Montano's Malady

IV. Diary of a Deceived Man

SEPTEMBER 25

At the start of the twenty-first century, as if I were walking to the rhythm of literature’s most recent history, I was alone and without direction on some byroad, in the evening, heading inexorably for melancholy. A slow, enveloping, increasingly deep nostalgia for all that literature had once been merged with the mist at dusk. I considered myself a very deceived man. In life. And in art. In art, I saw hateful lies, falsifications, masquerades, frauds all around me. And I also felt very lonely. And when I looked at what was in front of my eyes, I always saw the same: literature at the start of the twenty-first century, in agony. I sensed that, like the castaway Crusoe at the start of his diary, I was reaching the point where I had “to enter into a melancholy relation of a scene of silent life.” I was wandering without direction along the byroad. And the mist was becoming increasingly thick and mysterious. I might bump into Musil, I told myself. In its decline, literature, like the day, was growing pale, dying. I wanted to discuss it with someone, but the byroad was empty. I kept going for a long time, and night fell. Suddenly I saw a shadow move next to an empty house. It was Emily Dickinson. She was wearing a white nightgown and walking a dog. I asked after Musil and she looked at me in surprise. That place resembled the end of the world, the end of the earth. “Fog,” she remarked. I carried on walking, all night I heard birds passing, I flew with them. At dawn, as I turned off the byroad, I saw Musil next to an abyss. He wore a white open-necked shirt, a very black coat down to his feet, and red broad-brimmed hat. He was staring thoughtfully at the ground. He raised his head and looked at me. Before us there was only a void. “It is the air of the time,” I said to him. He gazed toward the blurred horizon. “Let us not just hand ourselves to the age as it covets us,” he said.

When I went to Nantes in November of last year, I still hadn’t aged twenty years in a single evening in Budapest. And literature was in a bad way, but not so much as now — it isn’t that it has aged a lot, it’s that it now resembles the Austro-Hungarian Empire hurtling toward its destruction.

I went to Nantes and was still young. Ten months later, the hand of the person writing this diary is that of an old man who was deceived in Budapest.

Two weeks ago, on Tuesday the 11th, Manhattan was attacked. The news affected me, but not so much as when I aged twenty years in the course of the lecture I gave last June, one evening in Budapest. As is to be expected, I don’t have very happy memories of that Hungarian evening. The worst bit was perhaps at the end, when I had already gained twenty years and I realized that, at the rate time was passing, if I didn’t end the lecture soon, I would come out of there dead. The trouble was I didn’t know how to round off that lecture, which was gradually turning into something like the Museum of the Novel of the Eternal, that book Macedonio Fernández could never find an ending to.

I didn’t know how to finish, it only occurred to me to ask the public to leave me alone on the stage, to silently acknowledge my drama as an old, defeated man of letters in Budapest, and for them all to go. This is what I finally did, I begged the public to leave me all alone in that room.

They didn’t budge.

“But don’t you see I’ve aged twenty years? Please go, all of you, disappear, I can’t face anybody right now, the lecture has ended, we mustn’t let it turn into the Museum of the Eternal Lecture.”

“What will we do to disappear?” asked Blanchot. I didn’t know what I would do to disappear, but I knew that the public could go, could disappear, and that this could be a good ending.

They began to leave.

After their initial hesitation, they started heading for the exit, they all filed out, emptying the room; the last to go was the writer Imre Kertész, who came toward me as if he wanted to say something, but I cut him off with two sentences that were sufficiently extravagant to make him arch an eyebrow and to stop him in his tracks: “I want to be alone, Kertész, my friend. I want to know, when I’m done, whether I am not.”

Finally I was left alone, with a half-empty jug of water and the script dictated to me by that wretched Tongoy, who throughout the lecture I had always referred to as “monsieur,” as if eager to turn him into a kind of personal Monsieur Teste. I remained alone on the stage, telling myself that no doubt in the world of the theater — or in that of lectures like mine, with a theatrical slant — there is a closely guarded secret: that, when everything is over, the authors, the people responsible for so many words, carry on living there, remain in the theater and their words carry on living beyond the moment at which they were spoken.

Everyone left and for a few moments I remained living there, experiencing a strange and highly paradoxical sensation, since on the one hand I felt that I was living in the Literature Museum and on the other that, on remaining alone, I was not. It was during those moments of loneliness and life that wasn’t, but was, life, that I decided, in view of the nonsense of reality at that point, I would delve into unreality.

I had just made up my mind when the museum’s administrator appeared out of nowhere and immediately returned me to my condition as a deceived man, returned me to my brutalized, debatable, muddled, hateful, meaningless reality.

“Mr Girondo, your wife is waiting for you in the hall,” she informed me.

You are abandoned, but told that it’s not like that, it’s absolutely not true that you’ve been left.

“Tongoy? Oh, come on … He’s just a friend, you’re crazy if you think that I’d sleep with a dragonfly,” Rosa tells you.

Then you decide you should be the one who abandons, but you won’t do it in Budapest, you’ll arm yourself with patience and wait until you reach Barcelona.

One morning, you suddenly up and leave, without even writing a note. You take nothing with you, only your private journal. You put on a dark suit and walk along the Catalan streets in the rain: by the trees, the pavement, the odd pedestrian. On reaching a square, you spot a bus. You quicken your pace, run across the avenue and board behind the other passengers. The bus moves off. You sit at the back for a better view of the human panorama. You contemplate the rain on the windows. A few hours later, you are crossing the Seine by Austerlitz Bridge, still on a bus, and at each stop you watch the people boarding. At Orly you pass a small security gate, you don’t even have hand luggage, only your private journal. You board an airplane that cleaves the air and lands in Santiago, where you take a taxi for Valparaiso and, once there, you race toward the Brighton Hotel’s terrace, where you notice that it will rain soon, and in any case you do not commit the idiocy of asking yourself what you are doing there, as you do not ask yourself whether you should put your scarf on the radiator in your room to dry, that is if you had a scarf, a radiator, a room, which you do not.

Later, you recall Tongoy on that very terrace the year before, all that disgusting business with the fly he drowned in alcohol, the end-of-the-century party on this very terrace, deserted today, terribly empty, without anybody. The hotel seems closed. It’s amazing to see a place so alive in your imagination and so dead in the world of reality. But this is not the time to be amazed. After all, you’re the one who sought the tremendous loneliness of this terrace, previously full of joy for you. It would be absurd to complain about anything now. You say this to yourself and suddenly a waiter appears. You’re slightly disappointed, you had begun to like the idea of walking alone through a space that is one of the central axes of your diary, as regards both your real life and your imagination. But, to counteract your disappointment, you realize that interesting possibilities are opening up for you and one of them is to order a pisco sour, which is what you do. A little later, as you are served, you think about life and you feel proud of yourself, you ask yourself what you have turned into since your escape. And you answer, I am a man of leisure, a sleepwalker, an oyster. You play alone, you’re content, with a fugitive’s happiness. You’re far from the world’s uproar: Rosa, extravagant projects, friends. You’ve left it all behind. You tell yourself that there was nothing else you could do and, for everything now to be perfect, all you need do is completely disappear, really disappear. It’s not so simple, you think. You look out over the bay of Valparaiso. What will I do to disappear? you ask yourself. You find no response and change the subject, you tell yourself that there’s a lot of poetry in abandonment and you recall the envy you felt one day when you heard somebody in the street say, “He gave up everything and just cleared off.” Since hearing that, you’ve been obsessed with the idea of escaping and have ended up doing it, you can feel satisfied, even if you’re very alone and before you had so much company. There’s a lot of poetry in abandonment, you think again as you listen to the Pacific’s deep, warlike roar. And you recall some verses by Philip Larkin, where the author says that deep down we all hate home and having to be there, we all detest our rooms, their specially chosen junk, the good books, the good bed, and our lives, in perfect order.

Take that! (you think), you bastards, you can have your nice houses, with the Mediterranean’s tame, miserable murmur, this pisco sour’s damn good.

It is evening on September 25th. In a break from writing this diary, I flicked through a book I bought yesterday by Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories, and was surprised to find some lines that inform me that the Swiss writer also wandered in the mist, along some byroad: “Often I wandered of course perplexed in a mist and in a thousand vacillations and dilemmas, and often I felt myself woefully forsaken. […] Proud and gay in the roots of his soul a man becomes only through trial bravely undergone, and through suffering patiently endured.” I told myself that now was a good time to identify with Walser. After all, my grandfather, my mother’s father, was very like Walser, and also his sons, the Girondos, my mother’s three brothers, bore a certain spiritual resemblance to Walser. They spent their lives bravely undergoing the hardships set by life and silently enduring the suffering that continually came their way, they suffered life without fuss, which always struck me as admirable. They were what we call “blessed souls,” and sometimes seemed like people made of wood, functioning automatically (like Felicity, the servant Flaubert wrote about). They possessed an enviable simplicity and, as an example of how they viewed the world, they would gaze at the sea and think that it had no bottom, that it was an image of the infinite, and that next to it one should always be very farsighted and, contemplating it, should say, “So much water, so much water!” They were discreet, extremely modest, simple, kind; I feel very sad but peaceful when I can identify with the Girondos, it’s as if I returned to the land I came from. They understood perfectly that it will always be a fine thing to fight and to know what it is to be gay in the roots of one’s soul, through certain hardships bravely undergone. It’s a fine thing to fight and to be, for example, literature itself, to fight for it, to embody it in your own person when it is in agony and you lead the pleasant existence of a deceived man. It’s a fine thing to fight, to challenge the abyss there in front of the void, to seek Musil.

