Every end has a prelude. But it takes a while to know when you’ve reached it. Endings and preludes happen in an insidious manner and later you see their traces in all those moments that seemed ordinary. I returned to Lisbon one November, almost four years after my first visit and the completion of the novel that took me there. In that time the novel had changed my life, not as much as it was about to in the next few months, but much more than I had ever imagined.
Slowly and unexpectedly, the book had become a bestseller. It received awards and a movie was in the works. Dizzy Gillespie was composing the soundtrack and also playing the part of the ailing jazz trumpeter. The boy who was born when I was still writing was about to turn four. We’d also had a daughter who just turned one in September. I had quit my job as a public employee and we no longer lived in the government housing by the river but in a house with a garden in a quiet neighborhood with trees, still in the city but more secluded, with spacious rooms and big windows and a room I could use exclusively for writing and listening to music. Now I was writing on a computer. I still had days when I got up and could not believe that I had the entire morning to myself, instead of having to drag my body to the office. Morning was now the gift of time, a gift that can disappear in the blink of an eye if you don’t learn to administer it wisely. The children now see me every day of the week, my wife works close to Granada, and we all live together.
* * *
This time I took a flight to Madrid and then the 11:00 p.m. Lusitania Express to Lisbon. In the last two or three years, I’ve lived in a daze of commitments and traveling. Success came unexpectedly and probably undeservedly or at least arbitrarily, like most things, and I had not learned to be more protective of my time. What keeps me grounded, to some extent, besides my love for writing, especially the habit of writing, is life with my family, my wife and my children.
Every trip is a hassle but sometimes also a needed break, a nice treat. You visit a city and someone comes to pick you up, they take you to a nice hotel, and then to an auditorium where people want to hear what you have to say. You were unknown not too long ago and now people come up to you after a talk and ask you to sign their copy of your book. People take your photo and interview you for the newspaper and the local radio. Younger people who like your work address you with deference and timidly present you with a book of poems or stories they have self-published.
A few years ago that was me. The organizers take you to late dinners after these events, and the dinners last an eternity followed by a round of drinks at a bar. The dreamlike quality of every night, in every city, was fueled and heightened by alcohol. I would go for late-night strolls after my hosts had dropped me off at the hotel. I was still looking for something but I did not know what, anything but returning alone and drunk to my hotel room. Your solitude, shy in hotels, says García Lorca. Smoking in bed in the dark, unable to fall asleep, I would be overcome with remorse for all the things alcohol made me do or say. I always returned home with a Tintin book for my children.
* * *
I had stopped drinking a few months before that return to Lisbon. It happened on a regular weekday. I had had a few beers around noon with a group of friends. Then we went to one of our favorite restaurants, the San Remo, had some food and wine and continued talking. But then we got a bottle of whiskey, and probably one of those poisonous herb liqueurs that were so fashionable at the time. I don’t think anyone left the place feeling drunk.
That night my wife and I were going to a housewarming dinner at our friends’ new place, a couple with small children, like us, with similar likes and literary interests. From the balcony off their dining room, I could see the Vega, the lights glimmering faintly in the distance. We drank beer, then wine with dinner, followed by whiskeys and gin and tonics as we talked and smoked cigarettes.
It was quite late when we returned home. We were both tired but in a good mood. I felt a pleasant dizziness and did not think much of it. I figured some fresh air on the balcony before going to sleep would make it go away.
I fell asleep quickly. Moments later, I woke up feeling like I was going to die. Somehow I made it to the bathroom. I barely closed the door before violently throwing up. The floor was revolving under my bare feet and the spasms sent me against the walls. I could not stop retching. There was vomit everywhere. I could not recognize myself in the mirror. I feared that my wife and children would wake up and see me like this. My body was drenched in sweat and I could smell the alcohol on my skin and breath. Later I found myself sitting on the toilet with my head on my knees, sweating profusely and struggling to breathe.
Somehow I managed to clean that mess. I took a long, hot shower and put on a clean pair of pajamas. I went to the children’s room to check I had not awoken them. Then I slid back into bed next to my wife. She seemed to be asleep, though it’s possible she heard it all and was just pretending to save me the embarrassment. Before finally closing my eyes, I caught a glimpse of the alarm clock. I was surprised to realize the whole incident had been much shorter than I imagined.
