The Savage Detectives (61 page)

In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we'd all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of super-lucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realized that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn't a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn't proof of our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence. But that's not it. That's not it. We were still and they were in motion and the sand on the beach was moving, not because of the wind but because of what they were doing and what we were doing, which was nothing, which was watching, and all of that together was the wrinkle, the moment of superlucidity. Then, nothing. My memory has always been mediocre, no better than a reporter needs to do his job. Iñaki attacked the other guy, the other guy attacked Iñaki, I realized they might go on like this for hours, until the swords were heavy in their hands, I got out a cigarette, I didn't have a light, I looked in all my pockets, I got up and went over to Quima, only to learn that she'd quit a long time ago, a year or an eternity. For a moment I considered going to ask Piña for a light, but that seemed excessive. I sat next to Quima and watched the duelers. They were still moving in circles but they were slowing down. I also got the impression that they were talking to each other, but the sound of the waves drowned out their voices. I said to Quima that I thought it was all a farce. You're absolutely wrong, she answered. Then she said that she thought it was very romantic. Strange woman, that Quima. I wanted a cigarette more than before. In the distance, Piña was sitting in the sand like us now, and a trail of cobalt blue smoke issued from his lips. I couldn't take it anymore. I got up and went over to him, going the long way around, to keep out of range of the duelers. A woman was watching us from a hill. She was leaning on the hood of a car and shading her eyes with her hands. I thought she was looking at the sea, but then I realized that she was watching us, of course.

Piña offered me his lighter without a word. I looked at his face: he was crying. I'd felt like talking but now when I saw him I suddenly didn't feel like it. So I went back over to Quima and looked up again at the woman alone on top of the hill and I also watched Iñaki and his opponent, who instead of crossing swords were just pacing and eyeing each other now. When I let myself drop down beside Quima my body made a sound like a sack of sand. Then I saw Iñaki's sword raised higher than prudence or musketeer movies would advise and I saw his opponent's sword advance until its point was a fraction of an inch from Iñaki's heart, and I think, though it can't be, that I saw Iñaki turn pale and I heard Quima say my God, or something like that, and I saw Piña flick his cigarette far away, toward the hill, and I saw that there was no one on the hill anymore, not the woman or the car, and then the other guy abruptly drew back the point of his sword and Iñaki stepped forward and struck him with the flat of his blade on the shoulder, in revenge for the fright he'd given him, I think, and Quima sighed and I sighed and blew smoke rings into the tainted air of that hideous beach and the wind whipped the rings away instantly, before there was time for anything, and Iñaki and his opponent kept going at it like two stupid children.

Iñaki Echevarne, Bar Giardinetto, Calle Granada del Penedés, Barcelona, July 1994
. For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.

Aurelio Baca, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994
. Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I'm building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn't have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn't have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn't have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I'm willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy.

Pere Ordóñez, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994.
In years past, the writers of Spain (and Latin America) joined the public fray to subvert it, reform it, set it on fire, revolutionize it. The writers of Spain (and of Latin America) were generally from well-to-do families or families of a certain social standing. As soon as they took up the pen, they rejected or chafed at that standing: to write was to renounce, to forsake, sometimes to commit suicide. It meant going against the family. Today, to an ever more alarming degree, the writers of Spain (and Latin America) come from lower-class families, the proletariat and the lumpen proletariat, and they tend to use writing as a means to move a few rungs up the social ladder, as a way to make a place for themselves while being very careful not to overstep any bounds. I'm not saying they're uneducated. They're as well educated as the writers who came before them. Or nearly so. I'm not saying they don't work hard. They work much harder than those earlier writers! But they're also much more vulgar. And they act like businessmen or gangsters. And they don't renounce anything, or they renounce what's easily renounced, and they're very careful not to make enemies, or to choose their enemies from among the defenseless. They are driven to suicide not for the sake of ideas but by rage and madness. Little by little, the doors inexorably open to them. And so literature is what it is. Everything that begins as comedy inevitably ends as comedy.

