Mezzodomenica

Early in our friendship, Trause told me a story about a French writer he had known in Paris in the early fifties. I can't remember his name, but John said he had published two novels and a collection of stories and was considered to be one of the shining lights of the young generation. He also wrote some poetry, and not long before John returned to America in the 1958 (he lived in Paris for six years), this writer acquaintance published a book-lenght narrative poem that revolved around the drowning death of a young girl. Two months after the book was released, the writer and his family went on a vacation to the Normandy coast, and on the last day of their trip his five-year-old daughter waded out into the choppy waters of the English Channel and drowned. The writer was a rational man, John said, a person known for his lucidity and sharpness of mind, but he blamed the poem for his daughter's death. Lost in the throes of grief, he persuaded himself that the words he'd written about an imaginary drowning had caused a real drowning, that a fictional tragedy had provoked a real tragedy in the real world. As a consequence, this immensely gifted writer, this man who had been born to write books, vowed never to write again. Words could kill, he discovered. Words could alter reality and therefore they were too dangerous to be entrusted to a man who loved them above all else. When John told me the story, the daughter had been dead for twenty-one years, and the writer still hadn't broken his vow. In French literary circles, that silence had turned him into a legendary figure. He was held in the highest regard for the dignity of his suffering, pitied by all who knew him, looked upon with awe.

John and I had talked about this story at some length, and I remember that I was quite firm in dismissing the writer's decision as an error, a misbegotten reading of the world. There was no connection between imagination and reality, I said, no cause and effect between the words in a poem and the events in our lives. It might have appeared that way to the writer, but what happened to him was no more than a horrible coincidence, a manifestation of bad luck in its cruelest, most perverse form. That didn't mean I blamed him for feeling as hi did, but in spite of sympathizing with the man for his dreadful loss, I saw his silence as a refusal to accept the power of the random, purely accidental forces that mold our destinies, and I told Trause that I thought he was punishing himself for no reason.

It was a bland, commonsense argument, a defense of pragmatism and science over the darkness of primitive, magical thinking. To my surprise, John took the opposite view. I wasn't sure if he was pulling my leg or simply trying to play devil's advocate, but he said the writer's decision made perfect sense to him and that he admired his friend for having kept his promise. "Thoughts are real" he said. "Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future".

Roughly three years after Trause and I had that conversation, I tore up the blue notebook and threw it into a garbage on the corner of Third Place and Court Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. At the time, it felt like the correct thing to do, and as I walked back to my appartment that Monday afternoon in September, nine days after the day in question, I was more or less convinced that the failures and disappointments of the past week were finally over. But they weren't over. The story was just beggining -the true story started only then, after I destroyed the blue notebook- and everything I've written so far is little more than a prelude to the horrors I'm about to relate now. Is there a connection between the before and after? I don't know. Did the unfortunate French writer kill his child with his poem -or did his words merely predict her death? I don't know. What I do know is that I would no longer argue against his decision today. I respect the silence he imposed on himself, and I understand the revulsion he must have felt whenever he thought of writing again. More than twenty years after the fact, I now believe that Trause called it right. We sometimes know things before they happen, even if we don't know that we know.

Oracle night by Paul Auster

El otro día acabé un libro con el que llevaba bastante tiempo viéndome las caras: Oracle Night, de Paul Auster. Reconozco que me costó entrar, pero una vez lo hice lo devoré! Por su prosa ágil y cuidada y por la historia (de la que pongo un fragmento arriba). Quizá también me gustó por lo mismo que me entusiasman las películas de Woody Allen, todos sus personajes (y vidas) son urbanísimos y las cosas que nos llegan más son con las que más nos identificamos. Así que se lo recomiendo, por supuesto, y si lo leen en inglés aún mejor.

Algo con lo que estoy de acuerdo, muchas veces somos capaces de conocer el futuro, no tanto por eventos extraordinarios y paranormales, sino porque la mayoría de las cosas que vendrán se anuncian en el presente. Sobre todo con las personas. Se anuncian por medio de hechos muchas veces pequeños, y si somos capaces de estar atentos a las señales que los demás nos emiten efectivamente somos capaces de adivinar cosas que vendrán.

No lo piensan también ustedes? : )