Fame (11 page)

Miguel Auristos Blanco didn’t invent these things, they came of their own volition and found their way into the manuscript without any help from him while he sat there watching with restrained curiosity as his typing fingers put line after line up onto the shimmering white screen, and when he stood at the end of a working day, and—like now, for instance—blinked as he watched the sun go down, he was no less exalted and edified than all of his seven millions readers were about to be.

He sighed. With a quick movement of the left hand, on whose middle finger a small tapered sapphire gleamed, he stroked first his moustache and then his thinning hair. As always when he came back from the toilet, he felt both comforted and prey to a vague melancholy. He was spending a great deal of time on the toilet these days; his doctor had told him recently that he would have to have a prostate operation soon. Miguel Auristos Blanco tilted his head, licked his lips, and heard himself give a faint sigh again. He was wearing bespoke shoes of highly polished chestnut leather, white linen
trousers, and a white silk shirt open to the third button. His gray chest hair was more sparse than it used to be, but his body, at sixty-four, was athletic, with the flat stomach only to be seen on people who have a personal trainer: every day, under the watchful eye of Gustavo Monti, the former Olympic gold medalist, he trotted on a groaning, rolling treadmill about which he had once written a little book on the affirmation of uniformity, the changes within continuity, and the gentle swaying of the spirit as it moves between exhaustion and concentration. (Naturally he used the apparatus only when he was here in the city. When he was in his country house close to Parati or in his Swiss chalet on the other side of the ocean, he moved in a trance every morning through the cool and the air, his attention focused on his own breathing and on the slowly building warmth of the new day.) The book wasn’t one of his most successful, but he loved it so much that he often read it to himself before he went jogging.

He hesitated. Had he sighed again? In a sudden impulse, he held his arms wide; it was as if he were feeling a sea wind. But of course he knew it was only the breeze from the almost-silent air conditioner.

As he walked toward his desk, his fingertips delicately removed a flower seed from his sleeve, flicked it away, and he watched the tiny silky fluff float away, sparkle in a ray of sunshine, and vanish into the air. Then he sank into his desk chair: upholstered in leather, supple, following the contours of his back exactly, made by the best chair-maker in São
Paulo. For a few seconds he rocked, the tips of both index fingers against his nose, his thumbs between his lips pursed in thought. Then he opened the second drawer from the top and took out, as he did so often, a pistol that was lying inside ready: a Glock, barrel length 114 millimeters, caliber 9 millimeters, never used, for which he had not only a permit but also authorization to carry it loaded.

Miguel Auristos Blanco liked weapons, if only as toys, he had never used one in anger. On his sun-spangled lawn in Parati he regularly did target practice, sometimes with bow and arrow, sometimes with a light hunting rifle in front of the patiently receptive round board.
A Steady Hand Makes a Calm Spirit
was the title of the book in which he elaborated on how when shooting one must become One with the target, so that success is no longer a concern, and for this very reason, one enters a paradoxical state that oscillates between tension and detachment and hits the bull’s-eye. It was not his strongest work, and only years later did he realize with a certain shock that it paraphrased almost in its entirety a very famous book about Japanese archery that he had once thumbed through when he was young. His readers hadn’t been bothered, and shortly after its publication a grateful manufacturer of sporting bows had told him how it had increased worldwide demand for his products.

He leaned down—the chair emitted a groan and he felt a brief twinge in his back—and took the ammunition clips out of the drawer. With careful hands, eyes narrowed and lips pursed, he loaded the pistol, pushing a clip into the magazine,
then pulling back the bolt, and letting it snap forward again—something you see so often in films that he realized it made him feel unintentionally like an actor when he did it himself.

The sun had set, flames of red dissolved themselves in the water, the mountain peaks glinted with an icy light, and between the hovels of the favelas he could see the snaking lines of unpaved streets. Miguel Auristos Blanco stood up, reached for the four letters his secretary had selected from the day’s mail (every day he received innumerable pleas for advice and help, along with tearful life stories, offers of marriage, prayers, and manuscripts of novels which were about either the search for life’s meaning or UFOs, plus invitations to conferences in dozens of cities, where there were directors of libraries, meditation centers, and bookshops who knew that this man was so busy he had no time to make personal appearances but didn’t want to give up hope that he would make an exception for them just this once, and extracted the first out of its envelope, which had already been slit open for him.

It was written on handmade deckled paper, with the letterheading of the United Nations, under which was the inquiry as to whether, if the jury decided in his favor, he would accept the Dialogue Between the Nations Award and be prepared to address the General Assembly. He smiled. The second letter was from his biographer Camier in Lyons asking in his respectful tiny handwriting for a further interview to discuss his time in a Japanese monastery thirty years
ago, his study of the koans, the wisdom of the East, and of course his first, second, and third marriages; as always, Camier assured him, he could rely on the discretion of the authorized biographer that nothing that he didn’t want would end up in print. Miguel Auristos Blanco paused. He didn’t believe Camier, but what could he do other than agree to the interview?

The third in the stack, without an envelope, was a postcard from Tenerife, where Aurelia was now living with their two children. The house, formerly belonging to both of them, was now hers exclusively, and it was almost a year since the last time he’d seen Luis and Laura. He had wondered all that time why he didn’t miss them more, and to explain it to himself, he had added a whole chapter to
Ask the Cosmos, It Will Speak
about how we only suffer the absence of those whose souls are not in harmony with our own. Whereas those closest to us who are part, as it were, of our very being, arouse no need in us to have them at our side, for what they feel, we feel, regardless of how far away they are, and what they suffer, we suffer, and every actual conversation with them is no more than a superfluous confirmation of the self-evident. He spent thirty seconds contemplating the photograph on the front (bay, mountains, flag, swarm of seagulls) and the two little signatures, then he set the card aside.

The fourth letter was from Sra. Angela João, the abbess of the Carmelite Convent of the Holy Providence in Belo Horizonte, who asked him in the name of that old friendship (either his memory was failing or hers was, because he
couldn’t remember ever having met her) for some words on theodicy for her edification and that of her sister nuns: why did suffering exist, why did loneliness, why above all was God so utterly distant, and yet why was the world so perfectly organized?

He shook his head irritably. He would soon need a new secretary. This one was obviously suffering from overload. No letter as tiresome as this one should ever have reached his desk.

The boats were casting enormously long shadows, the water shimmered blood-red, and dark fire flared in the sky. He had watched countless sunsets from this window, yet every one of them seemed like the first to him, and he felt he was witnessing a complicated experiment that could go horribly wrong from one evening to the next. He put the letter down pensively and took the pistol, his fingers searching instinctively, as they had the last time, three days ago, for the safety catch, until he realized that Glocks don’t have one and that on this particular model the trigger itself was the safety catch. He pointed the weapon at himself and looked into the mouth of the barrel. He’d often done it before, of an evening, usually around about this time, and as always he could feel himself begin to sweat. He put the pistol down, switched on the computer, and waited for the machine to laboriously boot up. Then he began to write.

But why? He himself didn’t really know. Perhaps it was mere politeness, because a question demanded an answer, perhaps also because old women in their religious habits had
filled him all his life with a mixture of respect and absolute terror. Dear Abbess, venerable and blessed Reverend Mother, God cannot be justified, life is atrocious, its beauty amoral, even peace is filled with crimes, and no matter whether He exists or not—I’ve never made up my mind about that—I have no doubt that my miserable death will evoke no more pity in Him than the deaths of my children or, some day may it be long distant, Reverend Mothers, yours.

He hesitated, blinked into the last fiery rays of the sun, tilted his head back, and took a deep breath. He listened to the silence. The air conditioning was humming quietly. Then he went back to writing.

He wrote while the sun was sending its last glow across the water; he wrote while the air slowly filled with darkness as if with some fine substance; he wrote while the lights down there glittered more and more distinctly and the smooth black expanse of the sky blended into the mountains; and when he looked up, his shirt wet and his moustache covered with drops of sweat, it was night. Dear Abbess, there are no grounds for hope, and even if God’s existence were to be justified by something other than His flagrant absence, every intelligent argument would still pale before the scale of suffering in the world, before the very fact that suffering exists, and that everything always and eternally, think about this, Reverend Mother, is stained with imperfection. The only things that help us are consoling lies such as the dignity incarnated in your sainted person. May you remain in this state for many years and in fond memory I remain yours, etc.… He
double-clicked on the mouse and the printer began to hum. A sheet, another sheet, a third, and then a fourth filled up with letters. Miguel Auristos Blanco picked up the tiny pile and began read.

He got to his feet. How had he written this? These pages were the absolute retraction of everything, the annihilation of his life’s work, the clear, concise apology for his ever having claimed that there was an order in the world and life could be good.

But it wasn’t until he reached a tanned hand out for the pistol that he understood what he’d done, and that the time when he’d thought he still had a choice was over. What had been a quasi-game before was suddenly real. If he really did squeeze the trigger, he would make history. All the world’s believers, all the optimists, and the prayerful who had his books in their bookcases and his example in their hearts—how could he resist the temptation to deliver such a blow to them! This, and only this, would make him a great man. The corners of his mouth twitched in a mixture of laughter and panic. What he had just written wasn’t even his own opinion. It was simply the truth.

His knees were suddenly weak; he leaned against the window. The winking lights of a plane drew a curve in the firmament, a boat fired off a flare that soared and burst silently in a whirl of sparks. In the room next door, with a poor sense of timing, the cleaning lady turned on the vacuum cleaner.

He picked up the last sheet one more time and asked himself if he really had written it, and how after so many years of
being emollient he could have come up with these words. He had a vision of the Church congresses and their tables of books from which his would be banished, he had a vision of bookshops with gaps in their shelves, he had a vision of shocked priests and blanching housewives, bewildered doctors’ wives and all the middle-ranking employees on five continents, to whom there would be no one left to say that their suffering had meaning. He dropped the piece of paper, and before it could float to the floor on the draft from the air conditioner that carried it gently this way and that, he picked up the pistol. No safety catch. You only had to pull the trigger. He opened his mouth and clenched his teeth around the polymer barrel, which to his surprise wasn’t even cold.

His fingers groped for the trigger. Eyes wide, as the sweat ran down over his forehead, he saw the city below, the twinkling lights of the boats, the expanse of the night. The bullet would pass through his head and hit the window—as if to strike not just the glass but the universe itself, as if the cracks would run through the sea, the mountains, and the sky, and he grasped that this was the truth, that this was exactly what would happen if he and only he branded the world with the sigh of his contempt, once and for all, if only he had the strength to pull the trigger. He heard himself panting. In the room next door the vacuum cleaner droned. If.

A Contribution to the Debate

H
ere I have to back up. Sorry: perfectly clear that lithuania23 and icu_lop will flame this posting for being too long; so will that troll lordoftheFlakes, just like he flamed on MovieForum, but I can’t do it shorter, and whoever’s in a hurry can just skip it. Meeting celebrities? Heads up!

Must signal that I’m a huge hardcore fan of this forum. Platinum idea. Normal types like you and me who spot famous people and report on their sightings: chill, no? wicked idea, really well worked out, interesting to everyone and besides it acts like control, so they know they’re being scanned and can’t just goof off. Wanted to post here forever, only where to get the stuff. But then came last weekend, the whole load.

Quick flashback. (My life has been the whole crazy load recently, but you have to cope, there are good days and bad days, yin and yang stuff and for you freaks who’ve never
heard of that: it’s philosophy!) You know my username mollwit from other forums. I post a lot on Supermovies and also on TheeveningNews, on literature4you, and chat rooms, and when I see bloggers serving up bullshit I let them have it. Username always mollwit. In Real Life (the real one!) I’m in my mid-thirties, quite tall, medium build. During the week I wear tie, office regs, whole capitalist racket, you do the same. Has to happen if you’re going to realize your Life Sense. In my case writing analyses, observations, and debates: contributions to culture, society, political stuff.