Vampire in Love by Enrique Vila-Matas

Author:Enrique Vila-Matas [Vila-Matas, Enrique]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9780811223478
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2016-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE BOY ON THE SWING

I

An employee of my father’s who works in an office very close to mine — a man who is held by everyone to be the most boring and most ordinary person in the world — was unfortunate enough as a young man to be sent to Melilla to do his military service, and there he had what, for him, was an extraordinary experience, which he never tires of recounting, as if nothing else had ever happened to him in his entire life. Since he has never told any other story, the whole office thinks he has no other stories to tell.

He was sent to Melilla and, far from being upset, the Unknown Soldier — that is what I’m going to call him because he has an unspeakable surname, as odd as it is frankly ridiculous, Parikitu, which, according to him, is Czech in origin and which, as well as being ugly (in Catalan, it means “parakeet”), has, I think, affected him his whole life — he took the attitude that what won’t kill you makes you strong and that his journey to Melilla might be his chance to live out a passionate love story of the kind he had so admired in the movie Morocco. In the last scene of that movie, Marlene Dietrich — who in all her other movies had always been cast in the role of maneater — kicked off her expensive shoes to pursue the handsome legionnaire Gary Cooper in order to share with him, like a humble Bedouin woman, the dangers and discomforts of the desert.

Or so reasoned Soldier — I’m going to call him that for short — when, with admirable optimism, he set off for Melilla, convinced that, far away from my father’s gloomy office — he has worked for him for forty years, and no one will be surprised to learn that, in only a few days’ time, this slave will be retiring — a love story awaited him in which, for his sake, a beautiful, arrogant woman would end up groveling in the desert dust. However, as soon as he arrived in Melilla, after an absolutely ghastly voyage, he realized that he could expect nothing good of that godforsaken town. Indeed, the sea crossing between Almería and Melilla had already demonstrated to him, with absolute clarity, the gulf that exists between the movies and life, between the cinema and the Spanish army. The voyage was simultaneously calm and rough. Calm because Soldier was the only one on board who had taken seasickness pills and thus remained in a state of perfect beatitude and inner wellbeing, agitated only by an abstract feeling brought on by what was happening around him, that is, the anarchic serial vomiting by officers and men during the whole of that unforgettable night in which he found it impossible to sleep, distracted as he was contemplating the “silent movie” amiably provided by the vomiters (the pills had left him in an excellent mood, but

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