Belano usually opened a story by narrating the
protagonist’s infancy: he would sculpt the character in the reader’s mind
through interpretable moments. Recently he had discovered that his obsession
with early stages, with the development of people both real and imagined, was
in good measure due to his compulsion to classify it all, to chart the world
and compel it until it fit in his grids. He wasn’t thus unlike a bad reader of
philosophy or fiction, those who open the book and check the number of pages
straight away, how many days and hours until the climax of having read this, a process which resulted in zero change for both
reader and book (unlike the river, which rapes you ontologically).
Belano’s biggest success coincided with Lena’s
greatest defeat. That night, they met at the Pompidou museum. He barely mustered
the courage to tell her he had won the ghost writer competition. His vocabulary
didn’t contemplate Lena’s suffering.
‘Can’t blame you’ she said in French, suspicious of
his guilt. ‘For a nègre a personal
defeat is damn near impossible.’
The French term nègre,
although perhaps politically incorrect in his language, made more sense to him
than the English alternative, a ‘ghost writer’. Lately, after a long writing
session, Belano would dream that he had died and was slowly crawling through an
ink swamp, an infinite tour through the words of every nègre in history, even Homer’s protonegros! He kept going like so
until it occurred to him to check his pockets, where he would find a pill.
Unlike so many dreams that end right before the protagonist’s death, Belano’s
always finished by taking the pill meant to bring him back to life.
