forget about it, to deny what had happened with rational arguments. Then the series of tragedies: I lost my daughter, I lost my life. I was disconnected from the world, devoid of thought. All I could do was watch the film of Pauli, over and over. I thought I’d never write again. Until, that summer, I went to the beach at Villa Gesell, and saw that body disappear out to sea. It was like a sign written in the water. Anyone would say it was an accident, and that’s what I thought at the time. But I understood what the sign was telling me. I knew the story I had to write. I didn’t know, I never could have imagined, that it was his novel—the beginning of his novel. I returned to Buenos Aires the next day: I just wanted to get started. Suddenly everything seemed clear. I could see the tiny but unmistakable light at the end of the tunnel—the subject of the novel. After all, it wasn’t so different from the story about the Cainites that I’d set aside. Only this one would take place in the present day. There’d be a girl, rather like Luciana. And someone who’d lost a daughter, like me. The girl would have a family just like Luciana’s. For once in a novel I wanted to keep some resemblance to real life, because I felt that the secret source, the wound I needed to prod, was my own. I didn’t want to forget myself, to let myself be swept along, as in my other books, by the flow of my imagination. The subject, of course, was punishment—what constitutes proportionate punishment. An eye for an eye, states the lex talionis. But what if one eye is smaller than the other? I had lost a daughter, but Luciana didn’t have any children. Yet my grief cried out that a daughter wasn’t equivalent to a short-term boyfriend with whom Luciana didn’t even seem to get on. I began writing with rigorous determination, but something seemed to have dried up, died inside me, as if my daughter’s death meant I was banished not only from the human race, but from my own writing. The few lines I managed to scribble each day were unrecognisable. Nothing was right. So, in my own way, I invoked him. I appealed to him night after night, until suddenly I realised I was no longer alone. He had returned. I could feel him once again at my shoulder. And I let him do as he pleased—I let him dictate to me again. He provided the momentum, gave the command, made the tuning fork hum. It was like a gradual thaw, as if the stone I had become had started to ooze. But I was writing again, and I knew exactly to whom I owed it. Inwardly I referred to him as my ‘Sredni Vashtar’. He was invisible, but his monstrous voice was as familiar as the sound of a loved one’s breathing. He was not only real but almost palpable, and I was sure anyone would know which sentences on the page were his. At first, it was almost all of them. But the physical act of writing, like a magical exercise of the muscles, gradually brought back my old skill, some of my old self. He’d made the electricity flow, made the dead man live again. I came back to life. I recovered my old pride, the only one I have, and no longer wanted his company. I went back to my long vigils, to my usual wavering and meandering, to my own imagination. But it wasn’t easy to get rid of him. I could feel him riding on my shoulders, like the Old Man of the Sea. And of course his sentences were always better than mine—primordial, savage, direct. But I managed to reject them one by one, despite the temptation. Eventually I felt I was alone again. And I thought I was free of him at last.”
“When was this?”
“Almost a year later, just before writing the scene with the parents’ death. I pictured them dying at their house by the beach, during their winter holiday, from a carbon monoxide leak from the boiler. That kind of accident happens every year. I didn’t consider any other possibility. When I went back to writing on my own, I realised that some of my bitterness had gone, life had resumed, and I was starting to forget Luciana. The novel was no longer