Love in Lowercase by Francesc Miralles Read Free Book Online Page B

cobble together one of your inspirational books?”
    â€œThat’s right. I’ll supervise the job from here to make things easier. You can take my keys and use my office. You’ll find the document in the computer.”
    If Titus hadn’t just cheated death, I’d have gotten up and left. You can’t really ask an academic who works with footnotes and critical bibliographies to do something like that.
    â€œWhat’s the title of the work?” I asked.
    â€œ
A Short Course in Everyday Magic.
”

Marilyn’s Last
    On my way home I felt overwhelmed by what I’d let myself in for. As if I didn’t have enough on my plate, what with preparing classes, correcting papers, and doing my housework! Now I also had to turn into an editor . . .
    Before going into my apartment, I went upstairs to Titus’s place. I opened the door and switched on the light in the hallway. At the end of it, the picture of the wanderer overlooking the sea of fog. I stopped to look at him.
    All this to be even lonelier than I already was
.
    I’d read in the newspaper that 20.3 percent of the households in my country were occupied by only one person. I was part of that statistic, a “home man,” the article said, a snail attached to a house in which there is only room for one.
    OK, so now I was going to have two homes and two parallel lives. In my place I’d still be Samuel, lecturer in German Studies, and upstairs I’d spend a few hours every day being Titus. The worst of it was that I was taking on this split personality with disconcerting composure.
    Whatever next!
    I gazed at the old man’s desk in the waning afternoon light. Everything was there: the laptop, the science book, the train set.Three books were scattered on the rug as if they’d fallen from Titus’s hands when he had his bout of angina.
    I knelt to pick them up. One was a collection of the most famous aphorisms by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. The other two were biographies of Alan Watts and Thomas Merton.
    I decided to take them home so I could start preparing for my new role. I wouldn’t start working on the book until the following day, assuming I was able to do something about it.
    â€”
    At about eight o’clock that evening, I started to feel anxious. The recent events were a bit too much for me. The three books—my new bedtime reading—lay on my bedside table.
    Suddenly I had a strong urge to get out of my apartment, even though I hadn’t done any of the chores I intended to complete. They were showing one of my favorite films at the Verdi,
The Misfits
. I checked the newspaper to see if I had enough time to get there for the penultimate screening. I grabbed my coat and went out, with the feeling that I was running away from myself.
    â€”
    Before going into the auditorium, I hung around in the foyer reading a leaflet about the shooting of the film. What turned out to be Marilyn Monroe’s last film—with a script by her husband, Arthur Miller—was a series of madcap events and disasters from start to finish.
    The filming lasted 111 days. Apart from the blonde bombshell, the movie starred Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. It soon became apparent that, like the characters they were enacting, none of the actors were in great shape.
    Every day Marilyn arrived on the set hours late because she was taking so many prescription drugs that it was impossible towake her up. It seems that she felt betrayed by her two lovers, John F. Kennedy and Yves Montand—not to mention Miller himself, who’d used her to make a comeback. When she eventually arrived on set, she wasn’t much use because she’d forgotten her lines, or her expression was so blank that the director—John Huston—decided to call it a day.
    At fifty-nine, Clark Gable wasn’t in the best of health. This didn’t stop him from downing two bottles of whiskey and smoking three packs of