This sort of megalomania or eagerness for literary protagonism occurs, in any case, with strange frequency, even when the situation in no way lends itself to confusion or alibi, as All Souls may have done because of the aforementioned coincidences between narrator and author. I remember that one evening a lady phoned me from one of the eastern regions of my country, a lady I had only seen twice, and briefly, once after a lecture or simulacrum of such that I had travelled to her region to deliver, and once in a Madrid café where I went, at her incomprehensible insistence, to sign a book for her, and on neither occasion had there been time to talk about anything personal, or, in fact, about almost anything at all, so I knew almost nothing about her. Well, she called to tell me she had read my first anthology of stories, published in 1990, and had liked it a great deal, including the final story, which struck her as “exquisite”—an odd adjective to use in respect to that monstrous story but undoubtedly a favorite of hers, I’d heard it from her at other times—“though I did understand that it refers to me and is about me and, in fact, is very hard on me.” I’d been dancing the hucklebuck with a friend of mine when the phone rang, and my friend refused to stop or lower the music (she really loves to dance, once she’s off there’s no slowing her down, it was Anna, or Julia), so I thought I wasn’t hearing right and only managed to gape in amazement and ask for confirmation of her bewildering words: “About you? You said the story is about you? What do you mean, about you?” Up to that point she had behaved sensibly and politely, even if everything always struck her as exquisite. “You deny it, then?” the reader from the east answered, verging on fury, and added imperiously (addressing me casually or intimately as “tú”): “Do me a favor and turn down that racket, I can’t hear a thing.” People often address me as tú and give me orders, I think I make too many jokes and fail to command respect. “You’re not going to deny that the story is out to get me, are you? You’re not denying that to me, Javier Marías.” I’m afraid I did deny it, nevertheless, and perhaps not in the most polite fashion, it was only natural for me to deny it, or so I believe, and I certainly never wanted to investigate the matter any further. The story in question is one of the things that most affected me as I wrote it. It was about a vengeful butler with whom I spent a rather long period of time trapped in an elevator that broke down between two floors of a New York skyscraper. The butler worked for the local cosmetics king and his new wife, who was Spanish; there was also a newborn baby girl who was sick. It was the first time that I made narrator and author coincide in an apparently fictional piece, the narrator was me. There were no other characters, so I chose not to find out which one my interlocutor from the east identified with: the Spanish wife, the butler, the newborn baby, I myself, or the elevator. At least she saved me from an exhausting and breakneck living-room hucklebuck. Shortly thereafter she sent me a completely incomprehensible telegram; the text was long and poetical and lacked all punctuation, I suppose it must have struck her as overly prosaic to interrupt the great flow of metaphorical surrealism with one or another “stop.” The only part that was clear was her remarkable way of signing off: she didn’t sign as “your slave,” or “your servant,” or even “your scullery maid,” or “your hired hand”—all of which would have been embarrassing while yet retaining at least some relationship to traditional epistolary rhetoric—but rather, sounding a much more contemporary note, she took her leave as “your cleaning lady.” Which made me quite certain that she had identified with the butler.
Of all the quite random and irresponsible misidentifications that were made in Oxford, the most ominous and objectionable, though not the most serious, was the one endured by my friend Eric Southworth, and in print, as well, two years after the novel first came out. On April 16, 1991, he wrote me a letter in response to a letter of mine in which I had included, for his Hispanistic information, an obituary of the well-known Spanish critic and scholar Ricardo Gullón, who had just died. As I’ve already mentioned, attempts were made to identify Eric with the character in the novel named Cromer-Blake, who was on the most excellent terms with the narrator, was ill, and in the end died. By some fluke Cromer-Blake’s diaries found their way into the hands of the Spanish narrator, who cited them very briefly a couple of times—I dislike the overreliance on this sort of expedient in fiction. But, as I also mentioned, the funereal and afflicted aspect of the character was, instead, attributed to Philip Lloyd-Bostock, whom I saw far less of but who did indeed die not long after my departure, after a long, indecisive and veiled illness. This should have meant that Eric would thus be free of