Mr. Gwyn Read online

  MR. GWYN

  &

  THREE TIMES AT DAWN

  Copyright © 2014 Alessandro Baricco

  English translation copyright © 2014 Alessandro Baricco

  Cover design by Sunra Thompson

  All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.

  McSweeney’s and colophon are registered trademarks of McSweeney’s, a privately held company with wildly fluctuating resources.

  ISBN: 978-1-940450-55-1

  www.mcsweeneys.net

  Contents

  Mr. Gwyn

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Three Times at Dawn

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  1

  As he was walking through Regent’s Park—along the path he always chose, among the many—Jasper Gwyn suddenly had the clear sensation that what he had been doing every day to earn his living no longer suited him. This thought had surfaced several times already, but never with such clarity and so much grace.

  So when he got home he began writing an article, which he then printed out, put in an envelope, and, crossing the city, delivered personally to the editorial offices of the Guardian. He was known there. Occasionally he contributed to the paper. He asked if it was possible to wait a week before publishing it.

  The article consisted of a list of fifty-two things that Jasper Gwyn intended never to do again. The first was to write articles for the Guardian. The thirteenth was to meet students and pretend to be sure of himself. The thirty-first, to be photographed with his hand on his chin, looking thoughtful. The forty-seventh, to make an effort to be cordial to colleagues whom he in truth despised. The last was: to write books. In a certain sense he was closing the possible loophole that the penultimate might have left: to publish books.

  It should be said that at that time Jasper Gwyn was a writer, quite fashionable in England and fairly well known abroad. He had made his debut twelve years earlier, with a thriller set in the Welsh countryside in the era of Thatcherism: a case of mysterious disappearances. Three years later, he had published a short novel about two sisters who decide never to see each other again: for a hundred pages they try to realize their modest desire, but it turns out to be impossible. The book ended with an extraordinary scene on a pier, in winter. Apart from an essay on Chesterton and two stories published in different anthologies, the oeuvre of Jasper Gwyn concluded with a third novel, five hundred pages long. It was the tranquil confession of an old Olympic fencing champion, a former navy captain and radio variety-show host. It was written in the first person and entitled Lights Off. It began with this sentence: “I have often reflected on sowing and reaping.”

  As many had noted, the three novels were so different from one another that it was difficult to recognize them as products of the same hand. It was an odd phenomenon, but it hadn’t kept Jasper Gwyn from becoming, in a short time, a writer acclaimed by the public and generally respected by the critics. His talent for storytelling was certainly indisputable, and in particular the ease with which he was able to identify with his characters and re-create their feelings was disconcerting. He seemed to know the words that they would say, and to think their thoughts, before they did. It’s not surprising if to many, in those years, it seemed reasonable to predict for him a brilliant career.

  At the age of forty-three, however, Jasper Gwyn wrote an article for the Guardian in which he listed fifty-two things that, starting that day, he would never do again. And the last was: write books.

  His brilliant career was already over.

  2

  The morning the article in the Guardian came out—with a big headline, in the Sunday supplement—Jasper Gwyn was in Spain, in Granada: it seemed to him appropriate, in the circumstances, to put a certain distance between himself and the world. He had chosen a hotel so modest that there was no telephone in the room, and so that morning someone had to come up to inform him that there was a call for him downstairs in the lobby. He went down in his pajamas and reluctantly went over to an old telephone, painted yellow, placed on a wicker table. He leaned the receiver against his ear and what he heard was the voice of Tom Bruce Shepperd, his agent.

  “What’s this all about, Jasper?”

  “What’s what about?”

  “The fifty-two things. I read them this morning, Lottie gave me the paper, I was still in bed. I practically had a stroke.”

  “Maybe I should have warned you.”

  “You’re not telling me it’s serious. Is it a challenge, a statement, what the hell is it?”

  “Nothing, an article. But it’s all true.”

  “In what sense?”

  “I mean I wrote it seriously. It’s exactly what I’ve decided.”

  “You’re telling me you’re going to stop writing?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I really have to go, you know?”

  “Wait a second, Jasper, we’ve got to talk about it, if you don’t talk about it to me, your agent…”

  “There’s nothing to add, I’m going to stop writing and that’s it.”

  “You know something, Jasper, are you listening to me, you know something?”

  “Yes, I’m listening to you.”

  “Then listen to me, I’ve heard that statement dozens of times, I’ve heard it said by an unimaginable number of writers, I’ve even heard Martin Amis say it, do you believe me? It must have been ten years ago, Martin Amis said those exact words, I’m going to stop writing, and it’s only one example, but I could give you twenty, you want me to make you a list?”

