From the Shadows Read online

  FROM THE SHADOWS

  FROM THE SHADOWS

  JUAN JOSÉ MILLÁS

  TRANSLATED BY THOMAS BUNSTEAD

  AND DANIEL HAHN

  Bellevue Literary Press

  NEW YORK

  First published in the United States in 2019 by

  Bellevue Literary Press, New York

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  90 Broad Street, Suite 2100

  New York, NY 10004

  www.blpress.org

  From the Shadows was originally published in Spanish in 2016 as Desde la Sombra by Seix Barral.

  Text © 2016 by Juan José Millás

  Translation © 2019 by Thomas Bunstead & Daniel Hahn

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Millás García, Juan José, 1946– author. | Bunstead, Thomas, translator. | Hahn, Daniel, translator.

  Title: From the shadows / Juan José Millás ; translated by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn.

  Other titles: Desde la sombra. English

  Description: First edition. | New York : Bellevue Literary Press, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018060792 (print) | LCCN 2018061540 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942658672 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942658665 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PQ6663.I46 (ebook) | LCC PQ6663.I46 D4513 2019 (print) |DDC 863/.64--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018060792

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

  This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  Bellevue Literary Press is committed to ecological stewardship in our book production practices, working to reduce our impact on the natural environment.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  paperback ISBN: 978-1-942658-66-5

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-67-2

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Three

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Every love story is a ghost story.

  —David Foster Wallace

  PART ONE

  1

  SERGIO O’KANE was asking Damián Lobo which sea creature he identified with most.

  “A shark, perhaps? … A sardine?”

  “Definitely not a shark,” said Lobo. “I’m not aggressive like that. I get kind of squeamish. Not a sardine, either. I don’t know … maybe a moray eel?”

  “A moray eel. And why is that?”

  “It’s quite shy, good at blending in, lives in tropical waters. And I can’t stand the cold.”

  Sergio O’Kane was not real; he existed only in Damián Lobo’s imagination, as a mechanism for conversing with himself. Damián told him everything he was thinking, usually as he was thinking it, in the form of an imaginary televised interview, which began the moment he got out of bed and stopped only once he’d gotten back into it. The interview was being broadcast globally, with simultaneous translations in non-Spanish-speaking countries. Lobo imagined it as being filmed in front of a studio audience while also going out live, with stratospheric viewing figures.

  To begin with, O’Kane had been nothing but a voice inside his head, with neither outward form nor a story of his own. Over the years, however, Damián Lobo had gradually supplied him with a physical appearance and a fully realized biography. A native of Madrid, O’Kane was the son of a North American diplomat—hence the surname. He was in his mid-forties now, fair, five foot eleven, and, though slim, he had a very slight gut. He favored dark suits in combination with white shirts and somewhat extravagant ties, complete with gold tie clip. O’Kane always fastened the top button of his suit jacket when getting up from a chair, and unfastened it when about to sit down, an apparently casual gesture whose elegance Damián found particularly intriguing.

  He had a very striking face, in part because of his eyes, which were yellow, and his wide mouth, whose fleshy lips parted to reveal a seemingly larger than average collection of teeth. His nose, a proper and nicely proportioned nose, went unnoticed in between these accidents of facial design. His forehead, which was broad and smooth, extended up into a receding hairline, which, far from hiding, he flaunted, with his hair scraped straight back.

  “So,” said O’Kane, “you’re still on welfare two months after being fired—pitilessly, unceremoniously—from the job you worked in for twenty-five years.”

  “The job I started at eighteen,” said Damián.

  “I’m sure that must have been very difficult for you. Tell us, if you don’t mind, what are your views on the heartlessness of today’s capitalism?”

  Damián Lobo pondered for a moment before explaining that the capitalist system had been to his life as water was to the fish that swam in it.

  “By which I mean, I’ve never understood the environment. Just as an octopus doesn’t need to understand the ocean to live in it.”

  “So, Señor Lobo, just to continue with the metaphor: In this particular ecosystem, which sea creature would you say you identify with most? A shark, perhaps? … A sardine?”

  “Definitely not a shark,” said Lobo. “I’m not aggressive like that. I get kind of squeamish. Not a sardine, either. I don’t know … maybe a moray eel?”

  The studio audience laughed. They often laughed when Damián spoke, even when what he said had not been obviously funny. But if he imagined them laughing, they laughed. They didn’t have a choice in the matter.