You literally left with what you had on, with the dark suit and the private journal. On the Brighton’s Victorian terrace, where one day you were with friends, today you are extraordinarily alone, in a space where for you real and invented life meet. You left with what you had on — that said, inside the dark suit, not by chance, was your credit card. Since it’s Sunday, you’ll wait until tomorrow to buy new clothes, including socks and pants, toothpaste and slippers, all that prosaic stuff that ruins your romantic escape and makes you a poor, lonely credit-card holder in a dark suit. So you change your mind and tell yourself that your loneliness is not such an agreeable sensation as it seemed a moment ago. But you mustn’t lose heart. Fortunately you have your diary with you, which can fill the dangerous hole your life as a deceived man has occupied. You instantly smile out of pure pleasure when you tell yourself that, basically, you’re hiding from your many friends — an entire life devoted to the noble nurturing of friendship, and all that now thrown overboard — you’re hiding from your friends and you experience a peculiar delight in this new, lonely lifestyle you have chosen, and you recall Walser when he said he found strange the depravity of secretly rejoicing when one admits that one is hiding a bit.

You have your diary to fill your deceived man’s dangerous hole. You order another pisco sour and ask the waiter if he remembers you, if he remembers the Catalan who came here at the end of last year. “I’m new in Valparaiso,” replies the waiter grudgingly. It may be that, apart from what you’ve written in the diary, there is no human testimony left to corroborate that you were here and you were happy.

The waiter was so unpleasant that, when he brings your second pisco, you ask him if he can offer a fly on the side, a fly to martyr and drown.

“Martyrdom by martini,” you remark.

He thinks you’re mad or drunk and disappears, you are once more alone with your diary, you decide to record in it everything that is happening to you; therefore you decide to be sincere and realistic, that is until you remember that the anti-artistic, naive artists you so detest do something similar. And then you also remember that, in view of the nonsense of the reality of your age, you were going to delve into unreality. You bring all this to mind, pull your diary out of the bag, and propose to renounce stupid sincerity, to describe images and situations, like the landscapes in Italian metaphysical painting, in a very clear, very exact, very accurate, and yet very unreal way. But you soon decide not to be a kind of metaphysical painter, in the same way that you decided not to be a silly and sincere diarist. And you end up writing this: “I think I’ve been on this sumptuous hanging terrace before, but I couldn’t say when. I have the bay of Valparaiso at my feet and tell myself that I should go back through this diary and try to find out when I was here before, supposing it to be certain that I have been in this city with all its winds and all its funiculars, in this city where the customs officer Rubén Darío wrote Azul …”

You interrupt what you were writing, it strikes you as stupidly literary and stupidly false. For this you’d do better to be faithful to reality and tell the truth about your anomalous situation here in Valparaiso, tell how you’re very alone and don’t know what’s going to become of you, and you don’t understand what you’re doing on the Brighton’s terrace, on this terrace so far away from your home in Barcelona, although, that said, it’s also true that you’ve done well to delve into a poetics of abandonment and escape, no doubt you’ve acted correctly in giving up everything and certainly the best thing you can do is not lose heart, since you need to feel very complete if you’re going to devote yourself to the fine fight you’ve gotten into, to the fine gesture of embodying literature in your own person in order to protect it from its desperate situation in front of the abyss.

You are a man of leisure, a sleepwalker, an oyster.

You are literature itself, you embody it this afternoon on this terrace. And you feel proud of your new life.

You have banished every kind of sincerity and any temptation to become poetic or to make literature from the diary. And you discover that, alongside the options the diary was offering you here in the Brighton (to record reality, delve into the unreal, be sincere and confess your anxiety, etc.), alongside the traditional options, a new and very attractive path has opened up, no less traditional even if you hadn’t thought of it before: to transfer what you would like to happen to you right now on this deserted terrace to the diary. And what you would like to happen is really tender, simple, pure filial love: for your mother to revive and be here with you now, to keep you company in your loneliness.

You think that to favor what isn’t happening is also a way to keep a diary. And then your deceived man’s aged hand does not tremble when you write that your late mother is at your side, she is there on the terrace, her eyes open to the void, and quite different from when she was alive.

You would proceed to ask your mother what life is like in the hereafter, you would ask her this, except that you’ve often asked the dead this question in your novels, and all of them have replied that life in the hereafter is like swimming in the pampas at night.

To avoid eliciting the same response from her, you decide to vary the question slightly and you express an interest in how things are with her, meaning that you do not give her any ideas by naming the hereafter, you simply ask her:

“How is everything, mother?”

“How do you think? Bad, son. That’s why things are bad for you as well, and they’ll get worse, you’ll see.”

“What shall I see?”

“You’ll see they call you Eternity, like me.”

Your mother begins to sob and seems to do so in the coarse manner in which Lewis Carroll’s Caterpillar wept. Although the wind starts to blow, you do not ask yourself whether all this will finally help you to disappear, completely disappear, as has been your objective for some time. You do not question any of this because actually you feel wonder-fully well and you don’t want to ask anything, being as you are with your pisco sour next to Eternity, Girondo, your late mother.

You point to the sea and, like someone made of wood, functioning automatically, you feel like a Girondo when you remark:

“Lots of water, lots of water.”

She nods and the wind picks up, and you feel increasingly well, being carried along by the life of your mind.

You leave Valparaiso lonelier than when you arrived and go around the world a few times, you pass through strange cities on various continents and end up returning to Europe, and by train from Munich you arrive in Budapest, where your first impulse — as if you were one of those stupid ghosts in Dickens, which, having the whole of infinite space at their disposal, always want to go back to the exact place where they were unhappy — is to visit the city’s Literature Museum and wander around the room where two months ago you gave a lecture, but at the last moment you withhold the impulse and remind yourself that you are in what was once “the city of the cafés” and you take refuge in the Krúdy, a literary café, and pretend to be Dezşö Kosztolányi, the great Hungarian writer and great sufferer of literature sickness who in the old Sirius, instead of ordering a coffee from the waiter, would ask for ink.

“Garçon” he would say, “ink s’il vous plaît!”

You’re in the Krúdy and you write in your diary what you would like to happen now, and your deceived man’s aged hand does not tremble when you write that you have just remembered that Nabokov wrote that “the soul is but a manner of being — not a constant state — that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations.” You also remember that he wrote that “the hereafter”—something your mother, Eternity, seems to know a lot about—“may be the full ability of consciously living in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden.”

Nor does your aged hand tremble when you write that a kind of gray cloud slowly dilutes the darkness inside the Krúdy and a snowy exterior becomes faintly perceptible through the cafés windows, and you feel you have taken possession of the soul of Robert Walser — that eternal walker along roads of fog and snow — and at the same time you think you see Robert Musil outside the café with a thermos of coffee, wearing a metalworker’s overalls that evidently are not sufficient to protect him from the cold, which leads you to rap with your knuckles on the windowpane and invite him in.

Musil comes in, you shake his hand.

“My name is Robert Walser,” you say, “and I’d like you to forget about the thermos so that I can buy you a proper cup of coffee.”

“I’d prefer something solid, a proper steak, for example,” replies Musil. “So your name’s Robert Walser, just like the writer? Funny that. Do you know you even look like him? Though, to tell the truth, with an air of Dracula.”

It being Musil, you allow him to pull your leg, but you ask him why he is dressed in such horrendous fashion, why he is disguised as a metalworker.

“Volume one, chapter twenty. Of my unfinished book. Do you remember that the title of this chapter is “The Touch of Reality”?”

You think you more or less understand what he means and call the garçon and order a steak for your guest and you ask him if he wasn’t very cold and hungry standing outside, dressed as a metalworker in touch with reality.

“I had spent,” he replies, “three days and nights on endless roads of snow. Finally I reached the place I wanted to get to, Budapest. But no sooner had I set foot in the city than I decided this place was unreachable. So I stopped to think and did so here, in my overalls, in front of the Krúdy. And I thought that, if this was the city I was seeking and I had reached it so easily, then I was an insignificant being. Or else this couldn’t be the place. Perhaps, I now tell myself, it is the place, but I may not have reached it.”

“Allow me to say that your reflections have an air of Kafka about them,” you comment, thus taking revenge for the bit about Dracula.

He behaves as if he hadn’t heard you and carries on talking in a Kafkaesque manner:

“Or perhaps it’s that there’s nobody in this place, and I am simply of the place and in the place. And nobody can reach it.”

A great writer is seated before you and at no point do you forget this. You know that to have someone like this before you is not normal in an age like today’s, which has hardly any great writers. You suddenly recall a book by Hemingway you read years ago, Green Hills of Africa, in which the author, next to the palm trees, in the middle of lion and rhinoceros tracks, abruptly falls to thinking about James Joyce and the days he saw him in Paris, and he writes, “When you saw him he would take up a conversation interrupted three years before. It was nice to see a great writer in our time.”

But you’re not in Africa, you’re in the Krúdy, you don’t have Joyce in front of you, you have Musil.

“What was that about Kafka?” he suddenly asks you.

“Oh, nothing.”

“I was thinking about him a lot only today. Were Kafka still in Prague, I would go to this city and ask him to join Action Without Parallel, I’m thinking of gathering my resistance friends in some place in the world.”

You immediately think of the island of Fayal, in the Azores, as an ideal place for this gathering. But you don’t say this to him because you realize in time that you don’t know what kind of resistance he’s talking about, nor do you know what Action Without Parallel might be.

Musil seems to have guessed what you’re wondering.

“Resistance,” he says, “underground people of letters. Fighters against the destruction of literature. I’d like to gather them together and start planting mental bombs against false writers, against the rogues who control the culture industry, against the emissaries of nothingness, against the pigs.”

Instinctively, with great enthusiasm, you think of mental bombs that you would carefully plant in the offices of certain pigs, enemies of the literary. And it brightens your day to dream about the triumph of literature. But you don’t say any of this to Musil, you’re afraid that he considers you too naive or a subversive child, you prefer to hand him the initiative, for him to propose — you’ll soon find out he won’t — that you join Action Without Parallel.

When his steak arrives, you decide to clarify something he told you before and you ask him what exactly he means by “touch of reality.”

Musil stares at you for a good while and finally says:

“What you’re seeing now, that’s exactly what I mean by touch of reality. And what are you seeing now? Well, what you see is a man in overalls preparing to dip into a steak. For unreality, Walser, my friend, is to invent, for example, that today is snowing and is a beautiful day in August 1913; for this and to do those things, we’ve plenty of time,” says Musil.

At which point he dips into his steak.

