No World Concerto (32 page)

She managed to get there by climbing a hill quite near to a plaza that was once frequented by a famous foreign writer. She’s never read any of his works, but she’s definitely heard of him. Even people who don’t read books have heard of him. If she took the screenwriter’s suggestion seriously, this would be an assignation, but there are certain things she won’t do. Perhaps in thirty or forty years she’ll think about it. She still avoids white clothing, her hair is still dyed, and her dark sunglasses just about conceal her features, but the screenwriter recognizes her nonetheless when she sits down in front of him in the café. She looks at him perplexedly, noting the dramatic change in his person: unclean, unshaven, in general disarray — neglect papered over by good manners and a polished accent. Something’s changed in their relationship. Something the girl dare not confess, not even to herself. Do you have any cash? the screenwriter asks. How much do you need? The girl empties her pockets and slaps down some notes and coins on the table. Tell me if it’s true I was hypnotized, she demands, as if her whole life depended on his answer. Do you really want to know? he asks, knowing she won’t like the answer. She nods. He waits a few moments. Yes, he admits, I was there. I saw it all happen. She responds with a look of disgust and gets up to leave. Don’t go, he implores her, taking her hand. The only person who could take him away from his writing is thinking about leaving him again — and just before the culmination of the plot. It’s a common formula: something you’d read in a beginner’s manual on storytelling. How could it be otherwise? Being hypnotized couldn’t have affected her because she already had talent. All that happened was that she’d stopped believing in herself. There’s another pretty obvious point. And it’s as simple as that, he says. So there — it’s no longer a big secret. Do you know of any dark corners nearby? he then asks, smiling suggestively. The girl smiles in turn, but it’s not a happy smile, her eyes say as much, and the screenwriter even detects in them the beginnings of contempt. She brought the pages he requested. He takes them out of her hand, stealing a finger’s caress. Such soft skin, he thinks, as he closes his eyes and kisses her. Everything’s a game, the girl hears him say, a game of two people’s shared pain. Only a game, nothing more. Do you think I’m crazy? the girl asks him, offering her hand again, as if to prove it’s made of flesh and bone, as if to prove there really is a world, and that somewhere in that world there’s a crusty old screenwriter sitting at a table in a café with all his worldly possessions at his side, everything he owns, stuffed into a big plastic bag, save the old-fashioned typewriter before which he sits, upon which he’s trying to finish his story, having stopped momentarily to take a girl’s hand, who wants to know if she’s barking mad. He doesn’t answer, but wants to know why she’s asking. She lies and tells him there’s no particular reason. Then she takes back her hand and leaves. The screenwriter stays seated, hardly budging, as he reads the pages that will guide him toward the conclusion of his story. Some people would call it the climax, but not him. Though he doesn’t even remember the technical terms designating the separate parts of a story’s arc. But he’s not going to be teaching any classes in paradise; there’ll be no more literature students, so he doesn’t need to know the terminology now. But he can still invoke them instinctively, even if he doesn’t know their names, and that’s all that really matters in the end. All that matters, he says, bracing himself before the typewriter. Only a few pages left, he tells himself, as he considers the next scene, which is set in one of the lounges of the hotel with the English name. The girl is standing next to the piano as her mother, wearing the gravest expression she’s yet shown, is handing her a large envelope. The envelope is unsealed, and the girl shows little interest as she inspects the contents: a videocassette and some photographs. She reseals the contents and leaves it on the tail of the piano. There’s no need for closer scrutiny; even if she might have denied it to herself, she’s always known what her destiny would be. Do you know how much damage this will do if it gets to the press? asks her mother from the other side of the piano. What’s the difference? asks the girl. As long as they manage to fill a soccer stadium, it doesn’t matter if a person sells their mind, their body, or their talent to do so. With the publicity these photographs will generate, combined with her skills on the piano, the girl will set the standard for the music of the future. This will be the kind of music they’ll listen to in the City in Outer Space. You better hope your father doesn’t find out, warns her mother, because I don’t know what he’ll do! The girl continues imputing her mother’s incapacity to see the bigger picture. Not what he’ll do to you, adds her mother, but to that teacher of yours. The girl asks if they’re demanding money, although she has a feeling the anonymous sender has already achieved his aim, and that it wasn’t blackmail, but to expose her relationship with the screenwriter to