She also told me she didn’t understand why I had accepted those gifts from the painter. She wished he hadn’t helped her get home on the day she fainted. She’d never asked for it. She had fainted in front of the painting because she wanted to see its enormous size in three dimensions. Earlier that afternoon, in the boys’ bathroom, Mario had beaten her in one of their breath-holding contests. But this time it hadn’t been in front of a mirror, but while they stared at an illustration given to them by their psychology teacher so that they could try to see images in three dimensions. Mario was feeling smug because he had seen it in three dimensions and had been able to hold his breath the longest. So, when Berta saw that painting in the foyer, composed of cubes and figures in relief, she was reminded of the psychology teacher’s illustration, and she couldn’t help staring at it. She also told me that while she was staring at the painting, just before she fainted, she saw something in it that frightened her, but she didn’t know how to explain it. It was just a game, and that’s why she couldn’t understand all this carry-on with the painter. The painting wasn’t beautiful. Even so, it wasn’t ugly enough to form part of the ugliness of her surroundings. It was just a painting that no longer interested her, and then all of a sudden, her mother had become obsessed with going and interviewing the painter and filling their house with his artworks. She didn’t want to see them; they weren’t the kind of ugly things that made her feel better. Only truly horrendous things belonged in her world, things that turn the stomachs of those who behold them, because it reminds them that the world is not perfect, that terrible things happen, like a fifteen-year-old boy suffering from cancer, or how when your parents separate, your life is turned upside down, and it feels like the entire world is spinning backwards.
‘Would we be able to tell if the world was spinning backwards? It’s true that we can’t tell that the world is constantly spinning, but I’m sure that if the world suddenly started spinning the other way, we’d notice. When Dad lived here, we didn’t realise that was “normal” — we only realised that after he left, right?’
This wasn’t a question to which she expected an answer. I just wanted to hug her, to keep listening to her.
‘Don’t you see how great it would be to have an ibis in the apartment?’
I remembered my dream with the bird carrying a stack of papers covered with Berta’s tiny circles in its beak, stalking through the hallway, where Vicente Rojo’s painting now rested against the wall.
‘You’re right. We should get one.’
PART 2
THE MAN WHO THOUGHT HE WAS VICENTE ROJO
Not long after I finished my degree, I began working at a publishing house that put out encyclopaedias. I wasn’t sure if this was something I was passionate about or had always dreamed of doing. But, if I’m honest, I did feel lucky to have been chosen. Sometimes, when I tell my daughter about that experience, she breaks into hysterical fits of laughter. She can’t understand the importance of an encyclopaedia, because since she was born, it has been possible to type a question into Google whenever you want to know anything. But I grew up in a house where one of the walls in the dining room was covered with a bookshelf full of encyclopaedias that were so specific, I’m not sure if any of my siblings ever consulted them. My favourite was the one that covered the major events of World War II: in each of the volumes there was an appendix that included reproductions of all the front pages of Spanish and European newspapers as they broke the news of those earth-shattering events. What I liked most was looking at those front pages, especially from the European newspapers, in languages I couldn’t understand, but which I knew spoke of the war.
I’m not trying to say that this is where my calling as a journalist came from. In fact, I doubt I ever really had a calling for it. I think I decided to study Communication Sciences because during my last year of high school — back then it was called the University Orientation Course — my art history teacher came in before class and dropped a newspaper clipping on my desk. It was a summary of a speech where Gabriel García Márquez had declared that journalism was the best profession in the world. Just like that, he’d given the writer a headline for his article. I’d never even read a book by Gabriel García Márquez, but I liked my art history teacher’s sensibilities; in class he’d shown us Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Primavera. Thinking about it now, it occurs to me how funny it would be if the teacher had left it on my desk accidentally.
When I began working at the publishing house, I’d already been writing for a local newspaper for a few months. They sent me to cover press conferences given by the mayor, and even sometimes to openings and events attended by some important regional politician. I won’t deny that I enjoyed being entrusted with such a duty: I became the only person responsible for recounting these events to the newspaper’s thousands of readers. Once, I accidentally changed the name or job title of one those regional authorities, a fact that was later relayed to me by the editors. But it was no big deal for them, because at the end of the day, I was still learning.
The culture section was my favourite, and my goal was to write for the weekend lift-out. Occasionally, writers or intellectuals would come by the offices, and spend time chatting with the editors. I listened in on their conversations about new literary titles, recent exhibits, and current trends in philosophy. All of these overheard conversations had an effect on my mood, but I was especially moved when I recognised a name that was mentioned. That was when I confused who I wanted to be with who I actually was: a girl who had just received an official piece of paper saying she had been awarded her degree, but who actually thought the paper said that the moment had arrived where everyone would recognise her value, because she had always been such a clever girl. By eavesdropping on the intellectuals who came to visit the local newspaper, I thought of myself as their equal. I felt I was just like them, even though they would never have recognised me as such, (I would never have recognised myself as such, either) because I had no idea who I was, let alone who I wanted to be. But I also wanted to try acting like one of those people who knows so much about so many things that everything becomes completely unbearable, because all that knowledge can only lead to an essentially negative truth.
My first boss at the publishing house didn’t seem particularly inclined to acknowledge how clever I was either. She gave me one of the worst tongue-lashings I’ve ever received in my life. After all this time I can’t remember exactly what she said, just the modulation of her tirade, the melody of her intonation as she spoke, how she bit off each of her words and tightened her jaw, which was a move I’d only ever seen from actors in old Western movies. She made me aware of the gravity of taking things for granted in a job like the one I was supposed to be doing. You could never trust others to know what you knew, you had to confirm and double-check everything — wasn’t I a journalist? Hadn’t anyone explained to me how important it was to check your information? Nothing should be taken as a given until you had verified it from trustworthy sources. All this to say that if I had any doubts, I should talk to her about them, because she’d be happy to help me out, just like she was right now.
It’s possible that my constant fear of making a mistake stems from this experience. I also think that my feeling of living near to the end of things grew stronger in this period. Although I had no idea at the time, encyclopaedias as I knew them had very little time left on Earth. Even my mother was soon in a rush to get rid of all the books she had covering the shelves, even the ones with the reproductions of the front pages of newspapers from World War II.