7 October 2007
Inspiration: Bookstore visit in San Telmo
(Potentially Unfinished)
It came as a bit of a shock to her, the discovery that he wasn’t real. It happened in an instant—the moment he ducked down to take a look at some collection of tales lining the lower shelves of a bookstore on Estados Unidos whose sign promised only “Good Used Books in English” (‘It’s a good thing they told us that, lest there be any confusion between it and that lot that house only bad used books,’ he commented the first time they passed). He lowered himself onto his haunches and in doing so disappeared from her vantage point behind the discounted books table. She turned around to show him a collection of cummings (secretly hoping he would ask her to read him her favorite) and he vanished on the spot. It was no optical illusion. No; a few strides around the table heavy-laden with the words of men and it became clear that he was no longer there. With a slightly open mouth and brows aloft like a pair of startled birds, her eyes fell upon Herman Melville and she muttered to herself “Perhaps he’s been swallowed by Moby Dick. Foolish man, prying open the paperback jaws of a monster.” And it was at this precise moment she remembered that he wasn’t real and never had been; he hadn’t ever entered the bookstore in the first place, and therefore the series of events described in this paragraph never actually transpired.
In earnest, this is not entirely true. A very real man existed with the same name and the same height and the same placement of features upon his face as the man she had believed journeyed down with her to the city of Borges and Peron and Yerba-Mate-sipping, lilty-Spanish-speaking men and women and babies and children who knew what it was like to bathe in one’s own sweat on a summer’s day or watch savings sizzle and then evaporate like a drink spilt on pavement in one hundred degree heat. But this man, Caleb Godfrey, resided in a city leagues and days and giant strides up North where buildings were the color of the sky; this man, Caleb Godfrey, knew nothing of sidewalks only half put together like some forsaken jigsaw puzzle, or exhaust-covered buildings that looked as though some gargantuan, overzealous artist had taken an equally gargantuan charcoal pencil to them. This man, Caleb Godfrey, certainly knew nothing of a back alley bookstore in San Telmo that at this very moment held a woman aged twenty-four amidst truths and untruths that found themselves printed in
Times New Roman and
Didot and
Helvetica. No, Caleb Godfrey, knew nothing of the comings and goings of the past year he had spent with her (but in truth hadn’t), including this set. And if we are to be completely earnest about the situation (which we might as well be), Caleb Godfrey hardly knew Eva Wagner at all.
A thought occurred to Eva as she placed the book she held back in the place it had previously sat, snuggling between the obras poeticas de Neruda and the cantos of Ezra Pound. The thought was this: “Why then, that conversation never took place. “
The conversation she was alluding to involved herself and Godfrey, and happened one Sunday afternoon while the two strolled through a park bedecked with newly budding branches, flighty pigeons, and wrinkled men whose focus upon wooden game pieces with edges softened by the pads of thumbs and pointer fingers was so intense Eva imagined, if directed otherwise, it had the potential to defy space-time.
She shook her head and smiled at this thought, and then directed her attention elsewhere and the following conversation was born. She began it, prompted by tufts of new grass and a memory of past sentimentalisms. Eva had already shared with Godfrey plenty of stories concerning the young man she had been fond of prior to meeting him, and here was yet another:
“There was a spot—“
“A spot?”
“Yes, that’s what I said, a spot. A spot on the grass where we were meant to lay, with 1,276 blades per square foot and daisies here and there, ready to lose their heads to anxious hands.”
“So did you sit?”
“No, we did not sit. We looked at the spot—were too afraid to leave the path and instead talked of de-planetificaiton.”
“Ah, yes, what a shame about Pluto.”
“Indeed.”
“So it was not done then?”
“No it was never completed.”
“It was not said?”
“Not a single word, except for the ‘I’ part, popping up in all the wrong places like ‘I do enjoy walking in parks’ and ‘I would like it if you would be frank’.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. I see that you are a terrified fool.”
“Isn’t that a bit harsh?”
“Life is harsh; I am honest.”
It had stopped there; their conversations usually came in spurts and were quite non-sensical to people who did not know the two intimately.
Recalling this conversation—one of the ones Eva kept pocketed in the part of her brain reserved for fond memories in the instance that it was true that heaven was no more than the mind locking itself into a pattern of eternal recollection of the sweet things of one’s life—she now wondered if this (along with myriad other conversations and memories) weren’t doubly false, with the story embedded in the conversation completely fabricated as well. Then she considered the possibility of this double negativity, as it were, possessing the potential to produce one truth (like a negative sign outside of a negative number encapsulated in a set of parentheses). And then she couldn’t be bothered with the conversation and its trueness or falsity because the delayed pain of realization was upon her.
It came like the cracking of a whip and left her stunned and scared and jumpy. She quickly left the bookstore, not even bothering to shut the door (much to the chagrin of the forty-something Argentine whose favorite part of owning a bookstore was hardly ever having to avert ones eyes from the beloved pages and words.) Hasty steps at a near-run pace brought her to the wooden doors of the building she was living in; keys were pulled out of a pocket, a door was opened, steps were climbed, another door was unlocked, and Eva was inside an apartment with half the amount of things she had believed it to contain.
Author: E.A.C. 
