector hastily concluded in fear, as if she had just heard an obscene word that had to be tiptoed past at top speed and disposed of without delay. Apparently, two or three of the professors in the cloister or congregation who were at that moment entertaining themselves on the sly with my novel rapidly concealed their copies under their gowns.
Peninsular or Continental or both things together to English minds — of which fortunately only a few were ill-disposed in principle towards my oblique and nonsensical vision of the city and University of Oxford. Though I sent Ian Michael, Toby Rylands, the Taylorian Library and of course Eric Southworth their respective inscribed copies of the book right away, a few students who spent the 1989 Easter vacation in Spain (the novel had already been in the bookstores for a few weeks when Eduardo Mendoza — handsomely bribed — officially launched it on April 7) moved more rapidly than my country’s wretched mail service, which isn’t difficult, and, in Ian Michael’s words, showed up in Oxford “with wagonloads” of my books, which they distributed, loaned out, or resold at exorbitant prices with unexpected, inexplicable glee, as a result of which, for several days, my former colleagues noticed certain sarcastic gazes or heard certain enigmatic and, of necessity, oblique allusions from their students, without knowing what to make of them. None of this was, of course, my intention.
The first one to read the book — not in vain is he the most inquisitive, the one who most prides himself on keeping abreast of all that happens in several cities: Oxford, Swansea, Southampton, Madrid and Vigo — was Ian Michael, who wrote me a letter from Exeter College that made me sigh in relief when I began reading it but which I returned to its envelope in horror and mortification once I had finished. He very kindly wrote that All Souls struck him as my “best novel yet,” and assured me he was not saying this “because I have some small role in it, or because of the morbid fascination everyone here is feeling as a result of the mistaken belief that it is a roman à clef (students like John London and Huw Lewis come panting back from Madrid with so many copies that possibly they alone had contributed to its selling out).” (His Spanish is excellent but not perfect.) He said he had read it “in one sitting” until five in the morning, and now he was reading it again, more slowly; he spoke of the “interweaving of antithetical themes,” among them “the fictional Gawsworth: the real Machen” —taking Gawsworth for a fiction; he made a few more literary observations and, in fine professorial fashion, pointed out to me “only a very few solecisms, of scant importance: are the streets a kind of red?”—arguing with my eyesight—“or are they honey-colored?” He had another reservation, of an architectural or topographical nature, which amused me for its punctilious erudition: “It doesn’t seem possible to me that the office of Clare Bayes”—the novel’s central female character—“could look directly onto Radcliffe Camera from All Souls, where the only windows facing that direction are those of the Codrington Library (or those of Hertford, perhaps?), since Hawksmoor built a false wall to finish off All Souls on the west side, knowing that Wren or another architect would construct something interesting in the space to oppose or complement his neo-gothic towers. I’ve also noticed the complete absence of any reference to the Oxonian flora which I do not attribute to the (for me) wretchedness or poverty of almost all Spanish writers in this respect, but to your desire to represent an entirely inhospitable city.” Here he was mistaken or was being polite, since, in the matter of the aforementioned “wretchedness or poverty,” if in no other (my country’s inspectors have so often denied me any syntactic nationality: it’s a very literate country, the inspectors write a great deal and are applauded by the customs officials, and vice versa), I engrave my name fully and with laurels in the Spanish tradition: so extravagantly urban and distracted am I that I would be unable to identify so much as a pine tree. (Nor do I believe I depicted Oxford as so unpleasant.) He obligingly pointed out a couple of typos, and then gave me news of himself, the most salient — or most distressing — item being that he had been suffering from a case of eczema brought on by allergies ever since he had moved away from the house on the Cherwell and had been forced to place his blind mother in a private nursing home in the village of Freeland, “where Toby Rylands’ mother spent the last thirteen years of her life,” he said, as if he couldn’t help noting the growing number of parallels between the trajectory of his predecessor’s life and his own, or as if he were beginning to see Rylands’ present as a portend of his future. (And that’s what he called him in the letter, “Toby Rylands,” the name he went by in the novel, this time it wasn’t me who was doing it.) He wasn’t sure if the eczema was a psychosomatic effect of relinquishing his mother and the river, or if it was caused by the rug in his new flat, previously inhabited by a “woman who was a radiologist or cobalt therapist,” perhaps insinuating that the lady had wickedly irradiated it by flinging herself about on the carpeted floor during her tenancy.