“When was this?”
“Almost a year later, just before writing the scene with the parents’ death. I pictured them dying at their house by the beach, during their winter holiday, from a carbon monoxide leak from the boiler. That kind of accident happens every year. I didn’t consider any other possibility. When I went back to writing on my own, I realised that some of my bitterness had gone, life had resumed, and I was starting to forget Luciana. The novel was no longer a voodoo doll. My writing had drifted in another direction. The parents in the novel were no longer Luciana’s parents. I could view them artistically and devise the kind of death that best suited them, just like characters in any of my novels. After all, I’d spent a lifetime thinking up murders. So perhaps because I no longer had the same desire for revenge, I imagined a painless end for them, in their sleep, together in the marital bed. I wrote the scene with absolute calmness of spirit. Then, a couple of weeks later, I received Luciana’s letter: her parents really had died. The letter was muddled-really she was begging me to forgive her for suing me, which was what had started it all, but she mentioned her parents’ death as if it were something I would know. And she told me the date of their death: it was the day after I had written the scene. Of course, I was stunned. I looked for news of the case in the papers. All the details were there. The circumstances were slightly different, but it seemed only to be a difference of style: a much more horrible death but, in its way, natural.”
“When you say natural,” I broke in, suddenly remembering what I had thought, what I’d felt I’d glimpsed, in the basement of the newspaper offices, “do you mean…”
“In the most literal sense. There were no boilers or ovens involved, nothing that had anything to do with civilisation. Poison from a plant-a simple, primitive death. I realised immediately that he had devised it. And as you’ll understand, I was shocked. It was one thing sensing his presence in the whispering, in the strange communion of that private dictation or in the blameless lines of a text, but quite another admitting that he existed outside me and could kill in the real world. I didn’t take that step. Though the evidence was there before my eyes, I couldn’t believe that there was a causal connection, that reality had responded to my text. Those past few months, as I said, I had come to feel like myself again. The few lines I managed to set down laboriously every day had gradually restored me to my former self. And my former self had always been sceptical, even contemptuous, of the irrational. I had, after all, studied science at university, and had written entire passages mocking the very idea of religion. I decided to consider the dictation episode as a passing fit, a period of mental disturbance brought on by the loss of my daughter. This was something I could admit: grief had made me temporarily lose my mind. Even so, even though I refused to believe, I was a little shaken, so I left the novel at that point. It remained in a drawer for years. It wasn’t exactly a superstitious fear that I felt, but something more personaclass="underline" the secret motor, my desire for revenge, had subsided. With the death of Luciana’s parents I had, at last, however monstrous this may sound, achieved reparation. My wound had healed, my flame had died down and, after the first moment of astonishment at the coincidence, I was at peace, if a little guilty, because I couldn’t help feeling that in anticipating and preparing those deaths in my imagination I had, in a mysterious, indirect way, prompted them. In any case, the ratio now seemed right and I almost wrote back to Luciana. Truly I no longer bore her any ill will.”
“But at some point you reopened that drawer.”
Kloster nodded slowly. “Years passed-three, four, I forget how many. I didn’t think about any of it again, and in the meantime wrote other books. Until one day I read a short article in the paper about premonitions in dreams. You know what I mean: one night someone dreams about the death of a loved one and the next day it comes true, as if the dream were really a prediction, an arrow shot at the target. The article was written by a professor of statistics, and the tone was rather mocking. He did a simple sum calculating the probabilities and showed that the likelihood of a premonition in a dream coming true was very low, but not so low that, in a big city like Tokyo or Buenos Aires, the coincidence between two events-person X having the dream and their loved one Y dying-didn’t routinely occur. Of course to the person who has the dream the coincidence is astonishing and they see it as a psychic phenomenon, the manifestation of a supernatural power; but for someone who could look down on an entire city at night and keep count of everyone’s dreams, it would be no more surprising than a bingo-caller hearing someone shout out ‘Bingo’. The article was very persuasive and made me think differently about the scene I’d written and the death of Luciana’s parents. I was rather ashamed of having given in to the fundamentally arrogant and superstitious belief that my writing could have had such an effect on reality. With hindsight, it seemed obvious that it had simply been a coincidence between two unrelated events. That night there must have been an army of writers imagining, as I was, some death or other. It just happened that what I’d imagined subsequently took place. A lottery number in a sea of statistics, assigned to me by chance. I opened the drawer again and reread the novel to where I’d left it. But now I was surprised by something else: it was the best thing I’d ever written. And, stranger still, I couldn’t distinguish between his writing and mine. I could no longer point out which sentences had been dictated to me. The whole text seemed to be both familiar and written by someone else. This had happened before when I’d gone back to some of my books and found passages I didn’t recognise, but what I’m trying to say is that I decided to believe-wanted to believe-that it was me who had written every one of those pages. That all the ideas were mine alone. I wanted to take possession of the book. But really I should say that it took possession of me once again. I couldn’t resist continuing. I realised that there was no doubt it would be my masterpiece, perhaps my only great novel. So you see, I gave in to that other arrogant superstition: wanting to create something ‘great’. Anyway, I returned to it, night after night. Until the time came to imagine the brother’s death.”