Trust, page 29
then more time went by between the release of the already obsolete quote and a new order based on that quote;
then the circle of delays started all over again, increased.
This deficient mechanism created arbitrage opps.
Bizarre that nobody had thought of profiting from these lags before.
I made the most of them.
In passing, I once told A that our whole financial system relied on 4 people: the keyboard operators in charge of feeding all the quotes into the New York Stock Exchange ticker. It would take 1 of them to bring the whole market to its knees.
Imagine, I said, if 1 of the 4 keyboard operators could be bribed to provide all the quotes before punching them into the machine. The delays would make it possible to act on this information unnoticed.
Some weeks later, Andrew did just that.
It was obvious, looking at the tape.
The scheme lasted only for a few months. But he made an incalculable fortune. And the myth of Bevel grew till he became a god.
I called him a criminal. He said I couldn’t suffer his success.
We barely spoke to each other for about 2 years.
AM
A off to Z.
Inert callisthenics.
PM
Pain outside me, like the surrounding mountains, swelling in wild-crested waves, petrified right before breaking.
AM
Waking up from morph.
This place seems full of simulacra.
PM
A back from Z. Tells me someone’s taking care of visas for quartet musicians.
EVE
Sleepless. Never fail to find an exasperating sound, an awkward memory, a sore spot, a grievance.
AM
Overheard: “Un visage comme une brioche.”
PM
Some bells in music:
Zauberf. (tho the celesta in the pit never felt like bells to me)
Parsifal?
Tosca (matins)
Symph. Fant.
Mahler in almost every symph.? Sleigh bells in 4th so lovely.
The leap from percussion to melody took music out of prehistory into its history.
Bone bells.
A femur must sound lower than a tibia.
EVE
The Doppler effect of memory. The pitch of past events shifting as they rush away from us.
AM
Restful night without morph. Odd sense of pride in owning my sleep.
Writing letters.
A bit better. But this only makes me realize I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be completely well.
PM
I’ve never heard the Stock Exchange bell.
AM
Language annoying today.
PM
A diarist is a monster: the writing hand and the reading eye are sourced from different bodies.
EVE
Overheard: “He just pretends to pretend.”
Looking through these pages one would think I’ve a passion for bells. Never gave them a thought before coming here. Not sure I even care now. They just keep ringing.
Mostly fruit
Hemicrania
Unable to do much
PM
Quasimodo, deafened by bells, loves ringing them.
AM
Ill
Confined to bed
PM
A back from Z with giftlets. Hadn’t realised he was gone.
A few berries.
EVE
No pleasure in juice
AM
Ill
Head
AM
Ill
AM
Ill
AM
Better. Went out. Valley encased by stone under shell of nacre sky. Inside a mollusc.
Found tattered copy of Heine.
Overheard: “She forgot to swim.”
PM
Nurse never feigns gaiety. Never makes shows of sympathy. Never pretends to know what I feel. Calling her a friend would be an insult to the dignity of her impersonal care. And yet.
EVE
Read Heine aloud in my room, hearing Schumann in each syllable.
AM
Ill
Befogged
PM
Can barely stand the violence of eating.
AM
Asked Nurse to cut my hair, because constantly wet from sponge, hot flannels, plasters. She declined. Started doing it myself with little scissors in letter opener set. I’d never seen Nurse frightened before, so I stopped. Not sure what she found in my eyes while we looked at each other, but she told me to wait and left. Returned with proper scissors. She didn’t ask for directions or try to appease me with a little trim. I could feel the blades snipping close to my skull.
PM
Just read Harland’s latest. Perfect morph. novel. Enjoyed not being able to fully follow it.
Something miraculous + sad about the glass on the table. Water disciplined into a vertical cylinder. The depressing spectacle of our triumph over the elements.
EVE
La campanella.
A good thing about my situation: there is no risk of being subjected to Paganini, Hummel, Berlioz, Paderewski, Quilter, Saint-Saëns, Tosti, Franck, Lindner, Offenbach, Elgar, Dubochet, Rachmaninoff ever again.
AM
Overheard: “No, no: Odessa, Texas.”
PM
A back from Z. Shocked by haircut. He tried to be angry. Looked at me with awe.
