That was Walter’s style, my friends, he’d say that you could only be truly yourself, find your own identity, if you talked your own language, the words you lived with every day, the words you used to buy tobacco or quarrel with other people or make love, words of joy or despair, and these were the words he used, which is why the fevered crowd followed his message to the letter, shouting and jumping up and down in their seats, with the colored lights turning in the dimly-lit room, the rap in the background and the smoke and Walter in the middle with his microphone, swaying from side to side, sweat pouring out of him, the veins on his neck inflamed. The people would take up the rhythm in their clapping and echo him and then trip down the street to their houses, and later you would start to hear in the grocery stores some of the things he said like “Get thee behind me, Satan!”
3. THE JOURNEY
On the day I was due to travel, I searched on the internet for some last-minute information about the ICBM, but, strangely, could not find a thing. Not that I was looking for anything very important, I only wanted to know what kind of clothes I should take to the conference, casual? smart? a couple of designer suits? it was a minor detail but these things can get complicated. I have always felt envious of colleagues like Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the great Mexican writer, who goes to talk to the Pen Club in London in a T-shirt and shabby jeans, and even says he will not attend if they forbid him to smoke, but that is all a question of personality, or extreme shyness in my case, so I try to deal with it as best I can, I hate hearing people clearing their throat and muttering, I like to pass unnoticed, wearing the same clothes as everyone else. I ended up packing a couple of linen jackets, six shirts with their ties, and some casual wear. Most of my clothes were large on me, as I had lost quite a bit of weight during my illness.
The other nightmare is always: which books to take? The first question was if I should take some of mine — those I had written, I mean — and here various hypotheses occurred to me. It might be appropriate to take a few for my hosts and some for any friends I might make there, and as people would be coming from all over the world it would be the ideal opportunity to get rid of a few copies in other languages, which I keep in boxes anyway. But then I thought about how much they would weigh, and it struck me that the best thing to do would be not to take any at all, since arriving with books that nobody has asked for is, when you come down to it, an act of vanity, and a touch unseemly, so I put them back on the shelves.
As for reading matter, now that is another story. To tell the truth, that caused a lot of last-minute problems when I was already ready to go out, with the taxi at the front door and the elevator waiting at my floor. As if, instead of a conference, I was going to a desert island for the rest of my life. Novels by Wiener and Walser, to start with. Three masterpieces of the novella — Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Twenty-Four Hours in a Woman’s Life by Stefan Zweig, and Hotel Savoy by Joseph Roth — and a good book of short stories to read on the plane, The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz, a book with Jewish themes, which I have been reading very slowly for years in a 1972 edition by Barral Editores, and the wonderful Closely Observed Trains by Hrabal, and something by Philip K. Dick, perhaps The Man in the High Castle, and another SF book, a rare pearl, We, by Yevgeny Zamiatin, and The Elephanta Suite, the latest by Paul Theroux, the best storyteller of his kind in the United States, and the latest by Thomas Pynchon, the best storyteller of his kind in the United States, there are many “best storytellers,” and of course, A Tale of Love and Darkness, the memoirs of Amos Oz, the best contemporary Israeli storyteller, and the work of St John of the Cross, the father of all poets, and Lost Illusions by Balzac, the father of all novelists, and something light, my God, a travel book, yes, that little book by Pierre Loti on the Middle East, where is it? and again the entry phone rang, and the Fascist caretaker cried, signore, if you don’t come down now the taxi will leave, hurry up, do you want me to come up for the bags? and I said, no! wait a minute, just a minute, I would never have agreed to that horrendous caretaker coming into my apartment, I know he would like nothing better than to spy on me, to sit down and ask me where I am going and for how long and then tell everybody, exercising his panoptic control over the lives of his tenants, so I took a last glance at my library and still found room in my baggage for a book of interviews with famous writers first published in The Paris Review, and at last I left, double-locking the door, and ran down to the street, regretting that I had not taken anything by Stifter, which would have been ideal for a journey, although I consoled myself with the thought that you never get time to read at conferences anyway. Apart from the heaps of novels you are given by colleagues, you never get to the hotel early enough or sober enough to read.
Fortunately, my flight left at midnight, which had given me the whole day to solve all these problems. I hate planes that leave at dawn, when you have to set the alarm for four in the morning and leave your bags packed the day before, next to the door, with all the dangers that lie in wait for the man who has slept badly and is not used to going to bed before midnight; in cases like that, it is better to cancel the whole thing, and remember the motto of that castle on the banks of the Danube that Magris talks about, “It is better for the happy to stay at home,” and even if you are not happy, or not completely happy, what does happiness matter anyway, it is always better to stay at home.
When I got to the airport, instead of checking in my case and going to the bar for a gin, I found myself trapped in an uncomfortably long line of travelers. The security checks were endless, there were dozens of questions to be answered and I had to subject my baggage to sophisticated detection with liquids and damp cotton. The atmosphere was distinctly hostile, and the nervous-looking soldiers with their submachine guns clearly took the whole thing very seriously.
What can I say about the flight?
Of course, the seat next to me was not filled by any of the pretty young girls of Slav origin or the Italian Jewish women I had seen in the waiting room, oh, no, they all walked past. The person who did sit down beside me was a fat rabbi who had been visiting his family in Italy, or so he said when he saw me looking at him with a certain interest, which I did, of course, not because I was anxious to talk but because I was startled by the foul smell given off by his coat.