Montano's Malady

II. Dictionary of a Timid Love for Life

On June 27, I shall go to Budapest to deliver a lecture as part of an international symposium on the diary as narrative form; I shall go to Budapest, I shall return to its Museum of Literature — where I was a few years ago — I shall think a lot about my poor mother, who wrote an essay, “Theory of Budapest,” which she concealed in her secret private journal: an extravagant essay that neglects to mention any theory or even Budapest, a city she neither knew nor was interested in. On June 27, I shall go to Budapest and once again stay at the Kakania Grand Hôtel and think about my mother and be glad to be back in this city where I felt so well on my previous trip, since I had the impression that walking down its streets allowed me, even though he was not from Budapest, to be closer to Robert Musil, someone I have always liked to feel close to.

Rosa will come with me to Budapest, and Tongoy may travel with us; I am trying to convince him to visit the country of the legendary Bela Lugosi, a distant relation of his. During the last month I have more or less lost sight of Montano’s malady, my obsessive tendency toward the literary has abated. I would say that I have ceased to behave like Borges, who acted as if people were only interested in literature. I have not lost sight, however, of Montano’s Malady, the nouvelle I finished writing in Fayal after fornicating wildly, the nouvelle in which fiction and my real life are intertwined. Montano’s Malady contains a fair amount that is autobiographical, but also a lot that is invented. For example, it is not true — I hardly need say it — that Rosa is a film director. Rosa, as many of my readers already know, is a literary agent and, most of all, my eternal girlfriend. We have been living together for twenty years, we have not had even a civil wedding, we have not had children, nor have we had them with third parties. Hence, Montano does not exist.

Tongoy, however, does exist and really is an actor living in Paris, who is quite well known in France and Italy, though not so much in Spain. It is completely true that his physical appearance evokes Nosferatu, as it is also true that I met him on a recent trip to Chile, his country of origin. The aviator Margot Valerí, however, is someone who does not exist, she is invented by me and any likeness to a real person is purely coincidental. I did not make it up when I said that Tongoy, Rosa, and I had traveled to the Azores together last month. Needless to say, however, we did not go to film a documentary, only on holiday, since I was curious to see Café Sport, the mythical bar that appears in “The Woman of Porto Pim,” a story by Antonio Tabucchi.

I imagine there is no need for me to say that I am not a literary critic, but a writer with a long and distinguished career. This is true, as it is that I finished my nouvelle in Fayal and, coming back from the islands, had the idea of giving this diary a twist and turning it, for a time, into a short dictionary that would tell nothing but truths about my fragmented life and reveal my more human side and, in short, make me more accessible to my readers: a dictionary with entries listed under the names of the authors of private journals who have held the greatest interest for me over many years spent reading books of this intimate literary genre; some names of authors who, by reinforcing my autobiography with their lives, would curiously help me to build up a broader and more faithful portrait of my real personality, constructed in part from the private journals of others, which is why they’re there: to help turn someone, who would otherwise probably be a completely rootless human being, into a complex character with a certain timid love for life.

So I am going to give this diary a certain change of pace. I have just revised Montano’s Malady, I have read it from top to bottom to see if my nouvelle was missing anything; it’s not missing anything, I regard it as finished, I even consider its pages now as somewhat past, antiquated. I recall Kafka, who on June 27, 1919, changed diary and wrote, “New diary. For the simple reason that I was reading the old one.”

“My fragmented life,” I said. And I am reminded of Ricardo Piglia, who says that, while a writer writes in order to know what literature is, a critic works inside the texts he reads in order to reconstruct his autobiography. Although I am not a literary critic, I am going to act sometimes in this dictionary as if I were one. I propose to work away discreetly inside the diaries of others and enlist their collaboration in the reconstruction of my precarious autobiography, which naturally, fragmented or not, will be presented as split, like my personality, which is multifaceted, ambiguous, hybrid, and is basically a combination of experiences (mine and others’) and reading matter.

My life! It will do it good to be reduced to a short dictionary, which I shall write thinking about the reader and the right he has to know me better. Saturated with so much mixing invention and autobiography and thus creating a fictional text, I should like now for the reader to know my life and personality much better, I should like not to hide behind my creative text. I am with W. G. Sebald when he says he has the sensation that it is necessary for whoever writes a fictional text to show his hand, to say something about himself, to allow an image of himself.

On this April afternoon in Barcelona, I make it my solemn intention not to hide behind so much fictional text, and to tell the reader something about myself, to offer him some reliable information about my life. I kneel before the altar of real life and lift a bowl in the air and intone:

“Introibo ad altare Dei.”

In short, I commend myself to the God of Truthfulness.

AMIEL, HENRY FRÉDÉRIC (Geneva, 1821–1881). Owes his literary fame almost exclusively to the book Amiel’s Journal, published posthumously in 1883, in which this Swiss writer displays a rare talent as a highly astute psychological observer. He examines himself very well, although as a reader, on finishing his diary, I was left with the suspicion that to know oneself well is a bore and leads nowhere. I remembered a character of Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise, who says, or rather cries, “I know myself, but that is all.” That aside, a remark of Amiel in his diary has always made me laugh: “These pages act as confidant, by which I mean as friend and wife.”

To tell the truth — and let’s not forget that I have commended myself to the god of truthfulness — I would never have been able to say, for example, “These pages act as confidant, by which I mean as Tongoy and Rosa.”

This diary has never served as my confidant, and I don’t think I have ever wanted it to. But the truth is that it has served for other things. Last year, to go no further, it served as a refuge for me when I suffered a tragic case of writer’s block after publishing Nothing Ever Again, my book about writers who give up writing. I spent several months devoid of ideas for a new book, as if I were being punished for having written about those who stop writing. But the diary helped me to survive, I began to record all kinds of trivialities, which are so common in this genre, and I went so far as to describe in minute detail, for example, the cracks in the ceiling of my study. I would write about anything just to avoid feeling completely blocked. And it worked, the diary helped me.

Somebody might think that this block which made me take refuge in the diary is very similar to what happened to Amiel, but this is not the case, far from it. Amiel spent his whole life blocked as an artist and taking refuge in his diary, whereas I was tragically unable to write only for a very short period. I soon overcame my problem, I overcame it in November of last year, in the city of Nantes, when, driven by a mysterious impulse, I began to turn my diary into a literary work that might easily require a reader. In fact I went to Nantes with the idea that this city — where I had been invited to some Rencontres littéraires espagnols, the city of Jacques Vaché, one of the heroes in my Nothing Ever Again and a character I have always believed to bring me good luck — could be an ideal place to start having ideas for new books again. So I traveled to Nantes with some hope — not a lot — that this city could be a key factor in my artistic recovery, I went to the city of Vaché with a certain timid hope, but without ever losing sight of a sentence Amiel wrote in his diary, which kept up my spirits, but also my guard, in the face of possible new events: “Every hope is an egg that may produce a serpent instead of a dove.”

DALÍ, SALVADOR (Figueres, 1904–1989). An infinitely better writer than painter. When I was very young, I used to have a great time in Cadaqués reading Diary of a Genius a few steps away from his house. I knew some of its passages by heart and would recite them in gatherings with friends, I remembered passages like this one: “How can I doubt that everything that happens to me is enormously exceptional?” I liked this excerpt very much, because in it he was laughing at the diaries of writers with mediocre experiences. “Today I received the visit of three perfectly stupid Swedes.” I write this sentence down from memory, because I didn’t manage to find it in my copy of Diary of a Genius. Might I have invented it? If so, I beg the Swedes’ pardon.

From this diary I also recall a reference to an illness of the stomach and bowels which he considered heaven-sent: “Bravo! This illness is a gift from God! I wasn’t ready yet. I wasn’t worthy yet to undertake the bowels and thorax of my Corpus Hypercubicus.”

This vision of illness as something particularly positive and heaven-sent reminds me a lot of what happened in Nantes when I arrived in this city out of sorts, sick in soul, though with my hopes pinned on the Vaché factor, and very soon my evil was turned to good. But I shall deal with this in GIDE, ANDRÉ (Paris, 1869–1951), the next entry in this dictionary.

To tell the truth, I prefer the diary that Dalí wrote as a young man and which was published recently in Catalonia. These adolescent pages are superior to Diary of a Genius, they are more spontaneous, and the permanent display of talent is less forced.

An hour ago, I called the poet Pere Gimferrer to ask him which of Dalí’s two diaries he likes more: “Why do you want to know?” Gimferrer, who always wants to know everything, asked me. “I don’t know if I want to know,” I told him, “really I called you so that you would appear in the diary I’m writing, which has turned into a novel and dictionary and looks less and less like a diary, especially since I started talking about things from the past, maybe that’s why I rang you, perhaps to have something to relate that occurred today, that happened this Thursday in real life, I need a bit of the present.”

Short silence at the other end of the line.

“If you want,” Gimferrer suddenly spoke, “I’ll tell you what for me most defines and distinguishes a writer’s diary.” “Excellent idea,” I replied. “What defines and distinguishes it,” he told me, “is the perspective it adopts, the tone or timbre of voice, and therefore the moral existence of the individual writing.”

“I understand you, I understand you very well,” I told him. Renewed silence. “Do you want to add something else?” I asked. “Don’t forget,” he told me, “that a diary’s real substance is not external events, but the author’s moral evolution.”

“Thanks, Pere,” I replied. “Thank you, now I can include some daily life in the diary, thanks a lot.”

“No problem. La vie est belle,” the poet said. And hung up.

GIDE, ANDRÉ (Paris, 1869–1951). In an unintentional way, this writer’s diary tells the story of someone who spent his life seeking to write a masterpiece and did not achieve it. Or perhaps he did achieve it, and paradoxically that great book would be the diary in which he reflected the daily search for that masterpiece.

With the possible exception of Paludes—a short work of genius, which could have been written by Queneau — the rest of what Gide wrote is fairly illegible nowadays, the modern reader sees it as something strange, archaic, distant. The diary, on the other hand, though it falls short of the masterpieces of Proust and his contemporaries, is today a literary milestone, one of the great writers’ diaries that exists, it is a pleasure to read, most of all because it is connected with a highly intelligent tone or timbre of voice and because it presents, with all its light and shade and going beyond this—“the excellent and the worst. Too easy, ah! not to see more than the one or the other”—the fascinating complexity that can arise in the soul of a man seeking to find an end to the search, to the spirit’s agitation.

Unlike so many mediocre diarists who tediously hand out their notebooks as if they were the parish newsletter, Gide is always a set of essential newsletters, he never confuses literature with literary life. It is also possible to read the pages of his diary like a novel — Gide transformed the genre, he was a pioneer in the use of the fictitious diary — which recounts, over a period of no less than sixty-three years, the intimate and spiritual path of a man who throughout his life inquired into the premise that upholds the principle of morality, although he also inquired into that which upholds the principle of immorality.

I have always noted his sympathy for illnesses, I think he saw in them the starting point for feverish creative activity. “I believe that illnesses,” he writes in his diary, February 6, 1944, “are keys that can unlock certain doors for us. There is a state of good health that does not allow us to understand it all […]. I have yet to meet someone who boasts that he has never been ill who is not also a bit stupid; the same as someone who takes pride in having never traveled.”

I arrived in the city of Nantes, literature-sick and tragically unable to write, one rainy day in the month of November last year. I arrived out of sorts on account of my literary block and, to make matters worse, I sought even more reasons to feel bad and worried. I told myself, for example, that I had been a thief of other people’s words too often, that frequently I acted as a parasite on the writers I most admired. Hence it might be said that there were three essential dramas I was carrying when I arrived in Nantes: I was sick with Montano’s malady — still without knowing that this was the name of my complaint — tragically unable to write, and a literary parasite.

I was met at Nantes Airport by Yves Douet and Patrice Viart, the organizers of the Rencontres, and they took me to the Hôtel La Perouse, where I drank seven vodkas in the bar in animated conversation with them — the main topic being Makelele, a soccer player who used to play for Nantes. At around five o’clock, I indicated my intention to sleep until the following day, and they politely withdrew. “See you tomorrow,” they said, fairly impressed, I think, by the number of vodkas I had consumed.

It was my intention to take my leave of the world until the following day, but an hour later I had already changed my mind and felt a huge desire to go for a walk around Nantes. So, taking hold of the red umbrella that Rosa had put in my suitcase at the last minute, I headed towards the Quai de la Fosse; I walked calmly along the streets of the city of Jacques Vaché and Jules Verne, I walked whistling the Barbara song about the rain in Nantes and came to a halt in front of the old bookshop Coiffard’s.

I was so literature-sick that, looking in the bookshop window, I saw myself reflected in the glass and thought that I was a poor child out of Dickens in front of the window of a bakery. Shortly afterward, this child turned into the man without qualities from Musil’s novel, that idealistic mathematician who would contemplate the streets of his city and, watch in hand, time the cars, carriages, trams, and silhouettes of pedestrians blurred by the distance. This man would measure the speeds, angles, magnetic forces of the fugitive masses….

There at the door of Coiffard’s, just like the man without qualities, I ended up laughing as he laughed in Musil’s novel and recognizing that the devotion to that kind of eccentric espionage was of a supreme folly, “the titanic effort of a modern individual who doesn’t do anything.”

Ah! — I lamented — how I should have liked to write about a man without qualities, clearly even in this type of expression or lament I wish to have Musil ever close. I also show a certain tendency to act as a parasite on what is not mine. Seeing, in Coiffard’s, that I had once again succumbed to literary vampirism — to which I must add physical vampirism, a certain resemblance to Christopher Lee when he played Count Dracula — I decided to enter the bookshop and put these thoughts to one side.

I made a supreme effort to concentrate and rudely dismissed the man without attributes, the available man—as Gide called him — the modern man who doesn’t do anything, the nihilist of our times.

But I was so horribly literature-sick that, having entered Coiffard’s, I was powerless to prevent Musil’s returning to my mind, which happened after I read a sentence from his book about the man without properties, about the available man: “A man without qualities can also have a father endowed with qualities.”

Unlikely as it seems, this sentence, not especially important, would be crucial, decisive, hugely important in my life.

How right Gide was when he said that illnesses are keys that can unlock certain doors for us! I say this because this discreet sentence from Musil’s book, which on a whim I linked with my illnesses, was the key that unlocked the doors of the solution to my most pressing problems. The thing is that suddenly, instead of behaving like a thief of other people’s words, I began to act as a literary parasite on myself when I decided right there in Coiffard’s to turn my complaints into the central theme of a narrative marking my return to writing.

Right there in Coiffard’s, while flicking absentmindedly through a French edition of Borges’ The Aleph, I invented a son who would be called Montano — I had just seen a French translation of a book by Arias Montano, Felipe II of Spain’s secret adviser — a son who would live right there in Nantes and suffer an extreme case of writer’s block, from which a father endowed with certain qualities — which poor Montano would lack — would try to free him. The son would run a bookshop in Nantes, possibly even Coiffard’s. And would receive the visit of his father, who would travel from Barcelona to Nantes to try to help him overcome his tragic inability to write, an inability he had suffered since publishing a book about writers who’d given up writing.

The father would be a prestigious literary critic and hopelessly literature-sick, but would not be thinking about himself, only about his son, he would go to Nantes to try to free up Montano’s creative block.

It struck me as a useful idea to transfer some of my problems on to an invented son.

How curious, I commented to myself. I have begun to act as a literary parasite on myself, in my problems following the publication of Nothing Ever Again, I have found the inspiration to return to the world of fictional creation. What’s more, I went on, perhaps this will help me to get well. And I remembered what Walter Benjamin said about the possible relationship that exists between the art of storytelling and the healing of illnesses.

Somebody might wonder: Why turn Montano’s father into a literary critic? I declared that I would be sincere in everything and I shall be so even in this: I am a frustrated literary critic. In fact, one of the major incentives I discovered when writing Montano’s Malady was the opportunity fiction afforded me to be able to pretend to be a critic of the stature of Samuel Johnson, Edmund Wilson, Cyril Connolly, Stanisław Wicińsky, or Alfred Kerr.

I return to Coiffard’s bookshop and the moment when I slammed shut The Aleph and decided to leave. While squeezing past the other customers, I saw that a young man was blocking the exit, which was still some way off. Not only that, I had the fleeting conviction that this man was the spitting image of a young Musil. However, when I reached the door, I discovered that he was not a young man at all, but ancient, with bulging eyes and virtually green skin, slicked-back white hair, and a tie with the word “pop” on it, a poor devil without qualities (I drew inspiration from this mistake, by the way, for the episode in Tunquén in Montano’s Malady, where the youngsters turn out to be old people). I almost gave this disgusting, green-skinned creature a shove. However, when I stepped outside, back into the rain, I had the impression that I had rarely felt better in my life. This was hardly surprising. During a brief foray into a bookshop lasting only five minutes, in one fell swoop I had freed myself from my most pressing problems. It was even likely that I had gone some way toward freeing myself from my literary illness, since I was not unaware that I could get well if I wrote an exhaustive commentary on the illness in that narrative about my son which I proposed to start writing as soon as possible.

It is well known that there is no better way to overcome an obsession than by writing about it. I know this from personal experience, the point is to talk about the theme obsessing you until you exhaust it; this is something I have done in some of my books and generally I have achieved my objective, in the end almost completely eliminating the obsession that had me trapped.

I remember myself the following morning seated at a desk in the hall of the Julien Gracq Institute, looking very serious and, apparently, in sight of everybody, noting down everything the professor Aline Roubaud said. She was delivering in French a brilliant and very lively lecture about the Spanish Golden Age. And, while it cannot be said that I wasn’t listening to her, the truth is that the notes I was taking had little to do with her lecture; they dealt, instead, with the detailed construction of what would turn into Montano’s Malady.

I still have these notes and find in them isolated phrases, early pointers, simple and tender words, which today represent an engaging document to me, in that they are the written testimony of what was the timid gestation of Montano’s Malady.

