If it weren’t for books, it would be almost as if none of these names had ever existed, and if it weren’t for the booksellers who time and again rescue and put back into circulation and resell the silent, patient voices which in spite of everything refuse to fall silent entirely and forever, voices that are inexhaustible because they make no effort to emit sounds and be heard, written voices, mute, persistent voices like the one now filling these pages day by day over the course of many hours when no one knows anything about me or sees me or spies on me, and so it can seem as if I had never been born.
Among those Oxford booksellers were Mr. and Mrs. Stone, of the pleasant and seemingly infinite bookstore Titles, in Turl Street, and thanks to the deductive logic of Ian Michael and to his habitual verbal incontinence, which was more festive than busybodyish, they learned—not long after Todas las almas had appeared in English as All Souls, which allowed them to read it if they chose—that they, too, had been portrayed in a novel, at least according to my ex-boss, whose authority among his townsmen must have been much greater than any I ever saw him exert: Mr. and Mrs. Alabaster, she with a pink wool wrap around her shoulder, seated at her table in front of a gigantic book of accounts, he, well though casually dressed, perched on a rung of the ladder which the narrator always borrowed to climb up and inspect the heights—these were characters for whom I was more indebted to Dickens or Conan Doyle than to any contemporary, living being.
The Stones remembered me well, or so Ian said; he had gone to tell them the story, a copy of the English edition in hand to tempt them with (he may have read a few paragraphs aloud), and though the year was 1992 it wasn’t entirely surprising that they hadn’t forgotten me, for during my years at Oxford I often visited their shop and had gone over it from top to bottom—there was a basement—with my magnetic fingers, gloved to keep my hands from being impregnated with dust, that particular, thick dust that collects on book-bindings. I was a little worried to learn that the Stones had been frivolously informed of the existence of their presumptive replicas, since the novel said about Mrs. Alabaster, among other things: “she was smiling and authoritarian, with one of those English smiles often seen in films, beaming from famous English stranglers as they choose their next victim.” And about Mr. Alabaster the book said, among other things: “he was also a smiler, but his smile was more like that of the strangler’s anonymous victim, just before learning of his fate.” It occurred to me that these observations might not strike them as funny, if they had indeed decided to see how they looked represented in monumental alabaster, though, for the most part, both characters were treated with humor and sympathy, or so I think anyway, though what I think about my own texts is of almost no importance, or is important only to me, and sporadically.
So the second time I revisited Oxford—definitely in the summer of 1993, coinciding with my friend Mercedes López-Ballesteros’ visit there—I hesitated a good while before mustering up the courage to go into the Stones’ store, fearful that if they were to recognize me they might hold my description of those other beings against me, if they had taken it for their own, and perhaps, with pained, accusatory looks on their faces, keep me from coming in at all. I was sure they would recognize me. I brought along a copy of All Souls to give them, a friendly gesture even if they’d already bought and read it, as was entirely possible after Ian’s blithe instigations. I remember I wandered around for a bit, killing time in the neighboring marketplace, and happened to buy a bunch of grapes, I suddenly felt like having some grapes. Leaning against the counter of a repellent butcher’s stall, I leafed through the book one last time in search of positive elements: Mr. Alabaster was presented as having a “certain air about him of an aging and theoretical lady’s man (one whose social milieu or early, iron-clad marriage prevented him from putting his charms to the test), who hasn’t entirely relinquished the coquetry or the cologne of his less hypothetical years,” and was said, furthermore, to be “handsome.” As for Mrs. Alabaster, her “vehement gaze” stood out, but also—oh, no—her “capped teeth,” which Mrs. Stone—oh no—might turn out actually to have, I’d never once looked at her teeth but promised myself I would this time. The fact that they were booksellers was no guarantee of any familiarity with or understanding of the minglings and fabulations and juxtapositions of literature, some booksellers are inquiring and sagacious like Mr. Bernard Kaye of York or Antonio Méndez and his Albertos of calle Mayor in Madrid, but I’m acquainted with at least one who spends his entire life thrusting aside the things he