Did Milena’s letters reach Kafka at his home, or did he prefer to receive them at the office? He sent hers to general delivery in Vienna so her husband wouldn’t see them. Reading many books did not tell me that she was something more than the shadow to whom he wrote letters or who occasionally appeared in the pages of his diary: she was a real woman who obstinately, courageously shaped her destiny in the face of hostile circumstances and a tyrannical father, who wrote books and articles in favor of human emancipation. She passionately loved several men, and continued to write when the Nazis were in Prague. Arrested and sent to a death camp, she died twenty-two years after the man whose letters I read in my office.
I surrounded myself with shadows that were more important to me than people, shades that whispered the names of cities I had never visited — Prague, Lisbon, Tangiers, Copenhagen, New York — and the place in America those letters came from bearing my name and the address of my office and written in a hand that became not the anticipation but the substance of my happiness. I kept Letters to Milena in a desk drawer, and sometimes I carried the book in a pocket to read on the bus. It nourished my love for the absent beloved, and for the failed or impossible loves I had learned of through films and books. Dispensing hand of happiness, Kafka writes of Milena’s hand.
I LIVED IN WRITTEN WORDS, books, letters, and drafts of things that never saw the light of day, and in an office that was more in harmony with me than my own house and was, in a strange and oblique way, my intimate dwelling; the outside world was a blur, as if I didn’t live in it, just as I performed my job so casually that it might have been someone else doing it. My life was what didn’t happen to me, my love a woman who was far away and might never return, my calling a passion I did not devote myself to in real life, although I had begun to publish an article or two in the local newspaper, using a pseudonym, then felt they were letters not addressed to anyone except a few readers as isolated as I was in our melancholy province, so remote from anything reported in the newspapers of Madrid.
I read in Pascaclass="underline" Entire worlds know nothing of us. I read eagerly, with the same will for oblivion that makes Robert De Niro yearn for the opium pipe in the Sergio Leone film that was playing then, Once upon a Time in America. I emerged from books as muddled as from the movies, when you come out of the darkness of the theater into bright sun. Some evenings I took on work I didn’t need to, or invented an excuse to go to the office for a few hours, then sat at my desk staring at the door of the small waiting room, imagining I was a private detective, as childishly, though nearly thirty, as when at twelve I imagined I was the Count of Monte Cristo or Jim Hawkins, or when I would look down on the street, with no danger that anyone would see me from below or that any visitor would come to interrupt me. I had read in Flaubert: Every man guards in his heart a royal chamber: I have sealed mine. My head was filled with phrases from books, films, songs, and those words were my only consolation in the exile to which I was condemned. I read Pavese’s diary, poisoning myself with his nihilism and misogyny, which I took for lucidity, just as I sometimes took the effects of too much alcohol for clearheadedness and enthusiasm. Death will come, and she will have your eyes. To write and read was to weave a protective and airless cocoon, to drink a potion that would allow me to flee invisible, to take a tunnel that no one knew, to scratch the wall of my cell with the patience of Edmond Dantes. With a silken line of blue ink I spun a world filled with imaginary men and women who softened the harsh edges of reality. The light scrape of pen on paper, the tapping of the keys of the typewriter, which was manual and noisy like the machines of fabulous screenwriters, the ones Chandler and Hammett used, literary gods, drunk, original, solitary men who could not be bought. The alcohol fumes and tobacco smoke of the 1980s, in retrospect as embarrassing as most of my alienated life then, as distant as the memory of that office and the woman to whom I wrote the letters, not realizing that I loved her not despite the fact that she lived on the other side of the ocean and with another man but precisely because she did. Had she returned, leaving everything to go with me, I would have been paralyzed with terror, I would have fled as Kafka fled before the determined and earthy passion of Milena Jesenska, preferring the refuge of letters and distance.
Everything at my office proceeded at an administrative crawl, and several months would pass before the Department of Internal Affairs installed the appropriate plaque beside the entrance and above the door, that is, assuming there was not an unexpected move to yet another place, another rented suite in the same area or a vacant office in the main building, and I would have to get settled all over again, the desk and metal filing cabinet with the documents and typewriter and folders with drafts that never reached final form, the books that filled the hours of waiting and daydreaming, the letters kept under lock and key in a desk drawer and judiciously reread.
My life had only past and future. The present was a parenthesis, an empty space, like the spaces that separate written words, the automatic touch of thumb to the long bar of the typewriter, the line that separates two dates on a calendar, the pause between two beats of the heart. I lived from one letter, among the ordinary envelopes on my mail tray, to the next, recognizing it from afar, the moment the clerk came through the door with the large folder of correspondence under his arm, unaware of the treasure he was bringing me.
Real life evolved on a distant plane, the space of separation between the remembered and the desired, a space as empty and neutral as the small reception room where someone occasionally waited, hoping for a part or an interview with one of my superiors, the manager if possible.
He was the one who made the decisions and the one to whom I submitted my reports but who rarely appeared, since he was devoted to tasks of greater importance, such as public relations, over in the main building where he welcomed the eminent personalities visiting the city, the first-class artists whose performances were booked in the best theater, the largest auditorium: managers of Catalan avant-garde companies, celebrated soloists, orchestra conductors. First thing in the morning, I would read the arts section of the newspaper, looking for notice of the arrival of these personalities, their interviews and the photographs in which they often shook the hand of one of my superiors, especially the manager, who always wore a big smile and leaned toward the celebrity to make sure he wasn’t left outside the frame. I cut the photographs out and put them in a folder after I pasted the clipping onto a page with a typed notation of occasion and date.
The artists I booked rated no more than a small box in some easily overlooked corner of the paper, pieces that were anonymous or signed with initials, sometimes mine, because more than once the editor on duty just reproduced the note I’d sent in. Thespians, many of them called themselves. The word made me think of limited talent, shabbiness of costumes and sets, the weariness of the itinerant ham actors of other days, except now updated with hippie schlock, improvisation, audience participation. They painted their faces and dressed in rags like clowns and played the drum or walked on stilts in their parades and street theater. The women wore sweaty tights, didn’t shave under their arms, and moved sexlessly. They were paid almost nothing, and that little money took a long time to reach them. Every morning they would show up at my office, listen to my explanations, not understanding much, probably not believing much. All the forms they had to fill out, the obscure progress of paperwork from office to office, from Administration to Auditing and then to Disbursements, the delays, the carelessness and neglect, which could mean more weeks of waiting, and the lies at which I had become expert: “They told me at Administration that today they’re sending the check request to be signed, and tomorrow without fail I myself will take that form to Auditing.”