Between Eternities: And Other Writings Read online

  In The Mirror of the Sea – a magnificent book that I translated into Spanish several years ago now – the great Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad speaks of ships having their own character and spirit, their own norms of behaviour, their caprices, rebellions and gratitudes. Of how, in large measure, their performance and reliability depend on the treatment they receive from captain and crew. If treated with respect, affection, consideration, care and tact, a ship, says Conrad, is grateful and responds by trying hard and giving of its best (or, rather, her best, since curiously and significantly the only objects that merit a gender in the English language are ships, which are always referred to as ‘she’ and not, as would be more natural, as ‘it’). If, on the contrary, the relationship between them is one of superiority, disdain or is simply too demanding, authoritarian or neglectful, abusive, inconsiderate or even despotic, ships react badly, and feel no ‘loyalty’ and fail to ‘protect’ their crews at moments of risk or danger. ‘Ships,’ writes Conrad, ‘are not exactly what men make them. They have their own nature; they can of themselves minister to our self-esteem by the demand their qualities make upon our skill and their shortcomings upon our hardiness and endurance.’ And further on, he adds: ‘The love that is given to ships is profoundly different from the love men feel for every other work of their hands – the love they bear to their houses, for instance – because it is untainted by the pride of possession. The pride of skill, the pride of responsibility, the pride of endurance there may be, but otherwise it is a disinterested sentiment. No seaman ever cherished a ship, even if she belonged to him, merely because of the profit she put in his pocket. No one, I think, ever did; for a ship-owner, even of the best, has always been outside the pale of that sentiment embracing in a feeling of intimate, equal fellowship the ship and the man, backing each other against the implacable, if sometimes dissembled, hostility of their world of waters.’ And later still, Conrad describes the touching words, tantamount to a funeral oration, uttered by the captain of a brig that had sunk: ‘No ship could have done so well … She was small, but she was good. I had no anxiety. She was strong. Last voyage I had my wife and two children in her. No other ship could have stood so long the weather she had to live through for days and days before we got dismasted a fortnight ago. She was fairly worn out, and that’s all. You may believe me. She lasted under us for days and days, but she could not last for ever. It was long enough. I am glad it is over. No better ship was ever left to sink at sea on such a day as this.’ Conrad sums up by saying: ‘She had lived, he had loved her; she had suffered and he was glad she was at rest.’

  We air passengers are not accustomed to perceiving, or even imagining, planes in this way, as almost animate beings, with a capacity for suffering and endurance, requiring consideration and esteem, and being sensitive, almost, to gratitude and rancour. We board them and can barely distinguish between them, we know nothing of their age or their past history, we don’t even notice their names, which, in Spain at least, are chosen in such a bureaucratic, pious spirit, so lacking in poetry, adventure and imagination, that it’s hard to retain them and, therefore, recognize them if ever we entrust ourselves to them again. I would like to ask Iberia, in this, the twenty-first century, to abandon their anodyne patriotic gestures and adulatory nods to the Catholic Church – all those planes called Our Lady of the Pillar and Our Lady of Good Remedy, The City of Burgos and The City of Tarragona – and instead choose names that are more cheerful and more literary. I, for one, would feel safer and more reassured, more protected, if I knew I was flying in The Red Eagle or The Fire Arrow or even Achilles or Emma Bovary or Falstaff or Liberty Valance or Nostromo.

  Perhaps reading that air hostess’s epistolary revelations had something to do with the diminution of my fears. Until that comment of hers, it had never occurred to me that captains might have a similar relationship with their planes as old seadogs do with their ships, and that air crews are like sailors. Perhaps what surprised and disturbed me during my long watches as a fearful traveller – a murmur, a squeak, a bump, a lurch – are perfectly recognizable to them, familiar, customary, the reactions of each individualized and distinguishable plane, just as we recognize the people close to us by their gestures and intonations, their silences and vacillations, so much so that, often, we don’t even need them to speak to know what’s wrong, what’s going through their minds, what they’re suffering or worrying about or plotting or waiting for.

