So at least I wasn’t punished with the indifference I had expected (there was very little of that), and the novel gave rise, I believe, to more joking and diversion than anger or strife in those who were able to read it immediately in Spanish, and to passive curiosity in those who had to wait for it to be translated into their language or some other language they knew; among those who had to wait was Sir Ralf Dahrendorf, the celebrated essayist and current warden of St. Antony’s College, who is of German origin and to whom I was able to send, some time later, and at the request of his secretary (I’m not acquainted with him personally but did so with pleasure, I was attached to St. Antony’s under another ruling), a copy in his native tongue, which also preceded the English version and came out just when he took the trouble to request it, more for his domestic than his literary satisfaction, I believe. Perhaps only to flatter me, both Eric and Ian sent word that certain stirrings of envy and even threats of reprisal arose from the members of other faculties and the other departments of our own Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages or Institutio Tayloriana, who did not have a similar foreign novel to presumably portray or reflect them, however problematically, about which they could crow to their tablemates at the interminable and competitive high tables or dinners that take place on a raised platform (apparently the Slavic high tables were the most torturous, and the French ones the most tedious). If this were true, I imagine their envy arose not so much from the existence of the book itself as from the muffled but hearty laughter they spotted my former colleagues giving in to each time the book furnished them with some additional piece of news or gleeful rumor.
There was also the occasional megalomaniac professor who staked his claim to a place in those pages, individuals who were unknown to me or with whom I had never exchanged a word, and yet who asserted — swore — that they had served nevertheless as the unmistakable model for this or that character, however incidental or vague. Once open season on identifications was declared, a number were made that, like the identification of the fictional lover Clare Bayes with Ian Michael’s mysterious current neighbor, were entirely groundless; it was suspected, for example, that behind the tippling warden named Lord Rymer in the novel was hidden poor Raymond Carr, the illustrious and now emeritus professor, because he had been warden of St Antony’s in my time and had concerned himself extensively with Spain in his prize-winning writings, and because of the unintentional equivalence between the consonants of the character’s surname and those of the historian’s Christian name (“Christian” is a figure of speech): Rymer, Raymond, completely absurd (there are so many customs officials and glib, twisted inspectors), particularly because there was indeed a slight source of inspiration for Lord Rymer, a genuine lord, ruddy, salacious, heavyset and with a real weakness for wine (not that Carr doesn’t enjoy a glass now and then, but not enough for any confusion: Carr is thin, and whenever I saw the lord he was staggering; they tell me he’s dead now). It was also believed — well, this was Ian again, who alerted the others with his inquiries and reconstructions — that the antiquarian book dealers who appear in All Souls as Mr. and Mrs. Alabaster had to correspond to the owners of the Turl Street bookshop Titles, whose name was Stone, in which case I would have ennobled them by transforming them from the vulgar Stone of reality to the monumental Alabaster of fiction (“Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, and smooth …”).
This sort of megalomania or eagerness for literary protagonism occurs, in any case, with strange frequency, even when the situation in no way lends itself to confusion or alibi, as All Souls may have done because of the aforementioned coincidences between narrator and author. I remember that one evening a lady phoned me from one of the eastern regions of my country, a lady I had only seen twice, and briefly, once after a lecture or simulacrum of such that I had travelled to her region to deliver, and once in a Madrid café where I went, at her incomprehensible insistence, to sign a book for her, and on neither occasion had there been time to talk about anything personal, or, in fact, about almost anything at all, so I knew almost nothing about her. Well, she called to tell me she had read my first anthology of stories, published in 1990, and had liked it a great deal, including the final story, which struck her as “exquisite”—an odd adjective to use in respect to that monstrous story but undoubtedly a favorite of hers, I’d heard it from her at other times—“though I did understand that it refers to me and is about me and, in fact, is very hard on me.” I’d been dancing the hucklebuck with a friend of mine when the phone rang, and my friend refused to stop or lower the music (she really loves to dance, once she’s off there’s no slowing her down, it was Anna, or Julia), so I thought I wasn’t hearing right and only managed to gape in amazement and ask for confirmation of her bewildering words: “About you? You said the story is about you? What do you mean, about you?” Up to that point she had behaved sensibly and politely, even if everything always struck her as exquisite. “You deny it, then?” the reader from the east answered, verging on fury, and added imperiously (addressing me casually or intimately as “tú”): “Do me a favor and turn down that racket, I can’t hear a thing.” People often address me as tú and give me orders, I think I make too many jokes and fail to command respect. “You’re not going to deny that the story is out to get me, are you? You’re not denying that to me, Javier Marías.” I’m afraid I did deny it, nevertheless, and perhaps not in the most polite fashion, it was only natural for me to deny it, or so I believe, and I certainly never wanted to investigate the matter any further. The story in question is one of the things that most affected me as I wrote it. It was about a vengeful butler with whom I spent a rather long period of time trapped in an elevator that broke down between two floors of a New York skyscraper. The butler worked for the local cosmetics king and his new wife, who was Spanish; there was also a newborn baby girl who was sick. It was the first time that I made narrator and author coincide in an apparently fictional piece, the narrator was me. There were no other characters, so I chose not to find out which one my interlocutor from the east identified with: the Spanish wife, the butler, the newborn baby, I myself, or the elevator. At least she saved me from an exhausting and breakneck living-room hucklebuck. Shortly thereafter she sent me a completely incomprehensible telegram; the text was long and poetical and lacked all punctuation, I suppose it must have struck her as overly prosaic to interrupt the great flow of metaphorical surrealism with one or another “stop.” The only part that was clear was her remarkable way of signing off: she didn’t sign as “your slave,” or “your servant,” or even “your scullery maid,” or “your hired hand”—all of which would have been embarrassing while yet retaining at least some relationship to traditional epistolary rhetoric — but rather, sounding a much more contemporary note, she took her leave as “your cleaning lady.” Which made me quite certain that she had identified with the butler.
Of all the quite random and irresponsible misidentifications that were made in Oxford, the most ominous and objectionable, though not the most serious, was the one endured by my friend Eric Southworth, and in print, as well, two years after the novel first came out. On April 16, 1991, he wrote me a letter in response to a letter of mine in which I had included, for his Hispanistic information, an obituary of the well-known Spanish critic and scholar Ricardo Gullón, who had just died. As I’ve already mentioned, attempts were made to identify Eric with the character in the novel named Cromer-Blake, who was on the most excellent terms with the narrator, was ill, and in the end died. By some fluke Cromer-Blake’s diaries found their way into the hands of the Spanish narrator, who cited them very briefly a couple of times — I dislike the overreliance on this sort of expedient in fiction. But, as I also mentioned, the funereal and afflicted aspect of the character was, instead, attributed to Philip Lloyd-Bostock, whom I saw far less of but who did indeed die not long after my departure, after a long, indecisive and veiled illness. This should have meant that Eric would thus be free of bad omens and unpleasant speculations, but even he was not spared: in his letter to me he enclosed a photocopy of the Boletín de la Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas, or Bulletin of the International Association of Benito Pérez Galdós Scholars, headquartered in Canada, in Kingston, Ontario — undoubtedly a most stimulating publication, it seems impossible that anything like it could exist and in its “Año XI,” or Year XI, no less, or so it stated — with its table of contents and corresponding sections, the seventh of which was titled “Necrología,” beneath which heading appeared the following: