Between Eternities: And Other Writings Page 4

  There are other people I do remember, although they’re so distant and so diluted that I find it hard to summon up their faces; they merely appeared in my life and then disappeared, as I did from theirs. I see the name of Ángeles Carrasco, a fellow student at college with red hair and blue eyes, a charming, rather gawky young woman, of whom I learned later on – I’ve no idea from whom, but the fact is there in my memory – that she died falling from a window in a building in Glasgow; whether she jumped, on the other hand, is a fact my memory is unable to verify. I see the name of Roberto Pujadas, an Argentinian I think, who, even though he didn’t know me, was kind enough to wangle me a free pass to the Cinémathèque in Paris when I was seventeen; I never saw him again and I learned some years later that he had died; I will never be able to thank him enough for that immense and entirely disinterested favour. I see the name of Laurie Cunningham, the English winger who played for Real Madrid. I interviewed him in English to help out a then girlfriend who knew nothing about football, and he died years later in a car accident. I see the names of Édouard de Andréis and Gilles Barbedette, my first French publishers, a delightful, intelligent couple who died on consecutive days, each after a long illness but from a quite different disease. I see, too, names that have no such sad memories attached, but whose presence is hard to explain. Like those of Philip and Jane Rylands in Venice, whom I have some recollection of having visited there, yet I couldn’t swear that I know who they are. There are the names of women who gave me their number in some bar or other, I suppose, but whom I didn’t dare to ring afterwards, or perhaps did, but without success, despite the promising phone number. Who are Suzanne Weldon and Caterina Visani, for example? I can’t even put faces to their names, whereas I can to Muriel Sieber and to Mercedes Viviani, although not much more than that. And there I am as well, with the addresses I had in countries where I lived a long time ago, and which I would have forgotten had I not found them here: Via della Lupa 4, in Rome; that must have been in 1975. Horton House, 666 Washington Street; that was in Massachusetts in 1984. And 22 Woodstock Road, Oxford; an address I remember much more clearly. You will, I’m sure, understand why I decided not to copy everything into my new book, but to keep this list of semi-ghosts, replete with antiquities, growing more jumbled and more torn with each day that passes. They erase themselves whether we like it or not and cancel out all vestiges and echoes of what was once so present and full of meaning.

  (2003)

  The Invading Library

  Like all the other apartments I’ve ever lived in, the apartment in which I spent my childhood was full of books. However, the word ‘full’ doesn’t really come near the truth, neither do the words ‘crammed’ or ‘crowded’, because not only was every wall covered with shelves, each of which was packed with volumes from every imaginable century, but the books also sometimes served as rugs, tables, sofas, chairs and even, almost, beds. I don’t mean that there was no furniture in the apartment and that we sat on piles of books or ate from other still taller piles – with a consequent disquieting sensation of constant instability – but that the rugs, tables, sofas, seats and even beds were often buried beneath vast tomes, for example, the complete and very abundant works of the late Renaissance philosopher Francisco Suárez. I remember those in particular because, on one occasion, I had to wrestle for hours with the philosophers Suárez and Condillac in order to make a large enough space on the floor to play with my toy soldiers. Bear in mind that my size at the time (I was seven or eight) didn’t really equip me for the easy removal of those large seventeenth- or eighteenth-century volumes obstructing my innocent games.

  In fact, for myself and my three brothers, the house was one long obstacle race – almost two hundred yards long – the obstacles always taking the form of books. That is why, from an early age, I became used to negotiating the words of the great philosophers and writers, with the inevitable result that I have a deep-rooted lack of respect for anyone who writes, myself included. It still surprises me when I see how other people (especially politicians and commentators) kowtow to writers or else fight to appear in photos accompanied by some scribe or other, or when the state rushes to give succour to ailing, ruined poets, privileging them with a treatment that only heaps humiliation on equally ruined or ailing street cleaners, businessmen, waiters, lawyers and cobblers. My scant respect for the trade to which I belong (from the most ancient of academicians to the most youthful of libelists) derives from a childhood home in which, as I have said, I grew used to mistreating and misusing almost all the seminal texts from the history of culture. Having too much respect for the kind of individuals who partially soured my childhood and invaded the territory occupied by my thrilling games of bottle-top football would seem to me masochistic in the extreme.

