Uselessness by Eduardo Lalo

Author:Eduardo Lalo [Lalo, Eduardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-20765-0
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

A few days later I found in my mailbox a package from Marie. After the argument with Simone, and with her full knowledge, I had sent Marie Neptune’s novel and copies of some of my texts. For most of my life abroad, Marie had been my first and sometimes my only reader. I valued her opinions and criticism, especially since none of my French friends could read in Spanish. Simone didn’t object, accepting, at least for now anyway, that between Marie and myself there was a bond she couldn’t surpass.

Marie wrote to me after having devoured Rue de Babylone. The range of characters and stories in Neptune’s world had given her a whiff of another atmosphere and an opportunity to lay aside her preoccupations. And she had read my texts and responded with disproportionate enthusiasm, which was probably a form of gratitude and seduction rather than critical appraisal. However, a young writer’s thirst for approval didn’t allow me to notice such subtleties, and I took pleasure in reading her letter several times, as if Marie’s response could be that of all possible and imaginable readers. The package also contained a hardcover notebook of very fine paper and a small box with a fountain pen. On it she had written a note: “So that you will write and write and write.”

The gifts meant so much to me. Not only did I enjoy these objects in themselves, but also the pleasure of seeing Marie reach out to me, which I experienced from the perspective of nostalgia. Despite my efforts and the struggles of our lives, I couldn’t (and perhaps didn’t want to) break free from her. I didn’t realize the extent to which my love was a ball and chain—in a way, an illness I couldn’t shake—a dependency, in brief, a stupidity. I still couldn’t forget the sweetness we had so often shared.

During those days I used the notebook for the first time. I began a novel I would work on for the next two or three years and that would accompany me when I returned to my country. I wanted to tell the story in these pages. A writer always returns to the same sources, even if afterwards the texts he presents to the public erase the traces. At that time, I was writing from inside the story, without knowing the outcome, struggling to find a meaning, a tone, and a denouement. The book wasn’t totally bad, and an editor was on the verge of publishing it, but I am grateful for his hesitation, which allowed me to return, again and again, to that time in Paris, fighting with memory, giving into the pain.

When I had already finished my exams and it was almost time for the new academic year to begin, I received in the morning mail a note from Pétrement inviting me to come by his house. He had just signed a contract that called for a great deal of work, most of it tedious, consisting, among other things, of producing notes on hundreds of file cards, and he was proposing to make me his assistant.

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