sells, not to speak of a certain distributor who doesn’t even know how to open the products known as “books” which he carries, and is unaware that they contain pages, and among publishers some, such as Gilles Barbedette or Laurens van Krevelen or MacLehose or the elderly Einaudi, are extremely cultured and even erudite, but I’ve also dealt with others who, if not illiterate, had only an elementary grasp of five languages and chit-chatted in a kind of international pidgin lingo, which was all their vocabulary would permit. Few people are better qualified than the professors of Oxford University to understand what a novel is and not impose responsibilities on it, and yet two or three of them had had rather primitive reactions to mine; there are never any guarantees. I thought about leaning against the counter of an eggseller’s stall to write an affectionate inscription to the Stones and, in passing, accidentally break a couple of eggs, getting myself covered in white and yolk and thus inspiring them with pity when I walked into their bookstore a sorry sight, dripping with languid liquid, but I quickly gave up the idea, they’d worry about my dirtying their floor or their books and would greet me with even more forbidding countenances; Mercedes L.-B., whom I’d arranged to meet a little later at Titles, would laugh at me wholeheartedly, and furthermore I was carrying my grapes wrapped in a paper cone and the possible mixture of liquids would be too unpalatable an ooze. I wrote out their inscription, which was sincere but quite smarmy, at a less risky counter (a disgusting fishmonger’s stall) and made with slow footsteps for the store and my ordeal.
I walked in, concealing my face a little behind my high paper cone, and there, as ever, was Mrs. Stone, her glasses slipping halfway down her nose, scrutinizing the screen of the closed-circuit (black and white) television by which they kept watch on the suspicious characters who went down to rummage in the basement; in my day I’d been one of the most persistent. In their possession of this modern device the Stones did coincide with the Alabasters, and this was undoubtedly the principal fact that guided Ian Michael in his meddling inquiries and daring conjectures. I didn’t see Mr. Stone for the moment and regretted it, since, in my final, terrified inspection of the book, I had found more favorable comments on his false Alabaster twin than on hers. Mrs. Stone raised her eyes when she heard the bell, but said nothing, no doubt she thought it was up to me to make the first move. I did so immediately, calling her by her name, “How are you, Mrs. Stone? I don’t know whether you remember me.” She looked hesitant for a moment, as if she were trying to recall my name, and then with the contrived stutter that is characteristic of many Oxford residents, said “Oh yes, yes, the Spanish gentleman.” And she pointed her hand towards me, palm up. “Mr. Márias” (accent on the first syllable), “Márias, isn’t it?” When she smiled, without malice, I took advantage of the opportunity to note the condition of her teeth; they appeared to be the genuine article, which was a source of some relief.
After we had exchanged another phrase or two, I asked after her husband. “Is Mr. Stone not here? I’ve brought something for both of you.”
“You’re most kind; tell me, what is it?” she asked, or ordered, almost, unable to contain herself. But she immediately rectified her tone and added, “Yes, Ralph is downstairs, I’ll call him. Ralph, love! Would you be so kind as to come up here a moment!” she shouted, her firm voice projecting down the stairs. “The Spanish gentleman is here, Mr. Márias! He’s brought a gift for us from Spain!”
If Ralph Stone—I’d never known his first name before—was in the basem
ent then it was he his wife was watching on the screen, or perhaps only contemplating or admiring; they seemed fond of each other and the most difficult and desirable thing in a marriage is managing sometimes to see the other person as new and unknown, the television screen may have helped. At least they didn’t communicate between floors with an intercom or walkie-talkie, out and over, or the other way, over and out.
Mr. Stone appeared immediately, bounding athletically up the steps, almost too quickly, as if he’d been posted at the foot of the stairway listening to whatever was said up above. He held out his right hand to me with a smile that was also athletic and open and seemed to promise that he bore me no rancor. After a minimal exchange of superfluous information (everything just the same, in his regard), I handed them my novel in the English edition published by the Harvill Press, with a studied gesture of hesitation. “Well, my present is not from Spain, exactly,” I felt obliged to apologize. “In any case, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it. I’ve brought you a copy, and took the liberty of inscribing it for you.”