  This possibility soothes me. We live in an age that tends to depersonalize even people, and which is, in principle, averse to anthropomorphism. Indeed, such a tendency is often criticized, erroneously and foolishly in my view, since that ‘rapprochement’ between the human and the non-human is quite natural and spontaneous, and far from being an attempt to deprive animals, plants and objects of their respective selves, it places them in the category of the ‘humanizable’, which is, for us, the highest and most respectable of categories. I know people who talk to, question, spoil, threaten or even quarrel with their computers, saying things like: ‘Right, now, you behave yourself’ or thanking them for their help. There’s nothing wrong in that, it’s perfectly understandable. In fact, given how often we travel in planes, the odd thing about our relationship with them – those complex machines endowed with movement, to which we surrender ourselves, and that transport us through the air – is that it isn’t more ‘personal’ or more ‘animal’ or more ‘sailor-like’, if you prefer. Perhaps those who crew them haven’t known how to communicate this to us. I’ve never seen them pat a plane, as you might pat a horse to calm or reward it; I’ve never seen planes being groomed and cleaned and tidied, except very hurriedly and impatiently; I’ve never seen them loved as Conrad’s captain loved his sunken brig; I’ve never seen air hostesses – who spend a lot of time onboard – treat them with the respect and care, at once fatherly and comradely, enjoyed by ships. That’s what I would like to see, less cool efficiency and more affection, and I’m sure that I, along with many other tense, vigilant passengers, would become infected by their confidence and be able to relax, because then, planes, like ships in the old days, would have their ‘reputation’, and we would know something of their voyages, their history, their deeds, their past and their future. The pilots, instead of frightening us with their usual litany of cold, hair-raising facts (‘We will be flying at an absurdly high altitude, the temperature outside is unbelievably cold’, etc.), could say: ‘This plane, the Pierre Menard, has had an amazing life so far. It was born ten years ago, has made five hundred flights and crossed the Atlantic on sixty-three previous occasions. It has always responded well to us, even in the most unfavourable of circumstances. It’s a docile plane by nature, but very sensitive as well, why, I remember once …’ Well, I leave the rest up to the airlines. Perhaps it isn’t too much to ask for a little more literature or – which comes to the same thing – a little uniqueness; a little history and background, a little life.

  (2004)

  The Lederhosen

  For reasons I needn’t go into here, I recently had to search out some old photographs, in particular photos from my childhood and early youth. I showed some of these to my brothers and to their sons and daughters, my nieces and nephews, most of whom are now in their twenties. And whereas the images of their parents and uncles, as babies or as children, produced in them a mixture of euphoria, retrospective tenderness and hilarity, they provoked, I think, in the subjects of those photographs a rather different combination of feelings: there was occasional hilarity, true, but tinged always, and perhaps inevitably, with a little pity, an occasional dash of embarrassment – a photo taken at the awkward age, or a photo in which one is wearing some particularly dated and thus antiquated item of clothing – and, now and then, a strange sense of simultaneity, or, rather, of immediate recognition and of time annulled. This last feeling occurred mainly when I could instantly recall the exact moment and place when a photo was taken, could remember precisely the circumstances and even my general state of min
d, or, more concretely, could ‘smell’ and ‘feel’ the clothes I was wearing. To give one non-incriminating example: when I saw myself in the stout lederhosen of which my godmother Olga brought us all a pair from Germany and which saw us through a whole school year, my immediate thought was: ‘There I am in my lederhosen, with the mother-of-pearl reindeer on the front,’ and not, as occurred to me with other photos: ‘There I am in those lederhosen …’ The difference is worth noting: in the first instance, I felt briefly as if I still owned those lederhosen and – even more striking and, of course, more comical – that I could once again put them on as I so often did when I was about eight years old; in the second instance, the aforementioned lederhosen were firmly in the past and I felt no connection with them whatsoever, clear in the knowledge that they were no longer to be found in my wardrobe and that I would never put them on again (not even for some eccentric trip to Bavaria, where even the grown-ups wear them).

