Montano's Malady

III. Theory of Budapest

FASTING IN BUDA

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished Hungarian public, I have been in the melancholy and beautiful city of Budapest for several days now, I arrived here with ample time to devote in situ to the preparation of my lecture as part of this International Symposium on the Private Journal as Narrative Form.

Until a few hours ago, when the organizers discovered that I was in the city and transferred me to the Kakania Grand Hotel (where, by the way, I have refused to shower and eat), I lived like a beggar, barely touching any food, in a disreputable boardinghouse in Buda. There, when I had the time — sometimes you will see me improvise as well, I am fascinated by exposing myself to danger, by risking my life in front of an audience — I began to prepare my words for this evening.

First of all, I should like to celebrate the presence among us, in this historic room in Budapest’s Literature Museum, of someone I admire, Imre Kertész. It is a great honor for me and a huge responsibility to have him in the audience. I should like also to greet Monsieur Tongoy, seated in the front row, arching his eyebrows at this moment. Monsieur Tongoy is a vagrant of Hungarian origin, a distant relation of Monsieur Teste and of the Hungarian Bela Lugosi. Some of you must already have noticed him, his miserable clothing and the vampiric features of his frightful face, he is the very image of Count Dracula, a strange cross between his relation Lugosi and Murnau’s Nosferatu. He is a vagrant, but he is also an actor, he works when he can, when producers forget that he is drawn to a miserable life. He starred as dragonfly-man in a film by Fellini. And has played Bela Lugosi on the screen. From here I send Monsieur Tongoy, my alter ego, my very best wishes. Greetings also to the mendicant beside him, Rosa, my partner in begging difficulties. I must warn you, before we begin, that I am hungry, very hungry.

Hungry.

I have been fasting hard in Buda for several days, only two sandwiches in one week, seven fruit juices, and water. But I want to make it clear from the start that I am hungry because I choose to be, having declined to eat at the Kakania, for example.

Fasting in Buda, I have very deliberately sought to appear before you today in a weak state, having apparently lost control of my thoughts, but not all control, just enough to enable you, live and in real time, to witness the public construction of the private journal of a writer who is hungry and who is pleased to deliver his lecture on the edge of the abyss, to risk his life for all to see, to pronounce some nocturnal words — I am taking a certain risk — on the diary as narrative form, always placing himself on the edge of the abyss, but clinging to it in precarious balance.

SO I’M NOT RELAXED

With the sensation that I could drop dead at any moment — the truth is I have given my best lectures in a state of tension, far from being relaxed — dying of hunger before you all today, I consider it helpful to inform you that my visit to Budapest’s Literature Museum has forced me to interrupt the novel I am writing in Barcelona on the subject of writers’ private journals, no less. This novel is also a diary, my diary as a literature-sick writer, in Budapest today doubly sick, because of hunger, my hunger as a fasting artist.

I interrupted the novel to be with you today, I interrupted it in a passage referring to Valéry’s notebooks, the notebooks, a form of private journal, which gave rise to the intellectual figure of Monsieur Teste, whose extended shadow — embodied here today by the repellent Monsieur Tongoy — is projected over this historic room. I interrupted it in this passage, but I plan to continue it, using whatever may happen here today, using whatever may take place during this lecture. You are, therefore, characters in my fictionalized diary and must keep alert and wide-awake before events and actions that can affect your lives at any stage. So I’m not relaxed, but my distinguished public would do well not to be either and to remember that, as John Donne would say, nobody falls asleep in the cart taking him to the gallows.

EVERYONE ELSE IS DEAD

Not everybody knows that the mendicant Rosa in the front row, the beautiful beggar seated next to the monster, is a femme fatale. What’s more, with her presence in this room today, I’m not joking, she could embody the diary’s sensationalist fatality as an element of a literary genre.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I do not forget that this symposium requires me to speak of the private journal as narrative form, I do not forget this; and that is why I now refer to the theme — my beggarly and professional duty is to stick to the symposium’s theme — and I tackle the question of fatality encapsulated in every private journal and also in Rosa and in Detour, a film I had the misfortune to see here in Budapest.

I said the diary’s “sensationalist fatality.” Well, sensationalist is the adjective that Alan Pauls uses to describe the recurring fact that, whenever you find a diary (“because a diary never appears: you find it, come across it, or stumble on it, even when you’ve been looking for it with desperation”), next to its pages, often staining them, there is a corpse.

We are faced, therefore, by a dramatic convention that is fatal. We find this convention, disguised as an anecdote, in the preface to the first volume of Strahlungen, Ernst Jüngers Second World War diaries, where the author tells us about the seven sailors who in 1633 spent the winter on the island of St. Mauritius, in the Arctic Ocean: “The Dutch Society of Greenland had left them there, with their consent, to carry out research or the Arctic winter and polar astronomy. In the summer of 1634, when the whaling fleet returned, they found the diary and seven corpses.” For Pauls, the scene could be the beginning of another version of The Thing, Christian Nyby’s classic horror movie: “A remote, frozen landscape, the corpses that turn up, one by one, showing no signs of violence, dotted about the camp, seemingly turned to stone in the middle of a final, casual gesture, the diary kept under lock and key, the forced box, a trembling hand that opens the worn covers and avidly seeks out the last observations.”

The last observation by the last sailor to die was this: “I don’t know if I’ll be able to write here what has happened, but I’m the only one who can. Everyone else is dead.”

The corpse of the author is almost always guaranteed in conventional diaries, perhaps less so in diaries that transform the genre — fictitious diaries or diaries construed as literary creation, where, however, the corpse of the author turns up eventually, as a fact of life. This is what must also happen sooner or later — especially if I stay this hungry — to the diary I am currently composing, live and out loud, for all of you. But let’s keep going, for the moment let’s go on. As long as there’s life, there’ll always be the hope of reaching the end of this lecture and receiving the fee and being able to give Monsieur Tongoy back the foul cents I owe him.

We have already broached the subject, we have already tackled the theme of the private journal as narrative form, we have already begun to demonstrate live how a lecture can be solemn or simply — as in the case of this one — solemnly free, combining as it does a certain narrative form, the essay’s reflective flight, and an autobiographical voice, among other registers. The last of these, the autobiographical voice, I now reintroduce to say that among other things I owe Monsieur Tongoy the cost of two movie tickets, since he insisted — on the same day we arrived in Budapest and visited what he terms his “cabin”—that Rosa and I go with him to see a film by Edgar G. Ulmer.

