Montano's Malady

I. Montano’s Malady

At the end of the twentieth century, the young Montano, who had just published his dangerous novel about the curious case of writers who give up writing, got caught in the net of his own fiction and, despite his compulsive tendency towards writing, suffered a complete block, paralysis, a tragic inability to write.

At the end of the twentieth century — today, November 15, 2000, to be more precise — I visited him at his home in Nantes and, just as I had expected, found him so sad and so dried up that some verses by Pushkin could well be used to describe him: Montano “lives wandering / in the shade of the woods / with the dangerous novel.”

The good thing is that wandering in the shade of the woods has led my son — the fact is that Montano is my son — to recover a certain passion for reading, and I have benefited from this. Not long ago, and on his recommendation, I read Prosa de la frontera propia, a novel recently published, by Julio Arward, a strange writer whom I had never fully trusted, believing him simply to be playing at being the double of the novelist Justo Navarro.

Today, among other things, I thanked my son for having recommended this book by Justo Navarro’s double, less his double since he wrote this novel. It is a good book and, reading it, I was often reminded of something I heard Julio Arward say on the radio one day: “A girlfriend once told me that all of us have a double in another place, living their life with a face identical to ours.” Reading this book, I was also reminded of something I heard Justo Navarro say one day, which I have sometimes given to understand was said by me: “There are coincidences and chances from which you die laughing, and there are coincidences and chances from which you die.”

The narrator of Prosa de la frontera propia is one of life’s strangers and at the same time a hero who appears to have walked straight out of a Chinese tale; he has a shadowy twin brother, or rather first cousin, who looks just like him and, to cap it all, has the same name: they are both called Cosme Badía.

The theme of the double — and of the double’s double, and so on ad infinitum in an extensive set of mirrors — is found at the center of the labyrinth of Julio Arward’s novel, a novel that — and now I am writing as the literary critic that I am — is a fictitious autobiography in which the author pretends to be Cosme Badía and, recalling with a memory that is not his own, invents the world of the two first cousins and makes out that he is recalling this world without for a moment forgetting Faulkner’s description of the novel as a writer’s secret life, wherein exists a man’s shadowy twin brother.

Perhaps this is what literature is, the invention of another life that could well be our own, the invention of a double. Ricardo Piglia says that to recall with a memory that is not our own is a variant of the double, but it is also a perfect metaphor for literary experience. Having quoted Piglia, I observe that I live surrounded by quotations from books and authors. I am literature-sick. If I carry on like this, literature could end up swallowing me, like a doll in a whirlpool, causing me to lose my bearings in its limitless regions. I find literature more and more stifling; at the age of fifty it frightens me to think that my destiny is to turn into a walking dictionary of quotations.

The narrator of Prosa de la frontera propia is someone who seems to have just emerged from a painting by Edward Hopper. There is nothing unusual in this, since Arward has felt fascination for this American painter ever since 1982, when he bought my first book — the first of five, all of literary criticism, that I have published — and he only bought it because on the front cover it had Nighthawks, Edward Hopper’s painting about night drinkers. At the time Arward had never seen a painting by Edward Hopper and he bought the book for the front cover — he did not even know me then — which he cut out with some kitchen scissors and hung on a wall of his home. He told me this himself a few years ago, when we met. I was not in the least offended, since I also remembered having cut out from a newspaper an article of his, “Life’s Strangers,” which I pinned to a wall of my study just to remind myself that I had to call Justo Navarro and tell him that there was a guy by the name of Arward who was copying him, in particular when he wrote, for example, “The lonely drinker in Nighthawks appears to be recalling past adventures in China. His neck, his back, his shoulders, bear the burden of the cold light of memory and of the years.”

Prosa de la frontera propia, which recalls Cosme Badía’s past Chinese adventures, led me the other day to remember when I put my name to an interview with Justo Navarro that he had in fact conducted himself, while on the facing page there was an interview that I had done, but which Justo Navarro had put his name to. Both interviews began with the same question, agreed beforehand: “Would you swap places with me?” “Right now,” I replied. “Not right now,” answered Justo Navarro. “Another time I’d love to, but not right now. At the moment you’re asking the questions and I’m answering them; if I swapped places with you, I would have to start asking them.”

Both Justo Navarro and I have always been obsessed with things that coincide, things which are equal, double. For a long time the police would always ask Justo Navarro for his documents at airports and search his baggage. When it occurred to him one day to ask a security guard why they only ever stopped him, the guard explained that his appearance coincided with the description of a wanted criminal.

Something similar happened to me in 1974 when I lived in Paris and was arrested in the drugstore of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, having been mistaken for the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos. Coincidences and chances. With these in mind, I have suddenly realised that in 1994 Sergio Pitol wrote a story called “The Shadowy Twin Brother,” which he opened with a quotation from Justo Navarro: “To be a writer is to turn into someone else, into a stranger. You have to begin to translate yourself. Writing is a case of impersonation, of adopting a new personality. Writing is pretending to be another.”

Further coincidences and chances. Without knowing that Justo Navarro and I more than once have pretended to be each other (possibly without even suspecting that we are acquainted), Sergio Pitol has made us coincide in “The Shadowy Twin Brother,” because the story is dedicated to me: “To my friend from overseas, to the last critic with delirious criteria.”

* * *

Today, in Montano’s home in Nantes, having confirmed that he is suffering as a result of his literary paralysis, I tried to amuse him by telling him all these stories of doubles and doubles’ doubles.

“There are coincidences and chances,” my son remarked, “from which you die laughing, and there are coincidences and chances from which you die.”

“Didn’t Justo Navarro say that?”

“And Julio Arward as well, who used it not long ago in an article you may not have seen.”

An expression of deep anguish came over Montano’s face. “Everyone writes,” he said. Next to him his partner, Aline, gave him a terrible look of compassion. Aline is beautiful, silent, intelligent. I do not know her very well — only from two times she has passed through Barcelona — but she inspires confidence in me. In us. Rosa, my wife — and Montano’s stepmother — believes that she is the best company that my difficult, unstable son could have.

“No doubt you’re thinking,” Montano said to me, “that I’m worried because I haven’t written anything since I published my book. But things are a little different. It’s not that I can no longer write, but that I’m constantly being visited by the ideas of others, ideas that arrive unexpectedly, that come to me out of the blue and take possession of my brain.” At this point he made a dramatic gesture. “To tell the truth, no one can write like this.”

I asked him, with a certain amount of distrust in what he had said to me, what kind of ideas these were that came to him out of the blue. And he explained that, for example, no sooner had I rung the doorbell than he had received a visit from Julio Arward’s personal memories.

“I don’t believe you,” I told him.

“Well, you should. It may seem strange, but it’s true. Julio Arward’s memory infiltrated mine and I saw a corner of the street in Málaga, Garriga Vela, where Arward lives. I saw this before you entered the house and thanked me for recommending that you read his novel. Have no doubt, I saw it before you said anything about Arward. I saw the corner of the street where he lives, and I also saw the bar, Comodoro Reading, which appears in that terrible novel where he copied Justo Navarro. Not only that, I saw the swimming pools in Granada, Baños de Simeón, which he went to once with his father when he was a boy….”

He almost certainly had to be fantasizing, perhaps childishly trying to conceal his anguish at his unfortunate inability to write. But in his slightly disturbed look there was a strange hint of truth.

I felt tired as a result of the journey and decided to take my leave, to withdraw to my hotel to rest. Besides, they had not expected me until tomorrow and had planned to have dinner this evening with some customers of the bookshop that they run here in Nantes. Again they insisted that I sleep in their home, something I do not intend to do. I propose to spend these days in Nantes without interfering in their life together. They gave me a lift to the Hôtel La Perouse and we arranged to meet for lunch the next day — I shall go around to the bookshop at midday. When we reached the door of the hotel, as I was getting out of the car, I tried to find out if all this about Arward’s memory having infiltrated my son’s memory was a passing invention, and I made a joke of it by asking him whether at that precise moment he was still receiving Arward’s personal memories.

“No, not now,” Montano replied very seriously. “But when we left home, I received a visit from Justo Navarro’s memory. It must be because his memory is infiltrating Julio Arward’s.”

Aline gave me a look as if to apologize for Montano’s words, which were possibly an attempt to appear clever in front of me and very different from what one might expect of a poor young man who has run out of ideas.

“And may we know what memory of Justo Navarro’s you received?” I asked him.

“His memory of the day — I don’t know if you remember — when he pretended to be you,” came the answer.

I reacted with equanimity, and took my leave until tomorrow.

A moment ago, pondering Montano’s words, I recalled a story by Jorge Luis Borges, “Shakespeare’s Memory,” the result of a dream that the Argentinian writer had in a room in Michigan, when he saw a faceless man who offered him Shakespeare’s memory; he did not offer him fame or glory — that would have been trivial — but the writer’s memory, the memory of the afternoon in which he wrote Act II of Hamlet.

* * *

I am going to bed, I feel tired after the journey and weary of so much writing in this diary I have kept for years, which today — when I wrote that sentence beginning “At the end of the twentieth century, the young Montano …”—I noticed could be driven by a mysterious impulse and become the beginning of a story that required readers, and not remain hidden among the pages of this private journal.

It is slightly absurd, all I needed now was to turn into a narrator. It is absurd most of all because I came to Nantes for a breath of fresh air, to try to stop literature from stifling me, at least for a while. I came to Nantes to see if I could forget a little that I am suffering from literature sickness.

And yet here I am now, in the Hôtel La Perouse, more book-sick than when I left Barcelona. Rosa may have been right when she told me that Nantes — with Montano suffering from a different strain of the same literary disease — was not exactly the best place for me to rest for a few days from my fearsome reviews and my sickly obsession for books and my habit of seeing everything from a literary viewpoint.

Rosa told me that I urgently needed a holiday: to change my excessive dependency on literature for some scenery and songs, to be a noncultural tourist, to take a break from my demanding work as a critic, to devote myself to the serene contemplation of Mother Nature—“To sit and watch how tomatoes, for example, grow in fields,” were her actual words — to observe sunsets and to think about her, to think more about her; she could not come with me because of work, but this is what I should do, think a lot more about her. Rosa, however, also told me not to go to Nantes, where my son — similarly wounded by letters, though for other reasons than mine — could aggravate my illness.

And here I am now, worse off than when I left Barcelona, suffering more as a result of the stifling encounter between a father and son, wounded — albeit with different scars — by the specter of literature: one (Montano) no doubt wanting to return to it, to literature; the other wishing he could forget it, at least for a while, but unable to do so for the moment and, to make matters worse, bogged down in the opening of something faintly resembling a literary narrative, and furthermore writing it in his diary.

How strange everything is. Father and son both suffering from a different strain of the same literary disease. How strange Montano was today, seated in his armchair at home in the rue du Calvaire, anxiously squeezing Aline’s hand, his literary horizon blocked by the dangerous novel, trapped in his own fiction or perhaps simply — if he is not making it up — by Arward’s and Navarro’s personal memories, trapped among the trapped, in Nantes, tragically reduced to a state of being unable to write and convinced that he won’t ever be able to write again.

Jules Verne was born here.

I cannot sleep, it is horrible, and I have picked up the diary perhaps just to write this, to say that Jules Verne was born here and, when he was young, walking along the canals in Nantes’ pretty river port, his eyes entranced by the brigantines, the caste of privateers and traffickers was long dead, their riches dispersed, though the ancient splendor still glimmered here and there among the ruins of the private city and a certain colonial fragrance still hung in the air.

I see now the lights of Nantes in the disquiet of this sleepless night and suddenly Aline springs to mind, and it strikes me that this apparently fragile woman is the very image of Jules Verne’s mother, whose name resembles a current of air: Sophie Allote de la Fuye. Aline’s name also has something of the fresh breeze in it and, even if this were not the case, I need to believe it, I need to trust that she will become my ally and be the current of air that will eliminate Montano’s literary illness and, if at all possible, mine at the same time.

Jacques Vaché was born here.

And here he committed suicide. Vaché is one of the main characters in Montano’s book about writers who gave up writing. Vaché went down in the history of French literature having barely lifted a finger, having written only a handful of letters to André Breton. An opium overdose ended his life in 1916 in Nantes, in the Grand Hôtel de France. The shade of this furtive poet accompanied Breton all his life. Breton used to admire him when he saw him walking along the streets of Nantes, dressed indiscriminately in the uniform of a hussar lieutenant, an aviator, or a doctor.

Among other things, Vaché wrote to Breton, “You’ll think that I’ve disappeared, or that I’m dead, and one day you’ll find out that there’s a certain Vaché living a retired life in Normandy, occupied in the rearing of livestock, who can introduce you to his wife, an innocent, reasonably pretty girl, who won’t ever have realized the danger she’s been in. Only a few books (very few, you understand), carefully stored away upstairs, will testify that something has happened.”

The night now conjures up the memory of when I was tempted to abandon literary criticism for a while and to take a chance with a kind of anthology that would bring together the most interesting cases of youngsters who down through history have stood out by being seriously dangerous: youngsters among whom I planned to include Vaché and among whom today I would include Montano. Montano, by the way, physically — but no longer mentally — increasingly resembles Gérard Depardieu’s son, that young man who is an actor like his famous father and who destroys everything in his path and who, when asked about his future, recently declared that he was pleased to have reached the age of twenty-nine and still be alive.

I have always liked youngsters who pose a serious threat to conservative society, those who find the world stupid and for a time want to leave it soon. I was one of them and my son has managed to become one, something that, until he set up his bookshop in this city, he demonstrated clearly by trashing hotel rooms or risking his life in gratuitous drunken brawls or taking drugs in endless dissolute nights or spitting in the face of the powers he came across. I shouldn’t exactly admire him for this, but I behaved in a very similar way and it would be ignoble on my part not to feel an intimate sense of satisfaction at my poor son’s wild and suicidal boldness.

To tell the truth, the talent displayed by Montano — by the way, his full name is Miguel de Abriles Montano, but he prefers to call himself just Montano, in honor of his late mother — and his need until very recently to live dangerously have always been as great as his sudden mental fragility, which would explain his tragic inability to write following the risky enterprise of a book about writers who give up writing. I remember how much I smiled at his words shortly after he published his book: “I count on my father, as he counts on me, because I’m not the only one people say terrible things about.”

I smiled because he had copied these words from Depardieu’s son, whom he resembled at the time both physically and mentally. I smiled because the terrible things people said about Depardieu Senior were not the same things that were said about me, on account of my merciless reviews. And now I smile, thinking how much I would like one day, with Montano, to write that anthology of dangerous youngsters or else, it occurs to me now, the elegant chronicle of how social misfits end up sooner or later becoming more moderate, joining forces and creating art.

When I woke up, despite having slept for barely two hours, I felt well, as if two hours were enough. I was greatly surprised to be feeling in such good form and decided not to sleep anymore and to head outside. Since I had plenty of time before my appointment at my son’s bookshop, I went for a walk in Procé Park. Literature-sick as I am, I was unable to avoid a private tribute to André Breton, who wrote in Nadja that Nantes was, perhaps, together with Paris, “the only city in France where I have the impression that something worthwhile may happen to me, where certain glances burn with excessive fire, where for me the cadence of life is not the same as elsewhere, where a spirit of adventure beyond all adventures persists in certain souls. Nantes, from where friends may still arrive; Nantes, where I loved a park: Procé Park.”