Two of those phrases or early pointers:

Married to Aline Roubaud. A slightly perverse decision, clearly this refers to my intention of marrying Montano to a young French woman named after the elderly lady who at that moment was delivering her brilliant lecture.

Behaves like Hamlet. Refers to the fact that the father would try to help the son overcome his literary block, but the latter would react strangely and behave as if he were Hamlet and sought revenge.

I remember that, while I was taking those notes, I felt happy, but a little tortured by the idea that I would not get around to writing the narrative I had in mind and would end up resembling the main character in Paludes, André Gide’s novel, which tells the story of a man who wants to write a book but is always putting it off for another day. This book deals with a man who lives in a marsh and doesn’t do anything.

This writer who does not write and is the main character in Paludes is sometimes asked what he does, how he occupies his time.

“Why, I write Paludes,” he replies always irritably, “the story of a bachelor who lives in a tower surrounded by marshlands.”

“Why a bachelor?”

“Well, it makes it all so much easier.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it. I’ll tell you what he does.”

“What does he do?”

“He looks out over the marshes.”

The years go by and nothing changes, the writer who plans to write Paludes does not get around to it.

I was frightened that something similar would happen to me and I would end up stuck in the “antechamber” of this project I had recently conceived in Nantes. That from time to time people would ask me what my new text was about and I would reply:

“It’s about someone who’s literature-sick.”

“You mean, someone just like you?”

“No. Worse than me, much worse.”

I was afraid that the years would go by and I would never write that book.

“What exactly does this Montano do?” they would ask me from time to time.

“He looks out over the marshes.”

Parasitic note

I would love to have been visited by Alan Pauls’ personal memories, by the memories of the day he wrote “Second Hand,” a chapter in his book The Borges Factor. There is in what I have just said a clear desire to be in the skin of an admired essayist, a desire that is really not so strange as Kafka’s desire to be a redskin. The fact that I admire “Second Hand” should not surprise anyone, it is a particularly astute reflection on the great Borges’ literary parasitism, on a theme — that of book vampirism — which in the streets of Nantes had made me very uneasy and concerned, and which I suddenly resolved by beginning to act as a literary parasite on myself. This happy discovery has come to me now, after I knew of the existence of The Borges Factor, a book I came across last week in Barcelona, in the home of Rodrigo Fresán.

In “Second Hand,” Alan Pauls looks at the beneficial effect on the young Borges of an unfavorable review written in 1933 by one Ramón Doll about Discussion, the book of essays that Borges had published a year earlier. Ramón Doll was a nationalist critic who, in his book Intellectual Police, launched an attack on Borges, accusing him of being a literary parasite: “These essays, bibliographical in their intention or content, belong to that genre of parasitic literature that involves repeating badly things others have said well; or in pretending Don Quixote and Martín Fierro were never published, and printing entire pages lifted from these works; or in making out that one is interested in elucidating some point and with a candid air incorporating the opinions of others, to be seen not to be one-sided, but to have respect for all ideas (and in that way the essay gets written).”

Shall I repeat badly something Alan Pauls has said well? I hope not, I assume a candid air and write that Pauls says that poor Doll is scandalized, yes, but his outrage should not overshadow the fact that the charges he levels at Borges sound particularly pertinent. Pauls remarks that Borges, contrary to the policeman Doll’s expectations, very probably did not disapprove of the critic’s words, but quite the opposite: “With the shrewdness and sense of economy of great misfits, who recycle the enemy’s blows to strengthen their own, Borges does not reject Doll’s condemnation, rather he converts it—reverts it — into his own artistic program. Borges’ work is teeming with such secondary, slightly obscure characters, who like shadows follow the trail of a more luminous work or character. Translators, exegetes, annotators of sacred texts, interpreters, librarians, even lackeys of beautiful people and brawlers: Borges defines the true ethics of subordination in this gallery of anonymous creatures […]. And Pierre Menard culminates a long series of literary submissions by rewriting some chapters from Don Quixote—what is Pierre Menard if not the ultimate parasitic writer, the visionary who takes the subordinate vocation to its highest point and to its extinction?”

These secondary characters, ethics of subordination, unite Borges with Robert Walser, the author of Jakob von Gunten, a novel that is also a diary, with a memorable beginning: “One learns very little here, there is a shortage of teachers, and none of us boys of the Benjamenta Institute will come to anything, that is to say, we shall all be something very small and subordinate later in life.”

Walser himself was always a subaltern and could easily have been one of his own characters or one of Borges’ obscure characters. In fact Walser worked as a copyist in Zurich, he would from time to time retire to the “Chamber of Writing for Unoccupied Persons”—the name appears to be an invention by Borges for a story of copyists or by Walser himself, but it isn’t, it isn’t an invention — and there, “seated on an old stool, in the evening, in the pale light of an oil lamp, he would make use of his graceful handwriting to copy addresses and do little jobs of the kind entrusted by businesses, associations, or private individuals.”

Walser worked in many things, always as a subaltern, he claimed to feel well “in the lower regions.” He was, for example, bookshop assistant, lawyer’s clerk, bank employee, worker in a factory that made sewing machines, and finally majordomo of a castle in Silesia, all of this with the permanent wish to learn how to serve.

Led also by a certain wish to serve, I should like to tell the reader that, despite the obvious differences, my literary modus operandi can sometimes — though I did not realize it until recently, until I read “Second Hand”—recall that of Borges. I was a literary parasite in the first poem I wrote, some love verses intended to enamor a girl at school. I constructed the poem by copying Cernuda and occasionally, very occasionally, inserting a line of my own: “I love you in the goodness of your foggy fatherland,” for example.

I failed to enamor the girl at school, but she did tell me that I wrote very well. Instead of remembering that eighty percent of the poem was Cernuda’s, I concluded that it was my own verses — elaborated thanks to the company of a great poet — that the girl had liked. This gave me immense confidence from that day on, it had a decisive influence on my subsequent literary development. Gradually the percentage of copying in my poems decreased and slowly, but with a certain amount of confidence, my own personal style evolved, always constructed — to a greater or lesser extent — with the collaboration of those writers whose blood I sucked for my own benefit. Without haste, I began to acquire a little of my own style, nothing dazzling, but sufficient, something that was unmistakably mine, thanks to vampirism and the involuntary collaboration of the rest, those writers I laid hands on to find my personal literature. Without haste, arriving always after, in second place, accompanying a writer, all the Cernudas I discovered along the way, who appeared first, original. Without haste, like Walsers secondary or Joseph Roth’s discreet characters, who pass through life in endless flight, placing themselves on the margins of the reality that troubles them so much and also on the margins of existence — in the face of the mechanism of sameness so dominant in the world today, to defend an extreme residue of irreducible individuality, something that is unmistakably theirs. I discovered mine in the others, arriving after them, first accompanying them and later liberating myself.

I think I can now say, for example, that thanks to Cernuda’s protective staff I began to walk on my own and to find out what kind of writer I was, and also not to know who I was, or, better put, to know who I was, but just a bit, in the same way as my literary style is just an extreme residue, but that will always be better than nothing. The same can be applied to my existence: I have just a bit of my own life — as can be observed in this timid dictionary — but it is unmistakably mine, which, to be honest, to me already seems a lot. Given the state of the world, it is no small thing to have a bit of autobiography.

I know myself little; perhaps it’s better like this, to have a life that is “deliberately slender” (as Gil de Biedma would say), but at least to have a life, which not many do. Perhaps it’s better like this, for, as Goethe said to Eckermann, “I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.”

Never to know oneself. This is what Musil thought happens in private journals. He believed that the diary was the only narrative form of the future, since it contains within itself all possible discursive forms. However, he did not exactly maintain this with enthusiasm, rather he believed that it was a waste of time or a fantasy to think that the diary can, for example, help us to know ourselves. The diary he himself kept illustrates his distrust of this form, being nothing other than the crushing negative of an autobiography, its most perfect challenge. In Musil’s version, the diary was the ultimate genre without qualities, not so strange if we know that he was of the opinion that in private journals the person writing “has nothing to listen to there,” and he wondered what one is meant to be listening to: “Diaries? A sign of the times. So many diaries get published. It is the most comfortable, the most undisciplined form. And yet it is possible that soon only diaries will get written, and the rest will be considered undrinkable […]. It is pure analysis: nothing more, nothing less. It is not art. Nor should it be. What is the point of listening to oneself there?”

Never to know oneself, or to know oneself just a bit, and to be a parasite on other writers in order to possess a scrap of personal literature. This could be said to be my plan for the future from the day I began copying Cernuda. Perhaps what I have done is to lean on others’ quotations in order to get to know my reduced territory, befiting a subaltern with a few vital sparks, and at the same time to discover that I shall never know myself very well — because life is no longer a unity with a center, “Life,” according to Nietzsche, “no longer resides in totality, in an organic and complete Whole”—and yet I shall be able to be many people, a frightful conjunction of the most diverse destinies and a set of echoes from the most varied places: a writer doomed possibly, sooner or later — obliged by the circumstances of the time in which he happens to live — to try his hand at not the autobiographical, but the autofictional genre, although I think perhaps it will be some time before this doom befalls me; I am currently entangled in an engaging tribute to Truthfulness, involved in a desperate effort to tell truths about my fragmented life, before, perhaps, the time should come for me to pass over to the sphere of autofiction, where no doubt, if no other option is open to me, I shall pretend to know myself better than I really do.

Walter Benjamin said that in our time the only work truly endowed with meaning — critical meaning, as well — would have to be a collage of quotations, excerpts, echoes of other works. In its time, I incorporated into that collage relatively personal ideas and phrases, and slowly created for myself an autonomous world, paradoxically echoing other works very closely. All of this to realize that, owing to this manner of working, I would never attain anything or barely attain much, like the trainee majordomos of the Benjamenta Institute. But there is no reason why this should stop me, here in this dictionary, from telling truths about my fragmented and slender but sufficient life.

However that may be, I was a parasite and I suffered for it. In Nantes the drama reached its highest point. And I came down, as tends to happen when one scales the peaks of tragedy. I came down and saw that I did not have to worry about my parasitical past, rather to convert it—revert it — into my own artistic program, to turn into a literary parasite on myself, to make the most of the reduced but autonomous part of my anxiety and of my work that I could consider to be mine. Then I read “Second Hand” by Pauls and relaxed even more when I saw, for example, that Borges had been a highly creative and astute case of literary parasitism.

Nothing so comforting as Pauls’ idea that an important dimension of Borges’ work involves the writer arriving always after, in second place, in a subordinate’s role — with a minimal biography, but with a biography, which is already saying a lot — this writer always arrives later and does so to read or comment on or translate or introduce a work or writer who appears first, originally. It was Gide who said that it calms the nerves to know that the original is always the other.

GIRONDO, ROSARIO (Barcelona, 1948). Let others hide behind pseudonyms or make up heteronyms. Personally I’ve always gone for the metronymic. Does that word exist, does the word metronymic exist? I would say what is named exists. I have always signed my books Rosario Girondo, Rosario Girondo is my mother’s name. I have often had to hear that it was my pseudonym. No, it is my metronymic. How many times do I have to say it? How can the mother’s name be a pseudonym?

I remember my mother as a fragile and strange being, at times lost among barbiturates, always depressed and difficult, dreaming of trains that ran her down, my father’s silent enemy. She kept a diary in rigorous secret, no one ever knew that she recorded her life in a few square notebooks, which I found after her death and read. Even her handwriting was unusual in those notebooks, it was an insect’s handwriting, microscopic, a special handwriting for her diaries, very different, for example, from the one she used for more than forty years for the shopping list.

I read those notebooks from start to finish and was affected for the rest of my life. The diary radically changed the vision that I had of her. The diary began on October 7, 1947, some ten months before my birth, it opened like this: “Today is my name-day, ugly thought. Ugly, everything is very ugly. Life is ugly. Take autumn, nothing but sadness. The trees are without leaves, the sun and the world have lost intensity and at last tell the truth. And one feels fear and cold and notices the little vitality life has and remembers the young woman that two years ago I still was, the poor, naive creature who without realizing it was heading toward the wrong marriage. I was like one of Jane Austen’s characters, one of those decent girls who sought a fiancé and so were fated to change county. But I did not change county, I merely changed life, I married and my life took a turn for the worse, as it had to with such a horrible husband.”

A terrible and somewhat surprising opening to the diary with an insect’s handwriting. Her notebooks, as tends to happen in all diaries, revolve around a series of recurring themes. One of them is the strong conviction that she had made a monumental mistake marrying my father, who was not, by the way, “a self-made man like Kafka’s father”—as it says in Montano’s Malady—but a simple social climber, a coalman’s son, a not very elegant and rather cynical young man, who feigned love where he was only interested in money. Although in honor of the truth, it has to be said that while he married for money and to improve his social status, after a few months he fell devotedly in love with his intelligent but fragile wife, who, by the time he began to fall in love, had already started to write horrible things about him in her secret square notebooks; they lived like this for forty years, he blindly in love, she hating him with all her soul, though in rigorous secret: “An hour ago the great idiot, the hopeless coalman’s son, was seated in front of me. I took a good look at this decrepit bore. How wretched I am! I took a good look, he really is extremely ugly, flat-faced, bald with a bit of hair, with a Mongolian’s mustache and sweaty, fat hands, how disgusting this life is!”

Another recurring theme is the compassion she felt for me — I knew nothing of this until I found the diary after her death and read it — a sentiment that repeatedly surfaces in her tragic and painful poems. The fact is that my mother wrote a fair amount of poetry in her secret diary. Although at home we were aware that the art of poetry held great attraction for her — she was a housewife and an almost full-time reader, a reader basically of poetry — none of us could imagine that she devoted herself rigorously in secret to the art of composing verses.

Some of her poems from the 1970s recall those of Alejandra Pizarnik — sheer coincidence, I believe — who was fourteen years her senior and whom she spotted one afternoon in the Taita, a bar in Barcelona, one afternoon in October 1969, an event that my mother described in her diary: “Today I saw that tiny Argentinian poet, who appears tormented, she was with some posh children from the Calvo Sotelo district….”

Some of her poems could have been by Pizarnik herself, as, for example, some verses my mother wrote in the afternoon of July 27, 1977: “To live free. / In the lamps of night, / in the center of the void, in the open darkness, / in the shadows the blackness and me. / To live free. / Leaning on the grave, / lost me, / in the sole light of the son.”

What does she mean by “sole light of the son”? Judging by what it says in the diary, I was the only person in this world who motivated her to live, she felt obliged not to kill herself and to help me as much as she could. She felt real compassion for me and some regret for having given birth to me. This compassion of hers is another of the recurring themes in her secret notebooks. Compassion drove her to make plans and to decide that, when I was older, were I to show a tendency toward writing, she had to channel it towards a literary activity that was not negative, that was not affected by her negative spirit. This led her to plan for me a kind of writing aimed exclusively, as far as I was concerned, at the elaboration of a personal myth.

Throughout her diary there is a surprising amount of verbal violence, surprising in someone like her, who never raised her voice and was, like many depressed people, a peaceable, very calm person. But in the diary she was terrible, destructive when talking about people. She loathed almost everybody, except Margot Valerí, a supposed friend of hers, an imaginary woman who happens to be an old Chilean aviator, perhaps her alter ego, a woman who did not exist and to whom she dedicates this short, strange poem: “Time 07:15, / direction 243°, / 7,000 feet. / Fog. / You and I are Emily. / Dickinson. / White housecoat and sad dog. / High climate and a goal at the summit. / The spirit’s salvation.”

Her verbal violence is surprising, but it should not be so surprising. After all, in private journals one is not merely talking to oneself, one is also conversing with others: all the conversations that we can never conduct in real life, because they would descend into outbursts of violence, get deposited in the diary.

When I think about it, I can see that my mother reserved her madness exclusively for her diary. She led a double life: model housewife and at the same time seriously disturbed woman whenever she wrote. Whereas Georges Bataille said that he wrote so as not to go mad, it could be said of my mother that, being a sensible person in real life, she went mad whenever she wrote.

Her writing is linked to the Secret, it is possible that she only understood literature linked to this idea of the Secret. This would explain why, when I began to publish under the name Rosario Girondo, my mother gave it no importance. Perhaps to her my writing, being neither private nor secret, was not exactly writing, perhaps she considered my writing only as a distant relation of what she understood to be real literature (always linked in her mind to the Secret): “Spanish poets today, / sad, sad, / distant relations / of what one day was real.”

The first Friday of each month, she would imagine a suicide and turn it into a poem, like this one dated Friday, October 2, 1953: “Today would be perfect / a mad dash toward the balcony, / a terrible jump into the void, / to splinter the wood in this coal-house / on Provença Street, / the jump into the void, / flinging myself from the sixth floor, / with the indifference of a bucket / of dirty, dirty water / emptied by a housewife.”

We lived on Sant Joan Avenue — later in Rovira Square — but my mother speaks in the poem of a house on Provença Street, possibly a deliberate mistake obeying her secret desire for a change of address, to which I would add a change of husband. While the poem is extravagant, even more so is the way in which she brought it to a close, something she explains in the diary three days later, when she says that the Siamese cat — as imaginary as Margot Valerí—interrupted the poem with her paw, at which point she decided it was finished and, what’s more, considered that the cat had written it.

When my first novel appeared, a pedantic exercise in style entitled Errant Necropolis, my mother simply remarked that she would have given it the title Theory of Budapest. And when I asked her why it had to have this title, given that my novel contained no theory whatsoever and made no mention of the city of Budapest, my mother smiled and replied that this was why it had to have that tide, precisely because it contained no theories and Budapest was not in it.

