Enrique Vila-Matas: Because She Never Asked

“Stop pulling my leg,” I said to Sophie.

It came from the gut. I uttered it spontaneously; it just burst out as a result of all these ambiguities. Now I was getting overly familiar with her.

“What do you mean, stop pulling my leg? Do you mean that you don’t want me to play with you?” Sophie asked in very good Spanish.

“Exactly,” I smiled. “Don’t mess with me.”

That seemed to me a good title for a novel.

But Florence Aubenas was in fact Florence Aubenas. Everyone around me confirmed it. Even Aubenas confirmed that she was herself; she invited me to her stand where she signed a copy of her recently published book, La méprise . So I went back to mine, to my stand that is, and continued signing books. Every once in a while, Sophie would show up, walking back and forth between Florence’s and my publisher’s stand.

Sophie would appear and stare straight at me, then laugh in an infectious way. I would end up laughing too, my expression distorted after uselessly trying to keep a straight face, or to express anger.

“Don’t mess with me,” I told her again.

I giggled. That was it. The next day, I returned to Barcelona, and Sophie attended her mother’s funeral. It seemed silly to reproach her for having propositioned so many men to bring a written adventure to life, having so many broken friends. It seemed grotesque to criticize her, and what’s more, I had no right whatsoever.

The idea was hers, after all, and she could perform it with whomever she pleased, whenever she pleased. I convinced myself (so as not to lose my wits) that it was all beyond reproach. I had no reason for feeling so apprehensive. Why not wait until May? But… it was May of next year! I was peeved, annoyed, over having been so submissive the whole time, about our agreeing that I would control what was to be done and what had to be lived out. I couldn’t understand why I was being so docile. Anyway, I thought, I would have another chance to rebel against the situation on my friend Ray Loriga’s television show; at least I’d be able to pound the table a little with my fist. I was hostage to the strange sensation of gripping a rock-solid hammer in my hand, but not being able to use it because its handle was in flames.

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9

Back in Barcelona, I received an email from Sophie letting me know that she would arrive in Madrid to tape the show on the 6th of April, as long as Ray Loriga confirmed that I would be on the show too. She had to say that she didn’t see much sense in a televised encounter, though, since the question remained: what was there for us to talk about if the project hadn’t begun yet?

On the 6th of April I showed up in Madrid and taped the show with Ray Loriga, explaining what had happened so far with Sophie. Not much had occurred, but I knew how to find water where there was no fountain to speak of. Sophie never showed up at the studio. She missed the appointment in Madrid, alleging a mix-up over the date and time, and Loriga decided to turn her into the program’s invited ghost. When I got back to Barcelona, in an attempt to hold my frustration in check, I sent Sophie a picture of a clock with a Portuguese caption: CONTAGEM DECRESENTE.

The message was meant as a moderately furious protest and even the seedling of a rupture, expressing that the clock of my patience had entered countdown mode. Sophie answered immediately. She explained that she was preparing a wall novel on the subject of “the missing” for the Venice Biennale, and would be traveling the next day to the south of France, where she would spend a stretch of time with Florence Aubenas, the renowned “missing person” who had disappeared in another era in Iraq. She bid adieu for a few weeks and asked me to remember that we could take up our project again in May 2007.

It seemed to me that while in the beginning it was I who played the part of the ghost, things had taken an unforeseen turn of events, and now the ghost — in Rita Malú’s story — was she. Surely, I said to myself, the spirit of the red house on the hill on Pico Island had done a good thing by closing the door on her softly .

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10

I traveled to Buenos Aires at the beginning of May, ostensibly to promote my novels, but more than anything else just to disappear for a few days. I ended up hospitalized in Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron clinic when I got back. No longer did I feel the urge to go missing in an Argentine hotel room. The peculiar thing is that in Buenos Aires, I boasted about building my strength in the hotel room in Recoleta, of not setting foot at all in the streets of the city, except for the two hours I spent in a public appearance at the Book Fair. The audience smiled when I said that I had turned into a shadow, and how, like the character in one of my books, I hadn’t stirred from the hotel since arriving in the city. But speaking in the style of Journey Around My Room was really no more than the desire to cover up a private secret: just walking down the hall was enough to make me fatigued. That was the only reason why I hadn’t gone to see Recoleta Square, for example, which I remembered from previous visits. It was only two hundred meters from my hotel.

I wasn’t yet aware of the worst part: I was experiencing severe kidney failure and heading toward an irreversible coma. But how could I possibly imagine something like that? How could I know that I was dying? Days went by before I fully realized what was happening. I returned to Barcelona and walked through El Prat airport like a somnambulist (a poisonous current of uric acid was reaching my brain and I didn’t notice it). I answered bizarrely when they asked why I didn’t have a suitcase, and my eyes rolled to the whites:

“Life has no idea what kind of life it lives.”

I had spent four full days holed up in that Argentine hotel room, observing a solitary, funereal landscape (almost as if it were a premonition) outside my window: I watched the tombs of the neighboring Recoleta Cemetery, full of the pantheons of some of the Argentine homeland’s national heroes. Flowers lay atop Evita Peron’s mausoleum. It was an obsessive, sickly, fatal view. How was that for taking a trip?!

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11

I remember W. G. Sebald’s obsessive view from the hospital window, which he describes in the beginning of The Rings of Saturn : “I can remember precisely how, upon being admitted to that room on the eighth floor, I became overwhelmed by the feeling that the Suffolk expanses I had walked the previous summer had now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot. Indeed, all that could be seen of the world from my bed was the colorless patch of sky framed in the window.”

Sebald recounts how over the course the day, he felt overwhelmed by the desire to look out the hospital window, draped strangely enough in black netting, to make certain that reality, as he had dreaded, hadn’t vanished forever. By dusk, the desire had grown so strong that he contrived a way to slide over the edge of the bed to the floor, half on his belly and half sideways, crawling to the wall on all fours and raising himself up despite the pain. He strained to hold himself upright for the first time against the windowsill. Like Gregor Samsa, or any garden-variety beetle.

Anyway, in my case it took three days to reach the blind, insensate spot of my window on the tenth floor and to contemplate, incredulous, the surprisingly lively view extending from Vall d’Hebron to the sea. So, the world is still there after all, I told myself. It seemed amazing to me, that anthill of people I observed from way up there, feverishly crossing avenues and streets: the same mad human stream that didn’t alter when the young man from Kafka’s “The Judgment” threw himself out the window of his paternal home.