  I said earlier that when I look at these old photos I often feel a touch of pity. Don’t misunderstand me: that word doesn’t mean the same as self-pity, which would, in my view, be entirely misplaced. It isn’t a matter of thinking how very innocent I was then (although I was, and it doesn’t matter what date you put on that ‘then’); it isn’t that I see myself in the light of today and am moved to pity, if I can put it like that, simply because the child or boy I was knows nothing of the troubles that await him, when the truth is he knows nothing of the satisfactions either, and rare is the life that does not contain both things: disappointments and contentments, enthusiasms and regrets. One should avoid harbouring such paternalistic feelings for oneself, largely because they’re incongruous and absurd, but also because they’re harmful and pointless, not only because it’s ridiculous to feel moved by the person one was and, up to a point, still is, but because it implies that one is putting the past in a higher category than the present, and placing ignorance above knowledge. Looking back nostalgically on the days when ‘you still didn’t know’ or when ‘you still believed’ or ‘still hoped’ or ‘still dreamed’ only makes sense in an age like ours that glorifies childhood and tries to make it last longer than ever before, even passing on the infection to those who should have long ago left childhood behind. All of us (apart from those who were wretchedly unhappy as children) occasionally have a sense of childhood as our real home, a sense that everything that has happened since was mere accident, sham and artifice, and that the true and original ‘I’ has been succeeded by a series of false ‘I’s with whom we have very little in common. This has led many a sentimental writer to declare – along with all the other nonsense that gets spouted in interviews – that they ‘have a child inside them’, that ‘childhood is their one true homeland’ and that they live, therefore, in a state of permanent exile.

  Any feeling of pity arises, at least in my case, from the contrary idea: far from carrying a child around inside us (which would, it must be said, be a terrible nuisance), what we think we see in our photos or in our oldest memories is that the adult we are was already contained in the child that we were, and wasn’t very difficult to spot either. Often, in order to get a sense of someone with whom, sooner or later, I’m going to have dealings, I try to imagine what they would have been like as a child and how we would have got on, whether we would have been good friends or have hated each other’s guts. One comes to realize that if anyone contains anyone, it’s the child who contains the future adult and not the other way round; and when one looks at old photos, it’s hard not to think, in a way, of the burden this implies. Not that there’s any place for self-pity here either: throughout all of history children have always been adults in the making, and the reason childhood has been seen as important is because of the way it shapes and influences what will come later, which is what matters. Nowadays, on the other hand, people give importance to childhood itself, as if humanity’s sole crazy aim was to shape and create eternal, perennial children. Not a good idea. But that is how it is.

  (2005)

  An Unknowable Mystery

  A few weeks ago, a Sunday supplement published an interview with yours truly, illustrated by three studio photographs taken for the occasion. On the afternoon when I arrived for the photographic session, I wasn’t, as I recall, in a particularly bad mood and nothing very dreadful had happened to me. True, I was in a hurry, but I submitted patiently enough to the tedious business of posing and sitting around. The result, from my point of view, was not at all flattering: in all three portraits I look like a horrible, vicious, unpleasant person, not unlike the images they used to print on wanted posters for murderers on the run. A bad-tempered individual whom I myself would hesitate to approach for fear he might turn nasty. A killer. It’s true that journalists and photographers take special pleasure in choosing the worst shots and I understand this and know how much it amuses them, just as TV cameras deliberately focus on an interviewee’s bald head or on the hole in his sock, or capture the moment when he’s scratching his nose or when he sneezes. It is nevertheless true that there was a moment, the moment captured by the camera, when we did look like that, just at one particular moment, in a particular light and from a never-to-be-repeated angle. Those circumstances may well never be repeated and we will therefore never again be that person or appear like that to anyone else, but the same applies to good photos, the ones we feel pleased with and that even flatter us.

