“The plot of a new novel?” asked Amaranta quietly.
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t it be better, dearest, if I heard it tomorrow morning? My mind’s a little fresher in the morning.”
“No, now. Tomorrow I won’t have the time. The Russian writer Derzhavin has just come to Lisbon, and I have to pay him a visit. He’s here with your much beloved, regrettably much beloved, Victor Hugo.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Now listen!”
Zinzaga sat down opposite her, raised his eyes to the ceiling, and began: “The setting is the entire world! Portugal, Spain, France, Russia, Brazil, and so on. In Lisbon, the hero reads a newspaper and finds out about the heroine’s calamity in New York. He travels to her. He is kidnapped by pirates, who are bribed by agents of Bismarck. The heroine is a French agent. The newspapers are full of insinuations. The speech of the Russian ambassador. The English. A sect of Poles in Austria and Gypsies in India. Intrigues. The hero is in jail. They want to bribe him and when he spurns the bribe, they sentence him to death. You follow? And then—he is freed by a handful of students. He takes part in the Russo-Turkish War, as part of a Russian-Montenegrin regiment . . .”
Zinzaga spoke enthusiastically, passionately, waving his hands, flashing his eyes. He spoke for a long, long time. A terribly long time!
Twice Amaranta fell asleep and twice she awoke. Out on the streets the lamps went out, the sun came up, and he still talked. The clock struck six, Amaranta longed for a cup of tea. Still he talked.
“Bismarck resigns. Our hero, no longer wishing to maintain his disguise, reveals that he is Alphonso Zunzuga and expires in terrible agonies. A gentle angel carries his gentle soul up into the cerulean sky . . .”
Zinzaga had finished talking. The clock struck seven.
“Well?” he asked Amaranta. “So what do you think? Will the scene between Alphonso and Maria end up being cut by the censors, do you think? Well?”
“No, it’s a lovely little scene!”
“But do you think it’s good as a whole? Tell the truth. You’re a woman. Most of my readers are women. I need your opinion.”
“Well, how should I put it? It seems to me that I’ve already come across your hero before. It’s just that I don’t remember where.”
“Impossible!”
“No, really! I’ve met your hero in some novel, the dumbest thing I’ve ever read, I have to say! Why, when I was reading it, I wondered how stuff like that gets published, and when I was done, it was clear that the author had to be as stupid as they come. What rubbish they publish, and yet they hardly publish you. Astounding!”
“Do you remember the name of the novel?”
“No, I don’t remember the title, but the hero’s name—that stuck in my mind because it included four r’s in a row. A stupid name! Carrrro!”
“And was it called The Sleepwalker Upon the Seas, by any chance?”
“Yes, yes, yes, that’s the one. How well you know our literature! That’s the one. You are so well-read! That’s the one. Your hero resembles Carrrro, but yours is much cleverer, of course. Whatever is the matter with you, Alphonso?”
Alphonso sprang up to his feet with a shout. “The Sleepwalker Upon the Seas is my novel!”
Amaranta blushed.
“My novel dumb? My novel?” he shouted so loudly that it hurt Amaranta’s throat too. “Oh, you fool! Oh, you brainless duck! So, madam, is that how you see my work? Is that how you see it, you she-ass? Let it slip out, did you? You’ll never see me again! Farewell, you idiot! My novel dumb? Count Barabanta-Alimonda doesn’t publish just anything, you know!”
Casting a disdainful look at his wife, Zinzaga pushed his hat down low on his forehead and strode out of suite number 147, slamming the door behind him.
Amaranta sighed, but she neither wept nor fainted. She knew that Alphonso would return to suite number 147, no matter how angry he was. For him to abandon suite number 147 would be for him to live and write on the streets of Lisbon, under the blue Portuguese sky, and where would he find someone to copy his work for free? Knowing this, Amaranta was hardly distraught over her husband’s departure. She just sighed and sought her consolation. Usually she consoled herself after one of her frequent quarrels with her husband by reading a page from an old newspaper that she stashed in an old tin candy box, next to a tiny perfume bottle. Squeezed in amid the advertisements, telegrams, discussions of politics, current events, and other reports on the human scene was that gem known as miscellany. There, below the stories of one American duping another, of the famous singer Miss Dubadolla Swist who ate a whole barrel of oysters and then crossed the Andes dry-shod, she found a short tale ideally suited to console Amaranta or any other artist’s wife. I include it in its entirety:
Portuguese parents and Portuguese daughters, take note! In one American town (America which was discovered by Christopher Columbus, that energetic and courageous man) there lived a certain Dr. Tanner. This Dr. Tanner was more of an artist than a scientist, which is why he was known to the whole world, and to Portugal in particular, as an artist after a fashion. He was an American, but he was also a man, and since he was a man, sooner or later he was bound to fall in love, and so he did. He fell in love with a beautiful American girl. He fell madly in love, like an artist. He was so much in love that once instead of aquae distillatae* he prescribed argentum nitricum.† He fell in love, proposed, and married.
At first, he lived quite happily with his beautiful American bride. So happily, in fact, that the honeymoon lasted, contrary to the nature of honeymoons, not one month but for six whole months. There can be no doubt that Tanner, being an educated man, and therefore exceedingly easy to get along with, would have lived with his wife quite happily till death did them part, if he hadn’t discovered that she possessed a horrible vice.
Madame Tanner’s vice consisted of eating like a normal human being. This vice of his wife’s struck Tanner to his very heart. “I will re-educate her!” he said. Once he set himself that goal, he got to work on Madame Tanner. First he weaned her off breakfasts and suppers, and then off tea. A year after her marriage, Madame Tanner was preparing one course for dinner instead of four. Two years after her marriage, she learned to be satisfied with unbelievably small amounts of food. Namely, during the course of twenty-four hours, she would ingest the following quantities of nourishing substances:
1 gram of salts
5 grams of protein
2 grams of fat
7 grams of water (distilled)
1 1/23 grams of Hungarian wine
Totaclass="underline" 16 1/23 grams
We do not include gases here because science is not yet able to determine accurately the quantities of gases that we take in.
Tanner rejoiced, but not for long. During the fourth year of his married life, he conceived a tormenting suspicion that Madame Tanner was consuming too much protein. He threw himself into her training with even more zeal and would have probably managed to decrease five grams to one or even to zero had he not discovered that he loved his wife no longer. Being an aesthete, he couldn’t help himself. Instead of remaining an American beauty well into her old age, Madame Tanner had all of a sudden decided to turn herself into the very image of an American beanpole. She lost both her beautiful figure and her mental acuity, and though that may have proved her to be suited for further training, she was now completely unsuitable for married life.
Dr. Tanner sued for divorce. Scientific experts duly arrived at his house, examined Madame Tanner from all angles, advised her to take a water cure, do calisthenics, go on a diet, and in general found the demands of their colleague to be quite justified. Dr. Tanner paid his expert colleagues a dollar each and treated them to a good breakfast. Since then Dr. Tanner lives in one place and his wife in another.