I did not love Procé Park — it is not my style — but my sense of well-being grew at a time of morning when, given how little I had slept, the most logical reaction would have been to feel irritated, tired, or bad-tempered. I felt very well walking in the drizzle, protected by the red umbrella that Rosa gave me for the trip. I paid close attention to the few people I met during my walk in the park and thought that I would have liked to know their full names and even to love them deeply — I preferred this possibility to loving the park — and for each of them to die knowing that their name was on my lips. I paid close attention to their apparently unique faces and saw in their sunken eyes the fear of a senseless slaughter. I derived great enjoyment from this perverse game of loving and killing off strangers and imagining each individual’s death, as they commended me, in their passage to the other life, to their nearest and dearest. In short, I played at imagining that I was the absolute king in the land of love and death. In short, I traveled beyond all adventures, I went farther than poor Breton.

In the bookshop I found Montano relaxed and pleasant. As for Aline, she seemed happier than yesterday, at least she was smiling more. Everything appeared idyllic, but it cannot be said that things went well. Now that I analyze Montano’s behavior during all the time we spent together, I have to say that he was disconcerting, highly volatile, with noticeably pronounced mood swings. As if he were Hamlet. Whether or not he was actually trying to imitate the Prince of Denmark — I shall never know for sure — Montano behaved like a being in surprising and continual transformation. He passed through the following stages — at least — of Hamlet’s character: a) formal and polite; b) sensible, thoughtful, even intellectual; c) emotional and melancholic; d) despotic and mocking; e) pretending to be deranged, vindictive, even stark raving mad.

a) As soon as I entered the bookshop, Montano displayed extreme courtesy. Let us say he was strange, but agreeable. He bowed to me very low and very affectionately — imitating the greeting he gave me as a boy on the rare occasions that I deigned to go and fetch him from school — and handed me a French translation of Asparagus and the Immortality of the Soul, a novel by the Italian Achille Campanile, a master of humoristic literature.

“On presenting you with this book,” he said to me with exquisite, exaggerated, but agreeable politeness, very formal, “I should like to pay tribute to the most incorruptible Spanish critic of all time.”

I smiled and asked him not to joke or flatter me so much, but expressed my gratitude for the detail of giving me the French translation of a novel I had stoutly defended in my last essay — as I had defended its author, a writer unjustly ignored today — which showed that he had bothered to read this article of mine. “I couldn’t put it down,” he told me. And then he moved away to greet a customer. At this point Aline, as beautiful and fragile as she was last night, came up to me and, after asking if I was happy to have lunch at La Cigale, in reference to Montano’s current good mood, she whispered:

“He’s charming when he wants to be.”

b) In the rain, on the way to La Cigale, it occurred to me to talk to Montano about my literary illness, only about mine; needless to say, I did not wish to talk to him so soon about his illness, a delicate matter which I planned to touch on later with great tact. I talked to him about my illness because I thought it might help him to know that his father found literature stifling and desired to abandon it at the first opportunity that presented itself. I thought that talking to him about my disease might perhaps alleviate his own, while at the same time my confession would afford me some respite.

“I’m thinking,” he said to me in a sensible and very thoughtful tone, “that Walter Benjamin speculated about the possible relationship that exists between the art of storytelling and the healing of illnesses.”

I was forced to confess the truth, namely that I had no idea about this curious relationship between narrative and healing. So Montano explained, in a sweet and friendly voice, that the connection between storytelling and curing illnesses had been suggested to Walter Benjamin by a German friend who told him about the healing powers of his wife’s hands, saying that their movements were very expressive, but it was impossible to describe their expressiveness, because it was as if those hands were telling a story.

“In such a way,” said my son, “in such a peculiar way, Walter Benjamin was reminded of an intimate scene: that of the boy who, when he falls ill, is sent to bed by his mother, who then comes and sits by his side and starts telling him stories. As a result of this memory, Walter Benjamin wondered whether narrative might not in fact be the most propitious atmosphere, the most favorable condition, for a large number of cures.”

Montano proceeded to reflect on the propitious atmosphere created by the narrative space, and I felt a little ridiculous for having confided my illness to him and having left myself at the mercy of the expressive movements of his hands as he aired his opinions on the matter. And the thing is, I had the impression that, as he held forth, including in his meditation brilliant stories of his own invention, he was seeking to heal me of my illness when this was not exactly what I had come to Nantes to achieve, but, in my role as his father, I had come primarily to help cure his illness, his tragic inability to write.

“I have to go back to my childhood,” Montano concluded, “to the days when I fell miserably ill, and Mom would tell me stories that always made me feel better; I have to go back to my childhood to deduce with absolute certainty something that may seem simple to you, but in fact is not: in the same imperceptible manner in which it began, the illness one day takes its leave.”

c) Once in La Cigale, Montano became emotional and started talking about his mother and how, as soon as I left the house, she would dance for joy. At the top of his voice and on the verge of hysterical sobbing, he introduced the subject of his late mother and did so in the style that is so characteristic of him when he suddenly becomes emotional for some reason, a style which, like the good critic I am, I have analyzed as if it were a text.

This emotional style, which finally drifts into the most disturbing melancholy, involves despising the straight line and wandering, adding personal touches, following ellipses and labyrinths, retreating, going around in circles, suddenly touching that inaccessible core which is the subject of his mother — whenever I have seen him so emotional, he has been talking about his blessed mother — and again retreating and again further circumlocutions obeying contrary instincts, until he mercilessly bares and ridicules any truth that’s liable to be certain with the exception — and here he again advances, again obeying contrary instincts — of one immutable truth, the only one he claims to possess with absolute certainty: that he has only ever loved one person in this world. That person is María, his dear late mother, my first wife of sacred memory.

d) After the meal, Aline, understandably saddened, slightly naively told Montano that he could love her as well. My son pierced her with his blue, perpetually cold eyes, the same cold, blue eyes his mother had. Aline was frightened, and I realized that Montano dominates her with a certain ease. That said, her fear quickly passed, and shortly afterward she dared to tell my son that persevering in obstinate grief over the disappearance of his mother was to behave with impious stubbornness. It wasn’t the best thing she could have said. Montano adopted a very somber and strange air. I immediately asked him if anything was wrong, other than being angry at her. He looked most unusual, with a wild expression in his eyes that I had never seen in him before. I again asked him if anything was the matter and he still did not answer me. His blue eyes were colder than ever.

“You look very sombre,” I said to him.

“Sombre, me?” he answered in a mocking tone. “Not so, my lord; I am too much i’ the sun.”

He answered like Hamlet—“I am too much i’ the sun,” exactly what the prince says — and I began to draw conclusions, one at least. Maybe he wanted to avenge his mother’s death. More than once he had stupidly insinuated that I had killed her. But perhaps this was the wrong conclusion to draw and he was not thinking about Hamlet or anything, perhaps his enigmatic and volatile behavior was due simply to the confusion he felt at his tragic inability to write.

Whatever the reason, Hamlet’s unexpected appearance reminded me of an idea that came to me in the hotel during the night, when I could not sleep. The idea was in some way related to Hamlet’s ghost and was intended to help Montano overcome the anxiety caused by his writer’s block. The idea originated as follows: during the night, unable to sleep, I suddenly switched on the light in my bedroom, when I thought I saw a spider crawling across the carpet. The spider, incautious and overhasty, came limping sluggishly toward me, stopped, suddenly noticed the gigantic shadow in front of it, and, not knowing whether to beat a retreat or to keep on going, contemplated its enormous enemy. On seeing that I barely moved, it plucked up its courage and continued forward, with a mixture of rashness, guile, and fear. As it passed next to me, I was about to crush it because it disgusted me, but instead I lifted up the carpet and helped it to escape, I spared its life. Why? Because my philosophy went beyond an all-too-easy impulsive gesture, just as Hamlet — I thought at the time — hesitates between knowledge (doing nothing) or rejecting knowledge in favor of an ancient moral custom we call revenge, which is basically an all-too-easy, animal gesture. Part of the greatness of Shakespeare’s Hamlet derives from this hesitation, a theory I expounded upon in my penultimate book.

In this way I moved from the spider to Hamlet and from there to my colleague Harold Bloom, who in a recent essay asks, “Why does Hamlet return from the sea?” Hamlet could have gone to Wittenberg, Paris, or London. But the truth is, Bloom goes on to explain, he cannot return to Wittenberg to study, because the prince of Act V has nothing left to learn—he already knows it all. It is a ghost who returns, whom I imagined in the middle of last night to have something in common with Jacques Vaché.

This is how things went last night in this hotel room where I continue to write this diary that is turning into a novel. Bloom’s question suggested to me a similar one that I could ask Montano today, which might help put him on the ideal path on which to escape from the tragedy of his blocked literary horizon.

The question was this: “Why does Marcel Duchamp return from the sea?”

On mentioning that Duchamp returns from the sea, I would be referring to how, after a long stay on the other side of the Atlantic, in the United States of America, one fine day Duchamp returned to Paris, where, with the clear-sighted vision of someone who, in the field of artistic creation, already knows it all, he continued in his practice of renouncing the all-too-easy gesture of “crushing the spider,” by which I mean creating works of art that merely repeat exhausted formulas.

Wide-awake in this room last night, I thought that as soon as I saw Montano today I would tell him that, if his only problem was writer’s block, it had an easy solution. À la Duchamp. All he had to do was calmly devote himself to doing nothing, the same as those artists who already know it all. Was it so dramatic to go through life like Duchamp, declaring oneself to be at a distance from artists who repeat what has already been done and personifying the wisdom of someone who has seen the sea, seen it all, and who, therefore, is a happy ghost, whose daily gestures bring on, for example, no more than the contented succession of the invisible books one writes, not on paper but in the thin air of every day or on life’s furtive surface?

A good plan for Montano. To follow Duchamp’s example and, like him, without surprise or suffering, to claim to be doing nothing. A good plan for my son, a plan that would enable him to escape from the constricted geometry of his blind alley. A plan as complex — it necessitated connecting a spider and Hamlet with Bloom and Duchamp — as it was basically very simple. In any case, a good plan for Montano. It came to me last night, as I lay wide awake in this hotel, but today, when I woke up, I had already forgotten it. However, the sudden irruption of Hamlet’s ghost into La Cigale brought it back to mind. All I had to do was ask him, innocent as can be, why Marcel Duchamp returns from the sea.

e) La Cigale is a historic restaurant, and not just because Jacques Demy shot his famous film Lola there in the 1960s. We were talking about all this and arguing about who should pay the bill when suddenly, possibly at the wrong moment, perhaps to stop him arguing about who should pay and also — why not say it? — trying in good faith to lend him a hand and to help him overcome his inability to write, at the wrong moment, I decided to ask him the question I had formulated in my hotel room.

“Why does Marcel Duchamp return from the sea?”

I know, I should have laid it all out and told him first about Bloom and the spider and all the paraphernalia of my literarily sick mind, which had led me to concoct this twisted but basically simple question intended subtly to help him — because I sought only to help him with this question that set in motion, I thought, my very well-intentioned Duchamp plan.

My son went from courting Hamlet’s ghost to becoming a monster that seeks revenge, also like Hamlet, I should add. The change in his expression was terrifying, his pupils suddenly dilated in a quite astonishing way, and, on answering me, he almost breathed fire:

“To see the sea.”

I remembered when he was a boy and one day, for no reason at all — unless it was to give us a good fright — the expression on his angelic face suddenly changed and turned into an enormous, horrible grimace, at which point he told us, warning us of his future literary calling, that the sea was paved with human faces, the faces of the dead. That day his mother, the ill-fated María, and I knew that our son would be difficult, though of course we had no way of knowing that later in Nantes he would choose to behave like Hamlet’s ghost in such an unstable way.

“I don’t think you understood me,” I replied today in La Cigale, “I asked you about Duchamp because it seems to me that living without writing, being a literary Duchamp, isn’t such a bad plan.”

I shall never forget his words or his deranged look, which suddenly sought revenge.

“Thanks to you,” he said, “thanks entirely to you, look what is happening to me at this precise moment: the memory of Gonzalo Rojas is infiltrating Justo Navarro’s and I am reliving the night when that poet wrote those verses in which Rimbaud paints the hum of vowels, Lautréamont howls at length, Kafka burns with his writings, Ezra Pound discusses an ideogram with the angels, and my mother, my poor mother …”

It was terrible, his pupils dilated even more.

“And my mother,” he continued, “listened to the piano recital that her charming murderer gave for her.”

At this point all I could think was how right Rosa was when she warned me that Montano, the one person who had inherited all my tastes and neuroses, was the least suitable human being in the world to help me dampen the obsessive presence of literature in my life.

At this point I clearly saw that remaining at Montano’s side could only make my illness worse. It was obvious that Montano’s malady, just like mine, was due to literature-sickness. And I told myself that, since Montano had inherited his father’s disease, I should name the illness after my son and call it Montano’s malady.

I looked at my son and confirmed my opinions. With his Hamletism, his aggressive theatrics, and his story about writers’ memories infiltrating the memories of others, Montano posed a real threat to his father and could only aggravate the latter’s literary illness.

“You killed her!” Montano suddenly exclaimed.

This was the last straw. He evidently believed that he was Hamlet and wanted to entrap the king’s conscience, my conscience.

“For crying out loud,” I answered, “I didn’t kill your mother!”

At this point Aline burst into tears.

It is raining outside, the rain is falling on Nantes and this hotel room is really very comfortable. But let’s get one thing straight: I did not kill Montano’s mother. Let there be no doubt. The idea that I murdered her is the classic literary construction of someone suffering from my son’s illness. It is raining on Nantes, and this reminds me of the Barbara song, where it also rained on the streets of this city. I gulp down two glasses of water in the hope that they will help mitigate the harmful effects of the evil, of my Montano’s malady. A moment ago I looked out of the window and saw a man with his arms half raised, in different positions, turning toward the mist — fairly thick at that time — as if he intended to enter it.

I did not kill his mother. What I do remember very well is the mad dash towards the balcony, the terrible jump in the air of María, the mother who left poor Montano feeling melancholy, the mother he won’t forget.

I remember in our house on Provença Street her deranged dash toward the balcony, which left the wood in splinters, her jump from the sixth floor with the indifference of a bucket of dirty water emptied out of the window by a housewife.

At the funeral, making out I was eternally bereaved, I read some verses by Eliot: “Ash on an old man’s sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave. / Dust in the air suspended / Marks the place where a story ended.”

I did not kill his mother.

Today in La Cigale, in an attempt to still the bloody thread of his runaway imagination, I said to him:

“All you ever do is revive the flies that suck my blood.”

I came out with this improbable sentence in part because I had again evoked the sea that he saw paved with the faces of the dead, and this reminded me of an old friend who always used to say that he wanted to crush two paving stones with the same fly. I came out with this sentence in part because of this and in part because I had the impression that my son, aware that I was suffering from Montano’s malady, sought to suck my blood and was trying to give me a final dose, a deadly overdose of literature.

This was not so very unusual, for my son simply to have it in mind to kill his father, a not uncommon desire in the West. The only strange thing was that he sought to do so by literary means. But, given Montano’s strangeness, nothing ever seems sufficiently odd. Whatever, the point is that, while I was in La Cigale, I understood that I could not run any more risks and that the best course of action was to leave Nantes as quickly as possible. I could not carry on hesitating like a vulgar Hamlet, wondering whether Montano was mad or simply pretending, or whether the poor boy was suffering on account of his inability to write (and that was all), or else he really did want to avenge his mother’s death, or he intended to aggravate my Montano’s malady by giving me his own and thus end up eliminating me by an overdose.

