“A fire,” he said, still apparently struggling with his thoughts. “Fire. Of course. And I can see now why you came all the way here.” He suddenly flashed me a contemptuous look. “You think I left home a couple of hours ago with my swimming things, torched that care home, then came here to do my hundred lengths in perfect calm while the old folks burned to a crisp. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
I shrugged doubtfully. “Luciana saw you a couple of weeks ago, standing outside the home, staring up at the balconies. That’s why she got in touch with me: she thought you were planning something against her grandmother.”
Kloster eyed me, still slightly contemptuous, but now seeming exasperated as well.
“That’s possible. Quite possible. In my novel I had to plot a murder in an old people’s home. I went to several, in different parts of town. I looked at some from outside, making mental notes. But in a couple of them I pretended I needed to put a relative in a home and looked round inside. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to get into those places. I was looking for distinctive features for a particularly ingenious murder. But I was only ever thinking of one murder, one person. Destroying the whole place-such a simple, brutal solution never occurred to me. I have to say, I’m surprised myself every time by the method. Though if you think about it, fire was an obvious choice.”
There was something distracted in the way he spoke now, as if he were addressing a third person. He looked at me, but his eyes darted about, and he started pacing again, as if engaged in a furious inner struggle.
“All those dead-they’re innocent,” he said. “This wasn’t meant to happen. This definitely was not meant to happen. It’s time to stop him. But it’s too late. I wouldn’t know how to.”
He came very close and his expression had changed again: he seemed now to want to show me his naked face, at my mercy, to be judged.
“I’ll ask again: do you believe it was me? Do you believe it was me every time?”
I couldn’t help stepping back. There was something ravaged and terrifying in Kloster’s eyes. A much deeper, darker madness than Luciana’s seemed to burn there.
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I no longer know what to believe.”
“Well, you should believe it,” said Kloster darkly. “You should believe it, but for another reason. A few hours ago, before coming here, I started writing that very scene, the murder in the care home. I left a rough draft on my desk. And as you see, it’s happened again. Only the method changes. As if he wanted to stamp his seal. Or make fun of me. A correction of style. It’s happened every time. All I had to do was write. At first I tried to convince myself that they must be coincidences. Very strange coincidences, of course. Too precise. But the dictation…had already begun. I suppose you could say it’s a work in collaboration.”
“In collaboration? With whom?”
Kloster looked at me warily, as if he might have gone too far and was suddenly unsure whether he should go on. Perhaps it was the first time he’d told anyone.
“I hinted at it, the first time we spoke, when I admitted that I didn’t believe the deaths were occurring entirely by chance. But at the time I couldn’t put it into words. It was the only possible explanation but also the one nobody would believe. Not even I fully believed it, until now. Perhaps you still won’t. You may remember, I mentioned the preface to Henry James’s Notebooks.”
“Yes, I remember it perfectly: you said that’s where you got the idea of dictating your novels.”
“There’s something else in the book. Something he reveals in some of the more personal notes, which I never would have suspected of the ironic and cosmopolitan Henry James. He had, or believed he had, a guiding spirit, or ‘guardian angel’. Sometimes he calls him his ‘demon of patience’, at others his ‘daimon’, or the ‘blessed Genius’, or ‘mon bon’. He invokes him, waits for him, sometimes senses him sitting near. He says he can even feel his breath on his cheek. He entrusts himself to this spirit, appeals to him when inspiration fails, waits for him whenever he moves into a new study to write. A guiding spirit that was with him all his life, until he started dictating. This may be what most struck me in the Notebooks: all references to his angel ceased at the moment when another person entered his workroom, when spoken words replaced silent pleas. As if the secret collaboration had been ended for ever. I remember that when I read the invocations of the guardian angel I couldn’t help smiling: I had trouble picturing venerable, distinguished Henry James pleading like a child to an invisible friend. It seemed puerile, if touching, and made me feel as if I’d been snooping and had seen something I shouldn’t have. Yes, I found it laughable and I forgot about it almost immediately. Until I started dictating myself. But unlike James, it was through dictation that I had a visitation of my own. Only it wasn’t a guardian angel.”
He took another sip from his glass and stared into the distance for a moment, before placing the glass back on the edge of the table and looking at me again with the same open expression.
