Call Me Brooklyn Read online

  In the library there’s a portrait of you in which she was able to capture one of those rare moments in which your spirit was at peace. This will seem like a ridiculous association to you, but that portrait reminds me of one of the most beautiful things you ever wrote: I’m talking about your piece on Lermontov. One afternoon at the Oakland, you spoke to me about him, and when I confessed that I didn’t know who he was you were shocked. How can you not know Lermontov? you asked me, astonished. It seemed impossible to you. The Russian poet, you said, lowering your voice and then falling into deep thought. It was one of those silences of yours where I could almost see the shape of your thoughts. Right afterward, you added: He died at twenty-seven, in a duel. The czar had exiled him, and all the locals for miles around attended his burial. When I saw you the following day, you had written a beautiful sketch of his life. You gave it to me, without saving a copy for yourself. Louise has it now. I gave it to her after all the other guests had left the second time I attended her Sunday salon. She led me to the library, sat down in a red leather armchair, and lit a cigarette. When she finished reading it, she said: It’s a beautiful piece, but it’s not about Lermontov. I shot her a look of surprise and asked: Well, who is it about then? Him, Gal, who else? she asked, amused. I’m sure that he didn’t even realize it, though. We shared a laugh. She was right, of course, it was about you. When she handed me back the Lermontov profile, I told her to keep it. I didn’t need it for Brooklyn.

  The more time goes by, the more I’m convinced that you always knew things would turn out this way. I never paid too much attention when you told me that you wouldn’t be able to finish the Brooklyn Notebook (the title you gave to your novel at first). But you reminded me of it so often, in your own way, without ever saying a word, that before I knew it we had sealed a sort of pact. True: at first, the suddenness of your death made me feel as if I’d fallen into a trap. With you gone, I couldn’t back out, and the weight of it was unbearable. Me, finish your book? I felt incapable of it, but I didn’t have a choice. I was bound to our pact. It was difficult to get started, but when I finally did, I realized that there was a lot already done. At almost every step along the way, I found some clue that allowed me to get a clear picture of where to go next. It was almost like having you there with me, showing me the way. And it wasn’t just your notes. Often I’d remember snippets of our conversations at just the right moment. Do you know the first thing that came to mind, before I had even touched a single page, after taking possession of the Archive? (That’s what Frank and I called your studio, in honor of Ben). Surrounded by your papers, I remembered the day that you told me about Kafka’s dying wish. He had given his life to his work, but when he felt death closing in, he asked his closest friend, Max Brod, to destroy all his writing.

  A trite anecdote, you added, but it’s still worth recalling. Virgil did the same thing. Of course, we only know about the cases in which the friends disobeyed. I wondered how many more cases there might have been in which the writer’s last wish was respected? How many Kafkas and Virgils have disappeared without leaving a trace?

  Which reminded me of another anecdote—one of your favorites. I was hoping you had written it down so I could use it in the Notebook, but I never found it among your papers. I’m talking about the story of the English poet who wrote on rolling paper. Do you remember the first time you told it to me? It was one morning shortly after we’d met. I had just flown in from Chicago and went directly from the airport to the Oakland. I was in the middle of breaking up with Diana, and I didn’t feel like stopping by our place. Even though we barely knew each other, you had already spoken to me about Brooklyn, the book that had been bouncing around in your head for so long.

  I don’t know what in the hell made you bring up that story about the English aristocrat who wrote poems on rice paper; he’d finish one, then roll a cigarette, and before lighting it would say: The interesting thing is creating them.