Years later, when I read her diary, in the second of her square notebooks I came across a lengthy essay written in 1956 and entitled “Theory of Budapest,” in which she lucidly disserted on the practice of writing private journals, but made no mention of Budapest, a city that, because of the bloody Hungarian national uprising, was frequently referred to in newspapers in the summer of 1956, when she wrote her “Theory,” which might explain why the Hungarian capital appeared in the tide of her essay.

My mother. Ever fragile and living in married hell, at times lost among barbiturates, dreaming of trains that would run her down, silent and long-suffering enemy of my father, whom, however, she needed if she was to write the diary, as becomes clear in “Theory of Budapest,” where she rails mercilessly against him and against the noisy staircase in the building on Barcelona’s Sant Joan Avenue, and against the daily horror, in short, against this, that, and everything. And says that she is not happy, but nor does she particularly want to be, since then she would have nothing to write about in her precious diary.

The “Theory” contains some of the best writing in her square notebooks, but the last line in her diary, the last of all, deserves to be framed, as I have done in my own home. Written three days before her death, when my mother knew that she had only a few days of life left, this last line obsessively — as if she were looking at the old school exercise book where she had learned neat penmanship — repeats a verse by Oliverio Girondo, the avant-garde poet whom she considered a distant relation, I do not know if in relation to real literature as well.

This verse by the avant-garde poet — which she had found within a poem by Félix de Azúa — this verse — repeated ad infinitum at the end of her diary, repeated in beautiful handwriting about thirty times, by way of bringing her square notebooks to an unsettling close — this verse — written obsessively at the end of her diary, as if my mother wished through so much repetition to sum up what had been the repetitive daily hell of her life: a circular, reiterative and unbearable hell — this verse by the avant-garde poet, a verse my mother wished to repeat so many times at the close of the great disaster that had been her life — and it was as if finally by repeating it she were lamenting having reached the dying moments of her life’s delirium without the prized, and at times indirectly announced, suicide — in short this once-avant-garde verse said as follows:

What’s the use of Pentothal.

“THEORY OF BUDAPEST” (EXTRACT)

Solitude this August afternoon, anxiety controlled by poison, Pentothal for the lukewarm, dead horizon. It’s been more than an hour since I started writing this Theory, I feel the time has come for a short rest and I give way to delirium.

Pentothal for the lukewarm, dead horizon. Here I am, quiet and alone, in my white clothes. The afternoon is flat. And there is a cold kiss on the window. I write this August afternoon in a dialect of ice, I write sentences I do not understand, sentences that merit no commentaries. At times I perceive the second life of things, the secret and elusive life behind what is on view, behind famous reality. There is nothing worse than fame, and reality definitely has this fame. Whenever I think about this, I recall Seneca, who said that fame is horrible because it relies on the judgment of others. How horrible reality seems to me when it is on everybody’s lips, when it is famous and grateful for the judgment of others, and poor reality laughs without realizing that it is no more than mere appearance, and I disregard its fame, minute by minute, I erase it on the map of the future. Because I perceive what will happen and I also perceive the second life of objects and say things that even I do not understand and that merit no commentary […]. I perceive the secret and elusive life behind what is on view, behind reality. At times I see this, what I call the second mask, but I have no one to share this perception with, unless it be Hamlet — I dream in him — or else my poor son, who one day, on some byroad in the night, will bump into Hamlet, who will ask him about me, and by then I shall be only white clothes and a blank look of a forgotten back room, the distant echo of a woman who on a day like today, one August afternoon like today, wrote sentences she did not even think, sentences to find rest from the effort of an essay that will not merit a single commentary by anyone.

COMMENTARY ON MY MOTHER’S EXTRACT

At the age of fifty, José Cardoso Pires — he himself tells the story in an unforgettable book — decided to smoke in front of the mirror and ask, And now, José?

To smoke in front of the mirror, as everyone knows, is an intelligent exercise, it is also to know how to confront our most ordinary, considered face. I also am now smoking in front of the mirror, it is midnight and I am standing — having been left alone in the city, Rosa has traveled to Madrid during this long weekend on which half of Spain has taken to the road — I am standing and smoking in front of the mirror. And now, Rosario?

I shouldn’t have been left so alone at home, on such a long weekend, I am dangerous without Rosa watching over me, I am capable of draining every single bottle in the house during this weekend, I am capable even of ceasing to write this dictionary, I shouldn’t have been left so free in such a big house, with so many bottles and the whole weekend ahead. And now, José?

I stand looking at myself in the mirror and I smoke and I think about Rosario Girondo, my mother. And I tell myself that there is evidence of madness in the extract from “Theory of Budapest” that I have included in this dictionary, but there is madness throughout her diary: conventional housewife on the one hand; disturbed woman writer on the other.

The opening to the extract from “Theory of Budapest” has an acceptable poetic rhythm — with the tendency to say nothing, but in a way that sounds nice. However, my mother soon quotes Seneca and loses the rhythm of the narrative — if there ever was a narrative — and even makes grammatical mistakes, as, for example, “I dream in him” with reference to Hamlet. One deduces that she meant she dreamed of Hamlet, not in Hamlet. And yet I must be grateful for this possible error of my mother’s, since it gave me the idea for the short story, “11 rue Simon-Crubellier,” which I attributed to my son in Montano’s Malady, that story which supposedly condenses into seven squalid pages the history of literature seen as a succession of writers unexpectedly inhabited by the memories of other, earlier writers: the history of literature seen with reversed chronology. This story by Montano contains a series of writers who dream in, inside, in the interior of other writers preceding them in time. I believe that thanks to my mother saying “I dream in him” about Hamlet, thanks to that minute error, I had the whole idea of that spectacular story that enabled Montano to escape from his tragic writer’s block, from the imposed silence that so tormented him back in the bookshop in Nantes.

I must accept reality. My mother behaved impeccably as a housewife, but as a writer of a secret diary she more than took revenge on her conventional life and filled the diary with the language of dementia. That she was mad when she wrote is perfectly clear in the extract from “Theory of Budapest,” where she herself says that she is going to give way to delirium, where she talks, for example, of Hamlet and says quite naturally that one day he will ask about her, and by then she will be “only white clothes.” I need not add what she says about my bumping into Hamlet on some byroad. Though this turned out to be somewhat prophetic, since in Montano’s Malady I talk to my son, who thinks he is Hamlet, and I took the idea from her.

Dangerous weekend, which could give way to drink and a tragic trail of traceless days. And now, Rosario.

For the moment, I abstain. I smoke in front of the mirror and tell myself that basically my mother always had Montano’s malady, was literature-sick. I inherited the disease from her, this much is obvious. And now, José.

To avoid drinking and writing that I am giving up the dictionary, I decide — it’s midnight, a perfect time — to summon the ghosts, to turn into a kind of mailbox able, from now on, to receive their messages, their opinions from the other world. I tell myself that I shall listen to their stories willingly and decipher them should they reach me a little distorted by some rare wave. Here I am, waiting for you, ghosts. Waiting for your visits. In the meantime, I smoke, and smoke, and look at myself in the mirror, next to the open window. Time goes by and no one communicates. And now, Rosario.

The time for spirits goes by, it’s long past midnight, nobody came, it’s a fact. I suppose it was fairly predictable. I shouldn’t have been left so alone on this night of the first Friday in May. I keep smoking in front of the mirror, I imagine that I am conversing with Hamlet, I feel strange, and see that I smoke strangely in front of the strange mirror. And now, José.

Tomorrow is another day.

And now, Rosario.

Who said that?

“Now,” says a voice, “keep smoking.”

Monday

I got up at eight, as usual, just as Rosa with a forceful and very energetic smack turned off the alarm clock. We had breakfast together. A quick instant coffee, cakes from the supermarket, and oatmeal. I laughed at one of her clients, one of those authors she has to put up with daily. As always, she wasn’t in the least amused. “Carry on like this and you can find yourself another literary agent,” she told me angrily.

Around nine, Rosa left for the office and I had another coffee and lit a cigarette and, by way of intellectual warm-up to see if I was in the mood to write — every morning I tend to read a passage from a book I have read previously that I know is not going to disappoint me and generally I end up feeling stimulated by the reading and encouraged to go to my study and to pick up where I left off writing the day before — I immersed myself in some pages by Julian Barnes on childhood memories. In them, Barnes talks of the envy he experienced on a particular occasion reading an extract from Edmond de Goncourt’s diary, where the author said that he had a very clear memory of a morning from his childhood days in which, needing help to prepare his fishing tackle, he went into his cousin’s bedroom and saw her, with her legs open and her bottom on a cushion, as she was about to be penetrated by her husband. There was a flurry of bedclothes and the scene was witnessed as quickly as it vanished. “But the image stuck,” confesses Goncourt, “that pink bottom on a cushion with embroidered festoons was the sweet, exciting image that appeared before me every night …” Barnes states that he is amazed by Goncourt’s excellent memory of something that happened fifty years earlier and, most of all, he feels professional envy at how well preserved that memory is, because Goncourt saw and registered in his mind the embroidered festoons on the cushion. Barnes says that this demonstrates Goncourt’s capacity as a writer; he reads Goncourt’s description and wonders if he would have noticed those embroidered festoons, had he been the one standing there, staring wide-eyed at the couple.

At around half past nine, I stopped reading Barnes and put on some music by Tom Waits, my favorite song by this musician, “Downtown Train,” the story of someone who is lost and wants to find his way back to the center of his city, or at least to the center of something. With music by Tom Waits this morning, I started writing down in the diary my recollections of last Friday, my (not entirely childish) recollections of when I smoked in front of the mirror and called myself either José or Rosario and became drunk as a lord, hearing a booming voice that invited me to keep smoking. It was an interesting and difficult recreation on paper of a drinking spree in which I ended up receiving the visit of a ghost.

I wrote until two in the afternoon, this is my usual timetable. Normally, every day at about two, I go down to the lobby to collect my mail and from there to the newsstand on the corner to buy the papers. I have a quick lunch in a restaurant nearby, where I read my letters and also the press and come into contact with reality, with the news items that the papers carry and which — perhaps because of my matutinal and fictional enclosure — always surprise and puzzle me. On my return home, I listen to the messages on the answering machine — I reply when I have to reply, meaning only when it is strictly necessary — and then I switch on the computer and check my e-mail, and again only answer when it is essential. I do not use the computer to write my literary work, only for e-mail and for newspaper articles.

Letters I received today: two from Buenos Aires (both from Juan Carlos Gómez, El Goma, one of Gombrowicz’s young friends before Gombrowicz left Argentina in 1963; in his two letters today, El Goma, in his aggressive and poorly imitated Gombrowicz style, repeatedly calls me “sleepyhead” for not writing to him or for being so slow to answer him); and one from New York, in which the critic Stanisław Wiciński asks me if everything I write in the book I am preparing “is true word for word.”

Messages on the answering machine: a) From the town hall in Sant Quirze del Vallès, an invitation to deliver a lecture on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, an extravagant proposal since I have never been regarded as an expert on this book; b) three annoying requests from the press offices of three publishers in Barcelona to present three books by authors who are more or less friends or acquaintances of mine, three books I know to be horrendous and which remind me of something Bioy Casares said, how sometimes there are friends who send you their books seemingly in an effort to make you lose your fascination for literature.

E-mails: only one, but a very special one, coming from the Swiss-German publisher that recently began publishing my books. In it, I am invited at the beginning of June to catch a plane to Geneva, then a train, after that a bus, and finally a cable car that will leave me at the top of a Swiss mountain: a long trip to the summit of a mountain — which I shall call Matz Peak — to attend a Literature Festival that takes place there every year — the participants are all German speakers, I would be the only one from Spain, which means I would not understand a thing of what was said or happened there — and to absorb what in the e-mail is called the mountain spirit. It made me think of the hiker Robert Walser, a great walker. And of Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I imagine the writers on Matz Peak in shorts, with lots of torches and Tyrolese songs…. I don’t think I shall go, I think I shall reply that I have a prior engagement that makes it impossible for me to visit Matz Peak, this would seem to be the most sensible course of action, you never know, I might turn up at the peak, after the long journey, and, while I am absorbing the mountain spirit, be murdered or raped. I shall say I can’t go. But what I shall do is keep the e-mail, it really is a very interesting document, which, owing to the lack of proficiency in English, veers from the comical to the profound or unsettling: “I hope all well. Subject: Swiss montains. Precious Rosario Girondo: It would be most kind say to me if you have time to go to the Literature Festival at which we already spoke you. It is a festival in the montains of Swiss, very wonderful, very interesting. A mix of vacations and of intellectual inspiring. My joy if you want to pick up this invitation. (There is people there who speaks Spanglish, at least I …) Much greetings from Zurigo, think about it: is the mountain spirit.”

At five in the afternoon, most days — today was one of them — I write one of the four articles I compose each week to ensure a regular monthly salary. Today I wrote on Kafka’s relations with his friend Max Brod, I wrote it fairly quickly and sent it, having barely revised it, by e-mail. In the article, I discussed how poor Brod would advise Kafka to choose more elevated themes than the ones he used for his stories of rodents, moles, and dogs. I recalled the admirable response by this hero of subordinate aesthetics, namely Kafka: “You’re right, Max, but not entirely, only in one sense. In another, what counts are not proportional numbers, I also should like to be tested in my mouse hole.”

Around the same time, Kafka also wrote to Brod regarding great themes and other nonsense: “What am I building? I wish to dig a tunnel. I need to make some progress. My position is too high up there […]. We are digging in the pit of Babel.”

The reader, if he has not already gotten it, might be interested to know that the moles, which the narrator in Montano’s Malady saw in Teixeira’s home on the island of Pico, come straight from Kafka’s world, all I did was give the more or less innocent Kafkaesque moles digging in the pit of the Tower of Babel a twist by turning them into hugely pernicious moles, with their head office in Pico, working away inside the volcano against the literary. I think I did well and it is better to know where the enemies of the literary are hiding themselves.

Having written and sent the article, I went down to the street to take a breather. As a writer, clearly, I live like a housewife. So to get out of the house and go for a walk each day is always beneficial. Otherwise I would end up drowning at home. I went for a wander in the vicinity and unexpectedly bumped into Rosa coming the other way, back from work. We were both overjoyed to recognize each other among the anonymous people in the street. It was preferable to meet there than at home, where there is no surprise and it’s always the same, Rosa comes back from work and we give each other a peck on the cheek. But today in the street was something else, we were both overjoyed. It must have been the best moment in a day, which is — I hope — already finishing.

Around eight, I took a sedative that relaxes me and calms my desire at that time in the evening, and started drinking in an attempt to bring the day to an abrupt close, to wait for tomorrow to return to my routine life as a housewife who gets up at eight, has an instant coffee, reads for encouragement to write, writes until two, then has lunch in the awful restaurant on the corner, later attends to his mail and the telephone and around five writes an article for a living and, with moderate enthusiasm, as the evening draws in, welcomes his wife home, and then watches television and goes mad if he does not take a sedative. If he takes the sedative, he goes mad as well, he just does so in a more relaxed way, without, however, ceasing to notice the grayness of his existence as a writer tied for life to his trade and the monotony of the daily tragedy of his life.

OK, not all the days are exactly the same. Today, for example, I took the sedative and, just as it was taking effect, received a call from a friend — whom I envy, I should like to copy him, lead his adventurous life and possess the intelligent vision he, as a literary critic, has of everything he reads, I said before that I was a frustrated critic — he wished to thank me for having recommended that he read César Aira. “The guy’s crazy, but he’s good,” he told me. I wanted to know why he thought he was crazy. “Well, his humor is completely round the bend,” he said. “Aira’s humor is totally unintentional,” I corrected him, on a war footing, a little nervous and uneasy despite the sedative. “I don’t think so,” my friend the critic replied. At this point I felt obliged to explain to him, having to control my temper — at this stage in the day I am fairly irritable and anything can wind me up further, sedative time is never a good time for me, even though it relaxes me or precisely because of this — I felt morally obliged to clarify one or two things about Aira and I told him — as if I were the critic, no doubt motivated by the envy I feel toward him — that Aira never tires of saying that he writes seriously and people find him hilarious and that is why he has turned into a misanthrope. “It’s strange that you should not see that you don’t exactly have to believe every word Aira says,” he told me, recovering his position as an intelligent man who defeats me in arguments.

For the first time ever, I took a second sedative. I continued talking to my friend, but every time he said something, I silently exacted revenge thinking about the day in Rome when he told me that he was going to commit suicide and I, already envious of him and also distrustful of his suicidal threats, did not lift a finger to dissuade him — I went so far as to tell him that, if he was planning to kill himself because the critic Stanisław Wiciński was miles better than him, he would do very well to take himself out of the picture — I opened a bottle of red Imola wine and sat down in the sitting room of the house in Rome and, having taken my seat, waited to see if by chance the explosion went off.

To return to today, at around ten in the evening, suddenly distressed at not being a critic and above all depressed because Rosa was not talking to me — she was absorbed watching a program on Catalan TV–I started reading Virginia Woolf’s diary and wondering whether or not to include it in this dictionary. For a long time I was lost among all those intelligent and angst-ridden pages she wrote over twenty-seven years, always in the half hour following teatime. “I will go down with my colors flying,” she wrote in the penultimate entry recorded in her diary, three weeks before her suicide. The sentence contains great pride and is very moving, but it is also true to say that the sentence has an unbearable aura of sadness, which managed to depress me even more. I decided to forget Virginia Woolf for today and started reading a story by Samuel Beckett, “From an Abandoned Work,” in which an old man, clearly mad, perhaps stultified by age, attempts to remember a day from his past, from the moment he left home in the morning to the time he came back at night. And one has the impression that three days, not one, have gone by.

Even the old man’s life seemed more interesting than my own and I told myself that I do well to invent when I devote myself to literary creation and renounce realism, because I would be stuck if I had to talk all the time about my gray existence as a housewife who writes. In short, I read the story of this dumb old man created by Beckett and was on the verge of taking a third sedative. Increasingly anxious and sleepy, I ate a potato omelet that Rosa had prepared and went to bed. I dreamed that I was more dumb than Beckett’s old man. Then I woke up and wrote down here what I did today, since I want the reader to have a certain idea of what I am like in my daily life, in which I lead such a monotonous and horrific existence that not infrequently I try to escape from it by writing about realities far removed from my real life. Of course, if I did not write, I wouldn’t have to spend so much time at home, and perhaps then I would lead a less gray life than at present. But what’s the use? “What’s the use of Pentothal,” as my mother would say. I’m not so obsessed about literature-sickness as I was when, for example, I arrived in Nantes in November of last year. That is why I can now say with an easy conscience that, between life and books, I choose the latter, which help me to make sense of the former. Literature has always enabled me to understand life. And for precisely that reason it leaves me outside it. I mean it: I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thursday (extract from Gombrowicz’s diary)

I got up, as usual, around ten, and had breakfast: tea with cakes, followed by oatmeal. Letters: one from Litka in New York; another from Jelenski in Paris. At midday I went to the office (on foot, it’s not far). I spoke to Marrill Alberes on the phone about the translation and to Russo to discuss the proposed trip to Goya. Ríos called to tell me they were already back from Miramar, and Drabrowski (regarding the flat).

At three, coffee and bread with ham.

At seven, I left the office and headed in the direction of Costanera Avenue for a breath of fresh air (it’s very hot, about 90 degrees). I was thinking about what Aldo told me yesterday. Then I went to Cecilia Benedit’s home and we went out for dinner together. I had soup, steak frites, and salad, stewed fruit. I hadn’t seen her for some time, so she told me about her adventures in a Mercedes […]. From there, around midnight, I went to the Rex for a coffee […]. On the way home, I went into the Tortoni to pick up a package and talk to Pocho. At home, I read Kafka’s diary. Went to sleep around three. I tell you all this for you to know what I am like in my daily life.

Friday

“Then,” says Justo Navarro, “you grab the thing that is closest: you talk about yourself. And, writing about yourself, you begin to see yourself as if you were another, you treat yourself as if you were another: you move away from yourself in proportion as you approach yourself.”

Saturday

In an essay by Alan Pauls on the genre, I have just read that the great theme of the private journal in the twentieth century is sickness. I didn’t know, I had never thought about this. And yet — curious coincidence — one of my diary’s central ideas, one of its most recurring themes, is undoubtedly that of sickness, in this case literature-sickness, Montano’s malady in short.

“The great theme of the private journal in the twentieth century,” writes Alan Pauls, “is sickness. The annotations which the writer attaches to this illness represent something like a daily, unflagging report, giving an account of its progress, a kind of clinical history that seems only to have ears for the stealthy expressiveness of the ailment.”

As I deduce from what I have read in this essay on the genre, those writing great private journals in the last century did not do so to know who they were, but kept them to know what they were turning into, in which unforeseeable direction catastrophe was taking them. “It is not, therefore, the revelation of a truth that these diaries could or wanted to give us, but the crude, clinical account of a mutation.”

We are, therefore, face-to-face with writing’s clinical dimension. Surely in these pages I have been striving — perhaps without being entirely aware of it until now — to find out where the elimination of my illness, of my Montano’s malady, would lead me. To silence, probably. Is this a good thing? I don’t think so, because I would be back to where I was in the beginning: seated before the rickety chair of someone who is tragically agraphic. So surely the illness is better than the cure.

But is the illness a good thing? At the moment the best thing would be to keep smoking, to keep writing: to write, for example, that I am smoking. I take a drag from my cigarette and remember that, in Gombrowicz’s diary, the writer ends up identifying himself with the evil: “I myself was the illness, meaning the anomaly, meaning something related to death….”

But was Gombrowicz being sincere when he wrote this? His diary is not exactly a masterpiece of sincerity, that quality so many hope to find in a private journal. In his diary, he accomplished a new inventive form and at the same time invented a new form of writing a diary. And he did this perhaps because, as a writer, what Gombrowicz feared most was Sincerity, he knew that Sincerity in literature led nowhere: “Has there ever been a diary that was sincere? The sincere diary is without a doubt the most fallacious, because frankness is not of this world. And also — sincerity, what a bore! It isn’t even faintly fascinating.”

Because of all this, he did not allow his diary to become confessional. He understood in time that in his diary he had to present himself in action, in his intention to impose himself on the reader in a certain way, in his will to create himself in sight of and with the knowledge of everyone. To tell the reader, “This is how I want to be for you,” and not, “This is how I am.” Gombrowicz claimed the right to his own face: “Surely I do not have to allow every Tom, Dick, and Harry to disfigure me as he pleases.”

I am doing something similar here, in this dictionary, resounding fortissimo with one of the great themes of existentialism: the creation of one’s self.

“But,” the reader might say, “you’ve been trying for some time now to be sincere, to give reliable information about your life.”

And it’s true, in many pages of this dictionary I have been kneeling before the altar of Truthfulness and offering an amount of reliable information about my life, about how I composed the fictional Montano’s Malady, I have opened a parenthesis here with great pleasure, and I have done so in the form of a timid autobiography, but it’s also true that, by the time I reach Monsieur Teste and Paul Valéry, the final entries planned for this dictionary of writers of private journals, I intend to enter a space bordering fiction and reality, possibly as a way of letting off steam after having been so veracious, after having told truths — for now, I shall carry on doing so — about my fragmented life, very truthful truths, recounted as if I didn’t know that the truth is also invented, as Antonio Machado said.

GOMBROWICZ, WITOLD (Małoszyce, 1904–Vence, 1969). At the end of the twentieth century, Rosa and I went to Valparaiso to think about explosions. It isn’t that we had agreed beforehand on something so extravagant as traveling to a distant place just to think about something so alien to us as explosions. No, in reality we went to Valparaiso just to celebrate the end of the century, but what happened was that, once we were on the hanging terrace of the Brighton Hotel, watching the fireworks launched from ships anchored in the bay, neither Rosa nor I could stop thinking about something normally so far from our minds as blessed explosions. So much so, that Valparaiso will always be linked in our minds with explosions and the names of six Chilean friends: Paula and Roberto Brodsky, Andrés, Rodrigo, Carolina, and Gonzalo. With all of them we spent the restless night of December 30, in a house facing the Pacific, in Tunquén, and the following day, with the idea of celebrating the end of the century, we made the long drive to the Brighton in Valparaiso, where we had booked all six rooms in this small hotel equipped with a truly unforgettable terrace, a terrace with a wonderful view of the city and bay, a space that today, with the perspective afforded by memory, strikes me as one of the central places in my life.

In Tunquén, the night before, we had been chatting and drinking until the early hours of the morning, in an ideal atmosphere for me, since our Chilean friends showed — or at least very politely feigned — a certain interest to know episodes and memories from my life: something that does not tend to happen to me in Barcelona, for example, where nobody seems interested in knowing fragments of my life — they behave as if they already knew it — and that may explain why they arrange to meet me in the city’s rowdiest bars and restaurants, they deliberately arrange to meet me in a place where they know that conversations will always be disrupted and nervous. In Tunquén, however, I was listened to with respect, laughter, and attention. Even Rosa seemed to be amused by my recollections and was especially charming when she laughed in the company of the others.

A long, unforgettable evening, with laughter at times punctuating some of my remarks. As, for example, when Carolina — an inspired journalist, a good interviewer in real life — asked me point-blank, almost treacherously, what I should like to be were I not a writer. And, after a brief hesitation, I replied that I should like to be a psychiatrist specializing in dissociative post-traumatic stress and disorders, and a member of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. (Response followed by prolonged laughter.)

I have never recalled so many things out loud as I did that night in Tunquén. I recalled, for example, the time in the 1970s when I lived between Paris and Berlin and considered myself to be a radical leftist and undergrounder and was friends with people like Ingrid Caven, Paloma Picasso, and Ulrike Meinhof (before she became a terrorist). And I recalled how in those days it seemed that my destiny — like that of many of my peers — would be loneliness, drugs, violence, or suicide. I remembered my mother, so fragile and strange, a secret poet, resembling Alejandra Pizarnik, permanently halfway between barbiturates and (the as yet unnamed) Montano’s malady. I remembered how my generation wanted to change the world, though said perhaps it was far better that our dreams never came true. I recalled the day I discovered that writing is like walking in the library of life. I recalled the day I discovered Cernuda and he made me literature-sick: “Light is the part of life / that like gods poets rescue.” I remembered how I used to sell apartments with my father on the Costa Brava. I remembered a trip to Warsaw, when I was twenty-five, a trip from Paris made exclusively to have dinner with Sergio Pitol. And finally I recalled how two days previously, on the airplane bringing Rosa and me to Chile, I had dreamed that I was married to the Canadian filmmaker Julia Rosenberg and how by chance, hours after that dream, I had learned that Rosenberg was married to a writer, the New Yorker Jonathan Lethem, who — and this was the strangest part — looked a lot like me when I was young, as I suddenly discovered in a photograph I came across completely by chance in one of the inflight magazines; he looked like the young man who had walked in Paris and Berlin in the 1970s, he looked like me before I began to resemble the elegant but vampiric Christopher Lee: a slightly tragic and regrettable destiny, but, when it comes to it, no harder than any other.

The evening was a little spoiled at the end, when Gombrowicz’s name was mentioned and our Chilean friends, wanting to see how I reacted when I got angry, piqued me by suggesting in a snide and persistent way, using the most varied arguments, that on more than one occasion I had copied the Polish writer.

There the night came to an end.

I slept little and badly. I dreamed that Julia Rosenberg was dancing with an iguana on a beach on the Pacific full of old people talking constantly about funereal themes, about how in their time it was customary for all the mirrors in the house of the deceased to be covered over with silk crêpe as a sign of mourning.

The following morning, none of us having rested very much, we began the long and tortuous journey — owing to the general hangover — to the Brighton, where we arrived at about half-past one in the afternoon and where the first thing Rosa and I were able to confirm was that the hotel’s famous hanging terrace was as spectacular as the Brodskys had told us.

The hotel was occupied by us, but the terrace at that time seemed to belong to the entire city of Valparaiso, there wasn’t room for another soul. What I saw as soon as I stepped onto it, I put down to the hangover: beneath a sunshade, an old and very ugly man, with horrible, grandiose ears and shaved head, appeared to be absorbed in reading Pornografia, a book by Gombrowicz.

As the Brodskys had told me that we were due to meet a friend of theirs who had been unable to come to Tunquén, I thought that this horrible, vampiric old man could be the person they planned to introduce to me. Separating from the group and spontaneously taking the initiative, as if drawn by the brotherly call of Nosferatu’s blood, I approached the old man and jokingly asked how much the Brodskys were paying him to pretend to be reading Gombrowicz.

The look that man directed toward me I would not wish on anyone.

“The Brodskys?” he said. “What on earth are you talking about? Those creatures who, with your lordship, have just stepped on to the terrace? Are they the Brodskys? I have to tell you, sir, those kids must be very good at playing ball.”

This man was undoubtedly very odd, and not just on account of his vampiric appearance. He was elegant, but very strange. And his elegance was also strange, not to say extravagant. For example, he was wearing a belt strapped around his waist, on top of his white shirt, as if he were tying himself up.

It seemed to me, despite his chilling gaze, that he was joking and I simply had to go along with it.

“They’re pretending to be adults,” I said. “But they’re just as much children as are you, who owns the ball.”

His next look made me think I was mistaken and this man had nothing to do with the Brodskys, I had been talking to a stranger in the literal sense of the word.

“Mistakes like yours,” he told me, suddenly sounding like Gombrowicz and adopting a very unpleasant tone, “deserve a flick. And now, mister intruder, clear off if you do not want to discover that my belt is a whip.”

Your head reminds me of a large lily, I thought of telling him. But the sentence was too soft for my liking. Your pale forehead is a confused map. This also seemed too soft, and sweet besides, and even sickeningly poetic. You’re the one who’s a flick, I thought of telling him. But I found that simplistic. You son of a bitch. This seemed more to the point, but too vulgar and direct. Besides, I had to show respect for my elders. All the same, I felt a sudden dislike for this man, he struck me as rude and detestable, and finally I went for this bold question:

“Did Your Majesty get his Draculean or DraculARSEan ears from his lady mother, the Great Arse?”

I thought that he would at least give me a smack or a heavy lash, but he didn’t. He looked at me, smiled, and roared with monumental, theatrical laughter, as spectacular as that terrace. Everyone suddenly turned toward us, and I almost blushed. His laughter seemed to have no end, but it ended. He then became very serious and reached out his hand to me in a friendly manner.

“Tongoy,” he said, “Felipe Tongoy.”

He was a friend of the Brodskys, I was not mistaken. But the fact he was reading Gombrowicz was in no way related to the previous night’s argument in Tunquén. Felipe Tongoy had been a fan of Gombrowicz his whole life, and that was all. Or nothing. Because Tongoy had such an odd appearance, he was seven times Dracula compared to me. And it was difficult to be sure about him, though this much was undoubtedly clear: he was friends with the Brodskys and read Gombrowicz.

“Tongoy,” he said again. “Felipe Tongoy. I am the Brodskys’ oldest friend. I like dry martinis, Chile, Gombrowicz, and vampires. Garçon,” he shouted to the waiter, “ink, please!”

He had ink on his gums, perhaps he had just eaten squid in their ink. He aroused in me neither disgust nor fear, I saw him as a friend, but most of all — this calmed me — as a friend of the Brodskys; though he did arouse in me a certain amount of fear, or even a great deal, not because of the Brodskys, but because of the strange ink on his gums. My blood was not circulating too well, I could feel it. I had never seen anyone so literature-sick as this monster.

“Girondo,” I replied, trembling. “Rosario Girondo at your service.”

“Do you like Chile?” he asked me with a devilish look.

I thought hard before answering.

“Chile is OK,” I said finally.

He smiled at me, I suppose so that I could see the ink again. And shortly afterward, with his left hand, which was the one he had free — because with his right he was again calling the waiter — he touched his monstrous right ear.

I recalled Gombrowicz: “If you wish to indicate that you liked my work, simply touch your right ear when you see me.”

“Girondo,” I said, also touching my ear. “Rosario Girondo.”

This tremulous and extravagant exchange of ears by way of credentials — with Gombrowicz in the background — was the start of a great, unexpected friendship.

“My dear Mrs. Girondo,” Tongoy said suddenly, with a huge, horrific happy smile, “welcome to the Brighton.”

Thursday

BUT IT’S RAINING!

The rain is falling on Barcelona, though with less wind and less cruelty than yesterday, when I went to the Avenida Palace to meet Rita Gombrowicz. It may seem a very curious coincidence or a very fortuitous chance, but the fact is that, as I was absorbed in the entry for Gombrowicz in this dictionary, Rita, his widow, arrived yesterday in Barcelona, and I went to see her at her hotel, the Avenida Palace. It may seem a very fortuitous chance, but in truth I had known for a month that Rita Gombrowicz was going to come to Barcelona and that she and I had to present a book by her husband in the bookshop La Central. To be honest, knowing this made me linger over the word Gombrowicz, because I did not want to find myself commenting on another author of private journals — Kafka, for example, the next entry in this dictionary — with Rita in Barcelona.

Yesterday I went to fetch her from the Avenida Palace. It was a very unpleasant afternoon, rain and a strong wind, a rare winter’s day in the middle of spring. I had seen only old photographs of Rita, images from the 1960s, from the time she went to live with Witold Gombrowicz, but I immediately recognized her. Inclined as I am to mythologize writers (Gombrowicz has always been a myth for me, which is not to say that he has influenced my writing, I made this very clear in Tunquén), I was nervous at the beginning of the meeting with Rita, but soon there arose between us a mutual current of sympathy and intimacy, as if we had known each other our whole lives.

It was raining steadily outside, it was raining in an aggressive way that was not at all melancholic, but the conversation in the hotel foyer turned nostalgic and persistent, seemingly enveloped in a strange melancholy invented by a rain that was not the rain outside, and gradually the meeting with Rita inclined toward intimacies: “He was someone,” she said of her husband, “who worked a lot on himself, creating his own style. He belonged to a group of writers whose work is the reincarnation of their own personality.”

We proceeded to talk about the close relationship between life and work, and we discussed writers who devote themselves to creating their own style. I didn’t wish to say anything about myself, but if there is one point I have in common with Gombrowicz, it is the origin of my literary style, based — as in his case — on a radical departure from the boring and conservative family discourse.

Gombrowicz’s style would have been nothing without the participation of his mother, who was naive, gluttonous, comfort loving, and whose culture was more fashionable than anything else. She was all this by nature, but she believed that she was lucid, intellectual, frugal, and heroically ascetic. “It was she,” wrote her son, “who pushed me to pure folly, to the absurd, which would later become one of the most important features of my art.” Together with his brother Jerzy, Gombrowicz very quickly hit upon the ideal way to wind her up: it involved systematically affirming the opposite of what she might say. Their mother had only to declare that the sun was shining for the two brothers to reply in unison, “But what are you saying? It’s raining!”

It is no surprise that, years later, Gombrowicz declared that he did not worship poetry and was not overly progressive or modern, or the typical intellectual, or even a nationalist, Catholic, Communist, upright man, nor did he revere science, art, or Marx: “Who was I then? Frequently I was simply the negation of everything the other person said.”

In my case, I learned, every day more skilfully, to interrupt my father’s boring discourse on, for example, our country’s dreams, its bungles and culture. I became the negation of everything he would propose, suggest, lay out, or declare. But, since my father’s discourse hardly ever flagged and was one-sided — only he could speak at home — I barely had time for my interjections, which took advantage of short pauses in my father’s discourse to slip in small tributes to folly, always trying to unbalance him. “You’re no son of mine,” my father would say. And also: “I don’t know why you always have to be different in front of me.”

To counteract the constant appearance of clichés in my father’s discourse, I had to — and this is what I did — concentrate all my energy on snippets of homespun skulduggery, short and avant-garde skirmishes with which I built up a nonconformist and eccentric literary style: an avant-garde style to begin with, which with time has simmered down. A style opposed to family boredom, that of my parents’ home, but also to the crushing boredom of the country in which I had chanced to be born. A contradictory style, an attempt always to say something different, with humor if possible, to break with the lack of irony in the head of the family’s antiquated and one-sided monologue. A style without too many flesh-and-blood literary characters. A style in revolt against everything, most of all against the sleep-inducing Spanish realism, a style that was always ironic toward the marchionesses and proletarian women, lovers and prostitutes, coming and going at five in the afternoon in today’s Spanish novels.

I originate from the avant-garde movement and the skirmishes that family boredom forced me into. And, although I later simmered down, I have devoted my whole life to shunning the established order and trying to create my own style and to say something different. I hate it, for example, when taxi drivers talk to me about the weather and abruptly initiate a string of set phrases. Just yesterday, when I was heading toward the Avenida Palace, the taxi driver said something to me about the gallons of rain that had fallen. During a pause in his leaden discourse, I hijacked the conversation and said (knowing that this would confuse and silence him), “Just today I was given the opportunity to kill bad weather. Do you know what I did?” Anxious silence, bewilderment. “I simply washed the weather’s face. That’s why it appears to be raining. You may not have realized that, in fact, it’s not raining.”

Thanks to my style, I can survive even in a taxi. With the taxi driver talking to me about the weather, I must have reached the Avenida Palace yesterday at about seven in the evening. The presentation in La Central was at eight, and Ferdydurke the book we were going to speak about. First we discussed other matters in the hotel, and did so with the steady, persistent rain of unexpected melancholy.

The real rain was waiting for us outside, when at about half-past seven we started walking along the Rambla de Catalunya, toward the bookshop. We were protected from that real rain by the red umbrella that had accompanied me in the rain in Nantes and had witnessed the birth of Montano’s Malady, an umbrella to which I had since attributed creative powers.

A single umbrella for two fans of Gombrowicz. But two rains for them. And even an imaginary sun.

“It’s not raining,” I said. “The sun’s coming out.”

Rita understood me, she grasped the tribute to Gombrowicz’s anti-maternal style and joked, with a happy and unforgettable wink:

“But it’s raining!”

The red umbrella started trying to unbalance me, the wind shook it from side to side and never have two fans of Gombrowicz gotten so wet. In the face of such an assault, it occurred to me to say to Rita that our umbrella wanted to commit suicide. “Clearly you’re not only concerned about flesh-and-blood characters, you also see a soul in umbrellas,” she said. I would have replied that in my books such characters are conspicuous by their absence, but I preferred not to speak about me and asked her if she was particularly interested in the flesh-and-blood people who appear in novels. She stopped abruptly in the middle of the street, in the rain, almost taking root in the wet tarmac while, among the gusts of wind, she considered her response. “I’m interested,” she said slowly, “in the traces of tears but not the tears. I’m interested in what flesh-and-blood characters leave in writing, and not so much in them.”

As I was about to say that not everybody leaves something in writing, Rita startled me by referring to an anonymous suicide note. The note simply said, “So much doing up and undoing.”

At that moment, the red umbrella took flight (its remains rest today in the kitchen at home), drawing a strange parabola and crashing against a tree in the Rambla. To indicate that I had liked the anonymous farewell note, with another wink of Gombrowicz collusion, I touched my ear as a sign of approving the phrase “so much doing up and undoing.” But Rita was no longer there, she had sensibly sought refuge in a doorway. While the umbrella left the tree and again took to its wings and started forging its own style on discovering revolt and freedom, I stood there absurdly still in the middle of the Rambla, a flesh-and-blood character soaked to the skin, representing for whoever wished to see the grotesque figure of a madman who has lost his umbrella and touches an ear. There I stood, a victim of my own style, there I stood for a short while, very still, as if I believed that really it was not raining, but a perfect midday sun was shining.

KAFKA, FRANZ (Prague, 1883–Kierling, 1924). “My outer ear felt fresh, rough, cold, and juicy to the touch, like the leaf of a tree,” writes Kafka in his 1910 diary. His remark refers me to another, reminds me of something I heard Claudio Magris say one evening in Barcelona: “Literature may also be part of the world in the same way as leaves are, for example.”

Magris’ remark not only consoles me, but returns me to the world. Literature and the world enter into harmony. I no longer consider it so serious to be literature-sick. It is pleasant to feel, as I feel this morning, in harmony with the world. But I remember a day in the summer of 1965, I remember that day very well, because I think I have never been so far removed from that harmony with the world.

Since, on that August afternoon, the notion of literature barely existed for me — I read little, spy novels, and I still hadn’t discovered Cernuda, I still didn’t know that I could find a warm but sickly refuge in literature, a refuge from the roughness of life — I could not find a place in the world, I felt deeply lost and disconsolate.

I could not find a place in the world, and not for lack of trying. I was anxious to find a place, however humble, in whatever Order: in the infinite universe, in the grayness of the world of work, in a spy ring, in a lunatic asylum, in a family with parents more sensible than my own, in the mediocrity of a peaceful married life seen as a lesser evil next to loneliness …

I had a lot of the sad hero of our time. But since I hardly read anything at all — I was almost completely detached from the literature that would later ensnare me — I could not draw on the happy and imaginative resources that reading offers us, allowing us to escape from the anxiety which sometimes pins us down. And, as for being ignorant, I didn’t even know — how it would have helped me that day! — that this is what I was, that at the age of fifteen I was the classic hero of our time. Knowing it would undoubtedly have benefited me, would even have made me feel — in my sadness — like an important young man, would even have given my life a certain meaning, would have helped me not to fall into the absolute disconsolation I fell into completely at around seven in the evening of that summer’s day, when, in my father’s absence, it was my turn to lock up the office on the Costa Brava where I helped him to sell apartments. On other days when I had been the one to lock up the office, I had felt a special satisfaction at having that responsibility. But on that summer’s day I was deeply disconsolate. I closed the office and looked at the world, I looked at the sea and then at the mountain. Sea and mountain, mountain and sea, sleeping and waking, studying and working, waking and sleeping, so much doing up and undoing …

I locked up and sat on the ground, in front of the closed office. I sat on the ground because I didn’t know where to go. After a short while, a respectable couple came by, who were friends with my parents. By way of greeting and a little surprised, they asked me, with no intention of interfering in my life or rebuking me for something, what I was doing there on the ground. “Business is going well,” I told them, “but I cannot talk to the employees, I cannot talk to the customers.” They were a little perplexed. My father had no employees, or, rather, I was his only employee. “Is something the matter?” they asked me. From the ground, I replied with another question: “Where am I going to go?” A slight panic took hold of them, I noticed that they were disturbed. And shortly afterward I discovered that the same thing was happening to these two poor creatures, they didn’t know where to go either. It seemed odd to me that this should happen to them as well, given that they were responsible and respectable adults. But, however odd it may have seemed to me, this was the case. I felt almost panic-stricken seeing them like this, so disoriented, inhibited and directionless, viewing the world with the same surprise with which I viewed it that afternoon. I should have liked to lend them a hand, but I was not the most suitable person to do this, I was not exactly in a fit state to help these adults, these respectable friends of my parents.

Another Kafkaesque episode, an incident that still haunts me now: the memory of the day I turn eighteen and insult my mother when I discover that she has lent my copy of Camus’ The Stranger to the daughter of a friend. “Leave my books alone! They’re all I have.” I say this to her, and also other, more aggressive things, charged with real fury. Without realizing, I am beginning to suffer from Montano’s malady. And then, at night, my parents whispering in bed, in the room next to mine. The enigmatic whisper of their voices. The almost complete certainty that they’re talking about me and about my angry outburst on account of Camus’ book. My ear pressed against the door of their bedroom and my inability to hear a single word, only the terrible, indecipherable murmurings. I think of suddenly opening the door of their room and telling my father, “Hold on to her, grab the flesh that’s next to you, your wife’s flesh is bound to calm you down, stop talking about your son who’s a stranger.” But no, I don’t open the door of my parents’ bedroom. No, I don’t open it.

I should have liked to have three sisters and to talk to them in Yiddish, to talk in a language my parents could not understand. It was not good to be an only child and to confront alone the terror that the manly resonance of my father’s voice and my mother’s weak voice — like the whisper of fallen leaves — caused me. I should have liked to have three sisters, and for the eldest to spend the day lounging on the sofa in my parents’ sitting room and to have shapely, bare, rounded, strong, dark shoulders that I would spy on at every moment, always proud that these shoulders belonged to the family estate. I should have liked my middle sister to walk around the house in an ash-colored corset, the lower part of which would be so far from her body that one could straddle it. I should have liked my youngest sister to be my favorite and to have a tender regard for her madness, I should have liked very much for my youngest sister to remind me of that young descendant of Lord Byron whom I saw one evening in Caffé Florian in Venice, that beautiful, deranged young woman who kept on asking for her ancestor. “Where is my George? What have you done to him?” she would shout out. I don’t know, I should have liked to have three sisters and to talk to them in Yiddish and not to have been the only child I was, a clumsy stranger in my parents’ home.

Sunday

An incredible, sunny spring day on which Rosa is in Turin and I am home alone and decide to lower the blinds and do without the happy, festive day, purely because I have an impression of absolute freedom, that I can do whatever I feel like, and the only thing I really feel like doing is not being too free and shutting myself up in darkness, thinking about Kafka and this dictionary where I try to comment on the world with my favorite diarists and which, if I am not careful, could turn into one of those texts commenting unendingly on the world.

I don’t think anyone is more literature-sick than Kafka. His diary is terrifying. At eight in the morning, he would arrive punctually at his office. He would write documents and reports, make inspections. He worked there, in that crowd of miserable workers and employees, where his superiors did not know him, only because he knew that he should not devote all his time to literature. He was afraid that literature would suck him in, like a whirlpool, causing him to lose his bearings in its limitless expanse. He could not be free, he needed a limitation, to have all the time to write struck him as dangerous, terrible. He would return to his parents’ home at about quarter-past two in the afternoon. He said that he felt like a stranger, although he had great love for his family, parents, and sisters. From time to time it occurred to him that he should move away from his friends and do so without the slightest consideration, become enemies with everyone, talk to no one. Other times, the opposite: he sought out his friends or favorite writers to establish a dialogue and to begin to comment unendingly on the world, as if what he wanted was to reach the source of all writing.

An incredible spring Sunday on which I close the windows and reread The Castle, a novel that cannot end, among other reasons because in it the Surveyor does not travel from one place to another, but from one interpretation to another, from one commentary to another. The Surveyor pauses at every bend in the imaginary road and comments on everything. One has the impression that he writes in order to reach the source of all writing, and in the meantime — in a series of commentaries that become endless — he comments on the world. He seems always to be searching for the first person to name something, for the original source. He strives to find the first to write something, the man who wrote the first word or phrase. But, for this, he must take on three thousand years of writing. Unlike Don Quixote, Kafka’s novel is not explicitly about books — K. is a surveyor, not a reader or writer — and so does not suffer from Montano’s malady or pose problems relating to writing; it carries those problems in its own structure as a novel, given that essentially K.’s pilgrimage does not involve changing places, but going from one exegesis to another, from one commentator to another, listening to each one of them with avid interest and then participating and arguing with everybody, following a method of thorough examination.

As Justo Navarro told me one day, The Castle is the torment of an unending commentary. I think of this statement and tell myself that no doubt it is also the journey of someone searching for the first word, the original word, the source of all writing.

“I know, there need to be two of us.”

“But why two? Why two words to say the same thing?”

“Because it’s always the other who says it.”

I wish to free myself from Montano’s malady, but hopefully the gods and Kafka won’t let me. I wish to free myself from the malady, and that is why I write obsessively about it. However, I know that, were I to achieve this, I could not comment on my achievement, I could not write about it, because, if I did, this would show — since, directly or indirectly, I would have to name the malady to say that I had forgotten it — that I was still thinking about it in some way. This would obviously be as bad as having the malady itself and would end up giving me the impression that my progress toward death and my progress toward the word were one and the same. I wish to free myself from Montano’s malady, but, should this diary ever reach its final hour and I overcome the illness and my salvation be a possibility, I’m not at all sure that it really will be, I think it will be something I need to comment on. This confirms my suspicion that these pages could go on forever; I don’t know if it is desirable either that they do so or that they come to an end. This is how things stand and, living as much with dread of this diary’s infinite movement as with fear of its death, one calms down on this spring night and even rejoices to see that, although one is writing obsessively about it, one is fortunately still Montano-stricken.

MANSFIELD, KATHERINE (Wellington, 1888–Fontainebleau, 1923). We had left the vampiric Tongoy in Valparaiso welcoming me to the Brighton’s terrace; we had left him there after that strange exchange of greetings by ear, which was the start of our friendship. Hours later, that night of the end of the year and the century, endless drinking bout, joyful explosions. At midday on January 1, I again saw Tongoy on the Brighton’s terrace. “How odd he is,” said Rosa. We went toward where he was seated in a corner of the terrace, looking like he had an almighty hangover. It wouldn’t be long now before our man seriously martyred a fly.

We were making friendly remarks about the awful hangover face or mask he was wearing when he suddenly noticed that a fly had fallen into his dry martini and was trying weakly, but desperately, to climb out again. He gave us a frightful look and smiled, baring his fangs in all their splendor. After that he took a teaspoon and elegantly removed the fly from the glass and plopped it on to a paper napkin. A delicate gesture from the monster. The fly soon began to shake its front legs and, raising its tiny, soaked body, it undertook the heroic and moving task of cleaning the dry martini from its wings. Little by little, the fly began to recover and return to life. Tongoy did not stop looking at it. “It’s your good deed for the day,” Rosa said to him. Then Tongoy saw that the fly was about to take off again and he seemed not to like this. Using the teaspoon, he soaked it again in his dry martini. Three times he did this, until he killed it. “It was brave,” he said to us, “but I’m hungover and I’m not in the mood to spare anyone’s life.”

If he wanted to impress us, he had managed to do so, not a lot, but to a degree he had managed it. We remained in silence for a while. I don’t know what Rosa was thinking, I was thinking about Marguerite Duras. I was telling myself that, should Tongoy happen to remark that the fly had died at twenty minutes past twelve, he would be repeating some inspired words by Marguerite Duras, who, in a passage from her book Ecrire, explains how she was moved by a fly’s death throes in her garden at Neauphle-le-Château and how the exact time at which the fly had left this world had engraved itself upon her memory.

But Tongoy was not Marguerite Duras. If I had to compare him to a female writer, I would say he had something in common with Katherine Mansfield, Chekhovian storyteller and angst-ridden diarist, author of a story, “The Fly,” in which, with her customary poetic attention to detail and what is fleeting — with the same inspired melancholy that enabled Proust, for example, to describe the glimmer of twilight above the trees in the Bois de Boulogne — she recounted the forays into the dominions of death and return to life again and again of a fly trapped — a kind of literary illness — in a blot of ink.

I don’t think I shall be far off the mark if I say that the fly was Katherine Mansfield herself, who spent half her life fighting against consumption, fighting against death: “The clocks are striking ten […]. I have consumption. There is still a great deal of moisture (and pain) in my BAD lung. But I do not care. I do not want anything I could not have. Peace, solitude, time to write my books …”

“In Mansfield,” Alan Pauls has written, “sickness is much more than a theme of the journal, it is its only subject matter, its obsession, its favorite prey, and at the same time what gives her writing a rhythm, a cadence, a regularity.”

Sickness was the axis of her tormented life and she spoke obsessively about her illness in the journal, just as the fly murdered by Tongoy — had it possessed the power of speech — could have spoken at great length about its own form of consumption: the moisture of the dry martini.

MAUGHAM, WILLIAM SOMERSET (Paris, 1874–Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Nice, 1965). This English writer, who was born and died in France, published in 1949 a summary of the fifteen volumes of notes he had taken over more than half a century, a diary — entitled A Writer’s Notebook—which invariably took as its inspiration Jules Renard’s diary, one he regarded as a lesser masterpiece of French literature.

Maugham’s diary has always accompanied me over the years. “I am on the wing” is how it ends, and I have always considered this sentence and applied it to my life.

I share Maugham’s belief that “there is in the heroic courage with which man confronts the irrationality of the world a beauty greater than the beauty of art […]. I find it,” he goes on, “in the cool determination of Captain Oates when he went out to his death in the arctic night rather than be a burden to his comrades. I find it in the loyalty of Helen Vagliano, a woman not very young, not very pretty, not very intelligent, who suffered hellish torture and accepted death, for a country not her own, rather than betray her friends.”

Maugham always reminds me that nobility of spirit exists and this nobility does not come from thought or depend on culture and education. It has its roots in the human being’s most primitive instincts. The refuge against despair is perhaps to be found in the consciousness that the spirit’s salvation is a possibility.

MICHAUX, HENRI (Namur, 1899–Paris, 1984). It’s the end of the year, but it’s not the end of the century, nor are we in Valparaiso with Tongoy, we are with Henri Michaux at sea aboard the Boskoop, which takes him—“severe and reserved the boat,” he tells us in his travel journal — in the direction of Ecuador, final or penultimate day of 1927, I cannot be sure about the date. If private journals have one limitation, it is the calendar. As Blanchot has observed, the journal, so susceptible to the movements of life and capable of every freedom — since dreams, fictions, thoughts, commentaries about oneself, important or insignificant events, everything suits the journal, whatever their order or disorder — the journal is, however, subject to a seemingly trivial, but fearful clause: it must respect the calendar. It’s strange, but this respect for dates — I don’t know if Blanchot thought about it — vanishes at sea, as is evident in Michaux’s travel journal, which right from the beginning is tossed about by the waves: “Let me see, are there thirty or thirty-one days in December? And is it two or three days that we have been at sea? In the non-calendar of the sea? Poor diary!”

This morning, shortly after Rosa left for work, I went looking for Ecuador, I searched for the book in the library in order to reread it before tackling this author’s entry in my timid dictionary. While I was searching for it, perhaps providentially, I came across a short essay by Proust on Flaubert, an essay I had forgotten about, which, after I reread it, ended up influencing the construction of my entry on Michaux, as will now become clear.

Let us start anew.

MICHAUX, HENRI. All his life, Michaux thought of man as a “broken animal” with an unsatisfied hunger for the infinite. His style is always very dry. His style, did I say? All his writing is in fact a hard struggle against it: “Style, the ability to install himself and to install the world, is that what man is? That suspicious acquisition for which the jolly writer is praised? […] Try to get out. See far enough inside yourself for your style not to be able to follow you.”

Michaux’s travels were always really inner, almost armchair, travels, though we see him at sea or in the thick of the Ecuadorean forest. They were really journeys of self-study. In Ecuador we see him board the Boskoop and, although we pass through varied scenery, we soon notice that what most interests us is the traveler himself and that unique way of relating to the environment that leads him to revolutionize the typical travel journal or description of what is seen en route and to turn it into a distressing private journal of anxiety. His language travels inward and is quick as a whip. Sometimes a sentence consists of two bare and solitary words. “Radical introspection,” he writes, for example, or “intravenous connections with the landscape.”

This morning, while searching for Ecuador, I came across the essay by Proust I had forgotten about. I started flicking through it — only to find out what it was about — and in the end I couldn’t put it down. In his essay, Proust speaks of that confusion — still in force today, by the way — regarding the episode of the madeleine. He bemoans the fact that certain people, some of them extremely learned, ignorant of the rigorous but veiled composition of Swann’s Way, believed that the novel was a kind of book of memories, linked according to the accidental laws of the association of ideas. “In support of this He,” says Proust, “they quoted pages in which some crumbs of madeleine dunked in herbal tea remind me of a whole period from my life. Well […], to switch from one scene to another, I simply used not a fact, but the purest and most useful join I could find, a phenomenon of memory.”

Proust then suggests we read Chateaubriand’s Memoirs, in which he says it is perfectly clear that the author was also familiar with this method of abrupt transition, this phenomenon of memory. While in Montboissier, Chateaubriand suddenly hears a thrush sing. And this song he had listened to so much when he was young immediately takes him back to Combourg, urges him, together with the reader, to switch time and place. Immediately the narrative is situated somewhere else.

This technical device, this phenomenon of memory, this method of abrupt transition reminded me this morning of the overwhelming simplicity of a method I learned about from Jean Echenoz, the French novelist, who one evening, in the Aviador — a bar in Barcelona, decorated with propellers and shields, remains of airports and air disasters — talked to me about abrupt but effective transitions in his stories. “A bird goes by,” he said. “I follow it. This enables me to go wherever I like in the narrative.” It struck me as a very interesting lesson, one to bear in mind, and I remember that I thought that, viewed in this way, any line in a story could become a migratory bird, for example. I took note of all this because it struck me as a very good means by which, in the moment that a written sentence lasts, one can simply start listening to other voices, other rooms. In fact Echenoz applies his theory in Double Jeopardy, where the duke, Pons, handles some binoculars in the south of Asia and, on focusing them, sees the flight of some migratory birds — in a way that recalls those minute signs in Cosmos that reveal to Gombrowicz the direction of the flight of the narrative — which in arrowhead formation — apparently pointing to the next chapter — head straight for Paris. As a result, confronted by such an instantaneous change of scene, the reader is likewise obliged to get hold of some good binoculars.

Years later, in Montano’s Malady, I made use of Echenoz’s lesson in the Aviador bar to move the action quickly from a Chilean landscape to Barcelona: “Back on terra firma, I looked up at the cloudless sky of San Fernando and saw a bird go by. I followed it. And it seemed to me that following it enabled me to go wherever I liked, to make use of all my possible mental mobility. A few hours later I was flying in the direction of Barcelona….”

The technical solution of the migratory bird is surprising both for its effectiveness and for its great simplicity. But this is how certain technical problems that put writers in double jeopardy are often resolved. After all, the instantaneous switch to other voices, other rooms, is one of the secret advantages that literature has over life, because in life this switch is never so simple, whereas in books everything is possible, and often amazingly easy.

To return to this morning, having read Proust’s essay, I renewed the search for my copy of Ecuador, which I eventually found and began to reread, suddenly experiencing a Proustian phenomenon of memory when, seated in my favorite armchair, I embarked on a peaceful journey to Ecuador, which very soon ceased to be comfortable. On various occasions an icy headwind pushed me violently backward, transferring me to Atlantic scenes that everything indicated were behind me: unmistakable scenes from the Azores and, more specifically, from the islands of Fayal and Pico.

The first time that this phenomenon of memory took place was when I read that Michaux, on his way to Ecuador, on the island of Guadeloupe, had a room overlooking a volcano (“My room overlooks a volcano. / In short a volcano. / I’m two steps away from a volcano. / […] Volcano, volcano, volcano. / This is my music for tonight.”), which caused the appearance of the icy, Proustian headwind. I lifted my eyes from the book and traveled back in my memory to hear the voices of that pleasant Atlantic scene in the hotel room Rosa and I shared in February this year in Fayal, with its balcony overlooking the volcano on the enigmatic island of Pico, the hotel room next to Tongoy, who accompanied us on our four-day trip to the Azores. I couldn’t help recalling Tongoy as he rested in a hammock in the hotel in Fayal when I read in Michaux’s diary, “Drops of blood fall from the hammock placed over me. This is the danger with vampires, they suck your blood without your realizing. Once you have been a victim, the vampires recognize you among the others and are drawn toward you.”

When shortly afterward I left the image of Tongoy in the hammock in the Azores and managed to start reading Michaux again, another icy headwind blew when I read the description of the climate of Ecuador, so similar to that of the Azores: “It is difficult to establish the climate of this country. In the altiplanos people tend to say — and it’s fairly accurate — four seasons in one day.”

This happened again and again. I would read Michaux, and the Proustian wind would take me back to the Azores. As, for example, when he describes how he disembarked on the island of Curaçao. The charm he notices there strikes me as identical to that which Tongoy, Rosa, and I felt this February when, arriving from Fayal, we disembarked on the enigmatic island of Pico. Michaux writes, “Nothing so seductive as an island. There is nothing on the planet, I assure you, that looks so like a cloud as an island. Each time we are captivated by it.”

So it is that Ecuador at various points contains clear and somewhat mysterious similarities to our trip to the Azores. I would read Ecuador and a migratory bird or an icy wind would carry me back, leave me in my memories of the Azores: a nearly constant phenomenon of memory. As if this were not enough, I would sometimes come across lines in Michaux that reminded me of — in tribute to Michaux, let us call them intravenous—relations between Tongoy, Rosa, and me: “On this last day in the month of February, a sudden wind carried me mentally to my house in Paris, where I spent a few imaginary hours in the company of my wife and a friend, before returning intact to this steep, straight Ecuador.”

Although we went to the Azores on holiday, each of us had another reason to add to the idea of traveling for the sake of it. I was prompted also by my curiosity to see Café Sport, which Tabucchi talks about in The Woman of Porto Pim, Tongoy went because he had always been curious to experience a whaler’s life first hand, and Rosa — who initially was the only one without a special reason apart from being a tourist — also found an additional reason when at the Lisbon Airport she bought a book by one Antonio Caiado—“a secret, hidden writer, like Julien Gracq, who lurks on the island of Pico, in the Azores,” it says on the back cover — and she was so fascinated by the story told in this book that she even planned to locate this “hidden writer” and suggest being his literary agent.

The story of The Rest Home for the Beauty-Sick—the tide of Caiado’s novel has always sounded almost Japanese to me — was the following: an Italian from Verona who considers himself a “hunter of beauty” arrives in Pico intending to find the perfect home in which to live out the rest of his days, but ends up being admitted to a kind of rest home or spa where a series of unusual travelers live, “all of whom are beauty-sick.”

It goes without saying that this story unsettled me, since I suspected that beauty-sick might simply mean “literature-sick,” and I found the idea of a spa to treat the literature-sick repulsive. I did not wish to run the risk and continue reading this novel. Tongoy sided with me (for different reasons) and likewise refused to read the book. He also refused to visit the aforementioned Caiado on the island of Pico. Tongoy is not without a sense of humor, and his fears were directly contrary to mine, he was simply afraid of not finding himself in the pages of this book.

The day the three of us traveled on the ferry from Fayal to Pico, there was a stiff breeze, which did not take us back in Proustian fashion to any strange country, but did threaten to land us on our backs on the deck of the boat. Rosa was in a happy mood, perhaps because she was convinced that it was a great adventure to go in search of the “hidden writer” of the island of Pico. The sea spray dashed against her face and Rosa was prettier than ever, I’ve never seen her looking so good, though I was silently conspiring against her, planning the way to avoid having to visit Caiado’s house or refuge. With her stunning appearance, Rosa looked wonderful, standing quietly, with the sea spray in her face. “Ocean,” writes Michaux, “what a beautiful toy they would make of you, if only your surface were able to support a man, as is often indicated by your stunning appearance, your solid plate. They would walk on you. On stormy days, in amazement they would descend your dizzy slopes.”

Rosa looked happy in the middle of the ocean, the wind stirred her hair at high speed and then left just as quickly. I looked at her in delight. But all of a sudden I had a strange sensation and I still do not know if it was due to the stark contrast between beauty and the beast, between her appearance and Tongoy’s somber, vampiric face. The fact is that suddenly, despite the wind and the ocean’s extreme mobility, it seemed as if Rosa and the seascape had turned into a dead photograph, a painfully frozen scene, on pause, lacking in nature and life. Weird and dreadful sensation. The sensation that everything was dead, including Rosa, Tongoy, and me. Today I tell myself, on remembering that sensation and the appallingly bad weather in the channel connecting Fayal and Pico, that some words by Michaux would have gone down very well and even helped me at that odd moment: “By dint of pains, of vain ascents, by dint of being rejected from the outside, from the outsides I had promised myself I would attain, by dint of rolling down from almost everywhere, I have carved out a deep channel in my life.”

Hence it might be said that the deathly vision of the ocean, the sudden absence of life and nature on the sea that day, carved out a deep channel, without life or a way out, in my insides. Add to this the realization that Tongoy was also aware of the deathly panorama and mysteriously asked me, “Will there not be another death in paradise?” And add on top of this the sense of unease caused by the island of Pico as the ferry approached. There was barely a soul in sight when we disembarked in Madalena’s ghostly harbor. The town was deserted and a vast silence hung over it, broken only by the gusts of wind and by the birds. I felt uneasy and anxious; it was as if I had traveled to Comala, the town in Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, that town where everyone is dead.

Sad and solitary Madalena. To escape my anxiety, I asked Tongoy what we were doing there. “Visiting Antonio Caiado,” Rosa interposed. You’d think she’d have said, “I came to Pico because I was told a mysterious writer lived here.” We watched the four passengers traveling with us disembark from the ferry, they got off the boat with their bags and baskets, in grave silence. In a few seconds they disappeared like ghosts down the streets of Madalena, and that was the last we saw of them. “One visits Pico for the experience,” Tongoy remarked. We went for a wander in the town, but didn’t find or see anybody and, on returning to the pier, we found an old taxi driver in a run-down car, parked opposite the small town hall. He was clearly waiting for us, no doubt he had been warned from Fayal of the arrival of three tourists. “Where is everybody?” we asked him. “It’s Carnival, a holiday,” he answered. We hired him for a tour of the island, to drive down the road connecting Madalena and Lajes, the only road in Pico. Rosa asked about Caiado and the taxi driver, after a few moments’ hesitation, told us that he lived in a house on a small hill on the road to Lajes, but was never there; it was said on the island that he really lived in New York. “We won’t lose anything if we look to see if he’s there,” said Tongoy and, although I protested that it was a waste of time — perhaps because I felt jealous of the mysterious writer — it was decided, two against one, to visit Caiado. I didn’t forgive Tongoy his vote, I recall that I stared at him in anger and thought that he looked awful, more frightful than ever. But I later realized — while we were driving down the gloomy Lajes road — that by his presence Tongoy gave me a strange sense of security. Perhaps the kind of serenity he passed on to me was one of the reasons I had instinctively sought his friendship back on the terrace in Valparaiso. Tongoy possessed a monster’s warmth. “Very quickly,” writes Michaux, “it became obvious (from my teenage years) that I had been born to live among monsters.”

The only road on the island of Pico is — as I already described it in Montano’s Malady without adding a single drop of fiction — a narrow road that runs along the breakwater, with many curves and deep potholes, over and against a rebellious and very blue Atlantic Ocean. The road, which was once covered in vineyards and luxurious villas crosses a stony and melancholic landscape with occasional, isolated houses on small hills swept by the wind. In one of these houses on the hills, the taxi driver had fallen in love, and he told us about it. In another of these houses lived Caiado. When we parked a few yards from the mysterious writer’s house, because of the strong wind buffeting even the taxi, Tongoy refused to get out. “You go,” said Tongoy, “but I can tell you now that there’s no one in that house.” No doubt he was absolutely right. The house on the hill battered by the wind seemed firmly closed. In an act almost of courage, defying the strong wind in that region, Rosa and I abandoned the taxi and climbed the short slope, in constant danger of losing our balance, until we reached the front door.

I knocked at the door and it was like knocking at the door of lost time. We knocked three times, and the only answer we got was the fierce noise of the wind raging at the two pitiful trees that stood on top of the hill. On returning to the taxi, I thought that lost time doesn’t really exist, but what does exist — I told myself — is an empty, doomed house.

That night, back in Fayal, we went to Café Sport and drank gin with the old whalers and people from the yachts, all that bizarre set who cross the Atlantic in winter and turn up at Café Sport and chat to the whalers in a fascinating exchange of adventures. With the aid of alcohol, I began to imagine that a character by the name of Teixeira lived in that empty, doomed house on Pico’s small hill and taught laughter therapy, a copy of “the new man,” the man to come, that inhuman man who is about to arrive in the world, if he hasn’t already. I imagined him living in the house on the hill, facing the sea, his house secretly connected, by underground galleries, with a world of moles and enemies of the literary inhabiting the inside of the volcano.

Rosa saw me engrossed in thought and suddenly asked me if anything was the matter. “No,” I said, “I was thinking about Caiado and how it’s a shame not to have seen him. Do you think he exists?” Rosa looked at me and downed her gin. “Maybe he’s dead,” she replied. I then recalled that death, another death, might also inhabit that famous paradise. And I proposed a toast to all the dead of Pico, to all those Pico souls who, according to the locals, take refuge in the farthest reaches of the wells and courtyards and whose voice is the song of crickets. Various sailors from the yachts anchored in Fayal and one or two of the old whalers joined the toast, all of them drunk and suddenly singing at the top of their voices a song of the Swiss Guard I had never heard before, the words of which fascinated me and which I jotted down on a Café Sport napkin:

Notre vie est un voyage

Dans l’hiver et dans la Nuit,

Nous chercherons notre passage

Dans le ciel où rien ne luit.

We then piled out on to the street, gin-soaked with the waning moon, rough sea, persistent moan of the wind. A bird went by. I followed it. Life is an inner journey, like Michaux’s travels. Life is a winter’s journey and goes from life to death. It is an entirely imaginary journey, as Louis-Ferdinand Céline said. This is where it derives its strength. Now I am in Barcelona, thinking that my problem is not suffering from Montano’s malady. This far into the winter’s journey, my problem is rather how to disappear—“What will we do to disappear?” as Blanchot said — how to manage to be a twin brother of MUSIL, Robert (Klagenfurt, 1880–Geneva, 1942), who dissolved in the fabric of his own unending work. Not long ago I remarked that it was not desirable for this diary to go on forever or to be mortal and have a single outcome. Now I see that what is really desirable may be to disappear inside it.

PAVESE, CESARE (Santo Stefano Belbo, 1908–Turin, 1950). Late into the night I was reading This Business of Living, Pavese’s private journal, I read to its well-known end (“Suicides are timid murderers […]. All this is sickening. Not words. An act. I won’t write any more.”). On closing the book, I told myself that literature cannot teach us practical methods, results to obtain, but only life’s coordinates. The rest is a lesson that should not be drawn from literature; it is life that should teach it. The private journal, literature in short, did not help Pavese to live very much, which was what most interested him. Could the diary have helped him in any way?

I closed the book and went to bed. I told myself that Pavese’s diary belonged to a period in world culture that tended to integrate existential experience with historical ethics. A period to which Pavese’s suicide seems to set a chronological boundary. I also told myself that, whereas Pavese’s diary was tragically anchored in life, that of Gide or Gombrowicz — closer to my sensibility — was anchored in literature, which is an autonomous world, an independent reality; it has no contact with reality because it is a reality in itself, a personal opinion of mine that no doubt Pavese would not agree with.

I closed the book and went to bed, thinking about all these things, admiring Pavese, but without being in tune with him, and I soon fell asleep. On a foggy road, I saw Robert Walser in conversation with Musil. “Out of here, that is my goal,” Walser was saying. “However much you cry, you won’t manage to be as real as I am,” replied Musil. “If I weren’t real, I couldn’t cry,” replied Walser. “I hope you don’t think those tears are real,” replied Musil.

