Chapter Ten

The heat had turned the town into a desert; the students had disappeared, the receptionists only came in the mornings, the library wasn’t open at night. Nina had already set out on her journey to colder lands. I looked after her house, watered her plants, opened the windows at night to cool down the rooms, and fed the fish that swam about stupidly in their circular tank.

Orion persisted at his circular paths (the parking lot at Blue Point, the loading bay at Davidson’s Market, the wooden bench under the trees, the old Dinky train waiting area); he went around with his radio player-recorder turned on, dressed in his white raincoat and a scarf because the heat was never enough for his icy bones. He greeted me from afar every time I crossed the campus to go to my office.

I was alone, and within that loneliness I needed to make several decisions: I had to leave Professor Hubert’s house at the end of the month, pack up my things, and make up my mind whether to go back to Buenos Aires or accept the offer to spend a semester in Berkeley. I’d spoken to them on the phone a couple of times and put together a lecture, a job talk as they call them, about the use of counterfactual conditional in short fiction, and I was preparing to travel to California with no real idea of what I would do afterward. Meanwhile I let the time pass, going out for walks, looking for cooler spots in the tree-lined parks around the neighborhood, or languishing in more neutral places; the supermarket stayed cold and empty, and you could wander down the brightly lit aisles, fill your cart, and wait in front of the cash registers until a lone employee, almost always Dominican or Pakistani, would appear, emerging from the back, from behind a curtain of transparent plastic strips. Now and then I’d rent a movie from the video section at the public library or sit down for a coffee at Small World. Once in a while Elizabeth came to visit me because I no longer went to New York; the city troubled me with its streets overcrowded by cars and stray cats.

I was feeling restless and spent most of my time out of the house. So I’d circle the streets and shut myself away in my office at the university with the windows closed. I liked to walk through the empty building with its lights that flicked on automatically as I passed down the hallways in the ample cool of the air-conditioning. I’d get there midmorning and stay until night, not doing anything, letting time pass, going over to the little kitchen in the lounge to make myself coffee and eat the walnuts and almonds left over from parties. For several days I subsisted on nuts and coffee.

The office was almost empty now that I’d returned the books to the library, and there was nothing on the shelves but old notices for symposia and conferences, memos, brochures from the Modern Language Association, university press catalogs, one magazine (New German Critique) that the previous occupant of the space had subscribed to, three or four volumes of German literature, and several dictionaries. There were also filing cabinets full of old exams, thesis projects, dossiers, photocopies of articles that no one read now, and course summaries. Years and years of work had accumulated in this office that several generations of literature professors had occupied before me. But one evening as I was about to leave, when I turned off the overhead lamp, the radiance of the lights from the hallway reflected off the red jacket and yellow oval of the Penguin Classics edition of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. It had been there, invisible yet so distinct on a low shelf, and I never would have seen it if not for the tiny, precise concurrence that allowed this reflection of light on the sheen of the cover. Ida was using it in her seminar and had left it for me on that fateful night.

Why had she left me the book? I turned the matter over while nervously eating some nuts and suddenly recalled the time at an organic shop in the Village when Ida had bought half a pound of Caribbean Mix, a blend of almonds, walnuts, dried fruit, and raisins.

Memories possess no order and often come to distract us from the things we want to think about. This unexpected memory mattered little to me; I considered it a factory defect, a design flaw. The absurd flow of forgotten memories troubles the soul, distracting us from our true obsessions. Yes, we’d eaten almonds and walnuts as we lay in bed that weekend in New York. But I wanted to reconstruct that moment when Ida, standing in the middle of the hallway, her mail in her left hand, her bag over her shoulder, and several papers in her right hand, saw me appear and turned toward me with a strange expression of happiness and also of vexation.

Maybe she wanted to tell me something about the book, but I interrupted her with the imminence of our date on the following night (Hyatt Hotel). Oh, the urgency of passion, always experienced in the present tense. She asked me to hold her papers while she looked for a pencil, but why? I can’t remember, I only recall her gesture as she searched through her bag, and then her smile as she said yes, of course, but right now she had to run. And why did you leave the meeting? she had asked. (It was to give her the number of the room I’d reserved at the hotel, I now remember.) She walked away down the hall, toward the elevator, and I stood there with the Conrad novel and a few papers in my hand. It didn’t seem to have been a deliberate intention, but tragic events can cause any detail to become significant. On the back cover of the book was the number of the course she was teaching that semester (COMP. 555), and the papers were all pointless announcements from the dean of the faculty or suggestions from the boy scouts on call about the dangers of sexual harassment (“Never close your office door when meeting with students, male or female. Never plan to meet students for personal reasons. Never address them by their first names.”) Ida had taught The Secret Agent during the first half of March, on Thursday the 7th, a week before that terrible, appalling day. It was a sign, a signal; each of us finds our oracle at the crossroads of the road we are destined to take.

I’d read that novel many years ago, but now Ida’s markings led me to read it with passion, the same way you can trace new paths around the map of a city you already know. With her underlining it seemed like a different novel, and it also felt like a private message. Ida had precisely and methodically marked out the areas of the book that she found significant. There was nothing special in that; she used private signs, little marks, slight indications, for example a “v” on its side (>) or a sign of amazement (!), and in cases of special interest she would write “ojo” in lowercase with several little vertical dashes next to a paragraph she didn’t want to forget. Keys enclosing phrases, arrows, slightly wavy lines, or very straight dashes (as if she’d made them with a ruler), they were clues, trails, and I followed her markings as though reading along with her!

Sometimes I’d get disoriented and lose my way, straying in the middle of the page as memories broke in and distracted me or images struck out vividly. In the bedroom of my house, in the neighborhood of Congreso, I imagined Junior stretched out in bed, naked (but wearing glasses), amusedly looking through the things underlined in my books (the things I had underlined in the books). “But look at what this idiot underlines… Hold on, I’ll read it to you,” he would say, while Clara, her body reclining in a graceful Greek curve, would be painting her toenails, with little bits of cotton between her toes, the smell of acetone… I could smell that intimate aroma! A wicked madeleine distracting me from the pencil strokes (she never underlined a book with ink) that she’d left for me, my Ariadne. Syntax is the first thing that you feel the effects of when you read, and I skimmed along—without grammatical articulations—reading Ida’s message. But was it a message? There were pages that contained no markings. We all do the same thing when taking notes in a book so that later—in rereading it—we can follow the clues: and that’s what I did! I followed Ida’s markings like fluorescent signs along a highway (Last Exit to Holland Tunnel), until I gradually came to realize that the underlined texts were pointing to something.

She wasn’t one of those who underline as they please with broad strokes, writing whatever takes their fancy; instead, through her signs, she was weaving a secret story, in quiet tones, slight cues, like a soft whisper accompanying the silent letters, and I was once more listening to her husky, risqué voice in my ears, her face luminous against the pillow, memories of that kind. Sometimes she would underline a single word, dynamite, for example, and a few pages later, the word cool. It’s easy to recognize a woman’s soul from the way she marks up a book (thoughtful, meticulous, personal, provocative), for if you love someone, even the discreet signs she leaves in a book resemble her.

Guided by Ida, Conrad’s novel revealed an intrigue at once evident and under the surface. An anarchist in London decides to blow up the Greenwich Mean Time clock in order to draw the attention of the powerful and awaken the downtrodden and the exploited. (In the Paris Commune, the rebelling workers shot up all of the clocks in the city.) The attempt fails, but the novel diverges toward the central character (who is nevertheless secondary in the book), the Professor. A professional revolutionary who has abandoned a stunning academic career in order to join an anarchist group and lead its actions. Ida turned him into the center of interest: The conviction (she’d written it in her birdlike handwriting in the white space at the top of the page).