  The truth is that we don’t know what we look like because, among other reasons, we’re always changing. Mirrors don’t tell us much: we see ourselves the wrong way round, our left eye is our right eye in the mirror and vice versa, and since we’re all slightly asymmetrical, our reflected image is very inexact. I always give the example of Cary Grant, who wore his hair parted – very precisely – on the right. If we were to see him as he would have seen himself in mirrors, with the part on the left, he would doubtless seem like a different person entirely. I’m not sure that television or video reproduce us very faithfully either (those of us, that is, who appear on television or own a video camera). The situations in which we’re filmed are so artificial that I doubt very much that our ways of speaking or moving correspond to any other moment of our lives – which is to say, most moments – spent without an audience. I hate seeing myself on a screen, I look like such a fraud, which is perhaps why I want to think that it’s a false image. And that’s despite my trying, on television or in photographs, not to do anything I wouldn’t do normally. A little while ago, I refused to be immortalized by a magazine in the act of jumping, arguing that jumping wasn’t part of my normal, everyday life. Then they asked me to stand holding a globe of the world in my arms. Again I replied that this wasn’t something I would normally do. Finally – they were, of course, looking for an ‘unconventional’ shot – they asked me to take a step forward, and I agreed to that, since I take steps all the time. During a television interview once, years ago now, I was urged to do all manner of silly things: as a young man, I used to play guitar very badly, and so they handed me one to play, but I wouldn’t strum a single chord, saying that I might mess it up and how would they explain that to the person who had lent it to them; then, because as a young man I used to perform acrobatics, they asked me to do a pirouette for them right there and then, and again I refused, arguing that if I fell awkwardly, I might wreck the set or break a spotlight. When I shared an apartment with my father, photographers were always fascinated by his study, which was a chaos of papers and books that filled sofas, armchairs and the floor. They always said: ‘Oh, let’s do the photos here, it’s got real atmosphere.’ In vain did I tell them that it wasn’t my atmosphere and that I was, in fact, extremely tidy. Consequently, there are dozens of images of me buried in books and mounds of paper that had nothing whatsoever to do with me. My study never looks a tip.

  It seems that nowadays we all have a fairly clear idea of our appearance, and yet I still hold that this remains an unknowable mystery to us all. It isn’t just a matter of how others see us – and they might view
us kindly or otherwise – but the fact that we ourselves are often disconcerted and astonished when we see ourselves: ‘Is that me?’ or ‘Is that what I look like now?’ What we should really ask ourselves is why we continue to believe that we stay the same from childhood into old age. I don’t think it’s ever due to the enigma of our changeable, multiple appearance, but to a convention and to a faculty. That convention is the name we bear and the faculty is memory.

  (1996)

  Ghosts and Antiquities

  It occurred to me a few days ago that it was time I got myself a new address book; the black cover of my old one is badly worn and its contents a real jumble, so much so that any new names beginning with C can be found under E, because C and D have long since been filled up, as have M and R and a few other letters. Faced by this tedious task, I realized that it wasn’t, as I thought, just ten or twelve years since I last transferred everything into a new book, but more like twenty-five or thirty. Or perhaps it was simply that I made the same decision then that I will doubtless make now, namely, not to exclude or score out anyone, not even the dead whose phone numbers and addresses I will never use again. It’s possible. It’s possible that ten or twelve years ago, it seemed to me – how can I put it – disloyal and unfair to suppress those who had once been part of my life, however tangentially or briefly. I see the phone numbers of people who live abroad (always the most transient), people I met once or perhaps never met at all, the kind of numbers your parents or friends give you when you’re younger, just in case anything bad happens to you while you’re travelling, some mishap, and you have no one else to turn to. I don’t even know who some of the names are on these squared-paper pages. Roberto Oltra, Beatrice Brooks, alongside an address in San Mateo, California, a place I’ve never visited. Then there’s Vibeke Munk. I have a vague idea she was a young Danish woman I spoke to on a train journey, who knows where or when. Nelson Modlin and Freddy Melgar, Maria Panos of Massachusetts, Piers Rodgers of London or Valérie Lejeune, I find it impossible to believe that I did once know who they were or to recall why I noted down their numbers on some now lost night that only returns – and yet doesn’t return – enigmatic and nebulous, in these names written down in my own hand (and may they all forgive me if I ought to be able to remember them better than I can).