Mr. Gwyn by Alessandro Baricco Read Free Book Online

went to bed with me, said Jasper Gwyn, I didn’t understand a thing. They laughed about it.
    The next day David Barber arrived in a broken-down station wagon that smelled of wet dog even from a distance. He parked in front of a hydrant, because it was his personal way of protesting the government’s management of cultural funds. They went into the studio and closed the door behind them. There was a great silence, apart from the gurgling pipes, naturally.
    â€œNice,” said David Barber.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou should pay attention to those water stains.”
    â€œIt’s all under control.”
    David Barber wandered around the room for a while, and took the measure of that particular silence. He listened attentively to the pipes, and assessed the squeaking of the wooden floor.
    â€œMaybe I should also know what type of book you’re writing,” he said.
    Jasper Gwyn had a moment of discomfort. He wasn’t yet used to the idea that it would take a lifetime to convince the world that he was no longer writing. It was an astonishing phenomenon. Once an editor he met on the street had complimented him warmly on his article in the Guardian . Immediately afterward he had asked, “What are you writing now?” These were things that Jasper Gwyn wasn’t able to understand.
    â€œBelieve me, what I’m writing isn’t important,” he said.
    And he explained that what he wanted was a background of sound that would change like light during the day, and thus imperceptibly and continuously. Above all: elegant. This was very important. He added that he wanted something in which there was no trace of rhythm, but only a becoming that would suspend time, and simply fill the space with a journey that had no coordinates. He said he would like something as motionless as a face that is aging.
    â€œWhere’s the bathroom?” David Barber asked.
    When he returned he said that he accepted.
    â€œTen thousand pounds plus the sound system. Let’s say twenty thousand pounds.”
    Jasper Gwyn liked the thought that he was using up all his savings gambling on a profession whose existence he wasn’t even sure of. He wanted somehow to put his back to the wall, because he knew that only then would he have a chance to find, in himself, what he was seeking. So he agreed.
    A month later David Barber came to install the sound system and then he left Jasper Gwyn a hard disk.
    â€œEnjoy it. It’s seventy-two hours, it came out a little long. I couldn’t find the ending.”
    That night Jasper Gwyn lay down on the floor, in his copyist’s studio, and started the loop. It began with what seemed a sound of leaves and continued on, moving imperceptibly, and coming upon sounds of every type as if by chance. Tears came to Jasper Gwyn’s eyes.

20
    During the month while he was waiting for David Barber’s music, or whatever it was, Jasper Gwyn had been busy refining other details. He had begun with the furniture. In the warehouse of a junk shop on Regent Street he had found three chairs and an iron bed, rather beat-up, but with a certain style. He had added two shabby leather armchairs the color of cricket balls. He rented two enormous and expensive carpets and bought at an unreasonable price a wall coatrack that came from a French brasserie. At one point he was tempted by a horse from an eighteenth-century merry-go-round and then he realized that things were getting out of hand.
    One thing he couldn’t immediately focus on was how he would write, whether standing or sitting at a desk, on a computer, by hand, on big sheets of paper, or in small notebooks. He still had to find out if in fact he was going to write, or if he would confine himself to observing and thinking, then, later, maybe at home, assembling what had occurred to him. For painters it was simple, they had the canvas in front of them—that wasn’t strange. But someone who wished, instead, to write?