I had never heard of Ulmer, a Viennese director who settled in Hollywood in the 1940s. The film, shot in 1945, was called Detour. A very strange film, extremely strange and fatalistic, it brings everybody bad luck; you only need to see the way Monsieur Tongoy looks today.

To begin with, I refused to go and see this film because I couldn’t spend the few cents I had to pay for our boardinghouse in Buda. We were visiting what Monsieur Tongoy, who had arrived in Budapest before the mendicant Rosa and myself, termed his “cabin” and we started arguing because he said I could pay for all of us; if I had enough for the boardinghouse in Buda, I also had enough for the cinema. Deep down I am horrified by stupid, drunken arguments between tramps, and even more by the places where they live. Monsieur’s cabin was in fact a wooden shack whose door he had ripped off to build a fire. A shack in very poor condition. The window was missing its pane and the roof had caved in at various points. It was all disgusting. In a cowpat, for example, Monsieur Tongoy had drawn a heart transfixed by an arrow. On the ground, among wine bottles that were his only possessions, was the Kemnitzer Cinema’s program. He became very tedious with the program and his grotesque praise of Ulmer — just because this Viennese director had shot a film with Lugosi called The Black Cat, another ill-omened title — and in the end, tired from the journey and from so much arguing, tired also of looking at the repulsive cowpat, we agreed to go and see the film, especially when monsieur revealed that he could make an effort and pay for us, after all, he said, I could give him back the money with interest when I received the fee for this lecture.

I shouldn’t have accepted this proposal, I should never have gone to see this film, since fatality went hand in hand with it, the same fatality that can reach us one day through “some miscarriage, some wrong turning” on a road somewhere.

FROM JOHN CHEEVER’S JOURNALS

“In the middle age there is mystery, there is mystification. The most I can make out of this hour is a kind of loneliness. Even the beauty of the visible world seems to crumble, yes even love. I feel that there has been

some miscarriage, some wrong turning

, but I do not know when it took place and I have no hope of finding it.”

IDENTITY

The diary that I abandoned in Barcelona and that I go on writing here is a little like a clinical report that seems only to pay attention to the stealthy expressiveness of an illness: my suffering from literature sickness. My diary is full of detailed observations on the evolution of this illness. In the same way as other diarists, I do not write to know who I am, but to know what I am turning into, what is the unforeseeable direction — to disappear would be the ideal, though perhaps not — in which catastrophe is taking me. It is not, therefore, the revelation of some truth that my diary pursues, but the crude, clinical account of a mutation. I began my diary as a narrator who longed to be a literary critic; I then went about building up a diarist’s personality thanks to some of my favorite diarists — I kept others back, like Cheever and Barnabooth, for this lecture, as I also kept fragments of autobiography — and now I see that I am starving myself of my own volition: I have turned into a proper vagrant, whom I see moving away, governed by his uneasiness, or rather by an uneasiness that isn’t necessarily his, but in which he partakes in some way. Who knows, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished Hungarian public, it may be my own uneasiness that is invading him.

STRANGE HELPLESSNESS

In Detour, a gray man called Al is content every night to play the piano for his girlfriend, a singer in a bar in New York. When she decides to be more ambitious and to head for Los Angeles, poor Al, the man without qualities, is left sad and defeated and, without knowing it, at the mercy of destiny’s darkest forces. One day he phones his girlfriend in Los Angeles and, when she tells him to come and visit her, our pianist decides to hitch all the way to the West Coast. He is picked up by a guy named Haskell, a fake with money, who drives a convertible and promises to take him as far as Los Angeles. It seems like a stroke of luck for Al, but when they make a detour on the road to fill up at a gas station, this turning — almost imperceptibly at first — will be the beginning of a series of endless fatalities, of continuous nightmarish setbacks that will change the life of Al the nondescript. When they stop again, Haskell dies of a heart attack and Al is forced to usurp his personality to keep going and falls into the clutches of a hitchhiker, an evil, disturbed femme fatale who knows the convertible’s previous owner and blackmails him. When she also dies accidentally — although the police will always believe that she has been murdered, killed by Al — she will leave our gray man with his nondescript character with two unexplained deaths on his shoulders, a fugitive from the law, a man without a credible identity, who has lost his way on some byroad.

On leaving the cinema, I did not fail to notice that the humbug Haskell was a little like Monsieur Tongoy, who sometimes, without having anything, boasts of having something: “cabins,” wine, interest in cinema, and a bit of money. Nor did I fail to notice certain similarities between the disturbed femme fatale and Rosa. And I could not help noticing that I resembled the nondescript without an identity, the man without qualities, who in the end wanders along the byroad.

A strange film, probably the oddest and best film that I have ever seen, but one I soon realized brought with it fatality and a strange helplessness, which I feel this evening, lacking shelter and food, on life’s byroad.

Final fatality: destiny turned its back on Tom Neal, the actor who plays Al, as soon as he finished shooting the film. He fell into perpetual disgrace in Hollywood when he fought with Franchot Tone for the love of a woman, for the love of Barbara Payton. Expelled from Los Angeles and from life, pariah on somber destiny’s road, Tom Neal in 1965 murdered his third wife. He spent years in prison and, when he got out, he led the life of a vagrant in the family of the defeated and one day he was found dead on a byroad south of Boston.

DIARY OF A RECENTLY MARRIED POET

There is Rosa, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished Hungarian public, there is Rosa, impassive in the front row, calm as anything when I call her a femme fatale. I’m not planning to do away with her as poor Tom Neal did. After all, in her capacity as vamp — this alone qualifies her to sit next to her partner in the front row, the vampire — it is some time since my wife gave up her corrosive activity at the end of the 1960s, when she would induce the young poets who crossed her path to commit suicide or else, if she saw that they were not up to it, she would annihilate them from a creative point of view. I never saw anyone with such a hatred of poetry. Today Rosa is a peaceful mendicant, calmly seated in the front row of this room, but when I met her she destroyed poets. She was worse than Calamity Jane, that legendary and disastrous woman of the West. Rosa chased poetry and poets to death, she believed that prose should be written instead of poetry and that verse had lost its raison d’être with the invention of writing, a few years after Homer. She was always quoting Leopardi: “Everything has been brought to perfection since Homer, except poetry.” For Rosa only prose existed and poetry deceived only fools, since it was really prose with a high opinion of itself. As soon as she spotted a poet, especially if he was young, she would do everything in her power to humiliate him and, if possible, to eliminate him. At best, she would send him back to the world of prose. She saw off more than one, more than one fragile poet, singer of the moon and cemeteries. She would wrap them all in the intimacy of her dark love nest and then ask them if it was true that they hailed from the land of sweet poets, and, if the poor, innocent souls fell into the trap and admitted being sweet and being poets, Rosa would lash them with a whiplike sentence: “You’re all poets, and yet I’m on the side of death.”

Rosa for a long time morally assassinated poets. She wanted to go beyond poetry, beyond the prestige of this discipline that got on her nerves and that struck her as fundamentally prosaic and above all opportunistic, a refuge for the mediocre. Rosa attracted young poets, seduced them thoroughly, and then threatened to leave them if they continued to believe in poetry or if they did not take it to its limits and place themselves on the side of death. She undermined lyrical morale with all kinds of devilish tricks. And more than one despaired, was annihilated, even committed suicide.

“Are you a poet?” she asked me the night we met. I was a novelist by then, although I had yet to publish anything, but I was also a poet, albeit secretly out of respect for and in honor of my mother, who had written poetry all her life without confessing to it. Around that time I was writing secret verses about the moon and the stars. But I didn’t tell Rosa anything. Fortunately. I felt good being a secret poet. I didn’t tell her anything, and at that stage I had no idea that she hated poetry in this way. I simply told her that I was a novelist and this probably saved my life. A few months later, we moved in together and, though no paperwork was involved, we felt that we had married. My poems have remained hidden until now, until today when I reveal my secret to Rosa. Shortly after moving in together, we went on a trip to Venice, which we always considered our honeymoon. There was a lot of talk around that time, in Spain’s literary circles, about a poetic style termed Venetian, the poetry of the novísimos, who were the poets of my generation. Fortunately, however, I made no mention of it during our trip, nor did it occur to me — also fortunately — to say anything about my secret attraction toward poetry; I have guarded the secret very closely until this evening. I don’t know what Rosa would have thought if I had shown signs of interest in the poets of my generation, for example, or if she had suddenly realized that her recently married novelist she was traveling with was also a poet. This, in fact, is what I was, a happy man, still unaware — I would find out on this trip — of Rosa’s hatred for poetry. I found out on a night with a full moon, one frankly poetic. I found out when we were floating along the Grand Canal, past the railway station and Tronchetto Island, out to sea, and Rosa the poet-breaker, no doubt abetted by the large amount of grappa she had imbibed, began to tell me, inserting the occasional sinister detail, how she had cruelly cut short the poetic life, and sometimes even the actual life, of more than one poet. I was horrified, unable to utter a word, there on the Grand Canal. I was dumbstruck as she let out a chilling guffaw that tore up any future attempt to publicize my poetry by the roots.

“Wretch, we’re lost because of you!” I told her, pretending that I was joking. It was the least I could say. I knew that, apart from confessing to her that I wrote poetry, I had to say something, and I told her this, but I did not go on, completely afraid that I would end up composing an ode to Venice before the sea of theaters.

How fragile I was back then, I wonder why.

THE BAT’S MONOLOGUE

Rosa has not come out of this biographical sketch very well, nor should Monsieur Tongoy hope to emerge from his unscathed. Here in Budapest he chose a miserable life, that of a bat. Chilling shadow of the vampire Lugosi, Monsieur Tongoy’s presence among us this evening ought to inspire us all with horror. Since I am unwilling to waste energy by criticizing him too much, in this theater-lecture I shall simply reproduce the miserable monologue that our vampire delivered today, when he proposed leaving the “cabin” and installing himself, at my expense — he achieved this — in the Kakania Grand Hotel.

“For days now I have eaten,” he said with a sleepless beggar’s pomposity, as if he wished to mimic a character from Beckett, “I have drunk, I have dressed and undressed, in this medium-sized cage facing Budapest’s northwest, with its marvelous view facing southeast of medium-sized cages. But soon I will have to get by in some other way, because the landscape is fatally doomed to demolition. Soon I will have to pack up my belongings and begin to eat, to drink, to sleep, to dress and undress, at the Kakania. With you, master. I will be the Sancho Panza you have always wanted me to be, but invite me to the Kakania, Rosario. Your squire is homeless. I’ve nothing left, only a cowpat and some red wine and these eyes that I open and shut, two central European eyes, I’ve nothing left except my tongue and eyes, my tongue that allows me to say that I will talk about myself when the repulsive vagrants have stopped, though in fact I won’t even talk about myself then, why, if what I really want is not to talk anymore, to rest at the Kakania, to be your squire, your monsieur.”

THE VAMPIRE’S TURNING

You must be thinking that it’s high time I told you that neither Rosa nor monsieur exist, since there is nobody in the front row and, what’s more, had Rosa and monsieur been seated there, they would be so indignant that they would have prevented me continuing some time ago.

Tell us, you must be thinking, that the two of them do not exist and, while you’re at it, confess that you’re not hungry after the banquet that was given today at the Kakania in your honor.

OK, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished Hungarian public, I am going to make an about-turn, a vampire’s turning. I shall tell truths, having lied to you slightly. I am not at all hungry, and you’re absolutely right that there’s nobody in the front row and the only one who looks like a vampire — I know that I resemble Christopher Lee — is me. But this does not mean that neither Rosa nor monsieur exist, that they aren’t in Budapest, that they aren’t now hungover having gone out last night, resting in their respective rooms at the Kakania.

Those of you who have already accepted that Monsieur Tongoy exists may be wondering if he and I look very much or a little alike. Well, the answer is: we bear an unmistakable family resemblance. That said, Monsieur Tongoy is not happy when he is placed in the bloody tradition of vampires. Unlike me, monsieur does not like to be connected with that depraved count who derived pleasure out of horror. I, however, feel the vampire’s pride. For example, for years I behaved in literature like a complete parasite. Later, I began to lose my attraction for the blood of other people’s work and, with their collaboration, I even cultivated a distinct style of my own: discreet, cultured, a little bit secret, perhaps just eccentric, but one that belongs to me and is a far cry from the uniform modern army of the identical. All the same, I have periods in which I relapse slightly into the vampirism of previous years. Today, to go no further, I have been behaving in this theater-lecture like a parasite, living off Monsieur Tongoy’s ideas, since it was he who provided the script, the outline of my speech this evening.

THIS THEORY’S LIFE

Monsieur Tongoy was born of chance. Like Monsieur Teste. Like everybody. The lecture he dictated to me is as far from the conventions of any lecture as the characters are eccentric in the story I have told you about: the mendicant vamp, the hungry quack — me myself — and the theoretical vagrant: erratic characters who arrived in Budapest a few days ago and went to see Detour and fell into the fatality that pursues those who watch this strange, extremely bizarre film.

I invented the vagrancy of these three characters on monsieur’s instructions. His lecture design required one fictional part — unusual for a lecture — that could be mixed, in the name of theater, with the essay part.

Monsieur Tongoy gave me two initial pointers for this lecture, two pointers he considered of paramount importance: 1) That I should not fail to emphasize the relationship between him and me; nor should I forget that Dracula — along with Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe — is one of the myths that founded contemporary man’s consciousness and, as in other myths, he did not marry or maintain stable and lasting relationships with women and, as in the others, he had a male servant or accomplice, which demonstrates his enormous self-centredness. 2) That my lecture should be a microcosm of what I am writing in Barcelona and should, therefore, combine essay, private memories, diary, travel book, and narrative fiction. And even copy the structure of my manuscript in Barcelona, going from fiction to reality, but without ever forgetting that literature is invention and, as Nabokov said, “fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver.”

Monsieur Tongoy really is a distant relation of Bela Lugosi. He comes from a family of Hungarian Jews who went into exile in Chile. He has traveled to Budapest to trace his roots. Don’t tell me it isn’t moving…. It is also Monsieur Tongoy who gives life to this lecture’s theory. A few days ago, when I had just arrived in this city with Rosa, he was perplexed when he understood that I had nothing prepared to say here this evening, and he asked me, “So what are you going to do? Not say anything? Make words in the treasure of silence.”

I make words. I make theory as well and inform you that I share monsieur’s idea that the world can no longer be recreated as in novels before, from the writer’s unique perspective. Monsieur and I believe that the world has fallen apart and only if you dare to show it in its disintegration can you hope to offer a credible image of it.

I make word, therefore, and announce that, because of monsieur, my relationship with Rosa has not been stable for some time. It is also because of monsieur that, seeing me now, you may be thinking of Faust, Dracula, or Don Quixote. I’m not sure if this is so great, I’m not sure if I should thank him for it.

But in the meantime I make words and also a theater-lecture and keep going and, guided by the chance of monsieur’s mind, I see how the theory takes shape as it chooses, with rhythm and mystery, all by itself.

MONSIEUR TONGOY’S DIARY

Were monsieur to keep a diary, I would find it extremely interesting, since no doubt Rosa and I would figure in it quite a lot. Were he to keep a diary, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to steal it for a few hours, without him realizing, and to read the thoughts he would have consigned to these pages, fascinating for sure, since I am convinced that Monsieur Tongoy is a keen observer and a remarkable thinker. He is also, though you may not have imagined it, the ugliest man in the world. Yes, that’s right. And yet this isn’t a problem for him, it never has been, he thinks that his intelligence makes him beautiful. However, I do not wish to mislead you: he is horrible, he is the most monstrous, the ugliest man in the world.

Monsieur would like to think like Valéry and continue Musil’s work, that’s why you’ll see him sometimes looking lost in the streets, searching for Musil. He doesn’t look so lost when he tackles the corridors of the Kakania Grand Hotel, though I don’t think he’ll be tackling anything right now, he’ll probably be sleeping off yesterday’s drinking bout, though, who knows, perhaps he’s already feeling better and is on his way here or opening a private journal. If he’s started to write one, I shall pinch it right away. Though, on reflection, it’s absurd. Why steal his diary if I can already imagine what he writes there: “Rosa likes Rosario because the poor man resembles a lesser Dracula. It would be much more natural for her to be drawn to me, since I am the most classic of Draculas, albeit I do not like to be connected with a vampire at all.”

In short, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished Hungarian public, I believe everybody should keep another’s diary. It’s an enormously healthy exercise.

BASER PASSIONS

You have already seen me improvise from time to time, depart from Monsieur Tongoy’s script, so now I leave these sheets behind and inform you that at the start of the twenty-first century, in February of this year, Rosa, monsieur and I traveled to the Azores. We had met in Chile, in Valparaiso, where we saw monsieur cruelly drown a fly in a pool of dry martini. A bird went by, and we followed it. We deduced that it was heading for the Azores and, two months later, the three of us set foot on those islands. On the island of Pico, inside its imposing volcano, I thought I saw some tireless moles working away day and night, in the service of the enemies of the literary. I thought I saw them, I imagined them, I suspected that they were there, in truth I saw them…. I couldn’t say now exactly what it was that happened, all I know is that I obtained a valuable image for the fictional diary I was, and still am, writing. The image, possibly visionary or simply intuitive or real, burrowed deep inside me. Hijacked as my mind was by the obsession that literature is under threat and runs the risk of extinction, this vision of the moles had a powerful effect on me.

It still does. Allow me to explain that real, true literature has always evolved serenely until reaching the point where it can be classed as lasting. That of the owners of Pico’s moles, on the other hand, is mere appearance, practiced by animals who claim to be writers and whose literature gallops with the noise and shouts of its practitioners, and every year launches thousands of books on to the market, although, as the years go by, one ends up asking where they are and what became of their brief and noisy renown; it is, therefore, a transient literature, unlike real literature, which is permanent, although, at times like this, real literature has to make an increasingly greater effort to withstand the assaults of the moles’ owners.

The day we traveled on the ferry from Fayal to Pico, with bad weather in the channel connecting the islands, I did not know that Monsieur Tongoy was so irritated by what he understood was an exaggerated tendency on my part to think about the dangers threatening real literature. I found out after we had just disembarked in Madalena, Pico’s harbor, with Rosa lagging behind us, and — I admit somewhat inopportunely — I remarked that the tragic, silent, and deserted scene — there was not a soul in sight in Madalena — was like a metaphor for the death of literature. He answered rudely. He got so worked up that he seemed to have gone mad. I shall never forget his reaction, most of all because, shortly afterward, he said something that had quite an impact on me and I had a first, fleeting intuition that there could be something between him and Rosa that I was not noticing.

It was an odd moment. As if he had suddenly revealed both how much my Montano’s malady or sickly obsession with literature infuriated him and the excessive intimacy he shared with Rosa. In fact, it was the prelude to what has finally exploded here in Budapest, where something like a fatality has appeared in our relationship, originating from some miscarriage, some wrong turning, and it is impossible today to know exactly when it took place, but it did take place, and it is dramatic.

I said that Madalena’s silent and deserted scene was like a metaphor for the death of literature, and Monsieur Tongoy, out of Rosa’s hearing, told me that, if I carried on being obsessed with what I was writing and above all obsessed with the death of literature, scarcely able to enjoy the trip and the scenery, he would feel obliged to warn Rosa that I was confusing what I was writing with reality, that I thought I was Don Quixote in the Azores.

At this point Rosa joined us and Monsieur Tongoy and I both fell silent. A little later, we hired a taxi — a taxi driver was the only person we saw in the whole of Madalena — and drove down the gloomy and solitary Lajes road, the road that would take us to a small hill a short distance from the island’s volcano, where a secret writer lived, who turned out to be as invisible as he was secret, but who helped me to create a sinister character — it was in front of his house where I saw, or thought I saw, the tireless moles — which I incorporated into my diary that night in Fayal, after we had returned from Pico and had all drunk a fair amount of gin. It was then that I reached a conclusion and, with the echo of monsieur’s words about Quixote still in my ear, I decided that in my fictional diary, to save it from extinction, I would embody literature itself, which has never been so seriously threatened as at the start of this century.

When, on leaving Café Sport that night, I told Rosa and monsieur that in Pico I had witnessed a battalion of tireless moles in the service of the basest of human passions, Monsieur Tongoy reacted abnormally. “And which is the basest of them all?” he asked obscenely and lasciviously, like an idiot, more drunk than I was, his central European eyes those of a dirty old man.

I thought for a moment. I gazed at the moon, listened to the murmur of the sea, thought how little thought takes place nowadays. The lack of culture, I said to myself, is suffocating thought. As is alcohol, you only have to look at monsieur. I’m not going to talk to him about sex, which is what he expects, I’m going to crush him with the danger posed by the enemies of the literary.

I thought about the merchants and emissaries of nothingness and other enemies of the literary.

“The stink of money and its proud stench,” I answered him, “and the deliberate lack of culture they generate, which goes against life, against real life.”

There was no immediate reply, only surprise. Then I told them both that for my book I had the idea of embodying literature’s complete memory. And this triggered a violent response from the two of them. Monsieur Tongoy looked at me angrily. “Go fuck yourself,” he told me. “You see everything in literature. I’m not surprised you even want to merge with it,” Rosa upbraided me. I tried to explain to them that I wanted to embody literature only in fiction. But they were too drunk to appreciate such subtlety. What bothered me most was that they did not share my concern for the future of real literature. I should have liked to admit to them that I was prepared to organize a movement of world resistance to the masters of Pico’s moles, but, given the circumstances, this would have been almost like putting my life on the line. I began to understand that I was alone on that island and that the only consolation left to me was to think that I was in paradise. I said this to myself so as not to lose heart completely. But their lack of solidarity with me I found so enraging that I could not contain myself. I told them that, if they did not change their attitude, I would abandon them right there on the island. They were stunned at first, but then they began to titter. This was the famous beginning of the end. “At the start of the twenty-first century, I am alone and without direction on some byroad,” I remarked reprovingly, testing to see what would happen. And it happened. First they started to giggle, but they ended up laughing their heads off and losing their balance, the two of them shaking, they thought it was so funny, and then holding on to a boat they had bumped into and trying to catch their breath. This was the limit, especially when their laughter expired and, to my surprise, I discovered that monsieur could read my thoughts.

NOSFERATU’S GIRLFRIEND

I hate the love stories readers today continue to demand from novels. All those blessed readers complain, I am told, when they see that love stories barely figure in the novels they buy. Since many of you may be such readers, who demand love stories in what they read or listen to, I have come here this evening with a commission from Monsieur Tongoy not to deprive you of a love story.

“The day will come,” monsieur told me yesterday, “when cold ideas will fill the heads of future beings, who will not be dependent on the romantic warmth of yesteryear, a warmth that will strike them rather as extraterrestrial. But since this day has not yet come, the best thing you can do tomorrow is make concessions to the public and in your Theory of Budapest to include a love story. Between tramps, for example.”

When Rosa and I arrived in this city, we visited monsieur in his cabin, we went to the cinema, we saw Detour, and, on coming out, I witnessed too many looks from her to him and realized that we made up as devilish a triangle as the one that appeared in the film we had just seen, that film so charged with fatality. And intuition made me afraid that any of the curses this strange film seemed to contain could easily affect us. For a start, I began to realize that Rosa seemed to have eyes only for the horrendous monsieur. And yesterday I became totally convinced, yesterday conflict broke out. Last night we inspected all the bars in the city and got very drunk, they did especially. I looked at them and thought how strange always is the laughter of those who are going to die. I wanted to kill them, yes, but I’m not a murderer, I’m a writer, a lecturer, a poor vagrant wandering along some byroad.

We visited all the bars in Budapest and ended up in the New Belvàrosi, where some gypsies played the Rakoczy March as a farewell to the customers. I shan’t deny that it was emotional. Rosa didn’t realize, but it was even a poetic moment, with those exciting tones of the Zingaro cymbals bringing the night to an especially poetic dramatic close….

Monsieur Tongoy did catch the poetic tone. “The three of us are also gypsies, vagrants, and you are wonderfully riddled with jealousy, you should talk about it tomorrow in the lecture,” he said to me.

At that precise moment, the Rakoczy March stopped.

At this precise moment in the lecture, according to monsieur’s script, I should drink a glass of water, a normal gesture in such proceedings. But I am not hungry, I am not thirsty, I have a premonition, a theory, the Theory of Budapest: at this precise moment, knowing that I am giving this lecture, Rosa and monsieur are in bed together.

There are proud men broken inside by invisible misfortune. This is not my case, it is easy to see how ridiculously cuckolded I am. But have no fear, ladies and gentlemen, I am not going to burst into tears or utter a cry of cosmic pain, or collapse at this desk as if I were Professor Immanuel Roth in the film The Blue Angel, and I’m certainly not going to ruin the rest of your evening. A strange sense of professionalism tells me that I must go on with my lecture. And this is what I do. I go on. I know I must go on, not cry, observe how life goes on and watch how the evening light bathes the quiet façades of the historic buildings opposite. I know I must not forget that deep down I always wanted to say good-bye to love in life and in novels, to lose everything except solitude. And to continue. All I have done in life is to continue. I would finish one book and start another, always continuing. To lose everything except solitude. And to have presence and dignity and not to cry, to justify myself before death with a job well done, to lead the unhappy, irreproachable life of a deceived man.

THE MILLIONAIRE BARNABOOTH’S DIARY

This morning I sensed very sharply the romance between them both. I saw it very clearly when both she and he, in their respective hovels at the Kakania, had, or said they had, a hangover that was literally boring a hole in their minds. I have spent the day in a nervous state and with the impression that a being on high allowed me to be so. I wondered if I would be able to see the lecture through. I have the admirable endurance of those clowns who, after something tragic befalls them, go out into the circus arena to ply their trade, but what I didn’t know is whether, feeling so deceived, I would end up deceiving myself, thinking that I could carry it off in public. I see that I have managed it, but I’m not relaxed, all the same; I haven’t been relaxed since this morning, when I ate breakfast alone and realized that Rosa and monsieur planned to go to bed together as soon as I departed for this lecture. Terrible panorama. It struck me that this breakfast could be the first in a long line of breakfasts alone.

I also felt under the influence of the dream I had suffered in the night, in which I had been mercilessly deafened by the drone of the Rakoczy March played by some gypsies on the terrace of a luxury hotel. I have never felt so on edge as I did this morning in the Kakania Grand Hotel, especially when I saw that the two fried eggs I had just been served — a kind of sinister metaphor for my soon-to-be-cuckolded condition — were staring at me from the plate, and I saw in them the eyes of the Chilean millionaire Barnabooth, that brilliant heteronym created by the French writer Valéry Larbaud. This vision lasted only a moment. Barnabooth looked at me and smiled, and then vanished from the fried eggs, but the truth of the matter is he was there for a second, I cannot be more certain, I mean I am convinced that the fried eggs undoubtedly contained the presence of the Chilean millionaire’s spirit.

I was so thirsty for revenge that I took my own revenge thinking that Monsieur Tongoy is also from Chile, with the difference that he’ll never be fit to hold a candle to the young riche amateur Barnabooth, author of a fascinating private journal, the journal of a happy traveler, who made a nocturnal crossing across enlightened Europe of the interwar period in luxury trains: “Lend me your vast noise, your vast and ever so sweet march, your nocturnal slide through enlightened Europe, O luxury train! and the anxious music that sounds in your corridors of golden skin …”

The anxious music reminds me of the gypsy songs in my dream last night. I have explained it in several of my novels. Though many of you cannot know this, I shall tell it again: for the last thirty years I have had a recurring dream in which I have always lived in a luxury hotel and have never paid the bill, which over time has grown and is now sizeable. Often the receptionist is about to hand me this impressive bill, but, conscious of the fortune I owe, I escape down a ramp in the garage, which I know very well and which is next to a service lift that only exists in my sleeping imagination. The dream recurs, but it is not always the same, it has all sorts of minor variations. In the version I had last night, it was a bellboy from the hotel, a young man named Montano, who led me stealthily to the ramp down which I could effect my escape. He was a bellboy who seemed to have emerged from one of the illustrations in the first edition of the millionaire Barnabooth’s diary.

Last night, when I had escaped down the ramp and was in the street, the bellboy Montano suddenly came up to me and, in a parody of Shakespeare, whispered in my ear, “To be again, that is the problem.” After that, as if he were going to pay my millionaire’s bill, behaving as a good son would, he went back into the hotel. “Montano!” I shouted. “One moment, I’m looking for the Pope of Rome,” the strange bellboy answered. “But, Montano!” I said. Rosa, who may have been awake or asleep, murmured, “Leave Montano alone.”

Some of you must be wondering if Barnabooth was really Chilean. Well, I have to say he was always thought of as a South American millionaire of no fixed state. But he can be considered Chilean because, when he was created — when he was “written” by Larbaud — his place of birth was Chile, hence it can be said that he was from Monsieur Tongoy’s country, though in fact Barnabooth was from everywhere, and this was his grace, he was stateless but also Chilean, because he was born in 1883, “in Campamento, Arequipa Province, today Chile, just when a war was being waged between Peru, Chile, and Bolivia over this territory.”

Revenge, Hamlet.

You don’t know how good it makes me feel to talk about this stateless millionaire, so vastly superior to that ghost, Monsieur Tongoy.

Barnabooth wrote an elegant private journal that begins in the Carlton Hotel in Florence and ends in London, where he takes his leave of Europe and decides to abandon the diary: “I shall leave these pages, this book. I shall leave it tomorrow afternoon, in Paris, where it will be published, I don’t care how or when. It is the final whim I permit myself.”

In truth Barnabooth wants the diary to be published so that he can lose sight of it, unburden himself. He says that when the diary reaches the bookshops, that will be the day he ceases to be a writer. Just like that. He wants nothing more to do with writing. And even less with the diary, about which he says, “It is over, I begin. Do not seek me in its pages, I’m somewhere else, I’m in Campamento, in South America.”

How superior is Barnabooth to Monsieur Tongoy! Revenge, Hamlet. And good-bye, Monsieur Tongoy. I use Barnabooth, who was Chilean like you, to send you packing to the Chilean Patagonia from where you mustn’t return. Good-bye, monsieur. I cease to give the lecture following your dictatorial dictation. I choose my own route, a decision as serious as it is in fact trivial, because in fact the difference between following monsieur’s dictation and ceasing to do so is the same as that between repeating the words of your dog and taking it for a walk.

DIARY OF THE CONVENT OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD

Good-bye, Rosa, good-bye. I knew the day would come when I would have to separate from you and I would write it here. Good-bye, Rosa. You’ll even end up missing those mornings when we ate breakfast together and I saw that the fried eggs were staring at me from the plates you served me sweetly, although sometimes they ended up glaring at me from the floor: plates that broke when you hurled the fried eggs at my head and said you felt weighed down by our lack of intimacy, that wanted to be on your own for a while. Goodbye, Rosa, good-bye. Now you will have all the time to enjoy your precious intimacy. After all, Monsieur Tongoy is a dirty old man with one foot in hell, already the slow Chilean train that will run him down is approaching. Soon, Rosa, you’ll have all the time in the world to miss those wonderful mornings when the fried eggs figured so prominently between us. Soon you’ll be hit by nostalgia even for the morning you spilled your blood over breakfast. It all began when I asked you if I could make some toast and you told me to wait until you had finished making yours, and shortly after saying this you started to cry, and I asked myself out loud what I had done to deserve this, and you called me a pig, and I told you to stop crying, for God’s sake, don’t cry anymore, I just wanted to make some toast, I told you, just some toast for the fried eggs, and you ordered me to make a boiled egg and to go to hell because I had spoiled your day, and then, when I told you that I didn’t want a boiled egg and that this argument was ridiculous, you hurled your plate at my head and started crying again and bent down to pick up the remains of the broken plate and ended up cutting the surface of your hand, you spilled your precious blood.

That’s where I wanted to get to. To the precious blood, which allows me to think about Chile, to recall the Convent of the Precious Blood, in the city of Santiago, where the extremely beautiful writer Teresa Wilms Montt, enclosed against her will, wrote part of her private journal, which today is named after the convent.

Teresa was great and you, Rosa, will never be. Revenge, Hamlet. Teresa was a real woman and you are just a flesh-and-blood character in the tragic novel of my life.

Teresa was born in 1893 in Viña del Mar, she was educated for marriage and for high-society parties, but from an early age this young woman of good family showed a tendency to rebel. She married the first man she met, Gustavo Balmaceda, with whom she shared a passion for the opera. The couple — she was only seventeen — had to leave Viña del Mar’s closed society and settle in Santiago, where Teresa became literature-sick while her husband became sick with jealousy and gave himself up to alcohol. Shouts, fights, blows. They moved to Iquique, where matters became even worse for the couple when she sought out the company of trade unionists and feminists who helped consolidate her Masonic and anarchist thinking.

Teresa had two daughters from her marriage, but was violently separated from them when her husband found out that she was unfaithful. He shut her up in the Convent of the Precious Blood in Santiago, where Teresa began to write her angst-ridden, terrible, bloody diary: “Stupid clock, continue loathsomely! Your black hands like a crow’s wings park on each endless minute. I feel an impulse to throw you far away, to stamp on you! Ironic, biting, impassive enemy of those who suffer, you are without mercy! When you see that we are happy, you become light and your minute hands fly…. You’re perverted, infested with the devil!”

During her angst-ridden enclosure, she clung to her diary, she acted as if she knew these words by John Cheever: “Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.”

Teresa escaped from that convent and fled with Vicente Huidobro to Buenos Aires, where she entered the literary circles and became one of the few women who frequented bohemian life in the capital. These words by Huidobro remain as a testament to those Argentinian days and have become an immortal eulogy: “Teresa Wilms is the greatest woman to have come out of America. Perfect in face, perfect in body, perfect in elegance, perfect in education, perfect in intelligence, perfect in spiritual strength, perfect in grace.”

But Teresa Wilms fled from Buenos Aires as well: “I have left Argentina because my destiny is to wander.” New York, Seville, Paris, London, and Valle-Inclán’s Madrid — she was his muse — all saw her go by. Go by and leave. Teresa fled from every city. And ended up fleeing from herself, she began not to eat and to take all kinds of sedatives to dull her overflowing senses. She carried her wandering life, her journey along some byroad, her destiny, to its logical conclusion. At the age of twenty-eight she killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates. Her language reminds me of Alejandra Pizarnik’s, and therefore also of my mother’s. Teresa Wilms killed herself and in her diary left passages like this: “Naked as I was born, I leave, as ignorant of what there was in the world. I suffered and this is the only baggage of the boat that leads to oblivion.”

You who in respectful silence follow the staging of my extensive personal drama will hardly or not be surprised if I tell you that Teresa was a very superior being to Rosa. Revenge, Hamlet. One Chilean millionaire and one poet from the same country have sufficed for me to fulminate against monsieur and Rosa. Thank you, Chile. Thank you, Hamlet. And goodbye, Rosa, good-bye. You are a toad for me this evening, and so is monsieur. Good-bye, both of you. I shan’t say now that the truth for a toad like you is that for another toad, monsieur’s toad. I shan’t say that, Rosa, but I will say that it is a pleasure to lose one toad, and even more, to lose both.

A TURNING TOWARD DESOLATION

John Cheever was a tireless writer of private journals over forty years, during which time he scarcely took a break when it came to trying to explain his complex conflict with life, because deep down, beyond appearances, the problem was life, as his son, Benjamin Cheever, writes in his foreword to the journals: “A simpleton might think that bisexuality was the essence of his problem, but of course it was not. Nor was alcoholism. He came to terms with his bisexuality. He quit drinking. But life was still a problem.”

There is an entry in his journals that I mentally carry as if it were permanently sewn in the left-hand pocket of all my trousers: “Hurricane watch, they say. Heavy rains after midnight. Gale winds. I wake at three. It is close. No sign of wind and rain. Then I think that I can do it, make sense of it, and recount my list of virtues: valor, saneness, decency, the ability to handle the natural hazards of life.”

Since reading this entry from his journal, I have carried it permanently on me, it is a list of values that has been decisive in my life. In the absence of other beliefs, I have had this list, which has served me never to lose my sense of direction. This past night, for example, it has helped me to deal with my problems and to save all of you the unpleasant cries of a wounded animal, the unpleasant signs of desperation.

The problems were always there, which enabled Cheever — this is the positive side of the matter — to write masterly pages in his journals, like this one that I carry loose in my pocket and shall now read you: “When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand. It is a headache, a slight case of indigestion, an infected finger; but you miss the 8:20 and arrive late at the meeting on credit extensions. The old friend that you meet for lunch suddenly exhausts your patience and in an effort to be pleasant you drink three cocktails, but by now the day has lost its form, its sense and meaning. To try and restore some purpose and beauty to it you drink too much at cocktails you talk too much you make a pass at somebody’s wife and you end with doing something foolish and obscene and wish in the morning that you were dead. But when you try to trace back the way you came into this abyss all you find is a grain of sand.”

Last night, distinguished public, I remained alone, alone and lost in Budapest, you yourselves have been witnessing my tragic process of separation from the others. This plunges me into a state of confusion that takes me even closer to the world of Cheever, who opened his extensive journals on a disconsolate note and he talked of loneliness and of how the beauty of the visible world seemed to crumble before him, even love crumbled. And Cheever spoke in this opening of some miscarriage, he had the impression that he had taken some wrong turning: the same impression that I have had today, here in Budapest, the sensation that, since seeing Detour, I have wandered from my road. I should never have gone into that movie, the beauty of the world has crumbled in me, and fatality has left me broken, alone, wandering along some byroad.

“The most I can make out of this hour is a kind of loneliness.” This is how Cheever’s journals begin, this is how I should begin my diary of a deceived man, because this is what my diary is turning into — that of a deceived man — after having told you the story of my turning toward desolation, the desolation I have come to know here in this city of Budapest, where I have undoubtedly taken a wrong turning, as if Cheever’s loneliness — the journals’ opening reminds me of the start of Robinson Crusoe’s diary: “And now being about to enter into a melancholy relation of a scene of silent life …”—continued to affect me.

I’m not going to sink further before you, I shall simply draw to a close this spectacle of someone who is not really hungry, who in the course of this lecture has gradually transformed into a deceived man, the composition of whose diary you have witnessed live, a diary that will continue even if the lecture finishes, that will go beyond this historic room and follow its course out of your sight, reflecting like Cheever on loneliness, on the weight of despair and dejection, on the painful attacks of unfounded anxiety, on love and hate, on the need for a writer to give words special importance, to move among them as comfortably as among human beings, if not more so; to dethrone words in order to show them to better seats, to squeeze them and question them and stroke them delicately and even paint with them impossible colors and, after so much intimacy with them, to know also how to be able to hide out of consideration for them.

RUSSIAN DIARY

It is not the revelation of some truth that my diary pursues, but information about my constant mutations. My diary has existed for years, but it only started to turn into a novel a few months ago, in November of last year, when I traveled to Nantes and imagined that I was visiting an invented son. I started to turn my diary into a novel being the writer that I am, but pretending to be a literary critic, later I began to construct a fake autobiography by injecting my diary with fragments from the lives or works of my favorite diarists and I discovered how right Gabriel Ferrater was when in 1956 he wrote in a letter to Jaime Gil de Biedma, “Have you noticed how curiously impersonal we letter-wounded are or, perhaps better, how lacking in intimacy our personality is?”

In short, I built myself a timid biography and later, here in Budapest, I transformed into a hungry lecturer whom I see now turning, after a new mutation because of his treacherous wife, into a lonely man, a man who wanders along some byroad, into a walker who tries out the identity of a deceived man.

The different characters I have been all suffered from literature-sickness, they needed to cling to literature in order to survive. The deceived vampire you see now before you is, of all those characters, the one who most needs literature to survive. This may be because in fiction he has just discovered a moral of life.

This deceived vampire’s diary is turning Russian since he connected it with another diary, that of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, called Diary of a Deceived Man, no less. This man, by which I mean this vampire, remembers well a passage from the anti-Communist Drieu La Rochelle’s diary; two sentences were written nervously in the days when his compatriots were asking him to commit suicide so that they would not have to shoot him for his collaboration with the Nazis: “It is said that in Russia they no longer know what jealousy is. I know because I am Russian.”

The deceived man I have turned into is like a Russian, he no longer knows what jealousy is. So he’s not going to cry out here with pain and terror. But I feel rage and infinite resentment, I cannot hide it. I should like to destroy the world. I’m afraid that from now on I shall keep the diary of a deceived, resentful, vindictive man. Life has treated me badly. Nobody likes to be deceived. I am not deceiving you if I tell you that I am Russian and am not jealous, but I’m thinking of planting mental bombs in all the homes of all those swines who are destroying literature, all those businessmen who publish books, all those departmental managers, marketing directors on the wire, economics graduates. I’m after them, I’ve already located where their lackeys hang out on the island of Pico, and now I’m after them. What they do lacks spirit and grace. I’m becoming increasingly like the protagonist of Detour, that character we see at the end of the film lost and alone on a road at dusk, without direction, with an abstract freedom he can do little or nothing with, except to try to disappear or hide or dissolve in the last corner of the world.

I want to delve deeply into unreality, to flee from so many hateful ghosts, so much falsification and masquerade, to flee from a reality that has lost its meaning. “One does not grow old in the space of an afternoon,” John Cheever remarked in his journals in reference to his story “The Swimmer,” whose protagonist crossed swimming pools in the course of a few hours that ended up turning into months, and finally years; he was an old man by the time he made it home. “Oh, well, kick it around,” I recall Cheever adding. And yet you have been able to see how it is perfectly possible to grow old in the space of a lecture on the private journal as narrative form. You have witnessed my unsightly transformation and know that I’m in an understandably bad mood. I shall leave this Literature Museum twenty years older, I have transformed into one of those terrible and very dangerous old men Macedonio Fernández talked about in one of his notes.

George Sand had already talked about this phenomenon of ageing live, in front of everybody. In one of her novels, she describes a French drawing room in which she observes the gestures and faces of the stale aristocracy and sees all the ancient aristocrats ageing right there. And Marcel Proust uses this idea for his Recherche. And now it could be said that the idea has used me, given that, as all of you have been perfectly able to appreciate — and this has formed the core spectacle of this lecture — I have been seen this evening to age right here, in front of everybody.

I feel bad for you, since you came to this museum to hear a lecture and have ended up witnessing the spectacle of a poor cuckold who has aged twenty years in an hour. The truth is that I never thought I would leave here so ancient and so dangerous, full of resentment, having just joined a band of imaginative elders, of wakeful monsters, although almost all have a cough, almost all are stooping, almost all are drug addicts, almost all are single, almost all are childless, almost all are in strange nursing homes, almost all are blind, almost all are forgers and fakes; and all, absolutely all, are deceived.