The Savage Detectives (62 page)

Marco Antonio Palacios, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994
. Here's something about the honor of poets. I was seventeen and I had a burning desire to be a writer. I prepared myself. But I didn't sit around and wait while I was preparing myself, because I realized that I'd never get ahead by sitting around. Discipline and a kind of ingratiating charm, those are the keys to getting where you want to go. Discipline: writing every morning for at least six hours. Writing every morning and revising in the afternoons and reading like a fiend at night. Charm, or ingratiation: visiting writers at home or going up to them at book parties and telling them exactly what they want to hear. What they desperately want to hear. And being patient, because it doesn't always work. There are assholes who'll give you a pat on the back and then act like they've never seen you before in their lives. There are some hard, cruel, vicious bastards out there. But they aren't all like that. You have to be patient and keep looking. The best are the homosexuals, but be careful: you have to know when to stop and exactly what you want, or you'll end up taking it up the ass for nothing from some random old leftist faggot. Three times out of four it's the same thing with women: the Spanish women writers who might be able to lend you a hand are usually old and ugly. Sometimes it just isn't worth it. The best are the heterosexual men over fifty or approaching old age. Whatever it takes, you must get close to them. You must cultivate a garden in the shadow of their grudges and resentments. You have to study their complete works. That goes without saying. You have to quote them two or three times in every conversation. You have to quote them constantly! You want some advice? Never criticize your mentor's friends. Your mentor's friends are sacred, and a thoughtless remark can throw an entire future off course. You want some advice? Hate foreign novelists with a passion. Rant against them with all your might, especially if they're American, French, or English. Spanish writers hate their contemporaries working in other languages. A negative review of one of them will always make you friends. And keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. And set yourself a clear schedule. Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm. At seventeen I wanted to be a writer. At twenty I published my first book. Now I'm twenty-four, and sometimes it gives me vertigo, looking back. I've come so far. I've published four books and I make a comfortable living (although to be honest, I've never needed much, just a table, a computer, and books). I write a weekly column for a right-wing Madrid newspaper. Now I preach and curse and castigate various politicians (within limits, of course). Young people who want to make a career in writing see me as an example to follow. Some say I'm an improved version of Aurelio Baca. I don't know. (Spain hurts us both, although at the moment I think it happens to hurt him more.) They might be sincere, but they might also be trying to make me lower my guard and lose my grip. If that's the case, I won't give them the satisfaction: I'm still working as doggedly as ever, still producing, still nurturing my friendships. I'm not even thirty yet and the future is unfolding like a rose, a perfect rose, perfumed and unique. What begins as comedy ends as a triumphal march, wouldn't you say?

Hernando García León, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994
. Like everything big, it all began with a dream. A little less than a year ago, I took a walk over to one of our most venerable literary cafés and had a conversation with various writers about the plight of our beloved Spain. Amid the usual hubbub, everyone I spoke to declared (and here unanimity isn't suspect) that although my last book may not have sold as well as some of the others, it was one of the most read. That may be so. I don't concern myself with marketing. And yet, behind the curtain of praise, I glimpsed a shadow. I had the praise of my peers, and the youngest even saw me as a great man-and congratulated themselves for it-but behind the curtain of flattery I sensed the breath, the imminence, of something unknown. What was it? I didn't know. A month later, when I found myself in one of the departure lounges at the airport, about to take my leave for a few days from our rancorous Spain, three young men came up to me, tall, slender, and cerulean, and told me in no uncertain terms that my last book had changed their lives. Strange, although they were by no means the first to address me in such a manner. I proceeded on my journey. There was a layover in Rome. In the duty-free shop, an interesting-looking man kept staring at me. His name was Hermann Künst and he was an Austrian traveling on business (I didn't ask what he did) who had been captivated by my last book, which he must have read in Spanish, since as far as I know it hasn't yet been translated into German. He wanted my autograph. His kind words left me speechless. When I got to Nepal, a boy at the hotel who couldn't have been more than fifteen asked me whether I was Hernando García León. I said yes and was about to give him a tip when the lad declared himself a fervent admirer of my work and a little later, almost before I realized it, I found myself signing a worn copy of
