“Mr. Roger Dobson told us there’s going to be a film based on All Souls” she said, to my great surprise, this time beating her husband to it. “Is it true? Will it be filmed on location here in Oxford? Have they picked the locations yet? Have they chosen the cast?”
I had been given little information about the project, still very incipient at that point, though I couldn’t have imagined then that Querejeta and Querejeta’s discourtesy and inconsiderateness would be so extreme that they would inform me of almost nothing—despite what the contract set forth—even when the film was well underway, and would endeavour not to show me the footage once it was finished, hiding it from me as long as they could while it was being seen at private screenings by all their pet critics and friends and acolytes, as I learned from other people. I had had my doubts about giving my permission to their project and granting them the film rights, among other reasons because I didn’t see how a film could easily or successfully be derived from that novel or any other I’ve written, except the first, which I wrote when I was nineteen and may still be my best. It also made me a little wary when, in a lunch prior to the agreement, Querejeta and Querejeta cheerfully expressed the pathetic idea that the characters of Toby Rylands and Cromer-Blake had been lovers, merely because the book said Cromer-Blake was homosexual and didn’t make clear what Rylands was, sexually speaking. “What?” I had answered. “There’s not the least hint or suggestion of that. It’s a relationship of master to disciple, elder to younger, a father-son relationship, in no way are they lovers or ex-lovers, what nonsense.” The fact that they had arrived at this banal idea suggested a failure to understand a word of the book, perhaps even the obtuse reading of a purely commercial mind which, to make matters worse, doesn’t believe itself to be any such thing. The imperious businessman persisted, asking a question that was outstanding in its genre and gave an idea of his immeasurable respect for writers and his equally impressive acuity. “Are you sure?” he said, gazing at me intensely as if by that means to convince me of my error. Given that he was going to write the screenplay with the other Querejeta, I should have thought it over a little more. I could have been sarcastic but refrained, after all they were being kind then to take an interest in my novel and very blandishing in their attempts to persuade me to accept their offer. So I limited myself to the obvious answer: “How could I not be sure? After all, this is a novel and I wrote it, and I’m not the sort of writer who leaves everything to the reader’s intuition.” Naively, I heaved a sigh of relief, believing I had nipped a serious misunderstanding in the bud. I need hardly say that in the film that was finally made and premiered four years later in 1996, Rylands and Cromer-Blake, poor men, had been transformed into two unlikely and rather unlikable and shrill ex-lovers, supposedly impassioned ex-lovers according to what we were continually being told but never saw in the images, who had nothing at all to do with the characters in the novel apart from their family names and Cromer-Blake’s illness: in fact, “Robert Rylands”—he no longer bore his very proper upper-class British name because, as Querejeta the director confessed in writing, she had once had a dog named Toby, a weighty artistic scruple indeed—struck me as an unbearable and odious individual, what you might call a drip, the mere sight of whom was enough to make anyone flee the room. There had never been any misunderstanding, it was something else, and if there was an initial misunderstanding it mattered very little to the father-daughter duo that the author had rejected it from the first moment: the author is insignificant. But when Mrs. Stone asked me about it in the summer of 1993, there wasn’t yet any screenplay, there was barely even a project, and I still had my naive good faith in both Querejetas, though always more in one particular Querejeta, to whom I believe I listened quite a bit when asked to do so and in whom I then felt very disappointed, for that reason.
“No, I don’t think they’ve chosen the locations or thought about the cast yet,” I answered from my high vantage point, the General History of the Pyrates casually in hand. I was looking at the price, £40, a little expensive, I wondered if I liked Manolo R. R. that much. “But yes, it’s true that a film is going to be made, and I know they plan to shoot it in Oxford.”
Mr. Stone put a single hand to his cheek and I saw his eyes light up with a suggestive gleam as he raised them towards the ceiling.
“And will it be quite faithful to the novel?” Mrs. Stone went on, “or will it only use the parts that are more, more sentimental?”
“Do you mean more sexual?” I answered: speaking from on high confers daring and a sense of impunity, as despots, bankers, businessmen, judges and tyrants have always known. The Stones had read the novel, then, someone else’s copy, perhaps even Roger Dobson’s. “No, I hope not, I don’t think so, but I doubt they’ll be very faithful, and of course parts of the book will be left out completely. As you know, the cinema is very rich in some ways, very limited in others.”
