they looked more like a parody of what Antonio thought American women expected from him, or perhaps his clothes were a rebuff for expecting him to dress like this, or perhaps the extra slim white bell bottoms with the crimson flowers printed on them and his extra tight white linen shirt abloom with ruffles were simply a ploy to make American women think that he wasn’t vain; that he favored the absurd not the vainglorious; that his clothes just happened to be tailored to accentuate his body and just happened to be expensive and that, unlike most Russian immigrants she didn’t associate with, he wasn’t brandishing these clothes as proof of European membership. On the other hand the more obvious possibility: Antonio had been having fun. Don’t you wish Antonio would have taken you to at least one of those all night dance parties, Masha? Yes. Maybe I would have tolerated the dumb trochaic rhythms of his electronic dance music just to watch him twirl in his slim flower pants inside a warehouse in the South of Market, no, I wouldn’t have tolerated it. I would have countermanded the excesses of the evening, which is probably why he never invited me. Or I would have drunk too much to thwart my tirades about his absurd costumes and a generation of young men hexed by, oh, enough, Mashinka. Enough.
—
I wanted to become a Jesuit priest, Antonio wrote, hoping his impulse to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen and still living in Guayaquil could sustain a novella or at least a short fiction about youth and god and so on, the kind of fiction that would rhapsodize his volunteer work with Leopoldo at the hospice Luis Plaza Dañín and would exalt their roles as catechists to the poor in Mapasingue, and yet a week or two after writing down that first sentence about wanting to become a Jesuit priest, a week like every other week for him in San Francisco (happy hour at 111 Minna on Wednesdays, a launch party for a new technology startup on Thursdays, an all night warehouse dance party on Fridays, and because he lived right behind Davies Symphony Hall and the War Memorial Opera House, and because he wanted to see and hear everything in the world — to become an expert on the unconscious one needs to know everything, Carl Jung said, and Antonio liked to believe that applied to becoming a writer, too — a symphony or an opera on Saturdays), Antonio concluded that although he wanted to write about his impulse to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen, he wasn’t interested in dramatizing his impulse to become a Jesuit priest through scenes and reversals and recognitions from the time of Aristotle, yes, let us please not follow the pious Ecuadorian boy who, after a series of intense religious experiences, including the apparition of La Virgen del Cajas, which Antonio was absolutely not going to write about for anyone in the United States (Leopoldo had been there, too), loses his faith as everyone eventually does, no, dramatizing his impulse to become a Jesuit priest with scenes and reversals and recognitions seemed to him contrary to everything he valued about fiction (his first adult encounter with fiction had been Borges, and it was only after he enrolled in an introductory fiction class at the Berkeley Extension that he was shown the flat world of Best American Realism — I discovered Borges because of Michaela from Sweden, Antonio would have liked to tell Leopoldo over the phone, a fellow economics student from Sweden who allowed me to stay with her during the winter break of my senior year at Stanford because I didn’t have any money to fly anywhere that resembled home — listen to this, Leopoldo, a Mexican grad student who also had a crush on Michaela had handwritten a dedication on Borges’s Ficciones that read Dear Michaela, after reading this book, you’ll finally understand me — how does anyone understand anyone via Borges, Leo? — fiction that unfolds solely in Judas’s head was how Antonio liked to think of Borges’s fictions), so Antonio discarded his first sentence about wanting to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen just as he had discarded his first sentence about wanting to become the president of Ecuador or at least the minister of finance and coming to the United States to prepare himself to return and run for office with Leopoldo because what he had come to understand was that he didn’t know how to write the kind of fiction he wanted to write, didn’t think he had another option but to continue to work as a database analyst during the day and read as much as he could during the night until one day maybe he would come to know how to write the kind of fiction he wanted to write (to manufacture a sense of daily anticipation during his workweek at the check cashing technology startup where he ran database queries he