Gasoline

“A gifted writer, he draws well on the rich tradition of Spanish surrealism to put a deliberately paranoic sense of menace in the apparently mundane everyday and also to sustain the lyrical, visionary quality of his imagination.”

—
New York Times

“Quim Monzó is today’s best known writer in Catalan. He is also, no exaggeration, one the world’s great short-story writers. This novel shows all his idiosyncrasy and originality. We have at last gained the opportunity to read (in English) one of the most original writers of our time.”

—
Independent
(London)

“To read this novel is to enter a fictional universe created by an author trapped between aversion to and astonishment at the world in which he has found himself. His almost manic humor is underpinned by a frighteningly bleak vision of daily life.”

—
Times Literary Supplement
(London)

in English Translation

The Enormity of the Tragedy

Guadalajara

O’Clock

Copyright © 1983, 2004 by Joaquim Monzó

Copyright © 1983, 2004 by Quaderns Crema, S. A.

Translation copyright © 2010 by Mary Ann Newman

Published by arrangement with Quaderns Crema, S. A., 2008

First published in Catalan as
Benzina
, by Quaderns Crema, S. A., 1983

First edition, 2010

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-62-7

Translation of this novel was made possible thanks to the

support of the Ramon Llull Institut.

Printed on acid-free paper in the United States of America.

Design by N. J. Furl

Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit,

literary translation press:

Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

www.openletterbooks.org

For Mary Ann Newman

“Blow me down.”

“I can’t.”

“In that case, let’s go.”

—Francesc Trabal,
L’any que ve

Once
again, he feels as if he were asleep and awake at the same time, yet if he concentrates he feels as if he were fast asleep. A fraction of a second later, it dawns on him that perhaps Hildegarda is already awake, up and about, and (out of boredom) dressed, as he wastes time wondering whether or not he’s awake. Then it all fades to gusts of wind, oranges, bicycles, a tin clown, a man jumping off a skyscraper, a tunnel, and a locomotive leaving a trail of smoke that, upon clearing, takes the shape of a street corner, a cafeteria with people inside. The dream is an exact reproduction of the scene in
Nighthawks
by Edward Hopper. He is thrilled to be able not only to identify the origin of the images in mid-dream, but also to be aware of doing it, and to remember that he had seen the painting as a little boy, many years before (impossible to calculate how many) at the Art Institute of Chicago. He also realizes that the painting is now appearing in this fantasy because the night before he had seen a reproduction of it in the window of a frame shop, along with two other reproductions of Hopper paintings. He remembers one of them: an office, and a secretary with a prominent ass (wearing a blue dress and glasses, he seems to recall) who is poring over a file cabinet, and a moth-eaten clerk sitting at his desk.

The diner, on the corner of two dark and deserted streets, has picture windows, a sign that reads
phillies
, and a thin old waiter behind the counter, wearing a white soda jerk’s hat. One woman and two men with wide-brimmed hats are sitting at the bar, drinking, but this doesn’t last long because soon the diner is filling up with people: men identical (in face, hat, and suit) to the man or men already sitting there; and women identical (in face, hairdo, and dress) to the woman already at the counter (but wearing hats, fur stoles draped around their necks, and shiny handbags). Outside, in the street, there is a good layer of snow on the ground, and this is perfectly logical, because it’s New Year’s Eve, though in the painting he had seen as a child (and obviously in the reproduction he has seen the night before) there wasn’t a trace of snow.

All at once, the people leave the bar and spill out onto the street, laughing. They leave by the dozens, by the hundreds. There are thousands of them, fleeing like insects. No matter how many leave, though, the diner is always full of people having vanilla, strawberry, raspberry, or chocolate milkshakes and crushed ice with a good squirt of blueberry, lemon, or mint syrup. It’s just like that old movie gag in which (by circling out beyond the camera’s range and circling back in again through an off-screen door) an endless stream of people gets out of a tiny car that could barely have seated four.

