117.
He liked to tell himself that he had chosen to settle in the seaside village because of its pleasant weather, or because reaching the Pacific implied some sort of finality. The truth was he had simply run out of money. At that point he had been on the road for more than a year, and he was tired: tired of the smell of diesel, of falling asleep sitting up, of waking up and having to ask his seatmate where he was. He was tired of dispensing vigilante justice. It had been fun for a while—he had been blessed more than a hooker having an allergy attack inside a confessional—but on the whole, the country was so saturated with corruption that he wasn’t doing much except gratifying his own ego.
The focal point of every Mexican village was an overlarge church, and his was no exception. Among other tasks, Pfefferkorn swept up, shined the pews, did the shopping, and helped prepare meals. He had become reasonably handy. If a lightbulb got stuck and broke off, he could get it out with a raw potato. If a chair went wobbly, he could screw the leg back on.
His chief duty was maintaining the belfry. He shooed away the birds and bats. He scaled off the guano. He oiled the hinges. He re-rigged the ropes. It was hard work, but later he would be reading or walking and he would hear the hour peal. What busy people heard as a single sustained note was to the patient listener a densely woven cloak of tones and overtones. Knowing that he had contributed in some small way to its beauty gave him a sense of accomplishment, one that lingered long after the ringing had died.
For his efforts he received a few pesos, two meals a day, and the right to sleep out back in a converted coal shed. It measured six by nine, with a packed dirt floor and a screened window that kept out most of the larger insects. He fell asleep to the sough of the ocean and woke to the mad babble of chickens running free in the yard. The gulls and pelicans that perched along the rear fence made an odd, bobbing skyline. Summers he slept nude. In winter the padre loaned him extra blankets, and Fray Manuel spread a tarp across the tin roof. Just in case, as soon as the clouds started to darken, they disconnected the extension cord. For this reason Pfefferkorn kept a flashlight on hand. His spare shirt hung on a nail. Obeying the rebukes of his ancestors, he had surreptitiously taken down the crucifix. There was enough space for a cot and—on the floor, along the wall—his growing library.
On the first of the month, he wired money to an independent bookseller in San Diego. A few weeks later, he received in return a parcel addressed to “Arturo Pimienta.” The postage alone ate up most of his spending money. He didn’t mind. What else did he need it for? Four paperbacks per order made for a nice, unhurried pace. One would be a classic novel he’d always meant to read but had never gotten around to. The second book was the seller’s choice. She leaned toward contemporary fiction that had received favorable reviews in certain publications of repute. The third and fourth books varied. Biographies, history, and popular science were his favorites. This month, with Christmas coming, he had chosen a thriller for Fray Manuel, who liked to work on his English, and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, which he planned to reread before giving it to the padre.
He put the food away in the rectory kitchen and retired to his shed. He hung up his hat, kicked off his shoes, and sat on the cot with the package in his lap, combing his fingers through his beard. He wasn’t ready to part with the delicious feeling of anticipation. He spanned the package with his hand. It was bulkier than usual, owing to the presence of a fifth book, a hardcover.
He had a ritual. He began with the cover. If there was an image, he analyzed it as one might a work of art: framing, perspective, dynamics. If the design was abstract, he contemplated the effect of its color scheme on his mood. Did it match the contents? He would have to wait and see. Next he read the flap copy, sleuthing out hidden meanings. He read the blurbs aloud, warmly dismissing their extravagant comparisons. He flipped to the front matter, starting with the Library of Congress information. He admired its tidy divisions. He read the author biography, stitching together names, institutions, cities, and accolades. The omissions spoke loudest. If a writer had graduated from a prestigious university, and this, ten years on, was her first novel, Pfefferkorn inferred that the intervening decade had been full of rejection. Other writers claimed advanced degrees, as if to explain why it had taken them so long. Still others made a fetish of their struggles, boasting of time spent driving taxis, delivering pizzas, working as short-order cooks or process servers. All wanted it to seem as though writing had been their destiny. Pfefferkorn understood the impulse and pardoned it.
He studied the photo, picturing the author buttering toast or waiting at the doctor’s office. He imagined what he or she would be like as a brother, a sister, a lover, a teacher, a friend. He imagined the author calling his agent and pitching a half-formed story that made no sense outside of his mind. He imagined the frustration the author felt when he understood, yet again, that his mind was not synonymous with anyone else’s, and that to tell his story he would have to sit down and write and rewrite and work and rework. And the frustration that came with knowing that the story would never come out quite the way he had envisioned it. Writing was impossible. It was easy to think of books as products, made in a factory, churned out by some gigantic machine. Pfefferkorn knew better. Books came from people. People were imperfect. It was their imperfections that made their books worth reading. And in committing those imperfections to paper, they became omnipotent. A book was a soft machine that made a god of its builder. It was impossible and yet it happened every single day.
Writing is impossible, Pfefferkorn thought, reading more impossible still. To read truly—to read bravely—to read with compassion and without fear—did anyone? Could anyone? There were too many ways to understand, too much emptiness between word and mind, an infinite chasm of misplaced sympathies.
118.
The hardcover had red library binding stamped with gold lettering. Breaking with tradition, he turned straight to the last page.
He wanted to feel disappointed, but disappointment entails the possibility of surprise, and he had formed in advance a fairly clear notion of what to expect. In the final, unattributed canto of the revised West Zlabian People’s Press edition of Vassily Nabochka, the king died before the antidote got to him, and a grief-stricken Prince Vassily repudiated the throne, deeding the royal lands over to the people and going to live as a commoner, tilling the fields and herding goats, finding redemption in manual labor before dying peacefully beneath a runty tree in the meadows of West Zlabia. It was the worst kind of agitprop: heavy-handed, impatient, and artless. The turns were improbable, the imagery fuzzy, and the characters reductive.
Pfefferkorn laughed until he cried.
119.
Three days before Christmas he made a pilgrimage. The bus dropped him at a dusty intersection in a village thirty miles south. He visited the market and the plaza. He admired the murals. He noted with pride that the church bell was not as fine as the one he tended.