bad omens and unpleasant speculations, but even he was not spared: in his letter to me he enclosed a photocopy of the Boletín de la Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas, or Bulletin of the International Association of Benito Pérez Galdós Scholars, headquartered in Canada, in Kingston, Ontario—undoubtedly a most stimulating publication, it seems impossible that anything like it could exist and in its “Año XI,” or Year XI, no less, or so it stated—with its table of contents and corresponding sections, the seventh of which was titled “Necrología,” beneath which heading appeared the following: “Erie Southworth, St Peter’s College, Oxford University.” And below: “Ricardo Gullón, Madrid.” Despite the official correction, Eric’s name was as clearly visible there as here, a horrifying sight that I would never wish to encounter again without the line through it, and in any case a thing of extremely ill omen. Fortunately, Eric is a Londoner, not a native of Seville or Cadiz, or a man of Madrid with a Cuban grandmother, like me, so he took no drastic measures, neither plotting revenge nor hatching conspiracies (perhaps he donned his two archbishop’s caps for a while and didn’t tell me, green tassel and red tassel, silk and satin). Nor, in keeping with Anglo-Saxon tradition, did he decide to file suit against Canada, or Ontario or Kingston or the Boletín or even the Galdosistas, who would have deserved it for more than one reason; no, he took his ephemeral demise in stride, as his accompanying letter shows: “The obituary of Ricardo Gullón you sent me can serve to introduce the curious death notice I’m enclosing for you in return, in which, as you’ll see, I share the ‘Deaths’ column with none other than Gullón, for which reason it could be said that not only am I already aware of his death, but, according to some impatient or scatterbrained pen, I’ve shaken his hand on the road to the great beyond and we may even have walked together a while, inevitably chatting about my favorite of Galdos’s novels, El amigo Manso, until he took the road towards Paradise and I, let us say, the one towards a long stretch in Purgatory, where I fear Pérez Galdós himself must still be tormented for his many sins. The chair of the Spanish department at Strathclyde called my friend Maurice Hemingway to say how awful it was that I had died, he had just read the news in the Boletín Internacional de Galdosistas. Maurice was astonished, took the precaution of ringing me up to be sure I was still alive, then got in touch with Rye, the man in charge of the Boletín, to inform him of the mistake. So, when I came back from Italy, a copy of the Boletín was waiting for me with my death properly suppressed—post publication, perhaps only postponed—and a letter of abject apology from the editor. Lo que no se saca en limpio”—Eric wrote that phrase, meaning “what has yet to be cleared up,” in Spanish—“however, is what the devil put the notion that I had died in their heads to begin with. My first thought was that Rye was taking revenge for a review I wrote of his most recent book on Galdós by killing me in his Boletín, and internationally, too, but now I’m wondering if it isn’t another case of life imitating art, and if the death of Cromer-Blake in your novel hasn’t been taken as evidence of my own death. Currently, one of the ways North American university professors demonstrate their own standing consists of counting the number of times their names appear in the publications of other university professors (the ‘citation count,’ you can imagine the scandalous mutual favors and the inflated rate of unjustified citations which make everything even more unreadable). I’m delighted at the idea of using a death notice to increase my standing and my sa
lary. After all, it’s one more mention of my infrequently cited name …”
BOLETÍN
“ROMANTICISM, REALISM AND THE PRESENCE OF THE WORD,” MEDIA, CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURE. ED. BRUCE GRONBECK ET AL. NEW YORK: SAGE. (VERSIÓN COMPLETA “FORTUNATA Y JACINTA, MADAME BOVARY AND ORAL TRACE,” LETRAS PENINSULARES.
“ON MONSTROUS BIRTH: LEOPOLDO ALAS AND THE INCHOATE,” NATURALISM IN THE EUROPEAN NOVEL. ED. BRIAN NELSON. OXFORD: BERG, 1991.
LINDA M. WILLEM
“A DICKENSIAN INTERLUDE IN GALDÓS’S ROSALÍA,” BULLETIN OF HISPANIC STUDIES.
“THE NARRATIVE PREMISE OF GALDÓS’S LO PROHIBIDO,” ROMANCE QUARTERLY, 38 (1991).
“THE NARRATIVE VOICE PRESENTATION OF ROSALÍA DE BRINGAS IN TWO GALDOSIAN NOVELS,” CRÍTICA HISPÁNICA, 12 (1990).
[6] OTRAS NOTICIAS
STELLA MORENO (CENTRAL WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY) PREPARA ACTUALMENTE SU DISERTACIÓN DOCTORAL SOBRE EL TENA “LOVE, MARRIAGE AND DESIRE IN THE NOVELAS CONTEMPORÁNEAS OF GALDÓS.”
A DIANE UREY (ILLINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY) LE HA SIDO OTORGADA UNA N.E.H. FELLOWSHIP PARA QUE PREPARE UN LIBRO SOBRE LOS PRIMEROS EPISODIOS NACIONALES.
[7] NECROLOGÍA
BRI[UNCLEAR] SOUTHWORTH ST. PETR’S COLLEGE, ORFOED UNIVERSITY.
