On the way back, I dropped by the Caffè Miró on Via Cola di Rienzo, one of the places in the neighborhood that I use as a kind of office, but by the time I was on my second cup of coffee I realized that I could not think of anything but the conference. It was the same on the days that followed. The thing kept growing inside me, like a cry echoing between the walls of a ravine. I started spying on the caretaker as he sorted the post, hoping against hope that I could see all the way from the fourth floor whether one of the envelopes was from the ICBM.
The days passed and I started to resign myself. They must have realized their mistake, I thought. After all, I had, in a way, dissuaded them myself. Well, I would just have to resume doing what I had been doing before, slowly getting my life back, even though I sensed that something surprising was about to happen, which was why I waited at the window or sat on benches in Roman squares, played solitaire on my laptop, or watched old football matches on TV.
But “everyone gets everything he wants” (it’s a line from Apocalypse Now that I quoted in one of my books), and so, one fine day, the long-awaited envelope arrived. I did actually recognize it from upstairs and rushed to the elevator, convinced that I had to open it before anyone else laid eyes on it: that damned caretaker, for example, whom I had long suspected, not only of being a Fascist, but also of opening the tenants’ mail. So I grabbed the bundle of envelopes and hid it under the flap of my jacket, a move to which the caretaker reacted with a disapproving scowl.
I heaved a sigh of relief when I got back inside my apartment, and settled down to look carefully through what had arrived. With a certain morbid curiosity, I put aside the envelope that interested me the most and opened my other mail, which turned out to be an advertisement for a gym and two letters from my agent enclosing royalty payments (one for 26.50 euros and the other for 157 euros). I needed the letter from the ICBM to restore my enthusiasm, even though I was sure they had withdrawn the invitation. I held the envelope up to the light. They’re going to apologize, I thought, and tell me they’ll send me something by way of consolation, the book with the proceedings of the conference or something like that, so imagine my surprise when I opened the envelope, saw the heading, and read the following:
Dear Mr. — , thank you for confirming that you are able to attend our conference, please fill in the enclosed forms and send them back to us, specifying if you wish to stay in Jerusalem for the duration of the conference (which we would greatly appreciate) or if you prefer to limit your stay. By return of post, you will receive a code for obtaining your airline tickets, the themes on which we will ask you to speak are in the enclosed booklet, once again we are grateful for your interest.
Yours sincerely,
Secretary General of the ICBM.
I felt a kind of primitive joy and my eyes filled with tears (since my illness I have found that I am easily moved to tears, which can be somewhat ridiculous). In gratitude for the letter, I looked out at the turbulent Roman sky. I do not believe in anything apart from the classics of literature, but I felt like shouting out: if anybody up there is listening, thank you! Inside the envelope was a form, with thirty-six questions, so I sat down to answer them. I needed to weigh each word carefully. As it was certain now that I would be going to the conference, I was no longer afraid of saying anything inappropriate, but I did want to give the best, or indeed the most impressive, answers I could.
Firstly, I made it clear that there were no subjects with which I thought I would have any problems or about which I was especially sensitive, from a political, religious, sexual, or moral point of view (questions 1 to 25); then I gave a brief account of my intellectual interests and aesthetic stance (questions 26 to 34), which I found quite useful, as it was something I had never done before; and, finally, I summarized my health problems and physical condition (questions 35 and 36), a subject I was pleased to see on the form, the way a student who knows the answer to a question is pleased when that question comes up, since it allowed me to mention my illness, the one thing that had dominated my life over the past few years. Then I looked at the booklet. I saw that there were going to be a number of round tables dealing with the relationship between language and the past, and that I was invited to take part in one of them, which would focus on “the many forms through which we remember, evaluate, understand, and convey a life.” I was also asked for a talk of a biographical nature “on any literary, sociological, human, or archetypal topic that has a connection with the main theme of the conference: The Soul of Words.” The wording was so vague that I was sure I could use one of my old lectures. That did not worry me, whereas the round table, I thought, might present more of a problem. In my experience, such discussions often throw up a variety of subjects that are not always easy to anticipate.
I started searching for books that dealt with the theme of memory and the life of words, and spent the afternoon looking through essays by Borges and Adorno and poems by Cavafy, even checking out some of Deleuze’s ideas, though I have never quite understood Deleuze, and adding a few ideas of my own, although not many: I have never been strong on theory or abstract thought. During those hours, I would not say I was happy, but I did feel quite content. I was occupied with intellectual labor, and I was making something happen. I had been given a second chance.
Some time later, reading by the light of an old lamp — it must have been three in the morning by now, the hour of the wolf, the hour when hospital patients are most in pain — I realized that there was something basic that I had not yet done, which was to look at the list of the other people invited to the conference. In the past, that had always been the first thing I had done, and it had often been the thing that had determined whether or not I would accept the invitation.
I remembered a fog-shrouded conference in the city of Gothenburg, in the middle of the northern winter, with the eye-catching name Current Narrative Tendencies, or the Dark Music of Cities. When I looked at the list and saw that Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Roberto Bolaño were among the speakers I immediately accepted, and set off in a Swedish plane that left behind the clear Italian sky to enter the gray atmosphere of the north and had to break through a layer of ice before setting down on a frozen runway. Then there was a hotel called the Osaka, with wooden stairs and striped carpets, and Rey Rosa and Castellanos Moya, their bodies stiff with cold and their faces glum, announcing that Roberto Bolaño had not arrived on the expected flight and that he would not be coming on any other, having cancelled at the last minute, which was very typical of him: he always gave the organizers of such events the jitters. A sense of disappointment settled over us. We felt alone, like three teenagers lost in the inhospitable streets of an industrial zone. The next day, when we had to discuss literature and cities in the fog in front of an audience shrouded in scarves, all we could come up with was a few vague ideas, and I do not know if I am saying this with hindsight because of what happened later, but when we said goodbye to each other in that desolate airport, which was more like a morgue or a gothic cathedral, Castellanos Moya, Rey Rosa, and I had red-rimmed eyes, as you do when you are trying desperately to avoid talking about something tragic, a feeling that, I am sure, was connected with Bolaño and his absence.