When I lift the blind in my bedroom, I see a little snowman on the railings of the flat roof next door, exactly opposite me. It’s a white pigeon, completely white, immaculately white; I’ve never seen another like it. White, fat, with ruffled feathers. It looks at me with one eye, winking.
In which the strange name of ‘Chl’ is explained
I was looking, in order to complete the story of the finger of God and related matters, for the exact date of my first face-to-face meeting with Chl. As with my dream about Ginebra, I couldn’t find any of the necessary emails. I also looked through the letters, but our letters sent as encrypted email attachments came later, when we had things to say to each other that couldn’t be read by anyone else. The date of our meeting can be placed with near perfect accuracy in the same month, May ’98, almost certainly on Tuesday the twenty-sixth.
But just now, when I was looking through the letters, I opened one at random. It was dated 5 July and contained none other than my clear, concise declaration of love, and the origin of the name ‘Chl’:
… I’ll be brief, then: I love you, I want you, I like you very much and find you terribly impressive. You’ve thrown me off balance and I’ll probably go under once and for all. But at least now there’s a smile on my face.
Thank you very much, little chica lista.
Chl, then, means ‘Chica lista’, or clever girl. And I really did go under once and for all, just as my hyperlucidity in that moment foresaw.
I imagine the eventual, hypothetical, long-suffering reader got lost a long time ago; if not entirely, then at least when it comes to this story I’ve been attempting to tell for some days. What with tracking down material (emails, letters) and editing this diary, which I’m still doing, and which involves various different tasks, there isn’t much time left for the diary itself, for continuing to write about minor everyday events. Nothing spectacular has happened, and I hope nothing does, but I’ve definitely been missing opportunities to make progress with some of the storylines forming the body of the narrative.
Now I’d like to take a few minutes to recapitulate, to give a short summary of the key points of my recent investigations and see if I can record any conclusions or reflections. The events that make up the set are:
1) My original dream, with therapeutic origins, in which I challenge ‘the world’ to seduce me.
2) My dream in which Ginebra appears, and the mention of the finger of God in my email telling Ginebra about the dream.
3) My rather desperate conviction, in the last of those emails to Ginebra, that only a kiss from a princess can break the curse:
All that remains, on that score, is the (theoretical) possibility that a beautiful woman will fall in love with me.
4) The sudden arrival of ‘Rafael’ and him telling me about the dream that’s similar to mine in many ways, with the explicit mention from him of the finger of God.
5) The first meeting with Chl in person, during which I’m immediately seduced. And the seduction seems to be mutual. Later on, I’ll include a dream Chl had about it.
All this in a period that runs from 6 to 26 May 1998; the sixth is the likely date of the dream in which I challenge the world to seduce me, and the twenty-sixth is the day of my meeting with Chl.
There are, of course, more questions than answers. I wonder, for example, if the ‘finger of God’ dream involving Ginebra is showing something that really happened; if Ginebra is one of those ‘familiars’ Burroughs describes. It’s obviously not a simple erotic dream; I feel no desire in it whatsoever and there’s no build-up, nothing that paves the way for Ginebra’s unexpected possession of me as I’m lying on the floor. And then there’s that flow of energy from sex to sex, which isn’t the same, if you ask me, as a sexual act. It’s quite clear that there’s contact between two worlds that can’t touch, but between which an exchange of energy is possible. It strikes me as natural for the energy to flow down the sexual channels, and there are some precedents for this. There seems to be an indissoluble union, or a single identity, linking the so-called psychic energy and the sexual energy that some people call libido.
I also wonder how that dream could relate to my challenge to the world to seduce me. What happens with Ginebra isn’t a seduction, yet something tells me that the scene is part of the process, that it’s an early response from the world (or the devil) to my challenge. Perhaps in that scene I’m receiving the energy I need for the changes I’ll soon have to face.
I should also emphasise that, in the dream, the person who appears as Ginebra doesn’t inevitably or necessarily have to be Ginebra. Nothing in her replies to me suggested that she’d felt anything herself; on the contrary, she was worried about my situation and the state of my relationship with my partner, etc., despite being a woman very given to witchcraft and mystical perceptions. Now it occurs to me that this dream-Ginebra could easily in fact have been Chl, whom I knew over email even though we hadn’t met in person, and with whom I’d discussed the possibility of meeting face to face. On that note, in the email where Chl tells me about the dream I promised to copy in here, I’ve just come across some revealing lines:
The thing is, meeting you wasn’t a surprise for me; first of all, I’d seen photos of you in magazines, and then [X], by telling me all those imperceptible details that matter to us women, helped me to put the finishing touches to your portrait, and when you opened the door to your house I knew it was you.
This suggests ‘a previous meeting’; and it’s very strange, on that note, how although I had no erotic expectations whatsoever before the meeting with Chl – whom I’d imagined very vividly as completely different to how she really is, and not very attractive at all – early in the morning before our meeting I decided to shave off my beard. At precisely four in the morning, in a complicated procedure that took about an hour.
Whatever it was, ever since hearing Rafael describe his dream I’ve been convinced that somewhere, in some dimension, something happened; an important event took place, which I depicted in my dream as the exchange with Ginebra, and which Rafael depicted in his as the encounter with Renata.
This could have happened to many other people, who could have noticed it in multiple different ways, though maintaining the basic principle of the masculine and the feminine almost touching. I wonder what role Chl can have played in it. Whether she noticed it, or indeed whether she created it, and whether she took part. There are no answers, and there never will be.
I’m also convinced that, from the dream about my challenge onwards, I began to live, and lived for a few days, in a state very different to any of my usual states, and that I definitely travelled in time, most of all forwards, which is why I could say to Ginebra that a beautiful woman would fall in love with me, and why I shaved in the early hours of that morning.
The punctilious reader may recall that some days ago I mentioned Red Harvest, by Hammett, probably the first Spanish edition of it, in the Rastros series. Then I added that The Dain Curse also appears in the catalogue. The Dain Curse is another Hammett book I’ve never seen in the Rastros series, even though I’ve been looking at Rastros books for about half a century. Well, today I found it. For five pesos. Along with eleven more Rastros, although perhaps one or two of them already exist in my library. And another copy, a deliberate extra copy this time, of Memoirs of Leticia Valle, by Rosa Chacel; I couldn’t resist it at that price, fifteen pesos, and it’s a book that could disappear from my library forever at any moment because I’m always lending it to people.
