The Next Story

The red ink his editor favoured had always struck him as a sign of bad taste, lending itself inescapably to the cheap metaphor of his words bleeding out. Lorca, he thought, looking at the manuscript. The only protection against a cheap metaphor was a good one, albeit stolen. Would his editor’s flesh be astonished on seeing itself opened with a knife? Would it be astonished, or rather, annoyed, irritated, indifferent perhaps, perhaps even mildly sardonic? What he didn’t doubt was that by that time he would be well anaesthetised, made sleepy by the food and the two or three gin and tonics he would already have ingested by that time of day.
He took his time choosing the knife. In the end he went for the small, bone-handled blade that his wife had used daily to peel the apple with which she finished every breakfast. She liked red apples the best and she would pare off their skin in one single glossy curl. He liked to watch her do it, he admired the skill with which she moved the blade so closely under the skin. It was a small knife but very effective. He slipped it into his jacket pocket.
Were he to write a story about this, he would make the protagonist take the bus to his meeting. As a story with a clearly autobiographical slant, the protagonist would, when making his decision, recognise that he was too drunk to drive. He would take the bus and the journey would give him time to reflect upon the nature of his relationship with his editor. There would be a flashback to the dinner at which the latter announced to the writer’s then wife that her husband was going to be famous, that he, editing his stories, would see to it that they were read the world over. He would have to include in that flashback some kind of warning, although there had been none, although at that moment he had felt only love and recognition. But he would have to include some kind of clue, some intimation of the future loyalties and conflicts that would arise between the three. He would think about that later.
He was grateful for the taxi driver’s silence. (Perhaps he didn’t understand English all that well. He looked as though he might be from the Middle East. What would he have done back in his own country? He might have been a physician, or a paid assassin. He might also have been a taxi driver.) He took out the manuscript from its envelope to go over it one more time. One hundred and ninety pages. Not one unmarked. There were five or six on which only a comma had been crossed out and, on another, a full stop repeated by mistake. But on other pages whole paragraphs had been eliminated without any explanation whatsoever. Hours and hours of this life obliterated with the editor’s red ink. And he no longer trusted his opinions, no longer saw that his stories were improved, but rather eviscerated. He felt disgusted by what he held in his hands, something akin to what he had felt towards the dead rodents his mother’s cat had left for them out on the porch. He put his hand in his jacket pocket. The knife was still there. He caressed the blade.
What would the protagonists be thinking about now? he wondered. The feel of the metal made him think of a dead rodent’s teeth, of long, blind teeth behind slightly open lips. (Do rodents have lips? Is it possible to talk about a rodent having lips?). They looked stupid, imbecilic, those corpses with their half-opened mouths, their feet in the air, their long, blind teeth. What would his editor look like in death? It didn’t really matter, he would not see him like that, foolish and stiff. He would only have time to see the astonishment or the irony or the indifference of the wound. Would it smile or yawn, that newly-made mouth? By the time he was stiff the writer would be in the police station or dead himself or in a taxi heading for the airport, grateful once again for the silence of some taxi driver-medic-paid assassin-goat herd-patron saint of cirrhotic writers. They had reached the publishing house.
He noticed he felt surprisingly calm. He wasn’t sweating as we would have imagined. The protagonist would be sweating. He would sweat as the writer himself had sweated on his first dates with his ex-wife. It wasn’t your usual armpit and groin kind of sweat. It was a sheet lightning of liquid that broke out from every pore at the same instant and left his forehead dripping. She always pretended not to notice. The editor in the story would not do the same. What would he say? He would think about that later.
“Have you eaten? You look rough. Let’s go eat.”
He didn’t even bother to say hello. Nor did he ask him about the package in his hands, which were sweating slightly now. He didn’t smell of alcohol. He had not anaesthetised himself. He would have to put up with him all through lunch. Let him enjoy his last gin and tonics. They were friends, after all. After all, they had been friends. At what point had they ceased to be so, he wondered. How many years had they been feigning an affection that neither one of them felt?
They didn’t have to talk about where to eat. They always went to the same place, a Vietnamese restaurant ten blocks north of the publishing house. They walked there. That didn’t need to be discussed either. They both liked to walk.
“You’ve looked at my corrections then?”
“Yes, I’ve seen them. I’ve come armed, in fact, I’m planning to kill you.”
“It still hurts, doesn’t it?”
“I’m serious. I am going to kill you.”
“Not to worry. I’m sure I deserve it.”
What would the protagonist think about after killing him? He would want to take a shower, clean off the sweat and the blood. Burn his clothes. Have a stiff drink. Would he be hungry? It would seem a shame to him then that he had not been able to stomach the thought of food in the restaurant. The memory of the aromas – the chilli, the coriander, the lemon-grass – would make him salivate. But then the story would have a different mood to it, would even feel slightly absurd, who thinks about food after killing a man?
“You mentioned you wanted to kill me?”
“Chekhov would have insisted.”
“And why is that?”
“I already told you I’ve come armed. And now if I don’t kill you…?”
The man placed a hand over his own.
“You’re not going to kill me. You’re going to go back home, fix yourself a drink and start work on your next story.”
“So what do I do with this knife then?”
He took it out of his pocket and placed it on the table.
The editor laughed. He gestured to the waitress to come over to their table and whispered something in her ear. The girl left, passed through the kitchen doors and returned with an apple served on a plate.
She placed it in front of the man who had asked for it and he pushed the plate towards his companion.
“Let’s see if you can peel it in one piece.”

Franz and Gala

Franz and Gala

Our story begins one sunny, autumn day in which Franz, a young bureaucrat of sombre and tubercular appearance, accompanies his friend Max on a visit to the new Prague zoo. Max is concerned for his friend’s mental health and hopes the outing will distract him. The two men advance methodically from cage to cage, reading the names (common, scientific and given) and origins of each inhabitant. They admire the Siberian tiger (a gift from the Budapest zoo), throw bread to the monkeys and chimpanzees (feeding the animals has yet to be prohibited) and are saddened on seeing the solitary black bear walk disconsolately from one side of his cage to the other, like an expectant father who has lost all hope of good news. The giraffes leave them open-mouthed with astonishment (surrealism has yet to be invented) and both are touched by the Madonna and child tableau represented by the elephant and her son (Franz cannot help but notice that the paternal figure does not appear to be missed).
They are drawing very close now to Gala. Nobody else has stopped to look at her. She has hidden herself in the furthest corner of her enclosure. She is forlorn, hungry and depressed. She has only been in Prague for two weeks and is deeply homesick for Berlin. In Berlin she had friends to play with and above all she had Olaf, her trainer, until this day the great love of her life. Gala has just turned three and of her 1107 days, she has passed only 63 without Olaf. She cannot understand why she has been taken from him. Whenever Olaf is absent, Gala refuses to eat and this is what she is doing now. She has not eaten since she last saw him in Berlin.
Max and Franz have reached her enclosure. There is only one sea lion, or rather, lioness – her name is Gala – and she appears rather unsociable, hiding away in a corner, revealing nothing more than a curved and fleshy back.
There is a bench in front of the enclosure and the two men, already somewhat fatigued, sit down to rest.
And now something breaks through the sad fog in which Gala has been enveloped, something which reminds her of her former life. It is the sound, the cadence of a human language that is achingly familiar. There are two men seated on the bench in front of her new premises and they are speaking in German. Gala would like to hear them better. She wants to fall asleep listening to their voices so she may dream of Olaf and Berlin and of when she was happy. She moves closer to the voices and flops down beside the wire fence that separates her from them. Surprised, the two men come towards her. One of them crouches down in front of her and looks into her eyes. At that instant both creatures recognise in the gaze of the other the anguish each harbours in their own soul. And from this recognition is born a love that will change both their lives forever.
“Why are you so sad?” Franz asks the sea lion. Gala does not understand the question but she is delighted that this voice, so unexpectedly deep and manly, should speak to her so kindly. Informed by her olfactory sense that he has not brought her any herring, Gala is moved to steal a kiss from him instead. It is a sincere, wet and malodorous kiss which takes Franz greatly by surprise. He has always believed himself to be a repulsive and undesirable being. And it now appears that his charm is so potent, even a magnificent female of 300 kilos lacks strength enough to resist him.
As fate would have it the zoo manager is passing by the marine installations at this moment. Having witnessed this moving display of pinniped affection he does not hesitate to address himself to its human object and asks him to employ his gifts to convince the stubborn beast to start eating and behave herself. He is a decisive man with a steamroller will, unused to taking no for an answer. Franz, overwhelmed by a sudden wave of what could only be happiness, is easily convinced to abandon his career as a bureaucrat and dedicate himself to the training of sea mammals, an activity he will go on to perform with outstanding diligence despite his absolute ignorance of the field.
Gala soon rediscovers her appetite and a few months later a male sea lion is found to share her enclosure with her and to father her young. Franz, unconditionally freed from his complexes and melancholy, marries a former girlfriend and allows himself to be happy. He devotes his free time to writing humorous stories for his two small children. The stories are not published during his lifetime but enjoy considerable success after his death of tuberculosis at the age of 41. Gala survives him by seven days.

Once

She’d heard his name spoken throughout the morning. It wasn’t unusual; it was the way they enounced it that struck her. The men and the women alike, they said his name with too much breath and too much music, as if he were a protagonist of the wedding and not just a part of the chorus. He was only the best man’s younger brother, yet even the groom asked when he would arrive and less discreetly the bride did not.

“Why don’t you go to meet him?” her friend had said to her and her smile was a dare or perhaps a gift.

The train stop was at the end of a path that walked down through a field to a platform that was bare but for the sign that marked it. When the train pulled in she was still walking up through the field and the sun was full in her face. With a hand raised to shield her eyes she saw the door opened and a dark shabby suitcase flung out onto the grass. When a cloud hid the sun she could see the man standing in the doorway of the train. She saw him take one step down and pause and everything else paused too as she watched his face look for the face he knew would come to meet him. And because she was the only other person in the field and the only other person in the world he knew she had come for him and everything in his face changed because of it and he smiled at her and waved and when she smiled and waved back he smiled and waved back more.

And now, when she cannot remember her own name or even his, when all the rooms of her memory have been sacked of possessions and even the mice that scuttled under the floorboards are stiff and dead in their traps and there is nothing but the bare and silent boards, even now there is still sometimes again the sun in her eyes and a suitcase thrown down to the ground without care and a man’s face before he has seen her and the world stopping just at that moment, time stopping so that what was only a second becomes infinite, eternity (all of it) held in that moment, just before he steps down from the train.

Cathedral

It’s true that the church doors stayed closed. It was I who closed them, after the bishop had left and before any of the students arrived. They left me behind to defend the Lord’s house on my own.

I woke up in the hospital. I didn’t know where I was and my jaw hurt like hell. It must have broken when I fell to the ground, unless my face collided later with the toe of some soldier’s boot.

I was left on my own under orders to keep the doors closed. “Don’t let anyone in,” they said.

I came out of hospital with a five-day growth of beard. It felt strange. I had never gone without shaving before. I don’t like wearing a beard and I’ve never been interested in politics. I only went to the demonstration because of el güero.

They were thousands and I was one. I heard them from the other side of the door. “This is the house of the Lord,” I wanted to say, but I said nothing.

I only went to the demonstration because of el güero. It was my kid sister’s birthday and we were going to go back to mine after it had finished. El güero helped me to pick out her gift. I bought her a box of watercolours. The case was silver-coloured and held 24 paints. She would have liked it. El güero bought her a sketchpad and some pencils. He said if you wanted to paint it was essential to know how to draw.

“This is the house of the Lord,” I wanted to tell them. “It is not a hiding place for atheists and Marxists.” That’s what I wanted to say but I couldn’t. I listened to the fists pounding against the doors and I couldn’t say anything.

My sister asked me for a photograph of el güero but I couldn’t find one so I had to ask Claudia. She seemed to have hundreds. I’d never realised.

“Open the doors, open the doors,” they shouted. They were thousands and I was one. I felt abandoned.

My sister drew a portrait of el güero that she copied from the photograph Claudia gave me. I watched her from the sofa. She made several sketches that ended up in the waste-paper basket but the last one turned out well. She gave it to el güero’s mother. They hadn’t met before but my sister came with me to the funeral and I introduced them. My sister told el güero’s mother that she had drawn a picture of Roberto – it sounded strange to hear her say his name – and his mother seemed to like it. She hugged my sister for a long time. To tell the truth, more than hug her, el güero’s mother clung to my sister as if she was afraid she might drown or as if a strong wind threatened to pluck her from the earth.

Then I thought: it is blasphemous to feel abandoned in the house of the Lord.

We became friends because we did. We had almost nothing in common. When we went to university I chose biology and he opted for history. We saw each other almost every day. I wouldn’t have been able to lie to him without his realising but I think he would have been able to lie to me.

I didn’t move away for a second. I stayed there listening to the screams and the gunshots and the fists pounding against the doors. I tried to pray but I couldn’t. I felt alone.

It amused people to see us together. He was blond and slight and I am sturdy and dark.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.

I started to feel bad before anything had happened. I had a feeling of claustrophobia being there in the square with so many people. There were thousands of us, I don’t know how many. I wouldn’t say that I had a presentiment, I just don’t like crowds and I’ve never felt comfortable being in a square full of people. I only went to the demonstration because of el güero and then we were both going to go back to mine to celebrate my kid sister’s birthday. I told el güero there would be pastel de tres leches because I knew that he liked it. But he would have come anyway because my sister had invited him and even though she’s only twelve there’s no man on earth can say no to my sister.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the
paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

I was already feeling bad and then they started shooting. El güero and I were close to the cathedral, we ran up to the doors, we shouted to whoever was inside to open up, we pounded our fists on the doors but they didn’t open.

I saw nothing of what happened. The windows of a church are not put there to look out on the world: their only purpose is to let in the light. I heard voices and gunshots. I heard the fists pounding against the wood of the doors. But I didn’t see anything.

The cathedral doors didn’t open. “Come on” I said to el güero and I put my arm around his shoulder to protect him. People were starting to panic. I was almost more afraid of us, of the other students, the other people in the square, than I was of the soldiers’ bullets. We had barely moved a few metres when I felt el güero fall to the ground. They had shot him in the back.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me
in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

We became friends because we did. I can’t explain it any other way. We had almost nothing in common but we enjoyed each other’s company. He made me read books I would otherwise never have read. He particularly liked Camus and he made me read The Stranger. “Marquitos,” he said, “this you have to read,” and I read it. I didn’t like it much. I felt a very disagreeable sensation reading that book, but I read it so I could discuss it with him afterwards. I told him that the only thing I had liked was Camus’ own description of his protagonist in the introduction. He wrote that he was a man “in love with a sun that leaves no shadows”. I think el güero was looking for that sun.

The sounds from the square began to die down after a while but I stayed guarding sentry by the doors. I stayed there for half the night watching over the Lord’s body lit up in the glow from the candles. I saw his tortured body and I thought “This is the house of the Lord. It is not a hiding place for atheists and Marxists.” But the Lord’s body reproached me and the Lord’s wounds reproached me and his blood and his silence also. At one point I nodded off while I was still on my feet and I woke up with a jerk of the head. Later I lay down on the floor.

Swimming

“Where was I?”
“It was before you were born.”
“But where was I?”
She’s getting angry now. Her cheeks are flushed; she doesn’t want to believe there was a time before her.
“You were waiting.”
“Was I hiding?”
“From me. Not from the dolphins.”
“Tell me again about the dolphins.”
“I was living near the beach. I was working in a café.”
“Was my daddy there with you?”
“No, he had already died and you were hiding.”
“And every morning you went swimming.”
“I did.”
“You weren’t very good at first, were you?”
“I wasn’t.”
“But you got better.”
“I swam a little further out every day.”

I meant to swim so far out that I couldn’t swim back.

“Was the water very cold?”
She’s prompting me; she wants to get to the good bit, the bit where she becomes unhidden.
“It was very cold.”
My life was stopped. I was supposed to be cold.
“Then one day you swam very far out.”
“Further out than I’d ever swum before and I didn’t really know how I was going to get back.”

How old will she be when she realizes I didn’t want to?

“That’s right,” she says, nodding. “You didn’t know how you were going to get back.”
“I decided to stop swimming and just tread water for a while.”

I couldn’t make myself not tread water.

“And then they appeared.”
“There were four of them and they were really large and they kept bumping me in the stomach.”
“And you were a bit frightened, weren’t you?”

I was mesmerized.

“A little bit. They were very beautiful but I didn’t know what they wanted. I thought they might hurt me.”
“But they didn’t.”
“No, they just kept swimming up to me and nudging me in the stomach with their snouts. Then a man came up in a little motor boat, and they were distracted.”
“What did they do?”
“They left me to go and take a look at the boat. Then they swam back to me and started bumping me again and the man on the boat shouted, “Don’t mind them, they’re just being nosy about the baby.””
“That was me, wasn’t it?”

“What the hell are you doing out here anyway?”

“That was you. But I didn’t understand that then. I just knew I had to get out of the water. The man knew too, he brought the boat over to me and he held out his hands and pulled me in.”
“Then he wrapped you in a blanket and took you back to his house, didn’t he?”
“He took me back to his house and his sister lent me some clothes and gave me a cup of tea but he wouldn’t let her give me any brandy.”
“And you asked him what he’d meant about the baby.”
“And he said “Dolphins are nosy buggers.”
“Nosy buggers,” she repeats, and her eyes shine with pleasure.
“And then I knew.”