Asking myself why I wanted to write the damn article was, without a doubt, a very pertinent question. But it’s also true that Isabel kept on hounding me for the article, and the painful truth of the situation was that I didn’t have enough material to write anything. I’d left the books and catalogues that the artist had given me next to the computer, on the desk that for so long was occupied exclusively by Pablo. Vicente Rojo had told me himself that I would find all my answers in those pages. I began with the most recent one, Open Diary, which was a book so exquisite that, without exaggeration, I was deeply moved simply by touching its pages. I was surprised to find many paragraphs underlined, as if Vicente Rojo himself had wished to draw my attention to the matters he considered most important. The artist wasn’t lying when he gave me the book: it was all here. As I read the underlined fragments, I heard the musicality of his voice again. All I needed to do was put the puzzle pieces he had laid out for me together: ‘the first memory I have took place on July 19, 1936, when I was four years old. I have a vivid recollection of the reaction in Barcelona to Franco’s uprising. I saw the whole thing from the window of my home. […] Ever since then, the awareness that joy is inseparable from sorrow has structured my work (and my life).’
There are other quotes and passages: some that speak of a double childhood, one about that boy staring out the window on July 19, 1936 and one about an adolescent whose life lights up once he arrives in Mexico; passages about the boy who has his left hand tied behind his back at school, and passages about a young artist questioning his creative impulses: ‘At the origin of each of my artistic projects there is the need to fill a void, and my true, abiding interest has been in figuring out how to do it. There has also been an artist’s desire to become someone else: I decided to depersonalise myself and invent a new painter (who unfortunately has to be called Vicente Rojo, too).’
This last fragment reminded me that the previous night I had dreamt that at last all my efforts had come into fruition, and I had become someone else. Far from living through a painful process of metamorphosis, in my dream I was already a different person who could look down on the insecure, timid, and fat woman who was disappearing as easily as a ‘fade-to-black’ effect on TV. The fact that I had managed to dream something so audio-visual was in itself a sign that I had already become someone else. I know it doesn’t mean anything, that it’s a very common feeling, and that when Vicente Rojo spoke of his desire to become a different painter he wasn’t talking about what I’d experienced, but a much more complex creative search, but for me the coincidence was something worth keeping in mind.
Advancing through Vicente Rojo’s book, I came across a text about a Catalan man from Mollerussa named Jusep Torres Campalans and his arrival in Chiapas in 1915. Vicente Rojo had told me about this in one of our meetings. I knew that name was linked to a certain game or puzzle concerning what was real, what was realistic, and what was true. In his text, Vicente Rojo attributed to Torres Campalans the idea that ‘art is converting truth into lies so that it never stops being true’ and the creation of a splendid book called Max Aub: The Novel. On that very page in the book, he had taped a piece of paper with something that looked like a quote or an aphorism by ‘Jusep Torres Campalans.’ The note said, ‘Blend yourself with your work. Be your own work. Don’t look at yourself from the outside. Never step back from the canvas to see the aspect of the brushstrokes. Be so inside that you cannot step outside what you have done. Nothing is worth anything, especially not a finished work. At the end of the day, it’s all rubbish.’
How would I ever be able to write a feature for the newspaper based on these riddles? The assumed reader of my article would be reading it to share in the revelations supposedly gained by local high school students after receiving classes from a prestigious artist who had come home after many years of exile: the nephew of a heroic soldier who, despite everything, had been defeated. Thanks to this legacy, the kids would hear the testimony of someone who represented the nation’s dramatic history, the richness and exoticism of many years in Mexico, the patina of a renowned intellectual with whom powerful politicians from all over the world had wanted to have their photos taken, and the humility of an artist who returned to his homeland because he had never been able to forget the essential things: roots and childhood. But from the clues I’d been able to gather myself, I’d never be able to write the article. Where did that huge painting sitting in my hallway fit into all this?
I had caught Berta staring at the painting on several occasions. Since Mario’s diagnosis, a calm had settled over us. She still maintained a certain distance from me, which she seemed to be using to protect herself, but she was much less tense, and she was distracted by other matters that were much more important than everyday skirmishes caused by living with me. She never tried to hide it when I found her looking at the painting. Even so, I knew better than to ask. Finally, it was Berta herself who wanted to talk about it.
‘I always used to tell Mario and Jorge that you have to look from behind the eyes, straight from the optic nerve, because the image that arrives at the brain is composed inside the eye. Only if you look directly from the brain are you able to perceive an object’s pure form. That way you can see things in different ways, without them being what we’ve always been told they are. Which is to say that if you see a door or a landscape, that’s because ever since you were small you’ve been told that it’s a door or a landscape. But if you’re able to see the colours and forms separately, without a small part of your brain telling you “this is a landscape,” the reality is quite different. This is why you have to try to see things with your brain. I think that if you try a little harder, you can even see things that are not normally there. Do you think so?’
‘That’s the game you used play at school, isn’t it?’
‘Since Mario got sick we don’t play it anymore, but I still try it sometimes. If there are ultra-violet rays or insects or bacteria we can’t see, then there have to be other things our eyes can’t see, right? We should learn to perceive these things in other ways. Dogs, for example, can hear and smell things that we can’t.’
‘I don’t think Mario’s illness has anything to do with this.’
I wasn’t trying to reassure Berta, I was simply telling her what I thought. But I had a feeling she interpreted my words as interference, and I understood I wasn’t allowed to talk about her game. She kept looking at the painting.
‘It’s important to hold your breath, because breathing controls the rhythm of the circulation of blood as it flows to the brain, and the brain tells us how we should see everything. While you breathe, everything is normal, and the body functions just the same as always, so you can’t force it to see things differently. It’s like when you manage to see an image in three dimensions. That day I was trying to see the painting in three dimensions, which is why I fainted, because I saw an image that frightened me, as if I were floating in the air and about to fall down amongst all those blocks, like in a dream when you fall from a precipice.’
I never saw blocks in the sequences of squares and cubes of different colours that made up the painting, but I couldn’t tell her that. Berta continued talking:
‘When you manage to see things from behind your eyes, or with your whole brain, everything is different. In our literature class, we had to read a story by Cristina Fernández Cubas where she explains this whole thing. It’s about a boy who learns to see everything through the lens of horror, and then he can’t stand anything at all. It’s a scary story, and it doesn’t end well. Something similar is happening to me now, I can no longer see things the way you do, or the way others do. You can’t see what’s terrifying about this painting, which is why you interview that man and go to see him at his house.’