All this during my walk with F, around a city suffering temperatures of thirty-three degrees centigrade, or so I was told; this time without P. I felt extra frightened on leaving the apartment because F was looking ravishing in a very thin, almost transparent white dress, low-cut at the front and the back, as if she wanted the jealous Uruguayans to throw stones at me. But the heat seemed to have made everyone more docile, because I saw no signs of aggression. The books didn’t come from the Feria del Libro, but from that other bookshop, which had the good sense to put some second-hand detective novels on its awful sale table.
The air conditioners, each one in turn, are flashing up a message that apparently means there’s low voltage. Curiously, when one of the units shows this message, the other one doesn’t. I’ll have to study the problem further, but right now I don’t know what I could do about it. They seem to be working, anyway, because the temperature in my apartment is very tolerable, and I’d even say cool.
I’m coming to the end of this complicated story. Now for the dream I promised; Chl’s dream. This is copied from an email she sent on 21 June, when there was still precisely one month to go before our physical union, but when we both knew well enough where things were headed.
… I had a dream last night. I dreamed we were on the flat roofs of two buildings, you on one and me on the other. A narrow street ran between the two buildings, but the buildings were so high, so very high, that we couldn’t see it. We were face to face, looking at each other, with the tips of our toes in mid-air. I said: ‘You have to turn into a cat; it’s very easy and you’ll be able to jump over here, and when you get here I’ll turn you back into Mario.’ So you turned into a big, slightly misshapen cat and jumped onto my roof, and when you were turning back into Mario I woke up.
I evidently found this dream very interesting and asked for more details, because the next day she wrote:
In the dream we were feeling very dizzy (I’m afraid of heights) but we didn’t care. I was wearing a long dark-grey overcoat and a neckerchief, and you were in something black but I don’t remember what. We swayed a little over the abyss (with the tips of our toes in the air) in silence until I decided to speak to you. I was surprised at how easy it was to persuade you to turn into a cat, and even more so to jump; as soon as I said it you were already doing it, they were two almost simultaneous actions.
An empty line, and then she ends the email with a touching domestic addition:
I bought some coffee cups with matching saucers.
So, I turned into a cat and jumped. In fact, I jumped twice; first, to extricate myself from that living death after several years, and to land in the arms of the wonderful Chl. The second jump was something like the extension of that first jump in material space and time, and it happened when I left the house where I was living for good and spent those six months in my friends’ house, looking for an apartment in the painful way I’ve already described. I spent those months in the air, dizzy from leaping so high, and when I landed … Chl was hardly there to catch me, because along came that trip of hers, and in a way I’m still in mid-air, with vertigo, with the sensation of an endless fall in slow motion, and the feeling of inevitable disaster.
‘You know you’re choosing solitude,’ my therapist said, more as a statement than a question, in a special session, a consultation I requested when she was no longer my therapist. I’d requested that session so she could assess my psychological state before I took the decisive step of moving out of what had once been my home. Her assessment was positive, as was that statement, more statement than question – though really it was a warning.
‘Yes,’ I answered, firmly and decisively. I knew the affair with Chl couldn’t last, because perhaps I myself couldn’t last. But I was prepared to take on my final solitude, which is what I’m going through now, though I never imagined it would be like this, filled with such ambiguity.
I felt as if that kind old woman was somehow giving me her blessing, and that she was somehow satisfied with the session, which was the true end of our therapy. My libido had managed to emerge and take notice of ‘an external object’ (my words, because she rarely used psychoanalytical language).
I spoke to ‘the external object’ on the phone earlier; tomorrow I’ll see her … and then she’ll go away again for a few days.
But I can’t seem to move on from this topic, and I always get distracted and end up drifting through memories and old emails. At one point in the past few days I thought I was mixing the diary with the project, and wondered if these pages might perhaps fit better in the luminous novel. Then I thought that there’s no luminosity in this story; there’s magic, yes, but not that luminous magic I’ve sought, and am still seeking, to record in the novel, with no visible success.
There’s something dark, perhaps even macabre, about the magic of May 1998. ‘Familiars’ have more to do with death and demons (incubi and succubi), and one night I saw a ghost in the corridor of my house. I don’t mean Chl is a demon, and if there’s anything luminous about all this, it’s her; luminous, bursting with light, and so full of grace and goodness that I came to worship her as if she were a supernatural being.
My final conclusion, having revived this story, is that Chl was probably the response to my challenge, and that all the strange events were generated by her, from my friend Rafael’s dream to the ghost in the corridor of my house. At the beginning of our relationship, in those months with their extremes of heaven and hell, Chl was a completely different being to today. Today she behaves like a perfectly ordinary young woman, almost even vulgar, with vulgar tastes and vulgar activities, or at least perfectly ordinary ones. In a way, she’s a healthier person now, and perhaps happier too. When I met her she was suffering from frequent depressions, during which she would be unable to speak. She went through long silent periods, turned in on herself. She also very often had miraculous dreams; every one of those dreams she described to me was practically a novel, and a science-fiction novel at that, in which she and the other people who appeared in it, as well as the scenery, were all part of a different and perhaps archetypal world. Around then, I began to suspect that there were beings from other planets walking this earth, and that Chl was one of them. We were frequently linked by paranormal phenomena, and her understanding of the most complex human problems was instantaneous and natural.
Sometimes when we were in a room together as the evening shadows gathered, in a certain kind of half-light I’d see her face change into a multitude of whitish, ghostly faces. One of them, which was repeated many times, was the face of Julia. But then came others, in quick succession, some very ugly, one a devil, another an indigenous man, and an old woman, and various others that weren’t repeated, but just appeared once, and plenty I couldn’t make out. It’s easy to say I was ‘projecting images from my unconscious’, but … I shook my head, I moved, I did everything I could to get out of a hypothetical trance state, and the ghostly figures didn’t go away.