The Professor was lacking in the social grace of resignation: he wouldn’t submit to the imperative of what was given (emphasis mine); he was a rebel, working in service of the Idea and the Cause. He lived in the subversion of values, the way a hermit lives inside his mystical visions, and he had turned his isolation into the condition of political impact. “I’ve the grit to work alone, quite alone, absolutely alone. I’ve worked alone for years.” Those words were underlined with a wavy line (as if she’d been startled by something while reading them or she’d been underlining them while in the restless car of a New Jersey Transit train).

And then, farther along, the same underlining once more revealed the theory that upheld direct action; there was no need to propose a perfect future society, no need to appease the hopes of the beautiful souls; the poor, the humiliated, and the sorrowful weren’t the pretext for action by those who want to be understood—and accepted—by the system; there was no need to demand anything, only the need to attack the center of power directly with a clear and enigmatic message. “No one can tell what form the social organization will take in the future. Then why indulge in prophetic fantasies?”

I remember that I set down the book and went out to walk around the empty hallways of the building like a sleepwalker. The disjointed fragments that Ida was linking together in the novel were forming a fabric that—when held up to the light—revealed the figure of Munk; not the truth, only the connection between two unknowns that, when placed side by side, produced a revelation. She gave me the book before she was murdered! Was it a warning? So she’d known? Was I in danger?

There were no nuts left, so I resorted to eating stale cookies, a square Danish kind that seemed to be made of cardboard. I understood what Ida was pointing to: it was a spiderweb, a net, Ariadne’s thread; and so I began to isolate the underlined sentences and extract an ideology.

Attacks on political figures are predictable and are among the habitual objectives of revolutionary violence. They no longer shock anyone; they are the rules of the game and have almost become natural acts, especially after the scandalous deaths of successive leaders, princes, and magistrates.

Now let us consider another kind of attack, for example against a temple or a church. No matter how subversive or political the intention, people would immediately ascribe to it the character of a clear manifestation of anti-religious hate. And that explanation would diminish the apparent sense of alarm and meaninglessness that we wish our actions to have.

A criminal attack on a restaurant or theatre would likewise be explained by a non-political passion; it would be presented as the exasperated rancor of an unemployed man or as an act of social resentment by an outcast who seeks revenge for a secret grievance. Society would immediately soothe itself: “Oh, it’s mere class hate,” or they would say: “Oh, it’s a consequence of religious fanaticism.” We must not allow them to be able to find a meaning behind our attacks.

All this is used up, it no longer functions, it is not instructive. Society has its archive of spiteful causalities to explain away revolutionary actions. We on the other hand must seek the pure act, which can neither be understood nor explained but provokes stupefaction and anomie.

We must attempt an action that unsettles common sense and exceeds the stereotypical explanations of the newspapers. We must not allow society to be able to explain the things we do. We must carry out an enigmatic, inexplicable, almost unthinkable act. Our actions must be at once incomprehensible and rational.

Gentlemen, our political target must be scientific knowledge; it is upon this knowledge that the structure of power is upheld.

Thus, in this age of brutality and noise, we will at last be heard.

Today everyone believes in science; they mysteriously believe that mathematics and technology are the source of their well-being and material prosperity. That is modern religion.

Attacking the foundation of general social belief is the revolutionary politics of our era. We will become rebels like Prometheus and true men of action when we are capable of throwing our incendiary bombs into mathematics and science.

It was Thomas Munk who put this creed into practice. Isn’t it remarkable that it’s possible to describe a series of events and a particular individual’s character by transcribing fragments from a literary work? It wasn’t reality that allowed a novel to be understood, it was a novel hinting at a reality that for years had been incomprehensible.

There’s something lonely and perverse in the abstraction of reading books, and in this case it had been transformed into a life plan.

It made me recall the readers of the I Ching who decided their actions based on the book. It was as if Munk had found, within literature, a path and a character that would define his clandestine activities. A reader of novels who seeks meaning in literature and then enacts it in his own life. Bovarism was the term for the power humans have to conceive of themselves as something other than they are and create for themselves an imaginary personality. The word comes from Emma Bovary, the character from Flaubert’s novel. Jules de Gaultier (Le bovarysme, 1906) expanded the definition, applying it to the delusions that individuals concoct about themselves. In a society that controls the imaginary and imposes the criteria of reality as norm, Bovarism must proliferate in order to strengthen humanity and safeguard its illusions.

