There was only one innovation in this production: Adam was black. Though this didn’t exactly qualify as an innovation. The actor was black, and he was probably the best actor they had. They weren’t about to discriminate against him! In Venezuela there are lots of blacks, though many fewer in the Andean region, and even fewer at the university. Those there are tend to be outstanding, so it shouldn’t have surprised me that they had given him the main role. They probably pretended he was just another actor, like any of the others, and, to tell the truth, I was probably the only one who realized he was black.
As for the Exoscope Adam carried around with him throughout the entire play, they had, indeed, done a good job, even though they resorted to the simplest and most unimaginative solution. The entire play pivoted on this instrument. In the notes, I had specified only its size (six-and-a-half feet by five feet by three-and-a-half feet, more or less) and that it should look like a scientific-optical device. The idea, which the props person had understood, was that it would be a celibate machine; perhaps he had understood it a little too well, because this Exoscope looked a lot like Duchamp’s Large Glass.
The plot unfolded one event at a time. The entire drama was based on the mysterious impossibility nested at the very heart of the relationship between the two protagonists. Their love was real, but at the same time it was impossible. Adam’s experiments, Eve’s courtesan frivolities, all were mere evasions. Love was revealed as an impossibility that seemed either metaphysical or supernatural, but was in reality very simple and even prosaic: Adam was married.
I must confess, I didn’t know how to resolve the difficult problem this plot line presented. Because if Adam and Eve were, respectively, the only man and the only woman on the planet, then Adam’s wife — the absent wife whose existence prevented him from living out his love with Eve — couldn’t be anybody other than Eve herself. The idea (very characteristic of me, to the point that I believe it to be how I conceive of literature) had been to create something equivalent to those figures that was both realistic and impossible, like Escher’s Belvedere, figures that look viable in a drawing but could not be built because they are but an illusion of perspective. Such a thing can be written, but one must be very inspired, very focused. I fail because of my precipitousness, my rush to finish, and my desperation to please. I was able to sustain it in this play only through the strength of ambiguities and funny repartees. And only for a short time, because very soon things started to happen.
It was then, when the action rushed toward a resolution, after the exasperating teatime dialogues, that the extent of my fiasco fell on me like a mental atomic bomb. Once again I had submitted to nonsense, to the frivolity of invention for invention’s sake, resorting to the unexpected as if it were some kind of deus ex machina! Again I had squandered the wise ancient advice adorning the frontispiece of my literary ethic, “Simplify, my son, simplify!” I have managed to write a few good things by following, quite by accident, that advice. What a waste! Only through minimalism is it possible to achieve the asymmetry that for me is the flower of art; complications inevitably form heavy symmetries, which are vulgar and overwrought.
But my mania — to be constantly adding things, episodes, characters, paragraphs, to be constantly veering off course, branching out — is fatal. It must be due to insecurity, fear that the basics are not enough, so I have to keep adding more and more adornment until I achieve a kind of surrealist rococo, which exasperates me more than it does anybody else.
It was like a nightmare (the mother of all nightmares) to watch the living defects of what I had written materialize in front of me. Though my punishment was a kind of poetic justice, because from that point on the logic the play began to obey was the logic of nightmares. Poor Adam’s brain began to rebel against him, and in a burst of dementia he murdered Eve. . The scene was full of gruesome details: he decapitated her, and, after performing a few macabre juggling acts with her head, he divided her long blond hair into two locks and tied them around the waist of the corpse, which he left standing. The hair knot hung over her buttocks, and her head hung down in front of her sex, like a codpiece. . then he ran off, still carrying the Exoscope. The police of Babylon got involved, and the inspector in charge proclaimed: We are dealing with a serial killer, there is a pattern, this is the seventh such crime, all with long blond hair, all with the head tied around the waist. . But Adam, by definition, was the first and only man! Therefore, he couldn’t be just one among many suspects, he was by necessity the guilty party. And moreover, if Eve were the only woman, how could she be one in a series of victims? Serial killers came later in evolution. I myself didn’t even understand it.
In the next scene, in the cave where Adam went to hide, Eve’s ghost appeared as an integral part of the glass of the celibate machine. Agents of a foreign power took advantage of the situation to steal the Exoscope from him, without knowing that Eve continued to live inside it. . It was grotesque, repulsive; I was mortified.
VII
Difficult as it is to believe, people liked that crap. It was nighttime by the time it ended. In the last light of day, at the culminating moment of the show, the evening flight arrived; there are two flights a day to Mérida, and both have to land during daylight hours because of how difficult it is to land a plane in this narrow valley surrounded by high peaks. The noise of the engines drowned out a few lines, and shortly thereafter the passengers walked in single file across the stage carrying their bags and suitcases but without interrupting the show. That detail was the most widely discussed during the reception hosted afterward by the airport director. There was a festive atmosphere, almost euphoric; everybody seemed happy, except me. I allowed myself to carry out the bad idea of drinking myself out of my depression. Since my detoxification, ten years earlier, I had not had a drop of alcohol. At least I had the good sense not to mix my drinks, but rum is deceptive, always so smooth, so calming, like a perennial cause with no effect, until the effect shows itself, and then you realize the effect had been there from the beginning, even before there began to be a cause. The hall had a bad echo. Everybody was shouting and nobody could hear anybody else. I accepted the congratulations with the graciousness of a perfect idiot. I watched lips move and smiles appear, sometimes I moved my lips, too, and drank, and smiled again; my face was hurting from holding that grimace for so long. That was even how I received Carlos Fuentes’s words.
What happened next is blurred by the fog of intoxication. We boarded buses that took us directly to the hotel dining room for dinner, from there we went to the bar so we could keep drinking, and at midnight we took taxis to a discotheque. . Throughout the many stages of that night I felt, underneath the strong effects of the rum, a discomfort that never let up, undoubtedly because I never managed to put my finger on what it was. I didn’t know what was wrong; it couldn’t be that I felt out of place, because that was normal for me. In retrospect, I understood what was happening to me: in my semiconscious state I had joined the group of young people: I returned with them on the bus, sat with them at dinner, and continued in their company through all that followed. They were the students who did volunteer work (they called it “logistics”) for the convention, almost all of them female, almost none older than twenty. People who signed up for this were not necessarily devotees of literature. My colleagues had done nothing to extricate me from them, on the contrary. They were corroborating the reputation I had forged for myself of preferring “life” to literature. They were convinced that I was pursuing the young women, and they approved; in a certain way it legitimized them indirectly by showing that literature was part of life and passion. As far as the students were concerned, they asked for nothing more than the attention I seemed to be paying them, the fact that I chose them over the famous writers I should have been interacting with, and the chance to be seen in public with the hero of the Macuto Line.