Then all this strange phenomenology began to fade, to disappear, even the archetypal or extraplanetary dreams, and Chl gradually turned into a perfectly ordinary clever girl. Very beautiful, sometimes radiating beauty in that almost supernatural way I’ve mentioned in some parts of this diary, but perfectly ordinary at the same time.
One personality gave way to another, which was perhaps easier for her to live with. The new personality doesn’t love me any more; it’s very fond of me, but the passion has gone, and so has the magic.
I think that when love, true love, springs up between a man and a woman, it transforms them both, giving them certain magical qualities. Perhaps they don’t realise. Love comes to guide them, to lead them, and they both find themselves able to do things that would normally seem impossible. They live in a reality with more dimensions.
I’m going to end up sounding almost blasphemous, but again, once again, on reaching this point, I can only return to the same thing: in erotic love, in loving sex, in the tension of desire, in the projection of the energies of the man and the woman onto the creation of a new life, there, in that tension and those intimate circumstances, is where whatever they each have within them of God, which is usually hidden, makes its presence felt. Only God can give life, and this and nothing else is the purpose of sex.
In the tension of our desire, Chl and I were, for a brief time, like gods. A supernatural form of magic that’s within everyone’s reach, but that few people recognise as such.
I was able to confirm those details online: it is indeed the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo.
I should record in this diary that the telepathy with the bookseller round the corner hasn’t been working. I went to his stall a few days ago, entirely convinced there would be some major new arrivals, and there was nothing. Today, although I felt I should have another look, because I had to pay the electricity bill and it’s more or less part of the routine to stop by the stall on the way home, I was sure I wouldn’t find anything. And yet there were several new detective novels. The bookseller was waiting for me, delighted.
Something I forgot to mention about my walk with F yesterday: on the way home, on the rive gauche of the Plaza Libertad, we ran into Gérard de Nerval. I did a double take, which is not something I’m used to doing with men, and he noticed and looked at me and there was a kind of recognition in his eyes, as if he knew I’d once been a fairly devoted reader of his work. F hadn’t read anything by him; I looked on my shelves when we got home and found Daughters of Fire. There’s a photo of him in the book, and F was quite astonished that we’d run into him – especially when I informed her that he’d hanged himself from a lamp post many years ago, or had been hanged, because the matter was never cleared up. ‘The dead get recycled,’ I explained. She took the book home.
Last night, Chl read the recent pages of this diary which talk about our meeting. Reading them had the same effect on her as writing them did on me, and her eyes were red and her cheeks damp when she’d finished. I’m not suggesting that other readers will be moved in the same way, but those tears are still an encouraging comment on my work.
I finished reading No Business of Mine by Raymond Marshall, a detective novel that was part of the extremely old El Elefante Blanco series, from the publisher Saturnino Calleja. There’s no publication date anywhere in the book. The beginning was impressive, very atmospheric and with a captivating storyline. Something resonated in my mind while I was reading it, something like a sense of déjà vu. Then I thought about Graham Greene, and in particular about the very unique atmosphere of The Third Man. Much later I came across a scene that seemed to be straight out of Chandler, and then I thought I understood what was going on. ‘Raymond Marshall is a pseudonym of James Hadley Chase,’ I said to myself, and I felt as if I’d known that once before. I opened the Vázquez de Parga book, which towards the end has a very handy list of pseudonyms alongside the corresponding real names, and to my disappointment I found that Raymond Marshall is called, or perhaps was called, René Raymond.
I couldn’t let the matter rest, so later on I had another look at the list of names and pseudonyms, and there it was: James Hadley Chase is a pseudonym of René Raymond. Chandler once accused Chase of plagiarism, though not because of this book, and he won the lawsuit. My reading today told me that René Raymond is, or was, an accomplished plagiarist; but he was also a skilled craftsman. He knew how to construct an entertaining narrative. At first, I thought: ‘It’s no bad thing that this pseudonym doesn’t write with the same morbid sadism as Chase’ – sadism that ultimately made me stop reading him, though not without some regret, because he published plenty of books and, as I said, he’s a skilled writer and very entertaining. But I read on, and yes, there were the gratuitous violence and sadism and degrading treatment of women: the fingerprints, I’d almost say, of James Hadley Chase.
Yesterday, when I raised the blind in my bedroom, just slightly, to let in a bit of light but no sun, I saw there was someone on the flat roof next door. A man, crouching down with his back to me, or almost, peering through something that looked like a camera. It seemed odd that a person would go up to the flat roof to take photos, but I couldn’t investigate further because I was in a hurry, though I’m not entirely sure why. There must have been something I was meant to be doing, perhaps having my breakfast.
I remembered in the evening and tried to see if the pigeon’s corpse had been taken away, but it was all very dark and I couldn’t be sure.
Today, on raising the blind slightly, I saw there were some men at work; it obviously wasn’t a camera that the man yesterday had been holding but a measuring instrument. The men were busy erecting an extremely tall mast with something on top, a kind of small metal box in the shape of a cube. The pigeon’s corpse had changed place; now it was closer to the railings on the far side of the roof, next to a little box of tools. I wondered again whether the corpse would eventually be taken away. Now night has fallen and I’ve just had a look out of the window, and once again it’s impossible to see anything on the flat roof. You can see the mast and the sinister device on top of it; probably something electromagnetic that causes brain tumours. The mast is held firmly in place by several tightly stretched wires. The landscape has been ruined, and fingers crossed it’s only the landscape.
I’ve just received an email response I’d been waiting for; the response allows me to include in this diary, after some delay, the account of a dream. The dreamer is called Carmen, and she’s a new email friend of mine from Mexico. On 21 February this year, she wrote:
I dreamed about you last night: you came to Mexico, you were standing by the wardrobe in my bedroom and I was looking at you, and looking at you, and thinking how wonderful it was that we’d met. Then you started rummaging through my clothes and pulling out different things, which I found funny but at the same time surprising; laughing, I asked: ‘What are you looking for, Mario? Do you need anything?’ And you said: ‘I just want to see your clothes, so I can get to know you.’
