Who Among Us (Penguin Modern Classics) Read online

  Part One. MIGUEL: XXIV

  1 Marie Bashkirtseff was a Russian artist living in nineteenth-century Paris, who died of tuberculosis aged twenty-five. Her Journal of a Young Artist is an early example of self-examination.

  Part Three. LUCAS: I

  1 In all the stories I’ve written, I can recognize (unlike my miserable critics) a slice of reality. Either my own, or that of other people; but my starting point is always something that takes place in real life. Maybe the correct explanation has to do with an inability on my part to imagine in the abstract. I don’t know how to tell myself stories; I know how to recognize the story in what I see or experience. Then I distort it, I add or subtract. I’ve always wanted (strictly for my own benefit) to register that distortion, but it’s been a long while since a real story has happened to me. Now that Alicia has left, and I’m still enveloped by her image, her smell, her desire, I feel the need to set down this extraordinary episode. With annotations. I’ll likely publish the story some day. These footnotes (even if I find I am writing them with my reader in mind and employing a suitable tone) must always remain unpublished, strictly personal, for my eyes only. It’s possible that as a result, the distortion my reality suffers when it becomes literature will be revealed: always supposing that what I write is literature.

  2 Well, in fact I think I did. Alicia represents a far too central trope of those years to be simply forgotten. But, in terms of literature, it creates a greater impact to remember everything suddenly at the moment she reappears, as if my memory were linked to her appearance, as if only her image could reawaken my memories. The literary is always to some extent the poetic, and there’s something rather lyrical in the relationship between memory and reappearance.

  3 That is, Alicia. This character’s name goes back a long way. Eleven years ago, when she used to phone me, I always confused her voice with ‘Claudia’s’. Of course, Claudia didn’t exist; but it was my way of annoying her.

  4 There is another sort of woman, irrelevant here: the sort who uses cheap perfume to conjure up nostalgia.

  5 Check this. As I’ve never smoked, I don’t know if tobacco has a cold taste.

  6 That is, me. I don’t like the name, but neither do I like Lucas Orellano.

  7 I think I did touch them just once, but can’t really remember it. If I strain my tactile memory, my hands – that is, the exact centre of their palms – the memories surface, like those of a bowl that once contained similar but clearly distinct items. But I’ve no idea who’s who.

  8 Through the smoke, to be precise. But not in the café, at the port. I went to wait for her (Miguel had told me she was coming) but arrived late, and caught sight of her as she was disembarking through the cloud of smoke hanging over a warehouse or shed, I’m not sure which. The thing is, it seemed to me she was walking, as so often in Montevideo, through cigarette smoke. The dialogue that follows roughly corresponds to what we said in the customs hall (where the relevant customs officer was so zealous he even waved around a delightful pair of black knickers) and in the taxi (where I became aware that things really had changed between us).

  9 I think that if I’d really said this to her, she would have slapped me. But I’d have loved to have done so. I find this kind of revenge (writing it in my story, because in the real world I didn’t dare) utterly depressing.

  10 That is, Miguel. I chose this name by opening the telephone directory at random. In fact, Andres was my third choice. The first two were Abraham and Cornelio, which for obvious reasons I rejected.

  11 This isn’t a bad way to end our first encounter. It’s a fairly innocuous phrase. A phrase which, anyway, wasn’t said at the time. It works to a certain extent because it synthesizes the change of roles, the passage of time, the suggestion of experience as the uninvited guests.

  Part Three. LUCAS: II

  1 In fact, it was a Thursday. Unlike the previous one, this encounter is pretty much based on reality. Maybe for that reason it’s the weakest in literary terms.

  2 A cliché. Why can’t I simply write: ‘He laughed’? And yet I find I have to add ‘out loud’, even if this openness is implied further on. I do need to write ‘throwing his head back’ even though, with regard to the character I’m inventing, this is a barely credible gesture. I have to add it so that the critic in Letras magazine doesn’t accuse me yet again of using ‘horribly mutilated sentences in his best stuttering style’.

  3 Personally, I’m convinced I was the fool. More than foolish, careless. Not to have realized that, eleven years earlier, Alicia represented an opportunity was unforgivably careless of me. Now everything is different. It’s not possible to go back or to recover that early innocence, in other words the gift of spouting nonsense without getting upset about it. It’s not possible … but I can’t remember whether or not I develop this theme later on in the story.

  4 The image is crude, but neither he nor she is particularly refined. I mustn’t forget that Lamas is, in part, myself or that I’ve experienced moments of dangerous depression from gloomily entertaining images of this kind.

  5 Never. I usually hid those pictures in the letter X of my Larousse dictionary.

  6 I know there’s a doubt whether I’m referring to Andres-Miguel or the rhinoceros. The ambiguity doesn’t displease me, because Miguel has always been a cuckold with only one horn: the one he is about to give himself and accept.

