The Invented Part Read online

  Sure, it’s been years since she accepted the fact that she’d never be a combative Cathy Earnshaw. Not even a Jane Eyre. But with every bit of the little strength she has left she refuses to end up like an exotic and foreign Bertha Antoinetta Mason, mad and burning in the attic of Thornfield Hall, throwing herself from the flaming roof, her infidelities and alcoholism and hallucinations forgiven, chalked up to a genetic disorder. Bertha, who sacrifices herself to leave the path free and open for the marriage of the blind Edward Fairfax Rochester and the servant Jane Eyre. Penelope doesn’t want to be the lame and boring device of an envious sister—because the merely very talented Charlotte was always intimidated by Emily’s rare genius, and didn’t hesitate to lovingly sabotage her memory, imposing the survivor’s official version—that neatly ties up the plot. And everybody’s happy.

  But no—that’d be too easy.

  To the contrary, the role that Penelope has fallen into is that of the lone survivor. Everything and everyone around her dead or disappeared. And the responsibility of telling the story is hers and hers alone. And, truthfully, she never wanted to be a writer. She just wanted to have and to live a good story. And now she’s so tired. So tired that, if she had a rifle, she wouldn’t hesitate to empty it into The Young Man’s body. To fill him full of lead and defend herself by saying she’d thought he was a burglar. And end up exonerated or in jail. Either way. Anything so long as the small storyline of her life diverges from the atomic and particular saga of her brother, who absorbs everything and rewrites it. Including the only thing that, she assumed, was hers and hers alone and that she—not for revenge but out of desperation—tore out the way you tear the page from a book that, though you never open it, you’ll always know is missing a page and that it’s that page.

  And the voice from that page is the one she hears again now: asking for the name of a favorite writer the way you ask a ghost to knock three times so you know it’s there when, really, all that’s there is the memory of that person, which is nothing at all without a living being to remember it. In stories and novels, the best ghosts are the ones who appear to people who knew them. Orphan ghosts, appearing to strangers, have little reason to be or to do and have too much to explain to people who, after the initial fright, will begin to perceive them as a nuisance, as a kind of malfunction in the house that they bought at, now it makes sense, a suspiciously low price. Those ghosts are just ghosts of themselves, sick of spinning circles in the air and, sometimes, the most dangerous ghosts of all; because they try to compensate for the fact that nobody misses them, tormenting and driving mad everyone who crosses their path, for whom they neither have nor feel any hate or affection.

  That is exactly how Penelope feels. Alone, bad company, and the last of her bloodline. No one will remember her. Except this fool who snuck into her house, this worshipper of her writer brother, now transformed into ultra solipsistic and quantum-ectoplasmatic autofiction, or whatever.

  So Penelope decides to spare The Young Man’s life.

  And not tell him to turn around.

  And not fix him with her eyes—greener than ever.

  And not stare into his eyes.

  And not detect in them something that—could it be desperation to find a way out?—might be her own emergency exit.

  And so great is The Young Man’s desire and passion that Penelope senses a vanishing point. Some relief. A blessed opportunity to break the curse with someone else’s desire.

  What was that story called? Something about a monkey paw and the contaminated perfume that make wishes come true. In it, the protagonist asked a monkey paw for something. And that wish was granted. But that granted wish always arrived by way of a dark road where it collided with horror. Be careful what you wish for, etcetera.

  So, Penelope thinks, why not leave all of it to The Young Man. The house and everything in it. “The palace of my memory,” as her brother would say; he never really appreciated that she’d been the one who financed it with part of the spoils she brought back from the desert of Abracadabra. A more or less perfect replica—because it’s known that children remember everything larger and shinier—of a place called Sad Songs, where her brother went on vacation with their parents and her, more or less proximal, inside their mother, newly pregnant and wondering, no doubt, what now?

  “What now?” Penelope asks herself. And the answer appears to her with the naturalness of something obvious, in that undeniable way that right answers have of presenting themselves: you haven’t even finished formulating the most complex of questions, after so long not daring to, when the answer is already there, on display in the middle of the room, spinning slowly, waiting for you to make it your own, to react to it, and to activate it, so that it can make what belongs to it belong to you.

  And what Penelope does is to do nothing.

  To slip away, the way one, following stage directions, leaves a stage.

  Exit.

  The Young Man turns slowly around, hands still held high, The Boy’s voice repeating that question over and over and obtaining that answer that he still can’t believe and yet believes immediately; because nothing is easier to believe in than what you want to believe in. And what he always wanted was to be someone’s favorite writer and, if possible, to be the favorite writer of someone like his favorite writer, like The Writer.

  The Young Man turns around and doesn’t see anyone there. The Writer’s Mad Sister isn’t there. He’s alone. But The Young Man is sure, something was there a few seconds ago. Something was watching him. And, face to face with its absence, what terrified him before relieves and even justifies him now. Again, this is one of the characteristic traits of criminal minds—the need to feel that they were impelled and even authorized by something that transcends and supersedes them. An external mandate. It doesn’t matter that his crimes, The Young Man’s, aren’t found in any penal code. Or maybe they are: because both the one before aboard the airplane and the one now in the house could easily be classified as forms of theft.

  But The Young Man prefers not to think about that.

  The Young Man prefers to think of himself as, yes, a toy—another toy—of destiny.

  A chosen one.

  And he decides that that brief yet powerful presence behind him (The Young Man could swear he still feels its reverberation in the air, like the ripples left on the surface of the water by a stone already sinking into the depths, where The Writer claimed that shipwrecked plotlines were waiting to be rescued and reconstructed) could only have been The Writer himself. The resolution of his story with the most open of endings. The Writer, in a way, coming back to mark him, choosing him, pointing out the way to reveal to him—coincidentally, but not by coincidence—his own name pulsing like a mantra inside that camera.

  The Young Man feels so happy, so innocent, that he goes out the window with a leap he’d never have thought himself capable of. Holding the camera and the toy in his hands. Ready to go in the tent, wake up The Young Woman (who’s dreaming a strange dream, where she and The Young Man meet in the future, many years later, on a museum stairway), and pack up all their gear. Quickly. To get out of there. Behind him he feels the heat of something exploding and—deploying the absurd logic of someone who already feels outside everything—the first thing The Young Man thinks is that it’s fireworks celebrating him, commemorating him. For him. But what has begun to burn—in a small series of explosions, as if according to a prefigured order, as if crossing off items from a list of rooms—is the house of The Writer and The Writer’s Mad Sister.

  “The contagious joy of fire,” The Young Man says to himself. “I don’t want to forget this phrase. I like it. I should write it down in my notebook,” he adds.

  And he goes inside the tent and yells, “Let’s go!”

  The Young Woman opens her eyes and looks at him, sleepily. And The Young Man is already imagining how her pupils will dilate when they see, as if fallen from the sky, that video of The Writer answering that question asked by that boy. Then anythi
ng will be possible. Anything.

  And The Young Man and The Young Woman start packing everything into bags and unpitching the tent that’ll be transformed into a light and portable cylinder and blessed be the miniaturization of gear and that the most important things take up less space all the time.

  The house is still burning, but it won’t burn for long and The Young Man and The Young Woman approach the edge of the blaze searching for The Writer’s Mad Sister, who is no longer there, who has discovered that there’s another alternative—to be the demented woman who unleashes a holocaust of flames and fury, yes, but not to die in it.

  To escape, clean and renewed.

  To start over again, after hurling everything into the fire. Not mad with joy, but mad with madness.

  The Young Man and The Young Woman and their backpacks run along the beach, along the cold and hard sand of the shore. Penelope watches them move away with the strange sadness of seeing something you’ll never see again. Something that you don’t really mind leaving behind, but that, at the same time, is still another thing that you’re leaving behind.

  And the irretrievable past builds itself like this, a little at a time, ceaselessly and arbitrarily.

  And who knows, thinks Penelope: maybe I’ll remember this random image—The Young Man and The Young Woman running and releasing little shrieks into the cold and dark air that the stars never warm—when I’ve already forgotten many other things, far more important things.

  Things safe from fire, but not from oblivion.

  Penelope remembers having read that of all the liquids and fluids produced by the human body—sweat, semen, vaginal fluid, saliva—tears are the only one without any trace of DNA. So, a killer can weep in peace at the scene of his crime. Impossible to identify someone from their tears, we’re all identical when we weep despite the many different reasons we have for weeping, something like that. Unlike unhappiness, tears don’t set us apart, they make us the same.

  But Penelope is convinced that this isn’t true.

  It can’t be true.

  Her tears—these tears—are hers and hers alone. She won’t share them with anyone, she won’t compare them, she won’t let them be compared.

  Nobody ever wept like she weeps now, no one ever wept for what she weeps tonight.

  They won’t take that away from her: it’s all she has, all she has left, leaving, her house in flames farther behind her all the time; just a spot of light that no expert sailor would ever confuse for a sign of solid ground.

  Now an earthquake. Because everything moves and Penelope moves.

  Leaving that place, all of it. Free of dead weight, alive and light. Changing scenery like someone changing style. Almost blind, groping along the insurmountable walls of the night, Penelope finds a handhold at last and grabs on with all her strength to keep from being dragged out to sea by the singular and inimitable whirlpool of her weeping.

  With her face cleansed by tears (this all happened so long ago, at a time when there were still waves and trees to describe and put in writing) Penelope opens the door and enters the forest.

  A FEW THINGS YOU HAPPEN TO THINK ABOUT WHEN ALL YOU WANT IS TO THINK ABOUT NOTHING

  Don’t touch.

  Don’t touch (having entered and arrived here; to a place where, paradoxically, they are going to be touching, they are going to be touching you absolutely everywhere in order to classify and diagnose the skill, the style, and the transcendence of what it is that’s brought you here), but, instead, look closely.

  And closer still.

  As close as the edge of that black line running across the white floor allows.

  Watch carefully.

  There he is.

  Staring into the void where—he doesn’t see but senses—someone is staring back.

  The name of his creator doesn’t matter, the name of the portrayed man either. Anonymous author, yes. And one of those neutral titles, simple and simply descriptive. The kind of prosthetic title (the true title was amputated by the passing of years and the movement of forgotten things) applied when anything is better than nothing. Anything, as long as it isn’t that, for him, oh so irritating Untitled trailed by a number, an attempt to cover up the author’s lack of will, or the lack of expertise of the experts in his work. Something helpful when the time comes to present it at the hour of the catalogue and the auction. And that’s it. And moving right along. And next! and look to the future.

  So, now, Portrait of a Lonely Man. And done. Period and new sentence. A simple descriptive title. And period and new paragraph.

  Isolated portrait of a Lonely Man in the emergency room where—though other people are waiting and accompanying each other in their wait—his loneliness is unbroken. The loneliness of a hospital or a clinic waiting room is invulnerable and immune to all the bacteria that the most-cited statistics say run rampant through hallways and bedrooms and operating rooms and infect healthy accompaniers and further sicken the accompanied sick. Because the loneliness there, in the preliminary stages of the hospital ritual, is composed of the links between various autonomous, independent, solitary lonelinesses; because there’s no loneliness more solid than that of someone who, though surrounded by others, knows that they’re completely and absolutely alone and is waiting for someone to tell them something.

  Portrait of a Lonely Man in the emergency room of a hospital in a city whose name isn’t important or decisive here; so it’ll suffice to identify it as B, and moving right along.

  Keep watching, of course. Pausing in suspense. Take your time along the way, it doesn’t matter what scene comes next and what scene just passed: he goes along slowly, he goes along gradually, he goes along stretching the sentence out little by little, because he’s having trouble breathing. So there he is and it’s easy for him to see himself as if from outside. As if he were looking at himself not in a mirror, but in a painting and, please, right?: none of those supposedly avant-garde tricks where a performer puts himself on exhibit. In a room in a museum. Sitting in a chair so the visiting public can sit down in another chair facing him and look at him and get all emotional and weep. And, on their way out, blurt out that this is one of the most transcendent and moving experiences of their entire lives because, it’s clear, he thinks, that there are people who have and lead very uninteresting lives where nothing happens and who, as such, hypersensitive about their lives’ uneventfulness, are moved by anything at all, by the first thing that happens to them. That was never his case. And there’s nothing he’d like less than to provoke that effect he’d never experienced himself in others, in strangers who need to be recognized, to get to know themselves simply by prepaying for a ticket that many appear ready to kill or die for.

  So he, even though he’s there, flesh and bone, prefers to feel himself framed. Alone. Hanging. Painted. Tall and wide and not raised or in relief. Title and date and school and technique and painter’s name—also the name of the painted (yes: it’s a self-portrait)—and, for now, just the date of birth. But, ah, any minute, you never know, another number will be added: the definitive number, the year of the end, after a too-short script that symbolizes everything that happened between one extreme and the other, between entrance and exit, between life and death, between the first and the last brushstroke. There, on the wall of a private museum dedicated to The Lonely Man and that The Lonely Man alone has access to.

  And again: don’t touch.

  In the portrait, he’s sitting in a hard and cold plastic chair, in a facility built of thick glass panels that are, without a doubt, everything-proof. Huge windows that silence all sound from the street and from the ambulances that enter and exit like ballerinas on the edges of a ballet. Outside pulses the humming heart of a neon red cross; which coheres even further the idea that people pray a lot in here, begging for miracles, asking for impossible things from beings they want to believe are genies, geniuses. Here, the doctors—the professionals—like direct descendants of demigods, of saints, of shamans, of superstars are capable of con
juring the sad and small eclipses of anonymous people who have names, but whose names mean nothing in here. All individual characteristics yield to the particularity of diseases that are too banal (though no less fatal) to be featured on an episode of one of those series with doctors whose charm and allure to viewers he never could understand. Where’s the pleasure in being reminded, before going healthily to sleep, that sooner or later they’ll cut you open and sew you up and blast you with rays and radiations? And that the person in charge will be nothing like that kind Adonis or that infallible and abusive psychopath? And that real nurses—like nuns or flight attendants—are nothing like their cathodic versions, more like centerfolds of some steamy magazine or the stars of some Broadway musical? And he thinks “Broadway” and into his head comes that film, All That Jazz, in which a legendary, supposedly fascinating (but decidedly intolerable) musical director slipped out of his room, wandered through hallways and basements and came to find a kind of symbolic ecstasy that included death and a great final number where everyone sang and waved goodbye amid colored lights and dancers in costumes that were like a second skin of red and blue blood.

  Yes, hospital or clinic waiting rooms—nothing of the scenographic or choreographic ambition of that movie—have something of a fictitious setting, of a too-neat façade.

  And it’s not that The Lonely Man is an expert in the matter. His experience traveling to these territories has been brief but definitive. In the moment of his birth—a baby of colossal proportions, a complicated delivery—he’d been declared dead, just seconds after arriving to the world. Mysteriously and inexplicably, a few minutes later, to the astonishment of his midwife and her team, he started to breathe again, after he’d already been written off, set aside on a metallic bed, bound for the morgue. The Lonely Man, of course, remembers nothing of his brief sojourn on the other side. But it’s easy enough for him to imagine that whatever and wherever it might be—above or below or in some wrinkle in space-time, a limbo of stardust—its waiting room must closely resemble the waiting room he was in now. And that from there, maybe, grow the roots that forced on him the cursed blessing of having lived to tell the tale.