Enrique Vila-Matas: Because She Never Asked

Rita figured the time had come to inquire after Turner and asked the driver if he could take her to the house where the island’s writer lived. The driver didn’t understand Rita’s Portuguese very well and thought she was asking about a writing desk. “No store in Pico sells such things,” he said. This is exactly what happened in the novel of the writer she was looking for, and Rita couldn’t help but think how funny it was, how sublime even, this impression of living out what’s in the pages of a book, a book that had already been written.

As expected — they had already told her as much on Faial — the Whaling Museum in Lajes was closed. So her search for the hidden author was nearing its end. “What a bore,” she sighed, whispering to herself that Turner, too, was like a closed museum. A shipwreck of her own life, Rita Malú wanted to return to Peter’s Bar, where she had enjoyed impersonating Sophie Calle without anyone being the wiser. As far as Turner was concerned, she preferred not to see him. What for?

Before returning to the pier at Madalena, Rita decided to visit the church in Lajes and walk around for a while. Later, she invited the cab driver for a coffee in the town square, where he recounted the splendors of his youth on Pico Island, in a tone filled with melancholy. “Men are so boring,” she murmured. A little while later, they headed back to the pier.

As they drew nearer to Madalena, they came to a bend in the road. Rita spied a short trail leading to a small red house that was identical to the one in her dream a few days earlier. She asked the driver to stop and wasn’t surprised to see how the path wound briefly up to the small top of a tree-covered hill, exactly as in her dream. It came to rest in front of the red house, whose tiniest details she now remembered with sharp precision.

It felt as though she had always been there, ever since her dream about this house whose door had been opened to her by an old man. The closer she got to this tiny red house, the more she felt compelled to knock at its door, pulled by its peculiar attraction. So she did exactly that, she knocked. The old man from her dream opened the door to her once again, only this time he was a towering and extremely thin old man with bat ears, a narrow face, and a bushy white beard. His coat was moth-eaten. It was Turner all right, but fifty years older. Unlike in her dream, Rita was now able to talk to the old man, and it occurred to her to ask if the house was for sale. It was, but the old man cautioned her against buying it.

“A ghost haunts this house,” the old man explained.

There was a brief silence.

“What ghost?” she asked.

“You,” the old man said, and he softly closed the door.

1

I wrote the story “The Journey of Rita Malú” for Sophie Calle. You could say I did it because she asked me to. It all began one afternoon when she called me at my home in Barcelona. I was flabbergasted. I revered her and considered her out of reach. I’d never met her in person and didn’t think I ever would. She had called to say that a mutual friend (Isabel Coixet) had given her my phone number, and that she wanted to propose something, but couldn’t do it over the phone.

Her words carried a strange, mysterious charge to them, however much she didn’t intend them to be that way. I suggested an encounter in Paris at the end of the month since I planned on spending New Year’s Eve there; 2005 was drawing to a close. We arranged to meet at the Café de Flore in Paris at noon on the 27th of December.

On the appointed day, I arrived in the neighborhood a half hour early, a little anxious over our encounter. Sophie Calle had something of a reputation for being capable of practically anything, and I was well aware of her eccentricities and audacity, partly thanks to Paul Auster’s novel Leviathan , in which Sophie is a character named Maria Turner. Auster’s dedication at the beginning reads: “The author extends special thanks to Sophie Calle for permission to mingle fact with fiction.”

I was already aware of all this, but I knew a lot of other things, too. For example, I recalled reading how once, when Sophie was young, she had felt lost in her home city of Paris after returning from a long trip through Lebanon. She wasn’t familiar with anyone anymore and felt compelled to follow people she had never met, so they would decide where she was supposed to go. I recalled this and some of her other famous “actions”: how she invited strangers to sleep in her bed as long as they let her observe and photograph them and answered her questions ( The Sleepers ); or how she had pursued a man one time after she found out purely by chance that he was traveling to Venice that evening ( Venetian Suite ); or how she got her mother to hire a private detective to follow her around and take photographs of her (knowing the whole time that she was being trailed) to have him profile her in his reports with the fake, naked truth of an objective observer.

On the way to our appointment at the Café de Flore, I was reminded of what Vicente Molina Foix had said about Sophie Calle, how she belonged to the realm of the verbal imagination. Considering the models that inspired her and the fact that words were always at the origin of her visual projects, considering her earnest personal accounts and the strong prose she used to tell the stories in which she established herself as the protagonist — victim and subject of an omniscient narration — Sophie Calle stood as one of the greatest novelists of our time.

I came to the appointment feeling uneasy, and asked myself what she could possibly have in store for me, if it might be something bizarre or dangerous. To buck up my self-confidence before our meeting, I ducked into the nearby Café Bonaparte and threw back two shots of whisky in less than five minutes, standing at the bar Wild West style. I left Café Bonaparte walking slowly (it was ten minutes to twelve) and stopped to have a look in the window of La Hune bookstore, which is only ten meters away from the Flore. The French translation of one of my novels was on display, but I didn’t pay much attention to it; I was too busy questioning myself about what Sophie Calle was going to say.

Suddenly, a little man with North African features asked very politely if I had a minute to talk. I thought he was going to ask for money and was irritated that he had pulled my concentration away from Sophie Calle.

“Pardon me, but I’ve been observing you and would like to offer my help,” the man said. He handed me the address for Alcoholics Anonymous, written on a piece of paper that was torn from a small notebook. He had been following me since the Bonaparte. I didn’t know how to respond. I considered telling him that I wasn’t an alcoholic, or anonymous. I thought of explaining to him that I didn’t drink as much as might appear and also that I wasn’t exactly an anonymous person, and then drawing his attention to my book on display in the window. But I didn’t say a word. I pocketed the address and tried to walk into the Flore without slouching or seeming complex-ridden.

I recognized Sophie Calle immediately from among the others. She had arrived early and got a table in a good spot. I asked her permission to sit down in a show of respect. She smiled and extended it, explaining that we would speak in Spanish, she had lived in Mexico for a year and knew my language well. I sat down, curbing my shyness by starting to talk immediately. I told her the story about how I had been spied on and pursued just a moment before by a recovering alcoholic; both the man and the chase seemed like something straight out of one of the wall novels Sophie was so addicted to. Might she have been responsible for putting him up to it?