In preparation for the ceremony, I gave a nylon stocking to Eighty-Three, an incredibly long stocking, as long as my sister’s legs, a stocking she would never wear again, and the dog’s bones — inside a pine coffin with a little gold plaque with the names of my mother and my sister carved onto it — ended up on top of my Grandfather’s, who had died in the Revolution, killed by a stray bullet.
~ ~ ~
The salon finished reading the first volume of In Search of Lost Time and to celebrate, they organised a cocktail party with champagne from Zacatecas and savoury crackers spread with tuna mayonnaise.
When I crossed the lobby on my way to the bar and they invited me to stay, I called out:
‘All this sophistication plays havoc with my digestion!’
And just when it seemed that nothing else could happen, what with all the things that had happened, it turned out that the new delivery boy had been telling the truth. We only found out the night Hipólita tripped over the lost tin of jalapeño peppers on the first-floor landing. The management committee declared the boy innocent of theft and guilty of murder in multiple degrees: Hipólita didn’t survive the fall. The salonists said: ‘It’s the supermarket’s fault for having hired that negligent delivery boy.’
‘It’s the delivery boy’s fault for not realising he’d dropped the tin in the corridor.’
‘It’s the management committee’s fault for not properly maintaining the building.’
‘It’s the doctor’s fault for giving her such a strong painkiller: it made her dizzy.’
‘It’s the plaster cast’s fault: if she’d been able to put her hands down she wouldn’t have hit her head.’
‘It’s her husband’s fault: if he hadn’t cheated on her she wouldn’t have had to leave Veracruz and end up in this building.’
‘It’s the champagne’s fault: it was too strong.’
‘It’s Hipólita’s fault for having drunk three glasses of it.’
I tried to join in: ‘It’s Proust’s fault, for not making Lost Time shorter!’
At A&E they told us she was stuffed full of painkillers. At least she hadn’t felt anything. There was no funeral and no burial, because her children had the body cremated and took the ashes to Veracruz. They said they were going to spread them at the foot of the Pico de Orizaba volcano. Instead of a funeral procession, the whole salon organised a protest march to the supermarket. Juliet, who was a soppy old thing, presented them with a hundred pounds of tomatoes. When I saw them all troop by from my balcony I called out: ‘There’s a bookshop in the Alliance Française on Calle Sócrates!’
In an attempt to understand everything that had happened, I wrote in my notebook: How can everything that’s happened be understood? What’s the meaning of it taking place? Was it a vindication of the forgotten, the disappeared, the damned, the marginal, the stray dogs? Was it a complicated way of saying art historians are revisionists? Was it a laboured joke that life played to rid itself of Hipólita? Or did Fate orchestrate it all to bring Willem and Dorotea together? What if they have a baby? What if the child ends up being the result of this whole story? Was it perhaps life that finds a way at any price? Or, worse, was there some sort of moral lesson that meant I’d have to give up drinking and channel my compulsions towards some other activity, such as writing a novel, for instance?
The need to understand everything, to try and sum it up like a lesson, gave me uneasy dreams. Towards dawn, at the end of a corridor in a large exhibition space, I recognised the unmistakeable silhouette of the Sorcerer. I walked over and saw the Sorcerer do the same, surrounded by the usual pack of melancholy mutts.
‘Now you really are ready to write my novel,’ he said.
‘Congratulations,’ I replied.
‘What for?’
‘For the exhibition.’
‘Do you think I’m interested in being recognised by posterity?’
‘You’re not?’
‘I’ve suffered more than Christ; nothing can remedy that.’
‘Nor can a novel.’
‘You’re right, but the novel you’re going to write is about me, not for me.’
‘So who’s it for, then?’
‘Who do you think? Look.’
And then he lifted up his shirt and, from down his trousers, where he had stuffed it, took a copy of Aesthetic Theory. He opened it up without hesitation at page 30, and ordered: ‘Read this.’
And I read a phrase that stood out in golden letters: The new is akin to death.
‘Am I going to die?’ I asked him.
‘Not yet,’ he replied. ‘First you’re going to write a novel. Now wake up.’
‘What?’
‘WAKE UP, DAMN IT!’
I woke in a cold sweat, with a stabbing pain in my liver, and got up to get a glass of water and find a pill that would calm me. As I crossed the darkness of the lounge I saw a little light burning. I felt for the light switch and the bulb illuminated Francesca, clad in a long robe of red silk and sitting in my little chair, using the Chinese reading light to read my notebook.
‘Give me the keys,’ I demanded.
She waved a heavy bunch.
‘My keys,’ I insisted.
‘I can’t,’ she replied. ‘It’s my responsibility, the responsibility of the chair of the management committee. Who do you think opens the door when someone here dies?’
‘Have you been coming into my apartment this whole time?’
She fell silent, conceding that this was indeed what she’d been doing.
‘But how is it possible I’ve only realised just now?’ I asked aloud, although it sounded more like an expression of surprise bouncing around in my own head.
‘You’re a deep sleeper. Perhaps if you didn’t drink so much…’
‘If I didn’t drink so much you wouldn’t sneak into my room to spy on my notebook?’
She stood up and put the notebook down where her soft, firm, long-yearned-for posterior had been.
‘Now you really are ready to write the novel,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I said now you can start writing the novel.’
‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Why so insistent? What for, what do you get out of it?’
‘You don’t know? I work for literature.’
‘You’re kidding! Does it pay you a grant?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Something like that? What does something like that mean? You can’t just come into my apartment and start playing guessing games!’
‘What I get out of it is a novel.’
‘You’re not going to tell me you’re a muse.’
She was silent again so as to confirm my suspicion and I raised my eyebrows just enough to demand an explanation.
‘What did you expect?’ she answered. ‘A nymph flitting about by a river? A translucent young girl with long blonde hair and blue eyes sitting in a café in Paris? A dark-skinned beauty with huge breasts suckling the children of the earth?’
‘For a muse you’re certainly pretty twisted.’
‘And don’t forget I’ve got that medical certificate; if you carry on acting up I’ll send you to the care home.’
‘I thought muses were meant to inspire, not blackmail.’