Manur puts on his glasses and turns to glance at the television which has nothing of interest to offer him; then he looks outside again: the Madrid sky, a plane in which I will no longer be afraid to fly, the street, the square, the women going out all dressed up, the cars in their many colors. This is not his country. His cognac-colored eyes stare out calmly and deliberately through his glasses: they no longer skim rapidly over or feel flattered by the things of the world. Manur turns off the television and switches on the light in the bathroom, in whose mirror he catches a fleeting glimpse of himself— his robust self — but he does not stop. He smoothes his few hairs without realizing that he is doing so. He urinates with the door open, he still has his jacket on. He goes back into the room, he watches the evening as it falls. He sits down and waits for night to come. He does not smell of anything. My day is over and I feel sleepy, I wonder what I will dream about tonight when I put down this pen and go to bed alone. My consciousness is accustomed to remaining alert (gennaio, agosto, novembre). Manur looks at his hand in the shadows. Then, sitting down, dressed to go out, he feels a desire to destroy himself. My hand is in the shadows. But don't worry, I would be incapable of following his example.
Epilogue: Something Unfulfilled
The Man of Feeling has its origins in two images: the first could well belong not so much to the real world as to an illustrated edition of Wuthering Heights or to one of the film versions made of Emily Bronte's novel. The image depicts a man and a woman standing in a rural landscape and separated by a fence. They are talking, perhaps having just met, or perhaps saying goodbye. This image, however, does not appear in my book; it served only as a stimulus, it was — to use Nabokov's expression — its first throb. The second image is drawn from the real world and is there in the early part of the book: traveling by train from Milan to Venice, I spent three hours sitting opposite a woman who corresponded exactly to the moral and physical description that the reader will find a few pages into the book. When I started writing the novel, that was almost all I had, that and the opening sentence.
This is how I usually work. I need to feel my way forwards, and nothing would bore me or put me off more than knowing, when I start a novel, precisely what it will be: the characters who will people it, when and how they will appear or disappear, what will become of their lives or of the fragment of their lives that I am going to recount. All this happens as I am actually writing the novel and belongs to the realm of invention in its etymological sense of discovering or stumbling upon something; there are even moments when I stop and see opening up before me two possible, and totally opposed, ways of continuing the story. Once the book is finished — that is, once the discovery has been made, and once the book exists in the particular way that publication makes immutable — it seems impossible that it could ever have been any different. Then one believes that one can talk about it, even explain it, using other words than those used in the book itself, as if those words were not suitable for all circumstances.
The Man of Feeling is a love story in which love is neither seen nor experienced, but announced and remembered. Can such a thing happen? Can something as urgent and unpostponable as love, which requires both presence and immediate consummation or consumption, be announced when it does not yet exist or truly remembered if it no longer exists? Or does the announcement itself and mere memory—now and still respectively — form part of that love? I don't know, but I do believe that love is based in large measure on its anticipation and on its recollection. It is the feeling that requires the largest dose of imagination, not only when one senses its presence, when one sees it coming, and not only when the person who has experienced and lost love feels a need to explain it to him or herself, but also while that love is evolving and is in full flow. Let us say it is a feeling which always demands an element of fiction beyond that afforded by reality. In other words, love always has an imaginary side to it, however tangible or real we believe it to be at any given moment. It is always about to be fulfilled, it is the realm of what might be. Or, rather, of what might have been.