* * *

You leave Budapest on the following day, without going anywhere near the museum where you displayed your cuckold’s horns, you leave without even going back to the cinema where your life took a detour on to some byroad, you leave Budapest without Musil, whom you lost sight of in the baths of the Geliert Hotel. You leave Budapest and barely ask yourself what can have happened to Rosa these past two months — before now you would ask yourself this from time to time, you would play at imagining that she had given you up for dead in a ditch by some byroad — you leave Budapest for Vienna in a boat that travels along the Danube and reminds you of the vaporetti in Venice; you leave for Vienna and there you take a taxi to Kierling, where you find the building with three floors — once a nursing-home — that Kafka died in.

You reach this modest building at 187 Hauptstrasse, Kierling, a small town near Klosterneuburg. Here, on June 3, 1924, Kafka died when the place was Dr. Hoffmann’s sanatorium. It is now an apartment building, which you have reached easily, having found the exact address in Danube; the place is more or less as Magris describes it in this book after his visit there in the 1980s. Kafka’s room on the second floor overlooked the garden. It was a room covered in flowers. On that same floor, in the exact space where Kafka died, a very pleasant old lady allows you into her apartment so that you can see the garden below from the balcony. The lady is dressed in a kind of white nightgown embroidered with ivory; it almost seems she had dressed up to receive you. In the garden there is now a wooden shed full of wheelbarrows and sickles. From his rocking chair, Kafka contemplated this garden, it was the last garden he saw. A neighbor’s dog barks, you try to imagine this landscape in winter, the sky gray with ice and snow stains. You’re quite impressed, you’re in the exact place where Kafka took leave of his life. Depending on how you look, you might see what he saw at the end of his days. “He saw,” writes Magris, “the greenness which eluded him, or rather the flowering, the springtime, the sap, everything that was sucked out of his body by paper and ink, desiccating him into a feeling of pure, impotent barrenness.”

“Will you have some tea with me, Mr. Walser?” the pleasant, old lady suggests.

You say, of course you will, and you’re delighted with her hospitality. Kafka died here, you think. And you think that, if you told the lady this, she would tell you that she also plans to die there. And you recall something else Magris wrote about this room: “Here truly, as in the old medieval morality plays, died Everyman.”

When she serves your tea, you ask her if she has read Kafka. If you could, you’d go on to ask her what it’s like living where Kafka died, but this second question seems rather inappropriate to you.

“I don’t read, Mr. Walser,” she replies.

“Don’t you?”

“It’s not a habit of mine, I need to do things with my hands, to keep them busy, you see. Books leave them static. No, I haven’t read Kafka.”

“Don’t you read at all?”

“No, though I admire Stephen Hawking a lot, I adore him; I hear him say amazing things on the TV and also on the radio”—she points to an old Marconi set from the 1950s—“he’s an extraordinary, moving person. I’m fascinated by everything he says, that we live in a universe with thousands of millions of galaxies, which in turn contain thousands of millions of I don’t know what other galaxies, which makes it all infinite…. And all those opinions about God. Believe me, I admire Hawking a lot, he’s an amazing man, he’s like God. The other day, I heard him talking about Ur, in Chaldea. Have you heard of Ur, in Chaldea, Mr. Walser?”

“I must confess I haven’t.”

“In Ur, Hawking says, they already knew about the cubic root and I don’t know what about the square root. That’s right, Mr. Walser. The cubic root! In Ur they already knew about it. Abraham and his lot were aware of it. Isn’t that incredible?”

You ask her who Abraham was, you recall having studied him at school, but you don’t remember any of it. She seems surprised that you don’t know who Abraham is, but then she hesitates a little when it comes to explaining who he was, she doesn’t seem to know so much about him:

“He was the father of the present-day Israelites, or the God of the Jews, or something like that. He was Abraham, you must have heard of him. The point is I admire Hawking and everything he says, he’s someone who encourages you to live when you see him like that, overcoming all his physical problems with an iron will.”

You discover that this very pleasant old lady, unlike you, is far removed from any Montano’s malady. And you tell yourself that you wouldn’t mind staying here for a long time, the conversation is agreeable and the tea is excellent. No doubt in a few days you would cease to be seriously literature-sick. That said, of course — the thought comes into your mind — you shouldn’t abandon your underground warrior’s militancy against the enemies of the literary, don’t forget that; even if it’s only out of loyalty to Musil, think that the likeliest outcome is for you to join Action Without Parallel, don’t forget that one mustn’t abandon one’s convictions, or that you’re almost obliged to stand by those who put up a fight against those who try to avoid the triumph of literature.

You look out again at the garden that was the last Kafka saw, and you hear the lady say:

“We live not to live, Mr. Walser, but to have already lived, to be already dead.”

You wonder what she can have meant by that. You can scarcely believe that this room where you are now, with its Marconi radio set and four pieces of petit bourgeois furniture, was once a room in a sanatorium, a room covered in flowers, in which a moribund Kafka was at times delirious: he no longer read, he played with the books, opened them, flicked through them, looked at them and closed them again, with the same old happiness. Pietro Citati relates how, after Kafka read the final proofs of his final book, tears came into his eyes as never before. What was he crying for? Death? The writer he had been? The writer he could have been, that he may have glimpsed in this final fire? He praised wine and beer and asked the others to drink, to swill the liquids — beer, wine, water, tea, fruit juice — he could no longer swallow.

You can scarcely believe that in this room where you are now, with a single vase, there used to be lots of flowers and a doctor and a nurse, and Kafka died here. You wonder what would happen if this room were once again full of flowers, covered in all the world’s flowers. And you tell yourself that you would hardly be able to breathe, like Kafka in his final hours here, in this world.

Kafka, in his final minute in this world, made a brusque, unusual movement and ordered the nurse to leave. All this happened here.

“A little more tea?” the pleasant old lady asks you.

All this happened here. Kafka gave this order, yanked out the catheter he was wearing, threw it in the middle of this room, and said he had put up with enough torture. When the doctor moved away from the bed for a moment to clean a syringe, Kafka told him, “Don’t go.” The doctor said, “No, I’m not going.” In a deep voice, Kafka replied, “I am going.”

1917 was an intense year in Kafka’s life. He began it in January by writing “The Hunter Gracchus,” his best story, in which he wrote a sentence so perfect that he had to finish the narrative with it; it’s not that he couldn’t find an ending to the story, but that the ending was in this perfect, terrible, icy sentence. The burgomaster of Riva asks the wild hunter Gracchus if he intends to remain with them in the town. The hunter has just arrived in his boat and, to make up for his mocking tone, lays a hand on the burgomaster’s knee and says, “I have no intentions. I am here. I don’t know any more than that. There’s nothing more I can do. My boat is without a helm — it journeys with the wind which blows in the deepest regions of death.”

In March that year, he wrote “The Great Wall of China” at the same time as he began to lose himself in a maze of mysterious roads that he journeyed along all his life without ever finding a way out, though now he would always have the hunter Gracchus’ final, perfect sentence.

In July he got engaged for the second time to Felice Bauer. In August he spat blood. On September 4th, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and on the 12th he was granted sick leave from his office. In October, in his diary, he compared Dickens to Robert Walser and said that they both hid their inhumanity behind styles of overflowing sentiment.

This is a brilhant intuition by Kafka and still today absolutely difficult to accept for those illustrious minds that believe in a warm culture and have always regarded Dickens as the founder of some kind of vital realism, sympathetic to poor humankind. In fact, like Walser, he was someone with a cold, crushing intelligence, which behind closed doors, for all who came into contact with him, made him a terrible, inhuman being, obliged only by the dumb circumstances of the age to hand out false, good sentiments left, right, and center.

On November 10th, Kafka wrote in his diary, “I have yet to record the crux, I’m still flowing in two channels. The work awaiting me is enormous.” At the end of November, he burst into Max Brod’s house reading Walser aloud, reading him and laughing. “Oh, come on, listen to what this man says completely seriously,” he remarked to Brod. In December his second engagement to Felice Bauer was broken off.

That’s about enough for today, night has closed in and this 25th of September is reaching its end, and I — all me Walser — take my leave of the day and also of this recollection of a year in Kafka’s life, this recollection that has turned into a digression diverting me from the narrative of my vagrant steps along the byroad. That’s about enough, but I shall keep going a while longer, I shall continue telling the intimate story of my minimal escape, I shall carry on journeying without moving from home, and at the same time being on the byroad.

“You mustn’t say you understand me.”

— KAFKA in a letter to MAX BROD

Two days after visiting the house in Kierling, after stopping over in Lisbon, you’re on the island of Fayal in the Azores, and your aged left hand does not tremble when in Café Sport you write that you’re back in your favorite bar, opposite the volcano on the island of Pico, in a lively gathering of your favorite authors of private journals; they’re all there except for Musil and Kafka, two forces whose whereabouts are unknown, apparently they’re on a secret mission, or perhaps they’re in reserve should some catastrophe befall the conspiracy in Fayal. In any case Musil and Kafka are not with you as you formulate your initial strategies for halting the advance of Pico’s moles. You call yourselves “the conspirators of the Great Wall” in memory of Kafka’s story that talks about a great wall, a great work involving builders and laborers scattered all over the geography of China: a story that essentially evokes Kafka’s own work, since this also resembles a wall and, like the conspiracy of diarists in Café Sport, has holes and cracks, gaps that other groups seek to fill.

You’re in Café Sport, in your favorite café, and you’re one of the pioneers of the walled plot, you’re on the alert against any movement by the enemy, though you’ve no plans to sit back and wait in some legendary desert for the Tartars to turn up. Like your fellow conspirators, you’re going to take the initiative and tomorrow, after this brief but decisive meeting, without further delay, you will disperse. You’ll disperse as one day the hidden forces of this diary you’re writing today with an already aged hand will disperse.

Café Sport appears to have endless galleries, like the whole of Kafka’s work and his Chinese wall. These galleries — of Kafka’s work, of Café Sport — being still under threat, have equally been perfectly articulated as a challenge against the wear and tear of time and, in the case of the conspiracy, against the wear and tear of the literary at the start of the twenty-first century.