  But to return to the description of my childhood home, things did not stop there. I mean that my parents, not content with that overweening love of books, felt exactly the same about paintings. It’s hard to understand how those two loves could be compatible, especially when you consider that there wasn’t a blank or empty wall to be seen in my childhood home. The absurd habit of hanging pictures in the bathroom and even the kitchen had not yet arrived, and given that it was the custom then to have two servants (a cook and a maid, who were always at daggers drawn), there was no way that one could set aside a room for paintings (as dentists and notaries do), a kind of mini-museum: the only room that could have been used for this purpose, and the only one in which there were no books, was occupied by the terrible rows between cook and maid, from which, according to some mysterious preordained law of subjugation, the latter almost always emerged the loser. Although, having said that there were no books, I realize now that the room, in fact, contained the two hundred Simenon books carefully and devotedly collected by my father. They were in French, of course, but I suppose it was a case of what later came to be called subliminal warnings, so that the servants wouldn’t overstep the mark in their quarrels or be tempted to steal any non-literary objects when it came to their inevitable dismissal. Inspector Maigret was watching.

  Anyway, my parents’ pictorial enthusiasm found a method of placing the paintings they acquired on top of the books, using a crazy mechanism that converted the canvases into small hanging doors. The pictures were hung only by their left side, so that they could be easily ‘opened’ to reveal the volumes they normally covered. An excellent copy of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation by Daniel Canellada, numerous landscapes by the nineteenth-century artist Ricardo Arredondo, an equally large number by the painter and friend of the family Alfredo Ramón, some miniatures by Vicente López, a few portraits by Vázquez Díaz, a few works by Benjamín Palencia and the occasional Eduardo Vicente, all hung absurdly from the highest shelves, thus eliminating from the rooms still more lateral space. I thus became accustomed to seeing paintings hung not against a smooth, white, plain backdrop, but surrounded by the spines and edges of bound volumes, which may be why I have equally scant respect for painters. Indeed, whenever I see a painting in an exhibition or museum, I have to repress an initial impulse to ‘open’ it and ‘take out’ a book by Kierkegaard or Aristotle, as if the pictures were just strongbox doors behind which were to be found the greatest bibliographic treasures. Only after that first impression, which converts any masterpiece into a small decorated door, only then can I concentrate and see what there is to see.

  The truth is that, despite all these inconveniences, I still cannot conceive of any comfortable abode whose walls are not carpeted with the brightly coloured spines and edges of books and built-in paintings, and although the various apartments in which I’ve lived in various countries have always been very temporary and not, of course, mine, I have never been able to feel even minimally at ease in them until I have acquired a few books and placed them on the shelves, a pale reflection of that childhood bounty. Only then have I begun to think of the place in question (be it England, the United States or Italy) as habitable: an apartment is made up of floors, ceilings and walls, an
d although I prefer the first two to remain uncluttered or, at most, adorned with a rug or lamp, the walls need to be totally covered so that the books can speak to me through their closed mouths, their motley, multicoloured and very silent spines.

  (1990)

  Uncle Jesús

  The only reason why Uncle Jesús, my mother’s brother, could not be termed the black sheep of the family was because there had already been so many, quite how many remains unclear, but far more than is advisable for the happiness and serenity of any family (we even count among our numbers a murderer, possibly a mass murderer). Uncle Jesús, however, was by far the blackest sheep of recent generations, at least until I and my cousins were old enough to commit new outrages and felonies.