They then left, or rather — making me feel incredibly jealous — they disappeared. I came to and wondered whether other ghosts from the dream would dare to speak. “Are you asleep?” Rosa asked from the sitting room, like a ghost. I pretended to be asleep and did not reply. Shortly afterwards Cesare Pavese deceased entered my room. He had walked a great distance, he told me, he had walked down Pico’s mysterious road and carried an empty, abandoned house — the world itself? — in his hand. “The dead do not laugh,” he told me. “Laughter is linked to life,” he told me. “Death will come and will have your eyes,” I told him. He was serious and quiet for a few moments. In effect he carried an empty house in his hand and walked along Pico’s road. “What’s the use of Pentothal” he finally said to me. I got up from bed and embraced him. Then Pavese asked me if I was Robert Walser. “I am,” I answered. “I’ve been waiting for you all my death and I’ll go on waiting,” he said. He possessed the voice I had imagined for Teixeira’s character, a nasal, somewhat sensual, but vaguely stupid voice. “Anything else?” I inquired. Pavese did not speak. Pavese was still there, but did not speak. “Not words,” I said. Then I fell asleep and dreamed nothing.

Saturday

THE DESPERATE FRIEND

Such is my regret for the lack of respect with which I undertook Pavese’s entry in this dictionary yesterday that I have spent the whole day today trying to add a few more constructive lines to it. I couldn’t, I cannot, correct what I wrote about the “nasal, somewhat sensual, but vaguely stupid voice” I imagined for Teixeira’s character and discovered was the voice of Pavese deceased. I cannot correct this, because it is true that I had this impression yesterday. And, if I had this impression, I am not now going to pretend and deny it; I do not forget that I swore at the start of this dictionary to kneel before the altar of Truthfulness. Nor can I deny that I saw him walking along Pico’s road, carrying an empty, abandoned house in his hand. I really did see him like this. What can I do if I saw him like this? By way of compensation, and above all because I was unfair yesterday, I believe I am in a position today to revise my opinion about Pavese’s diary and to recall here, without further ado, that, when he died, his friends had to force themselves to approach the bulging folder containing his diary (partly typed and partly handwritten); his friends had to overcome the sense of fearful reserve triggered by those pages, that secret itinerary of a life they had always supposed to be bitter and discontented, the pages of their friend whom they generally understood to be desperate.

Italo Calvino was one of the first friends to open Tutankhamen’s tomb, by which I mean Pavese’s diary, a dangerous diary because it might infect whoever read it with despair. His friends’ initial inspection of those pages was painstaking and restrained. They knew that they would not find there the reason for Pavese’s suicide, something sought by columnists in weekly and daily newspapers at that time; they knew that the reason for such an act can never be reduced to a formula or an episode, but must be sought over a whole life, the set of constants that Pavese, though not a fatalist, called his own destiny. But his friends felt that they were going to find there all the painful tension, the secret vibrations of his soul, which even they, his friends, had not always discerned: the traces of the ill he carried inside, under the guise of his stoicism.

Calvino relates how, on opening the diary at the first page, they realized that they were confronted with an impressive document, convulsed pages, desperate cries that overflowed from them loudly from time to time. “But, most of all, we also found something else, the opposite of despair and defeat: a patient, tenacious labor of self-construction, of inner clarity, of moral betterment, which is to be reached by means of work and reflection on the ultimate reasons behind art and one’s own and others’ lives.”

Yesterday I wrote that I admired Pavese’s diary, but without being in tune with it. Today I am ashamed to have written this. Because if there’s something the pages of my diary darkly pursue, it is the creation of myself and a moral improvement, which I seek by means of work and reflection on the precarious state of my life, of the lives of others and of the life of literature, which I need so much if I am to survive and which, at this century’s beginning, is exposed to the furious assaults of the enemies of the literary as never before.

I’m going to go to the kitchen to have a yogurt; I shall be accompanied by the desperate friend who always goes with me, that friend who is myself and who, so as not to fall into the clutches of cursed despair, writes this diary, this story of a soul trying to save itself by helping the survival of literature, this story of a soul no sooner strong and steady than it succumbs to depression, in order then, laboriously, to get back on its feet, to readjust through work and intelligence, constantly battling with Pico’s moles. I wonder now why I said yesterday that I was not in tune with Pavese if he is my shadow, I, my own reader, the desperate friend who always goes with us literature-sick, who are constantly fighting against despair and defeat.

PESSOA, FERNANDO (Lisbon, 1888–1935) invented a character by the name of Bernardo Soares, to whom he delegated the mission of writing a diary. As Antonio Tabucchi writes, “Soares is a fictional character who adopts the subtle literary fiction of autobiography. In this autobiography without facts, of a nonexistent person, is the only great narrative work left to us by Pessoa: his novel.”

Pessoa gave this diary, signed by Soares, the title The Book of Disquiet. He simply called the overall project of his work — mysterious and unrealizable, as if he had sought to dissolve in the fabric of his own unending “autofiction”—The Book (of disquiet), perhaps thinking of that mythical text Mallarmé longed for all his life, Le Livre, an impossible volume, whose completion — others may try, but the same thing will happen to them — is probably only ever to be found in the project itself, a project containing the seed of the decomposition of literary genres. The Book of Disquiet, like the project it was and could only be, was discovered one day in the trunk that, for almost fifty years, had guarded it in secret: the famous trunk containing 23,000 Pessoan documents. There rested The Book, the insomniac Soares’ book. A first version appeared in 1982 and later the publishing house of my friend Manuel Herminio Monteiro — who went in search of the lost trunk and found it — published a greatly enlarged and definitive edition of the clerk Soares’ diary.

What is meant by “disquiet”? Judging by what the assistant bookkeeper Soares reveals, we are to understand by disquiet a certain unease and, above all, a certain incompetence regarding life. This incompetence is like an illness that, at one point, he himself makes explicit and defines, calling it mal-de-viver (life-sickness). Disquiet is very possibly a manifestation of this illness. In his discreet office where he works as assistant bookkeeper, Soares daily discusses death, beauty, loneliness, and identity — and the barber on the corner. Soares the clerk writes about all this far from the ballrooms of Vienna or from the luxurious mountain health spas, he writes from the grayness of the window in his office, he writes from the standpoint of the daily and ordinary, of the simple and normal. In short, Soares the clerk and his diary seem real.

Soares’ look, which from a window surveys all the disquiet of his days and is articulated in The Book by a strange association between what he perceives and the alteration of these experiential data. The outside world becomes his I, meaning that his I takes possession of what is outside it. It can be said that Soares lives and does not live, his existence is placed between life and an awareness of life. Pessoa became one big Look thanks to Mr. Soares looking through him. Pessoa lived and Soares was life-sick, Soares had a window and wrote the diary, and his disquiet was the manifestation of his life-sickness. Perhaps Montano’s is just another variation on Soares’ illness. However that may be, perhaps the most attractive aspect of the Lisbon assistant bookkeeper’s bizarre world is, more than anything, this surprising way of being outside himself and looking. Right now it seems to me that someone who can look in this way is not very attached to life’s substance and is a walking ghost. Rosario Girondo, for example — me, not my mother — is also a walking ghost who wanders across these pages trying to learn to know how to read others, trying to be outside himself and to look, because he hopes one day to look as Soares looked, or to read as Pessoa read, always at a slight distance — unless the book were by Soares — because at each step — as happened to me the day before yesterday, when I was reading Michaux — memory would disrupt the narrative sequence: “After a few minutes, I was the one writing, and what was written was nowhere.” An elegant way of saying that his I took possession of what was outside it. This is what my I has been trying to mimic for some time. And I am not without a window.

Wednesday

I recommend that the traveler wishing to fall in love with Portugal calmly follow the course of the Tagus, see it first gravely flowing through the austere lands of Castile — all bare fields and solemnity — and then see it entering Portuguese territory, where the tragic Castilian Tagus undergoes, as Julio Camba wrote, “a lyrical tendency and is lined by trees, covered in boats shaped like a half moon, accompanied by songs.” Another world.

Portugal seems real, seems like another world. When I go to Lisbon, I walk down the streets of this city as if I had always been there. This was not the case when I first visited it, in 1968, when I went to work as a supporting actor in a James Bond film, the first not starring Sean Connery. On that occasion, my excessive and brazen youth made me wander through Lisbon like a “walking ghost in halls of memories,” as Pessoa wrote. I observed hardly anything, I didn’t see Lisbon, I didn’t see anything. But when I returned in 1989, I had the impression I had always been in this city, at each corner I sensed the diffuse memory of having already turned it. When? I didn’t know. But I had already been there before, never having been there.

When I go to Lisbon, I spend hours in Terreiro do Paço, on the riverbank, mimicking Soares, contemplating in vain: “I spend hours, sometimes, in Terreiro do Paço, on the banks of the Tagus, contemplating in vain […]. The quay, the evening, the smell of the sea, all combine to make up my anxiety.”

Excessive anxiety of the spirit for nothing. I go to Terreiro do Paço and then ritually head for Café Martinho da Arcada, where in earlier times the conversant Pessoa’s arrival was sad and sacred, punctual, methodical. The poet went every afternoon, according to legend, from his mournful office to Café Martinho, where he stretched out in thick silences of observation and agile thrusts of irony, and from there back home, slipping through the shadows.

When I go to Lisbon, I go to the Martinho in the early evening — I am Soares in my own way — and listen to what is said in conversations of yesteryear and today, because time is annulled, I listen to what is said in conversation, all the “metaphysics mislaid in the corners of cafés everywhere, the chance ideas of so many chancers, the intuitions of so many little people.”

When I go to Lisbon and walk in the Baixa, I drift like a melancholic child down the rua da Prata, down the rua dos Douradores, down the rua dos Franqueiros, and I know that tomorrow I shall also disappear and like my friend Herminio, stop walking down these streets, one less pedestrian in the street life of this city where I have always been: “Lisbon with its houses / of divers colors, / Lisbon with its houses / of divers colors, / Lisbon with its houses / of divers colors …”

In Lisbon I feel at home. “We meet again, Lisbon and Tagus and everything.” But it’s also true that, when I’m in this city, I want to be in Boca do Inferno and, when I’m in Boca do Inferno, I want to be in Lisbon. Excessive anxiety of the spirit for nothing. Often, when I’m in Barcelona, I should like to be in Boca do Inferno so that I should want to be in Lisbon. But today is another day, because I’m in Lisbon, wanting to be here as never before.

I traveled to this city to be in Terreiro do Paço and contemplate in vain. And now I’m here, thinking about Herminio, on the riverbank, watching the seagulls furiously spread their wings between the Tagus and me, until the animal curtain disperses and I again see the city, the Tagus, and everything, I again see everything, including my friend who disappeared in this climate that is suddenly moderate, perhaps it is a dream. I am in Terreiro do Paço; I stopped writing this dictionary in the middle of Pessoa’s entry, I stopped it in order to travel to Lisbon and so live, on my own boundary, inside this diary. I couldn’t write about Lisbon and Pessoa while still in my study, while still in my dictionary.

I am in Terreiro do Paço, thinking about my friend who disappeared. I have spent the day smoking. Slight, very slight, a breeze goes by. I am in a café next to the quay where the ferries berth, next to a large window that separates me from the river. For JOSÉ CARDOSO PIRES, there was no better place than the one I’m seated in: boats arriving, boats leaving, people coming and going, getting drinks at the bar, and me seated higher up the Tagus.

In this place, in this Café Atinel, Lisbon the city ends, and so does a book called Lisbon and subtitled Logbook, written by CARDOSO PIRES, JOSÉ (Peso, Ria Baixa, 1925–Lisbon, 1998), another writer of diaries — in this case, a logbook — who helps me construct my identity in this dictionary.

While Lisbon is a guide to this city — according to Melville, almost all literature, in a sense, is based on guidebooks — it is also a logbook, an urban one; its author journeys through a Lisbon that he sees literally perched on the Tagus, that he sees as a vessel, as a sailing city.

In this Café Atinel is the world’s end, finis terrae, here ends Lisbon and so does the book, the diary by Cardoso Pires, who had an unerring eye according to his good friend Antonio Tabucchi: “One look and it had absorbed everything.” Since I am now at the same table where Cardoso — Zé to his friends — finishes his book, the city is at my back. The Baixa, the Chiado, the crowds, Europe, everything has been left behind. “And don’t tell me,” writes Zé, “that it isn’t wonderful to be like this, at a table, by the water.” Tomorrow I shall go back to Barcelona and to the dictionary written in my study and not to the table of a port café. I shall go back and again wonder how to disappear, how to dissolve in this diary. Tomorrow, I shall go back to the dictionary and a cold hand, I’m sure, will continue to squeeze Pessoa’s throat, preventing him from breathing life. Tomorrow I shall go back, but I’m here now and I let myself be carried along by Zé’s look and see out Soares’ window. I feel anchored, with my unerring eye on loan, in this Lisbon that will see me off tomorrow. I am a look that absorbs everything, I am that look that seems real.

SOMETHING SPARKLES THROUGH THE WORN FABRIC

A sudden silence descended on a place as rowdy as this, and I felt that even the invisible beings were hiding. Mystery at dusk. Then the din of people from the ferries returned. Nightfall, which seemed to have abruptly frozen, has now gathered strength. I am still in Lisbon’s Café Atinel, thinking about Herminio, my disappeared friend. I am still here by the Tagus, at my table by the river, at my waterside table. The Baixa, the Chiado, the crowds, Europe, everything has been left behind, at my back. I am at the world’s end, free of time like a dead man. A seagull goes by and I follow it, and I am reminded of certain remarks made by W. G. Sebald on mystery and the impact of eccentricity on his own fantastic genre, certain remarks also about supposed coincidences and chances that might not be so, were we to possess better means of perception, were it not because, centuries ago, we became mentally very limited after shots were heard in paradise: “I prefer to write about fairly eccentric people, and eccentricity is somewhat fantastical. These things happen to us as well. For example, recently I visited a museum in London to see two paintings. There was a couple behind me who I think were speaking Polish. A very strange-looking man and woman, they seemed from another age. Later, in the afternoon, I had to go to the Tube station farthest from the center of London, a city of fifteen million inhabitants. There was nobody. Except these two from the museum. There they were.”

Sebald is a great reader of Borges, whom he always praises for understanding early on what a mistake it was to expel metaphysics from philosophy. Because in fact, Sebald claims, there are things we cannot easily explain away, and because it is part of our human condition — before more than now — to maintain a certain relation, not just social, with those who came before us. The commemoration of the dead is something that distinguishes us from the animals.

I am a covert and assiduous reader of Sebald, of his long walks à la Robert Walser, of his exploration of the world of the dead, of his fantastical forays into the space of eccentrics. Referring to the strange case of the Poles in the faraway station, Sebald said, “These are not coincidences, somewhere there is a relation that from time to time sparkles through a worn fabric.”

Here I am in Café Atinel, at dusk, next to the ferry passengers, working away on this dictionary of writers of private journals in an attempt to relate it to Montano’s Malady, to mend the worn fabric of relations between the two different texts, for something to sparkle again and remind us that there was once a young and perfect fabric, with a serene thread and logical language in which coincidences had no meaning because everything was cleanly coincidental.

Another seagull goes by and this time I do not follow it, I stay inside Sebald’s world, which reminds me of another coincidence, also possibly not at all coincidental, which stopped me in my tracks in February this year on the island of Fayal, the night we ended up leaving Café Sport and piling out on to the street, having toasted the dead of the islands, that legend that says the souls take refuge in the farthest reaches of the wells and courtyards and their voice is the song of crickets. Sebald would have enjoyed this legend from the Azores. I continue his walks in the world of ruins, of what is dead. I continue his contact with a stimulating tendency of the contemporary novel, a tendency that opens new ground between essay, fiction, and autobiography: the road traveled by works such as Claudio Magris’ Danube or Sergio Pitol’s El arte de la fuga.

That night in Fayal, as we staggered drunkenly beside the sea, back to the Hostal de la Santa Cruz, it suddenly occurred to me — slave that I was, in part, to the plot I was devising for Montano’s Malady—to turn into the complete memory of the history of literature, for me to be literature, to embody it in my own modest person, so that I could try to save it from extinction, to defend it against Pico’s moles. This meant really embodying it in the fictional Montano’s Malady that I was writing and needed to move forward. At no point — I don’t have so much of Quixote’s soul — did I think to turn into this complete memory of literature in real life, it was only an idea for the fiction I was writing, which evolved alongside my life and travels, my private journal. But the truth is that neither Tongoy nor Rosa understood me when I expounded my idea to them. They failed to comprehend what I had just told them and, what’s more, however drunk they may have been, they reacted terribly. They revealed their complete lack of interest in the subjects that concerned me.

When I told them that I was going to embody literature, that this was my idea to move the story I was writing forward, Tongoy abruptly brought his zigzag steps to a halt. Rosa proceeded to do the same. I don’t think the fact they were very drunk is an excuse. The truth of the matter is that they didn’t care what happened to literature. They also bore me a grudge and seemed to have been waiting for the right moment to rebuke me. Tongoy stared at me the way you stare at someone you cannot bear for another second. “Go fuck yourself,” he told me. I was very taken aback, although to be fair I have to say that his comment proved useful to me, it handed me the ending of Montano’s Malady on a plate. But at the time I was taken aback, astonished, unable to comprehend why he looked at me with such hatred. “You see everything in literature,” Rosa upbraided me, “I’m not surprised you actually want to merge with it.” Then Tongoy, laughing at me: “Our Quixote in the Azores, man you’re a bore.” Tongoy said this with an atrocious look of rage. I returned the look with hatred and contempt. There he was, Fellini’s great actor, completely drunk, in his ridiculous sea dog’s outfit, nocturnal Nosferatu with a touch of dragonfly. “You look like a whaler,” I told him. “All you need now is a harpoon.” “I don’t care what you say,” replied Tongoy, sharing another conspiratorial look with Rosa, the two seemed increasingly in cahoots, clearly they had just been talking about me, criticizing me. “It doesn’t matter, the fact is you don’t stop seeing everything in literature, it’s impossible to talk to you about anything else,” said Rosa. “All we needed,” added Tongoy, “was for you to want to turn into the history of literature, that really is the final straw.” “You’ve become a book,” appended Rosa.

It was no use trying to make them see and understand that the plot of Montano’s Malady required the narrator — not to be confused with me — to embody literature. Drunk in the night, they were soulless. I felt extremely downhearted when I considered that, if even Rosa, my wife, and my good friend the vampire were unable to comprehend and celebrate with me certain ideas of mine for the fiction I was writing, if neither one was able to share certain concerns about the future of literature with me, then clearly I was very alone in the world, obviously; though I had a wife and vampire friend, I could not be more alone in that paradise of the Azores.

I told myself that the Azores were a paradise because I needed to cling to a comforting idea in that general air of anxiety. It was then that something happened that has always struck me as unusual, to say the least. It was then something must have sparkled through a worn fabric. Tongoy, as if his intoxication or perhaps an invisible glimmer allowed him to read my thoughts, said in an abruptly conciliatory voice:

“You’re very alone in paradise, aren’t you?”

Time has gone by and I still don’t quite believe it, I consider it now and tell myself that there are more mental connections than we think, but we do not get any further because the original fabric seems to have become very worn and only occasionally does something sparkle in it. We see strange coincidences that no doubt have an explanation, which we do not manage to find. We go through life without correctly understanding many things. “There’s a misunderstanding, and this misunderstanding will be our downfall,” said Kafka.

The worn fabric is perhaps from some paradise where formerly the day was lit by another world; the logical thread of a verbal fabric that gave life meaning died. They were better times. But someone in that paradise upset the inventor of language; the fabric wore away and our lives became absurd, without the old order and the old meaning. This fabric, unrecognizable today, could be the same one which, though worn, is sensed by Sebald; we receive, when we receive them, fleeting but startling sparkles that perhaps are telling us we do not know what exactly can have happened and what the misunderstanding was, but there were definitely shots in some paradise or, in any case — as Sergio Pitol said to me when I showed him documents revealing a curious coincidence that had passed through our lives, betraying another sparkle in the worn fabric—“something must have happened, that’s for sure.”

PITOL, SERGIO (Puebla, Mexico, 1933). Of all the diarists gathered in this dictionary, he is the one who has collaborated longest in the construction of my timid identity. A key figure in my life. He turns up punctually and mysteriously, like a strange ambassador of the most reasonable thread in the worn fabric, and does so at those moments in my life most closely linked to the fantasy genre. I met him in Warsaw in 1973, when I traveled to this city, expressly hoping to share with him my impressions as a reader of his stories and, in passing, to get to know him. I ended up staying in his home for a whole month, and Pitol became my teacher. I aspired then to be a writer and was still unclear whether or not I would be, I wasn’t even using the name Rosario Girondo. He was already the author of a novel and various books of stories and worked as cultural attaché in the Embassy of Mexico in Poland. No writer before then had bothered to talk to me about literature as he did over unforgettable dinners during those days I stayed in his home. They ended up being key in my decision to write; those days marked my destiny and sowed the seed of my Montanism.

On August 23, 1973, the day I left Warsaw, Pitol presented me with a copy of his novel El tañido de una flauta and dedicated it to me with some words in English that alluded to Provence. It was the first book to have been dedicated to me, and for years I would visualize that dedication, I would often see it and finally knew it by heart. During those years, we never spoke by phone nor wrote each other a letter, but we would meet, often by chance, in the most diverse places. We saw each other, for example, in Bukhara, Trieste, Mérida in Venezuela, Beijing, Veracruz, Paris, Prague, and Mojácar. One day, August 23, 1993, he decided to send me a letter from Brasilia, the first he had ever sent me. On receiving it, I soon realized that exactly twenty years separated the Varsovian dedication and the Brazilian letter. I photocopied the documents, hoping eventually to show them to Sergio and to witness his reaction to this curious, surprising coincidence. The opportunity finally arrived, in the Provence of the dedication no less. Sergio and I met at a tribute to a writer and mutual friend in Aix-en-Provence. One night, in this city, I suddenly showed him the two documents and waited to see his reaction. Sergio pored over the photocopies, then took off his glasses, smiled, almost imperceptibly, allowed the silence to take hold of the situation, put his glasses back on, smiled a little nervously, re-examined the photocopies, raised his head and arched his eyebrows, lowered his head again and finally said, “Something must have happened, that’s for sure.”

I understood that there was little more he could say and what he said was already a lot; he preferred to be prudent and not to speculate in vain, but in any case obviously “something must have happened” in some place with light from another world, where something occasionally sparkles through a worn fabric.

This morning I read an interview with Sebald in which he admits to having paid tribute on occasion, albeit without naming him, to the hiker Robert Walser. Forerunner of Kafka, interned for many years in a Swiss sanatorium, Walser left his enclosure only to go for long walks in the snow. After lunch on December 25, 1956, he went out dressed in warm clothes, he emerged into the bright light of the snowy landscape surrounding the sanatorium. The solitary hiker, in search of “the mountain spirit,” filled his lungs with the clear winter air. He walked for a long time until he fainted and dropped dead in the snow. He was found by two children coming down the hill on a wooden sled.

Asked about his tributes to Walser the hiker, Sebald says that there is in fact an autobiographical reason for such tributes: “I was always puzzled that Walser should have died on the same day as my grandfather, whom I grew up with. What’s more, the two looked very alike and were both long-distance walkers and met similar ends, since my grandfather also died while out in the snow alone. The places Walser walked in were only sixty miles from my grandfather’s house in Wertach.”

Something’s happening here now in Café Atinel, that’s for sure. I think about Herminio, my friend who disappeared prematurely. And I hear beside me some voices, voices from other tables in Portuguese and other discussions and conversations, everyman’s concerns, the concerns of the quick and the dead. And I am reminded of Pessoa and the metaphysics mislaid in the corners of cafés everywhere, the chance ideas of so many chancers, the intuitions of so many little people. Perhaps one day, with some abstract fluid and impossible substance, they will form a God or a new fabric and with the light of another life occupy the world.

RENARD, JULES (Chalons, Mayenne, 1864–Paris, 1910). In his well-known diary, Renard reveals himself to be a man permanently installed on the hardest bunk in the carriage, taking the hardest drug of literature. Take, for example, this sentence: “Writing is a way of speaking without being interrupted.” At present I am looking at one of his family photographs and in it he appears with a terrifying expression of bad temper: the classic chronic sufferer of literature-sickness. The photograph is taken outside, the day extremely pleasant. The children, his son and daughter, look marvelous. His wife, in good health. But he is in a foul mood, as if someone had interrupted him while he was speaking. He clearly has withdrawal symptoms and thinks that he should be in his study by now.

“Writing,” says Lobo Antunes, “is like taking drugs, you start purely for pleasure and you end up organizing your life around your vice like a drug addict. This is my life. Even when I suffer, I live it like a split personality: the man is suffering and the writer is considering how to use the suffering in his work.”

Such a great and scandalously literature-sick diarist as Renard could not be absent from these pages. He died without knowing that he would go down in the history of literature precisely for the diary he kept without ever wishing to publish it, he died without knowing he would be betrayed and his diary would be published posthumously, astounding, among others, a Catalan countryman called Josep Pla — who would write an exceptional private journal, El quadern gris—and most especially André Gide, who would turn this genre in which Renard had proved a virtuoso — that of the autopsychographical diary, to use an adjective invented by Pessoa — into a work of literary creation consciously addressed to a reader.

Renard was so scandalously literature-sick that, in the foreword to the Spanish edition of his diary, he is openly treated as such by Josep Massot: “Fascinating pages of a diary that, as well as being a cruel testimony, […] reflect the insatiable disquiet of a writer who is sick with literature.”

You have to be very sick, you have to be very seriously sick—to quote Jaime Gil de Biedma, another great Catalan diarist — very literature-sick to think what Renard thought when, at the end of his days, he fell physically ill and told himself that he could only get better if he wrote: “I am again off balance. Rock bottom. Immediate cure if I worked.” And a little further on, in the diary’s dying pages, he defines himself in this way: “Man without a heart, who has only had literary emotions.”

The last thing he records in his diary: “I want to get up tonight. Heaviness. One leg hanging out. Then a moist trickle flows down my leg. It has to reach my heel for me to make up my mind. It will dry on the sheets, as when I was Poil de Carotte.”

Poil de Carotte was a character of his, probably himself when he was a child. Renard died of literature, of his own, he died having turned into one of his characters, having turned into the rustic child he always was. This would explain above all why, in the final years of his life, he pretended to be writing in Paris when in fact he spent his life — like Josep Pla — in the countryside, in his hometown, in the world of Poil de Carotte, with his childlike skin, carrot top even, writing literature-sick sentences and, as Musil would ask later, questioning the usefulness of diaries: “Why these notebooks? Nobody tells the truth, not even their authors.”

Possibly because I have just arrived from Lisbon, I am reminded of something about “the truth” written by Pessoa, or rather by his heteronym Alvaro de Campos: “I am defeated today, as if I knew the truth.”

The truth is that Renard’s “nobody tells the truth” would quickly become fertile ground for fictional diaries, for André Gide’s “life of the mind” and, a little later, for Gombrowicz’s “construction of self” and even for the project of fragmented identity that I am, I who have spent days immersed in this dictionary, trying to be as truthful as possible and giving all sorts of reliable information about myself, not always successfully, since I often remark that all I’m really looking for now, defeated by the impossible truth, is to dissolve like a man without qualities in mid-diary.

The afternoon is ambiguously flat in Barcelona today. A bird goes by and I do not follow it. After my fleeting tour of Lisbon, I am once more in my study, every day more devoted — without will, but with an exaggerated regularity, with a monstrous perseverance — to my diary. I am writing, alone and almost still, with my shoulders draped in a shawl, in my office. Rosa put flowers in it this morning, the whole house is little by little turning into an imaginary hospital. Another bird goes by, which I don’t follow either. My mind was trapped, a few moments ago, in the memory of Paul Valéry, another noticeable and extreme sufferer of literature sickness, absorbed in the elaboration of a strange, something more than odd dictionary. “This man, my father,” his son wrote of him, “up before dawn, in his pyjamas, his shoulders draped in a shawl, a cigarette between his fingers, his eyes fixed on the vane of a chimney, watching the birth of the day, would devote himself, with a monstrous perseverance, to a solitary rite: creating his own language, redoing a dictionary for his personal use: 250 notebooks blackened with observations, schemes, maxims, calculations, drawings, 30,000 typed pages.”

I have just received a call from Juan Villoro, a friend who in August is going to settle in Barcelona with his family and who is now in the city making preparations for the move. Rosa spoke to him first and then handed me the phone. A long and as always warm conversation with Villoro, in the middle of which, with regard to whatever topic we were discussing at that moment, he quoted an aphorism by Lichtenberg, another great diarist: “Once you have an ailment, you have a personal opinion.” I didn’t tell him this, but I jotted the sentence down, since it seemed to me to bear some relation to the theme of the literature-sick.

After speaking on the phone, I felt full of personal opinions. And that same ambiguously flat afternoon then took me to Lady Macbeth’s literary illness and reminded me, as if the afternoon were a prompt, that Shakespeare tells us that in his majesty’s absence Lady Macbeth was seen to “rise from her bed, throw her nightgown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon it, read it, afterward seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep.”

Lady Macbeth has an unusual way of sleeping. When the court doctor is informed, he describes the activity of his patient and writer, impatient writer, he describes literary activity in general, literature-sickness, in the following terms: “A great perturbation in nature, — to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching.”

Clearly the doctor is also Shakespeare and he is also sick.

TESTE, MONSIEUR (Sète, 1871–Paris, 1945). Paul Valéry’s alter ego and paradigm of the coldest and most incisive intelligence, Teste took “the spirit’s most fearful discipline” to the limit. For all their differences — Tongoy does not think so much — this Monsieur Teste was Valéry’s Tongoy and was often almost identical to him, a good friend, then, at other times, a monster.

Valéry wrote the life of his mind in a kind of engagement book in which from 1894 until his death, beginning each day, he would record impressions and thoughts in what was not exactly a diary but notebooks without confessions or anecdotes, and related, therefore, to Musil’s diary, lacking as they did any reference to external or private affairs. Valéry’s intention was to capture and record thought as it awoke, to examine his dreams and their relationship with the movements of consciousness.

These notes — like a mental drawing that comes to life — gave birth to Teste, a being who lives only as a result of the activity of his mind. Teste is Valéry in action, the action of writing, of writing the kind of intellectual diary that reflects the life of a mind not made for novels, whose great scenes — he said — their outbursts, passions, tragic moments, far from exalting him, struck him as miserable glimmers, rudimentary states where every form of stupidity is allowed to run free, where a being is simplified to the point of idiocy and drowns instead of swimming in his circumstances.

He shared this anti-novelism with Robert Musil, who was speaking at that time of the loathsome narrative and coming out with statements that suit this personal dictionary, constructed in part from the madness of others, extremely well: “Our whole being is just a delirium of many.” Or else: “Man’s deepest association with his peers is dissociation.” Musil, in The Man Without Qualities, ignores procreation, fills his whole novel with childless children, ignores continuity and Oedipal repetition; everything is left behind, there are no offspring and, therefore, all narrative possibilities are eliminated from his novel, since — as Magris says in this regard—“the possibility of narrative presupposes life and the meaning of life, the epic is based on the unity of the world and of the individual, on a multiplicity enlightened and ordered by a meaning and a value.”

Musil’s story dissolves into a game of symbols and variations that reflect one another without reference to a meaning. After the different variants are combined, there is no story left; after the rays of sun that tremble on the water, there is nothing left. I often think that, as Góngora wrote, everything ends “in earth, in smoke, in dust, in shade, in nothing.” I often feel close to Musil and to Ulrich, the character in The Man Without Qualities, who reveals himself to me now — on this flat afternoon in Barcelona today — to be a fanatic of Montano’s malady; you see, I have just remembered something he says at one point: “Our life should be purely and only literature.” Applause for Ulrich. I wonder how I can have been so stupid, believing for so long that I must eradicate my Montano’s malady, when it is the only worthwhile and truly comfortable possession I have. I also wonder why I should apologize for being so literary if, in the final outcome, only literature could save the spirit in an age as deplorable as ours. My life should be, once and for all, purely and only literature.

Monsieur Teste, Ulrich’s close relation, wanted to write the life of a life in the same way — he said — as that of a passion (going to bed), which has already been overwritten. Had Teste traveled to Budapest, perhaps he would have written a theory of Budapest — as my dear mother did — where we could have “finally seen with wide-open eyes to the limits of things or of sight.”

Teste’s adventure always took place within the limits of the self. The kind of horizon on which he wrote his diary about the life of his mind could only be intellectual, it could not be anything else. Teste, like Musil, was not made for novels, and much less for the kind of private journals being written in his time, which continue to proliferate today in rancid fashion, with all their painful introspection — why do they do it if they can’t hear anything there? — with all their sluggish descriptions of the behavior of others, which they wish to pass off as diaries and sometimes even as novels.

In the era of the autobiographical pact, in an age when the novel of the self has the upper hand, a man named Teste, up before dawn, in his pyjamas, his shoulders draped in a shawl, notes: “I am the unknown I carry in me.”

I return to the loathsome narrative and observe that I am incapable of taking a firm stand against the possibility of narrative, rather I sympathize with Borges when he says there is something of the story that will always last, and he does not believe that men will ever tire of hearing and telling stories. I evoke these comments by Borges and yet see that they imply a certain lack of trust in the future of the novel, perhaps because in the future a narrative art will most probably be born under other guises, though the story will continue to survive. Very new forms will flourish, immanently perhaps, with no dimension beyond reason. I still cannot imagine these forms. Fortunately, I think. The new man — i.e., Teixeira — in his empty home on the island of Pico, may be imagining them now. Fortunately, I think, I cannot imagine them and it is better like this; I trust that I shall not have to know them, that I can continue a little as before, attempting to transform the art of the novel, which is no mean feat. I realize that there are a thousand ways of doing this and I have to find mine, which, in fact, is what I’m doing.

VALÉRY, PAUL (Sète, 1871–Paris, 1945). A writer who was the youthful passion of Rosario Girondo, who aspired one day, as he says in his secret diary, to be as intelligent as him. “Stupidity is not my strong point,” Valéry tells us in the opening line of Monsieur Teste. I read the sentence a couple of times and ask myself how this afternoon, this false light, this false day, these papers, everything I perceive right now, yes, how this afternoon is different from yesterday’s.

I know perfectly well that today is not the same day, but I am only capable of knowing it. Is that to be intelligent? Was Valéry really intelligent? Has anyone ever been intelligent? Alberto Savinio said that complete, balanced, fertile intelligence has always been a special case. And he added: “The effort made by man to climb the steps of intelligence is so painful, so desperate…. The damages resulting from an incomplete intelligence are so much greater than those arising from a frank and submissive stupidity.”

We should doubt the usefulness and real value of such prized intelligence, prized perhaps because it doesn’t actually exist. The very fact that some of us — not all of us — search for intelligence simply goes to show that it isn’t natural, isn’t human, it isn’t of this world. Given this state of affairs, and given that his monstrous perseverance produced some very relative results, Valéry — like the rest of humanity — wasn’t so intelligent. “Intelligence,” says Savinio, “is the holy Grail, but stupidity, that Cinderella, poor, modest, despised, vilified stupidity, is what the true, spontaneous, lasting love of man in the end returns to.” Savinio thinks that man, even in metaphysics, divides his affection between intelligence (the lover, the holy Grail) and stupidity (the wife or consort). After all the deceptions of intelligence, it is she, good, magnanimous stupidity, who consoles us deeply.

Stupidity is loyal and constant, we have known her from time immemorial, she awaits us in the sweet home to share with us, with imposing resignation, the colossal misfortune not to be intelligent.

O Valéry!