The only consolation I derived from reading this strange note was that Cassavetes was dead. I suddenly recalled the many films by Cassavetes that Rosa and I had seen together. I stood there, sad and disconcerted, going weak at the knees, not knowing which way to turn, until eventually I decided to go to the bedroom, from where I could call Rosa’s cell phone. On switching on the bedroom light, I discovered Rosa seated on the bed, wearing an impeccable nightdress, smiling, telling me that Cassavetes could wait.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Has monsieur eaten his daily literature, his blessed alphabet soup?” she asked me. “What?” “Has monsieur had his daily treatment for Montano’s malady, albeit cold?”
She had behaved like this — she would tell me a little later — to try to make me show more interest in her and to help me come out of myself and of books and be less at the mercy of what she described in typically lighthearted fashion as “my mental problem in the form of alphabet soup.” “OK,” I said to her, “that’s enough of your charming show, which is very apt for a film director.” “What?” she exclaimed. And for a moment I was afraid she would throw the bedroom telephone at my head.
To tell the truth, I feel only admiration for the tactics Rosa decided to adopt in order to alleviate my Montano’s malady and enable her to occupy more time in my life. Whereas Tongoy had been able to relieve my personal illness by making it universal, Rosa had come up with the no less brilliant strategy of channeling some of my attention, albeit in a highly rarefied way, in her direction. And without a doubt the maneuver has worked magnificantly, I have spent the last few weeks following Rosa around, helping her like a madman in the preparations to shoot her film in the Azores, collaborating on the script more than was planned, suggesting that she hire an actor of Felipe Tongoy’s international stature, assisting her in any way I knew how. I should add, however, that I have not just been working on the film, but with absolute secrecy have also been immersed in compiling the geography of Montano’s malady and in planning to combat the death of literature.
It was the day before yesterday, as I said, when Montano’s envelope arrived with its manuscript, a short story bearing the title “11 rue Simon-Crubellier,” which I take to be in sincere tribute to Georges Perec and the house in Paris where this French writer centered the history of the world.
The story opens with a quotation from Macedonio Fernández with which my son presumably wishes to comment ironically on the lifting of his writer’s block: “‘Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been done,’ God heard someone telling him when he had yet to create the world, when there still wasn’t anything. ‘Someone already told me that,’ he rejoined perhaps from the old, cleft Void. And he began.”
The story in admirable fashion condenses into seven short but intense pages the whole of the history of literature, viewed as a succession of writers unexpectedly inhabited by the personal memory of other, earlier writers: the history of literature seen with a reverse chronology, since it starts with the contemporary period — Julio Arward, Justo Navarro, Pessoa, Kafka — and travels back in time — Twain, Flaubert, Verne, Hölderlin, Diderot, Sterne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Fray Luis de León, among others — until it reaches the Epic of Gilgamesh; the history of literature seen as a strange current of mental air containing sudden alien memories which with unexpected visits are meant to have caused an overload of involuntarily stolen reminiscences.
I liked the story. It has moments of high poetic tension, as for example when Pessoa is visited by the memories of a Prague writer he has never heard of and then sees a Chinese wall being built and a series of endless galleries under threat, but at the same time perfectly articulated as a challenge against the wear and tear of time; he also sees a hunger artist giving a lecture in Budapest and a cat advising a mouse to change direction because a dangerous odradek is approaching.
I liked the story. When I finished reading it, my memory was infiltrated by something Wallace Stevens once said: “The reader became the book; and summer night / Was like the conscious being of the book.”
When I reached the end of Montano’s story, I played at imagining that I felt the temptation to become the story, that I felt the temptation to embody it and become a walking story, to change my name to “11 rue Simon-Crubellier,” turning into a “story-man” who would fight against the disappearance of literature by reviving the abridged history of its memory in his own person.
Today, while having lunch with Tongoy here in Barcelona, I was unable to contain myself and I told him that the day before yesterday I had played at imagining that I felt the temptation to become the story I had just been sent by my son Montano.
Tongoy smiled at me, lit a cigarette, remained sunk in thought for a moment, and finally said, “Listen, I’d like to know how one should dress to be literature’s memory.” He then laughed out loud, looking more like Nosferatu than ever. He told me that he likes such games and, as soon as we are filming on the island of Fayal, in the Azores, he plans to behave, without attracting undue attention, as if he were my assistant in my crusade against Montano’s malady. “I will be your secret squire,” he said to me, “but only if you give me a handsome reward: the governorship of the island of Barataria, for example.”
Here I am in Fayal, opposite Pico, more literature-sick than ever, but a little less naive; I make Rosa think that I’m not so ill, I talk to her about everything except literature, and sometimes I even appear foolish; but the important thing is that she fail to notice that for some time now not only does literature no longer stifle me, but I consider it outrageous to have to apologize for being so literary; the important thing is that she fail to notice that recently I have taken upon myself the responsibility of combating the death of literature. I don’t need any more problems with Rosa, so I dissemble as much as I can. For example, I am careful to hide the map of Montano’s malady that I work on every day. But sick, that is literature-sick, I am as never before, and secretly I rejoice.
I am in Fayal and I am, or rather I pretend to be, a manuscript, I play at dreaming that I am literature’s errant memory, I am in the Azores, on the island of Fayal, opposite the island of Pico, and this time I have traveled with my diary, I am in the middle of the Atlantic, far from Europe and far from America, with the vague suspicion that distance is these islands’ charm. I am in the Hostal de la Santa Cruz, in Fayal, opposite the mysterious island of Pico. Night is falling, the final colors of the afternoon — as Borges would say — are fainting. I am on my room’s balcony, with its perfect view of the small harbor and behind it, extinct in the mist and twilight, the imposing volcano on the island that I visited today with Tongoy, the island of Pico, the strangest of the Azores, an island that sometimes, only sometimes, seems the closest thing to paradise, other times — there are no middle terms in this place — to hell. As we approached Pico this morning, Tongoy suddenly asked me:
“Will there not be another death in paradise?”