* * *
I would not taste a drop of alcohol for many months afterward. I immediately began to lose weight. My face looked younger in the mirror. It was a marvelous thing to wake up with a clear head each morning. I also started smoking less. Suddenly, I was in a state of lightness and physical well-being that was entirely new to me. I started writing every day and listening to Bach. Billie Holiday and some of my other favorites were now associated with alcohol and I could not take them. I discovered how the mind, free of alcohol, instead of growing atrophied for lack of chemical stimulus, can generate its own euphoria, self-sustaining flashes of neural excitement. A rather sickly disciple of Borges, I had loved in excess, like he says, the sunsets, the slums and misery. Now I was learning to love the mornings, the downtown and serenity.
It was, of course, a somewhat sad serenity, the fragile calm of convalescence. The months leading to that night of agony and shame in the bathroom had been a time of growing confusion, a delirium sustained by alcohol, lies, guilt, the simulacra of double lives that were quickly becoming more suffocating than the life I was trying to escape. That is why I was so attracted, then, to stories about spies, traitors, and impostors, novels about fugitives who fake their own death, acquire new identities, and are free at last of those who are after them. I lied like a coward when I was at home but I also lied whenever I left. I returned after every trip slightly hungover, ashamed, afraid that something was going to give me away. Always with a new Tintin book.
* * *
Staying calm did not take any effort. Some of the temptations that had been irresistible under the influence of alcohol now seemed trivial. Previously fascinating people now seemed boring and repetitive as I listened to them at the bar, drinking water or a Coca-Cola. The warmth and excitement of certain friendships ended up having more to do with the shared habit of drinking than old affinities and loyalties. Years before, when I was still in university, a friend who had to stop drinking by doctor’s orders said something I would later put in the mouth of the old trumpeter in my novel: without alcohol, life loses its brilliance, everything seems black and white. But for me it was the opposite. Now colors looked more vivid. Deep inside, however, I was afraid that without alcohol I would not experience the world with the same intensity and this would affect my writing. I was certain that I had saved myself from a great danger, something dark and perhaps irreparable, and, in any case, I needed a break, less traveling, more time with my children and my wife, acceptance of who I was and what I had, a new house, a life in Granada, a new novel in the works, which seemed to promise and require a new kind of writing, one that was less mediated by literature and more faithful to my personal experience and the people who had raised me.
Perhaps it was possible to live contently with what I had, within the limits I had created with my acts and indecisions, a calm without drama, with literature as the space where I could unleash my passions in a way that I could not do with my life. Do not lie and do not harm and do not suffer. I drank tea while I wrote, or water, or nothing. The brain produced amazing stimulants. And without alcohol the excitement of writing lasted much longer, the words flowed from my fingers and materialized on the computer monitor, acquiring a life of their own.
* * *
This was my frame of mind when I traveled to Lisbon a second time. I had a few hours in Madrid, before the train departed. A journalist who had interviewed me in Granada a few days before had given me her number, but I decided not to call her. We had dinner after the interview. She was younger, red-haired, attractive, with a beautiful Madrid accent, and a quick and sharp sense of humor.
I wandered around the downtown, the streets brought bittersweet memories. Every time I passed a telephone booth, I thought about the phone number in my pocket but could not bring myself to dial. I ended up heading to the train station much earlier than necessary.
This time I was traveling in one of the sleeper cars. One of the attendants approached me with a copy of the Lisbon novel and asked for an autograph. I could not sleep that night. I felt alone and restless, and I wanted to enjoy every minute in this comfortable little cabin, with the warm reading light over the bed, the rhythm of the train, the night scenery outside the window.
I don’t remember my first impression upon arriving, nor the location of the hotel. I remember, almost like a flashback, the clear sensation of walking under the November sun, down Liberty Avenue, and seeing once again the cobblestone sidewalks of Lisbon, the small polished stones, white and smooth like bone.
That is all I remember from that trip, a benevolent flood of light, the sudden memory of the city, recovered after almost four years. I don’t remember what I did or who I spent time with or who invited me. Sleep escaped me that night as well, as I found myself enveloped in that claustrophobic insomnia that is unique to hotel rooms on the last day before you have to leave.
* * *
I took a flight back to Madrid. I was scheduled to participate in a public homage to Adolfo Bioy Casares. I bought a bottle of scotch in the duty-free shop. With great caution, I was beginning to drink again, in moderation, one glass of wine with dinner, a beer, a pour of scotch on special occasions, sipped very slowly, rediscovering the aroma of smoke, wood, and peat without the numbness of habit.
The feeling that I lacked solid ground, that I was floating from side to side, was accentuated when I returned to Madrid. I was not familiar with the area around the hotel and could not place it in my mental map of the city. Hotel Mindanao. It was enormous, exemplary of a vulgar modernism, one more cement block on a wide and nondescript avenue of tall buildings from the seventies, practically indistinguishable from so many others in Madrid or any other city.