I’m about fifty pages into Diplomatic Corpse, by Phoebe Atwood Taylor (Rastros no. 175), and I wasn’t prepared for this lady’s sense of humour. I’ve hardly ever come across such a funny detective novel.
Yesterday I went for a walk with M. It took me a while to realise she was upset, and a little longer to work out the reasons why. Halfway through the walk to the boliche on Ejido, in the midst of her usual logorrhoea, which is always chaotic – or, rather than chaotic, not organised by subject area – she blurted out that she’d resigned from a job she recently got and described the dramatic scene that had unfolded; drama that was entirely justified on her part, but also unnecessary. That’s when I remembered the episode with the dog and all became clear. The dog, as she’d told me via email a few days ago – and yesterday she re-enacted it very impressively in my apartment – had opened her bag, taken out the plastic container where she keeps her medication and, after munching down part of the plastic, eaten six of the new pills it contained. The vet had to get involved.
‘What day did you quit, and what day did the dog eat the pills?’ I asked.
She laughed nervously and said my calculations were wrong; that her resignation had come before the episode with the dog. It was true that she’d been feeling rather unstable because of the lack of medication, but this had nothing to do with her quitting. Since I know she’s taking two kinds of medication, I asked which kind the dog had eaten; it was the tranquillisers. ‘And the antidepressants?’ I demanded, inquisitorially, because I realised she was in one of her self-destructive phases. ‘Well, the antidepressants ran out a few days earlier.’ ‘Aha,’ I said. ‘I didn’t buy more because I didn’t have any money,’ she added. ‘Why didn’t you ask me?’ I said. She came out with some excuse I don’t remember, but it was clear that M had been without her main medication for several days, and that, as I’d deduced, her resignation had been a self-destructive act. Not the resignation itself, but the way she’d burnt her boats with that dramatic scene. A couple of months ago she’d done the same thing with a different job, also during a gap in her antidepressants. She thinks, as she’s told me before, that the tranquillisers are the medication which really does her good, and the antidepressants aren’t very important. When in fact it’s the other way around. In the end I made her promise to go and see her psychiatrist that very night – at an unconventional hour – and get prescriptions for both kinds of medication, and start taking them again immediately. We were sitting at a table in the boliche by this point, and I picked up a serviette and wrote ‘Monitor medication M’ on it, along with the date. I said I was going to make sure she didn’t end up without medication, and she agreed to this. The reminder is now scheduled in the relevant program.
The end result of all this was that I spent hours glued to the computer screen and went to sleep very late; M had passed her anxiety on to me, along with some of that state which is so difficult to describe, a kind of mental disorganisation and a permanent effort to organise it, leading to disjointed, fragmentary speech whose ultimate meaning is very difficult to make out. Often she slips imperceptibly from one topic to another, and it takes me a while to realise she’s changed the subject; I lose the thread, characters and situations get muddled, and I almost always need to ask: ‘What are you talking about?’
Today she left a message on my answerphone, announcing the number of pills she’d got hold of. I’m glad to be keeping track. It seems I can’t forget the time twenty-five years ago when M decided to commit suicide, stuffed herself with pills, went for a walk and then, as if by chance, ended up ringing my doorbell. Not long afterwards I was in a desperate panic and struggling with the dead weight of her body, which was stretched out on the tiles in the hallway of my old apartment.
This afternoon, while I was waiting for F so we could go for our walk, I wrote this down by hand:
I find it very curious how in translations from English into Spanish, even when the translation isn’t bad, you so rarely come across the expression ‘tener hambre’.*
* Translator’s note: Spanish commonly uses the construction ‘tener hambre’ (literally ‘to have hunger’) instead of ‘estar hambriento’ (‘to be hungry’).
F arrived at that point and I broke off. I didn’t have the chance to add – although now I’ve forgotten everything I’d been planning to say about this, and, worse, how I’d been planning to say it – that the ‘estar hambriento’ that translators use instead of ‘tener hambre’ isn’t the same thing at all; or at least, I think it sounds much more dramatic. To me, ‘tengo hambre’, which would describe a normal state of affairs at lunchtime, is very different to ‘estoy hambriento’, which seems to suggests a level of distress, as if lunchtime had come and gone a very long time ago. However, for most translators, ‘tener hambre’ might as well not exist.
F came alone today as well. She wasn’t in as good a mood as last week, and the reasons for this were revealed during our conversation on the walk. We had to change boliches this time; the one on Ejido didn’t have any croissants, which happened to be what both F and I felt like eating. The usual waiter wasn’t there either; he’s a very nice waiter, with something of the natural happiness of Central Americans about him. He doesn’t have an accent, admittedly, though there is something Central American about his facial features. He’s always smiling, or making a polite gesture or a funny comment. I think he greets me particularly enthusiastically, perhaps because he sees me three times a week, with three different female companions on rotation, though I’m not sure he realises they’re different. Whoever the lady is, he greets her as if he’d last seen her the day before. But today’s waiter was terse and not very polite. When F and I were exchanging disconcerted glances because there were no croissants, and the offer to give us sandwiches instead didn’t cheer us up, he went to attend to some other tables. So we got up and left. It’s something I like to do in boliches to show my displeasure: sweep out, just like that. We walked a couple of blocks and then went to a boliche that had no outdoor tables but did have particularly good croissants. When I went inside, I remembered that I’d swept out of that one, too, a couple of months ago, because a waiter had come over to tell me that Chl and I were sitting in an area reserved for non-smokers. The information about the reserved area was written in tiny letters on a menu that you only saw once you’d sat down. He wanted me to put out my cigarette and move to a different area, but once we’d got up from our chairs, we left. It was brilliant. Today, F told me there was a smoking area at the far end, and that’s where we went. I couldn’t help noticing that, in contrast to the smoking area, which was packed, the non-smoking area wasn’t having much success: it was practically empty, except for a table near the window, with three people at it, one of whom was smoking.
Once we were sitting down, each with a good cup of coffee and a filled croissant in front of us, the conversation flowed much more easily than it had in the street. I learnt various bits and pieces about people I know, and who I didn’t realise know each other, or at least see each other from time to time. I was pleased to hear about this, especially because they met, as far as I’m aware, through me.
There was nothing for me on the bookshops’ sale tables. In the Feria del Libro, the detective-novel section wasn’t even there. I asked a member of staff and he told me they’d taken it down to make room for textbooks. Student season has begun. They could have taken something else down instead. But apparently they’ll put it back next month.
I don’t remember a detective novel ever boring me as much as Double, Double by Ellery Queen. But the information must have been filed away in my unconscious, because I had a bad feeling about it when I saw the cover. I know that as a teenager, when I was a real E. Q. fan, one of his novels left me furious and disillusioned, and not only me but the whole group of friends with whom I shared the detective novels I bought. At the bookstall a few days ago, I stood looking at that cover and hesitating about whether or not to buy it; I searched my memory, but I didn’t find anything specific. Just that bad feeling about the cover.
For years I’ve had the theory, or the suspicion, that the cousins who sign their books ‘Ellery Queen’ stopped writing once they became famous. They were the editors of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, a periodical that was also very successful, and which published selections of stories and short novels. They must have made pots of money.
They stopped writing, my theory goes, but they didn’t stop publishing books under the name Ellery Queen. Perhaps there’s someone who knows about this; I should look it up online. Double, Double bears no resemblance to the books that came before it. Only the ingenious but rather flimsy detective-novel riddle, which is very much E. Q.’s style but which isn’t enough for anything more than a twenty-page short story. This novel has 192 pages in small print (perhaps size eight), and it’s boring, boring beyond words, thanks to the parallel plot line of the friendship, and almost romance, between the detective and a girl. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bulk of the novel had been written by a woman. The romantic touches and sentimental scenes pile up and make you want to vomit, and they’re swathed in prose full of literary pretensions, as if the cousins Dannay and Lee had passed through a Uruguayan creative writing workshop. Quotes from famous authors, cheap philosophy, endless passages of detective-novel clichés, which are repeated over and over again in the guise of deductive reasoning … Oh, there are so many pages I skipped, and so many more I should have skipped. Last night I was actually falling asleep, and then carried on reading while I was asleep, without finding the strength to skip anything; I was almost stupefied by that inexhaustible stream of rubbish, by that story that didn’t go anywhere, and still didn’t go anywhere, and still … Compared to that book, this diary is a dynamic, interesting, entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable read.
A message from Lilí on the answerphone; I hope no one’s died. The sing-song tone of her voice suggests not, but … She doesn’t really leave messages; she talks to see if I pick up.
That was once I’d returned from a quick outing with Chl, who’d called in briefly for a visit. With her usual radiant beauty, so radiant it hurts.
Fascinated by the information online. I searched for ‘Ellery Queen’ and found plenty of results. One was a website with a huge number of pages, describing the life and work of these cousins in exhaustive detail. I also found what I was most interested in:
Since 1950 they started recruiting and training ghostwriters they already had used on some juvenile adaptations of Queen movies and radio shows.
The novel I’ve just read, and which caused me such irritation, was published in Spanish in 1951; 28 August, to be precise.
This research, which will involve plenty more work because I copied so many pages from the internet and now I have to sort them out ready to print and read, is an homage to the teenage fan I once was. It’s strange, clearing up some of these mysteries so easily, fifty years on. The image of myself on a bus on the way back from the market is still fresh in my memory, as if it had happened today. I’m in a seat to the left of the aisle, turning the pages of a book from the Serie Naranja collection with a feeling of awe; it was probably The New Adventures of Ellery Queen. In the first few pages, the mystery about their real dual personality – which had been hidden for some years – was revealed, and there were two circular photos, in black and white of course. Manfred B. Lee had a horrible face, particularly because of his tight, cruel lips, and general air of a high-ranking Nazi.
A medical practice used as a radical cure for certain illnesses, a practice as common as a surgical procedure, consisted of killing the patient and then bringing them back to life. On being resuscitated, the patient would be completely cured and even rejuvenated.
My doctor had brought me to a clinic and installed me in a bed; she left, and I lay waiting for the doctor from the clinic whose job it would be to kill me and bring me back to life. She was talking on the phone in the next room; she was talking in a very loud voice, so loud it was annoying, but I couldn’t make out the words, or perhaps I wasn’t very interested in what she was saying. I felt calm, and strangely indifferent about what was going to happen to me. The only thing that bothered me was having to wait for that woman who was nattering away in the next room. On my right was one of those devices used for hanging drips; at the upper end was a little bottle that looked like an old, many-sided vinegar dispenser, and I was connected to that bottle somehow; I was probably receiving oxygen from it, by means of a tube. The bottle also had a metallic device on the front, something like a valve or a little pipe. My doctor had explained that another device was to be connected to it, which would put a gas into circulation that would kill me quickly. The device was within reach. I saw it would be very easy to operate, and I even had the crazy idea that if that doctor went on talking on the phone and delaying things, I could connect it myself to save time.
I spent a long while looking at those things and convincing myself it would be very easy to operate the device; and while I was mulling it over I had a sudden revelation, a flash of understanding. I called my doctor, who must still have been somewhere nearby, and as I was getting out of bed and hurriedly pulling on my clothes, I said I wasn’t going through with the procedure. ‘If they kill me and I come back to life, I won’t be myself any more; I’ll be myself plus the experience of having died.’ I grew increasingly frantic and vehement as I spoke. My doctor seemed wholly indifferent, neither contradicting nor agreeing with me. Perhaps that’s what made me so frantic, as if she didn’t understand the overwhelming truth of my words, and I repeated my speech to her, with gestures and gesticulations, but she remained as detached as ever. The other doctor came over, though I couldn’t see her clearly, and she seemed equally detached.
‘Don’t you understand?’ I practically shouted. ‘If I die and come back to life, I won’t be the same person. And I don’t want to stop being the same person. I don’t care if I carry on being ill. I’d even rather have my legs cut off!’
They nodded, still distant and detached.