You’re gathered here, but tomorrow you’ll disperse all over the world and join other conspirators and recognize one another by means of a simple password for Chinese conspirators that you have read before — it’s in Kafka — and now you can hear it in any part of the world, on the hps of accomplices, it’s a simple password, which Max Brod failed to understand at the time, all you have to say is:

“You mustn’t say you understand me.”

You leave the island of Fayal and your favorite bar behind and return to Lisbon, you sleepwalk through the Baixa and Barrio Alto and visit the British Bar and like Alexandre O’Neill, without ruffling your hair, you ask yourself, “What are we doing here, Lisbon, the two of us, / in the land where you and I were born?” “Fazer horas” the people of Lisbon say when they don’t have anything to do. Making time. Bars are ideal for such activity, though, as Cardoso Pires said, time out in bars often becomes time in and can even cease to be waiting time: “In reality only the unsuspecting drinker believes he is deceiving the hours, since it’s often the hours that deceive us, with a firm and steady step marking a time beyond numbers.”

You’re in the British Bar with its clock that goes backward and strikes very punctual hours, you’re drinking right under the clock that advances in the other direction and you also think you’ve deceived the hours and the days, when suddenly, when you’re least expecting it, Alfonso Dumpert, a friend from Barcelona, wanders casually into the bar and is very surprised to see you there, since in your city they think you’ve disappeared, or maybe even died.

Dumpert asks you if you’ve come for tomorrow’s tribute to the ill-fated Manuel Hermínio Monteiro. You weren’t aware of this tribute, you’re lost in the world, in endless flight, and in the British Bar you were only “making time.” You say this to him and suddenly receive the impression that, now you’ve been discovered, from now on everything may be different in your life, and you tell yourself that it’s as if the clock of the future, its hands also turning the other way, had returned with stupid punctuality to an appointment with your life before you escaped.

Perhaps you have made the mistake of going too near Barcelona. You’ve been spotted in Lisbon and your escape has entered a new phase, it may be drawing to a close. You disguise the bad temper this setback has caused you and tell Dumpert you’ll see him at the tribute tomorrow. And in the evening of September 10th, you walk toward Fórum Lisboa, where the tribute is taking place, and embrace your dear friend Manuela Correia, Hermínio’s wife, and witness the recital of music, poems, and images, opened by the actress Germana Tánger with Aniversário by Alvaro de Campos: “At the time they were celebrating my birthday, / I was happy and no one was dead.”

At midday on the following day, in the reasonably pleasant restaurant without a television on the rua das Janelas Verdes, you have lunch with Manuela Correia and your friend Dumpert. One minute before the latter’s cell phone rings and you find out about the attack on Manhattan, a group of noisy, unpleasant, people enters the restaurant and the three of you are dumbstruck, horrified, until Dumpert remarks that the barbarians have just arrived:

“The world does not change.”

You understand that he means that the world can’t be helped. It’s not that the world does not change, the world is like this, as Baroja would say. But isn’t it perhaps the other way around, and the world, with its dizzying succession of images, is changing? You’re wondering about this when Dumpert’s cell rings and in Barcelona they’re surprised that you still don’t know about the attack on Manhattan and the outbreak of the Third World War.

After lunch, when you emerge on to the extremely beautiful and serene rua das Janelas Verdes, you’re surprised by the idea that war has broken out. In the white of the breeze and the light of Lisbon, grays are greens and the world, immersed in the course of time, seems perfect.

The radio of a red convertible abruptly disturbs the calm of the street and an excited announcer speaks of spectacular images that surpass any fiction out of Hollywood.

You think about Franz Kafka.

You see the images of the attack on the television of a bar and you think again about Kafka, who imagined something that in its own way also changed the world: the transformation of a clerk into a beetle. What would he have thought, watching the spectacle of airplanes and fire in Manhattan?

Kafka was an enormously visual person who could not bear the cinema because the speed of movements and the dizzying succession of images subjected him to a continually superficial vision. He said that in the cinema it’s never the look that chooses the images, but the images that choose the look.

You’ve been spotted in Lisbon and the clock of your life advances in the other direction. Somehow you have begun your return to Barcelona. What a shame. You would have liked to go back with your lungs burned clean by the sea air, tanned by distant climates, to go back to your city having swum a lot, having mown the tall grass and having hunted lions and, above all, having smoked like nobody before and having drunk strong liquor like molten metal, and you would also have liked a lot to return with iron limbs, dark skin, and furious eye, Rimbaud of the twenty-first century, you would have liked to return and, because of your sunburn, for all to think you belonged to a strong race and came with a lot of gold, with gold and more gold, transformed into a brutal creature of leisure, whom women would be eager to look after, because women like to look after such fierce cripples back from hot countries. But the reality is other: you won’t return with iron limbs or dark skin or furious eye, you’ll return with a dark suit and a credit card.

You wonder what Kafka — who could not bear the cinema — would have thought about this visual spectacle of the attack on Manhattan. And you ask yourself this in Seville, on the night of the 11th. You ask yourself this as you open Kafka’s diaries to September 11, 1911, exactly ninety years before the attack on the Twin Towers. You’re in Antonio Molina Flores’ home, in the Alameda district. You’re going to sleep on his sofa tonight, until you decide tomorrow whether to return to Barcelona.

You open Kafka’s diaries at this date ninety years ago and see that on this day he wrote a detailed description of the collision between a motor car and a tricycle. It was a minor crash that Kafka had witnessed that same day in the streets of Paris.

You’re in Molina Flores’ home, seeking refuge, before falling asleep, in Kafka’s diaries. On September 11, 1911, in connection with the collision between the motor car and tricycle, he wrote, “The bakery employee, who before that had been pedalling along without a care, wobbling in the way that people on tricycles do, on this vehicle that was company property, dismounts, approaches the motorist, who also dismounts, and begins to launch recriminations at him, lightened by the respect due to a motorist and heightened by the fear of his boss.”

This “pedalling along without a care” reminds you of the people of New York, without a care this morning before the double collision of the airplanes with the Twin Towers. You continue reading.

Cyclist and motorist argue. And people begin to congregate around the motorist and bakery employee, foreshadowing Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. They are anxious to know the possible consequences of the crash, many approach the tricycle to take a closer look at the damage that is the subject of so much discussion. The motorist, Kafka tells us, does not think that what has happened to the tricycle’s misshapen front wheel is so serious, despite which he is not prepared to cast a cursory glance, but circles the tricycle and examines it above and below.

“A large number of new spectators turn up,” Kafka goes on to say, “people who will have the enormous, cheap pleasure of watching the taking of the statement.” If the spectacle has continued to grow, it is because a policeman has arrived on the scene, who writes down the names of those involved and the bakery’s business address. In the crowd that has gathered around the spectacle, Kafka reads “the unconscious and candid hope of everyone present that the policeman will immediately resolve the matter with complete impartiality.”

You read this commentary by Kafka and think that everything seems to indicate that you are living now with just such an unconscious and candid hope. Like so many people in the world, you want it to be known soon who the enemy is, you want the FBI to shed some light on and to resolve the matter of Manhattan with impartiality. You share with Molina Flores the impression of having suddenly started to live in those barracks in The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati’s novel, in which a military contingent spends its time trying to ascertain who the enemy is.

You think to yourself that at least the conspirators of the Great Wall have a better idea where their enemies are and can even name them.

You are confused, there’s no denying it. To your amazement at what has happened in New York is added, on a strictly personal level, the impression that the time for being like Musil and Kafka, whereabouts unknown, is over. You have gone so near your city and your old home that you’ve been caught out. You’ve been spotted under the clock in the British Bar and there everything has ended. Everything? Yes, everything. But you think that it’s not so serious, remember that in the end, as Amália sings, all this is only destiny, all this is fado.

“And the world turned into a foreign country where it was no longer necessary to flee or to return home.”

— PETER HANDKE, Slow Homecoming

You’ve been tracked down better than you thought. From Barcelona, by telephone, Julio Arward explains that your editor has known about you for days. Someone from the Spanish embassy in Budapest saw you in Café Krúdy and passed on the information. It’s public and perhaps notorious that you’ve gone AWOL and could well return. Everything seems to push you into returning, even Monsieur Tongoy’s muffled — others call it inner — voice recommends you go back. And on the morning of the 12th you try to forget this and walk in the vicinity of the Giralda, the weather is magnificent, the conversation with Molina Flores very lively as you head toward the Hospital of Holy Charity, where legend has it that Don Juan, Seducer of Seville, is buried.

You see the tomb of Don Miguel de Mañara, the repentant sinner who for many was the real Don Juan, invented by the Spanish genius Tirso de Molina. “Here lies the worst man that ever existed in the world,” Mañara had inscribed on his tombstone, at the entrance to the hospital. Everyone, as they enter, is obliged to step on that tomb, to trample on it in fact, which is what the penitent lady-killer demands from his stone.

Inside the church is a painting by Valdés Leal, carried out according to Don Miguel de Mañara’s instructions; it is a dramatic depiction of death. In ictu oculi (In the Blink of an Eye) is the tide of the seventeenth-century funeral painting. This Latin inscription is written around the candle in the upper part of the painting, where the scene is dominated by the figure of a skeleton carrying its own coffin and a scythe as it extends one of its arms to quench the light of the candle, a clear symbol of life.

Molina Flores, who has never heard of Tongoy, abruptly remarks that the skeleton traveling with its own coffin is a seventeenth-century forerunner of Nosferatu in Murnau’s film. You are delighted to discover suddenly that the wretched Tongoy’s skeleton is depicted there, and delighted also to feel that you’re in the place where Don Juan died.

This is where Don Juan Tenorio is buried, you tell yourself. You’re not as impressed as when you were in the room where Kafka died. In the Seducer’s mortal space, you’re more relaxed. Molina Flores notices this and asks you why you let out a laugh. “This is where Tongoy died,” you tell him. He gives you a blank look and asks you who Tongoy is. “A Nosferatu from Chile,” you reply, “and the worst and ugliest man that ever set foot in this world, I didn’t want to see him even in a painting, and look where I see him now, here in this church, poor second-rate Dozn Juan, he had the face of an empty train.”

