The Seamstress and the Wind

2

FORGETTING BECOMES SIMPLY a sensation. It drops the object, as in a disappearance. It’s our whole life, that object of the past, that falls into the antigravity updrafts of adventure.

There’s been little adventure. None, in fact. I don’t remember any. And I don’t think it’s by chance, like when you stop to think and realize that in the whole past year you haven’t seen a single dwarf. My life must be shaped around that lack of adventure, which is lamentable because it would have been a good source of inspiration. But I’ve sought out that lack of adventure myself, and in the future I will do it on purpose. A few days ago, before I left, reflecting, I came to the conclusion that I will never travel again. I won’t go out looking for adventure. To tell the truth, I’ve never traveled. This trip, the same as the previous one (when I wrote El Llanto), can only come to nothing, a spiral of the imagination. If I now write, in the cafés of Paris, The Seamstress and the Wind, as I have proposed, it’s only to accelerate the process. What process? A process with no name, or form, or content. Or results. If it helps me survive, it’s only the way some little riddle would have. I think that for a process to be sustained over time there must always be the intrigue of a point out of place. But nothing will be discovered in the end, or at the beginning either, because the decision has already been made: I will never travel again. Suddenly, I’m in a café in Paris, writing, giving expression to anachronistic decisions made in the very heart of the fear of adventure (in a café in my neighborhood, Flores). A person can come to believe he has another life, in addition to his own, and logically he believes that he has it somewhere else, waiting for him. But you only have to test this theory once to see it doesn’t hold. One trip is enough (I made two). There’s only one life, and it is in its place. But still, something must have happened. If I’ve written, it’s been so I might interpolate forgetfulness between my life and myself. I was successful there. When a memory appears, it brings nothing with it, only a combination of itself and its negative aftereffects. And the whirlwind. And me. In some ways the “Seamstress and the Wind” have to do with (and are the most appropriate to, and even, I would almost say, the only fitting thing for) a strange quotation. I would prefer them to be the pure invention of my soul, now that my soul has been extracted from me. But they still aren’t, after all, nor could they be, because reality, or the past, contaminates them. I raise barriers, hoping they’re formidable, to impede the invasion, though I know the battle is already lost. I didn’t have an adventurous life because I didn’t want to weigh myself down with memories. . “Perhaps it is an exclusively personal point of view, but I experience an irrepressible distrust when I hear it said that the imagination will take care of everything.

“The imagination, this marvelous faculty, does nothing, if left uncontrolled, but lean on memory.

“Memory makes things felt, heard and seen rise into the light, a bit the way a bolus of grass rises again in a ruminant. It may be chewed, but it is neither digested nor transformed.” (Boulez)