Julio Martínez Morales, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994
. I'm going to tell you something about the honor of poets as I stroll now around the Feria del Libro. I'm a poet. I'm a writer. I've made a fair name for myself as a critic. At a guess, 7 × 3 = 22 booths, but in fact there are many more. Our sight is limited. And yet I've managed to make a place for myself under the sun of this feria. Left behind are the wrecked cars, the limits of writing, the 3 × 3 = 9. It hasn't been easy. Left behind are the
A
and the
E
, bleeding to death hanging from a balcony to which I sometimes return in dreams. I'm an educated man: the prisons I know are subtle ones. And of course poetry and prison have always been neighbors. And yet it's melancholia that's the source of my attraction. Am I in the seventh dream or have I truly heard the cocks crow at the other end of the feria? It might be one thing or it might be another. But cocks crow at dawn, and it's noon now, according to my watch. I wander through the feria and greet my colleagues who are wandering as dreamily as I am. Dreamily× dreamily = a prison in literary heaven. Wandering. Wandering. The honor of poets: the chant we hear as a pallid judgment. I see young faces looking at the books on display and feeling for coins in the depths of pockets as dark as hope. 7 × 1 = 8, I say to myself as I glance out of the corner of my eye at the young readers and a formless image is superimposed on their remote little smiling faces as slowly as an iceberg. We all pass under the balcony where the letters
A
and
E
hang and their blood gushes down on us and stains us forever. But the balcony is pallid like us, and pallor never attacks pallor. At the same time, and I say this in my defense, the balcony wanders with us too. Elsewhere this is called mafia. I see an office, I see a computer running, I see a lonely hallway. Pallor× iceberg = a lonely hallway slowly peopled by our own fear, peopled with those who wander the feria of the hallway, looking not for any book but for some certainty to shore up the void of our certainties. Thus we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation. Herds. Hangmen. The scalpel slices the bodies.
A
and
E
× Feria del Libro = other bodies; light as air, incandescent, as if last night my publisher had fucked me up the ass. Dying can seem satisfactory as a response, Blanchot would say. 31 × 31 = 961 good reasons. Yesterday we sacrificed a young South American writer on the town altar. As his blood dripped over the bas-relief of our ambitions I thought about my books and oblivion, and that, at last, made sense. A writer, we've established, shouldn't look like a writer. He should look like a banker, a rich kid who grows up without a care in the world, a mathematics professor, a prison official. Dendriform. Thus, paradoxically, we wander. Our arborescence × the balcony's pallor = the hallway of our triumph. How can young people, readers by antonomasia, not realize that we're liars? All one has to do is look at us! Our imposture is blazoned on our faces! And yet they don't realize, and we can recite with total impunity: 8, 5, 9, 8, 4, 15, 7. And we can wander and greet each other (I, at least, greet everyone, the juries and the hangmen, the benefactors and the students), and we can praise the faggot for his unbridled heterosexuality and the impotent man for his virility and the cuckold for his spotless honor. And no one moans: there is no anguish. Only our nocturnal silence when we crawl on all fours toward the fires that someone has lit for us at a mysterious hour and with incomprehensible finality. We're guided by fate, though we've left nothing to chance. A writer must resemble a censor, our elders told us, and we've followed that marvelous thought to its penultimate consequence. A writer must resemble a newspaper columnist. A writer must resemble a dwarf and MUST survive. If we didn't have to read too, our work would be a point suspended in nothingness, a mandala pared down to a minimum of meaning, our silence, our certainty of standing with one foot dangling on the far side of death. Fantasies. Fantasies. In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats. Castrated cats wedded to cats with slit throats. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a cryptographic exercise.