Two days later you arrive in Barcelona at night and go to the home of Julio Arward, who has promised not to tell anyone that you’ve returned to your city and lets you sleep at his house, until you decide what to do with your life.

You’re in Julio Arward’s home, in the claustrophobic sitting room where you’ll sleep tonight, a sitting room adorned with lots of reproductions of Edward Hopper’s paintings, whose protagonists always seemed to Arward to have just emerged from a Chinese tale. Recently landed in your city, you also remind him now of a character who has just escaped from a Chinese tale. He says this to you, laughs without malice, asks you what Chinese tale you come from. He doesn’t manage to surprise you, whereas you could give him a big surprise if you talked to him about your friends, the conspirators of the Great Wall. I’m from that tale, you would inform him. And you would leave him perplexed. But you prefer not to say anything. The conspiracy is secret. You simply ask him if he has Kafka’s diaries, you’d like to read them for a bit before turning out the light and being left in the dark with all of Hopper’s characters.

He has the diaries and gives them to you, taking his leave until tomorrow. You search for what Kafka did on September 11, 1912, exactly one year after witnessing the collision between a car and tricycle in Paris.

That day the writer dreamed. He was on a spit of land constructed from blocks of masonry, extending some way into the sea. To start with, the dreamer did not really know where he was, he only began to know when by chance he stood up from his seat and to the left, in front of him, and to the right, behind him, he saw that the vast sea was clearly circumscribed, with lots of warships lined up and firmly anchored. And the writer who dreams, a visionary Kafka, says:

“To the right you could see New York, we were in the port of New York.”

When you wake up, the curtains of a coarse fabric filter a yellowish light into the room that you find very familiar. You listen to the ticktock of the clock on the bedside table and, next to you, the steady breathing of Rosa, who is fast asleep. You soon slide a leg out of the bed. You have been home since yesterday; you returned, but not without having first watched the house for some time from the street. You recalled Wakefield, that character in a story by Hawthorne, that man who, after an absence of twenty years — they think he’s disappeared or died, though in fact he’s carried on living in the area — he feels tempted to return to his wife and stands for a long time in front of his old home until finally entering the house as if he had never left it.

Yesterday the same thing happened to you, in the street, you felt a bit like Wakefield, as you studied the possibility of returning home and recovering your identity as a writer, rediscovering your papers, your books, the vases acquired to keep the books company, your sweet bed, your perfect sedentary life. You were a long time yesterday deciding whether to return, watching your home from the street, until suddenly some drops of water fell and it began to rain and you even felt a gust of cold and it seemed to you ridiculous to get wet when your home was right there. So you trudged up the staircase and opened the door and Rosa, on seeing you, did not tell you off for not ringing the doorbell, she simply remarked:

“I’ve been waiting for you all afternoon.”

It can be said that your escape has ended, but also that you continue to journey at home, along the byroad.

The world for you, after your slow homecoming, has turned into a foreign country where there’s no longer the need to flee or to return home either.

Before the world was a foreign country, literature was a journey, an odyssey. There were two Odysseys, the classic one, a conservative epic going from Homer to James Joyce, in which the individual returned home with an identity, despite all the difficulties, reaffirmed by the journey across the world and also by the obstacles encountered along the way: Ulysses, in effect, returns to Ithaca, and Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s character, also, though in his case he did so in a kind of circular voyage of Oedipal repetition. The other odyssey was that of Musil’s man without qualities, who, unlike Ulysses, moved in an odyssey without return, in which the individual hurried forward, never returning home, continually advancing and getting lost, changing his identity instead of reaffirming it, dissolving it in what Musil called “a delirium of many.”

Now you live a double odyssey in a foreign country and along one of its byroads you walk in the mist at dusk, seeking Musil. Sometimes you catch sight of Emily Dickinson, who flees from something and whispers the word fog as she walks her dog. Sometimes you don’t see her, because she is sewing at home, she is the Penelope of the conservative epic.

You continually advance and get lost and change your identity instead of reaffirming it, and you dissolve in a delirium of many along the byroad — in the sitting room at home — amid the fog, under the mist. With the television switched on, but without the sound, so from time to time you lift your eyes and perceive an image, but do not retain it, it’s a kind of continuous visual track, in the background, as there was background music before.

I am with my favorite homely vases, in front of the abyss, in a directionless present, like the pages of this diary, which are paradoxically so attentive right now to the calendar. Early morning on September 26th. The world is in flames, up in arms. At the start of the twenty-first century, as if I walked to the rhythm of literature’s most recent history, I am alone and without direction on some byroad, at dawn, heading inexorably for melancholy. A slow, enveloping, increasingly deep nostalgia for all that literature once was merges with the thick mist in the early morning.

At the start of the twenty-first century, as if I walked in rhythm to the conspiracy of the Great Wall, I notice the cold that is usual at this hour and season in this house and switch on the heater and drape my shoulders in a shawl and wander mentally with my eyes closed and wonder what unknown I carry in me. I’m at home, but also on the byroad. With my homely vases, but in front of the abyss. Call me Walser.

OCTOBER 25

I place my hand on my temple because what I can’t believe is that the moles are working away inside my brain as well, injecting me with the sickness of Teste (from the Latin testa, skull), an acute and furious, frightful pain caused by the opening of underground galleries in my mind: a wedge of ninety degrees, of burning metal, driven into one side of my head. The wedge is the artwork of the enemies of the literary who dominate my city: haughty illiterates, managing directors of publishers that give shape to the black bottom of Nothingness. But the resistance to Teste’s disease is under way and gathering strength, it’s already here, it’s already in this foreign country where I’m on a double odyssey, where I dig in with my fellow conspirators, it’s already here in Action Without Parallel and the wall being built by Chinese conspirators. I’m going to resist, I need literature in order to survive and, if need be, I’ll embody it myself, if I’m not already doing so. “To suffer is to give something supreme attention and, to a small extent, I’m a man of attention,” we read in Monsieur Teste. The supreme attention I devote to literature and to my Montano’s malady has caused me to suffer, has given me a Teste-ache, but it’s worth it because Action, the wall and myself have now turned all our attention to the moles and their confident bosses. And both moles and bosses are in a bad way, they have it coming.

NOVEMBER 25

Unable to sleep at four in the morning, I switch on the heater due to the cold in the house and drape my shoulders in a shawl. I remember when I used to like writing at this silent hour of the night and decide to pick up this diary I left off one month ago, to go over the last three days, which have been “very mountainous,” I think it could be said that they have been traversed with the help of a continuous breeze from the most diverse mountains.

The day before yesterday, I had to travel to Granada in the afternoon. I got up as normal at eight in the morning, I got to my feet as soon as the alarm sounded, with its customary stridency, and Rosa turned it off with her no less-customary smack.

A wonderful smack.

We had coffee, biscuits and orange juice for breakfast. At nine Rosa went to work. Her first appointment was with a writer of journals who has dared to publish, for example, that the letters always flicker and blur in front of his eyes and he often has the sensation that everything is going to become paralyzed inside his body. While this is an idiocy or a poor imitation of some disturbed German writer, the worst part is that he writes such things because he believes they make him look interesting, and this may help him to get on in his career and ascend in the social scale, clothed in the purple mantle of a “tormented writer.”

I felt sorry for Rosa, who was going to meet this sad case, a friend of Pico’s moles and of the haughty illiterates. Few writers turn people off literature so much as this one. I felt sorry for Rosa and she did not thank me for it, but became annoyed. “He’s a client,” she said. Some people are very amusing when they get worked up and Rosa is one of them. I live with her due to lack of evidence, and it’s not that I haven’t searched for it deliriously, but the fact is there is nothing that proves her treachery.

I prepared my suitcase, although it was hours before I had to go to Granada. I started to reread El quadern gris by Josep Pla. I was due to talk about private journals at Granada University, most of all about my own, and I decided to have another look at Pla’s. “Mountainous” hours and even days were approaching, but I couldn’t tell at that moment when I opened Pla’s journal and read, “I don’t think it can be denied that the mountains are well made. If somebody disagrees and is of another opinion … tough luck! Some people are never happy.”

At midday, I turned on the computer and came across an e-mail in which I was again invited, this time with plenty of warning, to the Literature Festival that takes place every year in June on Matz Peak in Switzerland: open-air readings, all of them after midnight, probably Tyrolese songs and a journey by airplane, train, coach, and cable car before reaching Matz Peak and the high climate created every year among writers, all of whom are German speakers. “You will be the only foreigner, an interesting situation, you might write something about it. Intellectual inspiration and the spirit of the mountains,” it said in the e-mail, this time written in correct English, sent to me by my Swiss-German publisher.

As I went down to the lobby to collect the day’s mail, I thought about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and the kind of young sufferer of literature-sickness that appears in it: a young man who, Mann tells us, was sent home from the sanatorium on top of the mountain in an experiment to see if he had been cured. The young man returned to the arms of his wife and mother, to the arms of all his friends and relatives. But he spent the day on his back, with the thermometer in his mouth, and did not worry about anything else. “You don’t understand,” he would say, “you have to have lived up there to know how things must be done. The essential principles do not exist in this house.” In the end his mother, tired, tells him to go back up there, her useless son was now no good for anything. The young man returned to his “homeland,” as all the patients called the bewitching sanatorium.

At about one in the afternoon, I dropped Mann’s book on the floor and in a few seconds, without even forcing my imagination, I was on the byroad, walking in the mist over the snowy peaks of Matz. At ten past one, another mountain: I thought about Pico’s volcano and its tireless moles. At twenty past one, the telephone rang and I felt at home again. It was Justo Navarro from a chalet in the Sierra Nevada. At a quarter to two, I emerged onto the street, went to the bank, where I changed my investment fund and chatted to the branch manager for some minutes. I talked to him about snowy mountains as well, since his two daughters, he told me, went skiing in La Molina every weekend.

