As I was about to say that not everybody leaves something in writing, Rita startled me by referring to an anonymous suicide note. The note simply said, “So much doing up and undoing.”
At that moment, the red umbrella took flight (its remains rest today in the kitchen at home), drawing a strange parabola and crashing against a tree in the Rambla. To indicate that I had liked the anonymous farewell note, with another wink of Gombrowicz collusion, I touched my ear as a sign of approving the phrase “so much doing up and undoing.” But Rita was no longer there, she had sensibly sought refuge in a doorway. While the umbrella left the tree and again took to its wings and started forging its own style on discovering revolt and freedom, I stood there absurdly still in the middle of the Rambla, a flesh-and-blood character soaked to the skin, representing for whoever wished to see the grotesque figure of a madman who has lost his umbrella and touches an ear. There I stood, a victim of my own style, there I stood for a short while, very still, as if I believed that really it was not raining, but a perfect midday sun was shining.
KAFKA, FRANZ (Prague, 1883–Kierling, 1924). “My outer ear felt fresh, rough, cold, and juicy to the touch, like the leaf of a tree,” writes Kafka in his 1910 diary. His remark refers me to another, reminds me of something I heard Claudio Magris say one evening in Barcelona: “Literature may also be part of the world in the same way as leaves are, for example.”
Magris’ remark not only consoles me, but returns me to the world. Literature and the world enter into harmony. I no longer consider it so serious to be literature-sick. It is pleasant to feel, as I feel this morning, in harmony with the world. But I remember a day in the summer of 1965, I remember that day very well, because I think I have never been so far removed from that harmony with the world.
Since, on that August afternoon, the notion of literature barely existed for me — I read little, spy novels, and I still hadn’t discovered Cernuda, I still didn’t know that I could find a warm but sickly refuge in literature, a refuge from the roughness of life — I could not find a place in the world, I felt deeply lost and disconsolate.
I could not find a place in the world, and not for lack of trying. I was anxious to find a place, however humble, in whatever Order: in the infinite universe, in the grayness of the world of work, in a spy ring, in a lunatic asylum, in a family with parents more sensible than my own, in the mediocrity of a peaceful married life seen as a lesser evil next to loneliness …
I had a lot of the sad hero of our time. But since I hardly read anything at all — I was almost completely detached from the literature that would later ensnare me — I could not draw on the happy and imaginative resources that reading offers us, allowing us to escape from the anxiety which sometimes pins us down. And, as for being ignorant, I didn’t even know — how it would have helped me that day! — that this is what I was, that at the age of fifteen I was the classic hero of our time. Knowing it would undoubtedly have benefited me, would even have made me feel — in my sadness — like an important young man, would even have given my life a certain meaning, would have helped me not to fall into the absolute disconsolation I fell into completely at around seven in the evening of that summer’s day, when, in my father’s absence, it was my turn to lock up the office on the Costa Brava where I helped him to sell apartments. On other days when I had been the one to lock up the office, I had felt a special satisfaction at having that responsibility. But on that summer’s day I was deeply disconsolate. I closed the office and looked at the world, I looked at the sea and then at the mountain. Sea and mountain, mountain and sea, sleeping and waking, studying and working, waking and sleeping, so much doing up and undoing …
I locked up and sat on the ground, in front of the closed office. I sat on the ground because I didn’t know where to go. After a short while, a respectable couple came by, who were friends with my parents. By way of greeting and a little surprised, they asked me, with no intention of interfering in my life or rebuking me for something, what I was doing there on the ground. “Business is going well,” I told them, “but I cannot talk to the employees, I cannot talk to the customers.” They were a little perplexed. My father had no employees, or, rather, I was his only employee. “Is something the matter?” they asked me. From the ground, I replied with another question: “Where am I going to go?” A slight panic took hold of them, I noticed that they were disturbed. And shortly afterward I discovered that the same thing was happening to these two poor creatures, they didn’t know where to go either. It seemed odd to me that this should happen to them as well, given that they were responsible and respectable adults. But, however odd it may have seemed to me, this was the case. I felt almost panic-stricken seeing them like this, so disoriented, inhibited and directionless, viewing the world with the same surprise with which I viewed it that afternoon. I should have liked to lend them a hand, but I was not the most suitable person to do this, I was not exactly in a fit state to help these adults, these respectable friends of my parents.
Another Kafkaesque episode, an incident that still haunts me now: the memory of the day I turn eighteen and insult my mother when I discover that she has lent my copy of Camus’ The Stranger to the daughter of a friend. “Leave my books alone! They’re all I have.” I say this to her, and also other, more aggressive things, charged with real fury. Without realizing, I am beginning to suffer from Montano’s malady. And then, at night, my parents whispering in bed, in the room next to mine. The enigmatic whisper of their voices. The almost complete certainty that they’re talking about me and about my angry outburst on account of Camus’ book. My ear pressed against the door of their bedroom and my inability to hear a single word, only the terrible, indecipherable murmurings. I think of suddenly opening the door of their room and telling my father, “Hold on to her, grab the flesh that’s next to you, your wife’s flesh is bound to calm you down, stop talking about your son who’s a stranger.” But no, I don’t open the door of my parents’ bedroom. No, I don’t open it.
I should have liked to have three sisters and to talk to them in Yiddish, to talk in a language my parents could not understand. It was not good to be an only child and to confront alone the terror that the manly resonance of my father’s voice and my mother’s weak voice — like the whisper of fallen leaves — caused me. I should have liked to have three sisters, and for the eldest to spend the day lounging on the sofa in my parents’ sitting room and to have shapely, bare, rounded, strong, dark shoulders that I would spy on at every moment, always proud that these shoulders belonged to the family estate. I should have liked my middle sister to walk around the house in an ash-colored corset, the lower part of which would be so far from her body that one could straddle it. I should have liked my youngest sister to be my favorite and to have a tender regard for her madness, I should have liked very much for my youngest sister to remind me of that young descendant of Lord Byron whom I saw one evening in Caffé Florian in Venice, that beautiful, deranged young woman who kept on asking for her ancestor. “Where is my George? What have you done to him?” she would shout out. I don’t know, I should have liked to have three sisters and to talk to them in Yiddish and not to have been the only child I was, a clumsy stranger in my parents’ home.