In September of 2016, I was in Legacy City for a business conference. Afterwards, I drove down to my old neighborhood to walk awhile, and to remember who I once was.
I stopped at Casa España to grab something to eat. A flier pinned to the wall got my attention as I walked in the entranceway. Antonio “Tony” Alvarez, whom I hadn’t seen since high school, was giving a talk that evening at the local Copernicus University campus. I was surprised. Several years ago, I had run into his cousin, a man of few words, who told me Tony had left a consulting position with Microsoft in Seattle to go teach Literature at a small Catholic college in Ohio. I was intrigued. What was Tony doing in Legacy City?
After dinner, I drove back across town to see him. I sat in the rear of a small, crowded salon. The head of the World Literature Department mentioned Dr. Antonio Alvarez’s award-winning work on Miguel de Cervantes and the Spanish Golden Age, and introduced Tony as the department’s newest faculty member. Before I could fully digest what I had heard, there he was, a ghost from the past. I hardly recognized him. He looked too old for his age. For our age, actually. But that impression lasted only seconds. Tony silently scanned the audience, and finally, when he smiled, I recognized the boy who had been my friend all those years ago.
I was encouraged by the turnout, given the relatively unfamiliar subject matter, Cervantes’s five years of captivity in Algiers after the Battle of Lepanto. Tony held the group’s attention from beginning to end, exploring with them the link between trauma and creativity, and specifically, the creativity that would produce humanity’s first modern novel and foundational work of Western literature, Don Quixote.
Later, after the others had departed, I approached him. I told him my name. He gazed at me with a puzzled expression. Before I could explain who I was, he engulfed me in a powerful embrace. Long ago, it had seemed we were destined to become inseparable, but our paths diverged, and we never reconnected until that September day.
We sat in the campus pub and talked for hours. I was deeply moved by all he told me, and I asked him if he had considered writing a memoir. He said he had thought about it, but could neither find the time, nor generate the spark to begin. I’m sure he sensed my disappointment. Was a story as compelling as his, not as worthy of his time and energy as his other projects?
Admittedly, I had asked myself that very same question. Was I being a hypocrite? I knew full well the cost of resurrecting the past. My own unfinished projects testified against me. We were quiet for a long time, and all the while, Tony stared at me like a drunk.
“You write it!” he said abruptly, in the way he might have challenged me to perform some mindless act forty years ago, like leaping off a train trestle, for example.
“When we were kids, you said you were going to write a novel one day,” he continued. “But you haven’t, not yet. I’m offering you a low-risk opportunity to do it. You write my story, not as a memoir, but as a novel. No real names of people or places. Be as inventive as you like. I ask only one thing, make it true.”
The prospect did excite me. It also troubled me. When would I find time enough to make it true? I had a demanding job with too many meetings and too much travel. I had a loving wife, an ever-expanding family, a maintenance-needy home, and…
And nothing. I nodded obediently.
“Don’t screw it up,” Tony warned. He was sadly amused by my look of consternation. “You were the best writer in high school,” he said. “No one else came close, not even me. I’ll send you everything you need, including a rough outline, and plenty of source material for you to use at your discretion.”
“An outline? So, you did start writing your memoir.”
He ignored what I said. A week later I received two large boxes filled with old notebooks, letters, poems, and a rough outline, all of which I consumed and pondered over the following months.
We met again in February. He had finished reading the first draft I had mailed him, but he seemed more eager to tell me about a dream he’d had, than what he thought about the manuscript.
He was wandering through a noisy crowded town, carrying in his arms a young fox. He was seeking a safe haven for the fox, but the task proved difficult. Wherever he went, the fox was attacked by wild dogs, and each time Tony was forced to fight them off with a baseball bat. A home for the fox was all he wanted, a place where it could grow strong and thrive, and one day set out on its own to share its special beauty with the world.
I waited for Tony to tell me how things had turned out for the fox, but instead, he looked at me and handed the draft back to me. “It needs work,” he said.
Of course it needed work, it was a first draft. I had warned him about the book’s clumsy genesis and growing pains, and the difficulty of writing a novel in spurts, and amid constant demands and interruptions. I flipped through the pages, but I could not find a single comment or correction. Confused, I looked at him.
“Take care of my fox,” he said, laying his hand on the manuscript. He suggested we go have a drink at Casa España. It was there he told me about the cancer, which he had learned of shortly after being hired at Copernicus.
Despite the clinical trial rejection, and his irreversible decline, Tony managed to smile whenever he saw me. After skimming the seventh draft months later, he proclaimed with ironic satisfaction, “I can live with this one.”
Not long after, while he lay in a hospital bed, I handed Tony the first printed edition of Mr. Galaxy’s Unfinished Dream. He studied the cover and, with my help, opened the book to the epigraph page. I watched his lips move as he read Don Quixote’s defiance of life’s hulking giants and impossible odds. Then he closed his eyes, and took a raspy breath. “There are worst things than dying,” he murmured.
In deference to his pragmatic view of death, and in an awkward attempt to dull death’s sting, I said, “Tony, I’m going to read this story to you every evening. Death will have to wait until well after the last page, agreed?”
Tony opened his eyes. “Come closer,” he whispered. “Ray, you know as well as I, there’s no such thing as a last page.”
R. García Vázquez
20 November 2017
* * * * *
* NOTE: The “Author’s Preface” was written into an earlier draft of the novel. The idea of the fox as a metaphor for the novel came to the author in a dream. After some consideration, the author decided to remove the preface from the final draft.