Miguel Auristos Blanco didn’t invent these things, they came of their own volition and found their way into the manuscript without any help from him while he sat there watching with restrained curiosity as his typing fingers put line after line up onto the shimmering white screen, and when he stood at the end of a working day, and—like now, for instance—blinked as he watched the sun go down, he was no less exalted and edified than all of his seven millions readers were about to be.
He sighed. With a quick movement of the left hand, on whose middle finger a small tapered sapphire gleamed, he stroked first his moustache and then his thinning hair. As always when he came back from the toilet, he felt both comforted and prey to a vague melancholy. He was spending a great deal of time on the toilet these days; his doctor had told him recently that he would have to have a prostate operation soon. Miguel Auristos Blanco tilted his head, licked his lips, and heard himself give a faint sigh again. He was wearing bespoke shoes of highly polished chestnut leather, white linen trousers, and a white silk shirt open to the third button. His gray chest hair was more sparse than it used to be, but his body, at sixty-four, was athletic, with the flat stomach only to be seen on people who have a personal trainer: every day, under the watchful eye of Gustavo Monti, the former Olympic gold medalist, he trotted on a groaning, rolling treadmill about which he had once written a little book on the affirmation of uniformity, the changes within continuity, and the gentle swaying of the spirit as it moves between exhaustion and concentration. (Naturally he used the apparatus only when he was here in the city. When he was in his country house close to Parati or in his Swiss chalet on the other side of the ocean, he moved in a trance every morning through the cool and the air, his attention focused on his own breathing and on the slowly building warmth of the new day.) The book wasn’t one of his most successful, but he loved it so much that he often read it to himself before he went jogging.
He hesitated. Had he sighed again? In a sudden impulse, he held his arms wide; it was as if he were feeling a sea wind. But of course he knew it was only the breeze from the almost-silent air conditioner.
As he walked toward his desk, his fingertips delicately removed a flower seed from his sleeve, flicked it away, and he watched the tiny silky fluff float away, sparkle in a ray of sunshine, and vanish into the air. Then he sank into his desk chair: upholstered in leather, supple, following the contours of his back exactly, made by the best chair-maker in São Paulo. For a few seconds he rocked, the tips of both index fingers against his nose, his thumbs between his lips pursed in thought. Then he opened the second drawer from the top and took out, as he did so often, a pistol that was lying inside ready: a Glock, barrel length 114 millimeters, caliber 9 millimeters, never used, for which he had not only a permit but also authorization to carry it loaded.
Miguel Auristos Blanco liked weapons, if only as toys, he had never used one in anger. On his sun-spangled lawn in Parati he regularly did target practice, sometimes with bow and arrow, sometimes with a light hunting rifle in front of the patiently receptive round board. A Steady Hand Makes a Calm Spirit was the title of the book in which he elaborated on how when shooting one must become One with the target, so that success is no longer a concern, and for this very reason, one enters a paradoxical state that oscillates between tension and detachment and hits the bull’s-eye. It was not his strongest work, and only years later did he realize with a certain shock that it paraphrased almost in its entirety a very famous book about Japanese archery that he had once thumbed through when he was young. His readers hadn’t been bothered, and shortly after its publication a grateful manufacturer of sporting bows had told him how it had increased worldwide demand for his products.
He leaned down—the chair emitted a groan and he felt a brief twinge in his back—and took the ammunition clips out of the drawer. With careful hands, eyes narrowed and lips pursed, he loaded the pistol, pushing a clip into the magazine, then pulling back the bolt, and letting it snap forward again—something you see so often in films that he realized it made him feel unintentionally like an actor when he did it himself.
The sun had set, flames of red dissolved themselves in the water, the mountain peaks glinted with an icy light, and between the hovels of the favelas he could see the snaking lines of unpaved streets. Miguel Auristos Blanco stood up, reached for the four letters his secretary had selected from the day’s mail (every day he received innumerable pleas for advice and help, along with tearful life stories, offers of marriage, prayers, and manuscripts of novels which were about either the search for life’s meaning or UFOs, plus invitations to conferences in dozens of cities, where there were directors of libraries, meditation centers, and bookshops who knew that this man was so busy he had no time to make personal appearances but didn’t want to give up hope that he would make an exception for them just this once, and extracted the first out of its envelope, which had already been slit open for him.
It was written on handmade deckled paper, with the letterheading of the United Nations, under which was the inquiry as to whether, if the jury decided in his favor, he would accept the Dialogue Between the Nations Award and be prepared to address the General Assembly. He smiled. The second letter was from his biographer Camier in Lyons asking in his respectful tiny handwriting for a further interview to discuss his time in a Japanese monastery thirty years ago, his study of the koans, the wisdom of the East, and of course his first, second, and third marriages; as always, Camier assured him, he could rely on the discretion of the authorized biographer that nothing that he didn’t want would end up in print. Miguel Auristos Blanco paused. He didn’t believe Camier, but what could he do other than agree to the interview?
The third in the stack, without an envelope, was a postcard from Tenerife, where Aurelia was now living with their two children. The house, formerly belonging to both of them, was now hers exclusively, and it was almost a year since the last time he’d seen Luis and Laura. He had wondered all that time why he didn’t miss them more, and to explain it to himself, he had added a whole chapter to Ask the Cosmos, It Will Speak about how we only suffer the absence of those whose souls are not in harmony with our own. Whereas those closest to us who are part, as it were, of our very being, arouse no need in us to have them at our side, for what they feel, we feel, regardless of how far away they are, and what they suffer, we suffer, and every actual conversation with them is no more than a superfluous confirmation of the self-evident. He spent thirty seconds contemplating the photograph on the front (bay, mountains, flag, swarm of seagulls) and the two little signatures, then he set the card aside.
The fourth letter was from Sra. Angela João, the abbess of the Carmelite Convent of the Holy Providence in Belo Horizonte, who asked him in the name of that old friendship (either his memory was failing or hers was, because he couldn’t remember ever having met her) for some words on theodicy for her edification and that of her sister nuns: why did suffering exist, why did loneliness, why above all was God so utterly distant, and yet why was the world so perfectly organized?
He shook his head irritably. He would soon need a new secretary. This one was obviously suffering from overload. No letter as tiresome as this one should ever have reached his desk.
The boats were casting enormously long shadows, the water shimmered blood-red, and dark fire flared in the sky. He had watched countless sunsets from this window, yet every one of them seemed like the first to him, and he felt he was witnessing a complicated experiment that could go horribly wrong from one evening to the next. He put the letter down pensively and took the pistol, his fingers searching instinctively, as they had the last time, three days ago, for the safety catch, until he realized that Glocks don’t have one and that on this particular model the trigger itself was the safety catch. He pointed the weapon at himself and looked into the mouth of the barrel. He’d often done it before, of an evening, usually around about this time, and as always he could feel himself begin to sweat. He put the pistol down, switched on the computer, and waited for the machine to laboriously boot up. Then he began to write.