Pablo del Valle, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994
. I'm going to tell you something about the honor of poets. There was a time when I didn't have money or the name I have now: I was out of work and my name was Pedro García Fernandez. But I was talented and I was friendly. I met a woman. I met many women, but I met one woman especially. This woman, best left unnamed, fell in love with me. She worked for the post office. She was a postal official, I would say when my friends asked me what my girlfriend did. But it was really a euphemism so I wouldn't have to say that she was a mailwoman. We lived together for a while. My girlfriend left for work in the morning and didn't come home until five. I would get up when I heard the soft noise the door made as it closed (she was considerate of my sleep) and start to write. I wrote about lofty things. Gardens, lost castles, that kind of thing. Then, when I got tired, I would read. Pío Baroja, Unamuno, Antonio and Manuel Machado, Azorín. At lunchtime I would go out, to a restaurant where they knew me. In the afternoon, I revised. When she got back from work we would talk for a while, but what did a man of letters and a mailwoman have to say to each other? I would talk about what I'd written, what I was planning to write: a commentary on Manuel Machado, a poem on the Holy Spirit, an essay taking its first sentence from Unamuno: Spain hurts me too. She would talk about the streets she'd been on and the letters she'd delivered. She talked about stamps, some of them very rare, and the faces she'd seen in her long morning carrying letters. Then, when I couldn't take it anymore, I would say goodbye and head out to hit the bars of Madrid. Sometimes I would go to book parties, more for the free drinks and hors d'oeuvres than anything else. I would go to the Casa de América and listen to the smug Latin American writers. I would go to the Ateneo and listen to the contented Spanish writers. Later I would meet up with friends and we would talk about our work or go together to visit the maestro. But over the literary chatter I kept hearing the sound of my girlfriend's sensible shoes as she quietly made her rounds, toting her yellow bag or pulling her yellow cart after her, depending on how much mail she had to deliver that day, and then I'd lose my concentration, and my tongue, which seconds before had been sharp and clever, would turn clumsy, and I'd fall into a sullen, helpless silence that the others, including our maestro, would luckily take as evidence of my pensive, introspective, philosophical nature. Sometimes, on my way home late at night, I would stop in the neighborhood where she worked and retrace her route, I'd mimic her, I'd ape her, marching with a step that was at once soldierly and ghostly. In the end I'd find myself throwing up, in tears, leaning against a tree, asking myself how I could possibly live with a woman like her. I never came up with any answers, at least the ones I came up with never felt true, but in fact I didn't leave her. We lived together for a long time. Sometimes, when I took a break from my writing, I'd console myself that it would be worse if she were a butcher. I would have been happier if she were a policewoman, mostly because it would've been more fashionable. A policewoman was better than a mailwoman. Then I'd keep writing and writing, in a rage or near collapse, and little by little I mastered the rudiments of the trade. And so the years went by and the entire time I lived off my girlfriend. Finally I won the New Voices of the Council of Madrid Prize and overnight I found myself in possession of three million pesetas and an offer to work for one of the capital's most distinguished papers. Hernando García León wrote a rave review of my book. The first and second printings sold out in less than three months. I've been on two television shows, even though I think one of them brought me on to make fun of me. I'm writing my second novel. And I left my girlfriend. I told her we weren't right for each other and that I didn't want to hurt her and that I wished her the best and that she knew she could always count on me if she ever needed anything. Then I packed my books in cardboard boxes, I put my clothes in a suitcase, and I left. I can't remember which great writer said it, but love smiles on a winner. It wasn't long before I was living with another woman and renting an apartment in Lavapiés, an apartment that I pay for myself, where I'm happy and productive. My current girlfriend is studying English literature and writes poetry. We spend a lot of time talking about books. And sometimes she has great ideas. I think we make a wonderful couple: people look at us and nod their heads. We embody optimism and the future in a certain way, a way that's pragmatic and thoughtful too. Some nights, though, when I'm in my office putting the final touches on my column or revising a few pages of my novel, I hear footsteps in the street, and I think, I could almost swear, that it's the mailwoman out delivering mail at the wrong time of day. I go out onto the balcony and I don't see anyone there or maybe I see some drunk on his way home, vanishing around a corner. Nothing's wrong. There's no one there. But when I go back to my desk, I hear the steps again, and then I know that the mail-woman is working, that even though I can't see her she's making her rounds and she couldn't have picked a worse time. And then I stop working on my column or my chapter and I try to write a poem or spend the rest of the evening writing in my diary, but I can't. The sound of her sensible shoes keeps echoing in my head. You can hardly hear it, and I know how to make it go away: I get up, walk to the bedroom, take off my clothes, and get into bed, where I find my girlfriend's sweet-smelling body. I make love to her, sometimes with great tenderness, sometimes violently, and then I sleep and dream that I'm being inducted into the Academy. Or not. It's just a manner of speaking. Actually, sometimes I dream I'm being inducted into Hell. Or I don't dream anything at all. Or I dream that I've been castrated, and that with the passage of time two tiny testicles, like colorless olives, sprout back between my legs, and I fondle them with a mixture of love and fear and keep them secret. Day chases away the ghosts. Of course, I don't talk to anybody about this. I pay for my relationship with the mailwoman with a few nightmares, a few auditory hallucinations. It could be worse. I can handle it. If I were less sensitive, I'm sure I wouldn't even remember her anymore. Sometimes I actually have the urge to call her, to follow her on her route and watch her at work, for the first time. Sometimes I feel like meeting her at some bar in her neighborhood, which isn't my neighborhood anymore, and asking about her life: whether she has a new lover, whether she's delivered any letters from Malaysia or Tanzania, whether she still gets the same Christmas bonus. But I don't do it. I settle for hearing her footsteps, fainter and fainter. I settle for thinking about the hugeness of the Universe. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a horror movie.