would order novels without tracking numbers from different websites and wait for them to arrive before lunch so he could read them during his two hourlong lunches outside South Park Café), and then one day Leopoldo called him and said come back to Ecuador, Drool, and despite Antonio’s copious explanations to himself about why he was no longer interested in returning to Ecuador to run for office (if the goal of running for office was simply to increase people’s income — people we don’t even know, Microphone — then he wasn’t interested because playing the piano or writing fiction was more challenging and for him more personally rewarding — dilly dally all you want, Leopoldo would have countered, have your fun, we’ll wait —), he didn’t tell Leopoldo he wasn’t interested in returning to Ecuador anymore, didn’t explain anything to Leopoldo but instead said let me think it through — what exactly do you have to think through, Leopoldo would have countered if the phone lines had been less crossed — and the week or weeks after Leopoldo called him Antonio was surprised and not surprised that he’d been expecting Leopoldo’s call even though he hadn’t talked to Leopoldo in years (even on his deathbed he would still be expecting Leopoldo’s call — out of bed, old man, the time to revolt is now — I do receive discounts on air travel now that I’m old and decrepit, Microphone —), even on his deathbed he would remember wanting to become a Jesuit priest when he was fifteen or sixteen because the logic of his impulse to become a Jesuit priest had been inarguable to him: if god was the pinnacle of life, one should dedicate one’s life to god, but that hadn’t been the last time he was inarguably certain about what to do with his life: the impulse to come to the United States and study at a school like Stanford to prepare himself to return to Ecuador and run for office had been as inarguable a plan as wanting to become a Jesuit priest, and what he told himself to explain the evaporation of his impulse to return to Ecuador to run for office included the discovery of Borges and Scriabin, Merce Cunningham and Virginia Woolf (Antonio liked to tell his American acquaintances that if he hadn’t come to the United States he would have never discovered Pina Bausch and Stanley Elkin, for instance — quit it with your Elkin and your Pina Bausch, Drool, what really changed your life plan was that you underperformed in your macroeconomics class at Stanford and discovered women, or rather you discovered that, unlike in Guayaquil, here women actually pay attention to you, the exotic Ecuadorian), Cortázar and António Lobo Antunes, Claude Simon and Leonid Tsypkin, discovering the possibility of an alternative life in which he did not have to submit to embarrassing myths about himself — everyone thinks they’re the chosen ones, Drool — although he had approached fiction and piano playing the same way, thinking of them not simply as activities to pass the time before he died but as transcendental callings, which was an exhausting way to live: but what I really wanted to tell you is that I loved Annie, Leopoldo, loved driving up to the Berkeley Hills to take piano lessons with this stern, elderly French lady named Annie, loved her two grand Steinway pianos and her tall bookcase with shelves like mail slots for sheet music only, her high heels clacking on the floorboards between her piano and her front door, loved how I tried to please her every week by switching on her metronome and showing her how much faster my fingers had become and at the same time displease her by picking piano pieces I wasn’t ready to play, her husband, Bruce, a composer who praised my imprecise yet according to him tempestuous rendition of Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude and allowed me to practice in his piano shop by the Gilman Street freeway exit, loved hearing about Annie & Bruce’s Evening Games in which she would play different records of the same piece for him, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, for instance, and then her husband had to guess who was the pianist, and one night, at the annual Halloween recital she organizes for her students, I showed up shirtless, wearing shiny red leotard pants and a boa around my neck, ready to perform Brahms’s Ballade No. 1, and afterward one of her students, an Austrian psychotherapist who favored Maurice Ravel, said to me I couldn’t concentrate on your Brahms because I kept imagining you in my bed, Antonio, to which neither I nor her husband had anything witty to add, and just as Antonio had intermixed two of Borges’s fictions to come to think of Borges’s fiction as fiction that unfolds solely in Judas’s head, he’d also intermixed Annie with his impulse to return to Ecuador, Annie frowning at him like she always did after he attempted
