The times I was told off by my boss at the publishing house and the Schopenhauer expert melded in my mind and tortured me in endless nightmares while I slept, then swirled in my mind all day long. I lived in fear of all those words, and I heard them echoing so loudly in my head that I was convinced that if somebody got close enough — on the bus, for example — they’d be able to hear the voices of those two people shouting about how ignorant I was and how incapable of writing anything with the slightest amount of rigour. When I met someone in the street, I could only imagine what that person thought of me, because I already knew that I was completely incapable of getting anything done properly. At night, in that intermediary zone between wakefulness and sleep, I imagined how quickly my life would be ruined when my bosses at both newspapers, and the journalists who worked there, told everyone how incapable I was of doing anything worthwhile. My life would soon come to an end, because even Pablo, whom I had been seeing for several years at that stage and who had professed unconditional love for me, would surely leave.
Despite everything, I was given more assignments, for both newspapers. I had to learn how to walk around the offices without my legs trembling and without constantly blushing. I had to stay very alert, because I knew that at any moment they might spring a trap on me that would reveal without doubt how farcical the life I was attempting to lead really was. There was no room in journalism for people like me. For a time, I was getting regular work, and I flitted between the happiness I felt at each assignment (of course I never dared to pitch anything myself, I was too afraid of everything) and the terror I felt whenever I turned something in. The night before one of my pieces was to be published, I could barely sleep, and when I finally drifted off I had nightmares about the terrible mistakes I had made in my articles. There was no point going over it a thousand times before submitting, there would always be an error or a typo. It got so that I had doubts over the meaning and spelling of the simplest words and even over my own mental health. I wondered if I’d contracted some kind of illness where my brain no longer sent information correctly to my hands or mouth when I wrote or spoke.
The long-awaited day when my life would end because everyone discovered how hopeless I was never arrived. Or maybe it did arrive, and it was just much subtler than I had imagined. Pablo passed his public exams and to celebrate, he asked me to move in with him, which I did. More time passed and Berta was born, then someone told Pablo that an insurance company was looking for someone trained in communications for a job in their press department. We both agreed that this would provide much-needed stability, given that we had just started a family. Every time I sent a press release or made a call, my whole body shook, but I learned to live with it.
Although the time between each article in the newspapers grew longer and longer, I never pulled away fully, especially from the newspaper in the regional capital. But the regional newspaper folded not long after I went to live with Pablo. Which is all to say, that in a certain sense, I actually was close to the end of something, the whole time I worked there. Isabel had risen to become editor in chief of the newspaper in the regional capital, and we had remained friendly. We kept on running into each other and making dinner dates we never kept. Even so, she was still my closest, most concrete connection with the newspaper. When I called her to pitch the interview with Vicente Rojo, I knew she was pleased and surprised in equal parts. Later on, the idea that we could scoop the other newspapers over the artist’s visit had excited her enough to encourage me to write something, anything, and soon, even though I wasn’t used to writing things like that.
I had one of Vicente Rojo’s massive paintings, with a broken frame, sitting in the hallway of my apartment. My daughter had told me that the art teacher in the neighbourhood high school had not allowed him to give lessons there. I had recorded several long conversations with him during which I had gathered barely any material for the article the newspaper wanted. I hadn’t even been able to determine whether it would be an interview, a profile, or a feature. It had changed from being the article I wanted to write into something I was being asked to do, and once again, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to do it.
I still felt enough of my original excitement to think it was a good idea for the newspaper in the capital to publish something written by me about Vicente Rojo, but other, more vague anxieties were beginning to take hold of my brain. You could say I had forgotten the reasons why I wanted to write about the artist in the first place. Perhaps what I was trying to do was capture the melody I thought I could hear while he spoke, the melody that had washed over me like a revelation, an epiphany that demanded some sort of reaction. I still believe that when something like this happens to a person, they are obliged to leave evidence of it, but I have serious doubts about whether I’d be the best person for such a situation. I’d read on many occasions that music is the purest aesthetic expression, because it translates directly to emotion. From these givens, I reason that I was trying to come up with a formula, the correct combination of sounds from the artist’s message that had momentarily created a balanced world. I felt obliged to write about all this, which was another way of deciphering the mystery — as if I were capable of finding words to describe and bring forth the same effect as music — so that I could remember it whenever necessary.
This whole theory might seem outlandish, but the fact remains that I hadn’t thought of writing all these revelations from the artist down in a personal diary or one of my many notebooks. Instead, I had planned to publish them in an article in the newspaper from the provincial capital. So, at a bare minimum, this desire indicated that this was something beyond the scope of things that normally made me stop and think. But people don’t stop to think about all the things they should; in fact, in my case, during the period when I met Vicente Rojo, I had a clear tendency to think a lot less than a human being should. One thing I have no doubt about is that throughout those months, I fantasised about a woman capable of writing an article about Vicente Rojo and all his truths — where his greatness came from, the precise nature of the state of ecstasy provoked by his artworks — and, above all, I believed that that woman could be me, even if I was twenty kilos too heavy. At a time when the rules that had governed my reality were changing in an alarming way, I needed to believe that I was someone capable of writing a good article about this painter who by chance had entered into my life. I would also have the opportunity to tell a good story, the kind that shows the essence of a human being as they achieve their full potential, as their energies and multiple ways of being synergise. And it had to be a story published in print, because that was its natural medium. Newspapers were invented to leave written proof of significant events, to explain to readers how the world works, and to expand one’s horizons. It was also the ideal medium for me, because it seemed like printed newspapers, too, were entering their final phase. Many visionaries said that print’s days were numbered, and that newspapers would soon disappear. Nobody I knew in those days went to a newsstand to buy a newspaper; they didn’t even read them in the bars where you could still find them on the counter. But I wanted my piece on Vicente Rojo to be published in the newspaper from the regional capitaclass="underline" just like the artist, perhaps I, too, had come to believe that the internet didn’t exist.