But I don’t say anything, I just listen while he talks about how the legs get weak after a certain age and how names become hard to recollect because of the deterioration of the neurotransmitters. When we say good-bye at the door of the modern building where he lives (maybe the one before it was destroyed in the bombardments), I see him from behind as he walks through the entry hall toward the elevator, bent and diligent, with only a hint of hesitation in his movements. If she were alive, if she is alive, the woman my friend met and lost in the city called Narva, she would be ninety. And if she was saved and is still alive somewhere, I wonder if she remembers, now, tonight, as I write these words, the young lieutenant she danced with one January night in 1943.
tell me your name
I SAT QUIETLY, WAITING, killing time, observing things from my window for hours on end, in an office where it might be mid-morning before someone came in — an emissary from the outside world, usually a second- or third-rate artist, a poet from the provinces trying to set up a reading or get a subvention to publish a book of poems, people who knocked timidly at the door and who might sit for hours in the small reception room, waiting for a contract or a payment, a chance for an interview, to deliver a badly photocopied résumé that somehow, through my hands, might reach the manager I worked for, the man who made the decisions, judgments that were a long time coming, bogged down in the archaic lassitude of the administration, or held up by negligence or carelessness: the manager didn’t look at the documents I put on his desk, or I forgot to put them there. Sloth, isolation, estrangement, people always going out of focus, less real than the people in my mind or memories, in the fog between the invented and the remembered. In a letter Kafka wrote, I recognized the symptoms of my illness: ennui. I was like a dead man, having no desire to communicate, as if I did not belong to this world or any other; as if during all the years that led to this moment I had acted mechanically, done only what was required of me, while waiting for a voice that would call out to me.
I wrote letters, waited for letters, and when one came, I answered it hastily, then let a few days go by before I resumed my attitude of waiting, because it would be at least two weeks before the next letter arrived, that is, if it wasn’t delayed like the decisions awaited by the applicants in the reception room of my office. I waited in both expectation and fear, but also out of mere habit, and if I saw the striped edge of an air-mail envelope among the letters and documents my assistant brought every morning, I would feel a senseless surge of renewed hope.
I worked alone, not in the main administration building but on one of the floors rented for new offices, temporary quarters that always had something furtive about them and often lacked an official seal on the door. There might be just an improvised sign at the end of a narrow corridor or steep stairway, a location close to central headquarters but behind it, on a little street with old taverns, dark hangouts for drunks, and shops that not many years back sold condoms and dirty magazines under the counter. Those streets were so narrow the sun didn’t reach them, and there was always the hint of a sewer, and dank shadows gathered at the corners that faced the remnant of what once had been the red-light district, in other days a labyrinth called La Manigua. Now the last survivors occasionally emerged from those alleyways, old women, fat and heavily made up, or a few young pale ones hooked on heroin, with scuffed high heels and a cigarette stuck into the red stain of a mouth, specters loitering in lugubrious arcades.
I sat quietly at my desk waiting, and hours could go by before anyone came. Some mornings there might be only one or two visitors beside the person who brought the mail, perhaps a clerk asking me to consult a file in my archives, in which I had arranged the dossiers that came in the mail or were handed to me by the artists alphabetically, and the records of past performances chronologically. I saved every piece of paper in manila folders: posters, tickets, press clippings, should there be any, the count of the house, a number that often was misleading, depending on the reputation and attractions of the acts I booked; they were not for the important theaters in the city but for community centers in the barrios, little more than halls for school plays, or open-air stages in plazas or parks during the summer months, where it was also my responsibility to organize some festival or other that always featured the adjective popular on the posters advertising it, shows with lights and local rock groups, and merry-go-rounds and puppet shows.
My office occupied the narrowest angle of a triangular building that had a pastry shop on the ground floor and a small legal office on the first. Sweet, warm aromas wafted up from the pastry shop, and from the legal service came the sounds of voices and telephones and a lot of tramping back and forth that contrasted with the quiet prevailing in my office most of the time. There were two windows, one that looked out over the Plaza del Carmen and the other onto Calle Reyes Católicos, but the entry was on a narrow street with little traffic, so it was easy, when I came to work every morning, to feel that I was entering a secret observatory, as appropriate for spying as for getting away. I would come and go without being seen by anyone, and from the windows I could note who went by at that central crossroads of the city. The people I knew, who walked with no idea that they were being watched, looked different. Who is the person, really, when he is alone, temporarily free from others, from the identity others give him?
LIKE MANUEL AZAÑA when he was a fat, nearsighted adolescent, I wanted to be Captain Nemo. Closeted from eight to three between those walls were Nemo in his submarine and Robinson Crusoe on his island, and also the Invisible Man and detective Philip Marlowe and Fernando Pessoa’s Bernardo Soares and any of Kafka’s office workers in that company in Prague for preventing workplace accidents. I imagined that I, like them, was a secret exile, a stranger in a place where I had always lived, a sedentary fugitive who hid behind an appearance of perfect normality, who, seated at an office desk or riding in a bus on the way to work, could conjure up amazing adventures that would never happen, voyages that would never be made. In his office at the water plant in Alexandria, Constantine Cavafy imagines the music Mark Antony heard the night before his damnation, the retinue of Dionysus abandoning him. In a cheap restaurant in Lisbon, or riding a streetcar, Pessoa pensively scans the lines of a poem about a sumptuous transatlantic voyage to the Orient. A bespectacled, self-absorbed man arrives at a hotel in Turin, peaceful, well dressed, although with a hint of oddness that prevents his being taken for the usual traveler; he registers for that one night, and no one knows that it is Cesare Pavese and that in his minimal luggage he is carrying a dose of poison that within a few hours he will use to take his life. I imagined the suicide in morbid detail. From a literary point of view, was shooting oneself or killing oneself slowly with alcohol a form of heroism? I watched the hopeless drunks in the dark taverns of the side streets with both admiration and disgust, for each hid a terrible truth whose price was self-destruction. I walked past men with scowling faces and unsettled behavior and imagined Baudelaire in the final delirium of his life, wandering lost in Brussels or Paris, and Soren Kierkegaard cast adrift in the streets of Copenhagen, composing biblical diatribes against his countrymen and friends, mentally writing love letters to Regina Olsen, whom he left behind, perhaps frightened to death when he found himself betrothed to her, though he never forgives her when she later marries another man. Closeted in my office, I read his letters, diaries, and notebooks, and learned in Pascal that men never live in the present, only in their memory of the past or in their desire or fear of the future, and that all our miseries outlast us because we are not able to sit quietly in a room alone.