“You can take it to whomever you please and say it’s yours, if you like, to speed up publication. I give it to you gladly because I renounced the original though I don’t regret having written it, as I said before.”
“I don’t understand anything. You want to publish the book as if it were mine? How could you imagine I’d lend myself to that?”
“It’ll be better if we forget about it,” Marina interrupted. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“Absolutely not,” replied Sandro Vasari and then, in a different tone to the visitor: “If you don’t publish the book, neither will I. I’ll keep it, unsigned, in some drawer, and there my happy heirs, whoever they may be, will find it. They may even come to believe then that the original was yours. Which means you don’t help anything by refusing to accept it.”
“The snow’s coming earlier than we thought,” said Marina. “In this part of the country, the first snowfalls melt right away. They disappear in two days and are white tinged with pink, like the color of old coral and conch shells.”
From his orchestra seat in hell, he looked at her silently. Though her appearance might have been arrested at some very distant point in the past, and the years passed without disturbing her small features, he thought he could confirm her an age as similar to Sandro’s or their visitor’s. (“Marina, I suppose you won’t think now that I’ve been dreaming you and Sandro since the day I introduced the two of you at the university.”) Neither of them seemed to have heard his comment, as if in the theaters along the spiral unnoticed asides were possible. For a moment he forgot about them, and Sandro Vasari’s dream that later became a book about his own life and his stay in hell, to enjoy contemplating Marina. The pink, perishable whiteness of the first snows on BRIARWOOD DRIVE was merely an inevitable analogy or an obligatory identification with her brittle fragility.
“Fine,” the visitor seemed to give in. “Let’s hear the secret of so peculiar a decision. Or perhaps you’d prefer Marina to tell me about it, assuming she shares it with you. In any event, I’m all ears.”
“The secret is simple even if telling it turns out to be difficult,” replied Sandro Vasari, resting his palm for a moment on one of the stranger’s knees. “I’ll translate it into a fable or a parable, as Gerardo Diego would write elegies in the shape of a hare. Imagine three people like us in their first year at the university. One of them, let’s say the one most similar to a ridiculously rejuvenated image of you, introduces the other two, reinvigorated caricatures of Marina and me, in the courtyard of the School of Arts and Letters. If you’ll forgive the interruption, and to shorten the fable for you, from now on I’ll call the protagonists by our names. Do you follow?”
“At least I suppose I do. Go on.”
“The next part you know better than anyone and I’ll summarize it, pushing together what happened over many years. Marina and Sandro become lovers in a little house you rent to them beneath the Vallcarca bridge, not very far from the place where Don Antonio Machado y Ruiz, part of the cast of the manuscript that so far you refuse to accept, lived during his last months in Barcelona. As they say in the movies, any similarity to reality is purely coincidental.”
“Understood. Continue.”
“Marina always has the feeling that someone is watching her through an antique mirror when she and Sandro make love in their bedroom at the Vallcarca Bridge. It’s the start of a long process that I’ll move forward and conclude right here, in which she’ll come to believe that she and Sandro are nothing but characters in a permanently unfinished book of yours. Earlier, much earlier, in the dispensable history of the university under Franco and the years following the Second World War, Marina aborts Sandro’s child at the hands of a sweet old woman on Calle Montcada whose address, naturally, you give them. What no one knows then is that after this difficulty, Marina can have no more children.”
“Let’s move on to the second act.”
“Between one act and another many years go by, during which Marina and Sandro stop seeing each other. She marries a gentleman as dispensable as the protohistory of which she continues to be an oblique product. Sandro goes to the Indies of Eisenhower, marries twice, divorces twice. He has two children by his second wife, all of whom die in a car accident though he suffers no injuries. Then he begins a long process of alcoholization that he will virtuously cure though he is never cured of the cure, which he pays for with a good part of his talent. Earlier and as a result of a trip to Spain to confirm that the damn country has never existed and is simply an absurdity dreamed by Goya Lucientes, he meets Marina again at the house of someone who bears your name. I have no choice but to specify that the lovers begin to live in mortal sin and the dispensable gentleman married to Marina discreetly disappears, while the Caudillo of all Spain dies in installments at the Clinic de la Paz. I’ll spare you another interpolated history, like the tale of the Recklessly Curious Man, about a book proposed to Sandro Vasari by someone who bears your name, which Sandro never writes because you do it yourself, I mean to say, your double in my fable.”
“I believe I’ve read all that somewhere.”
“Perhaps in the catechism of Father Ripalda.”
“That’s very possible. What’s the hidden side of the fable?”
“Marina should tell you that but I don’t know if she’ll want to.” He saw Sandro turn toward the woman with a deferential expression he had not noticed before on the Italian’s face marked by a long scar on the cheek. “Darling, you can enlighten us with the final outlandish lines of our story.”
“Friday at the latest, the entire street will be covered with snow,” said Marina. Looking at her in the indecisive light of dusk that gradually descended to the stage, he thought he saw a Piero della Francesca. One of the women painted in the Church of San Francesco, in Arezzo, or in the Diptych of Federigo da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza in the Uffizi. “At midmorning on Sunday, the silence will melt it.”
“Fine. I’ll do it,” Sandro continued, fairly nervous now. “No one knows anyone else, as Señor Goya Lucientes says so well in one of his printed Caprices. You and I didn’t know that Marina had studied music, to great advantage, before and after her brief passage through the university. At least I didn’t find out until I finished the original you’ve brought me now. I gave it to her to read and she gave it back with no comment. A few days later, she asked me to buy her a piano.”
“A piano?”
“Exactly. A Wurlitzer we chose together, on which I spent my modest savings. Only then, when she had the piano, did she reveal her purpose. She wanted to compose a sonata inspired by the original of my book.”
“A sonata.” The newcomer shook his head as if making an effort to comprehend the real meaning of the word. “I don’t really understand … ”
“Perhaps I expressed myself badly. More than being inspired by what I had written, the sonata would be its translation into musical terms. Perhaps you remember that the book is divided into four parts, THE SPIRAL, THE ARREST, DESTINY, and THE TRIAL. The sonata would also have four, though the titles wouldn’t necessarily coincide or end with the death of Galadí at the hands of the Assault Guard.”
“Then how can you two call it a translation?”
“Heavenly bliss must be made up of people like you,” Sandro Vasari said with a smile. “Did you ever stop to notice that music not only has its own language but also its inalienable meaning? Demanding textual coincidence would be asking myth simply to repeat history.”