her parents. Moreover, she thinks she knows exactly who the anonymous sender is. The number of possible suspects wouldn’t exactly fill a soccer stadium. Her mother’s called the Principal of the Scholastic Institute to alert her of the situation. But if there’s no blackmail, there’s no point in getting worked up, says the girl. Her mother wants to know how long the relationship’s been going on. The girl says she hasn’t been keeping track — a year, perhaps. They’re going to fire him, her mother says, taking a few steps around the piano, thinking out loud, without looking at her daughter. He’ll probably never be able to teach again. His reputation will be ruined. What I don’t know is what to do with you, she says, stopping and looking back at the girl. How could you have done such a thing? A few moments go by, adding tension to the scene. If it was for money, all you had to do was ask. The girl smiles archly, but her mother keeps her eyes fixed on her. If it wasn’t for money then what was it? The girl doesn’t answer. What was it? her mother insists. You wouldn’t understand, the girl says at last. Her mother assures her she’ll do her best to understand. The girl walks away from the piano and goes to the window. The day’s become misty, but she can just make out a bridge overlooking the river. It was just a game, she says. A game? With him? But he’s a grown man! The girl turns to look at her mother and smiles mischievously again, because she knows it gets on her nerves. No, a game with your favorite musicians: the young conductor and brilliant composer. At night, while the screenwriter heads back to the bridge to get some sleep, he thinks about the pages the girl’s been sending him. If anything, it’s still a little vague in places, he thinks. She needs to make more explicit the link between the aliens and the No World. He rummages through some garbage and eats a piece of stale bread and a half-eaten apple someone else discarded. After exploring the bin to its very bottom, he manages to find a newspaper, so he goes to the nearest streetlight to sit down and read.

As he did the day before, the screenwriter walks the streets begging for change that he then spends on sandwiches and coffee. He goes to the fountain in the plaza to get a drink of water and then goes into the café to sit at his table and continue writing. The waitress occasionally pauses at his table to contemplate his furious, almost deranged expression as he types. He can’t keep going like this, she warns. He only asks for two more days, as if he was requesting an extension, two more days and he’ll be finished. Then he can roll over and die. To die peacefully, violently, perhaps indifferently. . he’s not sure which adjective applies. The waitress watches him closely as he says these words. She smiles at him. The screenwriter still feels quite distant from her, and yet the connection between them has never been closer, and although his face is haggard, piteous, he manages to smile back at her. He writes without stopping, until midday, when the girl pays him a visit. She’s wearing a wig this time, because she once again thinks they’re following her. She’s carrying more pages with her. They’re the last, she says. The screenwriter acknowledges to himself he’s nearing the end of the script, the end of love, the end of life perhaps. Will you be back? he asks her. She says no. She’ll be going back home as soon as possible. The screenwriter would have liked to start a new life with her, to have conquered every adversity with her, to have created something he’s never managed to create. The girl sits on the other side of the table, of the typewriter, listening to him say these things once more. I never promised you anything, she says. Then all that’s left for him to do is croak at his writing desk. Die with his boots on. He murmurs something incoherently about the time he has left, before asking her what day it is. Wednesday the thirty-first, she says, and the screenwriter gets lost in his usual reverie, imagining the two of them just barely scraping by together, but still happy since they’re together, on some faraway beach, dealing with life’s adversities by making love all day and all night until they expire. There are two ways to die with one’s boots on, he assures her, making love or writing. Then why die on some faraway beach? she asks him, implying he can die making love or writing in any old place. The screenwriter starts going over the pages she’s brought him. There are only a few of them, but they’re crucial, indispensable. They mean everything, actually. Then, without looking up, he asks her to wait another day or two before abandoning him and the neighboring country’s capital. Yes, they mean everything, he mumbles. They mean the story has come full circle. Are the circles concentric or spiral? Oh, what does it matter? The screenwriter’s words are becoming intelligible only to himself. So the girl gets up and leaves him to his musings; leaves him as she begins to doubt his sanity, turning to give him one last look before leaving the café terrace. The scene ends with a distant shot of the screenwriter sitting alone in the corner, talking to himself, although it looks like he’s mouthing the words he’s typing in his almost furious derangement on the typewriter.