  My earliest memories of Uncle Jesús go back to the time when I was still a child of tender years and he was living with my grandparents in Calle Cea Bermúdez in Madrid. My parents used to take me and my brothers there for Saturday lunch, where the menu never varied: it was what we used to call ‘Cuban food’ and my grandmother, an excitable, cheerful, ironic woman who was Cuban by birth, presented it to us as the only recipe to be had in the whole of Havana. In fact, we saw very little of Uncle Jesús, because he was not usually up by lunchtime. My grandmother, the most mild-mannered of people, would urge us children not to make too much noise because ‘poor Jesús is sleeping’. I assume that the expression ‘poor Jesús’ was a half-conscious attempt on his mother’s part to make us (and herself) believe that Uncle Jesús had been working hard all night. Nothing could have been further from the truth: through his other six surviving siblings, we knew that our uncle was out partying every night until all hours.

  Like many small children, I had a highly developed sense of cleanliness and a natural puritanism, and I remember my horror when I saw from the corridor that his bed was still unmade even at that late hour, when he was taking a leisurely bath while we were having our aperitif. Jesús occasionally joined us for those ‘Cuban lunches’, always whistling or humming, with his wet hair carefully combed, although at other times, he would race straight from the bathroom out into the street, doubtless fleeing the horde of children. When he did stay for lunch, he was always very funny and clever, as was his brother Javier, who was a couple of years younger and the baby of the family. Like my grandfather, several of my uncles could play the piano or some other instrument (Jesús, I seem to recall, could knock out a few jazz classics, jazz being his great love), and they would enliven our lunches there with occasional mad sorties to the piano – which happened to be located in the dining room – on which, between courses, they would hammer wildly away. The macabre tendencies of both Jesús and his older brother Enrique (now a respected music critic) were already apparent even at that early age, for they took delight in frightening their junior siblings – Tina (aka Gloria) or Javier – by singing a little ditty, the words of which also reached our young ears. I can now remember only the gruesome opening lines: ‘A nice little boy all roasted and toasted/is what I like best for my lunch,/some bones and a lung,/a nose and some tongue/slip down with a slurp and a crunch.’ While they were singing, they would stare fixedly at us younger children and lick their lips. I see in this a clear musical antecedent to Jesús’s later cinematographic liking for vampires and Jack the Rippers.

  After a certain age, however, I preferred it when Uncle Jesús wasn’t there, leaving the field clear for me. For despite being forbidden from entering his room, or precisely because of that, I would spend all afternoon inspecting it at great length. And my inspections became longer and longer when I discovered the magnificent collection of erotica that Jesús kept hidden away in his wardrobe. You have to remember that I’m speaking here of the early 1960s in Spain, when it was even rarer to see a photo of a woman’s breast than to see one in the flesh (either by chance or thanks to some particularly uninhibited or provocative maid). Jesús’s collection was a veritable treasure trove for the pre-adolescent I was then, and the item I enjoyed most was an unusual book (a hardback with full-page spreads) dedicated entirely to photographs of Brigitte Bardot, in which she never appeared wearing more than one article of clothing and usually less. Uncle Jesús may not know it, but I owe him a great debt of gratitude for this early initiation.

  To a large extent, I also owe him my initiation into literature, because, at the age of seventeen, I ran away to Paris to write my first novel, The Dominions of the Wolf, with the inestimable collaboration of the person who was, by then, more Jess Frank than Jesús. Tardily and after much delay, he had married a beautiful Frenchwoman called Nicole and, at the time, owned an apartment in Rue Freycinet, near the Champs-Elysées, which he was generous enough to let me use as my writing base in the summer of 1969, while he was away filming. It was an excellent place, presided over by a white grand piano and by shelves crammed – no need for concealment now – with pornographic books and magazines. I suppose, by then, Jesús had a good excuse for having such a collection – assuming his French wife needed him to provide her with an excuse – because as well as making horror and adventure films, he also made skin flicks, which were, I believe, filmed mainly in Germany and Italy under extravagant pseudonyms probably unknown to anyone, and he doubtless needed those publications as a source of new talent.