By mid-morning I was checked in; the room was very similar to the one I had just left in Lisbon. I had nothing to do until seven. I thought about calling the journalist, but I found an excuse—I told myself she would probably come to the event that night. I probably ate lunch alone at the hotel restaurant. I went to the room and called the house to say hi to the children. Then I lay in bed feeling exhausted but unable to sleep. I was nervous and somewhat daunted by the prospect of meeting Bioy. Some of his novels and stories had a decisive influence on me, much like Borges or Onetti: the lean and rigorous plots, the presence of mystery and the magical in the everyday, irony, the way of invoking sexual desire and love. I still had to prepare my remarks for the evening.
* * *
Also in attendance would be Enrique Vila-Matas and the poet Juan Luis Panero, a big, cordial man, with a voice and laughter to match his size, and a rotund eloquence that immediately brings to mind good conversation in a Spanish cafe. He was comfortable around Bioy. When I arrived at the event, I found Bioy polite, warm, thin, and beginning to bend under old age, which seemed to have recently arrived. He was an elegant man, not only in his dress—English wool suit, flexible leather shoes—but in his manners, the way he leaned in to listen, the way he said thank you. His hair was gray-blond; his eyes were light and framed by heavy eyebrows. Borges and Bioy were responsible for my love of detective stories and fantastic tales, which have in common the discipline of poetry. But in Bioy, there was also the love of women, the implicit vindication of a male subjectivity in awe of women and bound by respect, hopelessly seduced by the combination of intelligence and beauty, vulnerability and sensuality, the concealed, the forbidden.
* * *
I saw the journalist in the audience, but she wasn’t you yet, she could have easily been somebody else. She was in the back, near the exit, standing. She had either just arrived or was about to leave. It was the third time I had seen her and the first time her presence affected me and made me wish she would stay. I only knew her name and occupation. She could have left at the end of the event as people began gathering around Bioy. But she remained there, standing in the same spot, even after the room began to empty. Everything was happening with uncertainty, a constellation of improbable events. Just two days before, I was in Granada, yesterday in Lisbon, and this evening in Madrid, standing next to Bioy Casares, watching her out of the corner of my eye as people came to say things to me, to thank me, to give me books or envelopes, to ask for autographs.
* * *
I was finally free and I was getting ready to approach her when another woman came up to me. She was older, foreign, blond, blue-eyed. One of those round faces that even in old age preserve an air of youthfulness, a childlike form. She extended her hand and introduced herself. Her name was Dolly and she had a Buenos Aires accent. I thought the journalist would end up leaving if I could not excuse myself from this conversation.
Dolly, Dolly Onetti, she repeated. She said she had a message from Juan. Dolly always called Onetti Juan, instead of Juan Carlos. There was no writer alive that I admired more than Juan Carlos Onetti. Dolly was wearing a big coat and a small English hat. She said Juan had read my novel and wanted to talk to me. She gave me a paper with an address and a phone number. I was supposed to call in the morning to confirm, but they would expect me around noon.
* * *
I continue making my way toward her as in a dream where you walk and walk but don’t seem to advance. As I got closer I saw her smile, her eyes, almond-shaped and slightly downturned, her reddish hair, her lips painted red. She said she had only waited to say hi and bye. No doubt I had to stay and have dinner with Bioy and the other writers. I asked her to come with us. The restaurant was in the same hotel. I asked her to at least stay for a beer.
She glanced at her watch and looked around searching for something, a phone. I lost sight of her for a few moments and thought she had left. She reappeared, still shy, but a bit more calmed, putting a few coins back into her purse.
I did not know about her personal life and, for some reason, did not even wonder who she had to call to say she would be late. It was unclear how long she would stay. Would it be a few minutes, just a beer at the bar. Or would she stay a bit longer and drink a glass of wine with me while we waited for a table. She sat next to me because I was the only person she knew at the table, but we were still strangers to each other.
Bioy was attentive toward her, intuiting her discomfort and wanting to make her feel welcome. It was the amorous and melancholic courtesy of a seventy-six-year-old man toward a twenty-eight-year-old woman.
Dinner went on and on, with that exhausting persistence of Spanish dinners and despite the obvious fatigue in Bioy, who had arrived that morning from Buenos Aires. The poet Panero dominated the conversation. The journalist observed everything and listened attentively to the writers’ long-winded anecdotes but not without a sense of irony. She had barely touched her food or drink. She told me that she liked the effect of alcohol but not its taste or smell, so she rarely drank. Every time she signaled it was time for her to go, I would ask her to stay a bit longer. She would go to the bathroom, or to the pay phone, again. If she took longer than I expected, I feared she had decided to leave and skip the long round of goodbyes. To my delight, she always returned.
* * *
I could not overcome the impatience and the exhaustion. I had lost count of how many days I had gone without sleep. There must be a purgatory where the punishment is a never-ending cycle of Spanish dinners that start late, go on for hours and hours, and continue past the end into rounds and rounds of goodbyes.
We finally got up from the table after many hours. Standing by the elevator, pale and exhausted, Bioy shook everyone’s hand. Panero gave him a big hug with a few pats on the back. And then the journalist and I were left alone and there was no longer an excuse for her not to go. We walked out of the hotel. It was two or three in the morning. The avenue looked even more abstract at that late hour. There were no taxis. The avenue was a slope: in the distance, high above, there was a line of green taxi lights.
A few minutes ago time seemed to be standing still, frozen in that never-ending dinner. Now time was running out and all we had were the few steps to the taxi line, the moment when she got in a car and was finally on her way home, to whom and where I did not know. She would then disappear from my life as abruptly as she had materialized in the auditorium, in the background, beyond the crowd, where her beauty and the wry smile stood out, just like at the restaurant table, following the conversations like a stealthy cat, examining everything without making a sound.
She was quick and precise in her judgment, critical without cruelty, effortlessly sophisticated, and at ease in what she said and what she liked, films or songs or books, but with no use for solemnity or reverence. She moved with the wondering grace of someone who is fully in the world, like a child at a fair, possessed of the hard-earned dignity that comes with managing to live and work in a city like Madrid. She was in her own time, indifferent to the latest fashions. Her mane of red hair, her face like a silent film actress from the 1920s, bare nails, a pair of Walkman headphones, short boots, fitted trousers, Mickey Mouse socks. I was surprised by how strongly I desired her. At the last possible second, as we stood by the taxi, I took a deep breath and said, almost in a whisper: “I would like you to stay with me.”
* * *
I remember a soft light forming large shadows in the room and outlining the contours of your naked body. Hours went by, but it was still night outside our window and across all those roofs and balconies, that abstract city that somehow was the same Madrid of just a few hours ago. It all felt so new under that light—the city, my confusion, my gratitude at having met you. It was a night without tomorrow or yesterday, in a room beyond the reach of the world, a moment of sweetness and vulnerability, our eyes staring into the other’s, and our faces so close, so unknown, so amazing, so secret, the face that no one else will see.
* * *
Between dreams I saw you get up and walk naked across the darkened room. I heard the shower and then I saw you come out in silence, gather your clothes from the floor, and quickly dress. You whispered something in my ear and kissed me. Then you turned off the night lamp. I slept so deeply that night and had the most vivid dreams, the white and blue walls of Lisbon, the burning red of bougainvilleas, the morning light of Madrid.
I woke up to your voice but when I opened my eyes you were not there. It was your voice on the radio and you had left it tuned to that station. It was one of those clear and articulate radio voices that can make you fall in love without even seeing the person behind it. The woman with this voice had spent the night with me. I did not know if I would see her again.
* * *
So many things were happening at once, I struggled to organize them in my mind and memory. At 11:30 a.m. I was crossing Madrid in a taxi without the slightest idea of where I was. This was still a city of fragments for me, memories and impressions from one- or two-day trips. I was en route to the address Dolly Onetti had given me. America Avenue. From there I would go to the airport and take a flight back to Granada.
The flurry of meetings and events, the afterglow of our night together, mitigated the anxiety of meeting Onetti. I could feel my heart racing as I rode the elevator to the last floor. Behind that door at the end of the hall was the writer to whom I owed one of the key impulses of my craft.
I took a deep breath and rang the bell. Dolly opened the door and let me in. I remember a dark room and the open backlit windows with views of Madrid. “Juan is not feeling well,” Dolly said in a low voice. “He has a bad cold and wasn’t able to get any sleep last night.”
It was an apartment with modest furniture; aged things, worn by use; photos and posters on the walls; and shelves upon shelves with the all-too-familiar paperbacks, those unforgettable editions of The Seventh Circle and Bruguera. “Juan never stops reading detective novels. Finishes one and starts another. A few days ago, he took all the ones he had read to a used bookseller and came back with more. Since he doesn’t sleep, he finishes them right away.”
