All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel

Author:Alberto Manguel [Manguel, Alberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781846881329
Publisher: Riverhead
Published: 2008-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

3

The Blue Fairy

“Be honest and good and you’ll be happy,” the Fairy told him.

—CARLO COLLODI,

THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO

Monsieur Jean-Luc Terradillos,

L’Actualité Poitou-Charentes

Poitiers, France

1st January 2003

My dear Curious Impertinent,

I mistrust letters as a literary genre. They claim to tell an impartial truth independent of their scrumdolious author (my Cuban grandmother used this adjective to describe dresses which look swanky but are badly cut and sewn, and I bet myself that I would manage to use it in the first paragraph), when the opposite is true: only one chronicler gets to give his version of the story. But the epistolary genre is, in this case, the only one left to me. I’ve exhausted all my options: my literature no longer encompasses the epic genre, and the lyric one, such a conceited form, has always been denied to my muse. So I’ll have to be satisfied with this letter. At least no shit-stirring editor is going to stick his nose in it.

I met Bevilacqua in prison, but you already know that. I enjoyed talking to him, telling him my repertoire of stories, bouncing my literary inventions off his beleaguered eardrums. Whenever I start remembering things, my lips move of their own accord. If I have a typewriter in front of me, I start typing; if I have a blank page, I start writing; in the absence of any other instrument, I use my tongue. At night, faced with sheep butchers that get in the way of sleep, I make up stories that begin to unravel as I fall into the darkness. Bevilacqua was good for that: he could stop them unraveling.

Right from the beginning I trusted him. I felt that I could trust him the way that, in the army, one instinctively trusts the less daring corporal, the more familiar weapon. Novelty is no friend to success. And for someone like me, whose attractions are not obvious, it’s better not to expect aesthetic charity from anyone. Sincerity, yes, that’s a different matter. Or honesty, which brings with it a touch of meekness.

He wasn’t jealous. That envy which fuels literary inspiration, which desires that everyone else’s books fail and all their recompense be derisory—that wasn’t apparent in Bevilacqua. His emotions were all on the surface; envy requires a pretense of modesty, a show of reserve, and reveals itself at the corners of the mouth, in the hue of one’s skin. Bevilacqua’s smile was sweet, and his skin a constant gray. Of course prison would not have put color in his cheeks even if his constitution had favored it. As the Good Book puts it, “When I was in my Father’s house, I was in a better place.”

It’s weird how the most humdrum places can produce encounters that go on to have momentous consequences. For him, in this case; not for me. Human beings can be divided between those whom the gods, for their own amusement, guide through strange woods only to abandon them somewhere at the edge of a precipice, on a moonless night, and the others who find their own way along well-lit paths.

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