Mr. Gwyn (9 page)

“I once knew someone who was a copyist” was all he said.

They didn't go into it further.

They ate together, in a pub across the street. When they said goodbye, with dignified warmth, it was two forty-five. Rebecca
would arrive in just a little over an hour, and Jasper Gwyn prepared to do what he had been planning, in detail, for days.

26

He headed toward the Underground, took the Bakerloo line, got out at Charing Cross, and for a couple of hours browsed some used-book stores, seeking, without finding, a handbook on the use of inks. By chance he bought a biography of Rebecca West, and stole an eighteenth-century anthology of haiku, hiding it in his pocket. Around five he went into a café because he needed a bathroom. At the table, drinking a whiskey, he paged through the anthology of haiku, wondering for the hundredth time what sort of mind you needed to pursue a type of beauty like that. When he realized that it was already six, he left and went to a small organic supermarket in the neighborhood, where he bought four things for dinner. Then he went to the nearest tube station, stopping to visit a Laundromat that he came across on the way: he'd been cultivating the idea of compiling a guide to the hundred best places to do your laundry in London, so he never missed an opportunity to bring himself up to date. He got home at seven twenty. He took a shower, put on a Billie Holiday record, and cooked dinner, reheating on a slow flame some lentil soup, which he buried under grated parmesan. After he ate, he left the dishes on the table and stretched out on the couch, choosing the three books that he would devote the evening to. They were a Bolaño novel, the complete Donald Duck stories by Carl Barks, and Descartes's
Discourse on Method
. At least two
of the three had changed the world. At nine fifteen the telephone rang. Usually Jasper Gwyn didn't answer, but it was a special day.

“Hello?”

“Hello, it's Rebecca.”

“Good evening, Rebecca.”

A long moment of silence slid by.

“I'm sorry if I'm disturbing you. I just wanted to say that I went to the studio today.”

“I was sure of it.”

“Because I began to wonder if I'd got the day wrong.”

“No, no, it was today.”

“Okay, good, I can go to bed in peace.”

“Certainly.”

Another gust of silence went by.

“I went and I did what you told me to.”

“Very good. You didn't turn off the lights, right?”

“No, I left everything as it was.”

“Perfect. See you tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“Good night, Rebecca.”

“Good night. And I'm sorry if I bothered you.”

Jasper Gwyn went back to reading. He was in the middle of a fantastic story. Donald Duck was a traveling salesman and had been sent to the wilds of Alaska. He scaled mountains and journeyed down rivers, always carrying a sample of his wares. The great thing was the type of wares he was supposed to sell: pipe organs.

Then he went on to Descartes.

27

But the next day he was there when Rebecca arrived.

He was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. In the studio David Barber's loop was playing. A slow river.

Rebecca greeted him with a cautious smile. Jasper Gwyn nodded. He was wearing a light jacket and had chosen for the occasion leather shoes, with laces, pale brown. They gave an impression of seriousness. Of work.

When Rebecca began to undress he got up to reposition the shutters at one of the windows, mainly because it seemed to him inelegant to stand there watching her. She left her clothes on a chair. The last thing she took off was a black T-shirt. Under it she wore nothing. She went to sit on the bed. Her skin was very white; she had a tattoo at the base of her spine.

Jasper Gwyn sat down again on the floor, where he had been before, and began to look. Her small breasts surprised him, and the secret moles, but it wasn't on the details that he wanted to linger—it was more urgent to understand the whole, to bring back to some unity that figure which, for reasons to be clarified, seemed to have no coherence. He thought that without clothes it gave the impression of a random figure. He almost immediately lost the sense of time, and the simple act of observing seemed natural to him. Every so often he lowered his gaze, as another might have come back to the surface, to breathe.

For a long time Rebecca stayed on the bed. Then Jasper Gwyn saw her get up and slowly pace the room, taking small steps. She kept her eyes on the floor, and looked for imaginary points where
she could place her feet, which were like a child's. She moved as if each time she were assembling pieces of herself that were not intended to stay together. Her body seemed to be the result of an effort of will.

She returned to the bed. She lay down on her back, her neck resting on the pillow. She kept her eyes open.

At eight she got dressed, and for a few minutes sat, with her raincoat on, on a chair, breathing. Then she got up and left—just a small nod of goodbye.

For a moment Jasper Gwyn didn't move. When he got up, he did so in order to lie down on the bed. He began to stare at the ceiling. He rested his head in the indentation in the pillow left by Rebecca.

“How did it go?” asked the woman with the rain scarf.

“I don't know.”

“She's good, the girl.”

“I'm not sure she'll come back.”

“Why not?”

“It's all so ridiculous.”

“So?”

“I'm not even sure I'll go back myself.”

But the next day he returned.

28

It occurred to him to bring a notebook. He chose one that wasn't too small, its pages cream-colored. With a pencil, every so often he
wrote down some words, then he tore out the page and fastened it with a thumbtack to the wooden floor, each time choosing a different place, like someone setting out mousetraps.

So he wrote a sentence, at a certain point, and then he wandered around the room until he chose a point, on the floor, not far from where Rebecca was at that moment, standing, leaning against a wall. He bent over and fastened it to the wood with the thumbtack. Then he looked up at Rebecca. He had never been so close to her, since they started. Rebecca was staring into his eyes. They remained staring like that. They breathed slowly, in the river of David Barber's sounds. Then Jasper Gwyn lowered his gaze.

