As he tells it in his In Quest of El Dorado, Graham went back with him to the Hotel Isabel, at the corner of República del Salvador and Isabel la Católica, where Ewart was lodging on the recommendation of “a Spaniard” who had given him the address on the train. It was kept by an English-speaking German who, still according to Graham, tried to be ingratiating. He visited his friend’s fifth-floor room and admired its view of the mountains. Still, it didn’t strike him as a good place to write and “I meditated getting him to change over to the Iturbide.” In The Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart, however, Graham says the hotel had been suggested by “a Mexican lady” whose card he found with its name written in pencil on the back. He also says that they first went to the Iturbide so Ewart could see the fountain and the “banana palms” that the conjugal couple could contemplate from their suite, and that Ewart, charmed, “had half a mind” to move there that very afternoon, at which point they made for the Isabel to ask for and immediately settle the bill. But the owner took so long drawing it up and made so many mistakes that Wilfrid left it for the next morning. I imagine that these small or not so small contradictions don’t mean much and may have arisen from the sheer boredom of having to recount the same thing twice in the same way. We all try to avoid that (to the annoyance of children), if only so that the same thing will never be quite the same. Nevertheless, the contradictions certainly fertilized the ingenious and entirely baseless speculations as to a possible crime made in the aforementioned 1989 article by Sergio González Rodríguez, who fantasized about the possibility that Graham had murdered Ewart out of jealousy related to his wife, literary jealousy, envy of his overnight success, or some brooding military rancor. In any case, Graham’s two books both date from 1924, so the hypothesis of lapses or treacheries of memory can be discarded, particularly for a man who turned forty that year, and would go on to live fifty years more.
Ewart’s sudden fascination with Mexico City — a surly, quarrelsome place of no culture and no comfort, without one tolerable theatre — was odd. But he was much taken with the climate and the parks, especially Chapultepec, or so he said. He also liked the numerous booths or sidewalk stands run by young female manicurists who were sometimes curtained off and sometimes visible. During that lunch on the 30th he exhibited his gleaming nails to the Grahams with great satisfaction.
13
Graham’s detailed account of the 31st day of December, 1922, in Mexico City, offers excellent proof that, however hard one tries, the events immediately prior to the final event, the catastrophe, have no reason to be perforce significant or even of any interest whatsoever. When someone dies unexpectedly, we try to reconstruct what they said the last time we saw them, as if this could somehow save them; we try to remember the final day, once we know it was final, with an effort we would never make had it been only the penultimate, or just any ordinary day of the many forgotten days of lost time, and so we deceive ourselves, shining on the occasion a light that did not belong to it, not its own light but that of the ending; death, with its suspended brilliance, illuminates whatever came before it (“Put out the light, and then put out the light”), even what was shadowy or grey, in and of itself, and unimportant, never intended or hoped or planned to leave a trace of any kind and was already fading away. Unforeseen or premature death contaminates what preceded it, shooting out its retrospective flames which change everything; what was no more than the day before yesterday is suddenly transformed into “the final years,” in the standard phrase of articles and biographies, which often speak of the deceased “during his final years,” as if anyone could have anticipated that; and some anodyne yesterday is stylized by the blade of repetition that chisels and idealizes and fixes it forever in our minds, because all at once it has acquired the ominous status of the day before the end, which in its own moment it did not have. We try to confer solemnity on what turned out to be the last thing, in most cases a charlatan, fictitious, inculcated, borrowed solemnity, as if it tormented us to think that we might, in our ignorance, lose some word or gaze or gesture of farewell, or to accept that the other person’s death caught us off guard, preventing us from seizing the final stretch of his life and being its attentive witnesses, before the metamorphosis. Our awareness of not having intuited this farewell — of not knowing that it was one — weighs on us, if we were convinced we’d see the other person at least once more, though he was already ill and we were afraid he wouldn’t last much longer. And we struggle to remember signals, signs, cruel ironies, unnoticed omens of what happened next, and that calms us, like seeing a film a second time or rereading a book and then taking note of the premonitions or forewarnings of its denouement, now that we know what it is and there is no one who can change it.
Speaking for myself, it’s difficult to evoke the last time I saw Aliocha Coll or even to know with any certainty when it was; he was a friend who committed suicide quite a while after that last time and not long before our next meeting, which did not take place, and how could I know of his approaching end when perhaps even he didn’t know — but of course he did, he knew, he decided on the date — and so I let a couple of days go by in his city (Paris) without calling him, in the optimistic plan of doing it a little later, when I would have wrapped up my stupid activities (but those two adjectives, optimistic and stupid, belong above all to his death, the cessation of his light, which made my perfectly natural thought seem ridiculous and belittled my activities, which were probably only superfluous, and has now entirely erased them: I have no knowledge at all of what I did during those days; my date book says I travelled to Poitiers and returned to Paris, but my memory contains no trace of Poitiers). And given my difficulties with reconstructing that time, I attempted it in a semi-fiction or story entitled “Todo mal vuelve” or “Everything Bad Comes Back,” after one of the last phrases he wrote to me, in a telegram. But that story isn’t enough, because I believe I have still never confused fiction with reality — yes, I do believe that — and I know that my memory of his final words and gestures and his final state of mind and his final countenance is only amorphous, I think it was over lunch in the Brasserie Balzar on rue des Ecoles, but I’m not sure and don’t want to go paging through my date books right now — from which he will have disappeared after that final day, whenever it was — and in any case that lunch which may have been our last meeting is mingled with others that took place in the anodyne indifference of the time that went before and was lost. He was forty-two when he killed himself in 1990 with his unerring doctor’s hand, after rereading a last story — Nerval’s “Sylvie”—listening to a last piece of music — I don’t know what it was — and finishing his last glass of wine. In fact I wouldn’t have seen him again even if I had called him as soon as I arrived in Paris on November 20, because although I learned of his death on the 23rd, he had committed suicide on the 15th. He left two letters, neither was for me, he had already written me many.