I arrived in the city of Nantes, literature-sick and tragically unable to write, one rainy day in the month of November last year. I arrived out of sorts on account of my literary block and, to make matters worse, I sought even more reasons to feel bad and worried. I told myself, for example, that I had been a thief of other people’s words too often, that frequently I acted as a parasite on the writers I most admired. Hence it might be said that there were three essential dramas I was carrying when I arrived in Nantes: I was sick with Montano’s malady — still without knowing that this was the name of my complaint — tragically unable to write, and a literary parasite.
I was met at Nantes Airport by Yves Douet and Patrice Viart, the organizers of the Rencontres, and they took me to the Hôtel La Perouse, where I drank seven vodkas in the bar in animated conversation with them — the main topic being Makelele, a soccer player who used to play for Nantes. At around five o’clock, I indicated my intention to sleep until the following day, and they politely withdrew. “See you tomorrow,” they said, fairly impressed, I think, by the number of vodkas I had consumed.
It was my intention to take my leave of the world until the following day, but an hour later I had already changed my mind and felt a huge desire to go for a walk around Nantes. So, taking hold of the red umbrella that Rosa had put in my suitcase at the last minute, I headed towards the Quai de la Fosse; I walked calmly along the streets of the city of Jacques Vaché and Jules Verne, I walked whistling the Barbara song about the rain in Nantes and came to a halt in front of the old bookshop Coiffard’s.
I was so literature-sick that, looking in the bookshop window, I saw myself reflected in the glass and thought that I was a poor child out of Dickens in front of the window of a bakery. Shortly afterward, this child turned into the man without qualities from Musil’s novel, that idealistic mathematician who would contemplate the streets of his city and, watch in hand, time the cars, carriages, trams, and silhouettes of pedestrians blurred by the distance. This man would measure the speeds, angles, magnetic forces of the fugitive masses….
There at the door of Coiffard’s, just like the man without qualities, I ended up laughing as he laughed in Musil’s novel and recognizing that the devotion to that kind of eccentric espionage was of a supreme folly, “the titanic effort of a modern individual who doesn’t do anything.”
Ah! — I lamented — how I should have liked to write about a man without qualities, clearly even in this type of expression or lament I wish to have Musil ever close. I also show a certain tendency to act as a parasite on what is not mine. Seeing, in Coiffard’s, that I had once again succumbed to literary vampirism — to which I must add physical vampirism, a certain resemblance to Christopher Lee when he played Count Dracula — I decided to enter the bookshop and put these thoughts to one side.
I made a supreme effort to concentrate and rudely dismissed the man without attributes, the available man—as Gide called him — the modern man who doesn’t do anything, the nihilist of our times.
But I was so horribly literature-sick that, having entered Coiffard’s, I was powerless to prevent Musil’s returning to my mind, which happened after I read a sentence from his book about the man without properties, about the available man: “A man without qualities can also have a father endowed with qualities.”
Unlikely as it seems, this sentence, not especially important, would be crucial, decisive, hugely important in my life.
How right Gide was when he said that illnesses are keys that can unlock certain doors for us! I say this because this discreet sentence from Musil’s book, which on a whim I linked with my illnesses, was the key that unlocked the doors of the solution to my most pressing problems. The thing is that suddenly, instead of behaving like a thief of other people’s words, I began to act as a literary parasite on myself when I decided right there in Coiffard’s to turn my complaints into the central theme of a narrative marking my return to writing.
Right there in Coiffard’s, while flicking absentmindedly through a French edition of Borges’ The Aleph, I invented a son who would be called Montano — I had just seen a French translation of a book by Arias Montano, Felipe II of Spain’s secret adviser — a son who would live right there in Nantes and suffer an extreme case of writer’s block, from which a father endowed with certain qualities — which poor Montano would lack — would try to free him. The son would run a bookshop in Nantes, possibly even Coiffard’s. And would receive the visit of his father, who would travel from Barcelona to Nantes to try to help him overcome his tragic inability to write, an inability he had suffered since publishing a book about writers who’d given up writing.
The father would be a prestigious literary critic and hopelessly literature-sick, but would not be thinking about himself, only about his son, he would go to Nantes to try to free up Montano’s creative block.
It struck me as a useful idea to transfer some of my problems on to an invented son.
How curious, I commented to myself. I have begun to act as a literary parasite on myself, in my problems following the publication of Nothing Ever Again, I have found the inspiration to return to the world of fictional creation. What’s more, I went on, perhaps this will help me to get well. And I remembered what Walter Benjamin said about the possible relationship that exists between the art of storytelling and the healing of illnesses.
Somebody might wonder: Why turn Montano’s father into a literary critic? I declared that I would be sincere in everything and I shall be so even in this: I am a frustrated literary critic. In fact, one of the major incentives I discovered when writing Montano’s Malady was the opportunity fiction afforded me to be able to pretend to be a critic of the stature of Samuel Johnson, Edmund Wilson, Cyril Connolly, Stanisław Wicińsky, or Alfred Kerr.
I return to Coiffard’s bookshop and the moment when I slammed shut The Aleph and decided to leave. While squeezing past the other customers, I saw that a young man was blocking the exit, which was still some way off. Not only that, I had the fleeting conviction that this man was the spitting image of a young Musil. However, when I reached the door, I discovered that he was not a young man at all, but ancient, with bulging eyes and virtually green skin, slicked-back white hair, and a tie with the word “pop” on it, a poor devil without qualities (I drew inspiration from this mistake, by the way, for the episode in Tunquén in Montano’s Malady, where the youngsters turn out to be old people). I almost gave this disgusting, green-skinned creature a shove. However, when I stepped outside, back into the rain, I had the impression that I had rarely felt better in my life. This was hardly surprising. During a brief foray into a bookshop lasting only five minutes, in one fell swoop I had freed myself from my most pressing problems. It was even likely that I had gone some way toward freeing myself from my literary illness, since I was not unaware that I could get well if I wrote an exhaustive commentary on the illness in that narrative about my son which I proposed to start writing as soon as possible.
It is well known that there is no better way to overcome an obsession than by writing about it. I know this from personal experience, the point is to talk about the theme obsessing you until you exhaust it; this is something I have done in some of my books and generally I have achieved my objective, in the end almost completely eliminating the obsession that had me trapped.