Mr. Stone broke in then, in a tone both eager and apologetic. “Gillian was asking, Mr. Márias”—both of them pronounced my surname wrong, making it rhyme with “arias”—“because if they happen to need actors to play the booksellers in the novel, you know, that couple, the Alabasters, well, we’d be able to do it with great pleasure, I think we’d be right for the part, don’t you agree?” He paused for a moment, he was speaking timidly yet vehemently, as if it truly mattered a great deal to him. “Did you know? In my younger days I had considerable experience on the stage, and recently I’ve gone back to it, I played a small part in an independent dramatic production, that’s what they call them, at the last Edinburgh Festival, my son was involved in putting it on and asked me to lend a hand. Great fun. We are also members of the OSCA”—“the O.S.C.A.,” he said each letter separately—“and we’ve appeared in a few films that were shot here, The Madness of King George—ahem—was the most recent. Roger Dobson and Rupert Cook are also members. Acting is marvelous. So, if they consult you on the casting, don’t forget us, we’d be delighted to participate. Though we’ve already written to the Spanish producer, something like Elijah … Er, well, I’m incapable of pronouncing it, something with Q and the word ‘reject’ in it, isn’t that right, love?”—he asked his wife, who nodded—“which certainly isn’t very promising, for our hope that they won’t reject us, I mean, by offering us the parts that are so perfect for us. But we’ve had no answer at all, and we even wrote on stationery with the OSCA logo, if I remember aright. Is it normal in Spain not to answer letters?”
That acronym again. “The OSCA?”
“The Oxford Society of Crowd Artistes,” explained Mrs. Stone; in English, the word “artiste,” à la française, has a more modest and jocose ring to it than “artist,” and is reserved for singers, cooks, dancers, fashion designers, actors and milliners. Mrs. Stone handed a sheet of the stationery with the logo on it up to me, I came down a rung to take it. “The Oxford Society of Crowd Artistes (OSCA),” it said, “is an Oxford-based cooperative of extras for film and television with over one hundred members whose experience covers period dramas, thrillers, the Inspector Morse series and numerous important films, working both on location and in the studio.” I kept that piece of paper; in England there are all kinds of societies and organizations like this one.
“You wrote to the Querejetas? How did you know their address?”
“Oh, that was easy, we found them in the annual world guide to movie production companies. Mr. Dobson gave us the name. Do you think there’s any chance? Do you think they’ll answer us? Or that they’ll keep us in mind for the Alabasters?”
I went back up to the top rung and looked at the volume which I already had at home but was now going to buy for Manolo R. R., and a very instructive and amusing volume it is, because you don’t have to deal with the pirates, only read about them. There was expectation and agitation in Ralph Stone’s eyes, and a little sadness in Gillian Stone’s, she was waiting with her hands crossed in her lap.
“I don’t know”; I was expressing pessimism rather than doub
t. “I’m afraid they may not be very attentive to the wishes and offers of people they don’t know.” I was going to say “people of no influence” but fortunately stopped myself.
It was hard to believe. The Stones not only assumed themselves to be the model of the Alabasters, but wanted to incarnate them, lend them their presence and their physiques if the fictional characters emerged from the book and acquired corporeality and physiognomies in a film; a strange round trip it would have been had their belief and their appropriation or identification been correct, which it was not. And if such an incarnation were to occur, then the fictional Alabasters would become, in turn, a model for the real Stones, who would study and imitate them, though only while they played the Alabasters before a camera, or who knows if the thing might not have gone even farther. Pity that this whole dimension or zone of the novel, like so many others, and, in fact, in the end, all of them, held, from the start, no interest whatsoever for either Elijah or his daughter; I still don’t know what they saw in Todas las almas to pursue it so ardently at first and then run from it like the devil as soon as they thought it was theirs alone.
