No World Concerto by A. G. Porta

Author:A. G. Porta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2013-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

The first thing he does in the morning is call the producer. Money, another advance, I’d appreciate whatever you can send, he keeps repeating to himself, as if every time he calls he needs to persuade himself of his desperate situation in order to sound more convincing. Oh it’s a magnificent screenplay, he murmurs, I’d say it’s as good as anything written in the golden age. Then, he changes his mind. His insecurity always causes him to change his mind. But he doesn’t think the producer wants to hear about the golden age, and he doesn’t want any magnificent screenplays either, unless, by “magnificent,” the screenwriter means a guaranteed box-office hit. In fact, nothing would delight the producer more than talking about a potential box-office hit. The screenwriter knows he’s gone through this scenario before, had the same thoughts about money and the producer the last time he tried to call him. He hangs up and goes down to have breakfast. Afterward, in the lobby, he’s reading in the paper about a Nobel Prize winner who’s died. The screenwriter doesn’t recall ever reading his works. But there are so many great books that reading them all would leave him with little time to do anything else in life. After perusing the personal ads, he gets up and limps to the elevator. Damn leg, he grumbles on the way to his room, impatient to get back to his writing. Today, the girl’s wearing sunglasses. It seems the circles around her eyes, which the screenwriter finds so endearing on a teenager’s countenance, are now looking particularly bad to her. She’d prefer not to linger on the events of the past few days. She likes to think they were part of a game; that everything’s part of a game; the game of the world, the universe perhaps, but a game nonetheless. She’s repeated this same mantra ad nauseam. Everything’s a game, life’s a game. If nothing exists, or if nothing is true, then why not think of it as a game? Her theory’s plausible. She could return to the hotel and speak with her father, offer to help him, but she has her own plans. She wanders the streets of the neighboring country’s capital immersed in her usual thoughts about her novel, about her mother, and the young conductor. . She should’ve gone to rehearsals but was too lazy. So she goes into a library instead, and walks past books of every sort, from well-thumbed new releases piled up on tables near the front, to dusty old classics on inconspicuous shelves in the back. She’s baffled at not knowing any of the fashionable authors. Their new books are always announced with fanfare and tickertape, because in the neighboring country’s capital, there are authors who sell in the hundreds of thousands. The girl has certainly not sold so many records. She wonders which contemporary authors she should read, how to separate the grain from the chaff. She’s always avoided reading her contemporaries. But a

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