“What flies are you talking about?” he said. “You’re always trying to lecture me from your critic’s pedestal.”

This was all I needed. All I needed now was for him as an author to reproach me for being a critic. I stared at him with the most authoritarian expression I could adopt at that moment. And suddenly, I don’t know how it happened — I suppose it was due to the constant presence of Hamlet’s ghost — I remembered a gravedigger I once saw in Roses, singing while he dug graves. And immediately I remembered that in performances of Hamlet there is always such a character, a singing gravedigger.

I was so annoyed with my son that I was on the verge of telling him that I would sing on the day that I dug his grave. But it didn’t seem a good idea to add fuel to the flames. However, I did ask him what on earth the matter was, and told him that I had never seen him acting so strange. I already had it clear in my mind that, according to his response, I should make a swift exit before he had a chance to administer the lethal dose.

“You’re the one who’s acting strange;” he said. “You come to Nantes and tell me you’re literature-sick, which is pretty obvious, and then you start asking me about the sea and Duchamp.” I immediately regretted having confessed so freely yesterday that I felt saturated with so many books and so many quotations. I’m very glad I didn’t, but I was about to elaborate on yesterday’s confession by telling him that since arriving in Nantes I have felt trapped in the pages of a novel that I am copying down in my diary and whose enigmatic rhythm is being marked, with noticeable regularity, by Montano’s malady.

In the end the tension in La Cigale became so great that I told Aline and my son that I was walking back to the hotel and would come and see them in the bookshop at the end of the day.

I prepared my suitcase an hour ago. I shall finish writing these lines in my diary and then go to the station, where I shall take the first train out of this city. I shall leave on the first train. I know that this is a very literary thing to do, I also know that trains are very literary, but it does not matter, on the first train I find, I shall leave Nantes, I shall leave and let my son sing while he digs the grave of whomever he likes, so long as it isn’t mine.

* * *

The train steals out of Nantes, I am leaving Verne’s city behind, the relief is immense. In his diaries Ernst Jünger says that people with dilated pupils soon arouse distrust. I would add to this that sons, especially if they turn so exceedingly dangerous as mine, come into the world just to aggravate their fathers’ illnesses, sometimes just to kill them. It is supposed to be a fact of life, that some die so that others can be born. But I do not wish to die of a literary overdose, nor do I have any desire to suffer vengeance by Hamlet’s sword. I have no problem with the father being killed, just so long as I’m not the father.

I am leaving Nantes, abandoning the Danish court.

Even if I discovered now that my son is the sanest person in the world and I am simply odd, it would not change anything, I would still leave Nantes, because it is clear that my son, whether he is innocent or a dangerous killer, has not stopped aggravating my literary illness since I arrived in this city. I am sure that, had I stayed a few hours longer in Nantes, I would have ended up — if I haven’t already — turning into the most literary being on earth.

The distance swallows up Nantes, elegant provincial city with its river, a city exposed to the four winds, an open city and yet, also, an enclosed city, a literary city: Verne, Vaché, and Julien Gracq among others were born here or hereabouts.

Very soon I shall start thinking about tomatoes and asparagus and all sorts of natural products of the earth and I shall forget about so much literature. At least for a time, I need to have a complete break from literature, to rest in whatever way I can. Also, even if it is only for a short period, I am going to shelve this diary that was turning into a novel. I need to concentrate my mind on natural things, to meditate on whatever claptrap comes into my head, which I cannot easily relate to literature. “It is possible to speak of a writing malady,” I remember now that Marguerite Duras wrote. I wish to escape from such a malady for a good long while.

That’s enough literature for now. Fortunately, dangerous Nantes recedes into the distance. I am going to watch the countryside and look out for silly cows grazing in green meadows under the pretty rain. Anything that isn’t writing or thinking in literary terms. I feel sorry for Montano, he may have had high hopes for me. But he can find himself another victim, not me. He can sing while he digs another’s grave.

At the end of the twentieth century, I went to Valparaiso to think about explosions. It isn’t that I went to this Chilean port with this express purpose in mind, but circumstances combined in such a way that on New Year’s Eve, on the hanging terrace of the Brighton Hôtel, watching the fireworks that saw out the century, I ended up having the impression that fate had secretly planned it so that I would travel to Valparaiso to think about explosions. And about death, I should add. Explosions and death more than anything occupied my thoughts there on the hanging terrace of the Brighton Hotel, as I contemplated the water of the bay, which at that moment was a smoking black plate, in the pleasant company of Margot and Tongoy.

I had gone to Chile under Rosa’s strict orders. She was so tired of me that she had asked me to go as far away as possible for a few days. “To Chile,” she said, “Chile, for example.” There was the delightful Margot Valerí, our intrepid aviator friend. She could help me, Rosa said. Among Margot’s many attributes was the fact that she did not have a clue about literature and she never spoke about books.

I traveled to Chile one day before the end of the century, and I went to this country without this diary that was turning into a novel, I went to Chile with the intention of not reading or writing at all, purely to see the Pacific Ocean for the first time in my life, to see its famous violent blue color and to think about anything that I could not relate to literature or to death, which was what I thought about most since forcing myself not to think about literature.

Rosa came with me to the airport and gave me a big kiss good-bye. “Off you go,” she said, “come back when you’re well.” The days prior to my departure had been absolute hell for her. After my brief stay in Nantes, I had returned to Barcelona in a worse state than when I had left. From Nantes I could have gone to Paris, which would have been the most sensible thing to do, but I had been an idiot and taken the first train to appear in Nantes station — that idea of the “first train” has always been as literary and romantic as it is pernicious — and a few hours later, fool that I am, I was back in Barcelona, where, because I did not allow myself to think about anything referring to literature, the days became empty and devoid of meaning and I ended up thinking about death, which is precisely what literature talks about most.

I thought about death even when I was asleep. One afternoon, in the sitting room at home, I told myself that it would be better to try reading a book again than to switch on the television and watch those programs about the lives of the rich and famous, which, while they did not refer me to literature, made me so anxious that I always fell to thinking about death. However, my choice of a book was not a good one. With my eyes closed, I picked a book from the shelf and found myself with a biography of the writer Sir Thomas Browne, whom initially, I do not know why, I imagined to be a jovial lover of life. But in a matter of seconds I was more anxious than ever, having read that on one particular occasion Browne imagined seeing sleeping bodies from on high and suggested that, if one were to pass across the globe, following the setting sun, one would see the whole world as a vast city of the dead.

Anxiety everywhere! I put down the book, threw it on the floor as if it burned, and switched on the television again. They were showing a soccer game and focusing on the pained expression of a player lying sprawled on the turf. Anxiety everywhere, I went back to thinking about death.

Every day in Barcelona became horrible, very morbid. I would cry in my sleep and then wake up and tell Rosa that it was nothing, really, Rosa, just a dream or something like that, nothing, Rosa. But it was not a dream or even a nightmare, it was a mournful voice, I knew this very well, a voice that even at night prowled about me and told me that I was going to die and that I didn’t have long to live. I would wake up in the night and tell Rosa that it was nothing, just a dream, but shortly thereafter I would go to the kitchen to have a drink. Rosa would follow me to the kitchen and, as soon as she caught me with a bottle of something, she would tell me that I was in a very bad way, that it would even be better for me to start writing reviews again and to think about literature, or else to travel, yes, to travel to a faraway country, I needed it. And I would stand there, openmouthed and sad, staring silently at the kitchen calendar.

I decided to start reviewing again, and the first book they sent me was The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald. It was as if the editors of the newspaper had decided to send me this book so that its style of an extreme glacial beauty would finish me off. I knew this because I had been told, but I confirmed it by reading the book: the narrator viewed the world dominated by a strange quietness, as if all we humans looked through various sheets of glass. At times the narrator did not know whether he was in the “land of the living or already in another place.” Anxiety everywhere. The narrator set off to walk the county of Suffolk, “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” Visiting small villages, landscapes, and solitary ruins, he was confronted by traces of a past that referred him to the entire world. His pilgrimage along the coast lacked joy, light, and vivacity. For a dead man — the narrator seemed to be saying — the whole world is one long funeral.

The next book I was given to review, which had just been reprinted, was The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš, a collection of nine stories, the strangest of which — its long shadow would accompany me to Chilean lands, as I was soon to discover — was based on real events; it is the story of a man who, while on a trip, had been forced to spend the night in a miserable hostel “in the middle of the woods” and suddenly, in his dreams, had witnessed in minute detail the murder that would take place three years later in the same room where he was sleeping; the victim would be a lawyer by the name of Victor Arnaud. It was possible to locate the murderer, because the dream stayed in his memory.

Anxiety everywhere. One afternoon Rosa found me quiet, almost frozen from fear and from glacial beauty in front of the kitchen calendar, only the golden label on the bottle of rum from Martinique giving the scene some color. It was then that she suggested that I stop thinking about literature and about death and that I travel to Chile to visit Margot Valerí, who was eighty years old, but was life itself and would surely help me.

I didn’t hesitate, Rosa was right, I needed to travel. Rosa and I had met the intrepid aviator Margot Valerí in the summer of 1998 in Barcelona and we had become good friends. In case one day we decided to travel to Chile, she had invited us to her house in Tunquén, or the bay of Quintay, facing the Pacific. Margot had a delightful biography, which made her the ideal person to combat Montano’s malady. She had been born in Trafún, near Río Bueno, and as a girl had enjoyed horseback-riding and rowing on the Pilmaiquén River. When riding or rowing through the scenes of her childhood, she would often notice the airplanes constantly flying over the river. At the age of nine, she was given a pair of binoculars by her mother and was able to take a closer look at the Lan Chile mail planes flying very high over Trafún on the route connecting Santiago with Puerto Montt. Margot soon discovered she was destined to be an aviator. In the Second World War, she had been a pilot with the Free French Air Force, something of which she was very proud. At the age of eighty, she continued to pilot airplanes, she was a woman who seemed to travel through life without the need to refuel, and she had no ties with death or with literature. In fact, one day in Barcelona, I remembered having asked her what she thought of the writer-aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. She had answered that literature bored her stiff — possibly because her grandfather had tried to drum it into her — but most of all she hated the “aviator mystique” surrounding this insufferable French writer whom I had just mentioned and who, to cap it all, was not such a good pilot as he was rumored to have been.

Isn’t it wonderful that literature bored her stiff? Only once had I heard her say something vaguely literary, it was when I asked her if I should believe that at her age she still piloted airplanes. “Yes,” she answered, “of course I still shake the skies.”

It was this sentence I reminded her of when I called to find out if I could visit her at the end of the year and century in her house in Tunquén, or the bay of Quintay. First she joked and asked me if I had split up with Rosa. I explained to her what was going on, how Rosa had to stay in Barcelona because of work — she was busy with preparations to shoot a film in the Azores — and how she, more than anyone, needed a break from my neurotic literary ills.

I slept almost all the hours of the outward journey to Chile. The few moments I spent awake between one sleeping pill and the next were criminal. I could only think to flip through the in-flight magazine, where I came across some verses by Pablo Neruda, perfect for reminding me that death and literature existed: “There are lonely cemeteries, / graves full of bones without sound, / the heart passing through a tunnel, / dark, dark, dark, / as in a shipwreck we die from within …”

Startling verses of a great funereal beauty, but not at all what you want to read between one sleep and another. When after two naps brought on by different sleeping pills and a Nerudian interlude I arrived in Santiago, I was cheered by Margot’s lively smile as she stood at the foot of the steps, but saw that she was accompanied by a very ugly man, a kind of ultra-gloomy Nosferatu, and for a moment I couldn’t help thinking about Neruda’s verses and death.

“Allow me to introduce you,” she said, “to Felipe Tongoy, the ugliest man in the world. You will become very good friends.”

Short pause for Felipe Tongoy, the ugliest man in the world. I met him on the penultimate day of the twentieth century at Santiago Airport, as I just related in this diary, which I took up again after my return from Chile. Funnily enough, I am here in Barcelona writing about the time in Santiago when I met the ugly Tongoy and, in ten minutes, I have to leave home and have lunch with him at the restaurant Envalira in the district of Gràcia. My friend Tongoy is currently in Barcelona because he is due to work on the documentary about the world of whalers that Rosa is preparing and which will be shot shortly in the Azores.

Obviously it was I who suggested to Rosa that she offer Tongoy the part of a bogus whaler in the film. His appearances in the documentary may well have a disturbing effect because Tongoy is an authentic Nosferatu and has been in the acting profession for many years; he is a seasoned actor and somewhat famous in France, where he has lived for the last half century. I think that he will excel in his role as a bogus whaler cum outlandish Nosferatu.

Rosa’s documentary aims to record the depressing current state of the world of whales and whalers in the Azores, with Moby-Dick as a permanent literary backdrop. But it also aims to invent, to blend fact and fiction, and it is here, in the fiction, that Tongoy can shine, in the lines that, in my collaboration as scriptwriter, I have prepared for him to deliver at the start of the film.

My friend Tongoy is really very ugly, but one grows used to finding him less hideous on account of his good nature, his eccentric but elegant dress sense, and his refined manners. When I saw him for the first time at Santiago Airport, I quickly thought of Nosferatu. I kept quiet, however, because it is rude to tell someone you have just met that he looks like Dracula, but above all because I myself have always borne a certain resemblance to the actor Christopher Lee, who played Count Dracula in films of the 1950s. And also because he himself almost immediately brought up the matter of his remarkable physical oddity.

My friend Tongoy is seventy-four years old, has a shaved head, and ears like a bat’s. He has lived in Paris for half a century, but he was born into a family of Hungarian Jews who immigrated to Chile and settled in San Felipe. My friend’s real name is Felipe Kertész; he recently became quite famous in France when in a film he played the role of a sinister old man who goes about kidnapping children. He is also relatively well known for his roles as dragonfly-man in a film by Fellini and as Bela Lugosi in a biopic of this Hungarian actor.

With Margot’s valuable assistance, it took the ugly Tongoy and me very few minutes to establish a feeling of mutual sympathy, which led him to ask me, before we had even left the airport, whether I wanted to know how as a boy he came to realize that he was odd.

“I’d love to know,” I told him.

“Well, listen. I must have been about seven and I went on a trip with my family. We were accompanied by Olga, a friend of my mother. Olga was pregnant and at one point, having stared at me for a good long time, she asked my mother, ‘Do you think my baby will suck milk from my blood?’ When I heard this, I said to Olga in my childish way, ‘How can you be so stupid?’ She turned on me in a rage and said, ‘My God, how can you be so naughty and so ugly?’ When we got back home, I asked my mother if it was true that I was ugly, and she replied, ‘Only in Chile.’ At that precise moment I swore that one day I would have the world at my feet.”

In fact Tongoy has never felt ugly. Once, when he was young, a certain girl fell in love with him. She frequented a shop that was situated in the same basement where he lived. There was no light. She ended up pursuing him. Tongoy explained to her that her enthusiasm was an effect of the light, that it wasn’t good to be so literary in life and that she would die if she found out that he liked men. In this way he nipped her nascent feelings in the bud.

Tongoy is of the opinion that love stories for the most part are not sexual stories, but stories of tenderness. Tongoy maintains that people do not understand this or, even if it is only for ten minutes, they do not wish to understand.

