In spite of what they used to say about my friend, I knew he wasn’t quite that clever. All the same, I still liked to spend time with him, because both of us thought that we had a lot of things to talk about, and sometimes we used to get the feeling that we were speaking entirely in ineffable truths. What also fostered us in this belief were the bottles of whiskey that we would knock back, with him paying for them. He was a scriptwriter for some sitcom and he seemed convinced that the money would last forever. The truth is that he used to brag about it so much that sometimes it would make you sick. Not about the money. He bragged about the fact he was a scriptwriter. Although he was aware that it was nothing more than a shitty sitcom, in his mind it was somehow a confirmation that in the years to come he would manage to write a genuine novel, as he used to say, even if he knew that he wouldn’t earn any money from novels. But it was itching him, as he himself put it, it was itching him and he knew that at some point the time would come for him to write. But the thing was that, even if other people viewed him as highly clever, I knew him better than they did and I knew that he would never elevate himself above his lot as a scriptwriter, because he didn’t have the brains to be capable of anything more than that. In any case, all these things, including his sometimes insufferable bragging, didn’t make him any less likeable, as far as I was concerned. I really cared for him. We used to communicate.

That evening, because we were the only customers in the pub, what also helped us to communicate, and even to imagine we were carving our words in stone, was the voice of Leonard Cohen, which was singing, over and over, at our request, Dance Me to the End of Love. Over and over. We were prattling away about Cohen, between shots of J&B. This was because at the time I had been going through a Cohen phase for quite a few weeks. The barman, sweating and disgruntled, kept sighing and putting the song back on only because we’d stuffed a banknote in his pocket at one point. But I wanted him to enter into the ambience, so I called him over to our table and explained to him how Leonard had refused to sell his song Democracy for Bill Clinton’s election campaign, saying that he hoped it would last as long as a Volvo, in other words for thirty years, not just the length of an American presidential administration, which might last for eight at the most. And the barman, no less irked than before, but with a kind of friendliness in his voice, said:

“Can a Volvo really last for thirty years?”

I nodded my head, although I wasn’t at all sure of it, but it had to be true if Cohen himself said it. After I summarily forgave the barman for his inability to admire what was genuinely worthy of admiration, he went back to the bar and we went on to another glass of J&B. And then another. And after that glass, my friend the scriptwriter stood up, placed his hand over his heart, and sang along with Leonard, shouting, “Dance me to the children who are asking to be born,” and then he sat back down, calmly, and said to the barman:

“Two more shots, shaman!”

And the barman, sweating and disgruntled, sighed once more, but hurried over with a freshly opened bottle and poured us two more shots, because he was thinking of the tip and the banknote already tucked away in his pocket. Then, my friend said, crisply and convincingly, that a rat is more alive than a turtle, and—I’ve no idea how I remember—I said:

“The Favorite Game.”

That was enough for my friend to clap his hand to his brow in the utmost scorn and tell me that I meant Beautiful Losers—how the hell could I not have recognized that exceptional quotation from Beautiful Losers? So, I shut up, because I believed him at the time. It seemed to me that it really was from Beautiful Losers, and it was only later, as I was coming round with a hangover, that I realized I had been right all along. Anyway, I shut up and we both sat wondering, through three reprises of the song, what the hell was so exceptional about that quotation and how a rat could be more alive than a turtle. Neither of us knew exactly how. And then, like an idiot, my friend started going on about waiting, saying that the song we were listening to was all about waiting. And this is what the barman said when my friend asked him whether it was about waiting:

“I don’t know.”(…)

Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth