Read Online All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel - Free Book Online Page B

spread out his mat. Some afternoons he spent in bored resignation with Andrea at a poetry reading or a private view. But, to Andrea’s great concern, the ream of paper remained intact and the Olivetti unopened.
    One day, when Bevilacqua had gone off to sell his knickknacks, Andrea decided to clean up the flat, and on removing a pile of suitcases and boxes from the wardrobe, she spotted the old Pluna bag that Bevilacqua had brought over from Buenos Aires, a shirtsleeve protruding from it. Thinking that Bevilacqua must have forgotten some item of clothing that needed washing, Andrea emptied the bag and found, at the bottom of it, a rectangular packet, wrapped in plastic. She opened it. It was a bundle of handwritten papers, the first of which bore a title:
In Praise of Lying
. There was no name, either on the title page or the end page.
    As you can imagine, Andrea began to read, and devoured the manuscript in one sitting. As she finished, the bells of Santa Bárbara were striking six o’clock in the evening. Andrea quickly bundled everything else back into the wardrobe and set off for the Martín Fierro, taking the novel with her. There she placed it in a drawer of her desk and locked it. (I remember that desk, that drawer, and that key so well!)
    Although Andrea worked out the details of her plan little by little, the main thrust of it had come to her immediately, when she had barely read the first paragraphs. Bevilacqua was a writer, as she had always suspected. Not of
fotonovelas
and other pap. He was a real writer, the author of a work of art. Because
In Praise of Lying
was (and is, as you who have read it will know) a great novel.
    I know you’re thinking about that handful of bad reviews which, unsurprisingly, sought to redress the balance. I also read some skeptical and bad-tempered articles by a handful of cynical critics, including Pere Gimferrer in Barcelona and Noé Jitrik from his Mexican exile. I read them, and they honestly did not alter, in the slightest, my first opinion. Nor did they change Andrea’s—which, believe me, is not to be sniffed at. Because Andrea knew good literature when she saw it. She took pleasure, I admit, in minor works, those well-written and perfectly agreeable novels that make a journey shorter or while away the night hours. But a work of genius is something else, as Andrea knew all too well. And the one she had just read was part of that select, literary Olympus: it belonged on that shelf which Andrea reserved only for books without which, as someone once said, “the world would be poorer.”
In Praise of Lying
must not be hidden away. Nobody had the right to deprive the world of something so beautiful. Andrea (for all her small size, that woman was a
force de la nature,
as you might say, Terradillos) would be its herald, its standard-bearer. She would see it published to a fanfare. She would distribute it by hand, if necessary, to ensure that it reached the few luminaries who were beginning to appear on Spain’s dismal intellectual firmament. And not just Spain’s; Bevilacqua was going to be read in the remotest corners of the globe. Andrea felt herself possessed by a kind of evangelizing fever. If she had come to me for advice at that time, I would have cautioned prudence, reflection. But she didn’t. She went to Camilo Urquieta, instead.
    I keep forgetting that you don’t know any of these people! Being so young (forgive me, Terradillos, but at my age anyone with less than half a century under his belt is a stripling), you don’t know any of these names, which were so famous in their day. Urquieta was (he died a long time ago, poor old thing) your typical born editor. Some people embody their métier: they are a hundred percent carpenters, guitar players, and bankers to the core, and can never be anything else—they were that thing in their mothers’ womb and they will continue to be it after their last breath, as scattered