Talk about ten minutes, I have run out of those I had to write all this down. I’m off in a hurry to make my appointment with Tongoy, monster and friend.

I’m back, having had lunch with Tongoy at the Envalira. He’s clearly very excited about the film in the Azores. We spent a large part of the meal talking about this diary that I am currently writing. We also talked about Montano, and I thanked Tongoy for the good advice and good ideas he was able to give me in Valparaiso. After that we went on to remember when we first saw each other, our meeting at Santiago Airport. We recalled the journey at nightfall in the Chevrolet driven by Margot, which took us along minor roads to Tunquén, facing the Pacific. I was seeing this ocean for the first time and for ages I stood on the terrace of the house contemplating it in silence and missing this diary, which I had left in Barcelona, wishing I had it with me so that I could record some stimulating impressions of this moment I had waited so many years to enjoy: my eyes before the violent blue of the Pacific, the long, impressive sunset, unforgettable. And the low but brutal murmur of ancient battle reaching me from the sea.

Tunquén consists of a few isolated, beautiful wooden houses supported on tall stilts, a few houses in a wide open space facing the ocean. Margot livened up the evening by singing songs from the mountain and the sea and by telling stories about some of her more risky excursions by airplane. One story in particular sticks in my memory, perhaps because of the special emphasis she gave to it; she talked of the day in the middle of the war when she lost control of her plane and realized that the anti-aircraft batteries were firing on the enemy and she was caught up in the crossfire. When she got back to base, she saw that a missile had hit her back wheel.

Tongoy, hearing this story, turned to me and said that he had an almost identical memory to Margot’s, all he had to do was substitute the back wheel of a fighter plane with his Achilles’ heel, hit not by a missile but by a Chilean train.

I asked Tongoy if he cared to elaborate.

So he spoke of the day when he was seventeen and wanted to die and tried to get run over by a train going so slowly — back then all Chilean trains went slowly — that it had time to brake, and he to scramble clear at the last minute, at the last second, although in chilling detail he described leaving half his heel under the wheel and having give up any plans he had of becoming a dancer, since he had no way of supporting himself for the acrobatics.

As the evening in Tunquén wore on, we laughed a fair amount, listened to many stories, I told some of my own, concentrating on certain memories. I recalled the figure of my father, a “self-made man” like Kafka’s father — obviously I couldn’t avoid the literary reference — and I also recalled my poor mother, who bore some resemblance — again the literary reference — to the Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik, who was fragile and strange and, like my mother, was addicted to barbiturates and had clear suicidal tendencies. I remembered the time in the 1970s when I lived between Berlin and Paris and considered myself to be a radical leftist — with the help of my family’s money — and was friends with people in the underground movement like Ingrid Caven. I recalled my first wife’s suicide, how she jumped from the balcony as if she were a bucket of dirty water — she may have been, I said. I recalled my childhood in Barcelona’s Rovira Square during years of monotony and moral misery, which I spent disguised in school uniform, a perfect fool holding a ridiculous stick of chalk in front of the blackboard, with the irresistible look of a real bore. I remembered Rosa slaving away to establish herself as a film director. I remembered how my generation wanted to change the world and said that perhaps it was better that our dreams never came true. I recalled how as a teenager I read Cernuda a lot and sometimes cried if it rained. And then I remembered how I used to see myself remembering seeing myself writing and finally I remembered seeing myself remembering how I used to write.

After that I didn’t remember any more, because it was late and we went to bed, Margot and Tongoy together, it seemed to me. I stayed awake in the upstairs bedroom and, when I finally got to sleep, I thought I saw in minute detail — just as had happened to that character in Danilo Kiš’s story — a dramatic fight that would take place — perhaps I should say “will take place”—three years later in the same room: an argument between Montano, dressed as a British airman, and poor Margot, defending herself with a saber.

I woke up in a sweat and confused, and decided to go down to the porch to smoke a cigarette. While I was smoking and contemplating the Pacific, inclined as I am to think about everything in literature, I recalled a very precise moment in the life of someone I admire, Cyril Connolly, a moment reflected upon in his diary: he is alone in a railway carriage, records of slow foxtrots playing as the English countryside of the 1930s flashes past the window, and he feels that he has succeeded in becoming an interesting person.

The change I experienced was very pleasant. In a short time I had managed to go from my inner nightmare with Montano to a sense of outer happiness standing in front of the Pacific. I also, if I chose to think in this way, was an interesting person. I thought I heard a foxtrot, looked up at the sky, and confirmed that there was a full moon. There’s nothing like being alone at night, I thought. I decided to search for another stimulating memory from another private journal. Inclined as I am to think about everything in literature, I soon hit upon a new memory. I recalled a scene similar to Connolly’s, taken from a page in André Gide’s diary, where it says something like, “Though the silence be too great, I enjoy traveling in this railway carriage in the company of Fabrice [N.B. Gide is talking about himself]. Today, traveling first class, wearing a new suit cut in an unusual fashion, under a hat that suits him prodigiously well, he approaches himself in the mirror in amazement and is seduced, finds himself the most interesting person in the world.”

Conceited for no obvious reason and euphoric at the same time, I decided to go for a wander in the vicinity of the house, I took a few steps into the night — two, four, eight. In a couple of minutes, almost without realizing, I left behind the group of wooden houses that comprised Tunquén. As I emerged into open ground, a mildly irritating wind arose. Inclined as I am to think in literature, I recalled Goethe: “Who rides so late through the night and wind?” As was to be expected, nobody answered, and the silence together with the short gusts of wind began to erode both my conceit and my euphoria. With no clear direction in mind, I proceeded to climb a steep slope, thinking that, when I reached the top, I would find no more houses, I would find nothing else, there would be nothing on the other side, in the same way — I told myself, almost stifled — as there is nothing after death. However, there was something.

A hundred yards away, on the ground floor of a house with the lights on, a group of youngsters was engaged in lively conversation. I hid among the trees and, protected by the shadows of the night, gradually approached the house, intending to get close to those youngsters and perhaps be able to overhear what they were saying; I gradually approached a position that I understood to be discreet and above all strategic, where I thought I would be able to see and hear everything, but, on reaching it, I soon realized that I was mistaken and that, if I wanted to spy on the house, I had to draw nearer, with the inherent risk. Also I was frightened to steal along in the shadows, since I could end up being discovered and taken for a thief or at least a strange and possibly dangerous visitor. But curiosity — as Borges said — is stronger than fear. And I drew very close, so much so that I was suddenly surprised to find out that they were not youngsters in the lively group, but old people. Ancient people, I should say, who appeared to have walked straight out of a fairy tale.

What had started as a happy outing in the light of the full moon, making me feel that I was an interesting person, had drifted into something somber and ancient. No, I said to myself, so much literature is not possible, so much anxiety, old people and death, heavens above, it is not possible, I went for a simple, happy wander and have ended up coming face-to-face with death, some old people and fantasy literature — clearly I cannot escape this personal, angst-ridden closed situation; even in Chile.

I spied on the group of old men and women for a few seconds and heard one of them say that in his time it was customary for all the mirrors and all the paintings showing domestic landscapes in the house of the deceased to be covered over with silk crêpe in sign of mourning. “Not just paintings with landscapes,” added an old woman, “any painting showing human beings or fruits of the earth.”

Everything was shamelessly sad and real. Profoundly literary as well. Death seemed to preside over it all. In Tunquén I didn’t seem to be able to forget the obsessions that haunted me. Taking the necessary precautions not to be discovered at the last moment, I started back toward Margot’s house in great distress, as if it were my first outing after death and my soul should avoid becoming distracted by mirrors or landscapes; hence I walked with my eyes glued to Chilean soil on the Bay of Quintay, terrified, to tell the truth more frightened than ever, as if I were walking along the first shore of my life after death.

It is five in the afternoon, I shall stop here for a while; now is a good time to prepare a dry martini, though, after the excesses of today’s lunch with Tongoy, what I really need is an Alka-Seltzer. Or an aspirin, because I have a slight headache; it isn’t easy receiving Tongoy, having lunch with him and then coming home to write an account in these pages of my trip to Chile last New Year’s Eve and, owing to the needs of the text, having to delve into an episode of disagreeable memory, my angst-ridden nocturnal wander in the vicinity of the house in Tunquén.

I had not one but two dry martinis. As I was finishing the second, I heard the jangle of keys, Rosa was entering the house. I told myself that the time had come to introduce a topical theme into this diary, so that it might appear a little less like a novel, and to carry on recounting my trip to Chile later.

In the hope of having something fresh and homespun to relate in these pages, I decided — it isn’t difficult — to pick a fight with Rosa. The simplest tactic was to let her come into the kitchen and catch me with the second dry martini. But this was too easy. As I concealed all traces of my alcoholic crime, I recalled a biography that I’d read recently, the biography of a man who had become heavily addicted to alcohol: but, thanks to the strength of his constitution, was able to control his addiction, to ration out the alcohol: he never drank before midday and after lunch he would not drink again until five. This man knew that it was a hard struggle and always would be. On weekends he would paint doors, chop wood, mow the lawn, look at his watch every ten minutes to see if it was time to drink legally. At five to five, with a sweaty face and trembling hands, he would take out the cocktail shaker and prepare himself a dry martini.

I let Rosa catch me in the kitchen, but drinking a glass of water. “Things are not going well,” I said to her, thereby causing a mild fight that would introduce a small dose of hot topicality into this diary. “I don’t know what you’re referring to,” she replied. “Do you really think it is normal for a man and a woman to live together like this?” I asked her. “No,” she answered. “So let’s talk.” Her face was tense and pale, her eyes not swollen but glazed, her eyebrows slightly raised, clearly she was exhausted from work. “How is Tongoy?” she asked me. “He sends you his regards and says to remind you that he’ll be in your office tomorrow,” I replied. “You destroy everything you love!” she exclaimed suddenly. I hadn’t expected her to get heated up quite so soon. “I love my children and I haven’t destroyed them,” I answered jokingly, I really had not intended to pick a serious fight. “What children? Don’t bring Montano into this, you’ve done him enough damage already, stuffing literature into the poor boy, he speaks in book — do you know what it means to speak in book?” I stopped and thought for a few seconds and, before I explained that I had planned the fight only for this diary and we would do well to continue the idyllic state in which we had been living since my return from Chile, replied (not wanting her to believe that a literary critic of my stature was incapable of answering her question), “To speak in book means to read the world as if it were the continuation of a never-ending text.”

The following morning — to return to Tunquén — the wonderful Margot had prepared a splendid and very generous breakfast for us. Unable to conceal the bags under my eyes and my air of preoccupation, I ended up telling them about my strange nocturnal jaunt, the youngsters who were in fact old people, my anxiety about the hellish siege to which both literature and death were subjecting me.

“All this would pass if you could unite the two anxieties and channel them into a single preoccupation, a separate concern of deep humanistic import. The death of literature, for example,” Tongoy said as he sipped his third coffee of the morning. “Has it ever occurred to you that, in this savage age in which we live, poor literature is beset by a thousand dangers and directly threatened with death and needs your help?”

I heard his words but failed at that moment to capture their full meaning, because Margot, believing — I would later find out — that I was being further tortured by new cultural problems, quickly changed the subject and proceeded to give us a series of instructions for the journey we were to undertake along back roads to the Brighton Hotel in Valparaiso, and the marvelous hanging terrace on which we were to see in the new century.

* * *

At the end of the twentieth century, I went to Valparaiso to think about explosions. It isn’t that I went with this express purpose, but the truth is that fate arranged everything in such a way that, on the terrace of the Brighton Hotel, watching the explosions that signalled the end of the year and century, I ended up with the impression that I had traveled to this place to think about explosions.

The hanging terrace of the Brighton Hotel afforded a perfect view over the bay. The spectacle at midnight was unforgettable, it will remain as one of the most important memories in my life: from ships anchored in the bay, fireworks were launched to the prolonged hoot of sirens.

During the dictatorship Valparaiso’s fireworks had been a kind of secret popular response to Pinochet’s gunpowder, which meant some on the eve of a new century were carried away by the inertia of so many years of silence and crime and, from the Brighton’s terrace, took up the famous resistance song: “He’s going down, going down …”

Tonight I could write the saddest verses, I thought as I traced the explosions’ drawings in the air. Margot and Tongoy, seeing that I was not well, tried to cheer me up, but I was very metaphysical, in my mind wandering through spaces of explosions and lonely cemeteries and graves full of bones without sound. And when all the electricy of Valparaiso came to an end, it seemed to me that the night turned into a vast hospital and, like Rilke one day, I asked myself, “So is this where people come to live? I would have said they die here.”

I looked out to sea and saw only a black tear of smoke, and slowly, as if overcome by Montano’s malady, I succumbed to absolute melancholy.

I do not search for oddballs, I find them. And these oddballs — it is not easy to elude one’s destiny — always have something to do with literature. In the afternoon of the first day of this century, I abandoned the Brighton’s Victorian terrace, I left Margot and Tongoy getting drunk, and went for a walk on my own in the streets of Valparaiso. Although I struggled against any melancholic thought, it was impossible for me, in the air of the city, in each particle of its air, not to breathe the existence of fatality, terror, mortality.

At one point during the walk, in an attempt to escape from so much death in the air, my eyes came to rest on the tender image of a young woman who was seated on a bench, rocking a child’s carriage. I had the unhappy idea of approaching her. As I went to sit beside her on the bench, I saw that the child had a very visible rash on its forehead. I immediately moved away. The child slept with its mouth open, it was alive, and I thought that this was the important thing. It was best to be content with little, I told myself. The fact that it was living was already a lot. It was best not to ask a great deal more of life.

I ended up at a lively looking bar next to one of the city’s countless funiculars. Very young people stood laughing in the doorway and I thought that, if I went in, it might help me to get over my depression and to forget the horrible rash on the forehead of the sleeping child. I leaned against the long, busy counter and ordered a whiskey. Next to me, a man of about eighty, elegantly dressed, looked me over and, seeing me look at him, asked where I came from. “Barcelona,” I replied. I asked him where he was from. There was a short silence. “I was French. I am the late Charles Baudelaire,” he answered.

A couple of minutes ago I decided to take an Alka-Seltzer to counteract both the excesses of lunch with Tongoy and the unsettling effects of two dry martinis drunk on the sly prior to Rosa’s return. It may not seem important for the diary that I took an Alka-Seltzer, but it is, since it is directly related to Montano. In the same way, whenever I crack open an egg I recall María’s suicide — no doubt because she used to make fun of me when she saw how incompetent I was at breaking the shell — so since my trip to Nantes I have begun to associate Alka-Seltzers with Montano, who is hooked on this medicine being dried up. Such an association is not without malice on my part, since it is a means of fairly constant revenge — I am always taking Alka-Seltzers — revenge for the Hamletlike treatment my son meted out to me in Nantes.

But since the day before yesterday — and this is the interesting part — the association between pills and Montano has ceased to amuse me, because two days ago my son sent me a short story (compressed like a pill) that he recently wrote and with which he has resolved his tragic inability to write. Since the day before yesterday, whenever I go to the kitchen to take an Alka-Seltzer, instead of exacting revenge by silently laughing at his literary paralysis, I remember that he has written this story, which is not exactly a bad or sluggish story, but an amazing one containing the whole of literature’s memory, brilliantly compressed into barely seven pages. I remember that he has written this story — which I like so much I’m even planning to be this story — and it’s not that I can no longer silently exact revenge on my son, but that I’m overcome with admiration and with pleasure (I should say displeasure), such is the way of things.

