Read Online Mr. Gwyn by Alessandro Baricco - Free Book Online Page B

lights. They’re about to arrive, said Jasper Gwyn. She lay down on the bed, and stayed there for a while, staring at the ceiling. Jasper Gwyn began to arrange something upstairs, where the bathroom was: he didn’t want to be with her, in silence, in that studio, before the time was right. He came down only when he heard her steps on the wooden floor.
    Before she left Rebecca gave a last glance around.
    â€œWhere will you be?” she asked.
    â€œForget about me. I don’t exist.”
    Rebecca smiled, and made a face, as if to say yes, she understood, and sooner or later she would get used to it.
    They agreed that they could start the following Monday.

25
    Altogether, two years, three months, and twelve days had passed since Jasper Gwyn had communicated to the world that he was going to stop writing. Whatever effect it had had on his public image, he wasn’t aware of. The mail went, by a long-standing custom, to Tom, and sometime earlier Jasper Gwyn had asked him not even to send it on, since he had stopped opening it. He rarely read newspapers, he never went on the Internet. In fact, since he had published the list of the fifty-two things he would never do again, Jasper Gwyn had slipped into an isolation that others might have interpreted as a decline but that he tended to experience as a relief. He was convinced that after twelve years of unnatural public exposure, made inevitable by his profession as a writer, he was owed a form of convalescence. He imagined, probably, that when he started to work again, in his new job as a copyist, all the pieces of his life would reawaken and would be reassembled into a newly presentable picture. So when Jasper Gwyn left the house that Monday, it was with the certainty that he was entering not simply into the first day of a new job but into a new period of his existence. This explains why, coming out, he headed resolutely toward his regular barber, with the precise intention of having his head shaved.
    He was lucky. It was closed for renovations.
    So he wasted a little time and at ten appeared in the workshop of the old man in Camden Town, the one with the light bulbs. They had settled things on the phone. The old man took from a corner an old Italian pasta box that he had sealed with wide green tape and said that it was ready. In the taxi he didn’t want to stick it in the trunk, and he held it on his legs the whole way. Given that it was quite a large box but one whose contents were obviously light, there was something eerie about the agility with which he got out of the taxi and went up the few steps that led to Jasper Gwyn’s studio.
    When he entered he stood still for a moment, without putting down the box.
    â€œI was here once.”
    â€œDo you like vintage motorcycles?”
    â€œI don’t even know what they are.”
    They opened the box cautiously and took out the eighteen Catherine de Médicis. They were wrapped individually in very soft tissue paper. Jasper Gwyn got the ladder he had bought from an Indian around the corner and then stepped out of the way. The old man took an unreasonably long time, by moving the ladder, and climbing up, and climbing down, but in the end he achieved the hoped-for effect of eighteen Catherine de Médicis installed in eighteen sockets hanging from the ceiling in a geometric arrangement. Even turned off they made a good show.
    â€œWill you turn them on?” asked Jasper Gwyn, after closing the shutters on the windows.
    â€œYes, it would be better,” the old man said, as if an inexact pressure on the switch could possibly compromise everything.Probably, in his sick artisan’s mind, it did.
    He approached the electrical panel, and with his gaze fixed on his bulbs pressed the switch.
    They were silent for a moment.
    â€œDid I tell you I wanted red?” asked Jasper Gwyn, bewildered.
    â€œQuiet.”
    For some reason that Jasper Gwyn was unable to understand, the light bulbs, which went