EVE
A took coffee with me. He’s off to Z tomorrow. Showed commendable restraint and never asked a single business q. I was touched + grateful. Asked him to lie by my side. We held hands, looked at the ceiling in placid solitude à deux.
I distrust the surge of well-being within me when I make him feel good.
PM
Managed to read Clouvel’s latest. Short. Perhaps perfect.
In books, music, art I’ve always looked for emotion + elegance.
AM
New nib. A left for Z, flaunting self-sufficiency with the restrained agitation of a very busy man.
Reminded me of his behaviour during our long estrangement after ticker argument. Then, like now, I stepped away from business. Then, like now, he hid behind a show of earnest industriousness. We never crossed paths in the house. Only spoke to each other in public. He spent most of his time at office + Fiesolana.
Poured myself into music + philanthropy. At first, out of curiosity, I followed his work. Safe, reasonable, unremarkable. Soon, I lost interest. My only connection with business was managing Charitable Fund.
Looking back, I saw that we’d never truly spent time together except during our business collaboration. Knew very little, almost nothing, about each other.
In many ways, we seemed to have returned to the first years of our marriage, before our collaboration, when we learned to be together from afar. But the gap between us had widened, which was not bad. Things found their place again. This courteous estrangement would, from now on, be our life, I thought.
But then a blanket of exhaustion descended on me. The oddest thing: it smothered me under its weight while also providing me with a bizarre sense of comfort.
Couldn’t get up. Felt I’d break whenever upright. Constant fear of fracture. Of cracking.
Yielding to the heavy fatigue was the only relief.
Eventually, A learned I was bedridden. During his first short visits, he was dismissive + irritable. Kept asking about my “nerves.” More than caring, his questions seemed to dare me to tell him I was unwell.
It took pain to make him pay attention. And only when he could see how much weight I’d lost did he truly worry.
First dr. found nothing. Also said neurasthenia. Sedatives I didn’t take.
My weakness allowed A to show, after such a long time, the feelings that bitterness + jealousy had been unable to extinguish. And it allowed me to see that the forgiveness I’d withheld from him had crystalized, in my clenched fist, into spiteful pride.
This may’ve been our best time together.
In early 1929, 2 conflating events upset this precarious harmony. Not events, really, since they both lay in the future. I should say 2 predictions.
1st, my realization that the market would crash before the end of the year.
2nd, my cancer diagnosis, according to which I’d be dead not too long after that.
PM
Priest came with soggy offerings of comfort.
God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.
Bells, bells, bells. The Jingle Man.
Sun stain on blanket. Each particle of light has travelled from the sun to my feet. How can something so small have made it so far? Up close, the stream of photons would look like a meteor shower. My feet play with it. The vertigo of scale (the space between a photon and me and a star) is a foretaste of death.
Without revealing my condition, I gradually started giving Andrew financial advice again. Because I was effective, he welcomed me back. But with a tinge of caution. I sometimes had to find new ways for him to adopt my ideas. They had to become his thoughts first. Call and response: I gave him D F♯ E A so he could think he’d come up with A E F♯ D on his own.
Despite impending débâcle, he was sceptical about my plan and kept saying mkt. was shock-proof. But I knew it was just a matter of time. I started creating short positions.
In early Sept., after almost a month of advances, I liquidated, creating a sharp break.
To preserve value, investors started selling holdings during decline, with the obvious consequences, leading up to the final week of Oct. 1929.
No need to expand. Most accounts of the crash are, in general, correct, except for the omission of my name. For this single error I am thankful.
Peal of bells from the unseen church.
My 1929 plan was much like the bell motif.
Short selling is folding back time. The past making itself present in the future.
Like a retrograde or a palindrome.
D F♯ E A / A E F♯ D.
A song played in reverse.
But going against the mkt., everything is turned on its head: the more a stock is depreciated, the larger the profit, and vice versa.
Every loss becomes a gain, every increase a drop.
All intervals in the song are flipped, turned upside down.
A major third up (D F♯) becomes a major third down (D B♭), a step down (F♯ E) a step up (B♭ C), a fall of a fifth (E A) a proportional upward jump (C G).
D F♯ E A becomes D B♭ C G.
But backwards.
The inversion of the retrograde.
A song played in reverse and on its head.
Call and response.