* * *
Onetti was in a small room that was kept bare like in a hospital. He was on his side, propped on an elbow, and with a cigarette in hand. He wore light blue pajamas and slippers. His legs were visibly thin. His ankles were purple. I could see his stomach through the half-buttoned shirt. He had large bulging eyes and a sparse beard, and wore no glasses. His face had the bloated look that is caused by alcohol. His hands were long and crooked, only capable of holding cigarettes, glasses, books, and lighters. Dolly told me that at least he was now drinking only wine, mixed with water.
There was a glass with wine on the bedside table, along with a few books, newspapers, clippings, an ashtray, two packs of cigarettes, a bottle of wine, a glass with water, and some medicine bottles. A long and narrow window opened onto a balcony with potted plants and a view of the Madrid sky over that redbrick tower on America Avenue where the Iberia sign turned on at night.
I regret to this day not having written right away every word and every detail from that conversation. The memory seems worn from all the times I have invoked it. Above his bed, there were a few photos pinned or taped to the wall: a female fox terrier who had died recently, la Biche, friends and grandchildren, and his daughter, with Nordic features, and a beautiful young woman with tan skin and brunette hair. She had come to visit Juan not too long ago, said Dolly with a tone of indulgence. They had talked for hours. “Juan always needs his Lolita.” We talked about Humbert Humbert and Lolita: Onetti said that the novel should have ended with the night he rapes her, everything after was an unnecessary addition. Why couldn’t Nabokov be content with a short novel, he said, with that signature expression of tragic error in his big eyes.
He told me about his love for Faulkner, whom I had discovered thanks to him. He showed me a letter he had written to the newspaper, mocking the obsession that bishops and church clergy have with regulating or prohibiting sex, even though they have no experience of it. He recalled the joy of walking out of a bookstore with a new Faulkner novel, reading it as he walked and bumping into people.
The long yellowed fingers extracted cigarette after cigarette and lit them with a plastic lighter. Propped on his elbow, Onetti took long puffs, letting the column of ash form slowly and fall on his shirt, which he then shook without fuss. It was amazing that there were no cigarette burns on the bed or his pajamas. Dolly told me that the thought of him falling asleep with a lit cigarette kept her up at night.
I wish I had dared to tell him about you. I had always tried to learn from him how to write about desire and love, the wonder and gratitude of reaching what had never been imagined, what one did not even know existed. I quoted from memory a passage from The Face of Disgrace while secretly thinking about you: “And I suddenly had what I had never deserved, her face, overcome with weeping, and happiness under the moonlight.” That was Onetti for me: the ecstasy of beauty or unexpected abundance, as Larsen declares in The Shipyard: “Now at last I can breathe again: I can look at you, say whatever I like. I don’t know what life still holds in store for me; but meeting you is reward enough. I can see you, look at you.”
* * *
He was generous about my Lisbon novel. He told me that it had been right there on his nightstand, next to the medicines, the cigarettes, and the detective novels. It was then that I saw my meeting with him in the light of that story I had finished more than three years ago and was already leaving behind. Without that novel I would have never met him, I would not have been there that morning, I would not have returned to Lisbon, I would not have met you.
Graham Greene says that some novels are written with memories of the past and others with anticipated memories of the future. The image I had created of the young musician visiting his teacher was not that different from what I was doing now.
Dolly said that Onetti insisted on drinking bad wines and cheap whiskeys and that this was bad for him. I asked if I could give him the bottle of scotch I had purchased at the duty-free shop in the Lisbon airport. She said yes, with a gesture of resignation without drama. “At least he will drink something good.”
She brought two glasses and I poured the scotch. I had yet to eat any breakfast and I also wasn’t used to drinking anymore. The scotch had an immediate effect on me. He told me the three things he liked the most: “Writing, a sweet and gradual binge, making love.” Dolly recalled a story of their early years together, when she was just an adolescent, and he remained quiet and then said: “Ruben says there are only two things, regret and oblivion.”
Sometimes he got very quiet and terribly serious, with a big eye fixed on me or the wall or just looking into space. I glanced at my watch and felt disloyal. Soon I would have to leave for the airport. He asked Dolly to give me one of his most treasured books, the first volume of Joseph Blotner’s Faulkner: A Biography. Dolly asked why he did not give me the second volume as well. “That way he will come back for the second when he is done with the first one.” But time passed and I never went back. Dolly gave me the second volume as a gift after he died. When we said goodbye, Onetti squeezed my hand and said: “It’s beautiful to feel like a friend.”