Enrique Vila-Matas: Because She Never Asked

Sophie smiled slightly and almost without further ado pointed out an excerpt from my most popular novel. The excerpt, she said, related directly to what she wanted to propose. I could hardly recall that particular episode in my book. It recounted a story that Marcel Schwob tells in Parallel Lives : one about the life of Petronius, who when he turned thirty, it’s said, decided to narrate his forays into the seamy side of the city. He wrote sixteen books of his own invention and when he had finished, read them aloud to Sirius, his accomplice and slave, who laughed like a lunatic and applauded ceaselessly. So the two together, Sirius and Petronius, came up with the scheme of living out the adventures he had written, taking them from parchment to reality. Petronius and Sirius dressed up in costume and fled the city, taking to the open road and living out the adventures Petronius had composed. Petronius abandoned writing from that moment on, once he began living the life he had imagined. “In other words,” I ended saying in the excerpt, “if the theme of Don Quixote is about the dreamer who dares to become what he dreams, the story of Petronius is that of the writer who dares to experience what he has written, and for that reason stops writing.”

What Sophie suggested was that I write a story, any story. That I create a character she could bring to life: one whose behavior, for a maximum of one year’s time, would be contingent upon what I wrote. She wanted to change her life and what’s more, she was tired of having to determine her own deeds ; now she preferred to have someone else do it for her, to allow somebody else to decide how she was supposed to live. She would obey the author in everything. There was a brief silence. Everything, that is, except killing, she said.

“In short, you write a story, and I’ll bring it to life.”

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2

We remained silent for a few long seconds, till she regained her voice and explained to me that she had made the same proposition to Paul Auster some years earlier, but he had considered it too great a responsibility and declined. She also mentioned her more recent offer to Jean Echenoz, who also ended up declining the invitation.

It seemed to me that the intention behind Sophie’s proposition was to make the author disappear, which is precisely what I claimed to desire so much in my latest writing. But I hadn’t dared follow through with it, I’d only blurred my personality into the text a bit. Sophie was aware of my concerns, I told myself, and surely that’s why she had chosen me now, to bring my literature to life once and for all.

She explained that her mother had only two or three months left to live, it was important for me to keep this in mind; that was the only thing that might temporarily delay our common project, given, of course, that I was willing to accept her proposition.

“I haven’t responded yet, but I’m happy to accept,” I said.

Sophie smiled. I’ve always thought that a smile is the perfect form of laughter. She seemed happy that I had hardly doubted a second before accepting. But I shouldn’t forget, she reminded me again, that everything depended on the state of her mother’s health.

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3

Half an hour later, I was back in the Hotel Littré on rue Littré, where my wife was waiting for me. I excitedly explained this strange assignment to her. I was satisfied and even impressed with the prospect that had just opened in my life, although perhaps it would be better to say in my work, since the life bit was Sophie’s task. The problem now was figuring out what kind of story to write. At first, all I came up with were stupidities: making Sophie travel to Barcelona, for example, and sign up to take Catalan classes. Truly asinine things like that. My wife suggested that I make more of an effort. “You’ll come up with something. You always find a way out when you get stuck,” she told me.

I returned to Barcelona with my wife the next day. I figured the sooner I wrote the story, the better. I had a burning curiosity to clarify things as soon as possible; in other words, to find out as soon as I could how things would play out and to calculate whether I was truly interested in being involved in this attractive, though strange and uncertain, project. I worried that if I let too much time go by, Sophie Calle might back out or maybe even forget her proposition. So I went straight to work as soon as I returned to Barcelona and wrote “The Journey of Rita Malú.”

I emailed “The Journey of Rita Malú” to Sophie precisely on January 12. I was confident that she’d try to bring the story to life (and I was eager to see how she would go about it. Would she find the ghost, for example, who was my own self, only fifty years older?). Her answer by return email was slow to arrive. Days went by without a word from her, not a single message. I obliged myself to write something every day in my diary (I had been keeping a sort of diary in a red notebook since September), so I noted that she hadn’t yet given any sign of having received my story. Had my story not appealed to her? Could she have figured out that it was really an exploration of mental geographies in pursuit of a ghostly writer, who was in fact my own self, though visibly older?

The lack of a response certainly provoked in me a sense of uncertainty. It wasn’t that I thought the work was poorly written. My story was in keeping with what she had requested. What’s more, it was an elastic narrative that could either be a complete short story or otherwise the first chapter of a novel. So it offered a level of freedom: to climb aboard the story and live it out as a complete novel, or settle into the piece merely as a first chapter, a short story, and then step off early in the journey.

The days went by with no news from Sophie, until one afternoon I realized that her strange silence was crippling me as a writer. For the first time in my life, I was depending on someone else to be able to write: I needed this other person to move into action, I mean she had to start living out what I wrote and then ask me to continue the story if the occasion called for it. Obviously, what I couldn’t do now (which is what I was accustomed to doing when I wrote novels) was continue writing about the ghost of the Azores on my own; I couldn’t write anything else until she acted on the story, discovered the ghost, and asked what happened next, if in fact she wanted to follow the story onward.

Sophie’s silence made me anxious. What’s more, her lack of an answer left me vulnerable, literally paralyzed and incapable of writing. I was poised for a new book that couldn’t go anywhere because it wasn’t in my hands to make it happen. I began to wonder whether one of the intentions behind Sophie Calle’s project wasn’t to do me in as a writer.

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4

I had warned Sophie when we met at the Flore that I would be traveling on January 23 to a literary conference in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. She seemed to make a mental note of the information, because when her long overdue answer finally arrived, it came on the very 23rd of January (eleven days after I sent my story to her), precisely and peculiarly on the same day I left Barcelona for Colombia. My wife, worried over how uneasy I’d become over the whole affair, called my hotel in Cartagena to let me know that Sophie Calle had finally responded and that the email went like this: “I haven’t received anything from you yet, although no rush. I’ve had problems with my Internet, broke down last week. I’m afraid you might think (in case you sent me something) that I’ve been keeping silent.”

I realized we’d practically have to start all over. So upon my return from Cartagena, I resent “The Journey of Rita Malú” to Sophie. And that’s when it got worse. Once again, days of a newfound, strange silence passed. My angst expressed itself in troubled notes, written in my diary or red notebook.