  “I don’t think it’s necessary.”

  “And you know something? Not one of them really stopped, there’s no such thing as stopping.”

  “Okay, but now I really have to go, Tom.”

  “Not one.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good article, anyway.”

  “Thank you.”
/>   “You’ve really thrown a stone in the pond.”

  “Don’t use that expression, please.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Now I’m going.”

  “I’m expecting you in London, when are you coming? Lottie would be really happy to see you.”

  “I’m about to hang up, Tom.”

  “Jasper, big brother, don’t joke.”

  “I’ve hung up, Tom.”

  He spoke that last sentence, however, after he hung up, so Tom Bruce Shepperd didn’t hear it.

  3

  Jasper Gwyn stayed in the Spanish hotel, comfortably, for sixty-two days. When he paid the bill, his extra expenses included seventy-two cups of cold milk, seventy-two glasses of whiskey, two phone calls, an exorbitant laundry bill (129 items), and the purchase price of a transistor radio—which may throw some light on his inclinations.

  During his entire sojourn in Granada, given the distance, and the isolation, Jasper Gwyn didn’t have to return to the subject of his article except occasionally, in his own mind. One day, however, he happened to meet a young Slovenian woman and he ended up having a pleasant conversation with her in the courtyard garden of a museum. She was brilliant and self-assured, and she spoke fairly good English. She said that she worked at the University of Ljubljana, in the Department of Modern and Contemporary History. She was in Spain to do research: she was working on the history of an Italian noblewoman who, at the end of the nineteenth century, traveled around Europe looking for relics.

  “You know, trafficking in relics, at the time, was the hobby of a certain Catholic aristocracy,” she explained.

  “Really?”

  “It’s not well known, but it’s a fascinating story.”

  “Tell me.”

  They dined together, and at dessert, after discoursing at length about the tibias and phalanges of martyrs, the Slovenian woman began to talk about herself, and in particular of how lucky she felt to be a researcher, a profession that she considered wonderful. She added that, naturally, everything surrounding the profession was horrible, the colleagues, the competition, the mediocrity, the hypocrisy—everything. But she also said that as far as she was concerned absolutely nothing could take away the desire to study and write.

  “I’m happy to hear you say that,” Jasper Gwyn commented.

  Then the woman asked what he did. Jasper Gwyn hesitated a moment, and then he half-lied. He said that for a dozen years he had been an interior designer, but two weeks ago he had stopped. The woman appeared to be sorry about it and asked why he had given up a job that seemed so enjoyable. Jasper Gwyn gestured vaguely in the air. Then he said something incomprehensible.

  “One day I realized that nothing mattered to me anymore, and that everything was like a fatal wound.”

  The woman appeared to be intrigued, but Jasper Gwyn was skilled at leading the conversation to other subjects, slipping sidewise into the custom of putting a carpet in the bathroom, and then expatiating on the supremacy of southern civilizations, due to their knowledge of the exact meaning of the term light.

  Much later that evening they said good night, but they did it so slowly that the young Slovenian woman had time to find the right words to say that it would be nice to spend that night together.

  Jasper Gwyn wasn’t so sure about it, but he followed her to her hotel room. Then, mysteriously, it wasn’t so complicated to mix her haste and his caution in a Spanish bed.

  Two days later, when the Slovenian woman left, Jasper Gwyn gave her a list he had compiled of thirteen brands of Scotch whiskey.

  “What are they?” she asked.

  “Lovely names. I’m giving them to you.”

  Jasper Gwyn spent sixteen more days in Granada. Then he, too, left, forgetting in the hotel three shirts, an unpaired sock, a walking stick with an ivory head, a sandalwood bubble bath, and two telephone numbers written in felt-tipped pen on the plastic shower curtain.

  4

  Jasper Gwyn spent the first days of his return to London walking the streets of the city obsessively and for long periods, with the delightful conviction that he had become invisible. Since he had stopped writing, in his mind he had stopped being a public figure—there was no reason for people to notice him, now that he was an ordinary person again. He began dressing carelessly, and went back to doing many small things without the subconscious thought that he ought to be presentable, in case a reader suddenly recognized him. The position he took at the bar in the pub, for example. Riding the bus without a ticket. Eating by himself at McDonald’s. Every so often someone did recognize him, and then he denied that he was who he was.

