B0040702LQ EBOK (48 page)

I had no option but to sell Villa Nemo to Baron de Mulder.
I told him that I needed the money in order to go on a long
trip.

I always knew,' he said, `that sooner or later you would get
rid of Villa Nemo, which is a house intended for a large family
like mine, not for a confirmed bachelor like yourself. You
would be better off travelling and having a purely functional
apartment where, instead of throwing parties for multitudes,
you could have intimate suppers for two,' and he winked
lewdly, `don't you agree, my friend?'

`I haven't thrown a party for ages,' I said. `Not since I got
back from Hong Kong.'

With the money the baron gave me for the house, I paid off
the ransom and they returned my mother to me, but she was a
changed woman. Since I was now ruined, I had to go and live
with her, and she spent all day every day blaming me for the
kidnapping.

`You got into bad company,' she would say. `You can't fool
me. You got yourself into some mess or other, and I was the
one who had to pay. The proof is that you won't go to the
police.'

It was useless explaining to her that I suspected it was a
band of thugs of the kind who enjoy killing for killing's sake.
Going to the police would only provide them with the
opportunity for a cruel reprisal. My mother didn't believe me.
Besides, however much I declared my innocence, events conspired against me. My mother and I began getting visits from
members of the revived cult of British wizards demanding
information about unguents that would help them to fly and
so forth. In the end, my mother lost all patience and disinherited me. Tormented by remorse, she began to age rapidly and, though she no longer spent her days reproaching me, she
wouldn't talk to me either, but passed her time writing down
in a red notebook the salient details of all the funerals that
passed by beneath her window When she had noted down
thirty-three interments and some eighty or ninety different
details, she herself died. She may well have died of grief for
having so unjustly disinherited me, for she knew that she was
leaving me destitute. It could not.be said that life was exactly
smiling on me, but, nevertheless, I remained true to my
principles and I smiled back at life.

Moreover, I got a taste for the streets, and I became an
interesting vagabond, simulating madness, which proved most
profitable, because people took pity on me and gave me
money. My madness consisted in walking all over the city
carrying a pair of drumsticks and with them beating out on
the pavement a rhythm as emphatic as it was meaningless,
leaning clumsily forwards as I advanced along the street,
drumming hell out of the cement. My new life, including
nights spent in the metro, became a source of great satisfaction
to me. It was marvellous not having to read newspapers or
receive visits from British wizards, to pass the Rendel bookshop occasionally and make a V-sign at them through the
window, as an anonymous tramp. It was wonderful being able
to earn a living doing street theatre, a daily rendition of the
most refined madness an obese actor could manage.

Since I read no newspapers and had only transient contacts
with other wretched tramps, I did not find out for a long time
that Villa Nemo had been destroyed by a fire in which the
baron and all his family had perished. On the cold winter's
day when I learned this news, I thought to myself that the fire,
which the police had written off as an accident, might well
have been caused by the British wizards. It occurred to me
that they might have thought the baron was me. Unable to do
anything more for him, I said a prayer in the company of
another tramp and, shortly afterwards, dying of curiosity,
I went to see Villa Nemo, where I savoured the morbid
pleasure of strolling about, bearded and ragged, amongst the
ruins of what had once been my dazzling mansion. Only four walls remained standing and the house was very much like the
house I had discovered one April evening years before, the
house that had so fascinated me. The garden was beginning to
grow wild again, there was no lock or knocker on the door. It
had returned to being the same abandoned house I had seen
that first time, a house so adept at self-abandon.

I thought about Villa Nemo in the days that followed and
an irresistible electric force urged me to return, to return and
live there again. And last night I came back to stay. Very
excited, standing on one of the galleries open to the winds,
gleefully looking out on the now totally wild garden, I
decided to come and live in the house, or rather, in what
remained of the house. I told myself that, after all, not only was
it the ideal dwelling for a vagabond like myself, it was also the
most familiar, comfortable place I knew and doubtless ideal
for parties for one, for the intimate parties that would be held
each night after my exhausting travails as a mad beater of
pavements.

That is what I thought last night, when I returned to live in
what had once been my luxurious bedroom. And perhaps
because I could not stop thinking about all that or perhaps
because of the cold (which my one blanket could do nothing
to disguise), I took a long time to go to sleep. Around midnight, I was again woken by the cold. I began considering
making a fire out of what remained of a wardrobe that had
partially survived the blaze and which I knew very well, for it
had once belonged to me. While I was weighing up that
possibility and as if the wardrobe had realised my intentions, I
seemed to hear the sound of creaking and moaning emerging
from its depths. I thought it must be my imagination, but the
creaking came again, and then the sound of chains, and finally,
a heartrending cry.

`Who's there?' I said, lighting a match and still not entirely
losing my calm.

No one answered. By the light of that slender match, the
wardrobe seemed different from the one I had known. It
looked like an upended submarine. It was an art deco design,
which I had never noticed before either. I remembered the words of the baron when he had suggested I sell him Villa
Nemo with the submarine included. And I remembered too
when he had asked me if his ancestors' ghosts were quite
happy haunting the house. The match burned out, and for a
few seconds, plunged into darkness, I felt a certain respect for
the shadows, which I soon put paid to by lighting another
match.

`Who's there?' I said again, trying to keep my voice firm
and steady. I received no reply that time either, but just as I
was preparing to go back to sleep, the creaking resumed. I
realised that I must confront the situation whatever the consequences, and then, commending myself to all the saints in
the world, I wrenched open the wardrobe door.

