Conspiracy theories begin to sprout in your mind, maybe some convoluted plot has been hatched behind your back by Udi, your devious agent, the Israeli Foreign Affairs office, and the publisher that’s hosting you. They all know it’s just a facade, they all make an easy profit from the fact that your book has been published but not distributed, and you, the only Truman in The Truman Show, keep traveling abroad, still believing that this time it’s happening, this is your breakthrough.
The last trip was to Colombia, and something in the combination of the huge quantities of rum, the terminally run-down hotel whose only occupants, apart from you, were Japanese, and the streets full of totally nonliterary beggars blurs the line between reality and simulation. It makes you feel untethered, like an astronaut outside his spaceship, repairing a glitch, whose cable suddenly disconnects.
After the series of interviews, you spend the free time you have left in Bogotá making the rounds of the bookstores that are open late. Axel Wolff’s new novel in Spanish translation appears in all the windows. You go inside and look for your book on the central display tables. You search the eye-level shelves, then the lower ones. Your book is not on any shelf, not in any store. In one of them, you swallow your embarrassment and go over to the counter to ask. The clerk checks the computer and says they don’t have any in stock. But he can order it for you if you wish. When you go out into the street, you hit the lamppost just to see whether it hurts.
After the sixth tequila, in a bar where all the patrons look like extras hired for a bar scene, you pay the bartender and begin walking to your hotel. You remember that when you were a kid in the fourth or fifth grade, your social life improved miraculously in only a few months. In the time between Hanukkah and Passover, you went from being shut out to being sought out, and the shift was so sharp that you suspected your parents had set it up. That they had bribed everyone, boys and girls, so they would be nice to you. For an entire year, you walked around with that suspicion, looking for signs to reinforce it. And now, thirty years later, you’re right back there.
You want to call home. Speak to your wife. Hear a familiar voice. Grab on to something before you finally lose your balance. But the time difference. And the expense. Besides, whenever you’ve called her from abroad recently, she hasn’t answered, and if she has, there was no indication in her voice that she missed you. And there are other signs: She stifles yawns when you insist on foreplay, she doesn’t notice your haircut, when you tell her about an argument you’ve had with someone, she automatically takes his side. But of all those signs, which have become more numerous this year, her I-don’t-really-miss-you voice on the phone is the most upsetting.
So you don’t call home, to avoid feeling hurt, but the next day you have no choice, and in order to be sure you exist, you come on to a Colombian journalist who looks like Gabriela Sabatini, the tennis player. You flirt with her during the interview and ask for her e-mail address so you can send her some poems by Yehuda Amichai in Spanish translation. You send her the poems along with an invitation for dinner, but there’s still a cloud hanging over the meal: Maybe she’s an extra too? But when you kiss, the cloud disperses. She kisses hard and well, and you hail a taxi and go to your hotel. You walk past dozens of Japanese in that lobby, and you feel as if you exist. You fuck, and suddenly, you don’t care whether people abroad read your book or not. Later, she looks for her large earrings, which she took off before she undressed. She wants to go, but you touch her arm and ask her not to leave you, and all night, you sing Shlomo Artzi songs in Hebrew into her ear and fuck her. You fuck her and sing Shlomo Artzi songs. Over and over again. She’s divorced with a kid, and in the town she comes from, everyone knows everything about everyone, so she hasn’t been with a man for two years to keep them from gossiping about her in the local churrascaria, and she has a poem by Cavafy tattooed on her lower back, right near her buttocks, not “Ithaka,” something less well known. She doesn’t write fiction, only poems, and not for publication, and every time she comes, it sounds as if she’s having a serious asthma attack and might die.
She puts the large earrings on in the morning and goes off to interview other writers who have come to the festival, and you fly back to Israel.
You arrive in the middle of the night, carry your suitcase up the stairs to your apartment, and feel like Odysseus returning to Ithaca. Your wife is sleeping, buried deeply in the blanket, and you wake her with a kiss and tell her everything. There has always been complete honesty between you, and after you started becoming a professional liar, it became stronger, the need for one person to whom you can tell the truth and only the truth. But it’s not just that. You want her to truly wake up. To open her eyes.
The more you tell her, the straighter she sits up in bed. Shoves another pillow under her head. Moves from lying down to a full sitting position. Her eyes open wide. She can’t find words.
Talk to me, Diki, you plead. Say something.
She shakes her head. Slowly. Her eyes are shining.
I was lonely, you say, I was very, very lonely.
Lonely? she asks.
