Two Portraits
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The other day I finished reading Autoportrait by Édouard Levé. It took me a little time, but once I finished, I had the impulse to read it again, so I stayed up until the early hours reviewing its pages. It is a book that I’d been looking forward to reading ever since Emilia Gallegos recommended it in one of our last meetings. Emilia is a former faculty colleague and now the head coordinator of the Academic Writing program in a Jesuit university in Lima. I see her every other week and every time we meet, she asks me about the books I’m reading and the reviews I’m about to publish. And, since I don’t like talking about the books I’ve already written about in the newspaper, I always divert the topic by taking an interest in her activities at university. That way, for example, I learned recently that one of the professors she’s in charge of asked her to send me one of his books, in case I ‘would be so kind to review it’. But Emilia being Emilia, with a memory as unreliable as her sense of conjugal loyalty, forgot all about it and instead brought me Levé’s book.
‘Have you read him?’ she asked. ‘He’s one of yours.’
When I asked her what she meant by that, she took a prolonged sip of her coffee, with which she avoided making any kind of clarification. But Emilia was right, from time to time I’m grateful that books like Autoportrait come into my hands. For what they represent, yes, but more importantly for everything that they consciously avoid being. In this book, Levé does not seek to tell a story, nor does he waste time on strategies to surprise the reader. His narrator doesn’t get sad and moving us is not one of his concerns. If anything, I’d say the book lives up to its title, since its only purpose is to draw a face (metaphorically, that is, but I’d be lying if I say I’m not tempted to use the word ‘literally’), the obsessive prose layering detail upon detail until, eventually, the face takes shape. In short, this is what the book is all about. That should be the end of it, really, but Emilia and I have a history of dragging things out, whether by silence or insistence, until one ends up being fed up with the other, resulting in a much too predictable two- or three-month hiatus.
So yesterday morning I called Emilia and since she didn’t answer I had to leave her a voice message where I admitted that the recommendation had been well-received, and that Levé was truly ‘one of mine’. I also told her that the book reminded me of others that I’d previously read, such as those by Joe Brainard, Georges Perec and Martín Kohan – all of them respectively titled I Remember – but that Levé’s book, to me, seemed closer to achieving the consolidation of an always elusive identity. ‘It is, in fact, a self-portrait,’ I concluded in the message, unintentionally sounding like a dusty old professor in the middle of a lecture.
Later, Emilia replied with a rushed message in which she said it would be better to meet for lunch one of these days ‘so that you can explain to me, dear, how this thing about “always elusive identities” works’. I could almost see her ironically quoting my words in the air. In any case, I didn’t think any further explanation was possible because I don’t really have much more to say on the subject, until it occurred to me that I could relate another event that came to my mind while I was reading, and that I inevitably associated with the book: Oasis – live at Wembley Stadium in the summer of 2000.
That year, I was just a 26-year-old undergraduate student and had decided to travel abroad with Jessica Orsabia, a girlfriend I met in the classrooms of the Faculty of Letters. Jessica’s parents, who were both from Ecuador but had been living in Barcelona for years, had invited us to spend a few weeks in a little house near the sea. Well, the truth is that only Jessica had been invited, but she insisted on my coming with her so I, a man with no prospects of a real job or actual responsibilities, accepted immediately, although with the condition that, upon returning, I would be the one in charge of the next invitation to travel.
Let these few lines serve as a reminder that, at some point in my life, this poor – and generally pessimistic – literary critic also gave in to the strong waves of enthusiasm.
The fact is that once in Barcelona, Jessica’s parents, who were not aware of my existence until they saw me at the airport hand in hand with their daughter, quickly got bored of us and started to suggest activities in which we obviously didn’t need their company. So, the two weeks that we’d planned to enjoy with them on the Mediterranean coast seemed very long now. Luckily, Jessica had some friends living in the area, so we turned to them. These friends of hers, however, happened to be packing their bags to travel to London to see Oasis in concert. And when, in a very Peruvian impulse, it occurred to me to make a comment on how much those tickets must have cost, I received the following response:
‘What tickets? We’ll see that when we get there.’
I don’t remember now if such a carefree statement caused in me any sort of astonishment or fear or something very similar to vertigo, but surely there was something of all of that then because I always relate that scene with another in which I am in a bathroom, minutes later, throwing water on my face while thinking about my life choices. What was I even doing there? Meeting someone’s parents? In Barcelona? It was true that Jessica and I were happy together, but that was mostly because we’d only been dating for five or six months – which I know hardly explained my decision to go travelling with her in the first place. Things didn’t seem likely to improve, either: as soon as I came out of the bathroom, Jessica announced we’d be joining that crazy trip to London. I remember then asking for the toilet again.
Now, I want to clarify something: I am not against spontaneity or liveliness or the wildness with which some people decide to live their life; in fact, it’s often something I encourage in others. In others, that is. Because it so happens that I’m the kind of person who finds comfort in the daily, in the permanent and perhaps even in the static, which is an elegant way of saying I’m a tad boring. Nevertheless, I would also like to point out that this is a characteristic I do not complain about and that, to a certain extent, within the limits of decorum, am quite proud of. So, nothing was more out of my character than the days I spent with Jessica in Europe, but let these few lines serve as a reminder that, at some point in my life, this poor – and generally pessimistic – literary critic also gave in to the strong waves of enthusiasm.