It’s an old discussion we revisit on occasion: “let’s imagine twelve-tone music had never been invented,” except now pertaining to literature. The girl’s father dismisses it as a mere catchphrase of hers and her friends, something they repeat insistently, but which has little to do with any real concerns. The girl watches him from the small dining area of the apartment while he dresses at the foot of the bed. Consider, he says, the author who writes about solitude, jealousy, and the passage of time; or the writer who revolutionized twentieth-century literature. No other writers have contributed as much as these, which is why we can’t describe any others with these same epithets. It’s not for our sakes they became great writers, nor for the sake of the market. The girl watches him with great interest as he takes the gun from the holster that’s hanging from the bedpost, clicks off the safety, and returns it to the holster again. They’re important for other reasons than just being great storytellers, he continues. Perhaps neither was the best storyteller there ever was, and perhaps neither had the greatest skill as a writer, or maybe one of them did, but the point is that’s not why we remember them, he says as he takes his jacket from the back of a chair and dons it before the mirror. He looks sideways at his daughter. Let me see if I can explain. The girl takes a seat. Their contribution was not necessarily different in degree, but rather in kind, to what had come before. And so considerable was their contribution, they couldn’t be thought of as mere exponents of some ephemeral movement, members of a literary circle preaching some common aesthetic gospel. What they did went beyond the mere quibbling flimflam of coffeehouse cabals. Their achievement was to look farther than even the political flimflam dividing nations. The girl’s father says all this standing at the door, getting ready to go. That’s why they’re the only two writers with these particular epithets. Then he excuses himself because he’s in a hurry, and the girl’s left alone with her thoughts. To write. Contribute something new. Hypnosis. She walks around the room, looks at herself in the mirror. She doesn’t smoke habitually, but she lights a cigarette and looks out the window at a nondescript landscape. She certainly prefers the view from the hotel in front of the Grand Central Station. She sits in front of the laptop and resolves to write, to conquer the paralysis she believes was visited on her by the hypnotist. She still can’t accept that a mere change of mindset is all she needs to break the spell. She dabbles without success with one of the scenes featuring the old philosophy professor. Perhaps she should write the ending first; she has a good idea how her story’s going to end. Bad idea, she says to herself. Nothing that starts badly can be expected to end well. Perhaps she should change her approach. If she could write with the same daring, the same ingenuity she displayed at the piano. . if her writing was different, in degree and kind, to use her father’s words. . perhaps that’s what’s been missing, she thinks while trying to ignore the persistent ringing of the telephone. Her mother wants to know if she’s alone. She’s always alone. Her father’s still conducting his vigils, although she doesn’t know where they are this time. Her mother wants a meeting with her old teacher. But what’s the point? the girl asks. Her mother says, although unconvincingly, that she wants to come to a financial agreement with him. The girl doesn’t think it will be necessary. The mother then insists, but the girl refuses to comply with her. There’s no point, she says. There is a point, says her mother, and I have to see him. Why do you
have
to see him? Because he’s murdered his wife, her mother confesses. He gave her a horrible death. How? the girl asks. He tied her to a bed and just left her there to die. The girl gives her mother the address of the hotel where she used to visit him. He checked out of there days ago, says her mother, or rather, was kicked out for starting a fracas with a neighbor. The old teacher’s been keeping a pretty big secret, perhaps it’s more than one, thinks the girl, smirking, on entering the police station with her mother. The whole world has its secrets. Some people may not even be aware of the secrets they harbor. Perhaps we’re aliens without knowing it. But then that wouldn’t be a true secret, she considers, for a secret is something we deliberately conceal from others. One of the police officers shows them photographs of the screenwriter’s wife. There’s a passport photo, but mostly shots of the crime scene. Is it possible her death was part of some game? asks the officer. As far as she knows, the game only ends once the young conductor climbs into her mother’s bed, replies the girl. Her mother slaps her, humiliated. The girl looks back to the police officer. Apparently the game has already ended, she says coldly. Her mother moves away and takes a seat behind them, the shot blurring her in the background to focus on the girl and police officer. Who found her? she asks. Her son, he says. The girl is shaking when she gets back to the apartment. Her father’s still out, and she resolves to write the scene. Hypnosis is no longer a concern. The only thing that has her in a trance is the knowledge that someone so close to her could be capable of something so cruel. The game continues. Indeed, perhaps there are only two people in the world who know this to be true, that the game still lacks an ending. The girl gets down to work, finally exorcised of her obsession with hypnosis, of her self-doubt, or whatever it was that paralyzed her before. As novels with various stories moving in parallel must bring them all to an end, so it is with the game, and very few players seem to realize the difficulty of dealing with so many interrelated stories that diverge from one another and get lost before