  There were a lot of other things he no longer had to deal with. He was like one of those horses who, having shaken off the jockey, slow down, dreamily, to a gentle trot, while the others are still bursting their lungs in pursuit of a finish line and an order of arrival. That state of mind was infinitely pleasurable. When he happened upon an article in the newspaper or a bookshop window that reminded him of the fray he had just withdrawn from, he felt his heart grow light, and he breathed the childish intoxication of Saturday afternoon. It was years since he had felt so good.

  Partly for this reason he put off for a while taking the measure of his new life, prolonging that private atmosphere of vacation. The idea, developed during his sojourn in Spain, was to return to the profession he had had before publishing novels. It wouldn’t be difficult, or even unpleasant. One might perhaps see a certain formal elegance, a sort of strophic progress, as in a ballad. Nothing, however, pressed him to hurry that return, since Jasper Gwyn lived alone, and had no family and few expenses, and thus, for at least a couple of years, he could live in tranquility without even getting up in the morning. So he put the thing off, and devoted himself to casual acts and to tasks that he had long postponed.

  He threw away old newspapers. He took trains for unknown destinations.

  5

  What happened, however, was that, as the days passed, he discovered in himself a singular form of unease that he had trouble understanding and that only after a while did he come to recognize: although it was vexing to admit it, he missed the act of writing, and the daily care of ordering thoughts into the rectilinear form of a sentence. He hadn’t expected it, and this caused him to reflect. It was a sort of small irritation that showed up every day and promised to get worse. So, little by little, Jasper Gwyn began to wonder if he shouldn’t consider marginal jobs in which it would be possible for him to pursue the practice of writing without its necessitating an immediate return to the fifty-two things he had vowed never to do again.

  Travel guides, he said to himself. But he would have to travel.

  He thought of writers of instruction manuals for household appliances, and wondered if there still existed, somewhere in the world, the job of writing letters for those who were unable to do it.

  Translator, he thought. But from what language?

  In the end, the only thing that came clearly to mind was a word: copyist. He would like to be a copyist. It wasn’t a real profession, he realized, but the word had a resonance that was convincing, and inspired him to look for something precise. There was a secrecy in the act, and a patience in its methods—a mixture of modesty and solemnity. He would not like to do anything but that: be a copyist. He was sure that he could do it well.

  As he tried to imagine what in the real world might correspond to the word copyist, Jasper Gwyn let a lot of days slip by, one after another, apparently painlessly. He was scarcely aware of them.

  6

  Every so often contracts arrived for him to sign, which had to do with the books he had already written. Renewals, new translations, adaptations for the theater. He left them on the table, and in the end it was clear to him that he would never sign them. With some distress he discovered that not only did he no longer want to write books but, in some way, he didn’t even want to have written them. That is, he had liked doing it but he didn’t want them to have survived his decision to stop, and in f
act it bothered him that, with a force of their own, they went where he had promised himself never to set foot again. He began to throw away the contracts without even opening them. Every so often Tom passed on letters from admirers who politely thanked him for such and such a page, or a particular story. Even that made him nervous, and he noticed that none of them mentioned his silence—they didn’t seem to be informed about it. A couple of times he took the trouble to answer. He thanked them, in turn, with simple words. Then he added that he had stopped writing, and signed off.

  He noted that no one answered those letters.

  More and more often, however, that need to write returned, and he missed the daily care with which he put his thoughts in order, in the straight line of a sentence. Instinctively, then, he ended up compensating for that absence with a private liturgy, which did not seem to him without some beauty: he began to write mentally, while he was walking, or lying in bed with the light out, waiting for sleep. He chose words, he constructed sentences. He might follow an idea for days, writing in his head entire pages, which he then enjoyed repeating, sometimes aloud. He could, in the same way, have cracked his knuckles, or practiced athletic exercises, over and over again. It was a physical thing. He liked it.

  Once he wrote, in that way, an entire poker game. One of the players was a child.

  In particular he liked to write while he was waiting at the Laundromat, amid the spinning drums, to the rhythm of magazines leafed through distractedly on the crossed legs of women who did not seem to harbor any illusions that did not concern the slenderness of their ankles. One day he was writing in his mind a dialogue between two lovers in which the man was explaining that ever since he was a child he had had the curious faculty of dreaming about people only when he was sleeping with them, only while he was sleeping with them.

  “You mean that you only dream about people who are in your bed?” the woman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What sort of nonsense is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And if someone isn’t in your bed you don’t dream about her.”