I found it equally hard to be nice to another novelist, who signed himself Garay Fontina – just that, two surnames and no first name, which he may have thought was original and enigmatic, but in fact made him sound like a football referee – and who considered that the publishing house had a duty to solve every and any possible problem or difficulty, even if it had nothing to do with his books. He would ask us to go to his house to pick up an overcoat and take it to the dry-cleaner’s, or else send him an IT person or some painters or find him accommodation in Trincomalee or in Batticaloa and make all the arrangements for what was a purely private trip, a holiday with his tyrannical wife, who occasionally phoned or turned up in person at the office and who didn’t ask, but ordered. My boss held Garay Fontina in high esteem and did his best to please him – through us – not so much because Garay Fontina sold lots of books as because he had led my boss to believe that he was frequently invited to Stockholm – I happened to know that he always went there at his own expense in order to plot alone in the void and breathe the air – and that he was in line for the Nobel Prize, even though no one had publicly put his name forward, in Spain or anywhere else. Not even in his home town, as so often happens. In front of my boss and his subordinates, however, he would present it as a fait accompli, and we would blush to hear him say such things as: ‘My Nordic spies tell me that I’m a dead cert for this year or the next’ or ‘I’ve memorized the speech I’m going to give to Carl Gustaf at the ceremony – in Swedish! He’ll be flabbergasted, it will be the most extraordinary thing he’s ever heard, and in his own language too, a language no one ever learns.’ ‘And what’s in the speech?’ my boss would ask with anticipatory glee. ‘You’ll read it in the world’s press the next day,’ Garay Fontina would tell him proudly. ‘Every newspaper will carry it, and they’ll all have to translate it from Swedish, even the Spanish newspapers, isn’t that funny?’ (I thought it enviable to have such confidence in a goal, even though both goal and confidence were fictitious.) I tried to be as diplomatic as possible with him, I didn’t want to risk losing my job, but I found this increasingly hard now, when, for example, he would ring me up early in the morning with his overblown desires.
‘María,’ he said to me one morning over the phone, ‘I need you to get me a couple of grams of cocaine for a scene in my new book. Have someone come over to my house as soon as possible, or, at any rate, before it gets dark. I want to see what colour cocaine is in daylight, so that I don’t get it wrong.’
‘But, Señor Garay …’
‘I’ve told you before, my dear, it’s Garay Fontina. Just plain Garay could be anyone, be it in the Basque Country, in Mexico or in Argentina. It could even be the name of a footballer.’ He insisted on this so much that I became convinced he had made up that second surname (I looked in the Madrid telephone directory one day and there was no Fontina, only a certain Laurence Fontinoy, an even more improbable name, like a character out of Wuthering Heights), or perhaps he had made up both surnames and was really called Gómez Gómez or García García or some other such repetitive name that would have offended his sensibilities. If it was a pseudonym, he was doubtless unaware when he chose it that Fontina is a type of Italian cheese, made either from goat’s or cow’s milk, I’m not sure, and which is produced, I believe, in Val d’Aosta, and which apparently melts easily. But then again there are some peanuts called Borges, and I doubt Borges would have been greatly bothered by that.
‘Sorry, Señor Garay Fontina, I was merely trying to keep things short. But listen,’ I had to say this, even though it was far from being the most important thing I had to say, ‘don’t worry about the colour. I can assure you that cocaine is white, both in daylight and under artificial