Distant Star (13 page)

That afternoon, after lunch at a bar in Barceloneta, he asked me if I’d read the magazines. I’m working through them, I replied. The next day he turned up with a television and a VCR. These are for you, a gift from my client. What do you think? I don’t watch television, I said. Well you should, you don’t know
what you’re missing. I hate game shows, I said. Some of them are very interesting, said Romero. Simple people, autodidacts taking on the world. I remembered that Carlos Wieder was an autodidact, or pretended to be, all those years ago in Concepción. I read books, Romero, I said, and magazines too now, and sometimes I write. And it shows, said Romero. I don’t mean that as an insult, he added immediately, I’ve always respected priests and writers who renounce worldly possessions. I saw a film with Paul Newman once, he said. He was a writer and they gave him the Nobel Prize and then he confessed that for years he’d been writing detective novels under a pseudonym to earn his living. I respect that sort of writer. You can’t have known many, I remarked. Romero didn’t notice the sarcasm. You’re the first, he said. Then he explained that he couldn’t really set up the television in the boarding-house where he was staying and told me I should watch the three videos he had brought. I think I laughed out of sheer fright. I said, Don’t tell me you’ve got Wieder on film? I have indeed, on these three tapes, said Romero.

We set up the television, and before plugging in the VCR Romero tried to get one of the local channels, unsuccessfully. You’ll have to buy an antenna, he said. Then he put in the first video. I stayed where I was, sitting at the table covered with magazines. Romero sat down in the one and only armchair.

They were low-budget pornographic films. Halfway through the first one (Romero had brought a bottle of whisky and he was taking little swigs as he watched) I confessed that I couldn’t take three porno films in a row. Romero waited till the end then
switched off the video. Watch them tonight, on your own, no hurry, he said as he put the whisky bottle away in a corner of the kitchen. Am I supposed to recognize him? Is he one of the actors? I asked as he was leaving. Romero smiled enigmatically. The magazines are the main thing; the films are just an idea I had, for the sake of thoroughness.

That night I watched the two remaining films, then I went back and watched the first one again. And then I watched the other two a second time. Wieder didn’t appear in any of them. And Romero didn’t turn up the next day. I thought the films must have been one of his jokes. Yet within the four walls of my flat, Wieder’s presence kept growing stronger, as if in some way the films had conjured him up. At one point Romero had told me there was no need to dramatize things, but I could feel my whole life being sucked into the sewer.

When Romero returned he was sporting a new suit, fresh off the peg, and he had brought me a gift. Fervently hoping it would not be an item of clothing, I opened the packet. It contained a novel by García Márquez – which I’d already read, though I didn’t tell him that – and a pair of shoes. Try them on, he said. I hope they’re the right size. The French are very keen on Spanish shoes. To my surprise, they fitted me perfectly.

Explain the riddle of the porno films, I said. You didn’t notice anything strange or out of the ordinary, nothing that struck you as odd? asked Romero. From his tone of voice I could tell he didn’t give a damn about the films, the magazines, or anything at all, except perhaps returning to Chile with his family. All I know is that I’m becoming more and more obsessed with
this bastard Wieder, I said. And is that a good thing or a bad thing? It’s not funny, Romero, I said. All right, I’m going to tell you a story, said Romero. The lieutenant is there in all three films, but
behind
the camera. So Wieder directed them? No, said Romero, he was the cameraman.

Then he told me about a crew that used to make pornographic films in a villa on the Gulf of Tarento. One morning, it must have been a couple of years before, they were all found dead. Six people in all: three actresses, two actors and a cameraman. The prime suspect was the director-producer, who was taken into custody. They also arrested the owner of the villa, a lawyer from Corigliano who was associated with the underworld of violent hard-core: pornographic films showing real criminal acts. Both had alibis and had to be released. After a while the case was shelved. And what did Carlos Wieder have to do with all this? There was a second cameraman. A certain R. P. English. And the Italian police had never been able to track him down.

