Javier Marias - Dark Back of Time

“But this time I have to show my good side.” His request had already become a demand. “What are you going to say about me? Let’s have it.”

“All right, maybe I can read you something now.” The scene was partially written, so I picked up a page and read, “Let’s see, here it says: ‘Suddenly over dessert he fell silent for a few minutes, as if overwhelmed by fatigue from all the frenzy and exaltation, or as if he were immersed in dark thoughts, perhaps he was unhappy and had suddenly remembered it.’ ” I paused. “So. Interested?”

Professor Rico didn’t answer right away, then conceded, “It’s not bad, it doesn’t displease me. I liked the part about exaltation. Is this character melancholy? I think he must be, since he’s immersed in thought, isn’t he?

“Yes, professor; immersed.”

“In dark thoughts, right?”

“Yes, professor, very dark thoughts.”

“Go on, read more.”

Professor Rico is not, shall we say, much inclined toward melancholy, perhaps that was why he was interested in appearing melancholic in a work of fiction.

“All right, but only two sentences more: ‘In any case, he must have been a man of some ability in order to go from self-satisfaction to dejection so suddenly, without seeming affected or insincere. It was as if he were saying ‘What does anything matter now.’ ” I broke off. “Well, are you tempted?”

“The part about ability is very perceptive,” he answered. “But you could change it to ‘genius.’ Might as well, don’t you think?”

“Genius is harder to recognize, Professor Rico, and the narrator barely knows this guy.”

“Don’t call him a ‘guy,’ ” he chided. “Go on, read more.”

“Professor, I’m not about to read you the whole thing right now. Tell me if you want to be in the book or not. This is the only available role, and I’m warning you I could give it to someone else.”

Paco Rico was silent for a few seconds. Then he wanted confirmation. “ ‘As if he were saying,” What does anything matter now. “ ‘That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

“Yes, professor: ‘What does anything matter now.’ ”

“That part I liked. And I do sometimes think that, in moments of dejection. Yes,” he said, in a tone that wasn’t the least bit dejected. And he added, as if the idea and interest of including him in the novel were entirely mine, “Go ahead, I’ll give it my immediate authorization.”

So for a few days I went on writing my scene with Professor del Diestro now in it, his name and characteristics all consistent with the Del Diestro of All Souls . The character was more fully developed this time — no longer incidental, but now, at the very least, episodic — speaking at some length over the course of a dinner, which he dominates; I thought Paco Rico would be well pleased. But as I was about to finish the chapter I had another call from him, he was in Barcelona, where he lives.

“Hear me out on this, young Marías,” he said without preliminaries. Though a few years had gone by, we still hadn’t retreated from our ironic manner of addressing each other. We did so only after the death of the mutual friend through whose eyes we had managed to see each other with some sympathy, Don Juan Benet. “I’ve decided I don’t want to appear in this little novel of yours as Professor del Diestro or what-have-you or anything else. If I’m in it I want to be in it as myself.”

At first I didn’t understand. “Yourself? What do you mean?”

The professor grew impatient. “Myself, Francisco Rico, under my own name. I want Francisco Rico to appear, not a fictional entity who acts like him or parodies him.”

“But Del Diestro doesn’t act all that much like you, he’s not identical to you and I’d have to change him. Rico might not say or do the things he says and does, not all of them, and the character and his role are already fully drawn. I’m not going to change the story to make him more like you, I suppose you can understand that. Besides, how can a single real person appear among all the fictional entities, as you call them. That wouldn’t look right.”

The professor clicked his tongue a couple of times in irritation. I heard it very clearly, it almost ruptured my eardrum.

“And why not? That’s nonsense. There are real places and institutions in your novel, aren’t there? There must be one or two, no?”

“Yes, there’s the United Nations and the Prado, and …”

“Well, there you have it,” he said.

“Have what?”

“There you have it: I want to be like the Prado.”

I couldn’t help laughing and telling him, “Professor, no one doubts your great merit, you truly are illustrious, but I wonder if that might not be a lot to ask, especially while you’re still alive. Maybe once you’re dead they’ll have a bust made of you.”

“Don’t play the fool with me, young Marías,” he answered in feigned irritation. “You know perfectly well what I mean. You’re going to call the Prado Museum the Prado Museum in your novel; I don’t suppose you’ll be writing that someone went to the Meadow Museum or the Field Museum or the Leap Museum.”

Why the Leap? I asked myself.

“No. Why the Leap?” I asked him.

“Who cares, the Leap, the Jump, what does it matter? Therefore, just as the Prado is the Prado and not the Leap or the Jump, I must be Professor Francisco Rico with all of my attributes, distinguished professor at the Universidad de Bellaterra and member of the Real Academia Española de la Lengua”—his candidacy had been successful—“and not Del Diestro or Del Fieltro or any other fabrication or illusion, understand? I want to appear as myself. Otherwise not at all, nothing, take me out, I withdraw.”

There was an element of reciprocal ribbing in all his huff and bother, but it was clear that the professor, protected by our friendship, was stipulating futile conditions with which no one could ever comply. In fact, nothing can ever be imposed on a writer of fiction, who doesn’t need to ask permission to introduce any real person or sequence of events he happens to know about into his fiction; if he decides to, then nothing and no one can prevent him. We aren’t trustworthy people and some of us are heartless, though I don’t think I am. The professor was a friend and I wasn’t about to go against his express desires. I tried to convince him, mainly for my own comfort and convenience. It’s not easy to alter a character in a novel once he’s been imagined and described, there’s a price to pay, you feel what is called regret in English, or rimpianto , in Italian; there’s no Spanish word that says it exactly, maybe we’re not much given in these lands to lamenting what has or hasn’t happened, what we did or failed to do; we know more about rancor. Even changing a character’s name isn’t easy. (You never forget the first name, the one you took away and no one else ever knew, as a mother never forgets the name she chose for the child who was born dead, before she could ever speak it aloud to him, the child no one else ever knew.) The professor in A Heart So White already was who he was, and what was more I would have to retype the whole chapter with the new surname, I love marking up a page but hate having any marks on the final version, and I neither own nor use a computer. Therefore a tedious task.

“Then it will have to be nothing at all, because what you’re asking for won’t work, Professor, and I’m the first to feel it.”

Paco Rico said nothing, exuded silence. Maybe he was hoping I would give in. He was undoubtedly irked, but fortunately everything passes quickly with him — no, not everything, his romantic passions last, as I’ve seen over the years — he isn’t a tenacious man and doesn’t brood. He did not mutter.