Edmond Jabès said that, whenever one writes, one runs the risk of never writing again. Paraphrasing Jabès, I have to say that during my stay in Chile, whenever I spoke to Rosa on the phone, I had the impression I was running the risk of never speaking to her again. From the first phone conversation to the last, I was completely baffled. Rosa’s attitude could not have been more odd, everything she said seemed designed to keep me in Chile for as long as possible, sometimes she even seemed to want me never to come back. My first phone conversation with Rosa took place in the evening of the first day of the century, two hours after my strange encounter with the late Charles Baudelaire. I called her on the cell phone that Margot lent me, I called her from the Brighton’s terrace and the first thing that struck me about her was her question: “How is your stress coming along?” She did not normally use such language. The word “stress” in itself was ugly, nor did I think it could be applied to me, who bears scant resemblance to a stressed executive. I protested, without knowing what I was letting myself in for. I said that I had never suffered from stress and asked her what she meant by this. “Heavens above! What is wrong with you then? Montano’s malady, literature sickness? I can see you’re still thinking about everything in literature. You’ve given yourself away, you’re as bad as ever.” Clearly her words were unfair, no doubt she was speaking with premeditated aggression; what was unclear was why she was behaving in this way. With some well-chosen, serene words in an effort to be conciliatory, I told her that I was well again, that Margot and a friend of hers who was identical to Nosferatu had talked to me about dogfights in the air and railway accidents and that I no longer thought in literature at all, at least not in the exaggerated fashion in which I had been doing so in Barcelona. “You’re surely not telling me that you’re planning to return?” she then asked me. I was both surprised and understandably hurt. “I don’t follow you. Of course I want to come back soon. I’m already much better. And, besides, I never said I was going to stay in Chile for the rest of my life,” I answered. “Come back soon? Have you gone mad? Listen, I want you back in Barcelona when you’re fully cured, without a trace of stress,” she said. Her words sounded almost provocative, and my surprise grew by the minute. I am not overly jealous, but I would have to be an absolute fool not to suspect that Rosa might have sent me to Chile to make it easier for her to see someone. “You’re acting very strange,” I told her. These words were my downfall. “What did you just say?” she asked. I told her again that she was acting very strange, and then she hung up on me and I was left staring in bewilderment at the bay and the horizon. I handed Margot the phone. Both she and Tongoy had been listening to the conversation and were as surprised as I was at its outcome. “Didn’t she even want to speak to me?” asked Margot. “To Nosferatu, I’m sure she didn’t,” joked Tongoy. I decided to borrow the phone again and to call Rosa back, I couldn’t leave it like this. “What do you want now?” were her first, unpleasant words to me. I know I shouldn’t have, but I hazarded the following reply: “To know why you don’t want me to come back.” She hung up for a second time.

In view of the tragedy, Margot strove to reassure me. “The poor thing has a colossal hangover because of New Year’s Eve,” she said. I was incapable of putting two words together, I was not only confused, I felt I had been humiliated in front of my friends. In an attempt to help me, I suppose, Margot changed the subject, redirected the conversation and proceeded to talk about a friend of hers, Mari Pepi Colomer, the Catalan pioneer of female aviation — I had never heard of this lady — she was a woman of Margot’s generation, a compatriot of mine who for a large number of years had been living in England, on her British husband’s country estate, surrounded by lots of horses. “It’s funny,” said Margot, “as a girl I also lived surrounded by horses, there is obviously a relation between these animals and pioneers of aviation. What do you think?” I couldn’t think, I was very disturbed and worried. My disquiet was so apparent that Tongoy, who was wearing a Panama hat, felt obliged to entertain me, he began to remove his hat several times and to greet me with excessive theatricality.

Literarily predisposed as I am, I don’t know how it happened but, seeing Tongoy act like this, I was reminded of the figure of Hölderlin, shut away in the home of the carpenter Zimmer as a result of madness. The story goes that, when a potential customer visited Zimmer, the mad poet would remove his hat and begin to greet the customer with exaggerated reverential gestures, in a way that was completely over the top. Probably all that Hölderlin intended with these gestures was to manifest the true gesture of the poet, for whom the other, whoever it may be, is someone deserving veneration and respect.

It may be said, therefore, that in Tongoy’s excessive theatrics I saw a tribute to Hölderlin and a gesture of friendly respect toward me. But I didn’t say anything, I continued being down at the mouth, I couldn’t understand what had happened to me with Rosa. I didn’t want, however, to arouse pity in my friends and, making a concerted effort, in a humorous tone I proceeded to relate my recent walk around Valparaiso and my strange encounter with the late Charles Baudelaire.

“Well!” Tongoy remarked when I had finished speaking. “It really is amazing, you can’t escape from these two circles, literature and death, it’s amazing, even Baudelaire appears to you, uniting both things in his person. But I think, as I told you yesterday, that, instead of constantly returning to literature and death, you should be less self-centred and concern yourself with the death of literature, a demise that is fast approaching if things continue as bad as they are at the moment.”

That I think about the death of literature, this is what Tongoy was recommending. It struck me as a great idea, and I told him so at lunch today.

The death of literature. There on the Brighton’s terrace, listening to Tongoy’s words, I first looked out over the bay, then at Margot, who was smiling at me — as if to say, “That’s right, the death of literature”—and finally I gazed back at the bay and the horizon and imagined that on the very edge of the horizon I could see some diffuse clouds that announced a severe storm and, with it, the end of books, the triumph of the unliterary, of false writers.

Tongoy, as if reading my thoughts, noticing that I could not take my eyes off the horizon, remarked, “Like the sun, you can’t look the death of literature in the face.” At that moment, more than one of Fellini’s actors, Tongoy resembled a doctor specializing in Montano’s malady, and I thought — I think — that it really wasn’t a bad idea to stop trying to diminish the influence of literature in my life and to pay greater attention to the obvious threat closing in on literature in today’s world.

At this precise moment, something happened that was very important for me. I don’t know how, but I was reminded of a sentence by Nietzsche that I have always read in a thousand different ways, it depends on the meaning I wish to give it each time. It is a sentence I apply to a whole range of circumstances: “One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth.”

One cannot go against one’s imagination, and at that instant, on the terrace of the Brighton, I imagined my name and surname in a few years’ time evoking the brutal memory of a crisis in literature that humanity will have overcome — the imagination, when it’s very powerful, is capable of these things — thanks to my heroic conduct, Quixote, spear in hand, against the enemies of the literary.

What is more, I also imagined, or rather I had the strangest thought a madman has ever had in this world — I told myself that, following Tongoy’s instructions, from now on it would be expedient and necessary, both for the increase of my honor and for the good health of the republic of letters, for me to embody literature itself in the flesh and blood, to embody this literature that lives with the threat of death at the start of the twenty-first century: to become literature incarnate and to try to save it from possible extinction by reviving it, just in case, in my own person, my own sorrowful face.

I said nothing at that moment to Tongoy about the thoughts that had just come to me, but I was silently grateful to him for having been able, wisely, to redirect the narrow spectrum of my personal obsessions into a much broader theme: that of the death of literature. I was also grateful to him for having helped me to see that literature could suffer, as I did, from its own Montano’s malady, and it was only logical that the fight against literature’s sickness should take absolute priority over the fight against my own illness, which, all things considered, was so small compared with this larger illness.

That night, in my hotel room, observing my sorrowful face in the mirror, I told myself that at the start of the twenty-first century — obviously I was already thinking like an open book — literature could not breathe at all well, despite the irresponsible optimism of some. Literature, I told myself, is being harried as never before by Montano’s malady, which is a dangerous illness with a fairly complex geographical map, composed of the most diverse and varied provinces or maleficent zones; one of them, the most visible and possibly the most populous, certainly the most mundane and stupid, has been harrying literature since the time writing novels became the favorite sport of an almost infinite number of people. It is not easy for a dilettante to start constructing buildings or, straight away, to make bicycles, without having previously acquired a specific skill; it is the case, however, that everyone, precisely everyone in the world, feels able to write a novel without ever having learned even the most rudimentary tools of the trade; it is also the case that the abrupt rise of such copyists has had a seriously prejudicial effect on readers, nowadays plunged into noticeable confusion.

That night, in my hotel room, I turned all these things over in my mind and mentally thanked Tongoy every quarter of an hour for having moved me, albeit only slightly, away from my literatosis—this is how Onetti terms the obsession for the world of books — and for having reminded me how uncertain the future of literature was. That night, in front of the mirror that reflected my sorrowful face, I ended up concentrating my thoughts on the most mundane and stupid province of literature’s Montano’s malady, and I told myself that this geographical zone had existed for many years; Milton, for example, already spoke of it when he claimed to have visited a nebulous gray zone, a province whose inhabitants were in the habit of crushing the literary tradition’s elegance of spirit and most noble currents. Schopenhauer also seemed to have visited this mundane and stupid province when he said that literature was like life: whichever way one turns, one immediately comes face-to-face with the incorrigible mass of humanity, which multiplies everywhere, filling and staining everything, like flies in summer, and hence the proliferation of bad books, what he termed parasitic tares.

Such tares are rife in the most mundane and stupid province on the map of literature’s Montano’s malady, a highly complex map where we find a wide variety of provinces, warrens, nations, bends, woods, islands, shady corners, cities. The truth is that, since that night in the hotel in Valparaíso, I have frequently toured this map; I have often toured this map that I am slowly drawing and which also, by the way, almost on the outskirts — I haven’t even drawn it yet — contains a slum called Spain, where a kind of traditional, nineteenth-century Realism is encouraged and where it is normal for a majority of critics and readers to despise thought. A pearl of a slum. And as if this were not enough, this slum is connected by an underwater tunnel — which cannot even appear on the map — with a particular territory that recalls the island of Realism discovered by Chesterton, an island whose inhabitants passionately applaud everything they consider to be real art and cry, “This is Realism! This is things as they really are!” The Spanish are among those who think that, if you repeat something often enough, it will end up being true.

“OK, now I’m boarding the aircraft,” I said tremulously. “It’s a single-engine plane,” Margot pointed out to me. Single-engine! The phrase inspired me with terror. It made my hairs stand on end. The plane was a Piper Dakota, which Margot occasionally borrowed from the management of Chile Aeronautics, where she had good friends who were prepared to turn a blind eye to her advanced age. I felt an understandable fear, but also, I must confess, a certain attraction toward danger.

“Danger is the axis about which the sublime life rotates,” I observed. “Stop talking such rubbish and get in!” Margot ordered me. I obeyed. Inside the airplane, Tongoy was more panic-stricken than I was. In a few hours I would leave Chile, where I had already spent three fairly happy weeks, although they were overshadowed by the disquiet I felt after each phone conversation with Rosa, who sometimes would suddenly hang up, other times — if I dared to ask what the matter was — would threaten to hang up, and who never seemed to welcome the prospect of my return.

My Chilean happiness overshadowed by Rosa’s inexplicable attitude, that day I boarded the intrepid Margot’s Piper Dakota. The sky was overcast and the light, shining behind the low clouds, resembled a merciless, steely sword. Our flight would take us to the sun; we were heading from a cloudy Santiago to a San Fernando where the weather was good.

As soon as the single-engine plane took off, I began to have literary thoughts or, to put it another way, in order not to think about death, I began to think about the death of literature. I recalled Saint-Exupéry — so despised by Margot — the writer who for a period conveyed Chilean mail to Patagonia, crossing the Andes at night. And I reflected on Saint-Exupéry’s meeting with Julien Gracq in Nantes and on the pamphlet Gracq would write years later, “Literature in the Stomach,” in which he maintained that literary art was the unfortunate victim of massive dumbing down, and subject to the perverse, uneducated rules of the unliterary.

Certainly all this was very interesting, I mean my literary thoughts during the flight, and it was very interesting because, since I had moved Montano’s malady from a private to a public level, my own highly personal literary illness had taken a discreet backseat, but at the same time, though it may seem paradoxical, it had grown in strength and intensity, which did not worry me, quite the opposite, since my concern for the larger Montano’s malady allowed me to have my own Montano’s malady at my ease and without the slightest remorse. To put it another way, I had begun to enjoy — and continue to enjoy very much — my recently adopted and highly responsible moral stance in relation to the grave situation facing the truly literary in the world. And I was, and still am, delighted to find myself at the service of a noble, superior cause that also afforded me a perfect excuse to keep having, even to reinforce, my own Montano’s malady, now more than fully justified by the cause of the common good, and furthermore saved me the bother of having to apologize for being “so literary.”

At this point I don’t think anyone will be surprised if I say that the flight of that single-engine plane began to open itself up to interpretation as a fragmentary text. What is more, I told myself that, as soon as I returned to Barcelona, in this diary that I had left asleep at home, I would write down a series of fragments or notes on the art of being in the air, an art that for me was a question of pure balance. The single-engine plane that Margot piloted, like any other plane, flew thanks to a highly unusual series of balances and forces and was something of a metaphor for literary creation. After all, anyone writing with a sense of risk walks a tightrope and, as well as walking it, has to weave his own rope under his feet. AH this came to me up above, and it also occurred to me that, just as every flight contains the possibility of falling, so every book should contain the possibility of failing. This is what I thought and shortly afterward, carefully watching Margot handle the controls with some virtuosity, I began to wonder what will happen to us when humanism, on whose broken and ancient rope we have been reduced to unsteady walkers, and literature disappear.

I was wondering about this when Tongoy interrupted my concern for the other inhabitants of this world — or my navel-gazing, whichever you prefer — and announced that he was preparing in mid-flight to imitate the dragonfly-man he had played in Fellini’s film. That way, he said, at the speed of this famously fast-flying insect, he would plunge headlong into the void. I didn’t find the joke funny. And, to tell the truth, I didn’t get over my fear until we landed and, seeing how the earth welcomed us back, I could regain the marvelous sense of security that gravity affords, though we sometimes forget it.

Back on terra firma, I looked up at the cloudless sky of San Fernando and saw a bird go by. I followed it. And it seemed to me that following it enabled me to go wherever I liked, to pretend I had all that mobility. A few hours later I was flying in the direction of Barcelona, occupied in drawing an initial sketch of the geography of literature’s Montano’s malady, with its abject zones in the shade, its provinces, churches, islands, gullies, volcanoes, lakes, warrens, bends, cities. By the time I reached Barcelona, I had turned into the topographer of Montano’s malady.

As I feared, Rosa was not waiting for me at the airport. She had hung up the last time we spoke, she had hung up after telling me that she didn’t like the way I kept repeating my estimated time of arrival. The lights at home were all switched off, except for those in the kitchen, where I came across a cold dinner that Rosa had left out for me, a dinner consisting entirely of a grotesque bowl of soup containing letters, a terrible soup, a soup as chilly as the reception being offered to me, a cold soup with a note from Rosa beside it: “The sky is a very beautiful faded pink color and the air is cold as I write you this note to tell you that this afternoon I have taken off with John Cassavetes, I have gone with him to Los Angeles. Farewell, dear, farewell. Have fun!”

