Paul Auster - Invisible

So I accompanied her into the study, a midsize room on the ground floor with a wooden desk, another wall packed with books, filing cabinets, a laptop computer, and a telephone-not so much a lawyer’s miniature home office as a place to think, a vestige of Walker’s early life as a poet. A nine-by-twelve manila envelope had been placed on top of the shut computer. Rebecca picked it up and handed it to me. My name was written out across the front in block letters, and just below my name, in much smaller cursive, I read: Notes for Fall .

Dad gave this to me two days before he died, Rebecca said. It must have been around six o’clock, because I remember coming here straight from my job at the hospital to check in on him. He said he’d talked to you on the phone about two hours earlier, and that if and when, in the event of, I don’t want to say the word anymore, in the event of his you-know-what, I was to get this to you as quickly as possible. He looked so drained… so worn out when he said that to me, I could see he’d taken a bad turn, that his strength was beginning to leave him. Those were his last two requests. To delete the 1967 file from his computer and give you the envelope. Here it is. I have no idea what Notes for Fall means. Do you?

No, I lied. Not the foggiest notion.

Back in my hotel room later that night, I opened the envelope and pulled out a short, handwritten letter from Walker and thirty-one single-spaced pages of notes that he had typed up on his computer and then printed out for me. The letter read as follows:

Five minutes after our telephone conversation. Deepest thanks for the encouragement. First thing tomorrow morning, I will have my housekeeper send you the second chapter by express mail. If you find it repugnant, which I fear you will, please accept my apologies. As for the pages in this envelope, you will see that they are the outline for the third part. Written in great haste-telegraphic style-but working quickly helped bring back memories, a deluge of memories, and now that the outline is finished, I don’t know if I have it in me to work it up into a proper piece of prose. I feel exhausted, frightened, perhaps a little deranged. I will put the printed-out ms. into an envelope and give it to my daughter, who will send it to you in case I don’t hold on long enough to have our famous, much talked about dinner. So weak, so little left, time running out. I will be robbed of my old age. I try not to feel bitter about it, but sometimes I can’t help myself. Life is shit, I know, but the only thing I want is more life, more years on this godforsaken earth. As for the enclosed pages, do with them what you will. You are a pal, the best of men, and I trust your judgment in all things. Wish me luck on my journey. With love, Adam.

Reading that letter filled me with an immense, uncontainable sadness. Just hours before, Rebecca had jolted me with the news that Walker was dead, and now he was talking to me again, a dead man was talking to me, and I felt that as long as I held the letter in my hand, as long as the words of that letter were still before my eyes, it would be as if he had been resurrected, as if he had been momentarily brought back to life in the words he had written to me. A strange response, perhaps, no doubt an embarrassingly doltish response, but I was too distraught to censor the emotions that were running through me, and so I read the letter six or seven more times, ten times, twelve times, enough times to have learned every word of it by heart before I found the courage to put it away.

I went to the minibar, poured two little bottles of scotch into a tall glass, and then returned to the bed, where I sat down with the résumé of the third and final part of Walker’s book.

Telegraphic. No complete sentences. From beginning to end, written like this. Goes to the store. Falls asleep. Lights a cigarette. In the third person this time. Third person, present tense, and therefore I decided to follow his lead and render his account in exactly that way-third person, present tense. As for the enclosed pages, do with them what you will . He had given me his permission, and I don’t feel that turning his encrypted, Morse-code jottings into full sentences constitutes a betrayal of any kind. Despite my editorial involvement with the text, in the deepest, truest sense of what it means to tell a story, every word of Fall was written by Walker himself.

Walker arrives in Paris a month before his classes are scheduled to begin. He has already rejected the idea of living in a student dormitory and therefore must arrange for his own housing. On the first morning after crossing the Atlantic, he returns to the hotel he stayed in for several weeks during his first visit to Paris two years before. He plans to use it as a base while he searches for better lodgings elsewhere, but the half-drunk manager with the two-day stubble of beard remembers him from his earlier visit, and when Walker mentions that he will be staying for an entire year, the man offers him a monthly rate that averages out to less than two dollars a night. Nothing is expensive in the Paris of 1967, but even by the standards of that time this is an exceedingly low rent, almost an act of charity, and Walker impulsively decides to accept the man’s offer. They shake hands on it, and then the man ushers him into the back room for a glass of wine. It is ten o’clock in the morning. As Walker puts the glass to his mouth and takes his first sip of the acrid vin ordinaire , he says to himself: Good-bye, America. For better or worse, you are in Paris now. You must not allow yourself to fall apart.

The Hôtel du Sud is a decrepit, crumbling establishment on the rue Mazarine in the sixth arrondissement, not far from the Odéon metro station on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. In America, a building in such a state of disrepair would be condemned for demolition, but this is not America, and the broken-down eyesore Walker now inhabits is nevertheless a historic structure, erected in the seventeenth century, he thinks, perhaps even earlier, which means that in spite of its filthiness and dilapidation, in spite of the creaking, worn-out steps of the cramped circular staircase, his new digs are not entirely without charm. Granted, his room is a disaster area of brittle, peeling wallpaper and cracked wooden floor planks, the bed is an ancient spring contraption with a caved-in mattress and rock-hard pillows, the small desk wobbles, the desk chair is the least comfortable chair in all of Europe, and one door of the armoire is missing, but setting aside these disadvantages, the room is fairly spacious, light pours through the two sets of double windows, and no noise can be heard from the street. When the manager opens the door and lets him in for the first time, Walker instantly feels that this will be a good place for writing poems. In the long run, that is the only thing that counts. This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself, and as Walker deposits his suitcase and typewriter by the foot of the bed, he vows to spend no less than four hours a day on his writing, to bear down on his work with more diligence and concentration than ever before. It doesn’t matter that there is no telephone, that the toilet is a communal toilet at the end of the hall, that there is nowhere to shower or bathe, that everything around him is old. Walker is young, and this is the room where he means to reinvent himself.

There is university business to be taken care of, the tedium of consulting with the director of the Junior Year Abroad Program, selecting courses, filling out forms, attending an obligatory luncheon to meet the other students who will be in Paris for the year. There are just six of them (three Barnard girls and three Columbia boys), and while they all seem earnest and friendly, more than willing to accept him as a member of the gang, Walker makes up his mind to have as little to do with them as possible. He has no inclination to become part of a group, and he certainly doesn’t want to waste his time speaking English. The whole point in coming to Paris is to perfect his French. In order to do that, the shy and reticent Walker will have to embolden himself to make contact with the natives.