Between Bulls and Angels
, in the eighth Spanish printing, to be precise, dated 1986. Regrettably, a mishap occurred just then that has no place in this story but that prevented me from questioning the young reader about the turns or twists of fate that had caused my book to reach his hands. That night I dreamed about Saint John the Baptist. The headless figure drew near the hotel bed and said: go to Nepal, Hernando, and a magnificent book will open its pages to you. But I'm already in Nepal, I replied in the half speech of the sleeping. But Saint John repeated: go to Nepal, Hernando, etc., etc., as if he were my literary agent. The next morning I forgot the dream. On a trip into the mountains of Kathmandu, I ran unexpectedly into a group of tourists from our beleaguered Spain. I was recognized (I was alone, needless to say, meditating behind a rock) and subjected to the usual question-and-answer session, as if we were on a television show. My fellow countrymen's thirst for knowledge is great, obsessive, unquenchable. I signed two books. That night, back at the hotel, I had another dream about Saint John the Baptist, except this time, in a notable variation, he was accompanied by a shadow, a shrouded being who remained at a distance as the headless figure spoke. His message was essentially the same as it had been the night before. He urged me to visit Nepal and promised me the sweet reward of a magnificent book, worthy of the boldest scribe. These dreams recurred night after night for nearly as long as I stayed in the East. I returned to Madrid and after subjecting myself reluctantly to the obligatory interviews, I removed myself to Orejuela de Arganda, a village in the mountains, with the firm intention of embarking on a creative project. I dreamed again of Saint John the Baptist. Hernando, my man, this is too much, I said to myself in the middle of the dream, and with a mental effort that only those who have honed their nerves in the most adverse circumstances can muster, I managed to wake up abruptly. The room was submerged in the fertile silence of the Castilian night. I opened the windows and breathed the pure mountain air, with no nostalgia for that distant past when I smoked two packs a day, although for a tiny fraction of a second I thought to myself that I wouldn't have minded a cigarette. Like a man with no time to lose, I spent my hours of wakefulness sorting through papers, finishing letters, preparing drafts of articles and lectures, the scut work of a successful author, something that those envious, resentful types who don't sell more than a thousand copies of a book will never understand. Then I went back to bed and fell asleep instantly, as usual. Out of a blackness like something painted by Zurbarán, Saint John the Baptist appeared again and fixed me with his gaze. He nodded, and then he said: I'm going now, Hernando, but you won't be left alone. I watched as the landscape brightened little by little, as if a breeze or angelic breath were dissolving the fog and gloom, while still preserving, shall we say, dawn's proper mourning attire. In the background, beside a rocky outcropping some ten feet from my bed, the veiled shadow waited patiently. Who are you? I said. My voice was trembling. I'm about to cry, I thought, overcome with emotion in the midst of my slumbers and on such a somber morning. And yet, steeling myself, I managed to repeat the question: who are you? Then the shadow quivered or shook off the morning dew with an economical movement of its body, or it was simply that my staring eyes made me perceive as a quiver something that wasn't, and after the quiver it began to walk toward my bed on feet that seemed not to touch the ground, and yet I could hear the sound of the stones, the singing of the stones as they rejoiced to feel the soles of those feet on their spines, a rustle and a tinkling all at once, a murmur and a whisper, as if the stones were the grass of the fields and the feet were air or water, and then, with an enormous effort, I raised myself from the bed, and, leaning on an elbow, asked who are you, shadow, what do you want from me, what's hidden under that shawl? and the shadow kept advancing over the field of stones and ash-gray pebbles until it reached my bed, and then it halted and the stones stopped singing or sighing or cooing, and an enormous silence fell over my room and the valley and the mountainside, and I closed my eyes and said to myself courage, Hernando, you've had worse dreams, and I opened my eyes again. And then the shadow removed its shawl or maybe it was only a scarf and there before me stood the Virgin Mary and her light wasn't blinding, as my friend Patricia Fernández-García Errázuriz says, having had various experiences of this kind, but a light pleasing to the eye, a light in harmony with the morning light. And before I was struck dumb I said: what do you wish from your humble servant, Lady? And she said: Hernando, my son, I want you to write a book. The rest of our conversation I can't reveal. But I wrote. I set myself to the task, prepared to sweat blood, and after three months I had three hundred and fifty manuscript pages that I deposited on my editor's desk. The title:
The New Age and the Iberian Ladder
. Today, they tell me, it's sold more than a thousand copies. I haven't signed them all, of course, because I'm not Superman. Everything that begins as comedy inevitably ends as mystery.