As I was saying, Jessica and I embarked on that trip to London without thinking much about it, in her case because she was more accustomed to the sudden opportunities that came her way in life and in mine because, otherwise, I wouldn’t have had a place to stay. So, we arrived on the morning of July 19th, just one day before the first concert, which surprisingly did not discourage Jessica’s friends, who said they had everything under control. What they didn’t have under control, though, was where we were going to sleep that night, but even that didn’t seem to bother them. Thus, we alternated between bars and nightclubs and very long walks through the city that tested, among other things, my patience, until dawn came and found us lying on the green grass of some park in Bloomsbury. I don’t remember much about how well we slept that night or when exactly the sun came up the next morning, but I do have a clear memory of my head resting on Jessica’s lap, her hair falling across my face, and the warmth of her gaze – perhaps the warmest I had ever known.
The next day, surprised – but, more than that, defeated – by the still reigning enthusiasm in Jessica’s group of friends, I decided to cave and go along with them, to try to enjoy the moment and let the winds of destiny blow over the lonely and bitter sailboat that I was. We had a huge full English for breakfast which, I must admit, contributed significantly to my mood change. Then, at about two in the afternoon, we arrived at Wembley and walked around looking for the end of the queue.
That’s basically why I no longer justify myself when I tell a story. Everyone’s entitled to their fair share of scepticism, right?
‘But we don’t even have tickets,’ I said, surely repeating myself, although this time seeing the funny side of the situation, while Jessica, with her lovely eyes, made a gesture at me that meant ‘believe, Tavares, you just believe’. And, well, what else could I do if not believe that everything would turn out as it should? Funnily enough, that’s exactly how, against all odds or any sense of reality, we managed to get in the concert that sunny afternoon of July 20th.
To this day I can’t say how we did it, whether because of some desperate last-minute resale or because of some trick that I haven’t been – because I never really wanted to be – aware of. The few people I have shared this experience with tend to fall into two camps: those who praise my abilities to invent things that never happened and those who believe that I’m just being deliberately obtuse. That’s basically why I no longer justify myself when I tell a story. Everyone’s entitled to their fair share of scepticism, right?
‘What’s this all about?’ you may ask. Wasn’t I supposed to be talking about Levé’s brilliant book and what I would tell Emilia about my reading when we meet? Well, what do you know? We’ve just reached the part within my story that is crucial to my understanding of Autoportrait.
I know it may not seem like it, since I’ve been describing myself as someone who was reluctantly led towards a destination that, because it wasn’t properly arranged, he would’ve preferred not to have been involved in, but the truth is that I was quite excited at the prospect of seeing one of my favourite bands live. Perhaps that also explains my somewhat childish disbelief: there was always the possibility that we may have made the entire trip in vain, and I didn’t want to get my hopes up. But the fact is that, once inside, I was enjoying myself like a fervent teenager, shouting the lyrics of the songs as if there were no tomorrow, much to Jessica’s surprise, who had heard me say little or nothing about my love for the music of the Gallagher brothers. Then we reached the part of the concert where, I knew, they used to pay a kind of tribute to John Lennon, often through a performance of ‘Live Forever’. And so they did, but this time in a way I wasn’t expecting at all. For a few brief seconds, while Noel was playing and Liam was strolling around the stage, huge words in white took over the centre of the black screen to form some of the most famous quotes in the history of pop music, stating that ‘there is nothing conceptually better than Rock ‘n’ Roll’ or that ‘madness is the first sign of dandruff’. These phrases then became smaller and faded into the background, before the next one emerged and the same exercise was repeated. What all those quotes about music and drugs and youthful madness were going to form, in the end, was none other than the most iconic portrait of John Lennon with his wavy hair and his round glasses and, in general, the face of someone who doesn’t care much about the worries of everyday life.
That’s what came to my mind when I first read Levé’s book. The floating face of John Lennon in that long lost summer of 2000 and the tiny sentences that came together to shape his eyes, his nose, his glasses… I thought about Levé and his death, too, and how the sentences I was reading had been carefully chosen by him to shape the face with which he wanted to go. I remember thinking how peculiar a man you’d have to be to want to go that way, then thinking about how I’d like to go if I could choose. Would anything in my face now resemble the face of that 26-year-old student? What shape, if any, would my sentences give my face in the end?
I know, Emilia, this is perhaps a somewhat forced comparison of the two portraits, especially if we take into account what we know about Édouard Levé and John Lennon, and their tragically dissimilar deaths. But let it be clear that all this diversion was just necessary to give you a little context about what I meant on the phone. It’s your own fault, anyway, for asking for an explanation. You know perfectly well I don’t want to review the book of the professor you’re sleeping with these days. Such is the ‘always elusive’ nature of men.
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Carlos Paguada is a Peruvian writer based in Lima. He’s published a collection of short stories titled Atardecer en los Vidrios and was longlisted for the Young Latin American Literature Award in 2021 with El Interior de Esta Casa. He’s currently working on his first novel.
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