— That ground, or so it seems to me, is what a writer must mistrust the most. That was what I was trying to express. There in Spain, they’ve lost their way. They have a literary scene that requires manuscripts, whole reams for each and every season. A novelist is nothing but a producer churning out stories, a professional narrative-maker. There’s nothing that rubs the wrong way because almost all books do one thing: endeavor to make time melt away in the reader’s hands. That is the impoverishment I was speaking of. At this extreme, literature as we understand it is dead, or it survives almost underground, pushed farther and farther each day from the new arrivals table. Here, as in other countries where the literary marketplace barely exists, there still endures a type of writer that has been slowly disappearing in societies where publishing has become almost exclusively a business. Frailty in the culture of letters is always the manifestation of a despicable time, a brutal and naïve era.
— The funny thing, I said, is that there are lots of publishers in Spain that only publish translations. Their doubts about, if not outright disdain for, their own nation’s writers is plain enough right there. What’s surprising is that writers only complain about it in private, they don’t write about the subject. It’s as if they were all hoping to sneak onto the list, dreaming of the day when they’ll get the chance to be the exception.
— The problem is that they are so alone, said Noreña. As alone as we are, but they don’t realize it because they move in circles where there are real reputations and, sometimes, lots of money. You have to be brave not to join the charade. The risks are high. There isn’t much that one writer can do against a publishing world that starts to perceive him as a content provider. The record industry killed music. The book industry is in the process of annihilating literature. We’re castaways; all we have left is the bitter future of those who’ve survived from a world that will never exist again. What we wanted to do in our lifetimes no longer exists.
Noreña fell silent and for a few seconds we watched the sea.
— But I can’t live without that mirage, he went on. That’s why I was so adamant with García Pardo. He’s an impostor. A little talent and a lot of favorable circumstances. His books are dead after six months. He’ll never become a tragic figure because he had opportunities and knew how to use them.
— We’re bound to the day when a book bedazzled us, I said.
— Very likely so. That’s why, in spite of it all, we turned into writers. A few days ago, I told a young man not to become a writer if he could help it. It takes years to be convinced that it’s practically a life sentence. Yes, the first book that bedazzled us. We want to recreate as closely as we can the force that shocked us on that day. To bring it back to life, but through our own efforts this time, using the stuff of our own lives. García Pardo probably experienced this, too, but he opted for eight hours a day in front of a keyboard, like any office drone.
We sat in silence, smoking the small cigars.
— We’re alone, so alone.
I watched as the smoke carried his words away.
— I sent you an e-mail, he said. Have you seen it?
When I got home, I went straight to the computer and read the message that for some mysterious reason Máximo decided to write and send just before we met.
“Carmen is leaving for California. García Pardo has come to visit. Two movements, very much alike in their own way to one who has decided to remain here. Carmen is going where she can breathe deeply from a different atmosphere, construct her personal happiness, and who knows whether she will ever want to return. García Pardo is traveling through ‘the provinces’ and will return to Madrid convinced that, despite it all, he is in the best of all possible places. What happens when you wish to honor these streets not because they deserve any special tribute but because almost your whole past took place here, because here is what made us yearn to set it to paper? None of these questions have answers. You can’t even assess these things or formulate an idea that’s close to correct. We’re left with a pain we cannot relieve, a pain we feel each time someone walks by without seeing us, blinded by his tinseled traditions. Peace is impossible and that is perhaps why we write, and since writing does not relieve that pain either, writing becomes an obsessive, pointless act. It’s just another sentence, another paragraph, another page, and we can never finish. Best case, someone reads something we write and finds it unforgettable. We’ve all had such experiences ourselves, and they have marked us, but there are already too many unforgettable texts in the world.
“What is taken for success in literature matters less and less to me each day, even if I can’t help seeking it. I know now that it won’t solve anything, that at most it will cool the pain and make me write less willingly, and I will more closely resemble García Pardo and so many like him. I know I can only live by repeating a gesture that separates me from most of humanity. And without really knowing why, I feel that it is very important for me to wear myself out doing it. Out of choice or out of necessity.
“When we live like this, let this attitude determine our lives, the choice between staying or emigrating no longer has any meaning. We’re always alone, irremediably alone, with our rage. The rage of the place and the life we were fated to have. And then, sitting before a blank page some day or some night, you realize that this, precisely, is the point, that you had to get to the end of the dead-end street to be able to set something down on paper that’s worth the trouble. Worth the pain. That’s when you know: this is writing. A writer is an athlete of defeat. All the rest is not literature. That is García Pardo’s problem (and his tragedy).”
Frailty. All the times I’ve been weak, the times I’ve collapsed. To remember those times in order to know what it really means to live here. Here, I am fragile as I am nowhere else. My fault lines and fissures are here.
Happiness is bound up with coming back home. I was hoping for Li. I was hoping for happiness. I was hoping for the impossible, and therefore I kept on hoping and waiting. I was tied to what I had lost, and over these days, the yearning I felt for her could only be compared to what I had gone through when I was getting her messages, when I feared, each moment, that I was about to lose someone I still hadn’t found. The situation now was similar, but there was a scent of decay. Who was it that had been here and had gone? Was it really the woman with whom I had shared days and nights, or was it, sadly, the absurd absence of a body in which I had believed with a faith that was blind?
I was immersed in thought, unaware of my surroundings. Seconds passed, maybe a minute or more. That was it: the drawing Li had left in the mailbox on the day she had asked me to meet at the Cine Paradise. I searched for it. I had put it away in a drawer with all the others. I didn’t need to look at it to know, but I felt an urge to check and be certain. It was half a sheet torn from a drawing notebook, with a rectangle in black ink. It had attracted my attention at first because it was less dense than the others, allowing minute patches of paper to show through. It was my name. It had been made by writing and crossing out my name hundreds of times within a restricted space. It was her attempt to say what she already knew. The rest had been fear, exhaustion, a horrible good-bye. Li had given herself to me knowing she could not stay, knowing that the moment she made love to me she would have to leave.