Enrique Vila-Matas: Because She Never Asked

.

3

The phone rang one day, when she least expected it. A woman told Rita Malú that she had a proposition to make, but that she couldn’t talk over the phone. At last, a client! Life took on a whole new meaning. They arranged to meet at the dick’s office in two hours. The woman, who was very thin, almost thirty, and soberly dressed, had a pale, sad face: her name was Dora. The ad caught her eye, she said—“so original,” she emphasized, because it advertised Rita’s knack for finding someone in hiding. It fit the profile of the investigator she required. She needed Rita to find the whereabouts of her ex-husband, a famous young writer. He’d been at an undisclosed location for months and had failed to send her the hefty alimony checks he owed her. The writer had published his fifth novel not long ago, in which he staged his own disappearance. And he had now, as it were, vanished into the very text itself. He hadn’t been seen since the book was released. Dora had heard rumors that he found haven on Pico Island in the Azores. Lost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the island was basically one colossal volcano. Dora’s ex-husband had already written about the island in one of his earlier novels, so he was very familiar with the place, and surely that’s where he was hiding out, but it was too remote for her to track him down herself. She was sure that the agency — she would pay spectacularly well — could investigate and discover his whereabouts, whether on Pico Island or anywhere else. “Just find him,” she said, “and get him to do me the goddamn favor of paying the alimony.”

It took Rita Malú all of five minutes to be rid of any doubt about what was going on. The missing writer did exist, his name was Jean Turner, Rita had heard about him once. Up to that point everything made sense. But clearly this first client of hers, this woman, was batty. Dora must have read one of Turner’s books, fallen in love with it, and as a result, she now alleged and wanted to believe that the main character of the book (the young writer) was her ex-husband.

Rita felt a pang of fear when she realized she was dealing with a very unstable individual. It took a considerable effort to finally get rid of the client, and she swore to dismantle the office the very next day. Game over. This road could only lead to more deranged clients. She went to bed and dreamt about a little red house, a house she adored, atop a small promontory. Unable to resist its spell, she knocked at the door of the little house until finally an old man answered. Just as she opened her mouth to tell him something, she woke up. But the red house persisted in her memory for days to come; both the house and the old man. Maybe, she thought, they really exist somewhere.

The visit of the strange, lunatic client had unsettled her for some reason. So the next day she went out and bought the novel by this young writer, this Jean Turner, whom that poor woman thought was her ex-husband. The back-cover copy established that Turner did indeed narrate his own disappearance in the book, but hours later Rita would also discover that the author had only disappeared in the pages of the book. In real life, he’d simply retired to Pico Island and hadn’t tried to hide the fact from anyone.

What to make of it all? Rita stared at Turner’s photo on the back cover: a young man of thirty, very tall, extremely thin, with bat ears, a narrow face, and a bushy chestnut-colored beard; he wore a moth-eaten coat, a baseball cap, and a navy-blue scarf. He was rather unpleasant looking. But she had bought the book and his four earlier ones, too. After all, and without even realizing it, she had been relieved by poor Turner of the boredom of her daily life. Later that same afternoon, she came across repeated references of the Azores in his fourth book, where he mentioned Peter’s Bar a number of times, in the town of Horta on Faial Island, the one just beside Pico.

Rita stuck to her decision to shut down the sterile detective office and forego her less-than-exciting rounds of Montparnasse bars, where she’d been asking questions about her own self. It now occurred to her that it was time to travel. Why not escape the monotony? Why not travel to the Azores to find a man like, say, Turner? She’d never pursued a man before. And a natural outcome of never having pursued a man could be traveling to the Azores to find a vulgar, ugly fellow of no concern to her whatsoever. The man was insignificant, this writer with a bushy, chestnut-colored beard. Why not spend some time, perhaps begin an adventure like Lewis Carroll’s Alice (whom she’d so loved in adolescence), and wander around aimlessly to and fro, not worrying about whatever took her from one place to another?

.

4

Rita arrived in Lisbon three days later, ready to skip over to the Azores. She carried a small, abridged version of Sophie Calle’s work in her suitcase (a sort of Marcel Duchampian boite-en-valise ), along with a book by Simone Weil. Rita had been disconcerted by Weil’s contempt for the imaginative arts, which Weil considered mere tricks to camouflage the immense void of our mortality.

She decided to see a bit of Lisbon first and postpone her connecting flight to Faial Island in the Azores until the next day. The day was cold, almost wintry. And Rita, without quite knowing why — almost as if she were receiving some kind of command, as if someone behind her, thinking she wasn’t going anywhere, had ordered her to go somewhere — journeyed to that frightening place near Lisbon, Boca do Inferno. Only three kilometers from Cascais, it’s a ghastly spot in the winter. The tide comes in hard, filling the coves and rock crevices, howling dreadfully, and blowing crests of spray high on stormy days.

Boca do Inferno is the spot where the people of Lisbon traditionally commit suicide. Oddly, or at least contrary to the habitual practice of asking God for traveling mercies, Rita commended herself to the ghost of the magician and Satanist Aleister Crowley, who traveled to Lisbon in 1930 to meet Fernando Pessoa. He faked his own disappearance at Boca do Inferno, leaving a suicide note in his gold cigarette case. The message spread across the globe, since the Satanist was a very famous man, and also because his accomplice took it upon himself to notify Lisbon’s Diário de Notícias .

At Boca do Inferno, Rita imitated the diabolical Crowley and left her own note in a cigarette case she’d bought on Rua dos Douradores, announcing her suicide to the world and taking leave of Sophie Calle with words of love, written in Portuguese.

A few minutes later, unexpectedly, she felt as though, for this rather gratuitous act of writing the note, she was being thanked for being such a good sport; she was being rewarded by being taken spiritually very far, away from herself. And what was even stranger: she had the impression, for what seemed the eternity of a few seconds, that she had actually turned into the real Sophie Calle.

She felt herself shrinking a few centimeters.

So she wrote another suicide note, substituting it for the previous one in the cigarette case. The message said exactly the same thing. ( Nao posso viver sem ti. A outra Boca do Inferno apañar-me-á—nao sera tao quente como a tua ; I cannot live without you. The other Boca do Infierno will receive me — it will not be as hot as yours!) Only this time it was signed by Sophie Calle.

Then she snapped to and left Boca do Inferno, slouching visibly, as if her suitcase weighed heavily. There is a goal but no path: what we call a path is but a series of hesitations, she thought, in order just to think.

.

5

Two days later, Rita Malú arrived on Faial, the island next to Pico, her resolve strengthened by the fact that she had never pursued a man before and by her idea that what she was doing was merely a variation on the theme of not pursuing someone. In other words, she was traveling to the Azores to find some ugly, vulgar fellow who was really of no concern to her anyway.