10
Not everyone or everything that comes to an end receives this testament, though most do, in fact there are only a very few who receive no warning and don’t have the slightest chance to think about or foresee their end: people who ride in cars or boats or airplanes are not among them because even if they don’t dwell on it they know they are at risk, and neither are soldiers or doctors or bricklayers or politicians or those who live alone, almost all of us more or less expect our possible ending when it is about to occur, rare are the cases in which time does not conduct itself in civilized fashion but slices down cleanly with no splinters or forewarning. But they do exist, and I enumerated a few of them in speaking of ridiculous deaths at the beginning of another novel, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me. In one case I mentioned, I was thinking of a real person who existed; I refrained from mentioning another one I learned of through All Souls and John Gawsworth, because in a fictional novel it would have seemed too improbable and recherché, even as an example, more so even than the death of the Austrian writer of Hungarian origin, Ödön van Horváth, to which I did allude (“a bolt of lightning that splits apart a tree on a wide avenue, and the tree, in falling, crushes or severs the head of a passer-by, perhaps a foreigner”): he was killed by a tree blown down by a storm on the Champs Elysées in Paris in front of the Theatre Marigny, where he was waiting for a friend, the German filmmaker Robert Siodmak, with whom he was planning to escape to the United States, both of them having fled from Nazi Germany. His light was put out suddenly, in the most unexpected place — without an afterward, without testament — on January 1, 1938, when he was only thirty-six years old; Horvath was a foreigner, not in his own country, he had no warning, and he must have been doubly and superstitiously wept over by his girlfriend, a German actress whose father had died under the same exceptional circumstances — struck down by another tree that was singled out by another bolt of lightning — and who belonged to the family of Mercedes López-Ballesteros, not for nothing is she herself “Freud’s granddaughter.” Even so, it wasn’t my pinchaúvas friend who first told me about the circumstances of Horváth’s death, which I learned of a very long time before meeting her, though she did tell me about the unfortunate girlfriend, who saw this improbable story repeated twice within a single lifetime, her lifetime. I have only one book by Horváth, a play titled Don Juan Comes Back from the War. Robert Siodmak, on whom the tree might have fallen as well if he had arrived on time (or maybe they would both have been comfortably in their seats and it wouldn’t have fallen on Horváth either), did go back to America, which he had left after the crash of $29, and directed a number of films there until he had to leave again during the 1950s, harassed by the anti-artistic Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Among those films is one entitled The Killers (in Spain, Forajidos), inspired by the famous Hemingway story on which films by Siegel and Tarantino were also later based, which specifically depicts the opposite case, the case of a man who is not only warned of his imminent murder or only possible future, but who waits for the moment to come, reminiscing on a motel cot, without wanting to flee any longer or look for a way out. I’m especially grateful to Siodmak for El temible burlón or The Crimson Pirate, which had nothing at all to do with Defoe’s General History of the Pyrates and which I watched countless times with great enjoyment during my childhood, so that out of retrospective self-interest I’m glad his was not the head severed by the Parisian tree that was singled out by the storm of New Year’s Day 1938.
More mysterious and with even less testament or warning was the death of the English writer Wilfrid Ewart, fifteen years and one day earlier, on New Year’s Eve 1922, “in the sultry darkness of Mexico City,” when he was only thirty. But before speaking of Ewart it may be wise or useful to speak of the person who led me to him through the aforementioned citation and others, and it’s probably best to reproduce here what I knew about John Gawsworth when I wrote All Souls, even if it is a few pages long. Now that I know so much more and he lives in me to some extent, and his ghost lives in my house, and I know his handwriting or his voice that speaks, I wouldn’t be capable of telling the story in the same way, and the way I told it then is what counted then, and that alone. Those who have already read these pages in that novel can skip them — I believe — without feeling cheated (it’s always a pleasure to skip a few pages and it’s almost never possible), and those who have no prior acquaintance with them can read them now without having to spend a cent more to acquire them, though undoubtedly the reproduction will not be verbatim and may include a few marginal notes or scattered comments, so in the end I don’t know if those who are already happily and frivolously preparing to skip them would be wise to do so. Of course they can also skip all the pages, all these pages, without very serious consequences. The nameless narrator of that novel said:
“After Alan Marriott’s first visit, a year or more previously, I had included among the rare authors whose books I was seeking this John Gawsworth, unknown to me until then, whose name he had mentioned and noted down for me before saying goodbye, and for whom Machen had written a prologue. His work, as Alan Marriott himself had said, was very difficult to find.” I must point out here that this is the part of the novel that most closely coincides with my (and even with the only) reality and where I loaned my experiences and voice to the Spanish gentleman narrator; that is, I can vouch for almost everything he says and speaks of. Machen is Arthur Machen, the famous author of horror stories and novels of whose work Borges was so fond; like Ian Michael, Machen was Welsh. As for Alan Marriott, he never existed as he is described, but the person who first spoke to me of Gawsworth was Roger Dobson, or Roger Alan Dobson, which, he told me after having read the book, is his full name. He also noticed — a man attentive to coincidences, I hadn’t paid any attention — that Alan Marriott’s initials were the same as those of his idolized Arthur Machen. The narrator went on to say: “None of the scant body of work he produced is currently in print in England, but little by little, with patience and luck and the progressive sharpening of my predatory eye, I found one or another opuscule of his in my used book stores in Oxford and London, until, a few months later, I came upon a copy of his book Backwaters, from 1932, signed, moreover, by the author himself: ‘John Gawsworth, written aged 19 ½’ it said in pen as soon as it was opened. There was also a correction in his own hand on the first page of the text (he had added, after the name ‘Frankenstein,’ the word ‘monster,’ to make it clear that he was referring to the creature and not the creator). My curiosity was deepened by the sense of temporal vertigo or time negated that occurs when your hands are holding an object that doesn’t entirely silence its past, and after that moment I began a course of research that was quite fruitless for many months, so elusive and unknown was and is the figure of Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, the real name of the person who was in the habit of signing his name as Gawsworth.” Soon he will no longer be as elusive, now that the Dictionary of National Biography has commissioned an article on the poet-king of Redonda from his reluctant successor and literary executor (the two offices always go together in this legend) Jon Wynne-Tyson, or King Juan II.