“I think I’ve already told you about that morning: after days of silence, paralysis, I started dictating to Luciana again in a sudden rush, as if transported. As I was dictating to her, someone else was dictating to me in an imperious, brutal whisper that cut through all scruples, all doubts. I wanted the scene ahead of me, the scene at which I’d stopped, to be especially horrific. The bloody but methodical revenge carried out by the Cainites. I’d never written anything like it before; I’d always preferred more civilised, more discreet murders. I thought it wasn’t in my nature, that I’d never be able to do it. But suddenly, all I had to do was listen. Listen to the dark, ferocious whisper that conjured up the knife and the throat with perfect realism. Follow the miraculous connection, the voice that wouldn’t back down before anything, that killed and killed again. Thomas Mann said that, while writing Death in Venice, he had the sensation of moving forward unhindered, the impression, for the first time in his life, of being ‘carried in the air’. I too felt it for the first time. But I can’t say that the voice carrying me was benevolent. Instead it seemed to be dragging me, controlling me, a primitive, superior evil that I had to obey. A voice that I could only just follow, that had taken over everything, that seemed to wield the knife with savage joy, as if saying: “It’s easy, it’s simple, you do this and this and this.” By the time I had finished dictating the scene I was surprised to find that I didn’t have bloody hands. But something of the almost sexual euphoria, of the fit of inspiration, persisted. A remnant of that all-powerful urge. I think it was this terrible combination that made me try to kiss Luciana. I only returned to reality when I realised she was resisting.”
He raised his head slightly and shook it almost imperceptibly, as if he were reproving himself and trying to shake off the memory.
“Later, that night, I reread the pages I had dictated to her. There was no doubt: they were someone else’s. I could never have written anything like them, without error or hesitation. The language was primordial, with a terrible, primitive force that seemed to touch deep evil. I was terrified seeing the words there, fixed on paper, incontrovertible proof that it had been real. I couldn’t work on the novel again; I felt it was fatally contaminated by that other writing. I stopped at the last sentence I had dictated to Luciana before she got up to make coffee. I put it away in a drawer and tried to forget about it, to deny what had happened with rational arguments. Then the series of tragedies: I lost my daughter, I lost my life. I was disconnected from the world, devoid of thought. All I could do was watch the film of Pauli, over and over. I thought I’d never write again. Until, that summer, I went to the beach at Villa Gesell, and saw that body disappear out to sea. It was like a sign written in the water. Anyone would say it was an accident, and that’s what I thought at the time. But I understood what the sign was telling me. I knew the story I had to write. I didn’t know, I never could have imagined, that it was his novel-the beginning of his novel. I returned to Buenos Aires the next day: I just wanted to get started. Suddenly everything seemed clear. I could see the tiny but unmistakable light at the end of the tunnel-the subject of the novel. After all, it wasn’t so different from the story about the Cainites that I’d set aside. Only this one would take place in the present day. There’d be a girl, rather like Luciana. And someone who’d lost a daughter, like me. The girl would have a family just like Luciana’s. For once in a novel I wanted to keep some resemblance to real life, because I felt that the secret source, the wound I needed to prod, was my own. I didn’t want to forget myself, to let myself be swept along, as in my other books, by the flow of my imagination. The subject, of course, was punishment-what constitutes proportionate punishment. An eye for an eye, states the lex talionis. But what if one eye is smaller than the other? I had lost a daughter, but Luciana didn’t have any children. Yet my grief cried out that a daughter wasn’t equivalent to a short-term boyfriend with whom Luciana didn’t even seem to get on. I began writing with rigorous determination, but something seemed to have dried up, died inside me, as if my daughter’s death meant I was banished not only from the human race, but from my own writing. The few lines I managed to scribble each day were unrecognisable. Nothing was right. So, in my own way, I invoked him. I appealed to him night after night, until suddenly I realised I was no longer alone. He had returned. I could feel him once again at my shoulder. And I let him do as he pleased-I let him dictate to me again. He provided the momentum, gave the command, made the tuning fork hum. It was like a gradual thaw, as if the stone I had become had started to ooze. But I was writing again, and I knew exactly to whom I owed it. Inwardly I referred to him as my ‘Sredni Vashtar’. He was invisible, but his monstrous voice was as familiar as the sound of a loved one’s breathing. He was not only real but almost palpable, and I was sure anyone would know which sentences on the page were his. At first, it was almost all of them. But the physical act of writing, like a magical exercise of the muscles, gradually brought back my old skill, some of my old self. He’d made the electricity flow, made the dead man live again. I came back to life. I recovered my old pride, the only one I have, and no longer wanted his company. I went back to my long vigils, to my usual wavering and meandering, to my own imagination. But it wasn’t easy to get rid of him. I could feel him riding on my shoulders, like the Old Man of the Sea. And of course his sentences were always better than mine-primordial, savage, direct. But I managed to reject them one by one, despite the temptation. Eventually I felt I was alone again. And I thought I was free of him at last.”