The only consolation I derived from reading this strange note was that Cassavetes was dead. I suddenly recalled the many films by Cassavetes that Rosa and I had seen together. I stood there, sad and disconcerted, going weak at the knees, not knowing which way to turn, until eventually I decided to go to the bedroom, from where I could call Rosa’s cell phone. On switching on the bedroom light, I discovered Rosa seated on the bed, wearing an impeccable nightdress, smiling, telling me that Cassavetes could wait.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Has monsieur eaten his daily literature, his blessed alphabet soup?” she asked me. “What?” “Has monsieur had his daily treatment for Montano’s malady, albeit cold?”

She had behaved like this — she would tell me a little later — to try to make me show more interest in her and to help me come out of myself and of books and be less at the mercy of what she described in typically lighthearted fashion as “my mental problem in the form of alphabet soup.” “OK,” I said to her, “that’s enough of your charming show, which is very apt for a film director.” “What?” she exclaimed. And for a moment I was afraid she would throw the bedroom telephone at my head.

To tell the truth, I feel only admiration for the tactics Rosa decided to adopt in order to alleviate my Montano’s malady and enable her to occupy more time in my life. Whereas Tongoy had been able to relieve my personal illness by making it universal, Rosa had come up with the no less brilliant strategy of channeling some of my attention, albeit in a highly rarefied way, in her direction. And without a doubt the maneuver has worked magnificantly, I have spent the last few weeks following Rosa around, helping her like a madman in the preparations to shoot her film in the Azores, collaborating on the script more than was planned, suggesting that she hire an actor of Felipe Tongoy’s international stature, assisting her in any way I knew how. I should add, however, that I have not just been working on the film, but with absolute secrecy have also been immersed in compiling the geography of Montano’s malady and in planning to combat the death of literature.

It was the day before yesterday, as I said, when Montano’s envelope arrived with its manuscript, a short story bearing the title “11 rue Simon-Crubellier,” which I take to be in sincere tribute to Georges Perec and the house in Paris where this French writer centered the history of the world.

The story opens with a quotation from Macedonio Fernández with which my son presumably wishes to comment ironically on the lifting of his writer’s block: “‘Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been done,’ God heard someone telling him when he had yet to create the world, when there still wasn’t anything. ‘Someone already told me that,’ he rejoined perhaps from the old, cleft Void. And he began.”

The story in admirable fashion condenses into seven short but intense pages the whole of the history of literature, viewed as a succession of writers unexpectedly inhabited by the personal memory of other, earlier writers: the history of literature seen with a reverse chronology, since it starts with the contemporary period — Julio Arward, Justo Navarro, Pessoa, Kafka — and travels back in time — Twain, Flaubert, Verne, Hölderlin, Diderot, Sterne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Fray Luis de León, among others — until it reaches the Epic of Gilgamesh; the history of literature seen as a strange current of mental air containing sudden alien memories which with unexpected visits are meant to have caused an overload of involuntarily stolen reminiscences.

I liked the story. It has moments of high poetic tension, as for example when Pessoa is visited by the memories of a Prague writer he has never heard of and then sees a Chinese wall being built and a series of endless galleries under threat, but at the same time perfectly articulated as a challenge against the wear and tear of time; he also sees a hunger artist giving a lecture in Budapest and a cat advising a mouse to change direction because a dangerous odradek is approaching.

I liked the story. When I finished reading it, my memory was infiltrated by something Wallace Stevens once said: “The reader became the book; and summer night / Was like the conscious being of the book.”

When I reached the end of Montano’s story, I played at imagining that I felt the temptation to become the story, that I felt the temptation to embody it and become a walking story, to change my name to “11 rue Simon-Crubellier,” turning into a “story-man” who would fight against the disappearance of literature by reviving the abridged history of its memory in his own person.

Today, while having lunch with Tongoy here in Barcelona, I was unable to contain myself and I told him that the day before yesterday I had played at imagining that I felt the temptation to become the story I had just been sent by my son Montano.

Tongoy smiled at me, lit a cigarette, remained sunk in thought for a moment, and finally said, “Listen, I’d like to know how one should dress to be literature’s memory.” He then laughed out loud, looking more like Nosferatu than ever. He told me that he likes such games and, as soon as we are filming on the island of Fayal, in the Azores, he plans to behave, without attracting undue attention, as if he were my assistant in my crusade against Montano’s malady. “I will be your secret squire,” he said to me, “but only if you give me a handsome reward: the governorship of the island of Barataria, for example.”

Here I am in Fayal, opposite Pico, more literature-sick than ever, but a little less naive; I make Rosa think that I’m not so ill, I talk to her about everything except literature, and sometimes I even appear foolish; but the important thing is that she fail to notice that for some time now not only does literature no longer stifle me, but I consider it outrageous to have to apologize for being so literary; the important thing is that she fail to notice that recently I have taken upon myself the responsibility of combating the death of literature. I don’t need any more problems with Rosa, so I dissemble as much as I can. For example, I am careful to hide the map of Montano’s malady that I work on every day. But sick, that is literature-sick, I am as never before, and secretly I rejoice.

I am in Fayal and I am, or rather I pretend to be, a manuscript, I play at dreaming that I am literature’s errant memory, I am in the Azores, on the island of Fayal, opposite the island of Pico, and this time I have traveled with my diary, I am in the middle of the Atlantic, far from Europe and far from America, with the vague suspicion that distance is these islands’ charm. I am in the Hostal de la Santa Cruz, in Fayal, opposite the mysterious island of Pico. Night is falling, the final colors of the afternoon — as Borges would say — are fainting. I am on my room’s balcony, with its perfect view of the small harbor and behind it, extinct in the mist and twilight, the imposing volcano on the island that I visited today with Tongoy, the island of Pico, the strangest of the Azores, an island that sometimes, only sometimes, seems the closest thing to paradise, other times — there are no middle terms in this place — to hell. As we approached Pico this morning, Tongoy suddenly asked me:

“Will there not be another death in paradise?”

I understood that he sensed what I was sensing, but it is also true that the question appeared peculiar to me at the time. However that may be, the preparations for tonight’s filming are in the final stages in Fayal’s harbor. Today is the first day since we arrived on the island that Rosa has not filmed in daylight, because it is Carnival and the old whalers consider this festival to be sacred and have asked to spend it with their families or their solitude. I can see Rosa leaning against a harbor wall, I take the binoculars to observe her more closely and she spots me and makes strange gestures at me, which I am not prepared to decipher in case I misconstrue them and, above all, because I do not want to waste the precious time I have to devote to this diary and to my secret activity of extending my complex drawing of the map of Montano’s malady. I move out of Rosa’s field of vision, meaning I enter the room and go to where she cannot see me, so I perversely enter the room — as if I were a filmmaker suddenly abandoning an outside shot — but a few seconds later I return to the balcony, where I observe that Rosa is no longer making gestures at me, and then — even more perversely than before — I am the one making gestures, I make them at the paradise and hell of Pico’s volcano.

Then I take up the binoculars again and focus on the old whalers, some of whom are standing around Rosa, waiting for tonight’s filming to start. Among them is Tongoy, wearing a horrible black-and-white striped T-shirt, smoking, and pensively looking out to sea, looking like Nosferatu at dusk and stranger than ever in that grotesque sea dog’s outfit he is dressed in. Nearby, a few real whalers stare at him blatantly, circling him slowly, watching the intruder, I imagine, in some surprise, moving as if they were part of the landscape, as if they were mysteriously connected to the evening light. Their old harpoons, no doubt loaded with a thousand stories, are balanced against the fragile boats on which until not long ago they put out to sea. In fact everything, absolutely everything at this hour, seems very slow, dilatory, bloodied by the huge dusk, here in Fayal, on this side of paradise. I have hidden the map I am drawing, hidden also my literary illness, and this forces me sometimes to behave like an idiot; I should like to hide everything, and although the diary is always in view, I know that Rosa won’t dare to look at it.

As I contemplate the drawn-out dusk, I remember something Gonçalves Azevedo, the owner of Café Sport, told me. Yesterday he was talking to me about a certain fish, the moray, which they used to catch off this island at night, under the waxing moon. To attract the fish they would sing a song without words: a mournful song that seemed to emerge from the bottom of the sea or from souls lost in the night. “Nobody knows this song any more,” he told me. “It has been forgotten, and this may be a good thing, because it contained a curse.”

I cannot help thinking that this curse has relocated to the innards of Pico’s volcano. I sensed it being there today, at that house at the foot of the volcano, and the truth is that, after the experience in the home of that horrible man called Teixeira, I have decided to include the volcano on my map of the illness. I drew it a moment ago and on the inside placed underground galleries where moles, devoted to conspiring against literature, are meant to be working away silently and invisibly. Perhaps these galleries are what Tongoy sensed or saw when on the ferry this morning, as we approached the island and the volcano, despite the beauty of the moment and of the landscape, or perhaps because of all this, he asked me whether there wouldn’t be another death in paradise.

If I were foolish, I would be proud to know Montano’s story by heart, but I am not going to commit such a stupid act. I don’t know the story by heart, I simply remember it. Although it’s only seven pages long, in the end I have resisted memorizing it as if I were obliged to be like one of those grotesque book-men in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s novel.

What I have done is take on the memory of literature’s eccentric history in Montano’s free version and so at times, when I enter a trance, I am that memory, even though I do not recite my son’s short story all the way through. I merely remember the story as best I can, I remember passages. Sometimes I am visited by one of them. Just now, for example, while I was resting on the balcony — watching the filming start as Pico’s volcano vanished into the shadows of the night — I was visited by the recollection of that Montanesque scene in which we see Kafka writing in his diary and suddenly being visited by certain itinerant memories of Mark Twain, an author he is not especially drawn to.

It is nighttime in Prague on December 16, 1910. At that precise moment Kafka is writing: “I shall never abandon my diary, I have to cling to it, I have nowhere else to do this. I should like to describe the feeling of happiness that rises inside me at times, such as now.”

Immediately after writing the words “such as now,” Kafka begins to be visited by Twain’s itinerant memories and with some amazement relives the moment in 1897 when Twain, during one of his stops on his trip to Europe, greets the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef and tells him that a monarch, however good he may be, deserves the same respect as a pirate who on Sundays carries out acts of charity.

Kafka listens to Twain’s words as if they had been uttered by a second-rate literary bumblebee and sees how the emperor arches his eyebrows, but Kafka does not consider this relevant to his diary and continues recording his personal impressions, as if nothing untoward had happened: “It really is a fizzy thing, which fills me to the brim with light and agreeable quaverings …”

In a footnote the narrator of Montano’s story contends that this “fizzy thing” is a timid or veiled, perhaps even involuntary, allusion to Twain, who with his regrettable operatics infiltrated Kafka’s memory without being invited.

I went out on to the balcony to see how the filming was coming along and, as if I had a veil in front of me, saw nothing of what was happening at that moment because my memory was infiltrated by the recollection of what I witnessed during the filming yesterday morning: Rosa directing the artificial creation at sea of plumes of vapor that the sperm whales expel through their blowholes and which in the past would have had the lookouts firing warning shots for the whalers to run straight to their fragile boats.

But that was yesterday. Strangely enough, when I light a cigarette, the smoke, instead of veiling my vision of reality even more, unveils it at once and finally I am able to observe what is going on in tonight’s filming. Not that much is going on. Tongoy, for example, is leaning against a harbor wall on which there are various messages written by people from the boats that cross the Atlantic, messages from life’s castaways. I deduce that Tongoy is bored. I take the binoculars and scrutinize the expression on Rosa’s face. She looks tired and on edge, the filming appears not to be going altogether well.

I enter the room, hide my map of Montano’s malady, he on the bed, my memory is infiltrated by the recollection of something César Aira told me in the Café Tortoni, in Buenos Aires, one day when we fell into a bizarre conversation about the essence of literature. We had started discussing the review I had written of his last book and in a few seconds, with barely any transition from one theme to the other, we became engrossed, almost without realizing, in the subject of the essence of literature. “As a teenager, reading Borges,” Aira said to me, “I saw where the essence of literature was. This was definitive, but later I also discovered that literature does not have one, but many historical and contingent essences. So it was easy to escape from Borges’ orbit, as easy as going back, or as easy as never having escaped.”

Here in Fayal the subject of the essence of literature seems even stranger to me than on that day. However, I focus on it. Extreme tension on my balcony in the Hostal de la Santa Cruz. I look in the direction of Pico, although I can’t see anything — not even a trace of the volcano, the night appears to have swallowed it up — and start thinking about the moles I saw there today. Then I stop looking at the invisible volcano and suddenly, completely out of the blue, my memory is infiltrated by Maurice Blanchot; I see him on the evening he said he was fed up with always hearing the same two questions from journalists. One question was: “What are the tendencies in today’s literature?” The other: “Where is literature heading?”

“Literature is heading toward itself, toward its essence, which is its disappearance,” said Blanchot many evenings after having said he was fed up with the same two questions.

Out of a pure sense of the game, albeit also guided by a natural survival instinct, I tell myself that I should immediately turn into the essence of literature, embody it in my own modest person. But fortunately I realize that I am taking my responsibilities too far and in fact it is not a good idea, it really is not a good idea, for me to be the very essence of literature, for me to be Montano’s well-being or, which is more or less the same thing, to be the eternal rest of literature in its tomb. It is not a good idea, really it isn’t! The most prudent course of action would be to continue stealthily being the memory and not the disappearance of literature. It’s the least I could do.

Will literature never disappear?

I remember Scott Fitzgerald in Montano’s story paying an unexpected visit to Juan Rulfo’s memory and dictating to him in Coyoacán this sentence by Pedro Páramo: “Nothing can last so long.”

Whatever Tongoy may say, that man Teixeira we found hiding away on the island of Pico seems disturbingly to embody the new man, the man to come or perhaps the man who has already arrived; at least in Pico there is a specimen of what awaits us, his name is Teixeira and I would say that with his personality, he is constantly bidding farewell to a secular way of living the world, of living and conceiving it. I won’t easily forget Teixeira. Stunned by his dehumanized, barbarous laugh, I thought about something Bismarck said when he first saw the modern ships in the port of Hamburg: “Here begins a new era, which I cannot understand.”

I remove the map, my private geography of the illness, from its hiding place and look at it again, but without paying too much attention, when suddenly, absentmindedly, I discover that in the underground galleries inside the volcano, where the pencil has strayed most freely, an abyss has sprung up that I did not know and which has probably arisen — like the moles — from the corrupt and rough mental and moral subsoil I thought I observed in the cracks of the pathetic laughter of Teixeira, the man of the future, the man to come.

Will there not be another death in paradise?

— TONGOY

In Pico there is the volcano, which takes up virtually the whole island and is the highest mountain in Portugal. There is the volcano and three coastal enclaves: Madalena (where the ferries from Fayal dock), Sâo Roque, and Lajes, which is where supposedly — today we hardly saw a soul — most people live. Lajes has a whaling museum and an enormous church, disproportionate to the size of the island.

We hardly saw anybody this morning in the streets of Madalena when we arrived. Four or five passengers got off the ferry, no more; they got off with their bags and baskets, and in no time at all disappeared down the silent, deserted streets of this ghost town. I asked Tongoy if he knew what we were doing visiting Pico.

“One visits Pico for the experience,” he answered me.

There was nobody in the main square, only two taxi drivers with their vehicles parked opposite the small town hall (no doubt they had been warned from the pier in Fayal of the imminent arrival of two visitors, people from the film); the two taxi drivers did not address each other, one was young and looked like a criminal, the other was noticeably old. The young one, with a stupid smile, seemed confident that we would hire him.