Before she left, Rebecca crossed the room and went right over to where Jasper Gwyn was huddled, sitting on the floor, in a corner. She sat down beside him, stretching out her legs and hiding her hands between her thighs, with the backs touching. She didn't turn to look at him, she just stayed there, her head leaning against the wall. Jasper Gwyn then felt her warm closeness, and her perfume. He did so until Rebecca got up, dressed, and went out.

Left alone, Jasper Gwyn noted something on his pieces of paper and pinned them to the floor, at points that he chose with minute attention.

29

Rebecca got in the habit of walking around those pieces of paper, on the days that followed, designing routes that took her from one to another, as if she were seeking the outline of some figure. She never
stopped to read them, she just walked around them. Slowly Jasper Gwyn saw her change, become different in her ways of revealing herself, more unexpected in her movements. Perhaps it was the seventh day, or the eighth, when he saw her suddenly composed into a surprising beauty, without flaw. It lasted a moment, as if she knew very well how far she had ventured, and had no intention of staying there. So she shifted her weight onto the other side, raising a hand to smooth her hair, and becoming imperfect again.

That same day, she began to murmur, in a low voice, as she lay on the bed. Jasper Gwyn couldn't hear the words, and didn't want to. But she went on for many minutes, every so often smiling, or pausing in silence, and then starting up again. She seemed to be telling someone something. As she spoke she slid the palms of her hands back and forth along her extended legs. She stopped when she was silent. Without even realizing it, Jasper Gwyn approached the bed, like someone who is pursuing a small animal and ends up a few steps from its den. She didn't react, she only lowered the tone of her voice, and continued to speak, but barely moving her lips, in a whisper that sometimes ceased, and then began again.

The next day, while Jasper Gwyn was looking at her, her eyes filled with tears, but it was a moment of transient thoughts or of memories in flight.

If Jasper Gwyn had had to say when he began to think that there was a solution, probably he would have cited a day when, at a certain point, she put on her shirt, and it wasn't a way of going back on some decision but of going forward beyond what she had decided. She kept it on but unbuttoned in the front—she played with the cuffs. Then something in her shifted, in a way that one
might have defined as
lateral
, and Jasper Gwyn felt, for the first time, that Rebecca was letting him glimpse her true portrait.

That night he went out and walked the streets, and he walked for hours, without feeling fatigue. He observed that there were Laundromats that never closed, and he registered the fact with a particular satisfaction.

30

He no longer saw her as fat, or beautiful, and whatever he had thought and learned about her, before entering that studio, had completely dissipated, or had never existed. As it seemed to him that time did not pass in there but that, rather, a single instant unrolled, always identical to itself. He began to recognize, sometimes, passages in David Barber's loop, and their periodic returns, which were always the same, gave any lapse of time a poetic fixity compared to which what was happening in the world outside lost any enchantment. That everything took shape in a single unchanging, childish light was an infinite joy. The odors of the studio, the dust that was lying on things, the dirt that no one resisted—everything gave the impression of an animal in hibernation, breathing slowly, dead to the world. To the woman with the rain scarf, who wanted to know, Jasper Gwyn went so far as to explain that there was something hypnotic in all that, similar to the effects of a drug. I wouldn't exaggerate, said the old woman. And she reminded him that it was, after all, only a job, the job of a copyist. Think rather of accomplishing something good, she added, otherwise you'll be right back to meeting with students.

“How many days left?” asked Jasper Gwyn.

“Twenty, I think.”

“I have time.”

“Have you already written something?”

“Notes. Nothing it would make sense to read.”

“If I were you I wouldn't be so calm.”

“I'm not calm. I said only that I have time. I was thinking of panicking in a few days.”

“Always putting things off, you young people.”

31

He often arrived late, when Rebecca was already in the studio. It might be ten minutes, or it might be an hour. He did it deliberately. He liked to find that she had already disappeared to herself in David Barber's sound river and in that light—when he, instead, was still immersed in the crudeness and the rhythm of the world outside. Then he entered, making as little noise as possible, and on the threshold stopped, searching for her with his gaze as if in a giant birdcage: the instant he found her—that was the image that would remain most distinct in his memory. In time she got used to it, and didn't move when the door opened, but just stayed where she was. For days now they had been omitting any useless liturgy of greeting or farewell, in meeting and parting.

One day he came in and Rebecca was sleeping. Lying on the bed, slightly turned onto one side. She was breathing slowly. Jasper Gwyn silently approached a chair at the foot of the bed. He sat
down and watched her for a long time. As he had never done before, he scrutinized the details from close up, the folds of the body, the shadings of white in the skin, the small things. He didn't care about fixing them in his memory, they wouldn't be useful in his portrait, but by means of that looking he gained a secret closeness that in fact did help, and carried him far. He let the time pass without rushing the ideas he felt arriving, scattered and disorderly like people coming from a border. At some point Rebecca opened her eyes, saw him. Instinctively she closed her legs. But slowly she reopened them, returning to the position she had abandoned—she stared at him for a few seconds, and then closed her eyes again.

Jasper Gwyn didn't move from the chair, that day, and he got so close to Rebecca that it was natural to end up where she was, first passing through a torpor full of images, then sliding into sleep, without resisting, slumped in the chair. The last thing he heard was the voice of the woman in the rain scarf. Fine way of working, she said.

On the other hand it seemed normal to Rebecca, when she opened her eyes—something that was bound to happen. The writer asleep. What a strange sweetness. Silently she got off the bed. It was past eight. Before getting dressed she approached Jasper Gwyn and stood looking at him. She walked around him, and since one elbow was resting on the arm of the chair, the hand hanging in space, she brought her hips close to that hand, almost touching it, and stood motionless for a moment—the fingers of that man and my sex, she thought. She got dressed without making any noise. He was still sleeping when she left.