I had separated from my second wife and now lived alone in an apartment in Almagro that a friend had lent me; it had been so long since I’d published anything that, one afternoon, as I was leaving a movie theater, a blonde woman I’d struck up a conversation with under some pretext was startled to learn who I was because she thought I was already dead. (“Oh, someone told me you died in Barcelona.”)
I was getting by, working on a book about W. H. Hudson’s years in Argentina, but the project wasn’t going anywhere; I was tired, held in place by inertia, and I’d gone a couple of weeks without doing anything until, one morning, Ida tracked me down on the phone. Where had I gone off to that no one could find me? Classes were starting in a month, I had to leave right away. Everyone was waiting for me, she exaggerated.
I gave my friend back the keys to his apartment, put my things in a storage unit, and left. I spent one week in New York and, in mid-January, caught a New Jersey Transit train to the peaceful suburban town where the university operated. Ida wasn’t at the station when I arrived, of course, but she’d sent two students to wait for me on the platform, holding up a sign with my name misspelled in red letters.
It had snowed, and the parking lot was a white desert with vehicles buried in an icy haze. I got into the car and we moved forward at a walking pace, lit up in the middle of the afternoon by the yellow gleam of tall streetlights. Finally, we reached the house on Markham Road, not far from the campus, which Housing had rented for me from a philosophy professor who was spending a year on sabbatical in Germany. The two students were Mike and John III (I would encounter them again in my classes), and they helped me, energetically and wordlessly, with my suitcases, gave me some practical instructions, and opened the garage door to show me Professor Hubert’s Toyota, which was included with the rent; they showed me how the heating worked and wrote down a number to call if it started to freeze (“in a pinch, call Public Safety”).
The town was charming and seemed to exist apart from the world of New York at eighty kilometers away. Residences with wide open gardens, glass picture windows, tree-lined streets, total calm. It was like being in a luxury psychiatric clinic, just what I needed at that time. There were no metal bars, no security watchtowers, no walls anywhere. The fortifications were of a different order. The dangers of life seemed to exist outside of here, on the other side of the woods and lakes, in Trenton, in New Brunswick, in the burned-out houses and slums of New Jersey.
The first night, I stayed up late, investigating the rooms, looking out through the windows at the lunar landscapes of neighboring gardens. The house was very comfortable, but my strange feeling of dislocation returned given the fact that I was living in someone else’s place yet again. The pictures on the walls, the decorations on the mantel, the clothing stowed carefully in nylon bags made me feel more like a voyeur than an intruder. In the study upstairs, the walls were covered with books of philosophy, and, as I went through the library, I thought that the volumes were made of the same dense material that has always allowed me to cut myself off from the present and escape reality.
In the kitchen cupboards I found Mexican salsas, unusual spices, jars of dried mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes, tin cans of oil, and pots of jam, as though the house was prepared to weather a long siege. Canned food and philosophy books, what more could you ask for? I made myself some Campbell’s tomato soup, opened a tin of sardines, toasted some frozen bread, and uncorked a bottle of Chenin Blanc. Then I made coffee and settled down on a sofa in the living room to watch TV. I always do that when I arrive in a different place. Television is the same everywhere, the only tenet of reality that persists beyond all changes. On ESPN the Lakers were beating the Celtics, on the news Bill Clinton was smiling with his good-natured air, in a Honda ad a car was sinking in the ocean, on HBO they were showing Curtis Bernhardt’s Possessed, one of my favorite films. Joan Crawford appears in the middle of the night in a Los Angeles neighborhood, not knowing who she is, remembering nothing from her past, moving along the strangely lit streets as though inside an empty fish tank.
I must have dozed off, because the telephone woke me. It was nearly midnight. Someone who knew my name and called me Professor too insistently was offering to sell me cocaine. The whole thing was so extraordinary that it must have been real. I was startled and cut off the line. It might have been a prank caller, an idiot, or a DEA agent monitoring the private lives of Ivy League academics. How did he know my last name?
That call made me very uneasy, to tell the truth. I often have slight attacks of anxiety. No more than the next guy. I imagined that someone was watching me from outside, and I turned out the lights. The garden and street were in shadows, and the leaves of the trees rustled in the wind; off to one side, over the wooden fence, my neighbor’s house was visible, lit up, and a slight woman in jogging clothes was doing Tai Chi exercises in the living room, slow and harmonious, as though floating in the night.
2
The next day I went to the university to meet the receptionists and a few colleagues, but I didn’t mention the strange
