Javier Cercas - The Tenant and The Motive

Then he got an idea. He stood up and stealthily opened the apartment door; he crossed the landing. Pressing his ear to the door opposite, he held his breath, listened in silence.

‘I’ve had it up to here with you, you Italian pig!’ he heard thundering behind his back. ‘Up to here!’

Weighed down with shopping, Nancy dragged the mass of her body up the stairs laboriously. Mario held out his hands, apologized clumsily while retreating into his apartment, then offered to help Nancy with her bags.

‘You little turd,’ answered Nancy, dropping her packages on the floor. She breathed heavily as she hunted around in a pocket of her very ample dress that in vain sought to sow confusion with respect to the true dimensions of what it hid. She took out a bunch of keys, adding, ‘That’s far enough, you Italian swine. I’m phoning the old lady right now.’

‘No, Nancy, please,’ begged Mario, stepping towards her, his arms outstretched in an almost imploring manner. ‘Not Mrs Workman.’

Nancy had opened the door. She turned to confront Mario: he noticed the drops of sweat pearling on the woman’s brow.

‘But what the fuck were you doing there?’

‘The new tenant,’ Mario mumbled. ‘I just wanted to see if Berkowickz. . was. . um.’

Mario smiled without finishing his sentence. Nancy regarded him with resignation, almost with pity.

‘You’re not just a pig,’ she diagnosed, shaking her head gently from left to right. ‘You’re also going crazy.’

Nancy slammed the door. Mario returned to his apartment, closing the door softly.

After a short time Ginger arrived. She was wearing a blue sweater with red buttons, a black miniskirt and slightly worn black shoes; her eyes shone. Mario thought: She looks lovely. They sat down on the sofa in the dining room. Mario offered a whisky. Ginger accepted. Mario poured whisky over ice in two glasses in the kitchen and went back into the dining room.

They talked animatedly, laughing and drinking.

‘I’m pleased,’ said Ginger at one point, after a silence, looking at Mario with serious, blue, love-struck eyes.

‘What about?’ asked Mario, sipping his whisky.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ginger. She smiled weakly. She added, ‘You’ve been so strange this week.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Mario.

There was a silence.

‘I thought we were through,’ declared Ginger after a while.

‘Me too,’ said Mario.

He set his glass of whisky down on the floor, he moved closer to her, put his arm around her neck, stroked the nape of her neck and her hair, kissed her softly on the lips. Lengthening the kiss they slid over to rest against the right arm of the sofa, and laughed as they heard the books and papers heaped there fall on to the floor: an Italian — German dictionary, outlines for lectures, notes, a phonology manual and a photocopied article entitled ‘The Syllable in Phonological Theory, with Special Reference to the Italian’, by Daniel Berkowickz.

Álvaro took his work seriously. Every day he got up punctually at eight. He cleared his head with a cold shower and went down to the supermarket to buy bread and the newspaper. When he returned he made coffee and toast with butter and marmalade and ate breakfast in the kitchen, leafing through the paper and listening to the radio. By nine he was sitting in his study ready to begin the day’s work.

He’d made his life subordinate to literature: all friendships, interests, ambitions, possibilities for professional or economic advancement, days or evenings out had been displaced in its interest. He disdained anything he didn’t consider an impetus to his work. And, since the majority of well-paid jobs he could have had with his law degree demanded almost exclusive dedication, Álvaro preferred a modest position as consultant in a modest legal agency. This job allowed him to have the whole morning at his disposal to devote to his labours and freed him from any responsibility that might distract him from writing; it also gave him indispensable economic peace of mind.

He considered literature an exclusive lover. She must either be served with dedication and devotion or she would abandon him to his fate. Tertium non datur. As with all arts, literature is a matter of time and toil, he’d say to himself. Remembering a severe French moralist’s celebrated maxim on love, Álvaro thought it was with inspiration as it was with ghosts: everyone talked about it, but no one had seen it. And so he accepted that all creation consisted of one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. The reverse would mean leaving it in the hands of the amateur, the weekend writer; the reverse would mean improvisation, chaos and the most despicable lack of rigour.

He felt that literature had been left to amateurs. Conclusive proof: only the least eminent of his contemporaries devoted themselves to it. Frivolity, the absence of any authentic ambition, traditionally conformist commerce, indiscriminate use of obsolete formulas, myopia and even disdain for anything that diverged from the tracks of narrow provincialism ran rampant. Phenomena alien to actual creation added confusion to this panorama: the lack of stimulating and civilized social surroundings, of an environment suitable for work and fertile in truly artistic expression; even the petty social climbing, the advantage taken of cultural promotion as an access ramp to certain political positions. . Álvaro felt partly responsible for such a state of affairs. For that reason he must conceive an ambitious work of universal reach that would spur his colleagues on to continue the labour embarked upon by him.

He knew that a writer recognizes himself as such by his reading. Every writer must be, first and foremost, a great reader. He swiftly and efficiently covered the volumes published in the four languages he knew, making use of translations only for access to fundamental works of classical or marginal literatures. However, he distrusted the superstition that all translations were inferior to the original text, because the original was merely the score from which the interpreter executed the work. This — he later observed — did not impoverish the text, but endowed it with an almost infinite number of interpretations or forms, all potentially valid. He believed there was no literature, no matter how lateral or trifling, that did not contain all the elements of Literature, all its magic, all its abysses, all its games. He suspected that reading was an act of informative indolence: the truly literary thing was re-reading. Three or four books contained, as Flaubert believed, all the wisdom to which man had access, but the titles of these books also varied for each man.

Strictly speaking, literature is oblivion encouraged by vanity. This verification did not humble, but ennobled it. It was essential — Álvaro reflected during his long years of meditation and study prior to the conception of the Work — to find in the literature of our predecessors a seam that expresses us fully, a cypher of our very selves, our most intimate desires, our most abject reality. It was essential to retake that tradition and insert oneself into it, even if it had to be rescued from oblivion, marginalization or the studious hands of dusty scholars. It was essential to create a solid genealogy. It was essential to have fathers.

He considered various options. For a time, he thought that verse was by definition superior to prose. The lyric poem, however, struck him as too scattered in its execution, too instinctive and gusty. As much as he was repelled by the idea, he sensed that phenomena verging on magic, and therefore removed from the sweet control of a tenacious apprenticeship, and given to arising in spirits more festive than his own, clouded the act of creation. If what the classics romantically called inspiration was involved in any genre, it was the lyric poem. So, since he knew himself incapable of bringing one off, he decided to consider it obsolete: the lyric poem is an anachronism, he decreed.