A certain late, autumnal fame pursues Barclays on its European journey. People who speak the noble Spanish language want to meet him, take pictures with him and give him gifts. They see him regularly in the daily appearances that, tiring vanity, recounting the minutiae of his privacy, he makes on digital platforms, no longer on television, that contraption of the past. They love him, they consider him part of their family, they worry about his health. Not all, however, are disinterested. Some want to leave an unfinished manuscript so that Barclays can find a way to publish it, others claim ailments and ailments to borrow or, better yet, donate money.
Since he married for the second time and became a father for the third time, Barclays prefers to travel accompanied. Although he likes to be alone, he chooses to travel with his wife and his youngest daughter because they considerably beautify the journey, take care of his failing health and protect him from the unexpected siege of the most loyal viewers and readers of the peripatetic writer, author of twenty books, proud of none.
Barclays’ wife, barely thirty-five years old, also a writer, exercises a soft tyranny in the family. Therefore, when they arrive at the hotel, he gives instructions at the reception, concierge and concierge so that, if someone calls asking about Barclays, or shows up wanting to see him and leave him a gift, the uniformed staff will emphatically deny that the Barclays are sleeping. over there. With phones blocked and disconnected, concierges and receptionists lubricated with tips, the Barclays sleep until two in the afternoon, trusting that when they wake up, no sympathizers will ambush them in the hotel or on the outskirts.
Well, they are wrong. As Barclays’ wife and her daughter upload their photos to social networks, spontaneous people recognize them from afar and surprise them in the hotel bar, in the lobby, even in the bathrooms. They are Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Venezuelans, Spanish, Colombians, Chileans. They live in that city, Geneva, and are clever at avoiding the hotel’s strict surveillance. When Barclays finally comes down, overwhelmed with pills, bloated with chocolates, he is assaulted with an outpouring of affection, an abundance of gifts and urgent requests for photos (but take off your hat, take off your glasses, bend down a little). Although they live in Geneva or its surroundings, they are not entirely Swiss and long for their lands of origin. They almost always give away things to eat. Barclays is obese and his readers and viewers know that he loves chocolates, even more so if they are Swiss. Barclays then ends up having breakfast in the hotel bar with six, eight, ten people, and it is as if he were doing a talk show for the radio or a traveling television show. He feels loved. You feel read. He feels accompanied. He feels successful. But, above all, he feels fat. Fat and tired.
As the Barclays walk towards the cemetery of the kings to visit Borges’ tomb, some brothers carrying a flag shout for the writer, complaining that they have been thrown out of the hotel with bad manners, lying to them, telling them that Barclays is not staying there. , who is not in the city, who does not exist, who is a creature designed by artificial intelligence, and then, taking revenge for those harshnesses, they take photos with him, who suspends his breathing to tuck in his belly or contract his abdomen, and they ask him to sign the flag. Barclays immediately insults the flag with its hesitant signature, while they take photos.
Later, Barclays and his family visit a watch shop and ask about the price of used watches. Barclays is shocked. They cost thousands of Swiss francs: the cheapest ones cost five or six thousand francs, and they are second-hand. The writer then suffers a slight dizziness, the prelude to a soponcio, and asks that they serve him a Coca Cola so as not to faint. Everything is expensive, obscenely expensive. When they return to the hotel, they find a Spaniard and his Chinese girlfriend, who are waiting patiently to take the much-desired photos. They don’t leave gifts or ask for money. The Chinese woman has no idea who Barclays is and she looks at him as if she were looking at a palm tree, a cactus, a rare, languid flower.
In the Barclays’ room, fifth floor, overlooking the lake, there are so many boxes of chocolates given to him and his family that the writer, worried, wonders how on earth he will fit all of that into his suitcases. They’re not going to get in, he thinks. However, they do fit in my stomach, he reasons. I will take the chocolates in the wide portable case that is my belly, he concludes. Therefore, at night, after dinner, he attacks the chocolate shop that he has gathered in his room, courtesy of his viewers and readers. He wakes up every two hours, a victim of time zone imbalances, since he comes from America, and then he eats chocolates, nibbles on his sleeping pills and continues sleeping the sleep of the righteous or the gluttonous. Of course, he doesn’t dare step on the bathroom scale, or scrutinize the contours of his body in the mirrors. I’ll lose weight later, he thinks. For now I must please my admirers, acting as a chocolate taster.
At the hotel in Geneva, an Italian restaurant, they have dinner with a lifelong friend of Barclays, a friend from British school, a friend that Barclays has not seen in many years. His name is Germán and he is an artist. He lives alone, he doesn’t work, he is a free and happy man. He never married, has no children, is a writer and also a musician. You’re a writer who makes music, not a musician who writes, Barclays tells him. Germán loves women and is friends with all the women who have been his girlfriends. He also loves animals, particularly dogs. In his apartment near the train station, he has put a tree in the living room, as if it were Christmas all year round, and in the middle of the afternoon he opens the windows, leaves food for the birds and celebrates when the sparrows and crows come in to eat. and accompany him. Next to his bed is a colony of ants that he carefully feeds with sugar cubes.
Germán brings gifts for the Barclays: cheeses and a Swiss board to heat them, art objects, caps and hats, but not chocolates, much better that way, Barclays thinks. When he saw him entering the restaurant, wet from the rain, Barclays hugged him tightly, kissed him on the cheeks and felt that he and Germán were already old, deteriorated, and did not have much life left. They have promised to meet in six weeks, at a book fair, where Germán will present one of his exquisite literary rarities.
Few people recognize Barclays in Zurich. A Chilean on a bicycle tells him that he has come from Freiburg driving his car and asks him to sign a book. A Cuban lady overflows with affection on the street of expensive shops. A Peruvian woman brings bananas to the hotel. Barclays’ wife speaks the German language because she studied at a German school, and that is why she feels comfortable in Zurich and acts as a translator for her husband and her daughter. The Barclays enter the store with the famous Swiss blades. Suddenly Barclays remembers his absent father and becomes emotional. He was a collector of those knives. In honor of his memory, he buys one and Silvia buys others for his friends. They ask about the prices of the watches, but they are high and they do not dare to spend that much. I already have four watches, why do I want more, thinks Barclays. Remember Borges: luxury is vulgarity.
It won’t be easy to return home. It will be a flight of ten hours or more. They will cross the ocean, they will leave during the day, they will arrive even during the day. They will leave at the hotel in Zurich all the chocolates that Barclays didn’t manage to eat, the sweets that didn’t fit in their suitcases. They were sad to leave in Geneva a lemon panettone made in Lugano, a gift from an Ecuadorian lady. They will be sorry to leave all the cheeses they have been given as gifts in Zurich. If Barclays ate everything that his viewers and readers had left him as a gift, he would have a heart attack and wouldn’t make it home. Fat and tired, he remembers what he read on Borges’ tombstone, the harangue of a leader to his decimated army, before dying in front of a horde of Vikings: “and that they should not be afraid.” That is to say: that they did not fear death, that they lived with courage and died with courage.
At my age, and with my overweight, on every trip to Europe, every chocolate binge, I risk my life, but dying sweetened by the abysmal affection of people would be a dignified death, although devoid of courage, thinks Barclays.