RICARDO GULLÓN, MADRID.
[8] PRÓXIMO NÚMERO DEL BOLETÍN DE LA AIG
SE INCLUIRÁN EN ÉL:
A) COMUNICACIONES SOBRE LAS ENTIDADES Y PUBLICACIONES SIGUIENTES:
LA ASOCIACIÓN CULTURAL BENITO PÉREZ GALDÓS. (JOHN W. KRONIK)
EL CENTRO DE INVESTIGACIÓN “PÉREZ GALDÓS” DE LA FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS DE LA INFORMACIÓN, UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE, MADRID. (M[UNCLEAR] DEL PILAR PALOMO Y JULIÁN AVILA ARRELLANO)
EL OMNIBUS GALDOSIANO. (PEDRO ORTIX ARMENGOL)
EL CRUPO DE AMIGOS DE GALDÓS. (PEDRO ORTIX ARMENGOL)
“GALDÓS EN MADRID, MADRID EN GALDÓS.” (JULIO RODRÍGUEX PUÉRTOLAS)
B) RESÚMENES DEL CONTENIDO DE LAS ACTAS SIGUIENTES:
ACTAS DEL TERCER CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL DE ESTUDIOS GALDOSIANOS. LAS PALMAS: CABILDO INSULAR DE GRAN CANARIA, 1989. I, 316; II, 569.
GALDÓS, CENTENARIO DE ‘FORTUNATA Y JACINTA’ (1887-1987). ACTAS (CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL, 23-28 DE NOVIEMBRE). MADRID: UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE, 1989. PP. 669.
GALDÓS, EN EL CENTENARIO DE ‘FORTUNATA Y JACINTA’. ED. JULIO RODRÍGUER PUÉRTOLAS. PALMA DE MALLORCA: PRENSA UNIVERSITARIA, 1989. PP. 110.
I imagine that, his nonchalance notwithstanding, Eric must at least have crossed his fingers as I’ve seen him do many times, however much of a Londoner he may be, and of course I crossed mine, just in case, knocked on various types of wood, and got all tangled up in a string of garlic—I can never remember what exactly it’s for or how you’re supposed to put it on or use it or what you’re supposed to pass through it—and though it wasn’t exactly relevant nor was I having lunch when I read the letter, I threw salt over the shoulders of my polo shirt which for no apparent reason shrank like mad at the next washing. Perhaps all of it was not in vain, however ignorant and clumsy I was in the execution of my false superstitions. Eric Southworth is still alive (though his friend Hemingway, who called him six years ago to make sure of that fact, is not) and his health is as good as can be expected in someone who works a great deal and does not give up the more pleasurable of his minor vices. Still, in the years since this happened, every time he has travelled abroad he’s met with some mishap or accident. He fainted in Orly airport, apparently as a result of a very bad case of food poisoning contracted at a lunch given by the director of the Paris branch of the Instituto Cervantes, and once home in Oxford he had to keep to his bed for far too many alarming days; at Madrid’s Barajas airport he missed a plane to Santiago de Compostela (the airport’s fault) and, unable to go back to the house where he’d been staying—he’d already returned the keys—he had to drag his suitcases loaded with books around Madrid for an entire day since there was no luggage check where he could leave them (our airport, warm and obliging as ever), placing a severe strain on his back, the consequences of which afflicted him to such an extent that he had to cancel part of a planned car trip through Galicia; later, crossing the southern United States, also by car, he and his travelling companion Nick Clapton fell, for twelve hours, into the hands of an absurd sect hidden away in a valley or on a mountain near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who called themselves God’s Trappers, and all, regardless of gender, wore anachronistic coonskin caps complete with fake tails, like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone; needless to say, these cultists went hunting for the Englishmen and trapped them, but fortunately they were neither violent nor particularly tenacious, and let them go as soon as they saw they couldn’t convert them, though they could just as easily have sacrificed the two like a pair of beavers to their trapper deity. Then, in Tuscany, Eric fell down an embankment one insufficiently starry night and received multiple fractures that confined him for weeks to an open ward in an Italian hospital, like the other Hemingway, who wrote A Farewell to Arms. According to his doctors, with a little less luck and from a different spot this fall could have sent him straight to Purgatory (subito, addirittura, they scared him in Italian), and one of his ears was permanently damaged by the impact.
