Mr. Gwyn (2 page)

During his entire sojourn in Granada, given the distance, and the isolation, Jasper Gwyn didn't have to return to the subject of his article except occasionally, in his own mind. One day, however, he happened to meet a young Slovenian woman and he ended up having a pleasant conversation with her in the courtyard garden of a museum. She was brilliant and self-assured, and she spoke fairly good English. She said that she worked at the University of Ljubljana, in the Department of Modern and Contemporary History. She was in Spain to do research: she was working on the history of an Italian noblewoman who, at the end of the nineteenth century, traveled around Europe looking for relics.

“You know, trafficking in relics, at the time, was the hobby of a certain Catholic aristocracy,” she explained.

“Really?”

“It's not well known, but it's a fascinating story.”

“Tell me.”

They dined together, and at dessert, after discoursing at length about the tibias and phalanges of martyrs, the Slovenian woman began to talk about herself, and in particular of how lucky she felt to be a researcher, a profession that she considered wonderful. She added that, naturally, everything surrounding the profession was horrible, the colleagues, the competition, the mediocrity, the hypocrisy—everything. But she also said that as far as she was concerned absolutely nothing could take away the desire to study and write.

“I'm happy to hear you say that,” Jasper Gwyn commented.

Then the woman asked what he did. Jasper Gwyn hesitated a moment, and then he half-lied. He said that for a dozen years he had been an interior designer, but two weeks ago he had stopped. The woman appeared to be sorry about it and asked why he had given up a job that seemed so enjoyable. Jasper Gwyn gestured vaguely in the air. Then he said something incomprehensible.

“One day I realized that nothing mattered to me anymore, and that everything was like a fatal wound.”

The woman appeared to be intrigued, but Jasper Gwyn was skilled at leading the conversation to other subjects, slipping sidewise into the custom of putting a carpet in the bathroom, and then expatiating on the supremacy of southern civilizations, due to their knowledge of the exact meaning of the term
light
.

Much later that evening they said good night, but they did it so slowly that the young Slovenian woman had time to find the right words to say that it would be nice to spend that night together.

Jasper Gwyn wasn't so sure about it, but he followed her to her hotel room. Then, mysteriously, it wasn't so complicated to mix her haste and his caution in a Spanish bed.

Two days later, when the Slovenian woman left, Jasper Gwyn gave her a list he had compiled of thirteen brands of Scotch whiskey.

“What are they?” she asked.

“Lovely names. I'm giving them to you.”

Jasper Gwyn spent sixteen more days in Granada. Then he, too, left, forgetting in the hotel three shirts, an unpaired sock, a walking stick with an ivory head, a sandalwood bubble bath, and two telephone numbers written in felt-tipped pen on the plastic shower curtain.

4

Jasper Gwyn spent the first days of his return to London walking the streets of the city obsessively and for long periods, with the delightful conviction that he had become invisible. Since he had stopped writing, in his mind he had stopped being a public figure—there was no reason for people to notice him, now that he was an ordinary person again. He began dressing carelessly, and went back to doing many small things without the subconscious thought that he ought to be presentable, in case a reader suddenly recognized him. The position he took at the bar in the pub, for example. Riding the bus without a ticket. Eating by himself at McDonald's. Every so often someone did recognize him, and then he denied that he was who he was.

There were a lot of other things he no longer had to deal with. He was like one of those horses who, having shaken off the jockey, slow down, dreamily, to a gentle trot, while the others are still bursting their lungs in pursuit of a finish line and an order of arrival. That state of mind was infinitely pleasurable. When he happened upon an article in the newspaper or a bookshop window that reminded him of the fray he had just withdrawn from, he felt his heart grow light, and he breathed the childish intoxication of Saturday afternoon. It was years since he had felt so good.

Partly for this reason he put off for a while taking the measure of his new life, prolonging that private atmosphere of vacation. The idea, developed during his sojourn in Spain, was to return to the profession he had had before publishing novels. It wouldn't be difficult, or even unpleasant. One might perhaps see a certain formal elegance, a sort of strophic progress, as in a ballad. Nothing, however, pressed him to hurry that return, since Jasper Gwyn lived alone, and had no family and few expenses, and thus, for at least a couple of years, he could live in tranquility without even getting up in the morning. So he put the thing off, and devoted himself to casual acts and to tasks that he had long postponed.

He threw away old newspapers. He took trains for unknown destinations.

5

What happened, however, was that, as the days passed, he discovered in himself a singular form of unease that he had trouble
understanding and that only after a while did he come to recognize: although it was vexing to admit it, he missed the act of writing, and the daily care of ordering thoughts into the rectilinear form of a sentence. He hadn't expected it, and this caused him to reflect. It was a sort of small irritation that showed up every day and promised to get worse. So, little by little, Jasper Gwyn began to wonder if he shouldn't consider marginal jobs in which it would be possible for him to pursue the practice of writing without its necessitating an immediate return to the fifty-two things he had vowed never to do again.

Travel guides, he said to himself. But he would have to travel.

He thought of writers of instruction manuals for household appliances, and wondered if there still existed, somewhere in the world, the job of writing letters for those who were unable to do it.

Translator, he thought. But from what language?

