Like me, they lived in unfilled time, in the small waiting room of my office, as grim as that of a backstreet doctor or one of those private detectives in novels. They brought their portfolios, their sorry assortment of photocopies, their mediocre or invented résumés, and I cared nothing about them, indifferent to their lives and their art, though it was my job to give them hope, invent excuses for delays, confuse them with administrative procedures and administrative language. There was a Gypsy poet with sideburns and a thick head of white, curly hair who claimed he had translated the complete works of García Lorca and part of the New Testament into Caló, Gypsy Spanish, and as proof he brought the entire manuscript of his translation with him in a huge satchel, but he opened it only long enough to show me the first page, afraid he would be plagiarized or the translation would be stolen, and he refused to leave the bundle of pages to which he was dedicating his life in my office, lest they get lost among all the other papers or lest a ire break out in the oven of the pastry shop on the ground floor and his Lorca in Romany go up in flames. I asked him why he didn’t make a photocopy, saying it would be a good idea for him to have a spare just in case, but he didn’t trust the employees at the copy shop either, they might carelessly scorch the pages of his book or make another copy without his knowledge, and sell it or publish it under another name. No, he wouldn’t part with his manuscript, clutching it in his arms as he sat across from me at my desk or waited in the reception room for the manager to arrive, because he couldn’t rest until it was published, with his name in large letters on the cover and his photograph on the back so there would be no doubt about the author’s identity, his Gypsy face recognized by everyone in the city.
I can still see that dark, rustic face and white hair, and suddenly an unexpected detail surfaces, the large iron rings the Romany translator wore on his fingers, adding to the force with which his two hands fell on my desk or on the bulging satchel he was always protecting from the world, from adversity, theft, indifference, and the administrative lethargy he encountered every day in the waiting room or wandering outside the main building with the hope of catching the manager or some superior with greater influence than mine and in that way, by assault in the middle of the street, achieve what patience never accorded: the interview in which he would be granted money to publish his masterwork or at least a part of it, maybe the Romancero gitano, which he recited to me first in Spanish and then in Romany, closing his eyes tight, holding up his right hand with the index finger extended like a flamenco singer in a trance.
I watched him from my window, as I watched so many people, men and women, known and unknown, figures that passed across the unreal diorama of my life in those days. I watched him at the pedestrian crossing, walking with a resolute stride, his satchel held in his arms as if to prevent a blast of wind or a thief from seizing it, and somehow that man was not the same one who a few minutes later entered my office and asked if I thought the manager would be in that morning.
I pretended to pay attention to him, and then I pretended to be very busy sorting papers on my desk or checking figures in a financial report. I wanted to be alone, to go back to the book or letter the visitor had interrupted, and my impatience turned to irritation, although I tried not to show it. No, the manager won’t be in this morning, he called and had me cancel all his appointments, he has a very important meeting, and the man closed his satchel again, stood up, pressing it between the huge stonemason’s or smith’s hands adorned with rings in crude Asiatic splendor, and a minute later he had left the office and I could see him crossing the street, deep in thought and walking a little more slowly, though no less decisively, not yielding to dejection, perhaps reciting in his restless imagination lines from Lorca and evangelical sermons in Spanish and Romany. But now, as I am writing this, I wonder how I would have appeared if someone observed me from a window without my knowledge as I walked through those same streets, as intoxicated with words and chimera as the Gypsy poet: a strange man who sees nothing around him, his city inhabited with the dark ghosts of desire and books. They didn’t see Philip Marlowe, the Invisible Man, Franz Kafka, or Bernardo Soares, only a serious and ordinary thirty-year-old employee who left the office every day at the same time and read a book at the bus stop, and who once a week, always at the same hour, slipped a letter into the “Foreign-Urgent” slot of the mail drop on one side of the Post Office Building.
SOMEONE IS WAITING NOW in the reception room, courteously asking permission to come into my office. I hide in the drawer the letter or book I was reading. Of all the names and faces from that time, one figure stands out, nameless now, and another I remember perfectly. Two images, like illustrations from two different stories, but both set in the same place and atmosphere, a gloomy waiting room where applicants wait hours or days. A man and then a woman, their accents not the same. I listen in a silence broken only by the keyboard. The woman has a child in her arms, no, seated on her knees, because he isn’t a baby but a child of two or three. “What luck,” she is saying, speaking with a Montevideo or Buenos Aires accent. “I’m so happy that he can’t remember.”
The man speaks a meticulous, slightly formal Spanish, which he learned in his own country, I can’t remember now whether it was Romania or Bulgaria, when he was a teenager and he thought of Spain not as a real country but a fabulous kingdom of literature and music, especially music, the pieces that he studied at the conservatory in his distant past as a child prodigy, when he astounded his professors by playing from memory difficult piano passages from Albéniz, de Falla, and Debussy, invocations of gardens in the moonlight and Muslim palaces with splendors of stonework and murmuring fountains. He read translations of Washington Irving and listened to and quickly learned Ravel’s Rhapsody Espagnole and Night in Grenada by Debussy, who had never seen the city when he wrote that music, the pianist told me, and who in fact never traveled to Spain, though it was not far away and he had written music indebted to it. The pianist told me that the first time he walked through the Alhambra, after escaping from his country, Debussy’s music played in his mind, and he seemed to recognize the things around him not from photographs or drawings but from the faint notes of a piano.
AT FIRST HE WAS an applicant like any other, although somewhat better dressed and with better manners, which were as correct as his use of the Spanish language. In the half light of the reception room, he leafed through a magazine on the low table as if he were in a doctor’s waiting room. He, too, had brought a dossier, his briefcase with clippings and photocopies, but his were better organized than usual, the pages protected in plastic sleeves, some with color photographs and programs of recitals in the cities of Central Europe, often with text in Cyrillic characters. On the cover of the album was a professional artist’s photograph, somewhat dated, a younger and more vigorous version of the man before me; the pose was that of an impetuous, romantic concert artist, long hair, closely fitted tuxedo, elbow propped on the lid of a grand piano, hand on cheek with the index finger touching his temple, a dreamer of consummate virtuosity. Or maybe I’m remembering the jacket of a recording of Spanish music published at the height of his career, which he insisted on giving me though earlier he told me that there were few copies left, because all his records and books, everything he owned — except his credentials as a musician — had been abandoned, left behind at the border that then divided Europe. “I didn’t desert, didn’t flee,” he said. “Me fui, as you say in Spanish: I went away, because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life toeing a line, afraid my neighbor or colleague was a spy or that there were hidden microphones in the dressing room.” It wasn’t political, he assured me, sitting there in my office while I was willing him to leave so I could be alone again and he was lingering in the hope that the manager would come that morning. “I couldn’t bear to live in my country any longer, because everything was always the same, the face of the head of government on all the posters and in all the newspapers and on television, and his voice on the radio, while things that for you in the West are normal, buying a bottle of shampoo or looking up a number in the telephone book, were difficult, often impossible. In my country there are no telephone books, and it is a major undertaking to get a permit for foreign travel. If you try to bring in a typewriter, they confiscate it at customs and put you on the list of suspicious persons. But what am I saying, my country? Now my country is Spain.”