The disturbing part came last. For, after having stated that my book was not a roman à clef, which cheered me enormously and filled me with gratitude (since, in fact, it was not, and no one was in a better position than he to see that), Ian Michael went on to speak to me of my former colleagues in the department, calling each one by the name of a character in the novel, thus forcing me into some arcane speculations as to the referent in each case. And in that vein, he informed me that Rylands was “very pleased with one of those false honors”—he was paraphrasing my text, which said “insincere honors”—“that he received news of in the maiclass="underline" a prize that brought him four million pesetas and the obligation to give a lecture in Salamanca.” I was more worried about the next bit. “Your novel angered him, I’ve heard, and he flung it to the ground before he was halfway through.” And he went on, merrily tossing out fictional names: “I saw Alec Dewar furtively leafing through a copy brought to him by a muscular female student in a rugby shirt; later, in the commons of his college, he was bragging about having appeared in a Continental roman à clef.… Cromer-Blake”—the live one, not the dead one—“is just back from a lecture tour, perhaps a pleasure tour as well, in Italy … Leigh-Peele has yet to register a reaction.” Worst and most upsetting of all was the conclusion. If one character in All Souls was entirely made up (that is, could not be identified, even slyly or in bad faith, with anyone who was real) it was the central female, Clare Bayes, a married woman, also a professor, with whom the Spanish narrator maintained a clandestine relationship during his stay in what for him was always transient territory. Ian Michael, nevertheless, ended by saying, to my utmost bewilderment: “I see quite a bit of Clare Bayes these days since she’s moved as well, to a street near my new one, and I often run into her, she’s always carrying a lot of things around with her, as in the novel. She’s still fairly appealing, but not as attractive as before. No one knows whether she’s taken a new lover.”
I think I blushed (I know I did: I saw myself reflected on the television screen, I was watching a video and hadn’t stopped the tape to read the letter, I’m not sure if it was Los tres caballeros or Mi amor brasileño with Ricardo Montalbán, I remember that incongruous sambas were sounding in my ears as I deciphered the letter from my Oxonian former boss, the only boss I’ve had in my life, and who never acted like one, bless him), and of course I got a little worked up about it. Though I thought I would answer him in writing, too, as is proper, I immediately rang Ian up so that he could confirm Toby’s unexpected and to me deplorable fury, and I could rescue him at once from his error with regard to the dangerous conjecture of a real Clare Bayes. But when I had him at the other end of the line — it was evening — I thought it best not to inquire after the identity of the woman who, according to him, had lost some of her former appeal. “Good God,” I thought, as I watched either the seductive Montalbán or that green parrot in a straw hat, José Carioca, I’m not sure which, dancing, now soundlessly, “as a result of my novel there is now a professor at Oxford whom everyone believes to be an adulteress, guilty of an extra-marital, Continental and, worst of all, Peninsular liaison, some poor woman who did no such thing, or at least not with me, to the point that she’s expected to ‘take’ a new lover after my now long past departure; she hasn’t done so because she’s not in the habit of doing so, and, as always happens in these cases, she’ll be the only one who doesn’t know, or perhaps her husband won’t either, her husband who’ll be taken for a cuckold — made one by the intervention of a foreigner predisposed to malignment — what a calamity. Who can she be? I wondered, but didn’t ask Ian, though I couldn’t help but mention to him in passing, in a feeble attempt to save the unknown woman from slander and idle talk, that there had never been a Clare Bayes or Clare Bayes-equivalent of any kind during my stay in Oxford. “No?” was all he answered, and it was clear he didn’t believe me. I deeply regretted the fact that this woman, whoever she was, would be the object of gossip in so gossip-mongering a city, and I the indirect cause of it, and thus not only would her reputation be placed in question but her good taste as well. (I have no reputation to lose in this respect, but who knew if my taste wouldn’t be questioned, also.) If I may, I will state here that during my years in Oxford I lived very chastely, at least with respect to the native women, who in no way struck me as “rather whorish,” as Miriam Gómez once said they could be (she said it in her always inoffensive Cuban way and in the presence of her husband, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who said nothing, both of them having lived in London for thirty years). To my horror I suddenly realized that the high-mindedness and good sense of the lady professor would also be cast in doubt, for, according to British convention and tradition, being seduced by a Spaniard is third among the most sordid and, at the same time, naive entanglements that a married Englishwoman can become involved in: the second is seduction by an Italian, and the first by an Argentine. The worst of it is that there are a large number of people in Oxford with conventional and traditional British ideas. What a terrible disservice to this poor, unlucky woman to whom I wish no harm, I thought; really, we writers should be more careful about what we write, not only because of situations like this one but also because what we write sometimes comes to pass. And if I must be sincere — there’s no reason why I have to be, perhaps I’ll need to talk about that later — I also regretted not having known her, because if she was no longer quite as attractive that meant she had been attractive when I was a temporary part of the city and the congregation. Or perhaps I had known her. In any case, the two of us apparently made a plausible furtive couple, which gave rise to a certain vulgar curiosity that I was able to quell. I tried to see myself reflected on the television screen again, which is somewhat difficult when the screen is full of bright colors: entirely impossible to see oneself blush against a backdrop of Carioca and Montalbán, Donald Duck and Lana Turner, and I could only tell I was blushing from the heat of my face and the momentary palpitation of an eyelid.
Where Toby Rylands was concerned, my ex-boss Michael, to my sorrow, confirmed the initial rumors going around the Sub-Faculty. For reasons that were not known with any certainty, he had apparently hurled his copy of my book angrily down onto the grass in his garden, where it probably still moldered at that hour, soaked and warped by the intermittent rain and phlegmatic sun, perhaps chewed by some passing dog — a three-legged dog, perhaps, that had run away from its master. Ian told me he thought Toby must have been annoyed by the mention of his adventures in espionage and other escapades — the Spanish word Ian used was correrías, the type of word learned foreigners quickly pick up and enjoy using; I, who owe them so much, have used it here in connection with one of them, the bandit Dean of Canterbury, who almost left me forever in limbo — because it irritated Toby to have it spoken of in public, even more so in print. “But the character isn’t him,” I protested, “though I may have taken some of his physical characteristics on loan; there’s not a word spoken by Toby Rylands that I’ve ever heard Toby say, and I didn’t and still don’t know anything about any such activities.” “No?” Ian confined himself to answering once again; he wasn’t accepting any of my denials despite having seen clearly that this was not a roman à clef. “No,” I insisted, “it’s the first I’ve heard of it: I only imagined, made things up, that’s all.” Ian’s letter was dated on St. George’s Day 1989, and our conversation took place four or five days later. It left me very concerned about Toby. He was the one who had all but asked to appear as a character in the book, even if he was half joking, and now he was angry about a mild resemblance and a few involuntary coincidences. Not only did I greatly regret his wrath, which baffled me, but I also had to prepare myself to live in fear of some long-distance punishment if he deemed my recklessness or offense deserving of one, I didn’t even want to think about the vile aberrations he might accuse me of if that were the case, practices that exist only in textbooks. (Although I have no interest whatsoever in teaching, in America or anywhere else, my teaching days are over, and while they weren’t over yet then, I was only looking for the conviction and a suitable pretext to bring them to an end.)