We scoured every inch of Madalena in search of a bar or some incentive to stay there, but everything was shut, not even a bar open, not even someone other than the two taxi drivers, so we made our way back to the main square and again examined the two men; it felt as if we were in a brothel and had to choose between one prostitute and another.

The ferry did not return to Fayal for another three hours, and that was supposing it would, since a fairly spectacular black cloud was approaching. It became very clear that we had little option but to seek refuge in the old man’s taxi and to go to Lajes, to see if there were more people and more things there; perhaps the whaling museum was open — the old man told us he didn’t know. “One visits Lajes for the experience,” I remarked as the taxi pulled away. Tongoy gave me a very dirty look, and it struck me — I had already noticed it on the ferry — that he was in a foul mood.

“Have you seen the other cloud?” he asked me. “Because there are two black clouds, although you can’t see one of them. In a short while, this will be one of the darkest places on earth. I think one visits Pico for the experience, but I also think we made a mistake in coming here.”

There was only one black cloud, but I preferred to keep quiet. At that point the old taxi driver began to act as impromptu tour guide, he began to explain that there are only three towns in Pico and the rest is lava rock with the occasional vineyard and the odd wild pineapple. Then he said that he had only once left the island, to go to Fayal on honeymoon.

As the taxi driver was speaking, I paid closer attention to him and thought I observed that he looked a lot like Fernando Pessoa — Pessoa past the age of eighty. I had the happy idea of mentioning this to Tongoy, who reacted very badly and told me he would have had no problem laughing if I were joking, but he was sure I was being serious, and he found this awful, clearly I wasn’t just literature-sick, I was literature-rotten.

I preferred to keep quiet and watch the countryside gliding slowly past the taxi window. Pico’s road, the only one on the island, is terrifyingly sad in winter, but if you also happen to be traveling with an old taxi driver and Tongoy in a bad mood, you can fall into a depression lasting the rest of your days. The road runs along the breakwater, with many curves and deep potholes, overlooking a rebellious blue sea. The road, gloomy and narrow, crosses a stony and melancholic landscape, with occasional isolated houses on small hills, in winter normally swept by the wind.

“Here,” said the taxi driver, “there’s nothing left, but in the past, when I was a young man, this was full of vineyards that somehow grew from the difficult volcanic soil, and they made Pico wine. At the time of the grape harvest, there were parties, lots of parties.” On either side of the gloomy road could be seen the ruins of the old lordly mansions belonging to the families in Fayal who had made their fortunes producing wine in the lava soil. Of these once-great villas, where the grape harvest would have been celebrated, there remained only a few stones and the deep nostalgia of the taxi driver, who occasionally, with leaden and melancholic insistence, punctuating his cordial monologue, would say, in a Portuguese marked with a heavy Azorian accent:

“Festas, muitas festas.”

Leaden nostalgia for ancient days of splendor, in the most repellent cordial tone.

“Festas, muitas festas.”

The fifth time he said it, I fell into a trance and my brain began to whirl around. One of many things I remembered was that I had always to be on the alert against literature’s Montano’s malady. In short, I couldn’t help it, though I recognize that Tongoy was partially right when later he implied that I had overdone it and had gotten off track. In short, I couldn’t help it: the stupid poetic tone of the melancholic taxi driver reminded me that there is an activity we might call Proustian, which involves recalling facts from the past with sensibility and intelligence. The taxi driver seemed unaware of this, he seemed incapable of suspecting that there is a magnificent literary background in the art of telling melancholic stories; the taxi driver seemed entirely entrenched in the memory of some poor, unfortunate girlfriend he had once had at the time of the grape harvest; the taxi driver ended up getting on my nerves.

“Festas, muitas festas.”

I cannot stand cordial people. If it depended on them, literature would have disappeared from the face of the earth. However, “normal” people are highly regarded wherever you go. All murderers, as shown on television, in the eyes of their neighbors are always normal, cordial people. Normal people are accomplices in literature’s Montano’s malady. This is what I thought today at midday inside a Pico taxi, while recalling what Zelda said to her husband, Scott Fitzgerald, how no one but they had the right to live, and those other bastards were destroying their world.

I hate the vast majority of “normal” human beings who day by day are destroying my world. I hate people who are very good-natured because no one has given them the opportunity to know what evil is and so to choose good freely; I have always thought that such good-natured people have an extraordinary malice in the making. I detest them, I often think like Zelda and regard them all as bastards.

I could not stop myself and I gave the taxi driver a mental blow to the head. I waited for one of those brief pauses in his pseudo-tour-guide monologue which ended with the inevitable “festas, muitas festas” to ask him point-blank, as I stood at the ready against Montano’s malady, if he had ever heard of a writer living in Pico.

It was horrible and ludicrous at the same time, because the man thought that I wanted to know if there were typewriters on the island, typewriters for offices, and proceeded to talk about the lack both of offices and of suitable office equipment on the island. This was the last straw. I interrupted him and asked him if he had ever read Proust, who also talked about parties, lots of parties, but didn’t talk much about offices. Silence. Then I told him that his cordial and anti-literary discourse simply disgusted me. Clearly he didn’t understand a word of what I was saying and Tongoy intervened very angrily. “I think,” he said to me, “we’ve had enough of your obsession, illness, call it what you like. Try to calm down. And treat the taxi driver with some respect.” I wasn’t expecting such an outburst from Tongoy, I thought he was my accomplice or squire, but it was also true that I had taken my game too far.

In a show of repentance, I softened my manners, leaned forward and whispered directly in the taxi driver’s ear; I repeated my question in a slow and careful voice, I explained to him — using both Spanish and Portuguese — that I wanted only to know if there were writers — people with an interest in literature — on the island. Finally I got the message through. “Ah,” he said, “you mean book people, people with books, there’s one on the island, he’s not a book person, but he was.” The wretch let out a mysterious laugh. “He lives on the other side of Lajes, at the end of a dirt track, here we all call him Teixeira, we can go and see him if you like.”

The mysterious laugh aroused my curiosity. “He’s not a book person, but he was.” I thought of Montano, of whom something similar could be said when in Nantes he was suffering from writer’s block. At this point we passed through the deserted town of Sao Roque, with nobody in the streets. We hoped that there might be somebody in Lajes. I asked the taxi driver if there would be somebody in Lajes. “Teixeira,” he answered, and the wretch laughed. I asked if there was no one else living there. He shrugged his shoulders and said there might be, might not be, he was from Madalena. “Where there is nobody,” remarked Tongoy, whom anything this lunchtime seemed to put in a bad mood. “That’s right,” said the taxi driver a little uneasily, observing Tongoy’s Draculean face in the rearview mirror with a certain amount of mistrust. “And why is there nobody?” asked Tongoy in an almost frightening tone of voice, as if his life depended on that question. “Carnival,” answered the frightened taxi driver.

As was to be expected, the whaling museum in Lajes was firmly closed. What wasn’t closed in Pico? In Lajes only the monumental church was open, and a small bar modeled on an Irish pub. While the taxi driver stayed in his car, waiting for us to have a look at the two places that were open, we entered the church, where there was absolutely nobody and where what was on view can be seen in so many of the world’s churches; we continued to look at it for some time, we didn’t have much else to do: carpets, chalices, pews, missals, candles, hassocks, dried flowers, an unobtrusive organ, rancid silence. “What will happen on the day churches cease to make sense?” Tongoy asked me. Had we already visited Teixeira by then, I could have answered him: “Well, the new man, the Teixeiras of the new world will visit them in the same way we are visiting the one on this island, without understanding a thing.”

In the pub, which was completely empty — there was only a young waiter dozing behind the bar — Tongoy ordered a beer and asked me if I had realized that the two black clouds had disappeared. I replied that I wasn’t surprised the weather had changed, every day here it seemed to change more quickly. Tongoy then declared himself happy that I was talking about the weather in the Azores and not seeing Pessoa whichever way I turned. I ordered a Cardhu whiskey with water. “Sacrilege,” Tongoy said. “I’m sorry,” I was forced to reply, “it wasn’t my intention to offend you.” “But you don’t order a Cardhu with water,” he said with indignation. We drank in silence. The beer must have gone straight to his head, because he suddenly asked me what I was drawing the map of Montano’s malady for and why I kept hiding it and didn’t show it to Rosa and why I pretended in front of her by making her believe I was enjoying a peaceful, curative rest when in fact I spent the day believing I was the Don Quixote of the Azores, I was more literature-sick than ever and, though I did not realize it, I was unbearable and that was why Rosa had not wanted to accompany us to Pico, because deep down, though she did not wish to accept it, she sensed that I was worse than ever.

I didn’t even feel like making a joke of it and telling him, for example, that I thought he was a better squire than that, a better accomplice in a game we had started for fun in Barcelona, fun stupidly wasted in this pub, and it would be better if we left. “No way,” he said, ordering another beer and another whiskey. It came straight from the heart, very spontaneously, and I said to him, “Listen, if you’re in love with Rosa, all you have to do is wait for the film to end and you can run off with her.” He looked at me as if he could not believe his ears. For my part, this brief scene of unfounded jealousy suggested to me an idea for a role I wish to incorporate into a lecture I must give in Budapest, I think at the end of June. I took out a pencil and a notebook and jotted down the idea. “I know what you’re writing there, you’re mourning the fact I didn’t go along with your game, but you should remember that a squire is obliged to keep his master’s feet on the ground, especially if his master has ideas above his station,” Tongoy said. With the third beer, he asked me if I had heard of Flutterbudget Center. “Nope,” I said, responding like a boxer who raises his guard as a precaution. “Well, it’s on a hill, in the south of Oz.” “I don’t know where Oz is.” “The inhabitants of Oz who show signs of becoming a Flutterbudget are sent there to live.” “I don’t know why this is relevant,” I protested. “It is relevant because Flutterbudgets, like you, are harassed by imaginary dangers and obsessed by the disasters that might overcome them if the things they imagine were to happen.” I told him that he simply couldn’t hold his drink, at which point he ordered his fourth beer and my fourth whiskey, and this landed us in certain chaos, until eventually we began to consider the possibility of visiting Teixeira and finding out what kind of writer this man hiding in a house on the outskirts of Lajes had been. We considered the possibility, thought so hard that by mutual agreement — we had never been so much in agreement — we eventually asked the taxi driver to take us to Teixeira’s home. Halfway there, as we were driving along the dirt track, Tongoy leaned on my shoulder and said to me, “I was talking to you as a friend. It hurts me to see you take so seriously the fight against Montano’s malady, an imaginary disease, my darling Flutterbudget.” Instead of being grateful for his vampiric tenderness, I asked him if he had not noticed that for the extremely complex things he had to say he used a language that was very simple, very plebeian and far removed from my brilliant literary style. He looked at me again in disbelief at what I had said, his eyes shone, his pointed Draculean ears had suddenly gone red. He said to me that perhaps complexity was a weakness and that I had not realized, despite being so wise and such a wonderful critic, that the strength of Kafka, for example, resided precisely in his lack of complexity. He said this and laughed, convinced that he had won the round. “You don’t know,” I replied, “how glad I am to hear you talking about literature and also how glad I am of your strength, friend Sancho, dear squire of this poor Flutterbudget, you don’t know how much I admire an ugly man like you.” In case he hadn’t heard properly, I repeated the last bit: “An ugly man like you.” He stared at me with amusement. “I like it,” he said, “when you’re simple.”

As if seasick, we stood staring at Teixeira, lost in amazement at the sight of such a strange human bird as this. He was a thin man, with sunken eyes and hands with extremely long, gnarled fingers, reminiscent of an insect’s tentacles. There was Teixeira, suddenly in front of us. The truth is that, when we had him there, we didn’t even remember why we wanted to see him. He made a strong impression. There was Teixeira in his large house at the foot of the volcano, on the outskirts of Lajes; there in that remote house was a man who, in his own words, had previously enjoyed writing outdoors, seated on tree stumps and surrounded by trees that were still standing. “All my work back then,” he explained to us, “was directed toward the clarity of the woods, I was strong and weak at the same time. Now all I do is give seminars on laughter therapy.”

For someone who taught how to laugh, he was very serious. Here was a man, about fifty years of age, who seemed to have withdrawn to the world’s end. He was friends with the taxi driver and did not stop asking him if he had already told us how he was not a book person anymore, but a professor of laughter.

For a specialist in this laughter therapy, he could not have been more serious. His head was stuck inside the collar of his military-style shirt — his trousers were also army issue — his hair neatly trimmed around his scalp, fixed in place with Pico hairspray, his cheek muscles were the tensest I’ve ever seen. He was so serious it was frightening, and yet he claimed to be on the side of laughter and said that in the summer he earned a living from classes in which tourists discovered the benefits of laughter for their health.

He told us that in the past — perhaps he had made this up so that we could have a go at laughing — he had been friends with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Aga Khan, Einstein, Cole Porter, Alfonso XIII of Spain and Caruso, most of all with Caruso. He said he had turned down a decoration from Mussolini and received the Legion of Honor at the hands of General de Gaulle.

He had led the opposite of a mundane life, which he had abandoned in order to write seated on tree stumps in the woods, an occupation that did not help him write what he intended. One day, in Africa, he received divine enlightenment. He was lost in life because he was still writing seated on tree stumps, and because what he was trying to put down on paper was very difficult, since he was in the throes of founding a new form of art, a totally immanent form, one without dimension, beyond reason. But — and this was the problem — he could not think up this form. His intention was to produce a work that would be devoid at least of the possible existence, or nonexistence of God. However, he was unable to discover this third way. There he was in Africa in some desperation and helplessly writing while seated on tree stumps, searching in vain for the aesthetic form of the future, when suddenly, in the pygmy village where he was staying, he discovered nothing less than the plenitude of laughter. It was like when Saul of Tarsus fell off his horse; but in his case he fell to the ground after having laughed a lot, having never gotten on a horse.

The day he discovered that for pygmies, if you don’t fall down laughing, your laughter is incomplete, he thought he could glimpse a new path in his life; he immediately gave up searching on tree stumps for the aesthetic form of the future and decided to carry out exhaustive research in the field of human laughter. In a square in New Delhi he saw three hundred people who each month got together to perform exercises that resulted in laughter. They all lay on the ground in a big spiral, resting the back of their neck on another’s navel. Laughter, he explained, is contagious and, because it is linked to the diaphragm, you only need one person to start and there is an explosion of joy. He said this in such an infinitely serious way that I was afraid that the one who would explode was Teixeira, whose extreme seriousness could result in a colossal outburst of laughter. He certainly was an unusual bird. Tongoy asked him if he had a family or lived alone. And then Teixeira’s head retreated even farther into the collar of his military-style shirt (made in Vietnam), which he claimed a famous Portuguese comedian had given to him while staying in Pico. “Family dead in Mozambique in laughable accident,” Teixeira replied almost telegraphically while offering us a Sinhalese tea. To drink this tea we had to sit on the floor in a corner of that house modeled, in the worst possible taste, on the inside of a tent. The last thing we felt like doing was sitting down and, given how much we had been drinking, trying a Sinhalese tea. “Laughable accident,” Teixeira repeated with a sadness that made us sit on the floor, even if only for a minute, since it seemed that this was the only way to avoid an unnecessary mishap.

