He can be seen all over the neighborhood, in the rain, with a bag from the pharmacy and eating a pizza. His oversized sunglasses hide physical deterioration caused by his insomnia. Comical and touching, from time to time, he glances furtively at the croutons. Today, despite his evident outlandishness, he looks more normal than on other occasions, at least he’s on his way from the bakery and the pharmacy, and might seem — indeed he is — just like one more local. The last time he was in this area there were a lot of people who saw him walking around in the rain in his old raincoat, his shirt with its torn collar turned up, those hideous short trousers, his hair completely plastered to his head. It was a strange picture he made, a poor, formerly prestigious publisher, dressed to be taken straight to a psychiatrist. A dreadful picture of an unhinged eccentric. Because of his behavior that day, lots of people in the neighborhood now look at him dubiously, and this despite the fact they’ve seen him more than once on TV talking sensibly about the books he published and which brought him such great fame.
He walks slowly, with his Roquefort pizza and his croutons and his umbrella held up straight and the pills he’s just bought from the pharmacy. I’m normal, look at me, his appearance seems to be saying. Of course the sunglasses give him away, and the raincoat is the same one he wore the other night, and his slightly meandering walk also gives him away, as do his anxious bites of the pizza. Actually, everything puts him in his neighbors’ sights. In the glass window of the florist, he studies himself and gives a start as he sees a strange passerby, with short trousers on under his raincoat. But he’s not wearing short trousers. Why did he think he was? Who is this fucking old man; who’s this comic character reflected in the glass?
He starts to laugh at himself and to walk like a tramp from a silent film. He plays at being his shadow, that comic character he saw in the shop window. He walks in a deliberately erratic way and then, outside the deli, imagines he’s not a common tramp — he has a house, a stable home where, it’s true, he does trample around. While he carries on walking in a funny way, he imagines it’s night time already and that he’s in his house, the rain lashing against the windowpanes, where there’s a reflection of his shadow, the shadow of another shadow. Because in this imagined house he is an ex-publisher waiting to meet the man he was before he created — with the books he published and the catalog life he’s led — a false personality for himself.
He imagines that in his house he’s not tired — this last tallies with his own reality — and his old lamp is illuminating him as he starts preparing a report on his situation in life, a report he imagines he must finish before dawn breaks. So as not to feel bored out on the street — he’s never bored except when he walks around places as familiar as the ones in his neighborhood — he slowly elaborates mentally, painfully, sentence by sentence, as he advances in a decidedly pathetic way, with his silent cinema actor’s air, spitting a tide of garbage from his mind:
“Soon I will turn sixty. For two years now I’ve been haunted by the reality of death, at the same time as I devote myself to observing how bad things are in the world. As a friend says, it’s all over, or coming to an end. There is nothing else left but a great illiterate throng deliberately created by the powers that be, a kind of amorphous crowd that’s sunk us all into a general state of mediocrity. There must be a huge misunderstanding. And a tragic jumble of gothic stories and despicable publishers, guilty of a monumental mess. A funeral is already being prepared in Dublin for the literary publishing I gave my life to. And now all I can do is to devote myself to trying to breathe, to opening as many spaces as possible in the days I have left, to trying to search for an art of my own being, an art that maybe one day I can perfect by making an inventory of my main errors as a publisher. I have the impression — one last project, merely imaginary — that it would be great if other publishers wanted to do the same, and for there to be a book containing the confessions of publishers who described what it was they believe went awry in their publishing policy; independent publishers who told how extraordinary the books were that they dreamed of bringing to light one day; publishers who described their greatest hopes and how it was that these did not materialize (it would be good for a publisher such as the great Sensini to speak on this, someone who only published stories of brave characters who are adrift, who ended up standing trial in the United States); literary publishers who described the poverty of literature, now a whole symphony of crows lost in the funereal center of the corrupt jungle of their industry. In short, publishers who would agree to publish the great map of their disappointments and who would confess the truth and say once and for all, to top it all, that not one of them ever discovered a true genius along the way. A map like this would allow us to move deeper into the quicksand of truth. Riba thinks, I’d like one day to have the audacity to go deeper into these sands and to make an inventory of everything I tried to achieve in my catalog and never did. I’d like one day to have the honesty to reveal the great shadows hiding behind the lights of my work that was so absurdly praised. . ”
He decides to speed up on his way home because he’s exhausted, and what’s more, realizes his insomniac’s lucidity might start to wane at any moment, as even the outline of his laughable but ultimately pathetic silent cinema figure is dissolving and dangerously transforming itself in the shop windows. The only thing that matters to him now is that, when Celia gets home from work, she finds him with lunch made, nicely laid out on the tablecloth, and the TV on so they don’t have to talk as they eat. For now, he’ll have another coffee. She has to find him awake, as if there were nothing wrong. He must seek a prompt reconciliation. Become a Buddhist, if necessary. He has no faith in people with faith — even if it’s a Buddhist faith — but he’ll pretend to have it; his relationship with Celia is more important than anything else. Although it is also true he greatly distrusts people with faith. When he thinks of these matters, he always recalls something he heard Juan Carlos Onetti say toward the end of the seventies at the French Institute in Barcelona. Onetti, who seemed enormously, joyously drunk, was saying that Catholics, Freudians, Marxists, and patriots should all be lumped together. Anyone — he said — with faith, it didn’t matter in what; anyone who spouted opinions, who believed they knew or acted according to repeated, learned, or inherited thoughts.
Those words lingered for a long time in his mind. He recalls Onetti said, that day, that a faithful man was more dangerous than a hungry beast and that faith should be placed in what is most insignificant and subjective. In the woman you happen to be in love with at the moment, for example. Or a dog, a soccer team, a number on a roulette wheel, a lifelong vocation. This is what he believes Onetti said on that evening now so long ago in Barcelona.
Since the woman, in his case, is Celia and as such not exactly a woman of the moment, and since, not so long ago, he gave up publishing, which was always his lifelong vocation, and besides he has no dog or soccer team, it seems more than obvious that all he’s got left is a number. A roulette number, if he’s got anything left at all, and this number might well be on the wheel of life itself, that is, his destiny.
For a moment and without panicking, he stands in a daze looking at the croutons, as if they were his only true future.