It struck me that Mrs. Stone was growing sad, as mothers grow sad when their children are rejected or fail at something, they usually love them all the more for it, in vain; sorrow engenders love, I don’t know why it bothers so many people to inspire it. Perhaps the marriage—and maybe it was early and iron-clad—had cut short a vocation for acting that Ralph, the husband, was now trying to return to before the onset of old age or its foreshadowings, and she must have been the most enthusiastic proponent of any project related to this difficult, late, chimerical compensation, perhaps she felt she owed it to him; many women easily feel themselves to be indebted, few men. It must have been she who wrote and sent the letter to the Querejetas, the idea must have been hers. That letter undoubtedly went straight into the waste-basket, Crowd Artistes logo and all; the filmmakers weren’t even receptive to the wishes of their avowed source of inspiration, whom, though he is a person of no influence, they did know, or one of them at least wanted to know. I refer to the person who invented the story and the atmosphere and the characters.
At that moment, Mercedes López-Ballesteros arrived with her customary punctuality, “Freud’s granddaughter,” it was already time for lunch. I’d hardly had a chance to look around the shop at all, my only booty, The General History of the Pyrates, was scant in comparison to old times, and not even for my own library. Mercedes was in a cheery and very decisive mood; she was carrying an umbrella because she had no confidence in the British sun and she plunged it joyously into the umbrella stand; we all heard it puncturing the packet deposited there—the nauseating sound of many soft grapes being squashed. I’d eaten only one, just after I bought them. Fortunately the Stones took a sportsmanlike view of the whole thing, they didn’t make faces or scold. No book had been stained.
We were about to leave, with Rodríguez Rivero’s Defoe wrapped in rough paper, when they asked me to sign a copy of All Souls for Rupert Cook, their fellow crowd artiste who had loaned it to them quite a while before so they could read it. “That’s how we’ll make up for the delay, we’ll return it to him with value added,” Mrs. Stone said generously after taking it out of her drawer. They occasionally sold books that were signed or inscribed by their authors, the greatest and most costly treasures of any antiquarian book dealer, but an inscription of mine can’t be worth much, I’m still contemporary, not even dead yet. They also, with some hesitation, gave me a photocopy.
“It’s an interview with us that came out recently. You may enjoy seeing it, we tell a number of anecdotes. And we speak of you and your novel.”
“Really?” I took it with curiosity. “Thank you, I’ll read it later, it’s sure to be of great interest to me.”
It was illustrated with a photograph of the two of them, hard to make out on the photocopy, he, smiling with a double-columned folio volume between his outstretched hands, she, more serious, giving him a sidelong glance or perhaps watching out for the valuable folio, and wearing eye-catching earrings and a necklace, perhaps they had dressed up for the occasion, though he wasn’t wearing a tie, sporty as ever. It was from a specialized publication, probably for those in the second-hand bookselling trade, not quite as restricted an audience as that of the Boletín of the jinxed Galdosistas, but almost. It was called The Bookseller and was dated August 12, 1993, very recent indeed; strange that they had already made a photocopy when they couldn’t have known I was in Oxford and was going to visit them, entering their store as a distinguished author and leaving it some time later as a literal pinchaúvas or “puncturer of grapes,” which is a way of saying ne’er-do-well or good-for-nothing in Spanish, even if the act was committed through an intermediary who couldn’t stop laughing at her tremendous feat. The photocopy must not have been originally intended for me.
In the interview, the Stones told the story of their business, distributing the speaking parts equitably between them. They had had stores in Devon and in Shipton-under-Wychwood (that name, Wychwood Forest, a place between the Windrush and Evenlode rivers, “a wood that no longer exists, only its name remains, the wood was cut down and razed during the past century, but it’s very difficult to renounce your name, names say a great deal”) before setting up shop in Oxford. One title they always kept in stock, they said, was Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE. Lawrence or Lawrence of Arabia, in some valuable edition. Speaking of the back pains that are inevitable in the trade, because of the constant moving of books, Mrs. Stone suggested that the PBFA (which must be a Federation of some sort, in this case no one explained the acronym) should contract the services of a chiropractor, who might have made a good match for the lady cobalt therapist of Professor Ian Michael’s eczemic mishap. But the most jolting part of it, to me, was their mention of me in their comments on notable clients. “We even appear in a Spanish novel by Xavier Marias” (as Ralph Stone clearly referred to me, without the accent on the surname but also, stranger still, with my original and almost forgotten name, I renounced that name but remember it, it’s mine), “a nice young man who was at All Souls a few years ago and came into the shop regularly. He picked up on a habit some dons have of not seeing women, so that one might ask me a question, and I might refer to Gillian who might supply the answer. The supplementary question then comes back to me. This may go on two or three times. The book is called All Souls and we feature as Mr and Mrs Alabaster.”
