Enrique Vila-Matas - Montano's Malady

NOSFERATU’S GIRLFRIEND

I hate the love stories readers today continue to demand from novels. All those blessed readers complain, I am told, when they see that love stories barely figure in the novels they buy. Since many of you may be such readers, who demand love stories in what they read or listen to, I have come here this evening with a commission from Monsieur Tongoy not to deprive you of a love story.

“The day will come,” monsieur told me yesterday, “when cold ideas will fill the heads of future beings, who will not be dependent on the romantic warmth of yesteryear, a warmth that will strike them rather as extraterrestrial. But since this day has not yet come, the best thing you can do tomorrow is make concessions to the public and in your Theory of Budapest to include a love story. Between tramps, for example.”

When Rosa and I arrived in this city, we visited monsieur in his cabin, we went to the cinema, we saw Detour , and, on coming out, I witnessed too many looks from her to him and realized that we made up as devilish a triangle as the one that appeared in the film we had just seen, that film so charged with fatality. And intuition made me afraid that any of the curses this strange film seemed to contain could easily affect us. For a start, I began to realize that Rosa seemed to have eyes only for the horrendous monsieur. And yesterday I became totally convinced, yesterday conflict broke out. Last night we inspected all the bars in the city and got very drunk, they did especially. I looked at them and thought how strange always is the laughter of those who are going to die. I wanted to kill them, yes, but I’m not a murderer, I’m a writer, a lecturer, a poor vagrant wandering along some byroad.

We visited all the bars in Budapest and ended up in the New Belvàrosi, where some gypsies played the Rakoczy March as a farewell to the customers. I shan’t deny that it was emotional. Rosa didn’t realize, but it was even a poetic moment, with those exciting tones of the Zingaro cymbals bringing the night to an especially poetic dramatic close….

Monsieur Tongoy did catch the poetic tone. “The three of us are also gypsies, vagrants, and you are wonderfully riddled with jealousy, you should talk about it tomorrow in the lecture,” he said to me.

At that precise moment, the Rakoczy March stopped.

At this precise moment in the lecture, according to monsieur’s script, I should drink a glass of water, a normal gesture in such proceedings. But I am not hungry, I am not thirsty, I have a premonition, a theory, the Theory of Budapest: at this precise moment, knowing that I am giving this lecture, Rosa and monsieur are in bed together.

There are proud men broken inside by invisible misfortune. This is not my case, it is easy to see how ridiculously cuckolded I am. But have no fear, ladies and gentlemen, I am not going to burst into tears or utter a cry of cosmic pain, or collapse at this desk as if I were Professor Immanuel Roth in the film The Blue Angel , and I’m certainly not going to ruin the rest of your evening. A strange sense of professionalism tells me that I must go on with my lecture. And this is what I do. I go on. I know I must go on, not cry, observe how life goes on and watch how the evening light bathes the quiet façades of the historic buildings opposite. I know I must not forget that deep down I always wanted to say good-bye to love in life and in novels, to lose everything except solitude. And to continue. All I have done in life is to continue. I would finish one book and start another, always continuing. To lose everything except solitude. And to have presence and dignity and not to cry, to justify myself before death with a job well done, to lead the unhappy, irreproachable life of a deceived man.

THE MILLIONAIRE BARNABOOTH’S DIARY

This morning I sensed very sharply the romance between them both. I saw it very clearly when both she and he, in their respective hovels at the Kakania, had, or said they had, a hangover that was literally boring a hole in their minds. I have spent the day in a nervous state and with the impression that a being on high allowed me to be so. I wondered if I would be able to see the lecture through. I have the admirable endurance of those clowns who, after something tragic befalls them, go out into the circus arena to ply their trade, but what I didn’t know is whether, feeling so deceived, I would end up deceiving myself, thinking that I could carry it off in public. I see that I have managed it, but I’m not relaxed, all the same; I haven’t been relaxed since this morning, when I ate breakfast alone and realized that Rosa and monsieur planned to go to bed together as soon as I departed for this lecture. Terrible panorama. It struck me that this breakfast could be the first in a long line of breakfasts alone.

I also felt under the influence of the dream I had suffered in the night, in which I had been mercilessly deafened by the drone of the Rakoczy March played by some gypsies on the terrace of a luxury hotel. I have never felt so on edge as I did this morning in the Kakania Grand Hotel, especially when I saw that the two fried eggs I had just been served — a kind of sinister metaphor for my soon-to-be-cuckolded condition — were staring at me from the plate, and I saw in them the eyes of the Chilean millionaire Barnabooth, that brilliant heteronym created by the French writer Valéry Larbaud. This vision lasted only a moment. Barnabooth looked at me and smiled, and then vanished from the fried eggs, but the truth of the matter is he was there for a second, I cannot be more certain, I mean I am convinced that the fried eggs undoubtedly contained the presence of the Chilean millionaire’s spirit.

I was so thirsty for revenge that I took my own revenge thinking that Monsieur Tongoy is also from Chile, with the difference that he’ll never be fit to hold a candle to the young riche amateur Barnabooth, author of a fascinating private journal, the journal of a happy traveler, who made a nocturnal crossing across enlightened Europe of the interwar period in luxury trains: “Lend me your vast noise, your vast and ever so sweet march, your nocturnal slide through enlightened Europe, O luxury train! and the anxious music that sounds in your corridors of golden skin …”

The anxious music reminds me of the gypsy songs in my dream last night. I have explained it in several of my novels. Though many of you cannot know this, I shall tell it again: for the last thirty years I have had a recurring dream in which I have always lived in a luxury hotel and have never paid the bill, which over time has grown and is now sizeable. Often the receptionist is about to hand me this impressive bill, but, conscious of the fortune I owe, I escape down a ramp in the garage, which I know very well and which is next to a service lift that only exists in my sleeping imagination. The dream recurs, but it is not always the same, it has all sorts of minor variations. In the version I had last night, it was a bellboy from the hotel, a young man named Montano, who led me stealthily to the ramp down which I could effect my escape. He was a bellboy who seemed to have emerged from one of the illustrations in the first edition of the millionaire Barnabooth’s diary.

Last night, when I had escaped down the ramp and was in the street, the bellboy Montano suddenly came up to me and, in a parody of Shakespeare, whispered in my ear, “To be again, that is the problem.” After that, as if he were going to pay my millionaire’s bill, behaving as a good son would, he went back into the hotel. “Montano!” I shouted. “One moment, I’m looking for the Pope of Rome,” the strange bellboy answered. “But, Montano!” I said. Rosa, who may have been awake or asleep, murmured, “Leave Montano alone.”