I could take out my notebook and start controlling the navigation of my mind in a kind of semi-public session that everyone around me — though no one was present at that moment — would expect and tolerate. But I didn’t do so, even after the waiter had already brought my order and nothing would interrupt me for a good while. The two writer friends have done it. I could even argue that those two books were written entirely in public places, almost exclusively cafés or similar locales. Why should I be any different? What circumstance keeps me from being just like them? I didn’t find the answer then, and I don’t have it now, either.
So on the one hand, I could find no reason not to set about writing in the Café do Lago, but on the other it’s true that for some time I’d begun to feel a sort of cautiousness, or insecurity, when, in one of the few cafés near my home, after certain preliminaries, I’d decide to open my notebook. I’d feel threatened, or closely observed. In fact, it was all in my head; no one was looking at me, or at anyone else. Until one afternoon, it must have been some two or three years ago, after focusing my mind on the idea of the threat — since I couldn’t get over it — while the rest of the café’s customers were reading or writing, carefree, a good number of them doubtless writers as well, I noticed that in fact something else was going on, though similar: what I felt was shame. I was ashamed to write, a feeling that still persists. And like everything shameful, if one wants to put it into practice, one has no choice but to do it surreptitiously.
For a long time I considered writing a private task, which at a certain moment nonetheless had to become public, because otherwise it would be very hard for it to stay alive, in particular and in general. My shame, though, proceeded not only from being engaged in something private in full view of everyone, but also from doing something unproductive, a thing both moderately useless and fairly banal. I felt they’d speak of me as a frivolous character, capable of squandering his time without concern, at a remove from any significant interest. And since I knew myself all too well, I had no choice but to concur with them in advance. Accordingly, my main worry wasn’t so much overcoming my faults and my foolish illusions about writing, but rather, not being discovered. That’s what life boiled down to, I could say as I approached a crucial birthday: not being discovered. All of us have one vital lie, without which routine daily existence would collapse; mine consisted of simulacra, in this case of literature.
Having so often adopted a writerly attitude, I ended up being a writer; and now, in a kind of retrospective panic, I was terrified they’d find me out, just when I was able to consider almost all the dangers cleared away. And the fear was reflected in what was most basic, as always: hands at work, the anonymous circumstance. I no longer feared not being published, or living far from success or recognition, I already knew that those things would always be within my grasp, for better or for worse; I feared that somebody, passing alongside my open notebook, would unmask me as a simple, deliberate impostor. The leaves of my notebook wouldn’t contain sentences, or even words, just drawings that sought to simulate handwriting, or repeating pages with the word “what,” especially “how,” or with disconnected syllables that never made sense.
So I kept the backpack shut, didn’t take out the book, much less the notebook, and once again passed up a session of writing that might have been fruitful, that sometimes happens, in order to sink into a diffuse meditation on the matters I’m in the process of recounting. The table was bare, except for the solitary cup of coffee. In the distance No. 15 looked like a white dot in slow flight, safe from any danger. I thought of my birthday, its charged imminence. Had my hour of reckoning arrived? With different emphases and arguments, one friend as well as the other counsel against it and refuse to take it on, though in their own way they engage in it, that I remembered pretty well. Accordingly, I thought it best to obey them.
Before my fear of being unmasked, to give it some name, café tables were promising places for me, spaces for materialization, where what was potential — poetic inspiration, literary expressiveness, whatever it may have been — used to become real. I had my protocols, like all writers, in any event not overly ambitious or complicated, after which I’d take out the notebook, read over what was most recent or maybe also what was least fresh, and after a few moments of taking stock, I’d dive into writing, without undue haste, but without distractions, either. Now my memory of those scenes is one of absolute happiness.
I wondered about the origin of that sensuality, ever-unsatisfied and ever-renewed, that led me to continue, unmindful of the interruptions, especially since writing in other places, non-public ones, say, subjected me to different experiences and feelings. I’m not talking about results, that would deserve other, less clear-cut explanations and conclusions; I mean the question of my location. The answer is grounded in my being a public writer, in a literal sense: writing in public, like a pianist who plays before an audience or a declaimer in the moment of acting. The incidentals didn’t bother me, whether or not people were looking, nor if someone was secretly peeking into my notebook. There was something of a vocational commitment in that, a kind of anxiety that was unfocused and super-concentrated at once, until, after a brief moment of compenetration between my ideas’ development and the colonized page, I would feel a slight tremor surrounding me.
Not my own tremor, the one that comes from true creation — which in any case I’ve never known — and leads one to hesitate, stumble, and at times even fall, so they say; but instead the tremor of the atmosphere surrounding me at that moment, which seemed intent on heightening the pressure in anticipation of an imminent blast, like those general quiverings which one finds difficult to ascribe to a visible source and which precede explosions or disasters in general. Yet I don’t remember those moments as ones of mounting tension, or of menace, but, rather, of harmonious waiting. The atmosphere would begin to vibrate because something was happening, though nothing sufficiently important to call the attention of those present. The vibration concerned only me and was expressed, more than in an easily recognized change or rupture, in a sort of repressed contention of things: tables, display cases, chairs, counters, everything that made up the café. Objects lost their consistency or density, though not their form, and in a second reaction, since they couldn’t explode, they became soft, springy, as if they were rubber or silicon models. Hence the reaction to the slightest current of air or of sound, expressed in a subtle, though massive, tremor that overcame the immobility of the ensemble, only to confirm it.
My two friends don’t provide any significant details about their writing moments. They’d have no reason to. In any event, both mention them, and perhaps because of an excess of loyalty, or of feelings of indebtedness toward them, I now believe I should elaborate. I was saying, then, that things would go soft and begin to tremble. These were minimal vibrations, like electric ones or maybe sonic, who knows, which reminded me a little of the particular quivering of flan, when it shakes bashfully at a touch, as if it were afraid. That was the indication that something was happening in the session; compenetration, as I said, the absence of the surroundings, but its opposite, too, because it pertained to a private scale, my own scale of equilibrium or coexistence with the “publicness” I sought to attain. That is to say, what surrounded me was turning into a copy, it was a soft reality or soft version capable of including me. An anonymous scribe in a café governed by the murmurs of the congregation and the irritating sounds of the cups and dishes clattering behind the counter. Sometimes, if the things didn’t go soft they could change color; barely a tinge, the next shade on the gray scale, which upset everything uniformly. .