On coming out of the bank, I wanted to see myself as a businessman, something I have never been but, like everything I haven’t been, I like to try to be. Someone passed by and greeted me, “Hi there, Walser.” I then slowed my businessman’s powerful pace and, forgetting about my brand-new investment fund, began to move like a peaceful being, like a walker of Swiss nationality who liked to stop to contemplate all the vistas afforded along the way: a Helvetic walker with a pagan calm, on a direct path toward the abysses, or perhaps, as Dickens said — not in vain, in the world inhabited by Rosario Girondo, was December 25th approaching — toward “the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

I bought the papers and, walking along my street’s sunny pavement — the other side always looks like a byroad in permanent mist — I told myself that my name was Walser, but also Girondo. I was two people, like Kaspar Hauser in the streets of Nuremberg. But in my case, which is not that of Hauser, with all my memory intact.

At the airport I bought Tales from the Mountain by Miguel Torga. “Pursued all day by the mountains,” I wrote on the airplane — in the absence of other blank paper, on the bag Iberia provides for passengers who need to be sick.

I had left this diary at home, but carried photocopies of everything I wrote during the last year in my suitcase — I planned to read excerpts in Granada. So Iberia’s sick-bag became a scribbling pad of ideas destined for this diary. I jotted down, for example, in microscopic writing and telegraphic style that I elaborate here a little to make it more intelligible, “The prehistoric wind of the Icy Mountains blows in Walser as in Kafka. In reality both of them were doomed to a journey without a point of arrival. Their prose had something indefinitely extendible and elastic and a desire to comment on life from top to bottom, to comment on it all, to chase after even the most trivial details with a clear tendency toward the infinite, which made it ridiculous to search for conventional endings to their stories. I like novels that have no end. The reader who seeks finished novels — Unamuno said — does not deserve to be my reader, since he himself is already finished before he’s read me. In short, I recall that Walter Benjamin maintained that every finished work is the death mask of its intuition.”

In the evening I had dinner in Granada with some friends and we talked at length about Mulhacén Peak, where legend has it they buried the last Nazrid king, who from this magnificent viewpoint could dominate the jagged outcrops of Alcazaba and Veleta, the white villages of the Alpujarras, the meadows next to the Guadix desert, and, of course, the Alhambra and gentle slopes of the Sierra Nevada rising out of nothingness.

It was a mountaineering evening and, after a few hours’ sleep, the following morning …

“I have to report that one fine morning, I do not know anymore for sure what time it was, as the desire to take a walk came over me, I put my hat on my head, left my writing room, or room of phantoms, and ran down the stairs to hurry out into the street.”

This is how Walser’s “The Walk” begins, and this is how yesterday began for me. My appointment at the university was at noon, but I rose very early and decided to go for a morning walk through the streets of Granada. I symbolically put il cappello in testa (as it says in the elegant Italian translation of Walser’s book) and went out into the street, diretto in strada.

An imaginary blue hat on my head and straight into the street. As far as I can remember today (as I write this in the cold early morning, warmed by the poor heater), my spirits as I went out into the street yesterday were luminous and gay, like the self-same morning. The early world extending abruptly in front of my eyes seemed to me as beautiful as if I were seeing it for the first time. I had not yet taken twenty or thirty steps from a still-empty square when it occurred to me to look up, toward the paths of imaginary gravel that led to the Sierra Nevada, and suddenly I mentally walked along endless, straight roads, over jagged, red stones seen in childhood, until I reached a solitary, strange and remote valley that, as I scoured it, gave me the sensation that a distant historical age had just returned to the world and I was a medieval pilgrim.

It was hot, and the slightest human trace, the slightest indication of industry, culture or effort, was nowhere to be seen. A marvelous but terrifying sensation. I thought that it was better to be alone than that suddenly, for example, Emily Dickinson should appear in the wake of a strange, thick fog, walking her dog. I was alone and enjoying being so, and from time to time I thought about the art of despising art, which Pavese spoke about in reference to the world of private journals: “The art of despising art — The art of being alone.”

With this art in mind, I began to traverse rustic, stormy places that alternated with others that were peaceful and, it seems to me, absurd. And so, thinking about this art of being alone, I arrived at Granada University, at exactly midday, dreaming that I was dressed as a mountaineer, with a stick in one hand and a blue hat on my head.

In this way I arrived at Granada University. In one hand, the imaginary — the stick — and in the other, the real — the photocopies of my diary. Only in my mountain waistcoat did the real and imaginary merge: sewn into this waistcoat, in the form of an impeccable check, I carried my savings on the way to the wide, fresh, and luminous world of nothingness.

It’s not surprising that, arriving in good health, in such an early, mountaineering spirit, I should choose first to read the opening pages of my Diary of a Deceived Man: “At the start of the twenty-first century, as if I were walking to the rhythm of literature’s most recent history, I was alone and without direction …”

I read excerpts from my diary for an hour and, when I finished, a beautiful young student called Renata Cano — at first I thought she was called Renata Montano — came up to tell me, in a voice as pure as the driven snow, that she had been moved at the end of my Theory of Budapest by all those elders who appeared, almost all of them single, almost all of them childless, almost all of them plagiarists and fakes, and all, absolutely all of them, deceived.

I am very old. You see, in Budapest I aged twenty years in one go. In any case, the words of Montano — I have her permission to call her this — comforted me enormously. I can’t sleep, possibly because I’m unable to forget Renata’s words and yesterday’s lunch with her at that inn near Puerto del Suspiro del Moro, where we talked about snowy peaks, in particular those of Kilimanjaro, and also about other peaks, those that are reached only through love, passion.

I’m unable to forget the young Montano as I write now with the shawl around my shoulders and the heater’s silent company and tell myself that the constant presence of mountains in recent hours may be a sign indicating that it might be very good for me to accept the invitation to climb Matz Peak and read there excerpts from my diary, read them in the open air at midnight, in the Alps’ great silence, as a tribute to Renata.

In short, at eight, when the alarm sounds and Rosa turns it off with her customary smack, I shall answer the e-mail and at the same time — now that I remember — I shall send the critic Stanisław Wiciński a letter, the last I send him. I’ve decided to stop sending letters to this character I invented one day, perhaps to compensate for the fact that I’ve not been the great literary critic I wanted to be; I’m not going to send him any more letters to which I then have to reply, the game of writing to myself is over, but above all — I hope I don’t forget — I shall answer the e-mail, I shall agree to travel to the Swiss mountains and once there to listen to the wind that they say, as it stirs the leaves of the great trees, mimics human voices, the voices of unknown people that up on Matz Peak, in a great high climate, tell the world’s secrets.

The alarm rings, it’s eight o’clock, end of snores, the day awakens and with it its poetry, I hear the almighty smack.

DECEMBER 25 OR LE RICCORDANZE

The memories of various lay anniversaries dance today.

On such a day, forty-five years ago, in 1956, Robert Walser died. After lunch at the sanatorium, he decided to go for a hike in the snow, to climb to Rosenberg, where there are some ruins. From the top there was a wonderful view over the mountains of Alpstein. The hour was soothing, it was midday, and outside there was snow, pure snow, as far as the eye could see. The solitary hiker set out and began to fill his lungs with the clear winter air. He left Herisau Sanatorium behind. He climbed through beeches and firs up the side of Schochenberg. Two children found him where he dropped down dead in the snow, in perpetual ecstasy over the Swiss winter.

Walser, or the art of disappearing.

In one of his novels, The Tanner Siblings, there are some lines that presage his own death in the snow; in the mouth of one character he places an elegy to Sebastian, the poet found dead in the snow. “With what nobility he has chosen his tomb! He lies among splendid green firs covered in snow. I don’t want to inform anyone. Nature bends down to contemplate her deceased, the stars sing softly around his head and the night birds caw: it is the best music for someone who cannot hear or feel.”

Walser, or the art of disappearing at Christmas, of knowing how on such a sentimental date to leave the writing room, the room of phantoms.

On such a day, thirty-nine years ago, on December 25, 1962, the Great Snowfall took place over Barcelona. It is one of the most important memories of my early years. That morning the patio of my parents’ home appeared covered in snow and I couldn’t believe it. To start with, I thought it was part of my mother’s Christmas decorations. I remember that December 25th very well. Me with a scarf inside the house, listening to my mother say that for a city like Barcelona, so abandoned by the hand of God, it was a blessing that, even if it was only the once, He should have remembered us and brought us snow on the most appropriate day, Christmas Day, with divine punctuality.

For me, Christmas Day will always be the day of the Great Snowfall. Wrapped in two jerseys and a scarf inside the house, I switched on the radio and suddenly we heard a message of peace and Christmas goodwill from Salvador Dalí, a few emotional words from the Ampurdán painter telling us that, from that day on, he planned to orient all his life toward Franco’s Spain and the family: “Isabella the Catholic, consecrated hosts, melons, rosaries, truculent indigestion, bullfights, Calanda drums and Ampurdán sardines. To sum up: my life must be oriented toward Spain and the family.”

We listened to that message in respectful silence mixed with some astonishment. The snow fell stealthily on the patio outside, as at the beginning of a Christmas tale.

“Dalí’s turned into one of us,” said my father.

On such a day, forty-five years ago, in 1956, W. G. Sebald’s grandfather died, having gone out for a walk in the snow and collapsed on top of it at almost exactly the same time as another walker, Robert Walser, was also struck down on the snow, in a similar landscape.

Two dead for a single Christmas Day.

Eleven days ago, last Friday, December 14th, the writer W. G. Sebald died while out driving. He always seemed to have just emerged from another age: a slightly ancient man who, in sight of solitary landscapes, came across traces of a past in ruins that referred him to the wholeness of the world.

I am seated next to the Christmas tree in my home, and I remember the Great Snowfall of my childhood and that speech by Dalí, and I begin to listen to Vittorio Gassman reciting Leopardi’s Le ricordanze, and I let the memories, mine and others’, invade me, and I tell myself that without them and without those memories’ ruins, without memory, life would be even more distressing, though it may be even more distressing to realize that the more our memory grows, the more our death grows. Because man is just a machine for remembering and forgetting, heading for death. And I don’t say this with sadness because it’s also true that memory, disguised as life, turns death into something subtle and tenuous.