  Those were the years when I saw most of him and when he behaved most like the tolerant, errant uncle all the nephews of the world deserve. One summer, he also lent me the apartment he had in Rome, in Viale dei Parioli, where the big-name film directors lived, including Vittorio Gassman and Sergio Leone. He even took me with him filming: in one of his Fu Manchu films, my cousin Ricardo Franco and I appear in a couple of shots, looking totally unrecognizable. Disguised as Chinese hoodlums wearing black silk outfits and red headbands and wielding swords, we raced barefoot down a precipitous slope to the shore of a lake which was, in fact, a reservoir on the outskirts of Madrid. This suicidal descent, repeated several times, is, I think, the most dangerous thing I have ever done, and I nearly split my head open several times, not that Jesús Franco was bothered (even if the extras were his own flesh and blood), just as long as he got his takes. He made so many films and so quickly that he was, I understand, always working against the clock. I’ve even heard it said that on more than one occasion, without the knowledge of the actors, whom he kept in a state of confusion by giving them strange, bewildering scripts, he shot two films at once, with the same team and cast, who thus, completely unbeknown to them, were doing two jobs, but only getting paid for one. Unfortunately, the film in which I played such an ephemeral role involved none of the great names with whom Jesús was working at the time, for he had joined forces with an eccentric British producer called Harry Alan Towers and had at his beck and call such old glories and legends as Jack Palance, George Sanders, Christopher Lee, Mercedes McCambridge and Herbert Lom, to name but a few. He did, however, regale us with many juicy anecdotes about them.

  While Uncle Jesús was a source of joy to us, he was, both before and after that, and over a period of many years, a cause of despair for our parents. When he finally married Nicole, after a long bachelorhood and numerous girlfriends, each more absurd and unspeakable than the last, it was explained to us children that Nicole was a widow, so as to justify the existence of our new cousin, Caroline, who came along with her. Later on, in that summer of The Dominions of the Wolf, I happened to meet the father of our false cousin, and he was, I seem to recall, a very jolly divorcé called Jacques. The worst thing, as far as my mother was concerned, were the porn films about which, on the other hand, we heard very little. My mother was the eldest of a family of what started out as eleven children (four died either on the journey or before they had even set off) and she was nearly twenty years older than the three youngest, Tina (aka Gloria), Jesús and Javier, to whom she was a mother long before there was the remotest chance of my brothers and I even being conceived. For that reason, I think, she felt her lecherous brother’s cinematographic inclinations to be a personal failure on her part: she didn’t
so much regret the licentious path his career had taken as see in it a promising moral trajectory cut short. ‘It doesn’t seem possible,’ she used to say, ‘when I think how religious Jesús was as a child.’

  As far as I know, Jesús continued to be pretty much a child, but there was no way my mother could know that. Those who have shared hotel rooms with him recall, as did my mother when she remembered him as a boy, how panicky he would get if no light was left on to protect him from the dark. It’s hard to imagine when you see him – a short man, verging on the plump, a nervous, jokey, hyperactive type, with a somewhat flattened nose down which his glasses always seem about to slide. During my adolescence and early youth, no one called me ignorant and uncultivated as often as he did. Whenever he mentioned some C-list actor or some obscure figure from the jazz world, and I asked who they were, he would indignantly get to his feet and shout: ‘You mean you don’t know who Willis Bouchey is? How can you possibly not know Joe Albany?’ And so on and so on, as if it were a universal duty to know who those people were: ‘You really don’t know who Jack Pennick is? You’re having me on. You don’t know who Ike Quebec is?’ And he would exclaim in astonishment: ‘Ike Quebec! Willis Bouchey! Jack Pennick! Joe Albany! What ignorance! And you call yourself cultured! But they’re really famous! It’s like not knowing who Cervantes is!’ I should add that if I ever did find out who the very celebrated Albany, Bouchey, Quebec and Pennick were, I did so by my own means, because beyond feigning amazement, expressing a very real indignation and gesticulating wildly, Uncle Jesús never deigned to tell me.