In the end, the only thing that came clearly to mind was a word:
copyist
. He would like to be a copyist. It wasn't a real profession, he realized, but the word had a resonance that was convincing, and inspired him to look for something precise. There was a secrecy in the act, and a patience in its methods—a mixture of modesty and solemnity. He would not like to do anything but that: be a copyist. He was sure that he could do it well.

As he tried to imagine what in the real world might correspond to the word
copyist
, Jasper Gwyn let a lot of days slip by, one after another, apparently painlessly. He was scarcely aware of them.

6

Every so often contracts arrived for him to sign, which had to do with the books he had already written. Renewals, new translations, adaptations for the theater. He left them on the table, and in the end it was clear to him that he would never sign them. With some distress he discovered that not only did he no longer want to write books but, in some way, he didn't even want to have written them. That is, he had liked doing it but he didn't want them to have survived his decision to stop, and in fact it bothered him that, with a force of their own, they went where he had promised himself never to set foot again. He began to throw away the contracts without even opening them. Every so often Tom passed on letters from admirers who politely thanked him for such and such a page, or a particular story. Even that made him nervous, and he noticed that none of them mentioned his silence—they didn't seem to be informed about it. A couple of times he took the trouble to answer. He thanked them, in turn, with simple words. Then he added that he had stopped writing, and signed off.

He noted that no one answered those letters.

More and more often, however, that need to write returned, and he missed the daily care with which he put his thoughts in order, in the straight line of a sentence. Instinctively, then, he ended up compensating for that absence with a private liturgy, which did not seem to him without some beauty: he began to write
mentally
, while he was walking, or lying in bed with the light out, waiting for sleep. He chose words, he constructed sentences. He might follow an idea for days, writing in his head entire pages, which he then
enjoyed repeating, sometimes aloud. He could, in the same way, have cracked his knuckles, or practiced athletic exercises, over and over again. It was a physical thing. He liked it.

Once he wrote, in that way, an entire poker game. One of the players was a child.

In particular he liked to write while he was waiting at the Laundromat, amid the spinning drums, to the rhythm of magazines leafed through distractedly on the crossed legs of women who did not seem to harbor any illusions that did not concern the slenderness of their ankles. One day he was writing in his mind a dialogue between two lovers in which the man was explaining that ever since he was a child he had had the curious faculty of dreaming about people only when he was sleeping with them, only
while
he was sleeping with them.

“You mean that you only dream about people who are in your bed?” the woman asked.

“Yes.”

“What sort of nonsense is that?”

“I don't know.”

“And if someone isn't in your bed you don't dream about her.”

“Never.”

At that point a fat, rather elegant girl came up to him, there in the Laundromat, and she handed him a cell phone.

“It's for you,” she said.

Jasper Gwyn took the phone.

7

“Jasper! Did you put in the fabric softener?”

“Hello, Tom.”

“Am I disturbing you?”

“I was writing.”

“Bingo!”

“Not in that sense.”

“I don't find that there are many senses, if someone is a writer he writes, that's it. I told you, no one really succeeds in stopping.”

“Tom, I'm in the Laundromat.”

“I know, you're always there. And at home you don't answer.”

“Books aren't written in a Laundromat, you know, and anyway I wouldn't write them.”

“Bullshit. Come clean. What is it, a story?”

The laundry was still in prewash, and there was no one leafing through magazines. So Jasper Gwyn thought he could try to explain. He told Tom Bruce Shepperd that he liked lining up words, and forming sentences, the way he might crack his knuckles. He did it in the closed space of his mind. It relaxed him.

“Fantastic! I'll come there, you speak, I record, and the book is done. You wouldn't be the first to use a system like that.”

Jasper Gwyn explained to him that they weren't even stories, they were fragments, without a before and without an after—really, they could hardly even be called scenes.

“Brilliant. I've already got the title.”

“Don't tell me.”

“
Scenes from Books that I Will Never Write
.”

“You told me.”

“Don't move, I have to take care of two things and I'll be there.”

“Tom.”

“Tell me, brother.”

“Who is this elegant girl here?”

“Rebecca? She's new, very good.”

“What does she do besides carry around a cell phone in Laundromats?”

“She's learning, you have to begin somewhere.”

Jasper Gwyn thought that if there was one thing he didn't like about having stopped being a writer it was that he would no longer have any reason to work with Tom Bruce Shepperd. He thought that one day Tom would stop following him around with his phone calls, and that would be a bad day. He wondered if it wouldn't be right to tell him. There, in the Laundromat. Then he had a better idea.

He closed the phone and nodded to the fat girl, who had moved a few steps away, out of politeness. He noticed that she had a very beautiful face, and, besides, she limited the damage by choosing her clothes well. He asked her if he could give her a message for Tom.

“Of course.”

“Be so kind then as to tell him that I miss him.”

“Of course.”

“I mean that sooner or later he'll stop bothering me wherever I go, and I'll feel the same relief you feel when you're in a room and the refrigerator motor stops, but also the same inevitable dismay, and the sensation, which you surely know, of not being certain what to do with that sudden silence, and maybe not, ultimately, being equal to it. Do you think you understand?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Would you like me to repeat it?”

“Maybe I should take notes.”

Jasper Gwyn shook his head. Too complicated, he thought. He opened the phone again. Tom's voice arrived. Exactly how those gadgets functioned he would never understand.

“Tom, be quiet a second.”

“Jasper?”

“I want to tell you something.”