The memories dance for me and I adhere to the indispensable fabric of my memory and my identity — in this case, that reached with my double odyssey — and I tell myself that I am somebody only because I remember, which is to say that I am because I remember; I am the one memory has always helped, preventing him from falling into absolute distress, has helped during years with flashes and luminous sparks in which every day, in a ray of sun, charming and tragic, the tragic dust of time has danced for me.

There are two of me. I have a double odyssey’s identity. One is lurking in the Chinese wall and the other, more Christmassy and sedentary, listens to Gassman at home: “Viene il vento recando il suon dell’ora / dalla torre del borgo …”

The detective’s patience to trap a memory can verge on the ridiculous. One is satisfied with a cake dunked in tea; another, with a drop of perfume at the bottom of an empty bottle; another, with il suon dell’ora, a peal of bells swept by the wind from the village tower. Tastes, minimal smells, sounds of the past. I’m ashamed to say so, because it’s not very poetic, shall we say, but this is how it is and I can’t change it: my dunked cake, my drop of perfume, my music of the wind is a prosaic and vulgar mouthful — as brief as childhood — of a Catalan beverage called Cacaolat, a mixture of milk and cocoa that I used to drink daily during morning break at school.

I only have to taste that beverage for the memories to return. But this word, Cacaolat, could not be more ridiculous and less poetic, which may explain why I have spent half my life hating writers who work with their memories, and instead defending those who without the dead weight of memories are in a position to reach their maturity more quickly. I have spent half my life defending those writers who do not live off the rents of the past, and who can demonstrate an up-to-date imagination, an imagination capable of inventing out of the present, out of nothingness itself.

Half a life boasting of finding hardly anything in my tedious childhood, just a scarf, a patio covered in snow, and not much else. Half a life congratulating myself on never having had to resort to childhood to be able to write, congratulating myself on not becoming emotional when I examined a situation from my early years. And yet all this suddenly collapsed a few months ago in Barcelona’s Rovira Square, the approximate geographical center of my childhood; it collapsed when I visited this square recently to witness the filming of a sequence from Shanghai Nights, Juan Marsé’s novel that Fernando Trueba was making into a film. The set designers had turned Rovira Square into what it was fifty years before. It was as if I had pressed the time machine’s exact switch. Suddenly everything was the same as fifty years ago; even the posters for the double bill showing at the long-since-disappeared Rovira Cinema were the same; even the atmosphere of the air in the square struck me as identical to that of fifty years ago. I immediately understood — as when I took LSD in my formative years — that Time does not exist, everything is present.

I cried, I could not hold back the tears. I cried before the unexpected return of the past. Something very similar occurs in a passage from Sebald’s Vertigo. The narrator of “All’estero,” a chapter in that book, travels with a friend, Clara, who succumbs to the temptation to enter the school she had been to as a child: “In one of the classrooms, the very one where she had been taught in the early 1950s, the selfsame schoolmistress was still teaching, almost thirty years later, her voice quite unchanged — still warning the children to keep at their work, as she had done then […]. Alone in the entrance hall, surrounded by closed doors that had seemed at one time like mighty portals, Clara was overcome by tears […]. We returned to her grandmother’s flat in Ottakring, and neither on the way there nor that entire evening did she regain her composure following this unexpected encounter with her past.”

Here Sebald seems to be telling us that the past, all past, is still happening, surfacing, is there, doing its own thing. Without handing out a calling card or needing us to invoke it, the past, our past, is happening in the present. It’s thrilling, it’s terrifying. It reminds me of Emily Dickinson begging the Lord not to leave her alone down here. I believe that she sensed that we are completely alone, without anybody, in a world that is only a dark basement, where we may have been put for good.

JANUARY 23 OR MONTAIGNE’S MALADY

You aged twenty years in one go, one evening in Budapest, and now you’re lying on the bed and a voice talks to you in the dark. I am not, it tells you, exactly a human voice, I am the one who has always been with you, I am the voice that causes you to be alone, that tells you now there’s still something to say, I am Tongoy, I know very well who I am, the afternoon is flat, I am Tongoy, seated beside you, head in my hands, seeing myself right now rise and go, go out in search of the byroad, I am Tongoy, I see myself first rise and stand holding on to the chair and then sit down again and then rise again and stand again holding on to the chair, here I am, I know who I am, I am with you, I am alone, I am Tongoy, I have Montaigne’s malady, I like to assay, I assay, today I just assay.

JANUARY 24

I am the one who has always been with you, the voice that causes you to be alone, that tells you it may still be possible to name something, there may still be words to say, I am Tongoy, I know who I am, the afternoon is sad, the afternoon is flat, I am Tongoy, seated beside you, I am the one who has always been with you, look at me, my head is sunk on crippled hands and I see myself right now rise and come closer to you, I am Tongoy, a leaden light illuminates me, I am enormously tired, possibly because I have been conceived by a man I guess is vulnerable in everything except his writing: I’m sure that, if the world collapsed, he would keep up the work he has to do, without changing the subject, he would carry on talking about all that he will identify with until he finishes the book he is writing, he will identify fully with it only until then, so that, if the world collapsed now, he would carry on talking about the threat to the literary and how he conspires against the enemies and survives in the pages of books. He would carry on talking about all this, waiting to come across unexpected frontiers and find in them the prized formula to disappear completely one day. Said formula — the vulnerable man has an idea — may consist in saying, “disappear,” naming the word disappear, it may consist only in this, in saying, “disappear,” never despair. Or it may consist only in saying that I am Tongoy and I know very well who I am. In saying, for example, leaden light. Or saying leaden light on my body. Or saying head sunk on crippled hands. And then saying that it isn’t possible to name or say anything. And then what. I don’t know, I am Tongoy, the afternoon is flat; I know, there may not be anything to name, nothing, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have started. Once something begins, that something can no longer vanish. God, what will we do to disappear? We are immeasurable distances away from achieving it. But I plan to try, I shall go to the limits of the limitless void. With my head sunk on crippled hands.

JANUARY 25

A few minutes ago I was lying on my back, with my legs in the air, as if they wanted to hit the ceiling, my eyes closed, my face full of tears. It was surprising, but even crying and in this pathetic or ridiculous posture I confirmed once again what the great secret of everything is: to feel oneself the center of the world. This is exactly what every individual does.

FEBRUARY 23

“Switzerland: admirable source of energy. If the mountain makes a fir of the tree, it’s possible to guess what it can make of man. Aesthetics and morality of conifers.”

— ANDRÉ GIDE, Journal

Aesthetics of cypress, pine, and savin.

All morning on the byroad, under the constant weight of what I was reading by Kafka. Although I was reading at home, I had the vaguely disturbing sensation of being at home and feeling that I wasn’t.

“So he carried on; but the way was long. The road, that main street of the town, did not lead to the castle mound; it only approached, but then, almost deliberately, it took another direction, it didn’t move away from the castle, but it didn’t go any closer to it either.”

This is what I read this morning. And all the time I was lost on the byroad, where I got even more lost in the afternoon, when I traveled across a high ridge, where bluish-black boulders advanced in sharp wedges toward the train, and I looked out of the window, searching in vain for the peak. At dusk I suddenly saw snow-covered valleys, narrow and uneven, and with my finger I traced the direction in which they disappeared.

To avoid growing more anxious, I thought about the snows of yesteryear, about Christmas past, Christmas in Barcelona in 1962, the year of the Great Snowfall. And I picked up Josep Pla, hoping to find myself back at home, I started reading the Catalan writer, I searched for a passage from his diary in which he spoke of his strange feelings toward Christmas. I tried to put Kafka out of my mind.

On such a date, the 23rd, but in the month of December, in a year long ago, 1918, Josep Pla noted down in his diary his concern for the dryness of his heart and the sterility of his sentiment at Christmastide.

If Pla was worried by this dryness, I have once again been concerned all day with the difficulty of disappearing from the world, of disappearing even from this passage that I sense will always be unfinished, since it has neither a middle nor an end, nor any chance of dissolving, disappearing fully from the moment it began.

This, however, did not worry Pla, writer of passages. It was a relief to read him for a while, to cross a street and escape from Kafka. Pla was worried by other affairs. His cold attitude toward sentimental Christmas, for example. Had Kafka heard about Pla’s concern, he would have said of him that “the breath of his coldness toward Christmas made the faces of the others shudder.”

Although nobody’s forcing us to, the diarist Pla and this inhabitant of the Chinese wall coincide in one thing, and that is in our irrevocable — no longer for me worrying — our permanent state of literary-sickness.

On December 23, 1918, Pla noted down his concern for the sterility of his sentiment at Christmastide and ended by saying that he felt not the slightest impulse to adore anything and it seemed to him objectively disagreeable not to feel any excitement, either about women or about money or about becoming somebody in life, “just this secret, devilish obsession with writing (with poor results) to which I sacrifice everything, to which I shall probably sacrifice everything in life.”

It was a great relief to take momentary refuge in a great writer from my native land, but at around midnight I got lost again in my own home and thought I was in Switzerland when I saw wide mountain torrents gushing down, in huge waves, toward some dark, disturbing, almost invisible, foreign hills.

I realized that all this was of deep concern to me, but the fact is I suddenly felt an enormous aversion for everything that concerned me.

MARCH 6

It snowed, no one was expecting it, but snow always arrives like this, everybody knows. After the initial moments of amazement, I began to feel an urge to go out into the street and step on the snow. What did Robert Walser do when it didn’t snow? Where did that question come from? It seems strange to ask myself such things. I sat down in my favorite armchair and repressed the desire to step on the street and snow. For a long time I read Álvaro Pombo, a writer I admire. One of the concerns of his moral life is salvation, I would say the spirit’s salvation, which is not strictly a literary theme — this comes as a relief — but a universal one, human, which concerns us all. To create a reality distinct from the impoverished, meaningless reality of today’s world. To explore the countless, infinite meanings of the uncreated reality we shall only be able to invent from inside that reality. To be intelligent and kind. And to seek in others, as Mario Cesariny says, “a land of kindness and fog.” To see others. And not to carry out market research. To fight against the destructive mechanism of society’s Montano’s malady, to fight against the draining of the human figure brought about by the perversion of the selfsame humanist undertaking.