Superstitious or not, in the end I don’t believe that all this is nearly enough to counteract the curse of the Galdosistas, who, evidently, are every bit as international as their Boletín. And though I’ve watched Eric emerge more or less intact from these tribulations and think he’s out of danger now, if not invulnerable or immortal, I beg him at every opportunity to cultivate a greater knowledge of his own country and do his best to leave Great Britain as infrequently as possible. But he’s an inveterate traveller and pays me no heed. As far as the “citation count” goes, it’s a pity I’m no longer a professor of anything, not even a phony professor (I never really was a professor, not in spirit; if it was up to me I never gave exams and I never walked the halls with students flocking around me), for in that case the many mentions I’m making and will go on making of Eric in this book would surely place him, deservedly and to my great joy, in the highest ranks of the wholly unscrupulous and increasingly idiotic university hierarchy.
Antiquarian or used bookstores abound in Oxford; few places are better suited to their proliferation and prosperity than this immobile city where half of those who die possess magnificent libraries and very often lack heirs, all those unmarried men and women, but still primarily men, who spend their borrowed days surrounded by books, with no care whatsoever for what might come or happen after them—truly it doesn’t concern them—when their students, now grown up or old, never look back from their scattered remoteness; no one remembers them and everything goes back to the way it was, as if they had never been born. At those bookstores I have bought copies of books that once belonged to eminent figures in various fields, their pages sometimes bearing the inky trace of an homage, commentary, or difference of opinion with the text those men ran their eyes over so many years ago, when it was apparent that they had been born and were walking through the same streets that now offer not the least evidence of their hurried daily passage, no doubt wearing cap and gown and with these books in their briefcases, no doubt meeting with respect and cheerful greetings from those whose paths they crossed during the time that was lost as soon as it transpired, or was already lost when it was still present and transpiring.
Alfred Leslie Rowse, who devoted himself to Shakespeare without attaining great prestige, made some notes in the margins of a little known and very weighty tome by Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, which few other people can possibly have read; the marvelous Hellenist Gilbert Murray, “Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University” (the regal Professor Murray), corrected with his own hand the typographical errors in one of his best works, Five Stages of Greek Religion; the novelist Angus Wilson gave one of his novels to the filmmaker George Cukor, perhaps while Cukor was shooting My Fair Lady, “in the copy of my friend George Cukor,” was what he rap
idly scrawled; and someone who had been in Spain and may have been at the front, brought back to Oxford the first edition of the book of poems and photographs by Miguel Hernández titled Viento del pueblo (Wind of the People), which was banned and is almost nonexistent (“Este libro se acabó de imprimir en Valencia en la Litografía Durá en septiembre de 1937”; “This book was printed in Valencia by Durá Lithographers in September of 1937”; the publisher was Ediciones “Socorro Rojo” or “Red Aid” Editions). Almost all copies of it were destroyed by la mano dura de piedra, the stone-hard hand; I understand that only six are known to exist in the entire world, making mine the seventh, and all of them begin with the same line, “Atraviesa la muerte con herrumbrosas lanzas …” (“Death passes through with rusting lances …”), and all of them contain the other seven good ones of the “First Elegy” which I’ll paraphrase here; and another, more revered, Shakespeare expert, John Dover Wilson, must have mailed off a copy of his Fortunes of Falstaff from Edinburgh, for I have it in my hand right now and in its day it was addressed to one Arthur Melville Clark of Herriotshall and Oxton, according to his ex libris, which no one has removed over the course of the volume’s unknown journeyings and I won’t be the one to do so, his motto is “Blaw for Blaw,” a northern or Scottish way of saying something every language knows and sometimes applies, “Blow for blow,” I know it, too, and my father knew it even better, and Miguel Hernández best of all (“… y llueve sal, y esparce calaveras,” “… and rains salt, and scatters skulls”), the blows he was dealt were not metaphorical, nor were the jails, and those his lines could deliver were only verbal (“El sol pudre la sangre, la cubre de asechanzas y hace brotar la sombra más sombría,” “The sun rots the blood, covers it in snares and makes somberest shadow flow”); and the poet John Gawsworth gave a copy of his Collected Poems to another poet, the Scotsman George Sutherland Fraser, on June 29, 1949, still a desolate day in what would become my home once I was born, inscribing on a flyleaf, “For George, almost the most traitorous and undoubtedly the dearest of my Dukes, Neruda,” which was the extravagant title the king of Redonda bestowed that year in Cairo on his friend and former comrade-in-arms, the useless Sergeant Major Fraser, thus making him a member of the “intellectual aristocracy” of his both real and fantastical kingdom, with and without territory, another literary island, one, however, that can be located and does figure on certain maps, minuscule and upright and uninhabited, but not on others.