My old friends in Buenos Aires had done the same thing: they read Guerrilla Warfare: A Method, by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and climbed the mountain. They read What Is to Be Done? by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin, and founded the proletarian party; they read Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and became Peronists. They read Mao Tse-tung’s Works and immediately announced the start of the protracted people’s war.

But Munk was more radical still. In the wasteland of the contemporary world, without illusions or hopes, and where there are no longer powerful social fictions or alternatives to the status quo, he—like Alonso Quijano—had chosen to believe in fiction. He was a kind of Quixote who first reads novels furiously and hypnotically, and then sallies forth in order to experience them. But he was even more radical, because his actions weren’t only words as in Don Quixote (and what’s more, Cervantes had taken the precaution that he wouldn’t kill anyone, the poor Christ), but rather had become real events.

In Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, Razumov, the double agent, a truly Kafkaesque character, is listening to a heroic Russian revolutionary in exile, who tells him: “Remember, Razumov, that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action.” Did he read fiction seriously?

The decision to change one’s life: that is the grand theme in Conrad. In Lord Jim, the hero, who in a moment of cowardice had jumped from his capsizing ship, decides to alter the past and make himself into a brave man, just like Jay Gatsby, who buys a mansion on the bay and throws parties, trying to seduce the woman who abandoned him years before. Changing the past, becoming another person, ceasing to be a professor and becoming a man of action. Just like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, the intellectual, a reader of Nietzsche, who out of pure despotic willpower creates an empire from nothing in the gloomy landscape of the Congo: the empire of evil.

I went out into the street in such excitement that I went straight up to Orion and started telling him about what I’d discovered. We were sitting on the bench, under the trees. He moved around incessantly; maybe he had bedbugs biting him, maybe he too had a Conradian restlessness—who was he, after all? My only friend in exile. He listened to me, resignedly and attentively (although from time to time he did turn on the radio, which loudly sounded off the news and the weather report), until suddenly he said, in a low voice, with a few very well-constructed phrases mixed in with other confused and scattered words, “You have to shake off the police.”

I spent several days turning over Conrad’s books, but instead of writing an essay I decided to act, and I consulted Parker. “It’s true,” he said, “in 1984 Munk told his family that he’d read that Conrad novel a dozen times over the course of the years.” The FBI, for their part, had confirmed that Thomas Munk checked into the hotels he used as bases for his attacks as Conrad or Konrad, and he’d also signed as Kurtz, and in Missouri he’d registered as Marlow. Furthermore, they confirmed that the initials on the bombs (FC) resembled the signature (FP) from the bombs in the novel.

Dr. David Horn, a literature professor at Harvard and an expert in forensic literature, after examining the documents for the trial that was being prepared, had testified to “his evident use of fiction to help him make sense of his life.” According to Horn, he evidently imagined himself as the character in a great story. The printed word was his universe.

He had acted with the supposition that no one would notice the relationships between that book and his life. And so, for me, the key was that Ida had found him out while reading Conrad because she already knew Thomas Munk. What was their relationship? Had she known? Guessed? Only if she’d known Thomas Munk and followed his trajectory could she have discovered Tom’s tracks in the novel. Had they met during their years at Berkeley, she as a graduate student and he as a professor? Very possible, according to Parker. There was no clear information in the FBI files, only overlapping dates. And why hadn’t they posited any theory about Ida’s death? If I wanted to find an answer, I’d have to go to California and interview Thomas Munk myself.

It was August then, and I had to give my lecture at Berkeley in September. Munk had been transferred to Sacramento in preparation for the trial; his visitors were friends, admirers, or people contributing to his defense. Parker offered to help; he could provide me with an ID from the agency and a letter indicating that I was investigating Ida’s death at the request of her family members. It was nothing much, a credential with my name and photograph, the address of the Ace Agency, and an ID number.