  I read it in an interview with Lezama Lima, the Cuban novelist, you said. The story, like the ones about the deaths of Kafka and Virgil, came up more than once in our conversations, and it always made me ask myself the same question: Why does he write? One day, on our way to Jimmy Castellano’s gym to see one of Víctor’s matches, I asked you point-blank: Why do you write, Gal? You shrugged and picked up your pace. We were half a block away from the Luna Bowl. Cletus, the doorman, was waving at you. Determined to get an answer, I blocked your path and repeated: You heard me, Gal. Why do you write? You winced and waited for me to get out of the way. I muttered an apology and never brought it up again. It was you who never forgot about it. Let me show you something. You must have written this a couple of days later. It’s this kind of thing that made me think you had it all planned out:

  April 3, 1992

  Néstor’s question made me think of one of Ben’s Spanish friends, Antonio Ramos. They met in January of 1938, when Ben was stationed in a field hospital. One morning, during his rounds, he treated one of the prisoners from the rebel faction. I remember how emphatically Ben stressed that the prisoner was not a fascist. That’s the way things were: many people were sent to the front lines before they even had time to choose a side. His name was Antonio Ramos. He must have been eighteen or nineteen and said he was a painter. Aside from the severity of his wounds, he had a weak constitution and for many days wavered between life and death. After he was out of danger, he and Ben became friends. He had a unique sensibility, and my father quickly became fond of him. Often, after making his rounds, he’d return to Ramos’s bedside and stay there for some time chatting. There was something special about the boy. Among his things, Ramos had an anthology of the poems of Antonio Machado from which he liked to read aloud—he thought that poetry needed to be heard in order to be properly appreciated. On one of the occasions Lucia came to visit him in Madrid, Ben insisted on taking her to the hospital to meet Antonio. When he was discharged from the hospital, he was taken to a military prison. As a parting gift, Antonio Ramos gave Ben the Machado anthology and asked for his mailing address. When the militiamen put him up on the truck with the other prisoners, my father thought that he’d never see him again. He was wrong. Years after the war had ended, a card arrived in Brooklyn. It was postmarked Paris, where Antonio Ramos was living. He had completed a degree in the fine arts in Madrid and had been given a fellowship in Paris—a modest one, but enough to live on. My father wrote back, and in the years that followed, they corresponded sporadically. Finally, on one of his trips to Europe, Ben decided to pay him a visit. It must have been in the early sixties. When he rang the doorbell, a bone-thin, haggard figure opened the door. For a moment, Ben thought that he had the wrong floor. It was only after the apparition gave Ben a hug that he realized that it had to be him. Ramos explained that they had taken out one of his lungs, and that the other one didn’t work very well. He lived in a modest apartment, on the Boulevard Montparnasse, and the cold so infiltrated his body that, even though he had a heater running, he had to wrap himself in a blanket in order to paint. He had married a Frenchwoman named Nicole who was a translator for Gallimard. She wasn’t there at the moment. Ben asked him how he was doing, and Ramos said that the doctor had forbidden him to paint, had said that if he kept painting, given the condition of his only lung, the toxic fumes would kill him in no time. Ben noticed a number of large, half-finished oil canvases and realized that his friend was paying little heed to his doctor’s orders, but he didn’t say anything. I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong, Ramos said. I’ve told the doctor the same thing. It’s just the other way around: I’ll die if I don’t paint. They both smiled. Neither of them wanted to dispel the magic of their reunion. For years, Ramos had been saving a rare bottle of burgundy for a special occasion. When Nicole returned from Gallimard, they threw together some dinner, and the three of them put the burgundy to good use.

  So that’s why you wrote. I had to wait until you died to find out. As for the trap you made me fall into, the crucial day was April 8.
We were chatting in the Oakland and you asked me up to your studio without warning. I had been there before, and this time I had the feeling that things seemed a bit more organized than usual. Pointing to your towers of notebooks, you said:

