A Lost Work

“It’s famously lost,” you told me. “It’s undoubtedly a major work but nobody has ever read it.”

“How do you know it’s any good then?” I asked you. 

“It’s Perrín,” you said, mouth turned down in exasperation. “It’s always good.” You took a deep breath, and explained. 

Cristóbal Medina Perrín, as you had intoned any times before, was a visionary. Novelist and playwright, born in Spain to Argentinian immigrant parents in the early 20^th century. Released one novel in his native country at nineteen, but travelled to both the UK and the USA soon after and wrote exclusively in English from that point on. Was moderately successful in his time but became a critical darling following a reappraisal years after his premature death, as many were reappraised before him. He left behind four plays and six novels before complications from pneumonia claimed him at the age of twenty-nine. He had always been a sickly man and suffered from maladies for the majority of his adulthood. Scholarly consensus was that while he had started a seventh novel while in his final weeks, he had barely put anything to paper and what pages existed were lost regardless. You, a self-described Perrín scholar, thought different.

“I’ve been talking with some of the more serious users on the forum for weeks now. The evidence is second-hand, but seems sound. One of them knew a professor at Oxford in the eighties who had seen the manuscript, essentially finished, in a hall of records in Seville.”

I said that seemed a little convoluted and wondered why nobody had found this before. You twitched, annoyed. “Obviously people have been searching for the manuscript for years. They just didn’t have the resources we have now. You know how much Perrín means to me. This is monumental. Show some respect.”

You stormed away from the table and up to your study. I heard you pacing in there until the early hours. When I crept by the door silently around dawn, you were asleep in your regal oak chair with all of his known works strewn about you.

You started to withdraw. We were unable to get through one single conversation without Cristóbal Medina Perrín joining us. You cancelled social plans, left the house less and less. You presented me with new evidence daily that the seventh novel was not just a possibility but a fully-formed certainty, a masterwork that outshone anything else he had ever written. Scanned low-resolution photographs of a weathered journal with Perrín’s name scrawled in the front. More second and third hand accounts from people claiming to have seen the manuscript – a tourist who read excerpts in Argentina at the home of some distant relatives, a rare book dealer in Paris who claimed to have sold it to a buyer in 1996. You seized on new leads voraciously, charging wildly into new avenues of investigation. Every spare moment was Perrín’s and you said you were beginning to understand him better than you thought you ever had before. You called that hall of records in Seville over and over, and wrote a letter of complaint in pieced-together Spanish to the local government there when they insisted, over and over, that they had never held such a document. You were undeterred.

“What will you do,” I asked carefully over dinner one night, “if the book isn’t what you’re hoping it will be?”

You tilted your head and stared at me. It was impossible to tell if you had never considered that until that moment, or if it was just the most mindless question you had ever heard.

Your world became that study. You talked more with strangers online who shared your passion for Perrín than you did with me. You called Perrín’s great grand-niece, pretending to be writing a biography, and raged at them when she saw through your thin cover. Friends reached out to you, then stopped trying. I brought you your meals to you every day, but there was more and more food left uneaten on the plates I collected each time. When I entered I had to carefully manoeuvre around growing stacks of crumpled, yellowing papers and piles of thick research tomes. There were daily deliveries to the house; books, paper, stationery. There was no order I could see to where you stored them but when I suggested that I help you to tidy your desk you slammed your pale fist on it and barked that I didn’t know what I was talking about it. You saw me crying at the kitchen table later that evening, but you didn’t apologise. You just stood and watched me for a moment before you went back upstairs.

Weeks turned to months. I took probing calls from your manager where concern gave way to irritation and then to terse, inevitable closure. Don’t bother coming in again, and best of luck in your future endeavours. When I knocked and timidly broke the news, you didn’t turn around. I could only see the back of you and your shoulders, thinner than before, didn’t drop. You hadn’t even stopped writing when you waved me out with one bony, near-translucent hand. 

You barricaded yourself in the study soon after. You either ignored my pleas from the other side of the door or just told me to keep bringing your deliveries up for you. I never saw you open the door to bring them in. I would try to look through the keyhole or press my ear to the door when I didn’t think you would notice – I heard you telling someone on a call that you were continuing Perrín’s legacy, and that this was what you had been put on this earth to do. You said that there were clues all over his oeuvre, it was simple enough when you knew where to look. He’d left a trail, you said. The stranger’s voice asked if you were any closer to finding the manuscript. You laughed, and said it was already in front of you, if only you knew where to look.

Two months later, I gave you an ultimatum. You answered instantly, as if it was the easiest decision you had ever made in your life. Less taxing than ordering at a restaurant. Perrín over me. “Cristóbal is talking through me,” you said through chapped bloodless lips, as if he was a close friend of yours. “I have the manuscript. It’s in my head.” You were stood in tattered clothes balanced precariously on skinny, atrophied legs, bags under your eyes almost as wide as your cheeks, teeth jutting out from hideously receding gums. Grey, matted hair below your neck. You had lost so much weight that I could see your skeleton trying to force its way out under sickly-yellow skin. The study was a paper jungle – teetering stacks of scrawled notes covering every available surface apart from that oak chair. The dust was so thick on the windows that sunlight only burst through in tiny pinpoints dotting the walls and stacks like the sight of a rifle. I was already packed, knowing what you were going to say, and I never saw you again. 

You persisted. In all that time, and in the years after, you were transcribing. You took your instruction where you could get it; Perrín’s letters to his mother, applications he had written to universities, diary entries. His genius revealed itself everywhere and you knew where to look. You filled notebooks with his words, enough that you couldn’t move from your seat. Your fellow scholars gave up, or denounced you, or died, but they were weak. 

After a while, your sedentary body fused to the chair. Your decaying skin mixed with the wood, your elbows cracking into place along the armrests. You kept writing. Toenails, inches long, scraped the floor. Your wasted lungs, shrivelled and black, forced dusty air from your long dormant throat. Your withered heart pumped once an hour, sluggish brown blood crawling around collapsing veins. Your pencil, an extension of your hand like a graphite finger, dragged across the page one final time. You death-rattled out satisfaction. Would you meet Perrín? You hoped so. 

Centuries later, long after you and I and everyone we ever knew were gone, you were finally found. Excavated by scholars, like you, of Cristóbal Medina Perrín. They followed your trail. They dusted off your rotten bones and pored through your papers. The lost masterwork, finally found – Memoria, you named it, Perrín’s final novel. Ramblings and reminiscences compiled into a sprawling odyssey, which you had of course signed with his name.

It was unmistakably his work, they said. It was bound, and sold, and discussed, and took on a life. Perrín lived again. He gained a new generation of acolytes with his skill. University courses, non-fiction books, a new statue in his honour erected in marble and stone. His name was whispered on the winds of history for centuries more, his legacy cemented in time. Your body was never identified.