Would that be the best conclusion for the story he’s telling? Yesterday, Chaparro finished recounting his second meeting with Morales in the little bar in Once station, and now he’s tempted to let his book stop there. It’s cost him a mighty effort to bring the tale around to this point. Why not be satisfied? He’s described the crime, the investigation, and the discovery of the murderer. The wicked is imprisoned and the good is avenged: a happy ending, of a sort. The half of Chaparro that hates uncertainty and almost desperately longs to be done with his project suggests that he’s reached the perfect stopping point; he’s managed, more or less, to tell the story he proposed to tell, and he feels that the voice he’s found to tell it is adequate to the purpose. The characters he’s created have a startling resemblance to the flesh-and-blood people he knew, and those characters have said and done, more or less, things the real people said and did. His cautious side suspects that if he pushes ahead, everything will go to hell, his story will overflow its banks, and his characters will wind up acting at their own whim without sticking to the facts, or his memory of the facts, which in this case amounts to the same thing, and all his efforts will have been in vain.
But Chaparro has another half, and a strong desire to be guided by it. After all, it’s the part of him that felt the urge and made the decision to write what he’s written so far. And that part constantly reminds him that the story didn’t end where he’s ended it, that it kept on going, that he hasn’t yet told it all. So why is he so tense, so nervous, so distracted? Is it simply that he’s unsure of how to continue? Anxious about being in the middle of the river and unable to make out the other bank?
The correct answer is both simpler and more difficult, and that’s because for three weeks he’s heard nothing from Irene. Well, why should he? There’s no reason why he should, he acknowledges, and he falls to cursing her, himself, and his goddamned novel. Once again, he begins to circle the telephone, distracted from his book merely because he’s busy inventing a series of more and more unlikely excuses for calling her up.
This time, it takes barely two days of fasting, insomnia, and literary inaction before he picks up the phone and dials.
“Hello?” It’s her, in her office.
“Hello, Irene, this is—”
“I know who this is.” Brief silence. “Are you going to tell me where you’ve been all this time?”
Another silence.
“Yes, yes, sure. I’ve been wanting to call you, but …”
“So why didn’t you? You didn’t have any more favors to ask me?”
“No … I mean, yes … Well, it’s not exactly a favor, I just thought maybe you’d have time to read a few chapters of my novel, that is, if you want to, of course …”
“I’d love to! When are you coming?”
After their conversation is over, Chaparro doesn’t know whether to be happy about Irene’s enthusiasm (and about the fact that he’s going to see her very soon—next Thursday—and about the way she recognized his voice before he told her who he was) or terrified because he’s offered to bring her some chapters to read. And why would he make such an offer? Because he’s stuck, that’s why. Chaparro suspects that no serious writer would be prepared to show his work in such an unfinished state.
In any case—and this is unusual for him—he realizes that it doesn’t bother him very much to think he might not be a serious writer. What’s much more important is that he’s going to have coffee on Thursday with Irene.