  In the end, everything you see there doesn’t matter at all. I keep it because it’s my only consolation. Sometimes I open a notebook at random and what I read takes me to another dimension and that’s enough. I would be happy to get just one thing out of all this, that’s all I need, don’t ask me why. Like Alston used to say, one book is enough. I’ve told you about my friend Alston Hughes, the poet, right? He drank himself to death, like I will. Once, the night before a reading I’d arranged for him, he came home so I could help him choose which poems to read. He took a sheaf of no more than a hundred pages out of his bag. Everything he had written in his sixty-three years was there. He leafed through the sheets very slowly and when he finished he said: How embarrassing to have written so much. He could give a rat’s ass about publishing. He read with two other poets, a Chilean who had been Neruda’s secretary and a sweet woman with a demure look, a Peruvian, I think. I don’t remember their names, but both of them had published many books. Alston was the only one who was unknown. No one had the slightest idea who he was, and if he had been asked to read, it was only because I’d insisted to the organizers that he be included on the panel. It took me forever to convince them, but in the end they trusted my judgment. His reading was astonishing, although the audience didn’t know quite what to make of it—they had nothing to compare it with. They wavered between bewilderment and scorn. But the young people reacted very differently. As soon as the reading was over, they surrounded him, asking him where they could find his books. Nowhere, he told them with delight. I have never published anything, and I never will. Now I think that someone in Paris is putting together a collection of his work, but of course he’s dead. If I learned one thing from Alston, it was precisely that: You don’t write for fame or notoriety. Then, raising your right hand, you pointed into the air and added:

  There you have every sort of manuscript, things that writers have insisted on sending me all these years. Some are from friends, some from people I barely knew. Flawed stuff mostly, although once in a while I’ve come across something interesting. I store them up there, you said, and I saw you meant the pair of doors above the armoire. You know what I call that spot? You let out a long cackle before continuing:

  The tomb. You want to see inside the crypt, Ness?

  I didn’t get it, but before I could react you had grabbed a stepladder and told me in a peremptory tone:

  Get up there.

  You insisted I open the doors, and sure enough, as I was doing it, they seemed like the mouth of a crypt.

  Go ahead, look inside. See what’s in there? A few months ago, I went to get a manuscript and I felt like a gravedigger exhuming some remains to move them to another hole in the ground. It was then that I christened it. Look in, look in and you’ll see.

  I did as I was told. It was a rather deep, wide hole with cement walls. Inside, as little particles of light refracted amid a cloud of dust, the whitish reflection of the manuscripts made me think of a pile of bones scattered in an open pit. There was a damp smell. Truthfully, it made me a bit anxious, so I immediately got down. I didn’t touch anything, although you had told me to rummage around. As soon as I came down, you climbed to the top of the stepladder yourself and with a theatrical gesture exclaimed:

  A manuscript cemetery! You burst out laughing, unable to stop. There’s everything here, Ness: novels, poems, insufferable texts without any literary worth . . . Incredible, right? And their common fate is that they will never be read, never be published. So many dreams of fame and money, everything that most people who want to be published dream about. So much time and effort, for what? So much vanity and bitterness and frustration. So many dashed hopes. Here, let me show you.

  You began to read titles aloud from the top of the stepladder. You were laughing riotously, but the whole thing made me shudder. How could you do such a thing? It hurt me to see you this way. This was your dark side, and at that moment I found it unbearable. Thank God, the whole thing didn’t last long. Abruptly, you stopped laughing, you closed the crypt (you did it very gently, don’t think I missed that). You climbed down, folded the stepladder, and took it to the kitchen.

  As you know, I never keep anything to drink in here, you said. I’m going to the liquor store for a second. I’ll be right back.

  When you returned you found me browsing through the books in your shelves. You had brought back a flask of vodka, one of those small bottles that sold for a few dollars, as well as two glasses. You filled the glasses up and said:

  You can have anything you want from my shelves. All those names that meant so much to me once, but no longer speak to me. Books have bored me for a while now. Until recently, I used to reread them from time to time, but now I don’t even do that. I feel very close to the end, and I’m tired. I think Alston Hughes had the right idea. Leaving behind just one book. Posthumous publication. I wrote mine in the absurd hope that Nadia would read it, someday. Or do you think I wrote it for my health? Damn it, Ness, I’ve invested my whole life in it and I’m not quite sure why.

