“It’s an interview with us that came out recently. You may enjoy seeing it, we tell a number of anecdotes. And we speak of you and your novel.”
“Really?” I took it with curiosity. “Thank you, I’ll read it later, it’s sure to be of great interest to me.”
It was illustrated with a photograph of the two of them, hard to make out on the photocopy, he, smiling with a double-columned folio volume between his outstretched hands, she, more serious, giving him a sidelong glance or perhaps watching out for the valuable folio, and wearing eye-catching earrings and a necklace, perhaps they had dressed up for the occasion, though he wasn’t wearing a tie, sporty as ever. It was from a specialized publication, probably for those in the second-hand bookselling trade, not quite as restricted an audience as that of the Boletín of the jinxed Galdosistas, but almost. It was called The Bookseller and was dated August 12, 1993, very recent indeed; strange that they had already made a photocopy when they couldn’t have known I was in Oxford and was going to visit them, entering their store as a distinguished author and leaving it some time later as a literal pinchaúvas or “puncturer of grapes,” which is a way of saying ne’er-do-well or good-for-nothing in Spanish, even if the act was committed through an intermediary who couldn’t stop laughing at her tremendous feat. The photocopy must not have been originally intended for me.
In the interview, the Stones told the story of their business, distributing the speaking parts equitably between them. They had had stores in Devon and in Shipton-under-Wychwood (that name, Wychwood Forest, a place between the Windrush and Evenlode rivers, “a wood that no longer exists, only its name remains, the wood was cut down and razed during the past century, but it’s very difficult to renounce your name, names say a great deal”) before setting up shop in Oxford. One title they always kept in stock, they said, was Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE. Lawrence or Lawrence of Arabia, in some valuable edition. Speaking of the back pains that are inevitable in the trade, because of the constant moving of books, Mrs. Stone suggested that the PBFA (which must be a Federation of some sort, in this case no one explained the acronym) should contract the services of a chiropractor, who might have made a good match for the lady cobalt therapist of Professor Ian Michael’s eczemic mishap. But the most jolting part of it, to me, was their mention of me in their comments on notable clients. “We even appear in a Spanish novel by Xavier Marias” (as Ralph Stone clearly referred to me, without the accent on the surname but also, stranger still, with my original and almost forgotten name, I renounced that name but remember it, it’s mine), “a nice young man who was at All Souls a few years ago and came into the shop regularly. He picked up on a habit some dons have of not seeing women, so that one might ask me a question, and I might refer to Gillian who might supply the answer. The supplementary question then comes back to me. This may go on two or three times. The book is called All Souls and we feature as Mr and Mrs Alabaster.”
The paragraph is somewhat confusing, especially to someone who has no idea what it could be referring to, and I, initially, had no idea. What in God’s name are they saying? I asked myself as I read it, while Mercedes L-B went on laughing and gazing in satisfaction at the viticultural tip of her umbrella. What did they mean, “a habit of not seeing women”? That’s about the only thing I really have seen and still look at, always, both in and out of doors, and what’s more I know at a glance whether I admire them or not: I didn’t understand a word of it. I read and reread it, there in the restaurant, and showed it to Mercedes to see if she understood it any better and would leave off with her smugness, but she shook her head; until I suddenly figured it out. In describing the Alabasters, the narrator of the novel said, “But though he was invariably there as well, I don’t recall a single occasion when he answered my questions or inquiries. He would smile and say hello like a lively and energetic man (his whole bearing was intrepid), but he delegated every business matter or response, however trivial, to the greater knowledge and authority of his spouse. He would turn to her and vivaciously repeat the question that had just been asked of him, word for word, appropriating it, as if he were the one who wanted to know (‘Have we had anything in by Vernon Lee, darling?’), adding only the word ‘darling’ at the end.” And a little farther along the narrator returned to this: “The cheerful urbanity with which Mr. Alabaster greeted any customer who came in indicated that, in his subaltern passivity, the mere appearance of someone in the door of the shop had to be the great event of his day, and the effusive greeting he addressed to that someone its most glorious and sociable moment. For after that, as I’ve said already, he was incapable of answering a simple question or pointing a finger (‘Do we have a travel section, darling?’) towards the shelf that held what the buyer sought.”
All of this, it was clear, had not struck Mr. Stone as terribly funny — the “subaltern passivity” part wasn’t particularly flattering, I admit — though he had made me aware of this by the most delicate and discreet means possible, providing me, through his wife, by the way, with the photocopy in which he defended himself, or defended Alabaster, whom it was now certain he had taken possession of or adopted. The extraordinary thing was that in this interview the Stones were indirectly arguing with a novel, or rather they were refuting what a fictitious narrator had observed about two booksellers who were also fictitious, however much they had borrowed certain details or traits from the Mr. and Mrs. Stone of reality. And in order to deny that he, Stone, never answered questions and always transmitted them in their entirety to his wife as soon as he received them — but I had said that of Mr. Alabaster — they had found no better explanation than to claim that I — not the nameless narrator, but Xavier Marias, with a name — had acquired an extravagant, depraved habit from the Oxford dons, a habit I had never heard of before, which consisted of not seeing women, not registering them, erasing them, passing the gaze over them as if they were invisible or did not exist: this habit, then, would have led me — and hence my narrator — to address myself invariably to Stone and, we must suppose, to Alabaster, two or three times in succession, on every occasion and on numerous occasions, even though I knew very well that Mrs. Stone and, we must suppose, Mrs. Alabaster — whom, for that matter, I did not see, who were, for me, transparent — were the ones who could supply the answers. Perhaps this explained why, during my grape-bearing visit, Ralph, the husband, especially at the beginning, had tried to speak up before Gillian, the wife, whenever an answer or some information was required, so that I could register with my own eyes and ears that he was capable of supplying any information, requested or not, without having to consult her first. The idea was so appealing to me that I only regretted it wasn’t true: according to this, I would have come into the shop regularly without ever seeing Mrs. Stone because of this damnable habit picked up from the dons, so misogynous and cruel, those colleagues of mine; I would thus have asked Mr. Stone — who else? — if he had had in anything by Vernon Lee, for example; and then Mr. Stone, like a madman, would have turned toward no one and would, in turn, have asked this no one, “Have we had in anything by Vernon Lee, darling?”; this highly eccentric reaction — from my point of view, since I saw only air — wouldn’t have made me bat an eye, as if I were another madman, nor would I have made any inquiry with respect to his ethereal interlocutor, I would simply have waited out the obligatory seconds and then, not having heard any sort of response because I saw no one who could have supplied it, listened, very phlegmatic and natural, and on a regular basis, to the final reply of Mr. Stone after his consultation with someone who, for me, would have been, at most and with luck, a ghost who appeared only to him: “No we haven’t had anything by Vernon Lee in lately, Mr. Márias.”