Were Wieder and English one and the same? Romero thought so when he began his investigation, and for some time he travelled around Italy looking for people who had encountered English, showing them a photo of Wieder (the one in which he is posing next to his plane), but everyone he talked to seemed to have forgotten the cameraman, as if he had never existed or had no face to remember. Finally, in a clinic in Nîmes, he found an actress who recalled having worked with English. The actress was called Joanna Silvestri and she was stunning, said Romero, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever
seen, I swear. More beautiful than your wife? I asked, to tease him a bit. Oh, my wife’s getting on now, she doesn’t count, said Romero. Nor do I, he added almost straightaway. Anyway, she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. What I really mean is, the prettiest. You have to take your hat off to a woman like that, believe me. I asked him to describe her. Tall, blonde, with something in her gaze that made you feel like a child again. Something soft like satin, but with flashes of sadness and determination. She also had wonderful bones and very pale skin, with that olive undertone you often see in Mediterranean countries. A woman to day-dream about, but also to share your life with, the good times and the bad. You could tell, said Romero, from her bones, her skin, the depth of her gaze. I never saw her standing up, but I imagine she would have looked like a queen. The clinic wasn’t luxurious, but it had a little garden, where the patients used to go and sit in the afternoon. Most of them were French or Italian. The last time I went to see her, I suggested after a while that we go down there together (perhaps I was afraid she would get bored alone with me in the room). She said she couldn’t. We were talking in French, but now and then she would lapse into Italian. She looked me in the eye and said, I can’t, in Italian, and I tell you I felt like the most helpless, useless, miserable man in the world. I don’t know how to explain it: I thought I was going to burst into tears. But I controlled myself and tried to go on talking about the investigation I was supposed to be conducting. She thought it was funny that a Chilean was looking for a man called English. The Chilean detective, she
said with a smile. She looked like a cat, propped up on the pillows, with her arms crossed. And the shape of her legs under the blankets … even that was like a miracle, I don’t mean the sort that leaves you dazed, but a miracle simple as the day, that leaves you feeling peaceful, more peaceful than before. Christ Almighty, she was gorgeous! exclaimed Romero suddenly. Was she sick? She was dying, he said, and all on her own like a stray dog, or that’s how it looked to me anyway, after spending two afternoons with her at the clinic, and in spite of everything she had stayed calm and lucid. She liked to talk; it was obvious that visitors cheered her up (she didn’t seem to have many, though I couldn’t really tell). She was always reading or writing letters or watching television with her headphones on. She read news magazines and glossies. Her room was very tidy and it smelt good. So did she. Before visitors arrived, she probably brushed her hair and dabbed some cologne or perfume on her neck and hands. I imagine she did, anyway. The last time I saw her, before we said good-bye, she turned on the television and switched to something on an Italian channel. I was worried it might be one of her films. That really would have been too much for me, I swear. I don’t know what I would have done. But it was a talk show; one of her old friends was being interviewed. We shook hands and I left. As I was going out of the door, I couldn’t help glancing back at her. She already had the headphones on, and there was an odd expression on her face, a military sort of expression, I don’t know how else to describe it, as if her sick room were the cockpit of a space ship and she were the pilot firmly in
control. And what happened in the end? I asked (by this stage I didn’t feel like teasing him at all). Nothing. She remembered English and described him for me pretty well, but there would have been thousands of men in Europe fitting the description, and she didn’t recognize him in the photo of the pilot, which wasn’t surprising, it’s more than twenty years old, my friend. I meant, what happened with Joanna Silvestri? She died, said Romero. When? A few months later, when I was back in Paris, I saw the obituary in
Libération
. And you’ve never seen any of her films? I asked. Joanna Silvestri’s? No, of course not. Why would I? Never? You weren’t curious? No, I wasn’t; I’m a married man and too old for all that, said Romero.

Dinner was on me that night. We ate in the Calle Riera, in a cheap family restaurant, and then we went wandering through the nearby streets. We came to a video store that was open and I told Romero to come with me. You’re not going to get one of her films, are you? I heard him say behind me. I don’t trust your description, I said, I want to know what she really looked like. There were three shelves of porno films at the back of the premises. I think it was only the second time I had been to a video store. I hadn’t felt so good in ages, although there was something burning inside me. It took him a while to find what we were looking for. It was a pleasure just to watch his dark, gnarled hands moving over the spines of the cassettes. Here we go, he said. He was right, she was a very beautiful woman. When we came out, I realized that the video store was the only shop still open in the district.

