I understood that he sensed what I was sensing, but it is also true that the question appeared peculiar to me at the time. However that may be, the preparations for tonight’s filming are in the final stages in Fayal’s harbor. Today is the first day since we arrived on the island that Rosa has not filmed in daylight, because it is Carnival and the old whalers consider this festival to be sacred and have asked to spend it with their families or their solitude. I can see Rosa leaning against a harbor wall, I take the binoculars to observe her more closely and she spots me and makes strange gestures at me, which I am not prepared to decipher in case I misconstrue them and, above all, because I do not want to waste the precious time I have to devote to this diary and to my secret activity of extending my complex drawing of the map of Montano’s malady. I move out of Rosa’s field of vision, meaning I enter the room and go to where she cannot see me, so I perversely enter the room — as if I were a filmmaker suddenly abandoning an outside shot — but a few seconds later I return to the balcony, where I observe that Rosa is no longer making gestures at me, and then — even more perversely than before — I am the one making gestures, I make them at the paradise and hell of Pico’s volcano.
Then I take up the binoculars again and focus on the old whalers, some of whom are standing around Rosa, waiting for tonight’s filming to start. Among them is Tongoy, wearing a horrible black-and-white striped T-shirt, smoking, and pensively looking out to sea, looking like Nosferatu at dusk and stranger than ever in that grotesque sea dog’s outfit he is dressed in. Nearby, a few real whalers stare at him blatantly, circling him slowly, watching the intruder, I imagine, in some surprise, moving as if they were part of the landscape, as if they were mysteriously connected to the evening light. Their old harpoons, no doubt loaded with a thousand stories, are balanced against the fragile boats on which until not long ago they put out to sea. In fact everything, absolutely everything at this hour, seems very slow, dilatory, bloodied by the huge dusk, here in Fayal, on this side of paradise. I have hidden the map I am drawing, hidden also my literary illness, and this forces me sometimes to behave like an idiot; I should like to hide everything, and although the diary is always in view, I know that Rosa won’t dare to look at it.
As I contemplate the drawn-out dusk, I remember something Gonçalves Azevedo, the owner of Café Sport, told me. Yesterday he was talking to me about a certain fish, the moray, which they used to catch off this island at night, under the waxing moon. To attract the fish they would sing a song without words: a mournful song that seemed to emerge from the bottom of the sea or from souls lost in the night. “Nobody knows this song any more,” he told me. “It has been forgotten, and this may be a good thing, because it contained a curse.”
I cannot help thinking that this curse has relocated to the innards of Pico’s volcano. I sensed it being there today, at that house at the foot of the volcano, and the truth is that, after the experience in the home of that horrible man called Teixeira, I have decided to include the volcano on my map of the illness. I drew it a moment ago and on the inside placed underground galleries where moles, devoted to conspiring against literature, are meant to be working away silently and invisibly. Perhaps these galleries are what Tongoy sensed or saw when on the ferry this morning, as we approached the island and the volcano, despite the beauty of the moment and of the landscape, or perhaps because of all this, he asked me whether there wouldn’t be another death in paradise.
If I were foolish, I would be proud to know Montano’s story by heart, but I am not going to commit such a stupid act. I don’t know the story by heart, I simply remember it. Although it’s only seven pages long, in the end I have resisted memorizing it as if I were obliged to be like one of those grotesque book-men in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s novel.
What I have done is take on the memory of literature’s eccentric history in Montano’s free version and so at times, when I enter a trance, I am that memory, even though I do not recite my son’s short story all the way through. I merely remember the story as best I can, I remember passages. Sometimes I am visited by one of them. Just now, for example, while I was resting on the balcony — watching the filming start as Pico’s volcano vanished into the shadows of the night — I was visited by the recollection of that Montanesque scene in which we see Kafka writing in his diary and suddenly being visited by certain itinerant memories of Mark Twain, an author he is not especially drawn to.
It is nighttime in Prague on December 16, 1910. At that precise moment Kafka is writing: “I shall never abandon my diary, I have to cling to it, I have nowhere else to do this. I should like to describe the feeling of happiness that rises inside me at times, such as now.”
Immediately after writing the words “such as now,” Kafka begins to be visited by Twain’s itinerant memories and with some amazement relives the moment in 1897 when Twain, during one of his stops on his trip to Europe, greets the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef and tells him that a monarch, however good he may be, deserves the same respect as a pirate who on Sundays carries out acts of charity.
Kafka listens to Twain’s words as if they had been uttered by a second-rate literary bumblebee and sees how the emperor arches his eyebrows, but Kafka does not consider this relevant to his diary and continues recording his personal impressions, as if nothing untoward had happened: “It really is a fizzy thing, which fills me to the brim with light and agreeable quaverings …”
In a footnote the narrator of Montano’s story contends that this “fizzy thing” is a timid or veiled, perhaps even involuntary, allusion to Twain, who with his regrettable operatics infiltrated Kafka’s memory without being invited.
I went out on to the balcony to see how the filming was coming along and, as if I had a veil in front of me, saw nothing of what was happening at that moment because my memory was infiltrated by the recollection of what I witnessed during the filming yesterday morning: Rosa directing the artificial creation at sea of plumes of vapor that the sperm whales expel through their blowholes and which in the past would have had the lookouts firing warning shots for the whalers to run straight to their fragile boats.
But that was yesterday. Strangely enough, when I light a cigarette, the smoke, instead of veiling my vision of reality even more, unveils it at once and finally I am able to observe what is going on in tonight’s filming. Not that much is going on. Tongoy, for example, is leaning against a harbor wall on which there are various messages written by people from the boats that cross the Atlantic, messages from life’s castaways. I deduce that Tongoy is bored. I take the binoculars and scrutinize the expression on Rosa’s face. She looks tired and on edge, the filming appears not to be going altogether well.
I enter the room, hide my map of Montano’s malady, he on the bed, my memory is infiltrated by the recollection of something César Aira told me in the Café Tortoni, in Buenos Aires, one day when we fell into a bizarre conversation about the essence of literature. We had started discussing the review I had written of his last book and in a few seconds, with barely any transition from one theme to the other, we became engrossed, almost without realizing, in the subject of the essence of literature. “As a teenager, reading Borges,” Aira said to me, “I saw where the essence of literature was. This was definitive, but later I also discovered that literature does not have one, but many historical and contingent essences. So it was easy to escape from Borges’ orbit, as easy as going back, or as easy as never having escaped.”
Here in Fayal the subject of the essence of literature seems even stranger to me than on that day. However, I focus on it. Extreme tension on my balcony in the Hostal de la Santa Cruz. I look in the direction of Pico, although I can’t see anything — not even a trace of the volcano, the night appears to have swallowed it up — and start thinking about the moles I saw there today. Then I stop looking at the invisible volcano and suddenly, completely out of the blue, my memory is infiltrated by Maurice Blanchot; I see him on the evening he said he was fed up with always hearing the same two questions from journalists. One question was: “What are the tendencies in today’s literature?” The other: “Where is literature heading?”