The paragraph is somewhat confusing, especially to someone who has no idea what it could be referring to, and I, initially, had no idea. What in God’s name are they saying? I asked myself as I read it, while Mercedes L-B went on laughing and gazing in satisfaction at the viticultural tip of her umbrella. What did they mean, “a habit of not seeing women”? That’s about the only thing I really have seen and still look at, always, both in and out of doors, and what’s more I know at a glance whether I admire them or not: I didn’t understand a word of it. I read and reread it, there in the restaurant, and showed it to Mercedes to see if she understood it any better and would leave off with her smugness, but she shook her head; until I suddenly figured it out. In describing the Alabasters, the narrator of the novel said, “But though he was invariably there as well, I don’t recall a single occasion when he answered my questions or inquiries. He would smile and say hello like a lively and energetic man (his whole bearing was intrepid), but he delegated every business matter or response, however trivial, to the greater knowledge and authority of his spouse. He would turn to her and vivaciously repeat the question that had just been asked of him, word for word, appropriating it, as if he were the one who wanted to know (‘Have we had anything in by Vernon Lee, darling?’), adding only the word ‘darling’ at the end.” And a little farther along the narrator returned to this: “The cheerful urbanity with which Mr. Alabaster greeted any customer who came in indicated that, in his subaltern passivity, the mere appearance of someone in the door of the shop had to be the great event of his day, a
nd the effusive greeting he addressed to that someone its most glorious and sociable moment. For after that, as I’ve said already, he was incapable of answering a simple question or pointing a finger (‘Do we have a travel section, darling?’) towards the shelf that held what the buyer sought.”
All of this, it was clear, had not struck Mr. Stone as terribly funny—the “subaltern passivity” part wasn’t particularly flattering, I admit—though he had made me aware of this by the most delicate and discreet means possible, providing me, through his wife, by the way, with the photocopy in which he defended himself, or defended Alabaster, whom it was now certain he had taken possession of or adopted. The extraordinary thing was that in this interview the Stones were indirectly arguing with a novel, or rather they were refuting what a fictitious narrator had observed about two booksellers who were also fictitious, however much they had borrowed certain details or traits from the Mr. and Mrs. Stone of reality. And in order to deny that he, Stone, never answered questions and always transmitted them in their entirety to his wife as soon as he received them—but I had said that of Mr. Alabaster—they had found no better explanation than to claim that I—not the nameless narrator, but Xavier Marias, with a name—had acquired an extravagant, depraved habit from the Oxford dons, a habit I had never heard of before, which consisted of not seeing women, not registering them, erasing them, passing the gaze over them as if they were invisible or did not exist: this habit, then, would have led me—and hence my narrator—to address myself invariably to Stone and, we must suppose, to Alabaster, two or three times in succession, on every occasion and on numerous occasions, even though I knew very well that Mrs. Stone and, we must suppose, Mrs. Alabaster—whom, for that matter, I did not see, who were, for me, transparent—were the ones who could supply the answers. Perhaps this explained why, during my grape-bearing visit, Ralph, the husband, especially at the beginning, had tried to speak up before Gillian, the wife, whenever an answer or some information was required, so that I could register with my own eyes and ears that he was capable of supplying any information, requested or not, without having to consult her first. The idea was so appealing to me that I only regretted it wasn’t true: according to this, I would have come into the shop regularly without ever seeing Mrs. Stone because of this damnable habit picked up from the dons, so misogynous and cruel, those colleagues of mine; I would thus have asked Mr. Stone—who else?—if he had had in anything by Vernon Lee, for example; and then Mr. Stone, like a madman, would have turned toward no one and would, in turn, have asked this no one, “Have we had in anything by Vernon Lee, darling?”; this highly eccentric reaction—from my point of view, since I saw only air—wouldn’t have made me bat an eye, as if I were another madman, nor would I have made any inquiry with respect to his ethereal interlocutor, I would simply have waited out the obligatory seconds and then, not having heard any sort of response because I saw no one who could have supplied it, listened, very phlegmatic and natural, and on a regular basis, to the final reply of Mr. Stone after his consultation with someone who, for me, would have been, at most and with luck, a ghost who appeared only to him: “No we haven’t had anything by Vernon Lee in lately, Mr. Márias.”