  Part Three. LUCAS: III

  1 Lucía is her real name. She’s the only one who wouldn’t be offended, for the simple reason that she subtly despises everyone, including the opinions and prejudices expressed by yours truly. As a character, Lucía is the purest I’ve written. Even in real life she is a character from a story.

  2 This section is presented from Claudia-Alicia’s point of view. I like it, because I had to make up quite a lot. Who knows what Alicia thinks! I can see now that, lacking others and with the intention of filling certain gaps, I employed some of my own thoughts that I only half edited out.

  3 All these people date back to a much earlier time, approximately five years before. They never had any contact with Lucía. But, had she known them, this is probably how she would have introduced them. To her, snobbery is despicable. This is the secret of her slight cynicism and self-loathing, because she considers herself to be a snob as well.

  4 The real Asia didn’t look like Greer Garson, more like Joe Brown. From a strictly objective point of view, I must confess she was hideous. Yet I was always touched by her absolute, naive conviction of her own beauty, which made her unexpectedly likeable. Everyone ended up admitting she was intelligent and friendly; I even know two far from idiotic men who fell in love with her. In vain, by the way, because she considered them beneath her.

  5 This dialogue (or rather, the original version) took place in Montevideo more than ten years ago. It was in the Café Central, and I remember in particular Alicia’s reaction. I decided to include it with modifications (keeping only its innuendo) because to some extent it was meant to convey Alicia’s clash with her past – with our past – that I have confronted her with time and time again in my mind.

  6 When Scarcely Life came out and the critic on Letras observed: ‘Lucas Orellano settles in his chair and tells me: “These are poems about destiny, I haven’t the heart to stop writing them.” “The Song of the Deputy Assistant” is an unremarkable, prosaic poem that I like nevertheless. Besides, this is a good opportunity to see it in print, attributing it in an underhand way to someone who is both innocent and wretched.’

  Part Three. LUCAS: IV

  1 This chapter makes or breaks the story. It reaches a point where the possibilities diverge. From the moment one of them is chosen, the story is established, not so much because of the direction taken, but because of those that are rejected. That is how reality validates the story poetically, because in it reality is no more than a rejected possibility.

  2 Here in particular the story fails. Reality is much more effective and cannot be repeated. There was an untrans
latable emotion in the moment of arrival at my room. I also think I could have expressed it better, but didn’t. Even though I have no illusions about myself, I still have a remaining scrap of modesty and want to keep that shaming tenderness for my own benefit.

  3 I thought I was saying this as part of the story. But I wrote it because it’s true: Lucía is important to me.

  4 What an absurdly sad sight those varicose veins were. The worst of it is I don’t feel any compassion for Alicia; I feel sorry for myself, for that time of my life inexorably stained by a purple, unsightly blotch.

  5 I think this is accurate. There was an unforgettable moment when we studied each other pitilessly, and the other person’s faults became a reflection of our own. The worst of it (I can’t remember if I say so in the story) was the feeling of irretrievability. Not only was it impossible to recover the other person as they had once been, but we couldn’t retrieve our own former self, either.

  6 This must be Alicia’s invention. I don’t think Miguel is capable of writing down his thoughts each day. He’s too fearful, too much of an egotist, and egotists don’t keep diaries.

  7 The transcription of the letter is faithful to its meaning. I’ve left out some ‘domestically sexual’ references that would have enraged the critic in Letras.

  8 At that moment I had the sudden sense of a new, modest freedom. I instinctively distanced myself.

  9 But in fact she didn’t cry. In the story the possibility I was hoping for exists, what I would sincerely have preferred to happen. If she had wept, if she had shown she was vulnerable and hesitant, I would have forgiven her this loathing aimed precisely at the person I also detested. But she shouldn’t have read me the letter, she shouldn’t have remained so cold, without desire, simply waiting for me to possess her once and for all, in order to add still more reasons to her hatred.

  10 I understand now just how much I wanted that ending. I wanted us to be rehabilitated, for us to be able to feel we were stupidly good, isolated by desire, without rancour, forgotten.

  11 In reality I didn’t have to approach her. She had betrayed herself, and she knew it. Not even then did she relinquish her hardness. She smiled and was smiling. Everything had been said, she left and won’t be back. Now is the moment to ask myself why I didn’t want to do it. Because of the guardian angel? At first I fooled myself into thinking it was because of my friendship with Miguel. Later on I realized there was no such thing. He is mediocre, indecisive, a worm, but she shouldn’t have reminded me of that so vehemently. So was that why – because she became so crude, so wretched? I really don’t know. Maybe Lucía is another guardian angel. It’s true that this doesn’t bother me much, but it is also true that I don’t want to hurt her. And not wanting to hurt someone is the least dangerous interpretation of what love is. What’s also certain is that everything would have been better if Alicia and I had simply bumped into each other, if Miguel hadn’t taken the first and only decision in his life. But who among us is to judge?