Outside, the snow fell as in a song by Adamo.

I read Pombo and then I switched armchairs and moved to one with wings, where I used to read novels in the past, I spent hours reading stupid love stories. I put down Pombo to read a book about the universe of consciousness, I’ve been wondering where certain strange questions I sometimes ask myself come from. I read that nobody currently doubts that mental activity requires cerebral activity, but there is disagreement when it comes to defining the type of relationship that is established between the mind and the brain. And who hasn’t asked himself this before, without reaching a decisive conclusion? It’s a question of knowing whether it’s simply cerebral activity that gives rise to the mind or, on the contrary, if there is a distinct, immaterial entity using the brain as an instrument to manifest itself, causing mental activity. Does spirit exist? Is mental activity the manifestation of spirit, or only of matter?

Outside, it continued to snow. What did Robert Walser do when it snowed? I felt an irrepressible desire to go out into the street and step on the snow I thought about the passage of time. I confirmed that man does not have the length of his body, but of his years. He must drag them with him when he moves, an increasingly onerous task that ends up defeating him. I went out into the street and stepped on the snow. “I step on time / railway line / under the snow,” says a poem by Carlos Pardo. I wondered if I wasn’t dead in my home. The home, the hearth, is a heavy chain that ties us and wishes to bind our feet until death. I walked a long way. Suddenly I was Walser and was on a byroad. And the snow kept on falling, as in a song by Adamo that reminded me of my tormented youth. I wanted to disappear back then as well.

MARCH 7

ON DISAPPEARING

Till when will we have to listen to commentaries by great writers saying that they write in order not to die completely? We already know what they’re pretentiously talking to us about, what sort of immortality they’re dealing with. Let us hear an example of such aspirations, let us listen to André Gide: “The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death’s reach” (Journal, 27 July 1922). It’s a question, therefore, of writing in order not to die, of entrusting oneself to the survival of one’s works, this may be what links the artist with his creation most strongly. The genius faces death, his work is death made vain or transfigured or, according to Proust’s evasive words, made “less bitter,” “worthier” and “maybe less probable.”

But is it possible to keep trusting or believing in an immortality of one’s own? I am more interested in the world of the writer Kafka, who did not wish to keep anything from death. What’s more, he addressed the ability to die through his work, which in fact means that Kafka’s work was already in itself an experience of death — Kafka was always a dead man in life — an experience that seemingly, if we hold to what Kafka suggests, we would have to know beforehand in order to fully experience the work, to reach death. It couldn’t be more Kafkaesque — or more lucid.

I prefer Kafka’s vision to that of Gide, our energies should be focused on the need to disappear in the work. If we look carefully at today’s world, which is undergoing such transformation, we’ll see that what’s needed is not to remain in “the lazy eternity of idols” (as Blanchot wrote), but to change, to disappear in order to cooperate in the transformation of the world: to act namelessly and not be just an idle name. You’re Girondo today, Walser tomorrow, and your real name is lost in the universe, you want to put paid to writers’ mean dreams of survival, you want to join your readers on a single anonymous horizon where you could finally establish a relationship of liberty with death.

MARCH 22

Light and shade, pleasant and discordant noises at home, the cheerful song of the woman Rosa’s hired to clean the house on Tuesdays and Fridays, the dull drone of the washing machine. I can hardly think and I end up taking refuge in the diary. I decide to relate Tuesday’s trip to Cuenca, where I gave a lecture, I read Theory of Budapest and asked those present to take my dramatic words seriously, corresponding as they did to a real drama experienced lately. I then stayed to listen to Ramón Costa Baena’s lecture. “We novelists are an unscrupulous bunch,” he started by saying. And I jotted down these words of his: “The novel is a hybrid genre and a large part of its charm arises from the alluvial nature of its materials. There is nothing that doesn’t suit a novelist in action, when he’s in the course of writing his novel.”

It’s only been three days since I returned from Cuenca, but I can hardly remember anything about the trip. I still have a scrap of paper with Costa Baena’s description, which I jotted down I think because of the adjective “alluvial” used alongside the noun “nature.” I spent the whole of the return journey from Cuenca turning the adjective “alluvial” over in my mind. I don’t remember much else. An agreeable conversation in depth with the writer Guelbenzu, the hanging houses, a young girl — who reminded me of the young Montano — on a bridge over a stream holding a sparkler, the supposedly poetic but in fact horrific dusk. I remember little else.

What I do remember is that I spent the whole of the outward journey to Cuenca wondering whether I should go to Matz Peak at the beginning of June to read excerpts from this diary in the open air at midnight — and experience the “mountain spirit.” It is, no doubt, an extravagant invitation, which has obsessed me for some time now. I can’t help it. I see myself there alone, in shorts, the only foreigner surrounded by German-language writers, not understanding a word anybody says, after a journey by airplane, train, bus, and cable car. I’m sure that, if I end up going to Matz Peak, everything will be so odd, so novelesque that, on my return, I shall be able to write a fair few things about what happened to me up there. But I have one doubt. Is it worth undertaking such a long journey just to come back and relate the interminable series of strange experiences I’ll have had? What if I stay at home and simply imagine them? Do I not trust in my own imagination? Must I travel so far in pursuit of real events when those I imagine on Matz Peak are bound to be superior? Or do I think that what I’ll find on that peak is beyond my powers of imagination? I would love to be surprised by events, but what if I climb the peak and everything there is bland, outrageously normal: a handful of nuts in Tyrolese costume reading their rubbish at midnight in front of a few tents and seeking the mountain spirit inside a circle of torches? What if it turns out that the dull drone of the washing machine I am carefully listening to now is actually much more odd, normal, or stupid?

APRIL 21

“I’m absolutely convinced that publishing being in the hands of businessmen is just a passing episode.”

— CARLOS BARRAL

Every year’s the same at around this time. The number of illiterates in this country is on the increase, but this seems to be unimportant, there are more and more Book Days and it’s up to me to explain why we have to read. Yesterday, on the radio, I was invited to explain to listeners in two seconds why they should be encouraged to read. For them literally to be encouraged, I replied. I was going to add: and at the same time to achieve the spirit’s salvation, Musil’s ideal. I didn’t say this, it struck me as excessive and also I’d have overstepped the two-second limit.

I am no longer so rigidly literature-sick. Or, rather, I begin not to understand why I must advocate reading. Let every illiterate in this country do what he wants, of course. Besides, I hate virtually the whole of humanity and I spend the day planting mental bombs against all those businessmen who publish books, those departmental managers, market directors on the wire, and economics graduates. I plant mental bombs against them and against their disciplined followers and the rest of the world in general. So I wonder why I should lend them a hand and recommend that they read books if I only wish them ill, if I only want their stupidity to grow and for them to crash, once and for all, as they travel on the train of ignorance that we all pay for, but that one day they will pay a high price for, falling into the bottomless pit of failure, taking themselves elsewhere, into a different industry. What’s more, I loathe them so much that I’d be delighted if they were obliged to read, if a perfidious decree appeared from somewhere, a drastic order to become acquainted with books, and suddenly this country’s cities turned into libraries of forced, chaotic, daft intellectual activity.

In this way the failure of these haughty illiterates’ lives would be twofold. On the one hand there would be the already in itself resounding failure of all life, to which would be added that brought about by contact with literates — nobody doubts by now that to be a writer is to fail — not to mention with books, those astonishing “extensions of memory and imagination” that we take to beaches and cause to fail, not by reading them but by burying them in an unconscious great book of sand, very different from Borges’.

This would be my revenge for the calls to advocacy that always arrive at around this time and for the constant doubts that plague me and drive me wretchedly to say that no one can be advised to read, but also drive me to think that really, however much I don’t like it, I should advocate reading, albeit only in a stylized way by saying, for example, that there’s nothing to say, except that, without literature, life has no meaning. But, of course, I can only convince those who read of this. And the fact is many of those who read believe it’s an obligation, and they are almost more dangerous than Pico’s moles because they convey an obvious sensation of boredom, they seem not to have read that memorable statement by Montaigne: “I do nothing without joy.”

With this statement, Montaigne wished to indicate that the concept of obligatory reading is a false one. If he came across a difficult passage in a book, Montaigne left it. The point is he saw in reading a form of happiness. Like Borges, who said that a book must not require effort. Borges agreed with Montaigne, though he loved to quote Emerson, who contradicted Montaigne and, in a great essay about books, asserted that a library is a kind of magic box. The best spirits of humanity are imprisoned in this box by an enchanter, and they’re waiting for our word to come out of their silence. We have to open the book, then they awake.

That said — I wish to distance myself from any new temptation to advocacy — the company of literature is dangerous, so much so that I’m really not sure I should applaud people I value for reading a lot and getting so involved in books; you see, I wish them well, and anyone who has read Kafka, for example, is perfectly aware “how much excessive anxiety for nothing” (to quote Pessoa) there is in literature.

As Magris says: “Kafka was perfectly aware that literature distanced him from the territory of death and enabled him to understand life, but leaving him outside. Just as it enabled him to understand the greatness of his Jewish father, a model man, but did not exactly enable him to be like him.”

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it leaves us outside it. It’s hard, but sometimes it’s the best thing that can happen to us. Reading and writing search for life, but they can lose it precisely because they’re focused entirely on life and on the search for it.

It may be the melancholy of the evening in which I am writing, but the truth is I’m talking about an inextricable knot of good and evil, of light and shade inherent in reading and literature. All this is hard, why fool ourselves? It’s a difficulty that, according to Gombrowicz, good literature has as the product of an instinct to sharpen spiritual life. There are times when I would recommend reading to my worst enemies.

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it tells us what can be, but also what could have been. There is nothing sometimes farther away from reality than literature, which is constantly reminding us that life is like this and the world has been organized like that, but it could be otherwise. There is nothing more subversive than literature, which aims to return us to true life by exposing what real life and History smother. Magris knows this very well, he is deeply interested in what could have been, had History or human life taken another course. Anyone who’s interested in this is interested in reading. This is not advocacy. After all, there are times — like now — when I wouldn’t recommend reading even to Pico’s moles, even to my worst enemies.