A MAN, ALREADY ELDERLY, WHO HAS JUST LOST HIS WIFE. Not much information on his nature or on his biography. No story. The sole subject of the book is the new stage of life he has begun: when his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.
In the first chapter the man thinks about the dead woman all night long, disconcerted by the fact that memory fills his head with old rhymes, bits of pro-Franco songs from his Spanish adolescence, before he knew her. Why, why? Are memories always in such poor taste? Or are they mocking him? He strains to call up landscapes where he’d been together with her; he manages to see the scenes but “even fleetingly, she never reappeared in them.”
When he looks back, his life “lacked coherence: he could only find fragments, isolated elements, an incoherent succession of images…. The desire to provide a post-facto justification for the few scattered events would require some falsifying that might fool other people, but not himself.” (And I think: Isn’t that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an “incoherent succession of images”?)
From his new perspective the past appears in all its unreality; and what about the future? Of course, obviously, there’s nothing real about the future (he thinks of his father, who’d built a house for his sons that they never lived in). Thus, arm in arm, past and future draw away from him; he walks through a village holding a child’s hand, and to his amazement “he feels light, joyful, as free of a past as this child leading him…. Everything converges toward the present and is completed in the present.” And suddenly, in this existence reduced to the spareness of the present, he finds a happiness he never knew or expected.
After these explorations of time, we can understand God’s remark to him: “Even though you were engendered by a drop of sperm, and I was manufactured out of speculation and doctrinal Councils, still the two of us share something: non-existence.” God says that? Yes, that being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations. It is a God who does not exist and who, because he doesn’t exist, is free to utter glorious blasphemies.
In one of his conversations this impious God reminds the old man of his visit to Chechnya: it was at the time, after Communism fell, when Russia went to war with the Chechens. For that reason the old man had taken along a copy of Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, a novel about the war of those same Russians against those same Chechens some 150 years earlier.
Curiously, like Goytisolo’s old man, I too reread Hadji Murat at that time. I remember a circumstance that stupefied me then: even though everyone, the salons, the media, had been working themselves up for years over the carnage in Chechnya, I had never heard anybody—not a journalist, not a politician, not an intellectual—mention Tolstoy, refer to his book. They were all shocked at the scandal of the massacre, but no one was shocked that the massacre was a repetition! And yet that repetition is the true scandal, the queen of all scandals. Only Goytisolo’s blaspheming God knows this: “Tell me: what has ever changed on this Earth that legend says I created in a week? What’s the good of pointlessly prolonging this farce? Why do people go stubbornly on reproducing?”
Because the scandal of repetition is forever charitably wiped away by the scandal of forgetting (forgetting: that “great bottomless hole where memory drowns,” the memory of a beloved woman as well as the memory of a great novel or of a slaughter).