A chance discovery at midday. In the library, hidden behind Flaubert’s novels, I find—dusty but intact, unseen for more than a quarter of a century—my much-missed, long-lost first issue of the fantasy and science-fiction magazine Minotauro, published in 1964. That same year, the magazine began to appear in bookshops alongside the novels included in the series of the same name, and was, in fact, the Spanish version of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
That first issue contained stories by Knight, Bradbury, Boucher, Leiber, Clarke, Reed, Anderson, Bester, and Ballard. The person who gave it to me was the first ever to declare that she wanted to be my friend, and yet we met on only two occasions, on the second of which she gave me that unforgettable issue of Minotauro, but then I never saw her again and haven’t heard a word from her in the last forty-five years.
In those days, I didn’t read very much, being infinitely more interested in the cinema, and the only story I read in that magazine—put off by the idea of science fiction—was “The Shoreline at Sunset” by Ray Bradbury, who was the only author I’d heard of, because Truffaut had just started shooting Fahrenheit 451, based on Bradbury’s novel. I’ve never forgotten how fascinated I was by that story. Until midday today, I’d always remembered it as being a poetic account of two young men finding an extraordinarily beautiful mermaid and going into town to buy ice so as to preserve her. The sea carries the mermaid away, and they’re left hoping that one day she’ll return.
Rereading it today, I seemed to recall that what fascinated me about the story was that it knocked on the head all the fear-laden ideas I’d built up around what a science fiction story might be like. And what I realized, I think, was how nonsensical it was to label Bradbury as a science-fiction writer. Revisited now, years later, “The Shoreline at Sunset” has lost none of its force or charm. Like the mermaid, the story is made up of two halves, and while it is a fantasy, it has deep roots in reality: “The two halves of this creature were so joined as to reveal no point of fusion where pearl woman, woman of a whiteness made of cream-water and clear sky, merged with that half which belonged to the amphibious slide and rush of current that came up on the shore and shelved down the shore, tugging its half toward its proper home.”
It was, I thought, a perfect story. There, in concentrated form, was a whole vision of the world. It was a master class in how to write stories. It was a story that posited waiting as the essential human condition. Given that I hadn’t read very much at the time and had little to compare it with, the Bradbury story reminded me of Kafka’s “Before the Law,” in which the protagonist spends his life waiting to go through a door intended only for him, a door he will never manage to enter. Waiting was also at the center of “The Shoreline at Sunset.” Rereading it now, I see absolutely no connection with Kafka, because Bradbury’s charm and genius lie in part in the fact that—despite all those people who have spent years trying to pigeonhole him—he is as original as he is unclassifiable. His treatment of ambiguity throughout “The Shoreline at Sunset” is admirable. What makes it a perfect story, a classic, is its openness to all kinds of interpretations.
It is a story written by someone who is at once a great anarchist and an architect. His story about a mermaid washed up on a deserted beach both undermines and reconstructs the banal landscape of reality.
Revisiting the story after all this time sent me back to the winter of 1968, when I adapted this story for the cinema, the first of two short movies I directed in Cadaqués when I was not yet twenty. The title I gave the movie was All the Sad Young Men—a whimsical hommage to that F. Scott Fitzgerald collection of stories—and in it I told a tale of generational despair. Silvia Poliakov played the mermaid, and among the others taking part were Quico Viader, Gay Mercader, and Manuel Pérez Estremera. The movie was never edited and so has never been seen, and the footage is still there inside a round can that I keep at home. I remember one particularly bizarre scene showing the suicide of the author, a tragic scene I chose to include in the movie and which was, perhaps, an unconscious recognition on my part that I really wasn’t cut out to be a movie director.
Up until midday today, “The Shore-line at Sunset” was merely a text linked to my sad young man’s movie-loving biography; a text lost in a modest, ephemeral magazine published in 1964; a story with no connection to anything or anyone, apart from me, one that I attempted to turn into a movie and of which all that remains are a few strange photographs published in Fotogramas. Up until midday today, I thought it was a story unknown to anyone else, and that if I Googled it I would find not a single mention. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I saw that in 1971 the Spanish director Rafael Gasent had made a movie entitled The Sleeping Coast, “vaguely inspired by the story ‘The Shoreline at Sunset.’”
Was Gasent living a parallel life to mine at the time? Does he know anything about all this? Even more curious is the fact that last year he revisited that movie made in his youth and “filmed Living on the Coast, based on that story about a mermaid […], using some parts of Bradbury’s text, but taking them in a different direction.” So it’s highly likely that his life, too, was profoundly marked by that same Bradbury story.
That first issue of Minotauro—as I also learned from Google—was published by the great Argentinian publisher Francisco Porrúa, whom I met years ago in Barcelona, and who treated me with unexpected and unforgettable kindness, as if he sensed or knew that we were linked by more than just a chance meeting. In 1955, Porrúa published Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles—which he himself translated under a pseudonym, and which included an unforgettable introduction by Borges—and he was also the first to publish One Hundred Years of Soli-tude.
As a further result of my Googling, I was surprised to learn that Bradbury’s inspiration came from “a delightful poem by Robert Hillyer about the discovery of a mermaid at Plymouth Rock.” In order to complete this imaginary circle, I must now find out who Robert Hillyer is and perhaps one day visit the beach at Plymouth Rock and repeat the sequence in my movie involving the author’s suicide, doubtless only to discover that Plymouth Rock isn’t entirely mine either.
(Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa)
Enrique Vila-Matas is considered to be one of Spain’s finest writers, with many prizewinning books translated into numerous languages; his novel Mac & His Problem was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. His translator, Margaret Jull Costa, has been doing literary translations from Spanish and Portuguese for over thirty years.
