‘I’ll go and look at myself in the mirror,’ I said. ‘But don’t put too much faith in me. My senses are shot, too. I think I’m losing my sense of touch, my hearing is going and so is my sight. I wrote a novel twenty years ago in which cats were stealing my character’s senses; by the time he died, he had none left. Now it feels like he’s come back for revenge.’
‘I read that one,’ she said. ‘The character’s name is Carmona22.’
I was pleased she still remembered a book that few people had ever heard of. Besides, I was the least suitable person to bring her back to reality. I asked her whether she saw Simón or whether she thought she saw him.
‘I don’t understand the difference,’ she said. ‘I don’t talk to him, I can’t touch him, but I know he’s there. Ever since I saw him standing in the doorway — that doorway’ — she pointed to the door leading to the bedroom — ‘he hasn’t left, he doesn’t want to leave. He’s saying something to me, but I can’t understand him.’
‘I don’t understand you either, Emilia,’ I said. ‘You need to be clearer in explaining what you remember. When you tell me things, there are blind spots, contradictions, things that couldn’t have happened when you think they happened. I’m completely confused when you talk to me about your mother’s visits to the house on the calle Arenales, about when you moved back from the San Telmo apartment, how many times Chela’s wedding was postponed, about your father’s machinations. Maybe my senses are as damaged as yours. You need to go and see a doctor. I can’t help you. Just like you, I see things that aren’t there, but it doesn’t make me worry for my sanity. There are figures and feelings that are far removed from reality, or they’re part of a reality different from ours. Have you ever been to the Jewish museum in Berlin?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve never been to Germany.’
‘I visited the museum in 2005, and I have no wish ever to go again.’
‘Was it a painful experience?’
‘It was painful in a sense, but that’s not why. I experienced the same unreal sensations you’re talking about. I heard voices, I sat down on a terrace next to my dead father, there were past lives inside me struggling to come out. I’d read somewhere that the museum is an architectural masterpiece, and it is. I can’t explain why, there are lots of books about it. I don’t want to overwhelm you talking about the angles, the weird vertical planes, the ceilings that seem to be falling in on you, the silences that open and close up as you walk through, but you quickly find yourself in a different reality, one that you feel you could be lost in forever. For years, you’ve lived in exile, moving from place to place, Emilia; you think you know what it is, but you couldn’t begin to explain it, there are no stories, no words in this desolate terrain because everything within you remained outside the moment you crossed the threshold. You might say that at that moment you entered purgatory, if what came before was hell (and it wasn’t, at least for me it wasn’t), if after was paradise, which never came. And when the wandering is over, when you go back to the home you left behind, you think you’re closing the circle, but visiting the museum you realise that the whole journey has been a one-way trip, always leaving. No one returns from exile. What you forsake, forsakes you. To the south of the museum is what’s called the Garden of Exile, forty-nine columns that rise (no, they don’t rise — every verb seems inadequate: rise, extend, stretch away?), forty-nine hollow columns of decreasing height; an oblique vision of life. Out of each column emerges a tree: you can’t tell where the tree comes from, all you can see is the desperate struggle of the branches to reach the light, to meet the sky they once lost. Pity moves you to walk between the columns so the trees will not feel so alone. You walk. The ground is cobbled and sloping, an edge of the world towards which things slide until finally they fall. By the time you’ve taken two steps, you are nowhere, there are no columns, there are no trees, there is no sky, the compass that guided you has disappeared, your reason for existing has been wiped out, you are nothing and you have stopped in a place from which no one ever returns. Exile.’
I went over to the mirror and looked at myself. The photo of a young Simón smiled at the mirror from the nightstand. The room was a mess; it was strange that Emilia, usually so fastidious, allowed me to go in. Magazines lay open on the bed, the sort people read while they’re queuing at the supermarket, featuring huge photos of Jennifer Lopez pregnant with twins, Britney Spears in her rehab clinic. I would never have imagined Emilia had such a morbid curiosity about the lives of others, though it made sense: the Emilia who collected coupons and played bingo belonged to that niche. It is impossible really to know another human being completely, and I had only ever seen Emilia on one side of the eruv, I never knew what became of her when she crossed over. I talked to her from where I stood, trying to reassure her. ‘I’m standing in front of the mirror, Emilia. There’s no one here. All I can see is the idiot standing here talking to you, I can see a shadow beside me, but it’s the idiot’s shadow. Try as I might, I’ll never see Simón because the only reason for your Simón to exist is for you alone to see him.’
When did that happen? When was it that Emilia phoned me asking for help? When did I go round to her house and stand staring at myself in the mirror, and leave without recognising my own body, feeling that memories that were not mine had entered into my body and I could not shake them off, memories that insisted on staying inside me even though I ran out? I didn’t make a note of it in my diary and recently the days have become confused. I haven’t seen her since then. I tried calling her at Hammond to talk to her about the novel I’m writing but they told me that she’d stopped coming in. I went by her house a couple of times and was surprised not to see her beat-up silver Altima parked on North 4th Avenue or in the parking lot at Rite Aid where she sometimes left it.
More than once I was on the point of telling her something about my novel. But I held back, out of shyness, out of shame, for the nameless reason that drives all writers to hide what they are doing until it’s finished. I said nothing because I was foundering in a swamp of first drafts I still haven’t climbed out of. She is the character on which the story turns, she was even before I knew her, and now I’d rather not carry on with it until we have had a serious conversation. I’m not waiting for her to give me permission to continue — characters aren’t censors, they don’t interfere in what happens to them. But Emilia is not simply one of my characters, she is also a human being, someone I know, someone I run into at Stop & Shop, a friend who has confided in me. Or is she simply someone inside me the way Simón is inside her? Before going out to look for her I remembered the lines of Felisberto Hernández: One can betray only when one lives with others. But with the body in which I live, no betrayal is possible. This, Felisberto used to say, is a hopeless situation. I have to clarify things with Emilia, work out where she begins and I end. Not knowing makes me uneasy.
Writing has always been a liberating act for me, the only place myself could roam without having to explain itself. While I write, I let myself go. Only after I have taken a few steps do I think about the boundaries of what I am doing: whether I am headed towards a novel or an essay, whether this is a story or a film script or a profile of the dead. I most often get lost when I try to go beyond the boundaries. Though the boundaries may resist, still I cross them. I want to see what’s on the other side of the words, in the landscapes that are never seen, in the stories that disappear even as they are being told. Perhaps if I devoted myself to poetry I might catch a glimpse of this horizon I can never reach. But I am not a poet, something I regret. If I were I would be able to name the true nature of things, unerringly find the centre rather than becoming lost on the margins. What am I going to say to Emilia when I see her?