finally discovering their own endings. She’s now writing a scene she’s been struggling with for some time: the one in which the old professor’s arguing with his wife about the anonymous letter, about his relationship with the female student, with all the mutual threats, and the screaming and shouting. She thinks about the scene, not knowing how to approach it. It’s not the right words she lacks, but a focus for the scene, a resolution, and nothing that comes to mind strikes her as very original. She does have a clear image of the old guy in her mind, though, sitting in front of the bed, drained, as if after a great ordeal, looking at his wife as she slowly regains consciousness. She moves her mouth to say something, but finds her words are muffled by a gag. The discovery brings her to like a splash of cold water, and her eyes become as expressive as they’ve ever been — darting here and there, trying to take in everything around her, to ascertain whether he’s really followed through on his threats, and on discovering he has, as if trying to escape the fleshy tether binding them to the woman’s sockets. He watches her to ensure she’s properly secured. Then, without saying a word, gets up and goes. The girl lights a cigarette and leans out the window to smoke it. She’s not looking at anything, but her mind’s eye is focused on that image of the woman lying dead in the bed, for she’s entranced by the notion that the old guy committed such a despicable crime. He probably justified it by convincing himself she was an alien. How else could he have eased his conscience, been able to live with himself? Then she wonders if, years later, in the City in Outer Space, while seated on a chair in the control room, looking through the windows at the stars, the old professor could deal with the return of those memories; if, between dreams, while stumbling through deserted streets, familiar to him because he sees them daily, because the ravages of war have endowed each with its own unique aspect, he’ll be hoping for something to happen, something he’s been waiting for years to happen, a resolution, something for which the hope becomes an end in itself to make his situation more tolerable, so he can make sense of it. The girl writes: “When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The
riddle
does not exist.” This isn’t the ending, but the end’s right there. It’s always been there. Just a few more lines.

The essence of construction, recalls the screenwriter, is for the builder to have the outcome in mind before he begins, and then to proceed upward, step by step. He feels he’s only a few steps away. He’s had more than enough time to read about it in the girl’s
No World
and then write it down. His only regret is that he didn’t figure it out a lot sooner. He’s come up with the endings in the same way as someone who feels he’s finally understood the rules of a game, gained control of the board. He’s even read about how he’s going to die, although perhaps he’s always known how this would happen, he thinks, smiling. Still, he’s left with a bittersweet feeling inside. A bittersweet work: that’s what she’s written: a mixture of flavors, though nothing to do with dodecaphony. He’s not sure if her work is good or bad, for he’s lost the aesthetic distance he needs to make this judgment. Neither good nor bad, just a reality that repeats itself, he says, before proceeding with his bittersweet result, a result that may not be expressible in such language, that may have nothing to do with his own language, that sounds strange, foreign, that may be better expressed in another language, the language in which masterpieces are most often written. Who better than the author of jealousy and lost time to announce at the end of a novel to those who deemed him an invalid, incapable of completing a monumental work, that the story has come full circle, closing in on itself, that the work is the place where criticism begins and ends, that the reader has assisted him, step by step, in its construction? Well, this is an idea he’s stolen from the girl’s father. The screenwriter needs to think of something more humble. The recovery of lost time, which is the primary goal, wouldn’t be too harrowing if, in the process of writing, he also manages to recover himself — a bonus, as it were. He can’t decide if either recovery is even all that important — or perhaps they’re only important to him. No one else would care, and they might even prefer a different outcome altogether. Some of his colleagues in the movie business think getting to the end should take precedence over every other concern the writer might have during the writing of his story. The screenwriter takes a seat at his usual post in the back of the café and asks the waitress for his usual coffee. In front of him, a mountain of pages is begging to take its leave, his screenplay imploring to be completed and sent away — from him, from this world. Before entering the work, perhaps he needs a moment of repose to get the right perspective, the right aesthetic distance — the very things he’s never bothered about, which he never thought mattered. At the end of the day, all that matters is to be in the moment. After making a last call from the café telephone, he returns to his table and lights a cigarette. “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills,” he whispers to himself. The beginning of a novel the girl’s father would surely recognize. The screenwriter doesn’t know why, but the words are reassuring. “I had a farm. .” he repeats, imagining the girl’s father speaking them, taking another look outside the café: at the plaza and the fountain, at the people walking back and forth, at the tables and chairs on the terrace withstanding the passage of hours and days, and he takes his first drag, long and deep, and waits a few moments before exhaling a dense lungful at the ceiling with a sigh, as though satisfying a multitude of cravings at once.