The next day, when Romero came to my flat, I told him I
thought I had identified Wieder. If you saw him again, would you be able to recognize him? I don’t know, I replied.

This is my last communiqué from the planet of the monsters. Never again will I immerse myself in literature’s bottomless cesspools. I will go back to writing my poems, such as they are, find a job to keep body and soul together, and make no attempt to be published.

Among the magazines piled up on my table, two in particular caught my attention. The others could have provided material for a variegated sampler of psychopathy and schizophrenia, but only two had the
élan
, the singularity of purpose that would have attracted Carlos Wieder. Both were French: the first number of the
Evreux Literary Gazette
and No. 3 of the
Arras Nightwatchman’s Review
. In both I found critical essays by a certain Jules Defoe, although in the
Gazette
the text was set out, quite arbitrarily, as verse. But first I should say a word about Raoul Delorme and the sect known as “the barbaric writers.”

Born in 1935, Raoul Delorme began his working life as a soldier, then sold produce in a wholesale market, before becoming a caretaker in central Paris, a job better suited to someone suffering, as he did, from slight damage to the vertebrae, a souvenir
of his time in the Foreign Legion. In 1968, while the students were building barricades and the rising generation of French novelists were putting bricks through the windows of their schools or losing their virginity, he decided to found the sect or movement called “the barbaric writers.” While intellectuals were taking to the streets, the ex-legionnaire shut himself up in his tiny caretaker’s flat in the Rue des Eaux and began to hatch a new kind of writing. The apprenticeship consisted of two apparently simple steps: seclusion and reading. In order to take the first step, one had to purchase provisions sufficient for a week, or go hungry. To avoid inopportune visits, it was also necessary to make it clear that one was not to be disturbed for any reason, or pretend to be away travelling for a week or to have contracted a contagious disease. The second step was more complicated. According to Delorme, one had to commune with the master works. Communion was achieved in a singularly odd fashion: by defecating on the pages of Stendhal, blowing one’s nose on the pages of Victor Hugo, masturbating and spreading one’s semen over the pages of Gautier or Banville, vomiting onto the pages of Daudet, urinating on the pages of Lamartine, cutting oneself with a razor blade and spattering blood over the pages of Balzac or Maupassant, in short, submitting the books to a process of degradation which Delorme called “humanization.” A week of these “barbaric” rituals resulted in a flat or room full of filth, stench and ruined books, with the apprentice writer wallowing in the mess, naked or in underwear, drivelling and wriggling like a new-born baby, or, rather, like the pioneering fish that had decided to make the
break and live out of water. The barbaric writer, said Delorme, emerged from this experience with a new inner strength, and, more importantly, a deeper understanding of the art of writing, a wisdom acquired through what he called “real familiarity” with and “real assimilation” of the classics, a physical familiarity that broke all the barriers imposed by culture, the academy and technology.

