“A large number of new spectators turn up,” Kafka goes on to say, “people who will have the enormous, cheap pleasure of watching the taking of the statement.” If the spectacle has continued to grow, it is because a policeman has arrived on the scene, who writes down the names of those involved and the bakery’s business address. In the crowd that has gathered around the spectacle, Kafka reads “the unconscious and candid hope of everyone present that the policeman will immediately resolve the matter with complete impartiality.”
You read this commentary by Kafka and think that everything seems to indicate that you are living now with just such an unconscious and candid hope. Like so many people in the world, you want it to be known soon who the enemy is, you want the FBI to shed some light on and to resolve the matter of Manhattan with impartiality. You share with Molina Flores the impression of having suddenly started to live in those barracks in The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati’s novel, in which a military contingent spends its time trying to ascertain who the enemy is.
You think to yourself that at least the conspirators of the Great Wall have a better idea where their enemies are and can even name them.
You are confused, there’s no denying it. To your amazement at what has happened in New York is added, on a strictly personal level, the impression that the time for being like Musil and Kafka, whereabouts unknown, is over. You have gone so near your city and your old home that you’ve been caught out. You’ve been spotted under the clock in the British Bar and there everything has ended. Everything? Yes, everything. But you think that it’s not so serious, remember that in the end, as Amália sings, all this is only destiny, all this is fado.
“And the world turned into a foreign country where it was no longer necessary to flee or to return home.”
— PETER HANDKE, Slow Homecoming
You’ve been tracked down better than you thought. From Barcelona, by telephone, Julio Arward explains that your editor has known about you for days. Someone from the Spanish embassy in Budapest saw you in Café Krúdy and passed on the information. It’s public and perhaps notorious that you’ve gone AWOL and could well return. Everything seems to push you into returning, even Monsieur Tongoy’s muffled — others call it inner — voice recommends you go back. And on the morning of the 12th you try to forget this and walk in the vicinity of the Giralda, the weather is magnificent, the conversation with Molina Flores very lively as you head toward the Hospital of Holy Charity, where legend has it that Don Juan, Seducer of Seville, is buried.
You see the tomb of Don Miguel de Mañara, the repentant sinner who for many was the real Don Juan, invented by the Spanish genius Tirso de Molina. “Here lies the worst man that ever existed in the world,” Mañara had inscribed on his tombstone, at the entrance to the hospital. Everyone, as they enter, is obliged to step on that tomb, to trample on it in fact, which is what the penitent lady-killer demands from his stone.
Inside the church is a painting by Valdés Leal, carried out according to Don Miguel de Mañara’s instructions; it is a dramatic depiction of death. In ictu oculi (In the Blink of an Eye) is the tide of the seventeenth-century funeral painting. This Latin inscription is written around the candle in the upper part of the painting, where the scene is dominated by the figure of a skeleton carrying its own coffin and a scythe as it extends one of its arms to quench the light of the candle, a clear symbol of life.
Molina Flores, who has never heard of Tongoy, abruptly remarks that the skeleton traveling with its own coffin is a seventeenth-century forerunner of Nosferatu in Murnau’s film. You are delighted to discover suddenly that the wretched Tongoy’s skeleton is depicted there, and delighted also to feel that you’re in the place where Don Juan died.
This is where Don Juan Tenorio is buried, you tell yourself. You’re not as impressed as when you were in the room where Kafka died. In the Seducer’s mortal space, you’re more relaxed. Molina Flores notices this and asks you why you let out a laugh. “This is where Tongoy died,” you tell him. He gives you a blank look and asks you who Tongoy is. “A Nosferatu from Chile,” you reply, “and the worst and ugliest man that ever set foot in this world, I didn’t want to see him even in a painting, and look where I see him now, here in this church, poor second-rate Dozn Juan, he had the face of an empty train.”
Two days later you arrive in Barcelona at night and go to the home of Julio Arward, who has promised not to tell anyone that you’ve returned to your city and lets you sleep at his house, until you decide what to do with your life.
You’re in Julio Arward’s home, in the claustrophobic sitting room where you’ll sleep tonight, a sitting room adorned with lots of reproductions of Edward Hopper’s paintings, whose protagonists always seemed to Arward to have just emerged from a Chinese tale. Recently landed in your city, you also remind him now of a character who has just escaped from a Chinese tale. He says this to you, laughs without malice, asks you what Chinese tale you come from. He doesn’t manage to surprise you, whereas you could give him a big surprise if you talked to him about your friends, the conspirators of the Great Wall. I’m from that tale, you would inform him. And you would leave him perplexed. But you prefer not to say anything. The conspiracy is secret. You simply ask him if he has Kafka’s diaries, you’d like to read them for a bit before turning out the light and being left in the dark with all of Hopper’s characters.
He has the diaries and gives them to you, taking his leave until tomorrow. You search for what Kafka did on September 11, 1912, exactly one year after witnessing the collision between a car and tricycle in Paris.
That day the writer dreamed. He was on a spit of land constructed from blocks of masonry, extending some way into the sea. To start with, the dreamer did not really know where he was, he only began to know when by chance he stood up from his seat and to the left, in front of him, and to the right, behind him, he saw that the vast sea was clearly circumscribed, with lots of warships lined up and firmly anchored. And the writer who dreams, a visionary Kafka, says:
“To the right you could see New York, we were in the port of New York.”
When you wake up, the curtains of a coarse fabric filter a yellowish light into the room that you find very familiar. You listen to the ticktock of the clock on the bedside table and, next to you, the steady breathing of Rosa, who is fast asleep. You soon slide a leg out of the bed. You have been home since yesterday; you returned, but not without having first watched the house for some time from the street. You recalled Wakefield, that character in a story by Hawthorne, that man who, after an absence of twenty years — they think he’s disappeared or died, though in fact he’s carried on living in the area — he feels tempted to return to his wife and stands for a long time in front of his old home until finally entering the house as if he had never left it.
Yesterday the same thing happened to you, in the street, you felt a bit like Wakefield, as you studied the possibility of returning home and recovering your identity as a writer, rediscovering your papers, your books, the vases acquired to keep the books company, your sweet bed, your perfect sedentary life. You were a long time yesterday deciding whether to return, watching your home from the street, until suddenly some drops of water fell and it began to rain and you even felt a gust of cold and it seemed to you ridiculous to get wet when your home was right there. So you trudged up the staircase and opened the door and Rosa, on seeing you, did not tell you off for not ringing the doorbell, she simply remarked: