The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) (4 page)

Someone less generous or more aggressive might have been pleased to discover that a friend of his was stupid. It would make him feel superior, safe in his narcissistic integrity, more intelligent than he thought: in a word, the winner. This was not the case for me. I felt depressed and distressed, like someone on the verge of losing something of great value. In reality, that feeling lasted a few seconds, the time that elapsed between one remark and another in an animated dialogue. In bed at night, I wondered: can depression last a few seconds? Apparently, this was not a true depression but rather its conceptual nucleus, suitable to expand upon in memory, and I tried, almost as if it were a game, to do so in order to delight in its contemplation. As my memory already knew that there was no reason to be depressed, I did so in “fictional” mode, establishing a bridge between the subject and its development.

As I said, my friend’s reply was unexpected; he had been champing at the bit and bringing to bear all his patience so as not to interrupt me. He showed no sign of lack of comprehension or confusion; on the contrary: he was determined to free me from my error.

He started by saying something that I took as a somewhat marginal generalization. According to him, actor and character could coexist, and the movie we had both watched proved this; if I had really watched it, he added with a touch of sarcasm, because the scope of my error made him doubt that I had. In order for them to coexist, neither a suspension of skepticism nor any other psychological or metaphysical operation was necessary, as I had proposed in my ravings, but only a bit of ingenuity. Ingenuity in invention, occupational ingenuity, perhaps not a lot, only the usual for this kind of artistic-
commercial production; he was not sufficiently familiar with what was currently going on in Hollywood to evaluate what we had seen: it could be a product off the movie assembly line, no different from the hundred or thousand others churned out each year by the dream factory, or it could be a movie that just happened to turn out really good.

On the same subject, he made a digression in order to explain that he did not feel comfortable in the discussion on which we had embarked. His mind, trained in philosophy, could be applied only with violent effort to a subject as banal as Hollywood fluff. He did not know the codes of what came under the heading “mass entertainment,” and he feared he would commit errors of evaluation, not only of the quality, as he had mentioned earlier, but even of the meaning itself. At the same time, he admitted that no object was too small for an inquisitive mind.

I agreed, and when I remembered the words I used to tell him so, I also remembered, in a blinding flash, my years of practice in conversation, which was a grand object, capacious enough to hold cultural profundities, yet also small and minimal in its parts and in the parts of its parts: everything, the small and the large, had been bathed in the same impartial light of repetition.

He warned me that he would have to make certain assumptions, some of them quite risky.

Go ahead, I said.

In order for what we were doing to not seem like a dialogue of the deaf, he began, he would start with my ideas in the hope of getting me to see the flip side.

I had spoken of verisimilitude, right? In fact, I had based my argument on it. That it was not verisimilar for a humble mountain herdsman to be wearing a fancy Rolex. So, if ours had one, this would create a rupture in verisimilitude, and there my syllogism ended.

I thought that it wasn’t that simple, or at least I had made it not that simple because I had gone back to the root of the problem, but at that moment I didn’t feel like arguing (perhaps due to the residual effect of my super-brief depression), and I wanted to see where he was going, so I merely assented with a quick nod of impatience. Anyway, if we were perfectly frank, it
was
that simple.

Hence, he continued, my error consisted of me having limited myself to a static concept of verisimilitude. He proposed a different, more dynamic one. According to this concept, and seen within the movement of creation, verisimilitude could be, and was, a generator of stories.
Th
at attribute was a byproduct of its very raison d’être, which was to rectify an error. A real or virtual error, because it didn’t matter that one had not been committed or that never in a million years would it have crossed the mind of the author to commit it: the possibility of the error or anachronism or nonsense was enough, and the authors of stories, even if they didn’t know it, cultivated this possibility, protected it, and treasured it as their most precious asset.

With one wave of his hand, he silenced my request for an explanation, even if one was not necessarily forthcoming (I didn’t even know if it was).

We had to go a little further back, he said, to focus in on the question. Stories that are told or written or filmed, whether they belong to the realm of reality or fiction, have to have qualities that make them worthwhile, because they are neither facts nor natural occurrences. A rock along the side of the road, or a cloud, or a planet does not need to justify itself with its beauty or interest or novelty, but a story does. Because stories are gratuitous and have no specific function, other than whiling away the time, they rely on their quality. Inventiveness has to be maximized in each instance: each time, a new rabbit has to be pulled out of the hat. One recourse they use is verisimilitude. But not a static and narrow verisimilitude, which reality itself provides, but rather “emergency” verisimilitude, the one that arrives at the last minute, like firefighters with their sirens blaring, coming to the rescue in a dangerous situation.

Once he had established that premise, he returned to me. I was wrong to consider the Rolex an error or an anachronism or the result of a momentary oversight during the filming. Completely wrong. But even so, it could be considered a “possible” error, that is, posited as an error in the original generation of the story. This was not difficult to do. I had already thoroughly outlined the conditions for doing so: where was a primitive goatherd in the mountains of Ukraine going to get a Rolex? All fine and good. But if the goatherd in the story had a Rolex, and we had posited that the “error” had been committed, it had to be fixed, that is, made verisimilar.
Th
e story’s interest and novelty would emerge from such an operation. Only then would the story be rendered worthwhile. Without the “error,” things narrowed considerably. Who would be interested in the coherent life of a goatherd? Or of a coherent tycoon with a big gold watch? The interest arose, a priori, from their coexistence.

How could the Rolex on the goatherd’s wrist be justified? This was not so difficult. Here the author might regret that the “error” had not been more serious, for example, that the goatherd, who walked through the mountains along rocky paths only passable by goats . . . had a Ferrari! That would have demanded a much broader expansion of verisimilitude and would have resulted in a much more interesting story, right?

He paused after that little rhetorical question, which was not even that but rather a linguistic tic of his with which I was very familiar. So familiar that it didn’t even register in the conversation; but it did reappear when I laid it out on the table of my dreams. Which made me think, or rather feel, that there was something in my nocturnal reconstructions that surpassed me.

He gazed off into the distance, though he did not pause for long, for he already knew what he was going to say next. Maybe he paused only for effect.

In the meantime, in bed I used this opportunity to pause, even though I could do so whenever I wanted, between any question and any response, or, if I felt like it, if an idea suddenly struck me, in the middle of a sentence, and even in the middle of a word. During my pause I thought of something I should have thought of during his pause (during mine, it became an anachronism): up to this point his reasoning had been subtle and intelligent, which reassured me as far as my previous fears went: he was not a complete idiot, not at all. He was earning a lot of credit, and he even seemed poised to pay off his debt in full. Although it was also true that not being an idiot didn’t prevent him from being something even worse — for example, a madman. But I didn’t elaborate on that; I had more realistic things to think about. Anyway, he was already moving on.

How, then, to justify the Rolex on the wrist of the goatherd? How to justify it, not from the point of view of the spectator (from which, as I had shown, it was unjustifiable), but rather from that of the creator of the story? Very easily. It was clear as a bell. He had to become a fake goatherd. For example, a millionaire who was renouncing his millions because he was sick and tired of civilization and had gone into the mountains to live in communion with nature, or an undercover spy from the CIA trying to find out the secret route of the Baku-Kiev pipeline, or a fugitive from justice, or a scientist studying the behavior of goats . . . A full range of possibilities fanned open, though it would quickly start to close under pressure from the inflexible stipulations of realism.

Even when the fan was fully open, he said, certain restrictions appeared and began to leave clues. The distance between the Rolex and the traditional goatherd was one.
Th
e distance, more literally, between the centers of civilization, where people might wear Rolex watches, and remote mountaintops was another. Both coincided to indicate that the issue held a certain “importance.” Nobody, just for the sake of it, renounced the benefits of creature comforts to suffer the harsh conditions of life in the mountains, especially if they had the means to pay for those comforts, which was the case of anyone who owned a watch for the rich. There had to be a weighty reason.
Th
e arc traced by the fan, now narrower, was still extended over a broad area. In order to keep reducing it, one could turn — and this was a prudent step to take — to the genre the story was going to serve. A serious novel was not the same as a comic strip, and a surrealist story was not a ninja movie. Here we were dealing with a movie that belonged to the category “action and adventure thriller,” with a political backdrop. Once we had made this determination, we would need to look at the catalog of the more or less recent productions in this genre and try to find something that had not yet been done. Since we were within the rubric of commercial movies for mass consumption, it was better not to be overly original, for this could carry it over to the eccentric and thereby limit the target audience. Originality should not go beyond the conventional, right?

But to get to the subject at hand, he continued, we already had the North American hero on his way to the problematic highlands of Crimea on a secret mission. The choice of location was dictated by several considerations, which in turn dictated others, and with all of them combined, the story was well on its way.

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, Ukraine had been showing signs of wanting to distance itself from Russia.
Th
e strong lobby of the pig-iron oligarchy was pressing for greater independence from Moscow in their negotiations over the price of their exports. Putin, in turn, was applying pressure by threatening to cut off energy supplies. The internal situation was becoming increasingly complicated due to longstanding ethnic conflicts.
Th
e hatred between the Tatars and the Cossacks, kept latent for centuries by the exclusion of the former in 1590, had resurged explosively after the annexation of Crimea in the 1960s. A Tatar population had been preserved intact on the peninsula, which, due to contact with the progressive strands of Yeltsinism via tourism, now called itself neo-Tatar and denounced the past and present discriminatory policies of the influential Moldovan and Lithuanian minorities.
Th
e Ukrainian racial cauldron, stirred up by the presumptuousness of the Polish aristocracy and the deviousness of Romanian intellectuals, fugitives from Ceaușescu’s dungeons, led to the emergence of a new class of political opportunists. Using modernization as an excuse, a demagogic Legislature approved a request for numerous loans from the IMF and the World Bank. Washington was watching with interest, speculating about the emergence of a strategic ally in the region. Ever since the end of the Cold War, the Empire had been embarked on the somewhat paradoxical mission of increasing the reach of globalization. The opportunity to stake out some territory presented itself to them with the case of the toxic algae and Señorita Wild Savage.

A topographical question that was worth addressing before moving on to “your precious Rolex,” he said with a smile, was the following: all of Ukraine was an immense plain of black soil atop the Podolian Uplands, which leaned gently toward the Caspian Sea. All of its two hundred thousand square miles were arable, making the country a grain producer of the first magnitude. Across this gigantic plateau ran the three national rivers — the Dnieper, the Dniester, and the Dnierer. Irrigated by the waters of these rivers, the land flourished with alfalfa, which fed the cattle, another source of the country’s wealth.

Anyway, given all this, where were the mountains, those mountains that were from time immemorial the site of Ukrainian legends, the famous mountains of coal inhabited by nocturnal demons and hermits and lost races and eyeless beasts? Where were they?

The case of the toxic algae addressed this question with striking precision.
Th
ese extremely dangerous mutated marine growths had recently appeared in the depth of the Caspian Sea, so deep in its trenches that nobody could see them. Their existence and characteristics had to be deduced from the mortality of deep-sea fish that appeared, floating belly-up, in the surf — fish that were themselves unknown till then.
Th
e ichthyologists who identified and studied them found in their intestinal tracts microscopic fragments, sometimes only a few loose cells, of the algae that had killed them. From those minimal traces, they could diagram the algae.