Of all the crowd, aside from the waiter, two characters always stay behind: the redhead dressed in burgundy and the man eating vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup drizzled over it—who is he, himself (and he finds it hard to believe he hadn’t recognized himself till now)—staring intently at the street where a car flashes by. Bit by bit the sky turns from black to dark blue, lights come on in a few windows; they go out when day breaks definitively, morning arrives implacably, and the diner ceases to be the silvery island it was during the night. The waiter sets up the counter with cups, teaspoons, knives, bread, jam, and butter. Not missing a beat, a stream of hungry office workers hurries into place, pushing and shoving, gulping down watery coffee, milk, toast, and croissants. As he has shifted his attention to the inside of the bar, the outside starts to go dark on him again. This is why, when he tries to light up the street again (at that point in mid-morning when all the office workers have left and the lonely people in the place are the man and the woman, or the woman and the two men, one of whom is he), the surroundings fade: everything goes white, stunningly resplendent, and turns into a beach. Oh, what a delightful sight, Hopper’s diner smack in the middle of a beach with plastic chairs and a string of desolate awnings, and, in the distance, a backdrop of immobile waves spotted with surfing teenagers. Finally he feels he’s dreaming freely: he resolves to let his imagination flow. The woman in the burgundy dress is wearing sunglasses, as is the waiter. The other man is and isn’t there, appearing and disappearing. When he takes off his hat (and the shadow that hides his face vanishes), Heribert recognizes himself unmistakably, sweating beyond endurance in his steaming woolen winter coat.

The dream has been boring him for some time now. He tries to stop it, but he can’t. Now he sees them in bathing suits: himself in shiny black briefs and her in one of those backless skintight suits with two strips of cloth stretching up from the waist in front, covering the breasts and tying around the neck. They are rolling down a flight of stairs and he crashes into a glass door that softly gives. For a fraction of a second, Heribert (about to dive into the water) asks himself if the woman isn’t Helena. Now they are swimming, off on their own, surviving the gigantic waves that engulf them. They swim in silence, and when Heribert plunges deeper, he wishes he didn’t ever have to surface again. He seems to stay underwater for hours. When he does surface, she is already on the beach, walking slowly towards the diner. He rushes after her. When he reaches the sand, he steps on a small black cockroach. Hildegarda’s voice (was it Hildegarda, then, and not Helena?) tells him to hurry, to go faster, because she has to leave. Now he’s running, trying not to step on any of the thousands of roaches streaming out from under the sand. When he looks up, he tries to sight the cafeteria, but it is nowhere to be found: the beach is a long sliver, absolute and deserted, on which two figures are running: the woman and the other man who is finally there, and he seems to have seized the opportunity to run off with her (which proves that the whole game of appearing and disappearing was just a ruse to seem inconspicuous and then be free to make off with the woman). He thinks: if only I could remember the man’s face
. . . ;
if only I had seen his face
. . . ;
if only I could start dreaming another dream
. . .
He has a premonition that he will never dream again, and he flees through passageways between buildings, silent basements, swimming rough waves beating against the ships, going back to a port, to a city square at night, to the diner on the old street, with the woman dressed in burgundy and a man in a dark suit whose hat brim hides his face, wondering whether the figure of a second man will emerge, a shriek, a blow to the chin, the earth splitting open as he laughs, the fall.

•

A sharp noise awakens him. First he thinks maybe the bottle of champagne has fallen on the floor and shattered, but he slides his foot along until he finds the bottle right where he remembered leaving it: by the side of the bed. Then he figures it must be the shade banging against the windowpanes. Then he opens his eyes and shifts around under the sheets. Maybe it was a cat on the roof, or one of the wicker chairs on the balcony blown over by the wind, or maybe the glass ball has struck the banister. He sits up and touches his head. It hurts. He remembers the window shade again: it must have crashed into the glass, harder than ever before. Or maybe it had been a thief with a mask and a striped jersey who slipped in through the dining room window? Or a hit man with a long, black, shiny getaway car waiting out in front, with the motor running, who has jimmied the door open and is now coming slowly up the stairs, feeling his way along to that very room where he would now kill him? Or maybe it’s Helena herself (Helena would certainly have no need to hire a hit man) who suddenly feels like
. . . ?

He yawns. Yawning makes you sleepy. He closes his eyes tighter. He tries to go back to sleep.

He can’t. He lifts his head. He runs a finger along Hildegarda’s shoulder. He kisses her ear. In the half-light he looks at her back, her hips
. . .
He squeezes his eyelids shut. He tries to pick up the thread of the dream again, but it eludes him; the more he tries to remember it, the faster it flees. He only remembers the beach
. . .
If it were summer, he’d get up and run out to the ocean for a swim. Some people have a tradition of swimming on a certain day in the winter. In Barcelona they swim across the port. On New Year’s Day? The Feast of the Kings? Christmas? He remembers the beach full of spots, like red caviar. All at once, he can make out the counter, the waiter, the woman.

He saw the painting for the first time when he was thirteen, as a father in well-pressed trousers dragged him from one gallery of the museum to the next (until the moment he discovered the painting, after which the hard part was dragging him away from it).
Nighthawks
had mesmerized him. Many years later, when a critic averred (in passing in some article) that Hopper was a precursor of the hyperrealists, Heribert read it with surprise. It was a devaluation and, to some extent, an injustice to categorize him (and thus to label, limit, judge him, and store him in formaldehyde) as a mere precursor of the hyperrealists, when in any Hopper there was much more (a web of memory, of desire) than in all that evaporated outpouring of canvases filled with ketchup, French fries, and shiny cars.

He knows full well why he dreamed of it. Because the night before, in the shop window, he looked at it coldly and thought it really wasn’t such a big deal after all, and maybe if he were to come across it now for the first time he wouldn’t find it so exceptional. He yawns again; he decides to shut his eyes, but they are already shut.

There is no getting around it. He squeezes his eyes even tighter and thinks of the girl he saw last night at the party (wearing a magician’s hat covered with cardboard stars and a silvery moon) who was eating the twelve grapes of New Year’s by the handful and choking. He retrieves the image. He stands next to her. He smiles. The girl smiles back. They quickly down their drinks (Hildegarda is off in a corner of the room, dancing alone) and, hand in hand, they go outside. They sit on a stoop behind some bushes; he strokes her thighs, she strokes his chest.

He is tired of fantasizing, but he persists. The girl, naked
. . . ;
no, not naked: wearing a skirt but no underwear. No, wearing black panties but no bra; no: white panties
. . .
He feels like sleeping, but he’s not sleepy.

He checks the time: four o’clock. Only a little over an hour ago, he got into bed swearing that next New Year’s Eve he’d go to sleep at 9:00
p.m.
He licks Hildegarda’s back and waist and she shivers and shifts in her sleep.

He turns on the light on the night table. He picks up a book lying there.
A coleira do cão.
He starts to read.

He reads eighty pages. Then he stops. It’s not that he’s bored; he’s just not in the mood any more. He gets up, puts on his pants, lifts the shade a crack, flips the switch to the outside light, looks out at the snow-covered balcony, and the beach, farther on, black as the sky. He opens the door to the balcony: an icy gust of wind and the sound of the waves come in. He closes it at once.

In the kitchen he makes coffee and adds a splash of milk. He opens the shades. If a vampire were to appear now at the window and look at him, fangs at the ready, he would consider it the most predictable thing in the world.

He raises the shades in the living room, the dining room, in all the rooms. With the cup of coffee in his hand, he sits on the throw rug next to the bed where Hildegarda is still sleeping. He lets his eyes wander around the room and stops at the window. A round spot is reflected in the glass: the lamp on the night table. He looks at the window frame, the shutters, and the strips between the panes of glass
. . .
“What do you call the slats between the windowpanes? There has to be a specific name for them. Every object has a specific name.” He looks at the windowsill and thinks: “Now that’s a windowsill. But what are the lateral ‘sills’ called? And the opposite of the windowsill, the upper ‘sill’? What about the edge of the windowsill, does that have a name? Does the name change according to whether the edge is squared or rounded?” He goes down to the living room, searches among the books, finds a dictionary; he takes it out, goes upstairs, and sits down by the bed again. He opens it at random and reads: board (b
ō
rd, bôrd), n., 1. Daily meals, esp. as provided for pay:
Ten dollars a day for room and board.
—v.t., 2. To furnish with meals, or with meals and lodging, esp. for pay:
They boarded him for $20 a week.
—v.i., 3. to take one’s meals, or be supplied with food and lodging at a fixed price:
Several of us boarded at the same rooming house.
He shuts the book. He opens it again: georgic (jor´jik), adj., 1. agricultural. —n., 2. a poem on an agricultural theme. Syn. 1, 2. bucolic.
Georgics, The
, a didactic poem (39-29 B.C.) by Virgil.

He goes on reading at random. A few hours later, he closes the book and leaves it on the floor, and he sits watching as, bit by bit, the sun appears beyond the horizon and the first dawn of the year sheds an imperceptible light on all things below: the water, the sand on the beach, the folded umbrellas, the chairs on the balcony, the slats on the windows, the windowsill, the floor where he is sitting, the furniture, his own feet, which he stares at for quite a while as if they were two monsters. Then he hears Hildegarda waking up, and he sits on the bed, feeling her gaze on the nape of his neck. He doesn’t turn around until she traces the length of his spine with her fingernail.

•

Afterwards, he is completely overcome with sleep. When he opens his eyes again, the sun (a pale, faint sun) is high in the sky and Hildegarda is sitting in the armchair with a blue robe on (sky blue, bluer by far than today’s gray sky), painting her toenails, each nail a different color: one pink, one blue, one gold, one black, one purple, one white, one silver, one yellow, and one gray.