I won’t forget the tea anytime soon, it was vomit-inducing and I’d swear it wasn’t Sinhalese. “The horror, the horror!” Teixeira would occasionally exclaim with a smile. Did he mean the tea? No, he meant his pet cat, which had a broken paw. “The horror!” he exclaimed whenever the cat drew near, and then he would be silent for a few seconds and finally come out with all kinds of transcendental phrases. “The dead do not laugh, laughter is linked to life, only laughter has a future.” He would come out with such maxims and then fall silent again. Suddenly, when we were least expecting it, he had a fit of noncontagious, incredibly disagreeable laughter, as hideous as his tea. I have never seen anything like it. His mouth was one huge black nail with a crack down the middle. His laugh was terribly metallic, dehumanized, as if it were the laughter of the future, the laughter that awaits us, canned laughter, laughter neither with God nor without God, neither with books nor without books, something indescribable it was so repellent.

“Illness draws you in on yourself, whereas laughter makes you more open,” he said with evident satisfaction. And he added, “The more open you are, the healthier you feel.” His maxims reminded me of a period in Spain when it was fashionable for writers who wished to advance their carreers to publish maxims from their private journals. It was considered intelligent. However, it had the opposite effect. Thinking is not within the reach of everybody and these maxims that made you feel embarrassed for their authors—“Women can wait longer than men,” for example — only reminded you that it’s different for Walter Benjamin or Elias Canetti to record a thought than for the village idiot to do so.

Illness and laughter. Despite being noticeably plastered, I recalled Oscar Wilde, who said that laughter was the original approach to life: a mode of approach that persists only in criminals and artists. Was Teixeira a criminal or an artist? I set him a small trap and asked him if by illness he meant art. “I don’t even remember art,” he said, and again laughed in that horrific manner that allowed you to see or imagine underground galleries inside his atrocious mouth connecting with Pico’s volcano behind him; in fact the volcano was nearer Teixeira’s home than it at first seemed.

“I don’t even remember art, all I have are scattered images of the tree stumps on which I once wasted my time,” he said, opening his mouth wide and revealing with clarity now the moles tirelessly working away day and night against the literary. This enabled me to confirm that Teixeira was certainly not an artist but a modern criminal, or rather the man to come, or perhaps the man who has already arrived, the new man with his indifference to art past and present, a man of amoral, dehumanized laughter. A man of plastic laughter, laughter of death.

Tongoy had been right to ask whether there would not be another death in paradise, he had unwittingly acted like a prophet. I recalled a line by T. S. Eliot: “I should be glad of another death.” This was not my case, however, I wouldn’t say I felt glad to have discovered the new man with his amoral, new laugh, lurking in the center of the mysterious, remote island of Pico. “I suppose we’ll all have to laugh more,” I remarked to Teixeira, while experiencing a strong desire to put my hand in his mouth and do my utmost to squeeze and tear out the moist skin inside his face hosting those blasted sick moles.

Laughter of (literature’s) death in the middle of paradise. I mentioned this to Tongoy as we left the house at the foot of the volcano with just enough time for the taxi to take us to catch the return ferry. But Tongoy did not reply. There was a threatening black cloud again over the channel as the ferry began to make its way toward Fayal, like someone traveling through the heart or the very soul of darkness. We took some seasickness tablets, which didn’t help at all, they merely churned up our stomachs even more, and we spent the entire journey throwing up the whiskey, beer, and, above all, Sinhalese tea. By the time we reached Fayal, we had turned into two new men. We must have looked awful, because Rosa, who had come to the small pier to fetch us, was visibly shocked. “What did you see over in Pico?” she asked. “The new man,” I replied. “It’s not every day you see the soulless man of the future, it’s not every day you see the glacial, laughable face that humanity will have on the strange tomorrow that awaits us, this man is currently hiding over in Pico and he laughs a lot.”

Rosa looked at me as if to say, “You’ve been drinking.” Tongoy, in turn, stood staring at me with real concern because of what I had just said. In the end he asked me who this new man was, because the taxi driver was very old and Teixeira was a professor of laughter therapy, lost in a large house at the world’s end. To make him understand that the new man we had seen, the amoral man of the future, was Teixeira, I mimicked his metallic, canned, and amoral laughter. Tongoy immediately realized who I was talking about and burst out laughing in such an odd way that he looked like a real wreck. It occurred to me at that moment that Rosa’s film should start like this, with Tongoy pretending to be an old whaler from the Azores, with his pointed ears and vampiric teeth, reciting some strange sentences I would write for him, reciting these strange sentences and then letting out an odd laugh, like a wreck. This laugh would be followed by the opening credits.

“Teixeira, the new man?” said Tongoy, scratching his shaved head. “Don’t make me laugh. The guy was an idiot!”

Today, seven days after that trip to Pico, Tongoy again laughs like a wreck, but this time he does it in front of the cameras. I wrote the lines with which he opens the documentary about the lost world of whalers in the Azores.

A real close-up of Tongoy, with his big, pointed ears, his shaved head, and vampiric gaze directed with a harpooner’s ferocity toward the camera; looking in silence for a few seconds until he says, “Everybody used to talk about Freud when I was young. But I never read him. Shakespeare didn’t read him either. And I don’t think Melville did. Let alone Moby-Dick.”

He laughs like a wreck, the opening credits roll.

Today I spent a good while gazing at the fuzzy silhouette of Pico’s volcano and pondering a question Canetti put to himself one day: “Will God return when his creation is destroyed?”

Anxiety everywhere. I felt trapped both by the volcano and by Canetti’s aphorism. To avoid growing more anxious with all this, I resorted to thinking about something else; I thought how quick Tongoy has been these last few days to reproach me for having grabbed the first advice he gave me in Chile to help me combat my literary illness. According to Tongoy, it would have been better to wait for more advice, because I had taken his idea of combating the death of literature too literally. According to Tongoy, it is characteristic of disoriented minds to be concerned about something as commonplace and at the same time as elastic as the death of literature.

Recalling Tongoy’s reproaches — for example, he is always reproaching me for my ever-growing obsession for transforming everything I see, systematically converting it into concepts or literary quotations, which in his opinion makes conversation often dull or unbearable — recalling the persecution Tongoy has been subjecting me to recently with his criticism, has, however, helped me to forget both of Pico’s volcano and Canetti’s aphorism, which had kept my soul in suspense. But a possibly regrettable thing has happened. I have forgotten Pico, and the aphorism, but I have not managed to take my mind off Canetti. I have not been able to forget the figure of Kien, a character in Auto-da-Fé, his only novel: a character who one day, at the time he usually gets up, dreamed of a large library standing next to the crater of a volcano that in eight minutes would start to erupt.

Needless to say, with Canetti’s return, the volcano came back — not Pico’s, but it was as if it had been — that volcano which I thought I had lost sight of. And with it, as if this were not enough — and my mind were not giving serious signs of how literature-sick I am — the memory of Montano’s story and, with this memory, that of all the mountains there are in the world, all the mountains, volcanoes included, which Josep Pla — as he explained in his exemplary diary — liked so much, mountains similarly adored by André Gide; in Montano’s story, Gide infiltrates the memory of a young Samuel Beckett, who is dining with some friends in Dublin and is suddenly surprised by this mental visit of Gide, who says, point-blank, that adoration for any mountain is characteristic of Protestantism.

“So what?” asks Beckett. “First the bones,” answers Gide, disappearing as quickly as he came into the mind of Beckett at the table, who years later, according to Montano, would write with clear reference to Gide and his unexpected visit to Dublin: “What were skull to go? As good as go.”

Having freed myself of Pla’s mountains, Gide’s bones, Protestantism, Canetti and Beckett, Kien and everybody else, including the one who might return when his creation is destroyed; having freed myself of everybody, I was nevertheless afraid of falling into the clutches of any other writer or aphorism or passage from Montano’s story, and at this point I was overcome with anxiety, I felt so stifled in reality by my literary memory that I even thought Tongoy may have been right when he warned me that I had taken my idea of combating the unliterary too far.

I felt so angst-ridden that I would have given anything — here on the island of Fayal, where I am a manuscript — to return to my childhood, to the simple days when I was fascinated by space and those starry night skies. I would have given anything to return to the days of childhood when I journeyed through the space of the infinite universe and never felt the need to interpret it, let alone to transform it into a concept or literary quotation. I would have given anything, yes. Melancholy here in Fayal, as I think about those simple days in space.

At the break of day, the air was so clear that, without the help of my binoculars, I could see the foam created by the waves that were breaking against the bow of a boat sailing in the distance. For the first time in ages, an image simply existed. As if I were suddenly cured. A moment’s joy at dawn. I felt so alive suddenly that I could have swum to the boat and got on board. The early morning sun shone, the surface of the water was a mirror.

This lunchtime Rosa, in a break from filming, came into the room to fetch something she had forgotten and found me sprawled on the sofa, sleeping beside the great map of Montano’s malady, which was lying completely unfolded next to me.

“What is that?” she asked.

I immediately came out of the pornographic dream I was having and, still half asleep, understood that she was asking me about my wet trousers, not about the map.

How many years was it since my last emission like this? I had just come in my sleep and soiled my underpants, and that is why the last thing that occurred to me was that she might be interested in the map.

“What is that?”

It was twelve o’clock or a quarter past twelve. Half an hour previously, I had fallen into a deep sleep while working on the map. I had fallen asleep while attempting to perfect the palm trees of an oasis in a South American desert, where the wind blew and human footprints and the marks of horses’ hooves from remote times had remained completely untainted by the influence of literature: an oasis in which all traces of time and culture had been preserved.

“What is that?”

I had fallen asleep while drawing this Latin oasis of Montano’s malady. The excesses of last night in Café Sport had suddenly overpowered me on the sofa. It was a very curious labyrinthine path along which I had reached the no less curious ejaculation. There I was, working on those important details in the Latin oasis, when my brain abruptly ceased to function with agility and I felt so sleepy that I thought I was going to lose consciousness. I closed my eyes and soon fell asleep, with the map dangerously and completely unfolded next to me, my pencil on the floor. I dreamed that I was at the bar in Café Sport, drinking an exquisite Sinhalese tea. Suddenly someone gently took my arm from behind and, turning around, I encountered a faceless man, who I thought could be me. And, in effect, when I looked closely, I saw that it was me, though I bore a slight resemblance to the writer Ricardo Piglia.

“To recall with a memory that is not our own,” I heard him whisper in my ear, “is a variant of the theme of the double, but it is also a perfect metaphor for literary expression.”

“Allow me,” I said to him, “to laugh at this situation and mention that you do not need to remind me that I always converse with the man accompanying me.”

Piglia (meaning me) did not even raise a smile. He gave me a kind of order in a very serious tone:

“What you should be drawing are the somber classrooms of certain North American universities where they devote themselves to deconstructing literary texts.”

“OK,” I said, “I’ll draw them when I’ve finished the oasis. By the way, what does ‘deconstructing’ mean?”

“No, you’ll draw them right now.”

I looked at him, and it was no longer Piglia or me. Now I had a tedious dwarf in front of me who was telling me that I had to draw him, because he was the king of the moles. Suddenly, perhaps because I leaned too hard against the bar in Café Sport, a strange mechanism went off and shortly afterward I found myself on the other side of the bar, with the sensation that I was no longer in the bar but in a luxurious hotel room.

I was still accompanied by the tedious dwarf, who did not stop talking, he was an awful bore.

“I’m not the king of the moles,” he was saying. “You don’t need to include me in your map, which, by the way, is so detailed, so well done. If there is anyone who should be out of your map, it’s me. I’m an old-fashioned critic, someone who’s against the fierce, cabalistic jargon that has pervaded university circles in the United States, where professors and critics talk of the literary with such indifference to the aesthetic, moral, or political ingredients of literature properly understood that it could be said to have disappeared under the debris of theory. Do you follow me?”

“Not a lot. I think I only understand that you’re an old-fashioned critic.”

“A sad old critic,” said a woman with a voice of velvet, emerging from behind a curtain also of velvet. I recognized her body, though I could not see her face. The woman quickly removed her clothes, except for a black bra, slowly came toward me, and I heard her say in a drawl — which I also recognized — but with a dove’s serenity:

“I will spit on your grave.”

Only when she knelt down in front of me could I see her face. It was Rosa. She unzipped my trousers, took out my penis, and placed it in her mouth, a much bigger mouth than she has in reality. As she moved her tongue, her exquisite blonde hair swung from side to side in a dazzling, frenzied display. I did not want to come. But I couldn’t help it. And then I woke up.

“What is that?” Rosa asked.

I was terrified, I didn’t know what I could say to her. I decided to blame her, a ruse to try to get out of a tight spot.

“You know better than I do,” I said.

Only then did Rosa take the map and show it to me, and only then did I see that she was asking me about the map.

I breathed a sigh of relief, but could not relax, since it wasn’t going to be easy to explain to her why I devoted myself to drawing moles, provinces, slums — one of them called Spain — woods, bends, islands, underwater tunnels, devilish caves, warrens, intelligence services, Latin oases, shady corners. No, it wasn’t going to be easy to explain why I devoted myself to such meticulous drawings.

“World map of Montano’s malady,” she read aloud. “What on earth is that? Have you drawn here your mental problem in the form of alphabet soup?”

Anyone would think I had been with another woman. I was terrified, although I told myself that ultimately it was preferable that she should be asking me about the map and not, as yesterday, asking me if I knew how long it was since we had made love. Had she repeated her question today, I would have been forced to tell her something that was fairly close to the truth, I would have been forced to tell her that this map and Montano’s malady, being all-consuming, were the clearest reasons why we had not made love since the end of the previous century.

I realized that there was only one way to resolve the situation satisfactorily, and that was to make love to her without further ado, to try in this way to make her forget the map. But nor could it be said that this was the ideal solution at this point in time, since the emission had left me in no condition to confront the sexual act with any degree of self-confidence. It occurred to me that I should be praying for Rosa to not even think about unzipping my trousers, this could result in a catastrophe at least as big as that prepared by Montano’s malady, day by day — although I had the intention of seeing off the literary.

I decided that the only way out left to me was to try to explain — as skilfully as possible, inventing wherever necessary — why I had turned into a raging amateur topographer, which is to say, to try to justify the inexplicable.

“The thing is I’m inventing a setting for a novel I wish to write,” I told her.

She gave me a terribly angry look.

“Well,” she said to me, “I’ve just about had enough. Either you explain to me right now what Montano’s malady is and why it has a map. Either you tell me right now what your son has to do with all this, with such a childish map, and, while you’re at it, why it’s so long since we had sex. Either you explain all this to me properly, or you can start packing your bags and go and finish your map elsewhere. Do you hear me? What is Montano’s malady?”

“A novel,” I whispered.

She can’t have heard me.

“Where is it?” she asked.

“Where is what?”

“Montano’s malady.”

I went to the night table and produced the diary, this diary. And showed it to her.

“Here it is,” I told her.

She read a few pages of the diary and, horrified, asked me whether I had signed up with the group of idiots who think that literature is ending and the market is to blame, whether I was one of those numbskulls who believe that literature is in crisis, under threat. Then we had sex. We fucked wildly. We fucked as if the world and literature were coming to an end. We fucked with the enthusiasm of the day we first met. When it was all over, I went out onto the balcony and saw the foam of a few waves breaking against the bow of a boat sailing in the distance. The midday sun shone, the surface of the water was no longer a mirror. And I don’t know. I’d say I began to lose sight of Montano’s malady.