He gave me another of his sidelong glances and what he then said, with some sarcasm, was enough to calm my fears. “I don’t think you need worry about that, Javier. But perhaps about the opposite case. It’s more likely that those who may feel upset or offended will be the ones who don’t recognize themselves in your novel and think they don’t appear in it, not even camouflaged or in disguise, vilified or ridiculed. In the end, it’s more humiliating not to be a source of inspiration than to be one, not to be considered worthy of fiction than to be worthy, even at the cost of some indiscretion, or of appearing in a bad light as the inspiration for some depraved or absurd character. The worst thing is not to figure in a book at all, when there was a possibility of doing so.” He broke off for a few seconds and gazed at the river as if keeping an eye on it, then added with kindly mockery, tapping his craggy fingers on the arm of his foundering deck chair, “Besides, who knows, you could be writing a future classic. All the work we scholars do is condemned to being outdated, unusable, forgotten. That goes for those of us who write; those who don’t, like Eric … well, his knowledge is scattered to the winds as soon as he leaves the classroom, or even before then, you know that, Eric, you know, don’t you?” Yes, Eric knew perfectly well, he knows it and that’s how he wants it. “It may be that the only way we’ll reach posterity is in a contemporary novel we have no reason to pay the slightest attention to. Can you imagine? How unjust, how grotesque, what a cruel joke. Remembered for what we disdained. That’s how it is, that’s how it is. It seems unlikely that any contemporary novel will last. Too many are published and the newspaper critics have almost no discernment, but it’s possible, at least. What most assuredly will not endure is our research and our explications, which could only be of interest to our future archeological selves — how should I put it? — to a repeat version of ourselves that isn’t going to happen. Not even our increasingly impersonal and superfluous erudition will last, with these computers that steal it and devour and store everything and then release it to the first illiterate who knows how to push a button. Hmm. I don’t like it.” Rylands plunged a hand into the white meringue of his hair, without mussing it, as if trying to protect his archaic brain from this glimpsed future that was paining him, where there would be no place for anyone like him — and surely he had resigned himself to that — but neither would there be a place for people like Ian, who was younger, or Eric, still younger, and both with many active years ahead of them, and this must have struck him as too violent, an amputation or a sacrifice. “I don’t like it. Hmm. Even now, these texts of ours, crammed with laborious notes and exegeses, aren’t read much; most of their readers are resentful colleagues who read them with ill will, to object to or belittle them, or plagiarize them if we’re lucky. To disparage us while we’re alive, once we’re dead it’s not worth the trouble. So what you must do is try not to leave any of us out of your novel; you could be depriving one or another of us of immortality — unforgivable, don’t you agree? It seems to me that all you need fear is the fury of those you’ll be leaving without a literary posterity. Ta-ta-ta. Can you imagine? People like us, a century hence, doing research on the people we are now. Ta, ta, ta.” Rylands often laughed at his own quips.
Eric and Ian laughed as well, aspirating their consonants as they did so. Ian Michael wrote detective novels featuring an inspector named Bernal, but only to enjoy himself and make money in Japan (apparently the trick is to have five or six books with the same character and then success and addiction arrive automatically, especially in Japan with its fondness for repetition, or so they say), and he did not count on occupying a place in the history of literature. Neither did I, with my non-detective novels. Or maybe I do, it isn’t an easy thing to say. No, what I aspire to is something else.
“I don’t think there’s much danger of that,” I answered Toby. “If it depends on me, I’m afraid all of you are going to have to go on being mortal.”
5
I must make a digression — this is a book of digressions, a book that proceeds by digression — to admit that I’ve occasionally put Toby Rylands’ idea to use as a persuasive measure or bargaining tool. Once, while still writing All Souls, I convinced Francisco Rico himself of what the eminent gentleman from New Zealand had banteringly formulated in Ian Michael’s garden while watching the river. To me, at that time, Paco Rico was “Professor Rico, man of vast knowledge,” laboriously disdainful, insolent in his vanity and congenial in spite of himself, a complacent man who liked to surround himself with acolytes (and did so). On one occasion, nevertheless — it may have been in Vitoria — I managed to depress him by pointing out that all his professorial prestige and fanfare, his potential halo as a member of the Real Academia Española de la Lengua — he was pushing his candidacy — and his many acclaimed critical writings were destined to last only as long as he did. After him would come others who were by definition more competent, more informed and more advanced in their methodologies, individuals who might well manage to find out all there was to know about Lazarillo de Tormes, for example, or the Quijote, and who would render his interpretations and discoveries outdated or even absurd in their naiveté—the past always seems naive — and ignorance of new and fundamental information. On the other hand, it can be stated, I told him, that every contemporary novelist — even the most inept of us, the one from Manzaneela de Torio, or the one from Quicena, among the Spaniards; no, it has to be the one from Las Palmas — is in some way superior to Cervantes, though only because we know Cervantes and have his lessons and can rely on him, and what’s more we know what has come along in his wake, which in theory gives us a great advantage; yet none of us are better than him, neither our existence nor our pages erase or annul his, which continue to be studied and read without ever becoming outdated or invalid; this is a field in which the passage of additional time doesn’t advance or improve or determine the course of what came before; it may be the only field in which time past is not lost but won, not for individuals — we are always losing time — but for our intentions and the body of work we create, if it does last. No one pays any attention to what we write today, but there is a remote possibility that people like Rico may do so many years from now, or people like Rylands, or Michael, or Southworth, and that will never happen to what Professor Rico himself delivers to the presses today, however great its value and merit.
“It’s possible,” I told him, “that you may be remembered more for having appeared as a character in a novel so enduring that it will be pored over throughout eternity, than for anything it lies within your power to achieve, with all your assiduity and expository talent and all the knowledge you’ve amassed.”
At first the professor made a show of disdain, as was his practice, and even looked a bit piqued.
“Bah,” he said, with a haughty pout. “I’ve already appeared in a novel, as the one and only protagonist, the central and dominant character, the catalyst of the action and, above all, of the passion. An entire novel written against me by a woman, poor thing, to work through her heartbreak.”
“Yes, I’ve read it,” I answered, which appeared to surprise and furthermore to gratify him. (“Really? You’ve read it?” he couldn’t help saying, unable to conceal his delight, and that made me think that Rylands was on to something.) “But you didn’t come off very well, which I suppose is natural since it was written to settle a score with you. Nor were you particularly recognizable, physically enhanced to make the ridiculous passion more credible. You were taller, I think. And in general a loathsome and clichéd character, if I recall correctly, professor. Papier maché.”