Years later, in Montano’s Malady, I made use of Echenoz’s lesson in the Aviador bar to move the action quickly from a Chilean landscape to Barcelona: “Back on terra firma, I looked up at the cloudless sky of San Fernando and saw a bird go by. I followed it. And it seemed to me that following it enabled me to go wherever I liked, to make use of all my possible mental mobility. A few hours later I was flying in the direction of Barcelona….”
The technical solution of the migratory bird is surprising both for its effectiveness and for its great simplicity. But this is how certain technical problems that put writers in double jeopardy are often resolved. After all, the instantaneous switch to other voices, other rooms, is one of the secret advantages that literature has over life, because in life this switch is never so simple, whereas in books everything is possible, and often amazingly easy.
To return to this morning, having read Proust’s essay, I renewed the search for my copy of Ecuador, which I eventually found and began to reread, suddenly experiencing a Proustian phenomenon of memory when, seated in my favorite armchair, I embarked on a peaceful journey to Ecuador, which very soon ceased to be comfortable. On various occasions an icy headwind pushed me violently backward, transferring me to Atlantic scenes that everything indicated were behind me: unmistakable scenes from the Azores and, more specifically, from the islands of Fayal and Pico.
The first time that this phenomenon of memory took place was when I read that Michaux, on his way to Ecuador, on the island of Guadeloupe, had a room overlooking a volcano (“My room overlooks a volcano. / In short a volcano. / I’m two steps away from a volcano. / […] Volcano, volcano, volcano. / This is my music for tonight.”), which caused the appearance of the icy, Proustian headwind. I lifted my eyes from the book and traveled back in my memory to hear the voices of that pleasant Atlantic scene in the hotel room Rosa and I shared in February this year in Fayal, with its balcony overlooking the volcano on the enigmatic island of Pico, the hotel room next to Tongoy, who accompanied us on our four-day trip to the Azores. I couldn’t help recalling Tongoy as he rested in a hammock in the hotel in Fayal when I read in Michaux’s diary, “Drops of blood fall from the hammock placed over me. This is the danger with vampires, they suck your blood without your realizing. Once you have been a victim, the vampires recognize you among the others and are drawn toward you.”
When shortly afterward I left the image of Tongoy in the hammock in the Azores and managed to start reading Michaux again, another icy headwind blew when I read the description of the climate of Ecuador, so similar to that of the Azores: “It is difficult to establish the climate of this country. In the altiplanos people tend to say — and it’s fairly accurate — four seasons in one day.”
This happened again and again. I would read Michaux, and the Proustian wind would take me back to the Azores. As, for example, when he describes how he disembarked on the island of Curaçao. The charm he notices there strikes me as identical to that which Tongoy, Rosa, and I felt this February when, arriving from Fayal, we disembarked on the enigmatic island of Pico. Michaux writes, “Nothing so seductive as an island. There is nothing on the planet, I assure you, that looks so like a cloud as an island. Each time we are captivated by it.”
So it is that Ecuador at various points contains clear and somewhat mysterious similarities to our trip to the Azores. I would read Ecuador and a migratory bird or an icy wind would carry me back, leave me in my memories of the Azores: a nearly constant phenomenon of memory. As if this were not enough, I would sometimes come across lines in Michaux that reminded me of — in tribute to Michaux, let us call them intravenous—relations between Tongoy, Rosa, and me: “On this last day in the month of February, a sudden wind carried me mentally to my house in Paris, where I spent a few imaginary hours in the company of my wife and a friend, before returning intact to this steep, straight Ecuador.”
Although we went to the Azores on holiday, each of us had another reason to add to the idea of traveling for the sake of it. I was prompted also by my curiosity to see Café Sport, which Tabucchi talks about in The Woman of Porto Pim, Tongoy went because he had always been curious to experience a whaler’s life first hand, and Rosa — who initially was the only one without a special reason apart from being a tourist — also found an additional reason when at the Lisbon Airport she bought a book by one Antonio Caiado—“a secret, hidden writer, like Julien Gracq, who lurks on the island of Pico, in the Azores,” it says on the back cover — and she was so fascinated by the story told in this book that she even planned to locate this “hidden writer” and suggest being his literary agent.
The story of The Rest Home for the Beauty-Sick—the tide of Caiado’s novel has always sounded almost Japanese to me — was the following: an Italian from Verona who considers himself a “hunter of beauty” arrives in Pico intending to find the perfect home in which to live out the rest of his days, but ends up being admitted to a kind of rest home or spa where a series of unusual travelers live, “all of whom are beauty-sick.”
It goes without saying that this story unsettled me, since I suspected that beauty-sick might simply mean “literature-sick,” and I found the idea of a spa to treat the literature-sick repulsive. I did not wish to run the risk and continue reading this novel. Tongoy sided with me (for different reasons) and likewise refused to read the book. He also refused to visit the aforementioned Caiado on the island of Pico. Tongoy is not without a sense of humor, and his fears were directly contrary to mine, he was simply afraid of not finding himself in the pages of this book.
The day the three of us traveled on the ferry from Fayal to Pico, there was a stiff breeze, which did not take us back in Proustian fashion to any strange country, but did threaten to land us on our backs on the deck of the boat. Rosa was in a happy mood, perhaps because she was convinced that it was a great adventure to go in search of the “hidden writer” of the island of Pico. The sea spray dashed against her face and Rosa was prettier than ever, I’ve never seen her looking so good, though I was silently conspiring against her, planning the way to avoid having to visit Caiado’s house or refuge. With her stunning appearance, Rosa looked wonderful, standing quietly, with the sea spray in her face. “Ocean,” writes Michaux, “what a beautiful toy they would make of you, if only your surface were able to support a man, as is often indicated by your stunning appearance, your solid plate. They would walk on you. On stormy days, in amazement they would descend your dizzy slopes.”
Rosa looked happy in the middle of the ocean, the wind stirred her hair at high speed and then left just as quickly. I looked at her in delight. But all of a sudden I had a strange sensation and I still do not know if it was due to the stark contrast between beauty and the beast, between her appearance and Tongoy’s somber, vampiric face. The fact is that suddenly, despite the wind and the ocean’s extreme mobility, it seemed as if Rosa and the seascape had turned into a dead photograph, a painfully frozen scene, on pause, lacking in nature and life. Weird and dreadful sensation. The sensation that everything was dead, including Rosa, Tongoy, and me. Today I tell myself, on remembering that sensation and the appallingly bad weather in the channel connecting Fayal and Pico, that some words by Michaux would have gone down very well and even helped me at that odd moment: “By dint of pains, of vain ascents, by dint of being rejected from the outside, from the outsides I had promised myself I would attain, by dint of rolling down from almost everywhere, I have carved out a deep channel in my life.”