“Oh yes, of course, we’re selling it, and none too badly,” answered Mr. Stone, just ahead of Mrs. Stone who was left with her mouth open for a second, I stole another look at her lovely teeth. “But we don’t have our own copy, this is marvelous, it’s so extremely kind of you to have thought of us. Thank you, thank you. Look, Gillian, love,” he said, passing the book to his wife after having read the inscription or flattery.
I hadn’t known, either, that she was named Gillian. I couldn’t conceal my surprise; the Stones didn’t sell new books, there was never anything there that could be acquired easily in an ordinary bookstore.
“Selling it?” I said, “How’s that? It only came out a few months ago and as far as I know you only accept books of the dusty genre, I mean, books that have been ennobled by the slow and majestuous dust of time.”
Mrs. Stone laughed, which gave Mr. Stone the chance to break in ahead of her. “Yes, of course, that’s true, true. But this is a very special case, isn’t it? There’s a basis, a certain attraction to our selling it here, don’t you think? So I bought a few copies at Blackwell’s (publishers don’t generally fill orders for us, naturally, since we’ve nothing to do with them) and there we have them, didn’t you see them in the window? We’ve sold at least four or five.”
I hadn’t paid any attention to the window before I came in. Four or five copies must have seemed like a lot to people used to dealing in rare or out of print books that appear only one at time, with luck, and who almost never had more than one copy of any given title in stock, or not in the same edition, anyway. And there was no doubt about it, Mr. Stone had to be alluding to the Alabasters. “Dear God,” I thought, “the Stones assume they are the Alabasters, therefore they think it’s funny to sell in their store a novel that, according to them, speaks of them and of their store, in which they are now selling this novel that speaks of them. But the Alabasters would never have been able to sell my book, which creates and contains them.” Still, if the Stones didn’t have a copy of their own, perhaps they hadn’t yet read it and their references were only to what Ian or someone else had told them.
“Listen, could I put these grapes down in a safe place? I’m afraid they’re beginning to drip and I don’t want to get anything wet,” I said. Perhaps they were past their prime, the grapes they’d sold me at that squalid fruit stand.
Mr. and Mrs. Stone lifted their hands to their faces, both together (it may have been a gesture they’d picked up from each other), whether in consternation or fright or because they were abashed by the lack of an adequate place in the shop to leave a seeping cluster of grapes, I don’t know. They looked around, with their hands on their faces.
“Oh, here,” said Mrs. Stone finally, pointing to the umbrella stand. The weather that day was fine and the stand was empty, so I deposited my paper cone there with great care to make it stay upright.
“I’m glad indeed,” I said, nodding my head towards the window and referring to the spectacular sales figures, “it’s very nice to know.” And since I didn’t dare mention the Alabasters but could think only of them, I changed the subject: “Well, I’ll just go and have a look at your latest acquisitions and heavenly treasures, if that’s no trouble. I’m waiting for a friend.”
“Quite the contrary,” Mr. Stone answered, opening his arms wide in a theatrical gesture as if surrendering to an enemy. “The shop is entirely yours, just like old times.”
“Ah yes, just like old times.”