No one knows how, but he soon acquired a certain following. Like him, his disciples were uneducated and came from humble backgrounds. Beginning in May ’68, alone or in groups of two, three or even four, they shut themselves up twice a year in tiny attics, caretakers’ flats, hotel rooms, suburban bungalows, the backs of shops and stores in order to prepare the advent of the new literature, a literature that
could
in principle belong to everyone, according to Delorme, but that in practice would only belong to those who dared to cross the bridge of fire. While waiting for the great day, they produced fanzines, which they sold from makeshift stalls, set up wherever they could find a space at the countless second-hand book markets that spring up in squares and streets throughout France. Naturally, most of “the barbaric writers” were poets, although some wrote stories and others experimented with short plays. The titles of their magazines were anodyne or fanciful (there was a list of the movement’s publications in the
Evreux Literary Gazette
: the
Inland Seas
, the
Provençal Literary Bulletin
, the
Toulon Review of Arts and Letters
, the
New Literary School
etc.). The
Arras Nightwatchmen’s Review
(which was indeed published by a cooperative of nightwatchmen in Arras) provided a
reasonably representative and wide-ranging anthology of barbaric writing. A section entitled “Profession: Amateur” contained poems by Delorme, Sabrina Martin, Ilse Kraunitz, M. Poul, Antoine Dubacq and Antoine Madrid, each represented by a single poem, except for Delorme and Dubacq who had contributed three and two poems respectively. As if to underline the amateur status of the poets, their day jobs were given in brackets under their names and beside the odd passport-like photos, thus informing the reader that Kraunitz was a nursing aide in a geriatric care unit in Strasbourg, Sabrina Martin cleaned flats in Paris, and M. Poul worked as a butcher, while Antoine Madrid and Antoine Dubacq earned their francs selling newspapers from stands on a Paris boulevard. There was something subtly intriguing about the photos of Delorme and his band: first, they were all staring into the camera as if engaged in a childish (or at least futile) attempt to hypnotize the photographer or, through him, the readers; secondly, every one of them seemed confident and utterly self-assured, immune to ridicule and doubt, a condition which, on reflection, is perhaps not altogether exceptional, given that these were French writers. The differences in age were striking; whatever united the barbaric writers, it was clearly not the sense of belonging to a generation. There were two generations, at least, between Delorme, who was more than sixty (although he didn’t look it) and Antoine Madrid, who can’t have been more than twenty-two. In both magazines the texts were preceded by “A History of Barbaric Writing,” signed Xavier Rouberg, and a manifesto by Delorme himself, entitled “A Passion for Writing.” Delorme’s
rather pedantic and awkward screed and Rouberg’s surprisingly agile and elegant essay (accompanied by a brief note, which he probably wrote himself, presenting the author as an ex-surrealist, ex-communist and ex-fascist, now living in retirement in Poitou, and mentioning, among his works, a book on “his friend” Salvador Dalí, entitled
Dalí and the Opera of the World: Prosecution and Defense
) both recounted the origins of barbaric writing and the milestones that had marked its subterranean and occasionally turbulent evolution. Rouberg and Delorme aside, the others could easily have been mistaken for active (or at least aspiring) members of a writers’ group in some working-class suburb. Their faces were ordinary: Sabrina Martin looked thirtyish and cheerless; there was something about Antoine Madrid that suggested the discreet, wary kind of gay, the kind who keeps his distance; Antoine Dubacq was bald, short-sighted and about forty; outwardly Madame Kraunitz could have passed for an office worker of indefinite age, but she seemed to be hiding an immense reserve of unstable energy; M. Poul, around fifty, had a skull-like head, flat ears, a crew-cut, a pointy face, a long, cartilaginous nose and a prominent Adam’s apple; as for Delorme, the leader, he looked just like the man he was: a strong willed ex-legionnaire. (But how could
he
, of all people, have imagined that desecrating books was the way to improve one’s spoken and written French? At what point in his life did he discover the guiding principle behind this ritual?) The texts signed Xavier Rouberg (whom the editor of the
Arras Nightwatchman’s Review
described as the John the Baptist of the new literary movement) were accompanied by contributions from Jules Defoe: an essay in the
Review
and a poem in the
Gazette
. In a jerky and ferocious style, the essay argued that literature should be written by non-literary people, just as politics should be and indeed was being taken over by non-politicians, as the author was delighted to observe. The corresponding revolution in writing, Defoe went on to say, would, in a sense, abolish literature itself. When poetry is written by non-poets and read by non-readers. Any one of them could have written it, I thought. Rouberg perhaps (except for the style, which was totally different: Rouberg, you could tell, was old; once elegant, now he was ironic and venomous, and he was a European – literature, for him, was a navigable river, hazardous admittedly, but a river, not a hurricane, seen far off in an immensity of open space), or Delorme himself (assuming that by eviscerating hundreds of volumes of nineteenth-century French literature he had finally learned how to write prose, which is quite an assumption), or anyone else determined to set the world alight; but something told me this particular champion of barbaric writing was Carlos Wieder.