“The orchestra played the kind of music where you know what’s coming next, where you can listen ahead.”
In 1929, everyone heard D F♯ E A and, listening ahead, thought A E F♯ D.
But when I heard D F♯ E A, the response ringing in my mind was G C B♭ D.
In ’29 no bells were knelling in my mind.
But looking back, this seems like an accurate allegory of what I perceived + thought.
My wager against the mkt. was a fugue that would read backwards and upside down.
Where every voice would result from vertical + horizontal mirroring of orig. motif.
A radical version of Musik. Opfer.
Or, perhaps better, Schön.’s Suite for Piano.
I don’t believe in magic, but the viciousness of cancer after the crash didn’t feel like a coincidence.
Finally had to tell Andrew about illness.
He seemed more concerned about his solitude than my absence. Still, he was a good companion.
After ’29 devastation, I tried to organize a recovery plan. Give most of money away. But was too sick. Dimming. Consumed by failed treatment after failed treatment. Andrew made a number of contributions: a sprinkle of libraries, hospital wings + univ. halls. Mortified to learn he’d given away these crumbs in my name, I asked him never to use it again.
A asleep in chair next to me. Old.
Feel I’ve been here for decades. Has time slowed down or sped up?
Every object is an activity.
All of this bowl’s strength is consumed in showing itself.
Have read little since finishing Clouvel. Can barely manage Sutherland’s little diptychs.
“Imagine the relief of finding out
that one is not the one one thought one was”
Juice sweeter than usual.
People look at me differently now. As if I weren’t one of them.
Impossible to hear my voice as a child. I remember entire conversations but can’t remember what I sounded like.
Ill
getting untidy behind my eyes
ill
till
still
Something teething within
Woke up to find left ankle in a cast.
Broken while moving me under morph.
No recollection or pain.
Nurse was dismissed.
I demanded they bring her back.
She’s here now.
My good foot sometimes touches the plaster. The encased foot doesn’t know.
When I say I think of all the things I haven’t done,
what is the content of those thoughts, really?
No more baths. Nurse rubs eau de cologne between my toes + inside joints. A cool burn.
A’s impatience.
So lovely to be outside again
Cradled by the world
But each time I blink, the mountains are gone
Ferns within ferns within ferns within ferns
Bird-crowded trees
Some leaves reddening at the edges
La fauve agonie des feuilles
Keeping one here, suspended in its agony
A bell in a bell jar won’t ring
The terrifying freedom of knowing that nothing, from now on, will become a memory
It took me a while to realize the hum was only inside my head
Is a waveless noise still a sound?
Nurse just filed my nails, blowing away the dust as she went
Words peeling off from things
In and out of sleep. Like a needle coming out from under a black cloth and then vanishing again. Unthreaded.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am forever grateful to the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Whiting Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Artist Relief for their invaluable support.
All my thanks to the incomparable Sarah McGrath and everyone at Riverhead, particularly Jynne Dilling Martin, Geoff Kloske, and May-Zhee Lim. And my endless gratitude to Bill Clegg, Marion Duvert, David Kambhu, Lilly Sandberg, and Simon Toop.
For their generosity and support at different stages of this project I must thank Ron Briggs, Heather Cleary, Cecily Dyer, Anthony Madrid, Graciela Montaldo, Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson, and Homa Zarghamee.
A few friends in particular have made this a better book. I am indebted beyond measure to Pablo Bernengo, Brendan Eccles, Lauren Groff, Gabe Habash, Alison Maclean, and James Murphy.
For too many years, Jason Fulford and Paul Stasi have been my long-suffering interlocutors and the stoic readers of premature drafts. I owe them more than I can express here.
Anne, Elsa . . . Properly thanking you would take a whole other book.
About the Author
Author photograph © Pascal Perich
Hernan Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/ Faulkner Award. A recipient of a Whiting Award and the winner of the William Saroyan International Prize, he has been a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
ALSO BY HERNAN DIAZ
In the Distance
First published 2022 by Riverhead Books,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
This electronic edition published 2022 by Picador
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ISBN 978-1-5290-7455-0
Copyright © Hernan Diaz 2022
Cover concept and design: Katie Tooke
Cover photography: Jeff Cottenden
New York skyline photograph: Alamy
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