The World Idiot (8 page)

Belperron wanted to be a writer, or rather he wanted to be a
successful
writer, a man who received adoration and money simply for setting words down on paper. He had many ideas but even more distractions and it was impossible to find enough peaceful time to pursue his ambition.

The pale city of Montevideo bathed itself in starlight and music. His friends called for him at any hour, ringing his doorbell or climbing up to his balcony unannounced, and they did not allow him to feign absence. His mood changed when he saw them at the window — all thoughts of work vanished and he became a celebrant almost against his will.

This situation had to be rectified for the sake of literature.

He was often weak, sometimes stubborn, and it seemed right to set these different qualities against each other: the stubbornness would prevail. Accordingly he resolved to compose at least one book before attending another party. It was necessary to hide from society behind an impenetrable barrier.

His friends disapproved but accepted it was a temporary measure and finally agreed to help. They treated his scheme as a game. From many nations they had come, seeking the bohemian ambience and rhythms of this newly fashionable old port, the dancehalls, nightclubs and art galleries. In a room illuminated by soft lanterns, he gathered them around on softer cushions and told them of his plan, which was nothing less than voluntary entombment in his house. He owned a small place on the outskirts. They sighed and nodded at his words, his request for bricks and mortar.

The following day they sealed him in.

He sipped sherry as the work continued outside and waited for the shadows to dominate every room — all the windows had to be bricked up as well as the front door. He lit a dozen spare lanterns and hung them at strategic points within the house. Almost immediately he was overcome with hunger.

His cupboards were bare but he found half a loaf of bread in the cold oven and a packet of Uruguayan tea on a bookshelf. There was no need to worry about future meals. He had come to a clever arrangement with his friends: they would prepare dinners in their own kitchens and deliver them through a small chute they had fitted between the bricks covering his front door. All he had to do was leave a clean plate at the base of the chute to receive his daily nourishment.

He wandered from room to room, almost unsure of where he was, but the novelty of being an exile in his own home soon wore off and he grew bored with the familiar objects. He approached his writing desk and stared at the blank pieces of paper but they held no appeal for him and he turned away.

His relationship with words would begin tomorrow.

In the meantime he decided to relax and forget the responsibilities of creation and allow his mind to shrink into banality. He moved into the most spacious room in the house, weaving between the cushions on the floor and sinking into his deepest couch. For long moments he stared at the far wall in confusion.

The television had vanished.

The remote control rested on the arm of the couch and he picked it up and sullenly pressed a few buttons but his plan of spending his first evening thoughtlessly washed by boxed flickers had to be abandoned. He had no memory of moving the contraption elsewhere. Rousing himself he conducted a brief search of dim cupboards and obscure corners and then retired to bed in a trivial rage.

He took the remote control with him and jabbed it as if to conjure images on his ceiling. His friends despised television as a poor substitute for real pleasure and never indulged the habit. He agreed in principle. But there was one curious way in which he approved of the invention and that was in its depiction of fictional violence.

The argument that screen violence encouraged aggression in real life was too unimaginative. It seemed to him that as well as glorifying injury and death, fictional violence also set limits to the pain and destruction wrought by one person on another. A man inspired by a film to plunge a knife between the ribs of an innocent victim had by necessity also been inspired not to do anything
worse
. The moment an extreme was manifested in fiction it prevented itself from travelling beyond that extremity and lost all potential to become even more disagreeable.

These were the thoughts that lulled him to sleep.

He experienced a vivid dream: a landscape belonging to another world, a desert of blue dunes dotted with oases of strange trees. Figures moved between the branches picking fruit. He viewed this scene from a distance and was overcome with a feeling of dislocation. Then a sudden wind shifted the sands, uncovering the ruins of temples dedicated to gods with forms and faces he would never recall. Thin smoke drifted from oddly shaped doorways, trapped clouds of ancient incense released after an unimaginable number of centuries.

He awoke with a start but did not know if it was morning or still night. The sun had been bricked out of his abode and there was not a single timepiece in any of the rooms. He looked at the level of oil in the lanterns but this meant nothing to him. So he rose and resumed his pacing of the floor, his senses painfully alert.

He found it impossible to imagine the city outside, to remember the buildings and streets. He had lost Montevideo during his sleep. He still knew the names of his favourite haunts, the Museo Romántico, Teatro el Picadero and Plaza Zabala, the Bar Lobizón and Sala Zitarrosa, and those steak houses where he always ate, El Palenque, El Fogón and the others, but they seemed less real. There was a distance between them and his present situation, a gulf of time and space larger than a single night and wall of bricks.

The world of blue dunes felt closer.

He pressed his ears to the walls but heard nothing from outside, no traffic or arguments, none of those sounds that blanketed his normal existence in this house. One explanation was that the brick shell insulated him completely. He licked his lips.

He waited impatiently for his daily meal, his appetite increased by the tea he sipped from a gourd, and when he heard fumbling on the far side of the chute he ran like a child to watch the arrival of dinner on his plate. It came and he gasped.

Something flat and purple and very sticky.

He carried it to his writing desk and sniffed it cautiously. Then he picked it up and crammed it into his mouth, chewing with a reckless joy. It was a fruit concoction of a mysterious kind — he had never known such a taste before. He wiped his lips with his sleeve and sat up in shock, toppling his chair.

A thought had come to him and he could not dismiss it, despite the fact it was absurd. His house had left the Earth and travelled far across the universe to the planet in his dream. The figures in the oases had been picking fruit for
this
meal. It was they who had just fed him, not his friends. This was a better explanation for his feelings of loss and separation, his own alienation.

It occurred to him that the remote control was responsible for bringing him here. Long months of inactivity had somehow altered its internal workings, dust had interfered with the function of its circuits and now it no longer switched channels on a missing television but dematerialised a house and reassembled it on another world.

He went back to the bedroom and found the device. He pressed more buttons and his head span. He sank to the floor and gripped a cushion for safety: he could feel himself rushing into the vacuum of the cosmos, passing through clouds of stardust. When the nausea passed he knew he would not write a single line today. The occasion was too momentous. His only desire was to learn what new planet he had reached. It was a bittersweet irony that he could see and hear nothing of what existed outside. Only through the sense of taste might he be made aware of his latest destination.

He waited anxiously near the chute.

The meal came when he had almost given up hope of being fed. It was more peculiar than his previous feast, consisting of complex geometrical shapes mixed together, each of the same rubbery consistency and glowing with a deep red light that had substance and
flowed
in response to the jabbing of his spoon. He finished the meal and licked the plate clean. Then he returned to bed and considered the clues he had been given.

He allowed his imagination to summon up a landscape of shallow seas sprinkled with atolls and tiny islands, the opposite of the desert world, and he convinced himself this vision was a product of a true dream rather than his conscious mind. There were no temples on this planet, but enormous canoes bore idols of twisted coral between the islands. The blood in his head resembled the beating of drums. He slept and digested his new status as an interstellar emissary.

When he awoke he jabbed more buttons.

He found it impossible to do anything other than wait for his meals. It was all that mattered: he was experiencing one of the most extreme adventures any human had ever attempted. To write or read would be an insult to the gravity of the process.

His third meal was a collection of roughly spherical objects with fibrous husks under which palpitated a creamy yellow lava. He pictured a young world of active volcanoes with basalt cities lurking beneath showers of ash and sparks. The inhabitants rarely ventured out but took shelter beneath roofs of thick stone. Even their clothes were made from minerals. He did not linger long on this planet.

Every day he voyaged to a different world, exploring its geography, history and culture through taste alone. He was amazed and relieved that the inhabitants were never hostile but always willing to leave offerings for him, depositing the finest examples of their unutterably bizarre cuisine through his chute. Possibly they regarded him as a deity of some kind or it might be that simple generosity was a universal constant. To judge alien civilisations by the standards of those on Earth was surely a mistake. He accepted each act of charity with good grace.

He was dimly aware that the planets and cultures he encountered were not really so original in concept after all. They tended to be exaggerations and distortions of what already existed on his home world, as if he had taken one element of a particular climate or country and wrapped a whole globe in it. Planets of ice or mountain ranges or swamps or grasslands. And the beings who dwelled on the surfaces were fairly bland creations, minor variations of each other, based on his own ideas of what noble savages should be like.

Only once did he manage to imagine a truly unique world, a planet with static weather patterns but pliable continents: the tectonic plates flowed and altered under the unmoving winds and rains and heatwaves so that the people who lived on the surface experienced changing weather as they were carried back and forth by the shifting ground beneath them. It was a nice conceit and he was proud to deduce the existence of such a place from taste alone.

But he slowly began to feel a despairing kind of homesickness and this evolved into a panic that he would never return to Earth. He became obsessed with the idea of reaching Montevideo but he did not know which buttons to press in the correct order. Another worry dominated his mind: the inevitability of eventually landing on a world with a hostile population. This drove him to greater efforts to find Earth again, blind efforts, a desperate faith in chance.

Finally it seemed his nightmare had come true. One morning he heard a pounding on the walls of his house. A force was breaking down the shell of bricks. He lunged for the remote control to propel his abode to safety but something had gone wrong. The device no longer worked. The pounding continued. Now he realised how facile his former views about violence were, how acutely different the threat of genuine pain and injury was. He did not care to imagine what limits would be set by any act of brutality on his person and how this would preclude something more extreme. He cared only about the integrity of his physical body.

He took refuge under his writing desk.

Something shattered at the front door. Daylight flooded the rooms. His friends found him shivering and begging for mercy. They lowered the hammers they carried and lifted him up.

“Your month of exile is over,” they said.

They were astonished at the ferocity of his tears, the thanks he gave them and the delight he expressed at being once more on his home planet. He was weary beyond belief, a man who had returned from the stars alive and full. They blinked at each other.

“Show us what you have written,” they suggested.

He did not seem to hear and so they picked up the papers on his desk. The pages were stained with food, the remnants of a month of daily meals, but they did not contain words. So they berated him for wasting their time and betraying his own ambition.

“I was too busy travelling,” he protested.