At the intersection of four of the tiles in my bathroom, there existed, for a time, a special dimensionality. A tangle of hair was lying there, probably made up of strands that had fallen out of a comb and perhaps been collected together by a draught of air; the tangle was of a considerable size, and the amount of hair involved was also considerable. Now, then: at points, this tangle seemed to be submerged in a puddle of water, though it didn’t look quite like water. It looked more like a solid transparent entity, like those models suspended in transparent resin I used to make; but that puddle or block of resin didn’t have clear limits, it didn’t have edges, although instead of stretching out indefinitely, it only just cleared the clump of hair on all sides. I thought there was something wrong with my eyes; but if there had been, the effect would have been visible in other parts of the bathroom when I moved my eyes or head, and it wasn’t: it was always in the same place. I approached it with some trepidation, thinking: ‘If I put my hand in and pull out the tangle of hair, perhaps my hand will be swallowed up by something and appear in another dimension; who knows what kind of a fold in space-time this is, and if I put my hand in, maybe it will end up in a remote galaxy and some mysterious thing will bite off my fingers,’ etc. In the end, I steeled myself and picked up the tangle of hair. And that’s all it was: a tangle of hair. The puddle, block of resin or visual effect vanished. Then I put the tangle of hair back, and the strange effect returned. I put it down in other places and there was nothing. Then I put it back in the same place, but by then its configuration was slightly different and it didn’t have the same effect; it was just any old tangle of hair.
There are some computer-generated optical illusions that were in fashion a few years ago; books were even published that made use of the effects. You had to look at diagrams in a certain way (I managed it by squinting), and then suddenly, poof, the three-dimensional effect kicked in, and things appeared to be floating in what looked like space. Well, that clump of hair achieved the same effect by chance, and much more successfully than those drawings, since I didn’t need to squint or do anything special with my eyes. It was enough to rest my gaze on it.
Today was a bad day. It began in the early hours of the morning, with what I presume are the effects of some new cystitis medication. When my doctor found out that nothing had changed after several days of treatment, she put me on a different drug. This one seems very effective: the symptoms quickly cleared up, even though I’d gone back to sleep with the air conditioning on. When I went to bed I turned it off, after taking my temperature twice within the space of an hour, because I felt feverish; the top of my head was very hot and my lips were chapped, and I had that unpleasant sensation in my fingertips that sometimes comes with a fever. But my temperature was perfectly normal. At the same time, although I was very tired, despite it being early for me – three in the morning – I also felt very uneasy, with a strange overexcitement that wouldn’t let me sleep. What’s more, one of the effects of the new medication was to make me urinate abundantly, which must have contributed to my feeling better, and I had to get up very frequently to go to the bathroom. Things carried on that way until five o’clock and I still couldn’t sleep. I realised that as well as feeling feverish, I was too hot; and at five o’clock I turned on the air conditioning and took something like an eighth of a Valium 10 tablet which, strangely enough, gradually soothed my anxieties until at last I fell asleep. But taking Valium at that time always makes waking up very confusing. I woke up at what’s currently my usual time, 1.30 p.m., but I couldn’t get out of bed right away. I spent over an hour trying to shake off the dregs of sleep and waiting for my mind to clear a little. In the end I got up, but begrudgingly. My body was aching, especially around my waist. I had all the signs of flu, and it was difficult to coordinate my usual movements and get through my routines; I made mistakes, objects fell from my hands, I didn’t do things in a logical order, or in the order I normally do them in, logical or not. The afternoon was passing me by. At the last minute I managed to go out and have a look at the bookstall, and buy some cigarettes. Once again, plenty more novels had arrived – detective novels, I mean. I brought home a small batch of new ones, and a list of five or six I wasn’t sure I had (and when I got home I found I only had two from the list). Then my yoga teacher came, but I didn’t want to have the class. I wasn’t feeling well, and what’s more I was hungry.
Reviewing this diary, I find that in mid-January I was worried about short circuits blowing the fuse in the caretaker’s office at an inopportune moment. The capricious Ulises had assured me there was no reason for it to blow. I asked him to cause a short circuit deliberately to see what happened, but he laughed and did nothing. Well, some time after 5 a.m. a few days ago, just as I was falling asleep, I went to the bathroom, turned on the light, and BANG! One of the two bulbs exploded spectacularly and, of course, the fuse in the apartment blew. I thought: ‘The fuse downstairs must have blown as well,’ and began cursing Ulises in advance whilst tentatively making my way towards the fuse in the little passage that extends from the kitchen. And indeed it had: I flicked the switch over and over in vain. Nothing. Summoning all my patience, I set off slowly through the darkness to get the torch I always keep handy on my bedside table, returned to the kitchen with it, unplugged the fridge, and then went to the pocket of the shirt where I keep the telephone number for Rosa, the caretaker, just in case. I copied the number out onto a piece of paper in big writing, taped the paper to the telephone receiver, and then went back to the bedroom, flicked the switch on the lamp so the bulb wouldn’t light up unexpectedly when the power came back, and tried to sleep whilst repeating to myself in my head: ‘Call Rosa no later than ten,’ because the food in the freezer might start going off. Fortunately I’d already read enough to be feeling sleepy, meaning there was no need for the laborious activity of reading by the light of a torch or a candle.
So, the matter of the electricity supply is back on the table. I’m waiting until we’re through the height of summer, because going outside before 5 p.m. is nothing short of suicide at the moment. Meanwhile, every time I switch on a light, I tremble a little. Especially in the early hours of the morning.
On the railings of the flat roof next door, exactly opposite my window – the one I look through when I’m dressing to go out – there are two pigeons. On the right, one that looks a lot like the widow; and on the left, a few feet away, one that looks a lot like the husband, or whatever he was, who kept her company while she was looking after her young. They’re both scratching themselves like things possessed. This suggests they really are who I suspect they are, but I still have my doubts. The widow, if it is her, is much fatter, unless it’s an effect of the scratching and the gusts of wind that mess up her feathers; perhaps that’s what’s making her look a bit inflated. She has the same white mark on her back where it’s always been, and now I can see that it stretches almost all the way down, because in order to scratch herself she sometimes spreads her wings and reveals her back in its entirety. But those wings are a lighter grey than I remember the widow’s wings being. It occurs to me that maybe wings are renewed every so often, and that maybe the new ones are paler in colour, at least for a while. The corpse is still on the flat roof, where the workmen left it when they installed that mysterious mast. It’s lost all its dignity; it was probably nudged by a foot, or even kicked, to its new location by the railings on the other side, which are always in the shade. And its shape is very confusing now, like an old, worn-out feather duster with no handle.
