‘At first horrified by the prospect, G. eventually resigns himself to his fate.
‘With his new face, and a new name to match, he moves into a well-appointed ranch-house, an estancia, the Villa Borgese, two hundred kilometres north of Buenos Aires. There, emancipated from the perpetual suspense of his peripatetic life in England, he lives contentedly enough for the first few months, reading, zapping the TV, pottering in the Villa’s lushly overrun gardens. Except that there has, of course, been one imperative condition to his acceptance of this new existence of his. He has been forbidden to write, even more so to publish, a single word. His style is so instantly distinguishable from any other that, even under a pseudonym, he would sooner or later be tracked down.
‘G. is a writer, however. He was born a writer, he will die a writer. Writing for him is not merely a profession, not merely a vocation, it’s a natural, now almost physiological function, one he cannot for ever deny himself. And, one day, when he feels he can no longer tolerate such enforced autism, he conceives of a scheme, an absurdly grandiose scheme, whereby he may actually succeed in trumping fate. It’s true, he owns to himself, that, even before the catastrophe had struck, his reputation was no longer what it had been. Reviewers and readers alike had wearied of magical realism, and their disaffection had been reflected in his once fabulous sales. So what, is his febrile thought, what if he were to exploit his predicament to do what he perhaps ought to have done a long time before – reinvent that too famous style of his?
‘Where once his sentences had been luxuriantly long and serpentine, they would now become short and staccato. Where once his prose had been silvered by ripe, and some had said overripe, imagery, it would now be dry and lapidary. Where once his pacing had been leisurely, it would now be rapid-fire. Of everything he had once done he would now do the opposite. Not only would such a contrarian strategy permit him to continue writing, even (why not?) publishing, not only would it maintain the secret of his true identity, it might even be his regeneration as an artist.
‘And so it proved. Obliged, like the author of an anonymous letter, to camouflage his own all too distinctive écriture, he ruthlessly pruned his prose, focusing solely, even monomaniacally, on the stark self-sufficiency of the external world and thereby mining his way to a shining new simplicity.
‘In the very last of the Footnotes, while informing the Reader how he also arranged, the better to cover his tracks, for Apocalypso to be published first in German translation and only afterwards in English, G. unexpectedly switches, quite literally in mid-sentence, to the present tense. He has just spotted a snow-white monoplane flying to and fro above the Villa Borgese. Later, on the same afternoon, having bicycled down into a nearby village to pick up supplies, he hears from local tradespeople that two American-accented strangers have been making enquiries about its tenant.
‘And there both Novel and Footnotes end.
‘There is, however, a brief Afterword. In this Afterword G. writes, still in the present tense, of the arrival at the estancia of the two Americans, of their cod-Pinteresque conversation with him and of his dawning realisation that their intention is indeed to kill him. Sinister yet at the same time unnervingly polite and accommodating, they allow him to complete the annotated edition of Apocalypso by writing, precisely, the Afterword the reader is in the process of reading. And G. himself takes the further opportunity of expressing his satisfaction that there is henceforth nothing to stop Apocalypso from being published at last under his own name.
‘In the Afterword’s closing paragraph G. recounts the very last minutes of his earthly existence. Considering all the precautions he took – changing his name, having his face surgically altered, living a loner’s life in an obscure Argentinian province, publishing, and in German, a book which bore not the slightest resemblance to any work of fiction he had ever previously written – how, he asks his Nemeses, did they nevertheless contrive to track him down?
“‘Why, sir,” one of them smilingly replies, as though the response were self-evident, “it was your style. That style of yours is quite unmistakable.”
‘Et voilà!’ concluded Slavorigin with all the corny panache of a professional conjuror.
His bravura performance, which I have to say it was, prompted still more applause from virtually the entire dining room, in which, as I had failed to realise, so raptly attentive had I myself been to his storytelling, hardly a word had been exchanged for twenty minutes or so. At our own table, on the other hand, the reaction was, shall we say, mixed. From neither Meredith nor Autry, for example, could be detected any sign of enthusiasm at all.
After responding to Düttmann’s ‘Bravo!’ with a charming little bow, Slavorigin addressed the former.
‘So, Merry,’ he asked her in a voice that had turned slurry again, something it hadn’t been during his filibuster, ‘what did you think?’
‘You know what I think!’ she snapped back at him.
‘No, I don’t. How could I?’
‘You know how repulsive I found Out of a Clear Blue Sky. Okay, a lot of bad stuff has happened since then and maybe we’ve all come to feel differently about things, I know I have, but even so, even so, for you to be so fucking callous and conceited as to return to your offence, an offence some of us might just have been willing to forgive, to return to it like a dog to its doo-doos, no, no, that I can’t take!’
The whole room fell deathly quiet. I felt Evie’s eyes on all of us and on me above all.
‘And what offence is that?’
‘The “poetry of September 11”! For Christ’s sake, those were real people who died in the Towers! Those were real people who leapt to their certain deaths one after the other! “Like globs of wax dripping from two tall twin candles”! That’s what you wrote, isn’t it? Globs of wax? It’s disgusting.’
‘Do try not to misquote me. What I wrote was “globules of wax”.’
‘How dare you make poetry, so-called poetry, out of human agony! How dare you say “They’re only Americans, after all”!’
‘No hypocrisy, please, Meredith,’ he said. ‘When you open your LA Times and you see a headline, assuming the LA Times even bothers to publish such a headline, about some genocidal massacre in Serbia or Sudan, let’s be honest now, don’t you yawn and think, “Oh well, they’re only Serbians or Sudanese” and at once turn the page?’
‘Of course I don’t!’
‘Quite right, you don’t. You don’t even have to. You don’t have to think anything at all. For you Americans indifference to the suffering of others has become so instinctive it’s not even a tic.’
‘You really are a scumbag.’
‘I may be a scumbag,’ answered Slavorigin, a hard and dangerous glitter in his eyes. ‘I’m also an artist, an aesthete. You talk of making poetry out of human agony. Tell me, how long do you suppose Tennyson waited before writing “The Charge of the Light Brigade”?’
Since Meredith made no reply, he swept the table with a glance.
‘No? Nobody? Spaulding? How long?’
‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ Hugh said with a soft belch.
‘Guess.’
‘I dunno. Obviously not long, etc, etc, or you wouldn’t be asking the question. A year? Six months?’
‘Minutes!’ Slavorigin all but shrieked at us. ‘According to his grandson, Tennyson wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade” a matter of minutes after reading a reporter’s account of the massacre in The Times. He waited minutes, I waited five years. A day will dawn,’ he continued tipsily, ‘a day will dawn when the poetry of September 11 has become a cliché. I’m just ahead of my time as usual.’