The Private Life of a Novelist
My literary kitchen is often an empty room, without even a window. Of course, I’d like it if there were something in it, a lamp, some books, a faint scent of courage, but the truth is that there’s nothing.
And yet sometimes, when I succumb to irrepressible bouts of optimism (which lead, incidentally, to terrible allergy attacks), my literary kitchen becomes a medieval castle (with a kitchen) or a New York apartment (with a kitchen and incredible views) or a hut in the foothills of the mountains (without a kitchen, but with a campfire). In these circumstances, I do what everybody does: I lose my sense of proportion and imagine I’m immortal. I don’t mean immortal in literary terms, because you’d have to be an idiot to believe that, but literally immortal, like dogs and children and good citizens who have yet to fall ill. Fortunately or unfortunately, every bout of optimism has a beginning and an end. If it didn’t, it would become a political calling. Or a religious declaration. And from there it’s just a short step to burying books (I won’t say “burning books” because that would be an exaggeration). In my case, at least, the truth is that these bouts of optimism come to an end, and with them goes the literary kitchen, which vanishes into thin air, and all that’s left is my convalescent self and a faint smell of dirty pots, unscraped plates, spoiled sauces.
The literary kitchen, I tell myself sometimes, is ruled by taste, by which I mean that it’s a domain in which memory and ethics (or moral values, if I can call them that) play a game whose rules I don’t know. Talent and excellence watch the game, mesmerized, but they don’t take part. Daring and bravery do take part, but only at certain moments, which is to say not often. Suffering takes part, pain takes part, death takes part, but on the condition that they don’t take the game seriously. They’re just playing to be polite.
Much more important than the literary kitchen is the literary library (if you’ll excuse the redundancy). A library is much more comfortable than a kitchen. A library is like a church, whereas a kitchen gradually begins to resemble a morgue. Reading, said Gil de Biedma, is more natural than writing. I would add (redundancy aside) that it’s also much healthier, no matter what the ophthalmologists say. In fact, literature is a long struggle from redundancy to redundancy, until the final redundancy.
If I had to choose a literary kitchen to move into for a week, I would choose one that belonged to a woman writer, so long as that writer wasn’t Chilean. I would live very happily in Silvina Ocampo’s kitchen, or Alexandra Pizarnik’s, or in the kitchen of the novelist and Mexican poet Carmen Boullosa, or of Simone de Beauvoir. Among other things, because they’re cleaner.