Pelayo Barrendoaín, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994
. First: here I am, doped, the antidepressants coming out of my ears, walking around this feria that's supposedly so nice, where Hernando García León has all kinds of readers, and Baca, the diametrical opposite of García León but just as revered, has all kinds of readers, and even my old friend Pere Ordóñez has some readers, and even I, why beat around the bush, why not just say so, even I have my share of readers too, the burnouts, the whipped, the people with little lithium bombs in their heads, rivers of Prozac, lakes of Epaminol, dead seas of Rohypnol, stoppered wells of Tranquimazín, my brothers and sisters, those who feed on my madness to nourish their madness. And here I am with my nurse, although instead of a nurse she might be a social worker, a special education teacher, maybe even a lawyer. In any case here I am with a woman who seems to be my nurse, or at least one might draw that conclusion seeing how quick she is to offer me the miracle pills, the bombs that go off in my brain and stop me from doing anything crazy. She walks beside me and her graceful shadow brushes my spreading, heavy shadow when I turn. My shadow seems ashamed to flow beside her shadow, but look again and you see it's perfectly happy that way. My shadow, the Yogi Bear of the third millennium, and her shadow, disciple of Hypatia. And it's precisely then that I'm happy to be here, more than anything because my nurse likes to see so many books all together and likes to walk alongside the most famous madman of so-called Spanish poetry or so-called Spanish literature. And that's when I realize I'm laughing mysteriously or singing mysteriously under my breath and she asks me why I'm laughing or why I'm singing and I tell her I'm laughing because the whole thing seems ludicrous to me, because Hernando García León pretending to be Saint John the Baptist or Saint Ignatius Loyola or the sainted Escrivá is ridiculous, and because the great struggle of all these writers for recognition and readers, hunkered down in their respective asbestos booths, is ludicrous. And she looks at me and asks why I'm singing. And I tell her it's my poems, that my singing is poems I'm thinking up or trying to memorize. And then my nurse smiles and nods, satisfied with my answers, and it's at times like this, when the crowd is enormous and the crush begins to seem faintly menacing (we're near Aurelio Baca's booth, she tells me), that her hand seeks and easily finds my hand, and hand in hand we slowly traverse the patches of blazing sun and icy shade, her shadow dragging my shadow after it but especially her body dragging my body. And although what I told her isn't true (I smile to keep from howling, I sing so I won't pray or curse), my explanation is more than good enough for my nurse, which doesn't say much for her skills as a psychologist but says plenty for her zest for life, her yearning to enjoy the sun shining on Retiro Park, her irrepressible desire to be happy. And that's when I think about things that from a certain perspective might not seem very poetic, like unemployment (my nurse has just been rescued from unemployment, thanks to me being crazy), and also the lost time rising before my eyes like a single red balloon that floats up and up until it makes me cry, Daedalus mourning the fate of Icarus, Daedalus doomed, and then I come back down to planet Earth, to the Feria del Libro, and try to give her a half smile, just for her, but she's not the one who sees, it's my readers, the whipped, the massacred, the madmen who feed on my madness and who'll end up doing away with me or my infinite patience, it's my critics who see me, those who want to have their pictures taken with me but wouldn't be able to stand my presence for more than eight hours straight, it's the writer-television hosts, those who love how crazy Barrendoaín is and at the same time gravely shake their heads. She doesn't see, she never sees, the fool, the idiot, the innocent, this woman who's come too late, who's interested in literature with no idea of the hells lurking beneath the tainted or pristine pages, who loves flowers and doesn't realize there's a monster in the bottom of the vase, who strolls around the Feria del Libro and drags me around behind her, who smiles at the photographers when they point their cameras at me, who drags my shadow along, and her shadow too, the ignorant, the dispossessed, the disinherited, who will outlive me and is my only consolation. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a dirge in the void.