Nothing. There was nothing and no one inside. I went back
to my bed, wrapped myself in the blanket, and tried to get to
sleep. I was once more considering turning the submarine
into a good blazing fire when the creaking recommenced, this
time accompanied by an unmistakable lament.

`Don't burn me,' I heard a voice saying. `If you do, I will
offer no resistance, but I fear that, in the attempt, you will lose
all your strength. I am a spirit.'

`Who's there,' I said again, feeling alarmed this time.

`It's your friend, Baron de Mulder. My ruin in this world
was forged in this very room, in this house I lost all my family,
in this wardrobe I kept my finest clothes. This house is mine:
let me have it.'

I didn't dare light another match, afraid that he might think
I was about to set fire to the wardrobe.

`I would never have recognised your voice, Baron,' I said,
trying to recover my presence of mind.

,if you could see me, you would appreciate the great physical change I have undergone too. The fire transformed me
into a pale, emaciated figure who spends each night standing
in this wardrobe. It's a pity you can't see me and have a good
laugh. It's a pity you still belong to the land of the living and
cannot appreciate the truly comic nature of my slender,
supernatural appearance.'

I tried to explain to him that it did not seem logical to me that, given that he was a ghost and had the chance to visit all
the most beautiful places on earth (for I presumed that distance now meant nothing to him), he should choose to return
to the one place where he had suffered most.

`I know I'm foolish,' he said, `but I enjoy it, just as I love
being thin and miserable. Because, my dear friend, I have great
natural reserves of laughter, and I laugh all the time and, the
more miserable I am, the more I laugh.'

And he laughed. And had he not already been dead, he
would have died laughing right there and then.

`You laugh in a terribly serious way,' I said. `I don't know
that you could really call it laughter as such. Listen to mine, for
example.'

I demonstrated to him how to laugh in a cheerful, carefree
manner and, as I did so, I felt the gentle but powerful connection between his laughter and mine. There was a current of
mutual sympathy between us, the stimulating solidarity of the
wretched. And there was something very strange in both of us
that triggered the growth or the emergence into the light of a
hidden electricity lurking deep inside the other.

I remarked on this, but he did not reply. Then I thought
that perhaps it was because what I had said had made him
anxious. After all, what I had said was all very well, but the fact
was we could never be a truly electrifying double act if I did
not take a fundamental step (which only I could take) that
would place me, like the baron, outside my dirty, crumpled
clothes, outside my beard, this room, the submarine, outside
this life.

That is why now I am waiting for night to fall and for the
baron to return to his wardrobe. I have everything ready,
the strychnine with which I will take that last fundamental
step and which will allow me at last to form an electrifying
artistic double act, an act that will soon be going on tour, a
triumphant tour of outer space.

© Enrique Vila-Matas

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Enrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, 1948) has published both
novels and short stories: Impostura (1984), Historia abreviada de
la literatura portatil (1985), Una casa para siempre (1988), Hijos sin
hyos (1993), Lejos de Veracruz (1995) and Extrana forma de vida
(1997). He has also published two compilations of essays and
articles: El viajero mas lento (1992) and El traje de los domingos
(1995), and is a regular contributor to the Spanish daily newspaper El Pais. `In Search of the Electrifying Double Act' was
originally published in a collection of stories about imaginary
suicides - Suicidios ejemplares (Anagrama, 1991) - which, like
much of his work, is a disconcerting mixture of comedy and
tragedy.

It is very likely that, amongst these people thronging the
station to greet the trains as they come in, I will find the man
I am looking for. It is likely too that, when I kill him, I will
be doing him a favour. From the barrier, in the passageway
leading out of the station, I have often observed the faces of
travellers. Tired, tetchy people with hesitant eyes. Destroyed
by some family tragedy, a bereavement, a financial disaster,
perhaps an adulterous relationship. Others, with the wide,
vacant, gentle eyes of those who have just been told by a
doctor that there is no hope. Yes, in that mass of lives arriving
on the nine o'clock train, amongst those who are off to the
station cinema to pass the time as they wait, I am bound to
find the man I have to kill. For I have to kill a man. I can't
leave it until tomorrow. Everyone at home is away and I can
do what I like. It will be a most valuable experience. A man
without a name, without an address, perhaps someone who
has already considered suicide. A man who will bear in the
lines in the palm of his hand the astonishing warning that
today, Saturday, he will meet me.

It wasn't hard to find him. There are many people who
think about death, who call to it, who dream of it as they lie
resting. As usual, I was leaning on the railings that separate the
passageway from Customs. Even if there had been another ten
thousand people, I would have spotted him at once. Each time
he bent his knees as he walked, he was swathed in burgeoning
light, in an irrepressible lassitude. There he is. He threw his
suitcases down on the customs officers' bench like someone
sloughing off ... I don't quite know what. His shoulders are
too hunched, the line of his lips too anxious for so impersonal
an act as opening up his suitcases for a border guard. I think
that was when he saw me for the first time. I won't be so foolish as to say that he smiled at me. He could no longer
smile by then. But perhaps his eyes ... He must have been
asking himself, like so many other people in Customs, where
should I look? All smugglers ask themselves that question; I
have sometimes asked myself the same thing. But that wasn't
why he was doing it. It was because I didn't know where to
look. That is why he noticed me.