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Authors: Enrique Vila-Matas
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to exchange the modest splendor of my provincial childhood world of post-war Spain for the center of the world.
One day, out of the blue, I was invited to spend a night in New York.
I was asked to take part in a conference in a library in Manhattan. Though a single night wasn’t much — the following days I had to be in Providence and Boston for two other conferences — I accepted the invitation and traveled to New York, above all I traveled to find out what happened when one finds oneself in real life inside one’s most recurring and happiest dream.
Shortly after arriving in New York, at night in the solitude of my hotel room with my suitcase not yet unpacked, I looked out the window and contemplated the skyscrapers surrounding me. Visually it was like in my patio dream, but nothing special happened. I was inside my dream and at the same time everything was real. But, as was to be expected, my sense of fulfillment or happiness hadn’t increased because I was there. I was in New York, and that was all. I got into bed, fell asleep, and then dreamed I was playing in a patio in New York, surrounded by houses from Barcelona. And suddenly I discovered that the
duende
of the dream was never New York City, but rather the child playing in the dream. The child I had been was what had caused that particular dream to be my dream of dreams. The next morning, despite the fact that I was in New York, I was hugely upset when I found myself awake. New York was the least of it, with its skyscrapers and undeniable allure. What mattered least was confirming that, actually, I did like New York better than Paris. And what mattered most was that on waking up, the child had disappeared, I had lost the true
duende
of the dream. I walked around like a sleepwalker the whole day, the only day of my life that I spent in New York.
30
The Lettered Assassin
(a book written by the assassin herself, though the reader shouldn’t know it until the end) opens with an almost perfect first sentence that speaks of how occasions for laughter and tears are intertwined in the narrator’s life (a sentence that’s actually the last one I wrote in the whole book and of that more later). Then it goes on: “It was last year, in an old hotel in Bremen, I was in search of Vidal Escabia. Through a labyrinth of corridors I had arrived at his room, number 666, and since the door was ajar . . .”
The murderess tells the reader that in room 666, in the old hotel in Bremen, she discovers the lifeless body of Vidal Escabia, and next to the corpse she finds, dropped on the floor, as if death had struck as he read it, the original manuscript of
The Lettered Assassin
. And a little further on the murderess reveals that in May 1975 she sent the victim a personal letter from Worpswede, near Bremen, along with the manuscript of
The Lettered Assassin
and some notes on the text.
The reason I chose Bremen and Worpswede — a city and village I knew nothing about, only that they were German — was really very simple. Due to the demands of the plot, I needed the name of a city that wasn’t too far from Paris. At that moment, the book I had closest at hand in the garret was
Letters to a Young Poet,
by Rainer Maria Rilke. I opened the book with my eyes closed and there was the fourth letter, dated July, 1903, in
Worpswede
,
near Bremen
. I realized straightaway that I had found the city I was looking for, but also a village with a strange name it would be a shame not to use. And that’s how it happened that these two places, the strange-named village, Worpswede, and the city of Bremen, appeared on the first page of my first book and as time went by — there are few pages I have visited more frequently than the first page of
The Lettered Assassin
— they ended up becoming mythical names for me, two names that became
part of me
.
Allow me to leave aside irony for a few moments and to recall tenderly what I was reading in those long-ago days. I think I saw Rilke and
One day, out of the blue, I was invited to spend a night in New York.
I was asked to take part in a conference in a library in Manhattan. Though a single night wasn’t much — the following days I had to be in Providence and Boston for two other conferences — I accepted the invitation and traveled to New York, above all I traveled to find out what happened when one finds oneself in real life inside one’s most recurring and happiest dream.
Shortly after arriving in New York, at night in the solitude of my hotel room with my suitcase not yet unpacked, I looked out the window and contemplated the skyscrapers surrounding me. Visually it was like in my patio dream, but nothing special happened. I was inside my dream and at the same time everything was real. But, as was to be expected, my sense of fulfillment or happiness hadn’t increased because I was there. I was in New York, and that was all. I got into bed, fell asleep, and then dreamed I was playing in a patio in New York, surrounded by houses from Barcelona. And suddenly I discovered that the
duende
of the dream was never New York City, but rather the child playing in the dream. The child I had been was what had caused that particular dream to be my dream of dreams. The next morning, despite the fact that I was in New York, I was hugely upset when I found myself awake. New York was the least of it, with its skyscrapers and undeniable allure. What mattered least was confirming that, actually, I did like New York better than Paris. And what mattered most was that on waking up, the child had disappeared, I had lost the true
duende
of the dream. I walked around like a sleepwalker the whole day, the only day of my life that I spent in New York.
30
The Lettered Assassin
(a book written by the assassin herself, though the reader shouldn’t know it until the end) opens with an almost perfect first sentence that speaks of how occasions for laughter and tears are intertwined in the narrator’s life (a sentence that’s actually the last one I wrote in the whole book and of that more later). Then it goes on: “It was last year, in an old hotel in Bremen, I was in search of Vidal Escabia. Through a labyrinth of corridors I had arrived at his room, number 666, and since the door was ajar . . .”
The murderess tells the reader that in room 666, in the old hotel in Bremen, she discovers the lifeless body of Vidal Escabia, and next to the corpse she finds, dropped on the floor, as if death had struck as he read it, the original manuscript of
The Lettered Assassin
. And a little further on the murderess reveals that in May 1975 she sent the victim a personal letter from Worpswede, near Bremen, along with the manuscript of
The Lettered Assassin
and some notes on the text.
The reason I chose Bremen and Worpswede — a city and village I knew nothing about, only that they were German — was really very simple. Due to the demands of the plot, I needed the name of a city that wasn’t too far from Paris. At that moment, the book I had closest at hand in the garret was
Letters to a Young Poet,
by Rainer Maria Rilke. I opened the book with my eyes closed and there was the fourth letter, dated July, 1903, in
Worpswede
,
near Bremen
. I realized straightaway that I had found the city I was looking for, but also a village with a strange name it would be a shame not to use. And that’s how it happened that these two places, the strange-named village, Worpswede, and the city of Bremen, appeared on the first page of my first book and as time went by — there are few pages I have visited more frequently than the first page of
The Lettered Assassin
— they ended up becoming mythical names for me, two names that became
part of me
.
Allow me to leave aside irony for a few moments and to recall tenderly what I was reading in those long-ago days. I think I saw Rilke and
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