  You approached the towers of paper, saying:

  Here it is, Ness, Brooklyn . . . bits of my novel scattered throughout the pages of all these notebooks. Well, technically, it’s not finished, but it’s close. At this point, you could say it’s a race against time. If I live a little longer, perhaps I’ll finish it. But if not . . . Do you know that it was Nadia who made me realize that this was a race? I talked to her so much about the book that I was going to write. I told her what it was about, filled her in on the details of its structure. I listed for her all of the titles that I had come up with to see which ones she liked best. I told her about the sections I was thinking about adding, many of which I never got to write. One of those times she asked me when I thought I was going to finish it. Never, I replied, completely serious. Nadia was used to my retorts, but this one left her completely rattled.

  I don’t understand.

  There’s nothing to understand, it’s just a fact.

  But why?

  I don’t know, it’s like a curse.

  That can’t be.

  Why?

  Because it’s not up to you, Gal. The book exists already,

  scattered in all your notebooks.

  But I’m not sure I can retrieve it.

  If that’s the case, then someone else will do it for you.

  Right?

  That’s from one of your notebooks. Do you remember it? You wrote it yourself. That was the pact, wasn’t it? A great way to start, don’t you think? Going back to that day, the vodka sat untouched in our two glasses. You opened the curtains, and the morning light erupted into the room, making you say:

  Look at this light, Néstor. It’s the light that Louise talks about in her poem. The Brooklyn light.

  You closed the curtains again, as if you found it impossible to continue chatting enveloped by such brightness.

  What I told Nadia is true. There’s something in me that prevents me from giving a final shape to anything I write. But she was right too, the book already existed, scattered in my notebooks.

  Later, I found the page that told the full story. That day you failed to mention that Nadia had been clairvoyant enough to realize that someone would finish it for you. But you didn’t need to bother. The deal had already been made, though I didn’t know about it yet. Then you gave me the key to your studio and got up. You didn’t say anything else and neither did I, because again we didn’t need to. Our fates had been decided long before you asked me up that day. You didn’t even let me drink with you. That shadow that I had grown to know so well crossed over your face. You were far away, alone, lost in your thoughts, barely conscious of your surroundings. Without waiting for me, you took your glass and emptied it in one gulp. You glanced toward the curtains, as if you w
ere afraid that the light might break in. With a slight tremble in your hand, you took my glass and drank it as well. Then you headed for the door without saying anything, as if I wasn’t even there. I didn’t follow you out. I stuck my hand in my pocket, unconsciously playing with the key you had given me. It was the last time I saw you alive.

  On April 9, I left for a trip to New Mexico on assignment. On the night of the 14, when I returned to the hotel in Taos, there was a message from Frank Otero asking me to call the Oakland immediately.

  Bad news, Ness. Gal died yesterday at Lennox Hill. He was in a coma for three days. I called the newsroom. Dylan Taylor told me how to get a hold of you. He said you’re coming back tonight, so you’ll be back on time. The burial is the day after tomorrow at Fenners Point. I’m waiting for the permit, but I have my connections and I’m sure we’ll get it in time.

  I had never heard of Fenners Point, but I didn’t ask because it wasn’t the time for explanations. When everything was over, I told Frank that you had given me the key to your studio and asked him to come up with me. Everything was just as we had left it the last time I was there with you. Then I told him about our last conversation in detail.

  I don’t have any plans to rent it, was all he said. Do what you need to do with what’s in here.

  It has been two years, two years of organizing the enormous amount of material that you left behind, destroying anything that wasn’t destined to become a part of Brooklyn. In the studio, surrounded by your pictures, your letters and memories, it was as if you were there with me. When the work began to take shape, I often stayed overnight, and after a few months, I moved in so that nothing could take me away from the work.

  Reading your words, I could hear your voice perfectly clear. More than once when a piece of furniture or the wood floor creaked, I turned, thinking you were in the room and were about to say something.