  While the imaginary interview with O’Kane continued in Damián’s mind, he brought his cup of tea to his lips but found it still too hot to drink. He was sitting in a dark, narrow café, at the end of the bar, a good way from the rest of the clientele, like a moray eel hiding in a seabed crevice all its own. He had just come from lunch with his father and sister at their house in Arturo Soria, and had decided to stretch his legs before taking the subway home.

  O’Kane’s mentioning the heartlessness of capitalism took Damián back to the family meal, which he began to describe to his imaginary interviewer as he waited for the tea to cool.

  “So my older sister is Chinese,” he said. “And she and my father live together.”

  “How did that come about?” asked O’Kane.

  “Her living with my father?”

  “No, her being
Chinese.”

  “Oh. My parents adopted her as a baby, having been unable to conceive. But then a couple of years later they did manage it, and I showed up.”

  “So they weren’t trying for you?” asked O’Kane. “You were … a surprise?”

  “That’s right, I was a surprise.”

  The studio audience was still on tenterhooks. There were probably people tuning in everywhere, streaming in, like fish into a trawler’s net. Damián Lobo and Sergio O’Kane, both of them able to sense the bump in interest, acted naturally. The presenter looked into one of the cameras, granting it a close-up of those yellow eyes, with their little flecks and flares like solar storms. Breaking off, he turned back to his interviewee and, with an encouraging nod, urged him to go on.

  “Like I said,” Damián Lobo continued after a dramatic pause, “my Chinese sister’s two years older than I am, so when I was fourteen, she was sixteen, and already very well developed.”

  Murmurs in the audience suggested imminent laughter—or widespread smiling at the very least. Damián Lobo, catching Sergio O’Kane’s approving look, saw immediately where he needed to take the story next.

  “And so, if you can imagine, there I was, right in the throes of adolescence, and her really, you know, developing…. She used to come out of the bathroom with nothing on but a skimpy towel, or she’d walk straight through the living room half-dressed….”

  “And you didn’t find it troubling that it was your sister who was acting in this way?” said Sergio O’Kane, cutting across the swell of laughter in the studio.

  “Well, on paper she was my sister, but it wasn’t as if she had come out of the same womb as I did, or as if my father’s sperm had anything to do with her coming into being. On top of that, she was a different ethnicity from me, so in a way that made us even more unrelated. Given all of that, I don’t think you can really call my desires incestuous. Or hers.”

  “She, too, felt an attraction?”

  “I’m not sure if it was an attraction; it’s just that ever since I was young, she’d always played with my penis.”

  Laughter erupted, and this time the presenter did nothing to quell it. Damián, meanwhile, sat stony-faced, as he always did whenever the audience found his answers funny. He was well aware it made the whole thing funnier if he kept a straight face. The show was bound to be going viral right about now, he thought.

  “She started playing with your penis….” repeated Sergio O’Kane.

  “Yes, as far back as I can recall, I have memories of her telling me to drop my pants so she could play with it. Sometimes she came into my bedroom and took my pajamas off herself. She’d take it out, hold it out one way, then another, squeeze it in her hands, put it in her mouth….”

  Again the audience roared with laughter, drowning Damián out, and this time, while continuing to look as though he hadn’t said anything funny, he added a touch of surprise—a go-to expression of his—as if to say he had no idea why people were laughing.

  Sergio O’Kane, himself struggling not to laugh, finally calmed the audience, and Damián Lobo continued.

  “She was always asking to come to the bathroom with me so she could hold it while I had a pee. She was obsessed.”

  “What did your parents say?”

  “They never got wind of it. She always chose her moments.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “Nothing. She started playing with it when I was tiny, so for me it was simply part of normal life.”

  “So she just went on doing it?”

  “Yes, though as I got older, the consequences changed, naturally.”

  Now the laughter was rising intermittently, the audience pausing each time he began to speak, eager not to miss a thing.

  “Now I’m wondering what this has got to do with what we were talking about,” said O’Kane.

  “You mentioned the heartlessness of capitalism, and that took me back to the lunch I had with my father and sister earlier today.”

  “Really?”

  “The thing is, I can’t remember how old I was exactly, twelve or thirteen possibly, but a moment came when my Chinese sister—her name’s Desirée, by the way—started referring to it as my kindhearted penis.”

  This time, the presenter was the first to burst out laughing, followed by the members of the audience, who were beside themselves. Damián looked around uncomprehendingly, glancing back and forth between the camera operators and other crew, as if waiting for someone to explain the joke.

  “So,” said O’Kane, wiping away tears, “you’ve got a kindhearted penis. The idea presumably being that other people don’t have kindhearted penises? Anyone in particular, do you think?”

