It’s midnight. I am in the Westbury Hotel, sweating over the outline for Smell the Flowers. Arnie doesn’t even know that I want to write a novel yet, let alone the extent to which it will not be centred on a floral tribute. You would have thought that I could write a phoney outline for Smell the Flowers and then write the morbid novel I really have in mind, but I’ve made the fatal mistake of drawing a cordon sanitaire of honesty around the subject of my death.
Earlier today I started writing something a little magical. ‘Magical, there’s a market for,’ as Arnie might say. News travels slowly from Paris to Bogotá, but from that ingenious capital it has pulsed around the world at the speed of light.
Doña S was always very particular about attending confession, no easy matter given that she was permanently asleep and lived at the bottom of a well. The Jesuits from the seminary at San Sebastián refused to come over the mountains to our lonely little village, and so we chose my grandmother’s donkey to be our priest. To us simple folk, Eeh-Aw might as well have been the Pope. Once a week at noon we would follow our beloved confessor to the well in a candle-lit procession, give him a bucket of carrots and leave him to listen to Doña S’s seemingly chaotic but highly symbolical ramblings …
Charming as it might be to skip along in the Andean style, I’ve decided that whimsy is not the royal road to freedom, and that I have to return to the one fact I can rely on: that I, whoever I am, am dying.
The trouble is that when the mind is fixed on dying everything starts to spiral and to magnify. Have you noticed how many spirals there are? Double helixes, spiral galaxies, corkscrews. They are hints of the mental habits that dying brings. Maybe if I settle into the helter-skelter of my final thoughts, the sharp edges will start to curve, the oppositions start to flow into each other. I must let it happen, I must soften my gaze. Being sharp is just one thing. Why get hung up on it?
Imagine a very old, very lonely woman whose only wish is that somebody should really mind about her death. And then imagine her very reluctantly realizing that she’s going to have to go it alone on this one too. Join her for a moment. It doesn’t matter who she is.
That idea didn’t take either. Instead, at five-thirty this morning as the garbage trucks outside my window were grinding the detritus of Madison Avenue in their savage jaws, I wrote the following fragment.
Patrick climbed on board the two-forty-five for London Paddington. The pedantic emphasis on Paddington struck him as a rather shrill assertion of straightforwardness in a word-world grown too playful for its own good, as if the train might otherwise be hijacked by Doña S and, despite setting out from Oxford, dive under the metropolis and approach it from the east, terminating inconveniently at Liverpool Street station.
Patrick flicked past the notes he had taken at the consciousness conference, until he reached some more personal reflections recorded at the back of his notebook.
‘Like St Francis I am wedded to poverty, but in my case the marriage has not been a success.’
It was not true. He had enough money to be getting on with.
‘The night is young. I must try not to envy her too much.’
His own youth had been a nightmare from which he was grateful to be distanced.
He was exasperated by his craven need for elegance, disgusted by his own stylistic habits. Was it too late to change?
He only had six months to find out. Cirrhosis, of course. The reprimand of those young nights.
The truth was that he was desperate about everything and he would have to abandon his taste for aphorisms if he was going to get close to describing his feelings. Even the routine unhappiness of the strangers on the station platform devastated him. The feeling raged through him, like a burning rope he couldn’t hold on to, although someone he loved was falling at the other end of it; it ripped the skin from his hands. As he walked down the platform he had felt the pressure to drag bits of dead language over himself, like cardboard blankets on a freezing night. But he remained utterly exposed.
I was too tired to go on, but before I fell asleep I felt the relief of writing a third-person narrative. It is so much more personal than a first-person narrative, which reveals too flagrantly the imposture of the personality it depends on.
As I lay on the bed, spiralling into sleep, I realized that I couldn’t grab at anything any more. I couldn’t even grasp the simplest idea. Nothing would take hold. The chains of cause and effect were heaped uselessly at my feet. Maybe that’s what freedom is like, only less drowsy.