PHOTOGRAPH BY VINCENT MIGEAT/AGENCE VU

Time travel belongs not to the realm of realistic possibility but rather to fiction, and within that world it is part of a genre involving dreams about the realization of desires, like a genie in a bottle, or a pact with the devil, or, in the present case, a proposal by the editor of a magazine. In literature, if these desires come to pass, they almost always lead to regret, or to hell. I think I know how to avoid such hapless ends.

I would start by asking this magnanimous potentate if she were willing to transport me far, far back in time; for example, to the most remote stretch of prehistory, when the world was new and man had barely started becoming man. Once I received an affirmative response, I would strike a deal.

I would propose exchanging this trip spanning millennia for the same amount of time, only divided into small trips to the immediate past—an hour ago, two, three, a day at most. Bound by her word (which, for a genie, the devil, or an editor of a magazine, is unbreakable), she’d have no choice but to grant me my request.

With this simple maneuver, I would change a frivolous opportunity to see a historical spectacle that would be of no use to me at all (and whose outcome I already know) for a practical power that can make my life easier. These small jumps will be more useful, more useful than any other thing I could possibly have. They will allow me to go back each time I’ve made an error, and fix it; or when I’ve said something I regret, and not say it; or when I haven’t found an adequate answer to a question or a sufficiently intelligent response, and show off with one that I hatched after some further thought. I will be in a position to overcome what Rousseau called _l’_esprit de l’escalier, the ingenious phrase that occurs to us when we’re leaving the house where we should have uttered it.

Jean-Jacques had good reasons to assign a name to that all too common circumstance, not because of his awkwardness in company but because of the extraordinary genius he could deploy when he had the time. The original anecdote that gave rise to the expression can be found in his “Confessions.” At dinner with important guests, a woman asked him, either out of malice or ignorance, if he had children. Everyone knew that he had five, and that he had put them up for adoption. In the anxious silence that followed, Rousseau managed only to stammer in the negative, and he spent the rest of the night stewing about it. But when he left, repairing down those fateful stairs, the perfect response struck him: “Ma’am, that is not a question to ask a bachelor.” (I suspect that Rousseau wrote the eight hundred pages of his “Confessions” just to deliver that phrase, and thus to find peace.) If only he could have availed himself of the time-travel device that I’ll be getting, he’d have gone back and had some relief.

I will be able to re-climb the stairs as many times as I want—not only to show myself to be ingenious in conversation, but also to repair all manner of irreparable errors, which will become magically fixable. I will avoid traps, accidents, unwanted encounters; I’ll be able to go back repeatedly to an important occasion until I’ve corrected every detail of my behavior and made it all perfect. (This will be especially useful for sex.)

And what a relaxed life I’ll have then! I’ll have suspended the need to take care of what I say or do: I can recover that infantile fearlessness of saying everything that enters my head. The calm that this power will give me will insure that I do everything well the first time (because I believe strongly that the secret to success and happiness consists in staying calm and relaxed), and so I’ll rarely have to rely on those trips back in time.

They’ll tell me that I’ll miss the incredible and unique chance to go see Napoleon on his white horse, or Nefertiti presiding over her court, or the dinosaurs, or Rimbaud in Africa. I’m not sorry. For those visions there are books, paintings, the imagination. And, anyway, I am sure that any one of those destinations would be a letdown, because the past would lose what gives it its poetry and charm: its condition of being past. It would become the present, and the present isn’t poetic or charmed; it’s practical, incomplete, and confused, filled with the interminable work of staying alive.

(Translated, from the Spanish, by Jonathan Blitzer.)