And they were pretty old by now, those times, I thought as, without much conviction, I clambered up the rungs of the ladder to the highest level, the greatest finds often wait in the most out-of-the-way places, they never reward the lazy. Those times were old by now, 1983 and ’84 and ’85, I’d arrived in Oxford during the first of those years and had left during the last, and if they weren’t so old for me it was because I had later written that book and through it and its still unfinished life had maintained my link with the city and with those times that felt and still feel very much present or not yet brought to a close, but neither the Stones nor almost anyone else in Oxford had maintained a link with me, or with the Spanish gentleman I was to them, with my increasingly amorphous and dissolving face which in any case, hasn’t stayed the same, it’s become older and perhaps sadder, as if the traces one does not leave in any place or any life or any person are all embodied and accumulate in one’s own features, which may be the only thing that registers them visibly. I had maintained my link to the city and its inhabitants through my book, as if by doing so I could refuse to become haze and shadow that no one sees distinctly any longer, remembered only barely or with great effort (“Oh yes, he used to visit us, hunting for rarities, I wonder what’s become of him, that was so long ago”), two years of my life had gone by here and normally, eight or ten years later, there would no longer have remained the slightest evidence of my upright form, with gown or without, or of my voice which apparently is different in English than in my own language, or of my hurried daily passage, book-crammed briefcase in hand, through the distracted streets that tolerate us for a time without growing impatient because they know none of us will pass through them forever, none of us. Two years is a long time, and take a long time to go by, yet two years can sometimes be erased as if we had never lived through them, no one knows them or remembers us during them, no one from that time or that place seeks us out or misses us, and even we ourselves can come to forget the people we were then, neither looking for ourselves nor missing ourselves. I forgot the enormous and unjust scar I saw and kissed every day not for two but for three years, in days that were even older and in a distant city that wasn’t my city either, a scar on a thigh. And when a friend who knew of its existence reminded me of it not long ago in speaking of the woman who bore it on her thigh, it took me such an effort to reconstruct the memory and the image that I even came to see a scar on her breast that never existed before I managed to focus and see again at last, twenty years later, the smooth, scorched crater that formed a conspicuous, indissoluble part of the person I loved. How can I possibly have lost that, I thought, when my friend inadvertently forced me to recover it, how can it be that for years this scar disappeared from my treasured visions, this scar that was familiar to me and that I made my own, and whose bearer, before I saw it for the first time in a cheap hotel room in Vienna, warned me of it with such consideration and tact, as if to say, “Listen, come here, look, there’s this thing on me and perhaps you’d rather not see it. You still have time not to, and if you don’t then you won’t ever have to.” But there are things one can’t fail to see once told of their existence, still less if what you want is to see everything, all of the person who tells you, and waits. I saw it, and then I saw it every day, until undoubtedly I ceased to see it and my eyes ran over it but overlooked it, though it was still there, smooth and scorched, and although I kissed it, I kissed it without awareness and without merit—if kissing can ever be said to have that??
?and perhaps I came, so incredibly, to forget it not only because there was a time of mourning or sorrow when the memory was very painful to me, but because on her side the link was broken from the start of the good-bye, or from my loss, and when at last it broke on my side, as well, after long years of concentrated and sterile effort and soliloquies and superfluous farewells that no one answered—as if I were still caught in the spiderweb she was no longer weaving—then all that had happened and had been suddenly became remote and alien, as the past becomes when it does not languish or idle and is not allowed to peer out even once into the present, not even in its most softened and inoffensive and comforting forms. “Oh yes,” she may think from time to time, “a young man once lived here with me, he was from Madrid, I wonder what’s become of him, it was so long ago.”
I climbed to the top of the ladder and stood there a moment, looking down at Mr. and Mrs. Stone from above, as if they were my subjects; they, for their part, had not returned to their duties but were observing me in great expectation, as if they thought a failure to hang on to my every movement and step would be a slight or insult to me during my visit in these new times and therefore had decided to observe or accompany me with their gaze in my quests. I ran my eyes and swift fingers over the top shelf and immediately found a volume I’d been seeking for some time to give to my friend Manolo Rodríguez Rivero, who, for his many escapades, is in no way deserving of such a gift, but who had envied my own copy more than once on seeing it in my house; I often have it out because it’s the kind of book you read bit by bit and in episodes: A General History of the Pyrates, by Daniel Defoe, in its infrequent complete version, an immense tome, more than seven hundred pages long. I was casually hefting the General History of the Pyrates when Mrs. Stone began to talk about the film of my novel that was then being planned by the imposing businessman Elías Querejeta, to be directed by his daughter, whose name, naturally, was Querejeta as well, but not Elias.