The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(130)
Taken aback once more, Gilliam glanced at him before letting out a loud guffaw.
“Oh, I know these potboilers have little merit,” he agreed, when he had stopped laughing, “but I couldn’t care less about that. The authors of this nonsense, as you call it, possess something far more important to me than the ability to create sublime sentences: namely a visionary intelligence that amazes me and which I wish I had. Most of these works confine themselves to describing a single invention and its effect on mankind. Have you read the novel about the Jewish inventor who devises a machine that magnifies things? It’s a truly awful book, and yet I confess the image of an army of giant stag beetles swarming across Hyde Park truly terrified me. Thankfully, they are not all like that. Such ravings apart, some present an idea of the future whose plausibility I enjoyed exploring. And there was something else I couldn’t deny: after enjoying a book by Dickens, for example, it would never have occurred to me to try to imitate him, to see whether I was able of concocting a story about the adventures of a street urchin or the hardships of a boy forced to work in a blacking factory, because it seemed to me anyone with a modicum of imagination and time would be able to do that. But to write about the future … Ah, Mr. Wells, that was different. To me, that seemed a real challenge. It was an undertaking that required intelligence, man’s capacity for deduction. “Would I be capable of creating a believable future?” I said to myself one night after finishing another of those novels. As you will have guessed, I took you as my example, because, besides our common interests, we are the same age. It took me a month to write my novel about the future, a piece of science fiction that would display my insight, my powers of invention. Naturally, I made every effort to write well, but I was more interested in the novel’s prophetic side. I wanted my readers to find my vision of the future plausible. But most of all, I valued the opinion of the writer who had been my guiding light. Your opinion, Mr. Wells; I wanted you to be as intellectually stimulated by my novel as I had been by yours.” The two men’s eyes met in a silence broken only by the distant cawing of crows.
“But as you know, it didn’t happen like that,” Gilliam lamented, unable to prevent himself shaking his head in sorrow.
The gesture moved Wells, as he considered it the only sincere one Murray had made since they set off on their walk.
They had come to a halt next to a huge mound of rubble, and there, hands dug into the pockets of his loud jacket, Gilliam paused for a few moments staring down at his shoes, clearly distressed, perhaps waiting for Wells to place his hand on his shoulder and offer words of solace, which, like the shaman’s chant would soothe the painful wound Wells himself had inflicted on Murray’s pride that afternoon long ago. However, the author simply studied him with the disdain of the poacher watching a rabbit struggle in a trap, aware that while seemingly responsible for what was happening, he was a simple mediator, and the animal’s torment was dictated by the cruel laws of nature.
Having realized that the only person capable of alleviating his hurt seemed unwilling to do so, Gilliam smiled grimly and carried on walking. They went down what to judge by the grandiose wrought-iron gates and the palatial remains of the buildings amid the rubble, was a luxurious residential street evoking a life that seemed incongruous amidst all that devastation, as though man’s proliferation on the planet had been no more than a divine blunder, a ridiculous flowering, doomed to perish under the elements.
“I shan’t try to deny that at first I was upset when you doubted my abilities as a writer,” Gilliam acknowledged in a voice that seemed to ooze with the slowness of treacle from inside his throat. “Nobody enjoys having their work pilloried. But what most vexed me was that you questioned the plausibility of my novel, the future I had so carefully contrived. I admit my response was entirely unacceptable, and I wish to take this opportunity to apologize for having attacked your novel the way I did. As I’m sure you’ll have guessed, my opinion of it hasn’t changed. I still consider it the work of a genius,” Gilliam said, laying a faintly ironic emphasis on the final words. He had recovered his conceited smirk, but Wells had glimpsed a chink in his armor, the crack that from time to time threatened to bring this powerful colossus crashing down, and in the face of Murray’s intolerable arrogance, Wells felt almost proud to have been the cause of it.
“That afternoon, however, I was unable to defend myself other than like a cornered rat,” Wells heard Gilliam justify himself.
“Happily, when I finally managed to recover, I could see things in a different light. Yes, you might say I experienced a kind of epiphany.” “Really,” commented Wells, with dry irony.
“Yes, I’m sure of it. Sitting opposite you in that chair, I realized I’d chosen the wrong means of presenting my idea of the future to the world; in doing it through a novel, I was condemning it to being mere fiction, plausible fiction, but fiction all the same, as you had done with your future inhabited by Morlocks and Eloi.
But what if I were able to put my idea across without confining it to the restrictive medium of the novel? What if I could present it as something real? Evidently, the pleasure of writing a believable piece of fiction would pale beside the incredible satisfaction of having the whole country believe in the reality of my vision of the year 2000. “But was this feasible?” the businessman in me asked.
The conditions for realizing such a project seemed perfect. Your novel, Mr. Wells, had sparked off a polemic about time travel. People in clubs and cafés talked of nothing else but the possibility of traveling into the future. It is one of life’s ironies that you fertilized the ground for me to plant my seed. Why not give people what they wished for? Why not offer them a journey to the year 2000, to “my” future? I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pull it off, but one thing was certain: I wouldn’t be able to go on living if I didn’t try. Purely by accident, Mr. Wells, the way most things happen in life, you gave me a reason to carry on, a goal which, were I to achieve it, would give me the longed-for fulfillment, the elusive happiness I could never obtain from the manufacture of glasshouses.” Wells was compelled to lower his head in order to conceal his sense of sympathy towards Murray. His words had reminded Wells of the extraordinary chain of events that had delivered him into the loving arms of literature, away from the mediocrity to which his not so loving mother had sought to condemn him. And it had been his way with words, a gift he had not asked for, that had spared him the need to find a meaning to his life, had exempted him from having to tread the path taken by those who had no idea why they had been born, those who could only experience the conventional, atavistic joy found in everyday pleasures such as a glass of wine or a woman’s caress. Yes, he would have walked among those redundant shadows, unaware that the longed-for happiness he had scarcely glimpsed during his fits of melancholy lay curled up in a ball on the keys of a typewriter, waiting for him to bring it to life.