Enrique Vila-Matas: Because She Never Asked

We remained silent for a few slow seconds, till she went on to explain that she’d already made the same proposition to Paul Auster some years earlier, but he’d considered it too great a responsibility and declined. She had also proposed the same thing, without any luck, to Jean Echenoz, Olivier Rolin, my friend Ray Loriga, and Maurice Forest-Meyer.

“Who’s that last person?” I asked distrustfully and almost unintelligibly; my question was like a humble bullet shooting underwater in a lake, like a ridiculous Bachelor’s shot. But Sophie contended that now was not the time for this question. She refused to clarify who this Maurice Forest-Meyer somebody was, whose name she uttered with a trace of meaning. I realized, moreover, that what I wanted to know was something else, completely different. What I truly wanted to extract from her was whether this was a simple mise-en-scène, or if she was being serious. But why bother asking? Whatever the response, it wouldn’t serve to clarify the situation or orient me in any way. It was a useless question. So I fired another shot, this time with passion: I asked if what she really wanted was to turn me into a retired artist. The initial stupor of her look grew into what seemed to me an ice-cold glare.

I broke a lengthy silence by saying that someone had once alleged that the commanding intelligence of our species — the rich and yet vulnerable result of evolution — finds itself at times before doors that are better left unopened, or that should be closed very softly . Another glacial stare, which, in this specific instance, was accompanied by a look of utter bafflement. I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I just blurted it out, straight from the gut, articulating every word carefully: “I am not particularly interested in reaching beyond literature.”

Did she hear what I said?

“Just in case,” I added, “let me say it another way. I don’t want to jump any deeper into the abyss, I mean, into what lies beyond literature. There’s no life there, only the risk of death. It’s like these medical breakthroughs we’re starting to see and that I think are really ambushes for human beings. That’s why I’ve mentioned that there are some doors better left unopened.”

“I won’t deny,” I continued saying, “that I’ve been tempted to go beyond what I’ve written. But on second thought, I prefer to stay where I am.” No, not another step further into the abyss, the void, and no moving from literature to life. I told her I no longer wanted to abandon my writing to the whim of that sinister hole we call life. I’d been researching, exploring the shadowy abyss I intuited in the uncertain beyond of my writing, and figured it was about time to ask ourselves, especially because of the moment we were living, what were we really talking about when we talked about “life?”

Sophie said that she had to think everything over, camouflaging what seemed like a smirk. I decided to conclude, though, to finish what I had expounded, and let her know that literature would always be more interesting than this famous thing called life. First, it was more elegant, and second, I’d always found it a more powerful experience.

It’s not that I was very sure of what I was saying. What was elegant was what I had said, and life would always be life, I was pretty sure of that much… No, I wasn’t so sure of what I had just said so confidently. Literature is potent, and life isn’t something just following in its wake.

I wasn’t at all sure of what I’d just said, but it was already out there. My behavior had to do with the fact that deep down, I was annoyed because Sophie had never sincerely asked me for a story to live out on her own initiative. But why should she have? Who did I think I was? Wasn’t I a mere ghost?

A song popped into my head, given Sophie’s renewed and awkward silence, that went, “Love stories usually end badly.” I looked Sophie straight in the eye, and it dawned on me that without realizing it, she had the ghost of Pico Island sitting in front of her. All she had to do was film me for a few seconds with her video camera, and “The Journey of Rita Malú,” the story I held so carefully folded in my pocket, would come to an end right then and there.

“Anyway, I’m gone,” I said.

And I took off. Outside on the street, I ran into that famous thing called life and a traffic jam that went on forever. And I crossed the street to the other side, to the other side of the boulevard.

Enrique Vila-Matas

“Enrique Vila-Matas has pioneered one of contemporary literature’s most interesting responses to the great Modernist writers.”

— The Paris Review

“Truth, fiction, history, memoir: these are always charmingly unstable categories in Vila-Matas’s writing.”

— Adam Thirwell, Times Literary Supplement

Enrique Vila-Mataswas born in Barcelona in 1948. He studied law and journalism and in 1968 became a columnist for the magazine Film Frames . In 1970 he moved to Paris, renting an attic that was once rented by Marguerite Duras. He wrote about this experience in his novel Never Any End to Paris . Vila-Matas now lives in Barcelona and is one of Spain’s most highly regarded writers. His other New Directions books include Bartleby & Co., Montano’s Malady, Dublinesque, The Illogic of Kassel , and A Brief History of Portable Literature . He is a Knight of the Legion of Honor from France and has won many prizes, including the Rómulo Gallegos, the Prix Médicis, the Gregor von Rezzori International Prize, and most recently the Formentor Prize.

Valerie Miles, an editor, writer, translator, and professor, is the cofounding editor of the literary journal Granta in Spanish.