Tola has died. Thirty-one years later. I heard the news at the same time; my yoga teacher left me an answerphone message at eleven in the morning. The message said Tola ‘had left his body’, meaning that as well as the information, the message contained an ideological element.
It shouldn’t be sad news; he lived a good, long and productive life. As for me, although I’ve become an orphan again, fully this time – or almost, because there’s always someone around who can serve as a father or mother – it doesn’t feel like that. We hadn’t seen each other for a few years, but, as he himself said to my daughter, ‘There are many different ways of seeing people’; I never felt disconnected from him, or lacking in his presence or support.
Thirty-one years ago I was told in a dream – three times – that Tola had died. When the telephone rang at eleven that morning, I went to answer it feeling absolutely sure I was going to have the news from the dream confirmed, but no, there was a translation error in the message from the unconscious, and in fact it was my physical father who had died. The figure of Tola had become such a powerful paternal image for me that, when something or someone told me telepathically that my father had died, I read the message as if it had been Tola. And at that moment I would have had reason to weep for him loudly. Now I don’t; everything’s OK, everything’s as it should be.
I got up to listen to the answerphone message, because I’d heard the voice even though I couldn’t make out the words, and it sounded like my yoga teacher. I knew it was crucial to listen to the message, because she’d never call at eleven in the morning without a compelling reason to do so. Then I went back to bed, but I didn’t sleep, and I spent a while thinking about these things and remembering the story of that message from thirty-one years ago. In doing so, I reached an interesting conclusion: that telepathic messages are transmitted through symbols; primitive, essential and no doubt archetypal symbols. I remembered what I’d read about some experiments carried out on monkeys. They’re given a kind of computer keyboard that responds to their wishes, and the monkeys learn how to make themselves understood by combining the limited number of symbols available to them. I particularly remember the case of one monkey who was a real coffee fiend, and who learnt to ask for coffee by pressing the key that made people bring him water and a key that represented the colour black. Black water.
The transmission between one unconscious and another presumably uses similar mechanisms; ‘death’ and ‘father’ must of course be two of those universal symbols, and two of the most powerful. I received the death + father package, and when the information reached my consciousness, my consciousness opened the package and translated it as ‘Tola has died’, because at that time the symbol ‘father’ was associated more strongly with him than with the figure of my father.
It’s true that sometimes words which don’t easily correspond to universal symbols are transmitted telepathically, which suggests that there isn’t one single form of telepathic transmission. The form that uses symbols is the most universal and primitive and, as far as we know, it’s linked to the emotions. You could say it’s an emotional transmission rather than an intellectual one. The messages are clearer and more colourful than when the transmission isn’t linked especially closely to emotions or strong affections, and is instead what you might call the intellectual variety. These intellectual messages are more easily lost, or they get confused with the person’s own thoughts, or perhaps they only very occasionally reach the consciousness; conversely, the messages that come from that emotional zone, perhaps the most primitive centre of the brain, the ‘reptile brain’, or perhaps not even from the brain but from some plexus, probably the solar plexus; these messages, I was saying, come with such urgency that they’re difficult to ignore; I don’t think they ever fail to reach the consciousness, and even when the consciousness is determined not to receive them, they find other, often fairly drastic ways of making themselves heard – like the clock that fell off the wall at the moment of my mother’s death.
Well, Tola, we’ll be in touch.
Typing up my corrections to January, I notice there’s a story about the ‘new neighbour’, the usual bookseller’s competitor. Well, he was there for two or three days and then he never came back. I asked the bookseller what happened, and he told me the guy hadn’t sold much and it had been a lot of work for him, because he had to come from a long way away carrying all the boards, trestles and books on a trolley. ‘It’s a shame, because it suited me to have him there,’ he added. I was surprised. ‘Yes, yes. Think about Calle Bacacay. There used to be one restaurant on that street and it was always empty. Now there are ten, and they’re all full.’ He’s right.
Rotring.
Today you can feel the first of the autumn winds. The walk today (or rather yesterday, Saturday) was in the company of M and her daughter – small, captivating, solemn and silent. Amidst the remnants of high summer, brief gusts of air formed whirlwinds, neatly arranging the dry leaves (already!) on the pavement into heaps – heaps of different sizes, because there were several almost simultaneous whirlwinds, some of which were bigger than others. I thought, and said, that it would be wonderful to be able to see the whirlwinds; they should have a colour. Although, actually, I find it hard to imagine their exact shape. You’d need something lighter in substance than the leaves (perhaps, for example, a feather), so its movement could better trace the shape of each whirlwind. Later on we found ourselves right in the middle of one; it wasn’t quite a tornado, but it did feel a bit alarming. Everything was spinning around as if it wanted to wrap us up and carry us away; the dry leaves spun at the level of the pavement, with us as their centre.
In exactly a month, the workshops will begin. I need to start organising them.
The weather is still building on its tendencies from yesterday, and autumn continues apace. Inside my apartment, the ambiguity (a cool breeze coming in through the east-facing windows, and heat, though less intense than in high summer, filtering in through the west-facing ones) is producing a fairly pleasant mixture. I haven’t turned the air conditioners on yet today, and nor were they on while I slept; that considerably reduced the irritation from the cystitis, of which the air conditioners seem to be the sole cause. Yes, it was, and still is, an atypical summer, in no way as torturous as all the others have been for as long as I can remember. Even the walks in the company of my guardians, even at temperatures of thirty-three degrees, were, rather than a torment, a relief from the cold I was experiencing at home. The downsides were moderate bronchitis and moderate cystitis, and a deafness that didn’t go away as it usually does when summer arrives. Still, I’m glad autumn is here, and with it, crucially, this air containing some amount of oxygen, which is blowing in through the east-facing windows and taking the place of the stale air, the kind you find inside a freezer, in this apartment whose windows have been shut for far too long.
