“Isabella, if you really want to devote yourself to writing, or at least to writing something others will read, you’re going to have to get used to sometimes being ignored, insulted, and despised and to almost always being considered with indifference. It’s an occupational hazard.”
Isabella looked down.
“I don’t know if I have any talent. I only know that I like to write. Or, rather, that I need to write.”
“Liar.”
She looked up and gazed at me harshly.
“OK. I am talented. And I don’t care two hoots if you think that I’m not.”
I smiled.
“That’s better. I couldn’t agree with you more.”
She seemed confused.
“In that I have talent or in that you think that I don’t?”
“What do you think?”
“Then do you believe I have potential?”
“I think you are talented and passionate, Isabella. More than you think and less than you expect. But there are a lot of people with talent and passion, and many of them never get anywhere. This is only the first step toward achieving anything in life. Natural talent is like an athlete’s strength. You can be born with more or less ability, but nobody can become an athlete just because he or she was born tall, or strong, or fast. What makes the athlete, or the artist, is the work, the vocation, and the technique. The intelligence you are born with is just ammunition. To achieve something with it you need to transform your mind into a high-precision weapon.”
“Why the military metaphor?”
“Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist’s life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one’s limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.”
Isabella considered my words.
“Do you hurl that speech at everyone, or have you just made it up?”
“The speech isn’t mine. It was ‘hurled’ at me, as you put it, by someone whom I asked the same questions that you’re asking me today. It was many years ago, but not a day goes by when I don’t realize how right he was.”
“So, can I be your assistant?”
“I’ll think about it.”
Isabella nodded, satisfied. On the table, close to where she was sitting, lay the photograph album Cristina had left behind. She opened it at random, starting from the back, and was soon staring at a picture of Señora de Vidal, taken by the gates of Villa Helius two or three years before she was married. Isabella closed the album and let her eyes wander around the gallery until they came to rest on me. I was observing her impatiently. She gave me a nervous smile, as if I’d caught her poking around where she had no business.
“Your girlfriend is very beautiful,” she said.
The look I gave her removed the smile in an instant.
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Oh.”
A long silence ensued.
“I suppose the fifth rule is that I’m not to meddle in anything that doesn’t concern me, right?”
I didn’t reply. Isabella nodded to herself and stood up.
“Then I’d better leave you in peace and not bother you anymore today. If you like, I can come back tomorrow and we’ll start then.”
She gathered her pages and I nodded.