  “My father, I guess,” Damián Lobo said uncertainly. “Maybe men in general.”

  He spoke the last part so solemnly that it plunged the audience into a silence just as intense as the laughter that had gone before.

  “Well, I won’t ask you to show us,” said O’Kane eventually, trying to lighten the mood, “but I’m imagining something must have made her think of your penis as kindhearted.”

  “Something to do with having a nice face, I guess.”

  “Your sister?”

  “No, my penis.”

  Again the audience started to howl, and O’Kane looked relieved, pleased to be back on familiar ground.

  “Sorry about the laughter,” he said once the audience had recovered. “It’s just that I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone on the show talking about penises with kind hearts before, or without kind hearts, for that matter.”

  The interview was going very well, in Damián’s estimation. The only problem now would be how to top this climax. So he decided to inject a new note of drama, bring things down to earth a little.

  “If my father saw this, he’d die of shame.”

  “Oh?” said O’Kane.

  “He hates trashy TV. He only watches Canal+. He’s subscribed ever since it first launched.”

  “And so to him the conversation we’re having would be trashy?”

  “Absolutely. Because of the subject matter, but also because we’re discussing it in a shallow way.”

  “Why don’t you tell us a little about your father?”

  “He’s a university professor as well as a renowned movie critic. An intellectual. He lives in a house full of books—books that always frightened me as a child.”

  “And why would you say that was?”

  “Just the feeling that, every time I went near them, they seemed to call out to me to read them.”

  “You mean metaphorically, I guess?”

  “No, not at all. I could hear their little voices whispering, ‘Read me, please read me’ as I walked by. Actually, it was just my father, who, as I passed the bookshelves, used to hide in one corner of his library, doing different voices. ‘Read me, please read me.’ I still hear it to this day, whenever I go anywhere near a book.”

  “Did you find certain books more frightening than others?”

  “I always tried to avoid the nineteenth-century Russian section. The ‘Read me’ whispers there always sounded guttural, kind of tormented.”

  “And did you read any of them?”

  “Never. I don’t read anything but user manuals and instruction booklets.”

  “Instructions for what?”

  “Anything and everything. Electrical domestic appliances, for example, but anything mechanical, really. I also love the rule books that come with board games.”

  This answer went down particularly well, and Sergio O’Kane took the chance to announce a commercial break. Damián Lobo returned to the counter in the café, where his tea was now cool enough to drink. He thought about the reception in the newspapers around the world the next morning. Reviews that would even transcend the “Culture” section and make it onto the front page; it had happened before. READ ME, PLEASE was a pretty eye-catching headline.

  He finished his tea just as the commercials were coming to an end, and to
ok himself back to the TV studio to carry on telling the world his story. After the lunch, he said, his father had fallen asleep in front of a Canal+ interview between Iñaki Gabilondo and a famous movie director.

  “My father adores Iñaki Gabilondo,” he said, “because—”

  “Sure,” O’Kane said, interrupting him, as if jealous of the well-known journalist, “but what about your mother? You’ve been surprisingly quiet about her.”

  “My mother was like an extension of my father; that’s how I always saw her. My father was to her as Iñaki Gabilondo was to him. She died about ten years ago, but before that she taught chemistry in a public high school. She was a good teacher, I think, but the moment she got home, she fell in with whatever my father was up to—she sort of blended in; you couldn’t really tell she was there. I believe my father wanted her dead so he could be alone with my sister, who, by the way, is Chinese.”

  “So you’re saying your father wanted to be alone with your sister?”

  “I am, but I’d rather not go into it.”

  In order to assuage the obvious disappointment of both his interviewer and their audience, Damián Lobo began describing how after lunch, as their father nodded off in front of the television, he and his sister had shut themselves away in her bedroom.

  “To play with the kindhearted penis?” asked O’Kane with a smile.

  “Yes,” said Damián. Then, to the audience’s delight, he launched into an account of the sexual acts the siblings had partaken in while their father slept.

  As Damián began describing his Chinese sister’s vulva and vagina, O’Kane must have heard a voice in his earpiece, and he seamlessly changed the subject.

  “So tell us, what was the job you got fired from?”

  “Capital goods. I was in charge of maintenance,” said Damián.

  “Looking after sockets, plumbing, that kind of thing?”

  “Clearly, it’s an area you don’t know much about, Señor O’Kane. To run a maintenance team, especially in this day and age, one has to be extremely technically capable.”