I was in charge of a bookshop, and a distributor had given me some books on consignment; among them were at least two substantial volumes which looked very expensive. I don’t remember seeing or experiencing any of this, but it’s possible to deduce it from what I do remember: two boys appear in the shop, salesmen working for the distributor, and they look at me askance, rather accusingly, though instead of saying anything outright they just drop a few hints. I understand, with some effort, that those two very expensive volumes are not in my bookshop, and that they think I’ve sold them and kept the money. Then a more important character shows up, the owner or manager of the distribution company, and I tell him resolutely that there are two books which have disappeared; that I haven’t sold them, and that they’ve probably been stolen, but that at any rate it’s my responsibility. I’m not sure I have enough money to pay for them, but I imagine I’ll be able to do it in instalments. The man, however, doesn’t appear to think it’s very important, and seems more concerned about some circulars my mother has sent to the press, promoting books written by me, or about me as an author. This is very confusing. I’m annoyed, because I don’t like my mother, or anyone else, to do things like that, much less without my knowledge. And it sounds like she’s made some mistakes in those circulars, such as using the word ‘fumature’ instead of ‘literature’. Then the dream becomes rapidly more confusing and all I remember is that the action somehow moves to a place that’s ambiguously related to both the youth wing of the Uruguayan Communist Party and the Guardia Nueva tango club.
Soon after waking up, I interpret this dream as, essentially, a way of calling my attention to the fact I’ve ‘lost’ (I’ve stopped working on) two books, i.e. this diary and the grant project. I feel like I’m falling behind.
I’ll try to start repaying this debt, if only in instalments.
You can’t deny that autumn’s been punctual this year; really it began yesterday, with some persistent drizzle, and today it settled in with this blustery weather that’s been going on all day. It’s terrifying how quickly summer went by; that summer period which has always felt to me like a hell without end, and has seemed to last whole lifetimes. My strategy of air conditioning, detective novels and the computer kept me in an almost constant trance state, and although I wouldn’t say that today I’ve awoken like Sleeping Beauty of the Forest with a kiss from Prince Autumn, or that I’m now functioning at full capacity, I have opened my eyes enough to be terrified by the pulverisation of that summer which, I can say with total certainty, I didn’t experience. You can’t have everything, and if I manage to get rid of the suffering, I get rid of a lot of other things as well. But the point is that I had an OK time, which at this stage in my life and under the current circumstances is saying a lot. It’s just that the almost instantaneous disappearance of a quarter of a year really makes you think.
What I remember of summer are the hallucinatory walks with my loyal guardians, through a Montevideo I didn’t recognise; it was strange, ridiculous, arduous, circus-like, hellish in the aesthetic sense of the word and perhaps in other senses too. It’s a much more dreamlike memory than the memory of an actual dream or nightmare, more like the memory of a fantasy film. Blade Runner, for example. Philip K. Dick would no doubt have found an experience like this very interesting.
When I thought about Sleeping Beauty, I remembered that the most accurate translation probably isn’t the one in the stories I read, or had read to me, as a child – ‘The Sleeping Beauty of the Forest’ – but rather ‘The Beauty of the Sleeping Forest’, a far more evocative and logical title, because the translation used in those books from my childhood suggested a dull, standard-issue forest, which in fact didn’t need to appear in the title at all; not only would ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ contain all the necessary information, but it’s also stronger in a literary sense than ‘The Sleeping Beauty of the Forest’. But the image, from the title onwards, of a sleeping forest, which on top of that contains a Beauty, has an unparalleled evocative power. And it’s true that in the story the forest was sleeping as well; it seemed almost dead.
As for me, I may have opened my eyes a bit but I haven’t woken up, and neither has the forest. And I don’t think any prince would be capable of waking this forest up.
Chl’s back. I still haven’t seen her, but what I mean is that it looks like as of today, we’ll fall back into our rhythm from before the summer. I hope I can resist it. What’s more, if my guardians are prepared to keep dragging me around, I’d like to continue our walks.
Today I dreamed about Vargas Llosa, the writer. Literature is obviously not quite ready to leave me alone. An initial reflection on the dream (‘Why Vargas Llosa specifically?’) reminded me of something my friend Ginebra told me via email a couple of weeks ago: according to her, Mario Vargas Llosa is really called Jorge Mario, like me. The dream must have made use of that point we have in common to develop its narrative.
As ever, there’s a long, muddled stretch of the dream about which I can’t provide any details. I know Elvio Gandolfo was present, and there was a whole storyline about something, perhaps a record that appears in the final part of the dream, which I do remember. My inability to remember this stretch of the dream is particularly frustrating, because I know there were several very interesting aspects.
I was visiting Vargas Llosa at home. He looked just the way he does in photos, and had the elegant presence of aristocratic Peruvians, although at the same time his manner was laid-back, even democratic; he addressed me as an equal, despite the fact that I had a strong sense of being his inferior, as far as social class is concerned.
(I’ve just been interrupted by a fly, goddamn it. It landed exactly opposite me, on the computer monitor, and looked at me steadily whilst rubbing its front legs together. I had to get up, close the door, open the window, raise the blind, turn off the light and waft it with my hand to get rid of it. I think it’s gone, because I can’t see it any more, but I didn’t notice it leave.)
I was sitting in an armchair and leaning backwards, reclining even, probably because the shape of the chair was forcing me to; I didn’t feel very comfortable. He was moving around the room, and he put on a record, which I was supposed to listen to from start to finish. It was an LP, and I estimated it would last about an hour. The truth was that I didn’t want to listen to that record at all, let alone from start to finish, but it seemed very important to Vargas that I did, and I got the sense that it contained some secret or truth I ought to hear. When it started playing, I realised I recognised it; it was one of those pretentious, jazzy pieces, like Rhapsody in Blue. I tried to tell Vargas something to that effect, but he cut me off and gestured that I should pay attention to the record. A little later in the piece came the whole of an extremely famous operatic fragment, which might be called ‘Rustic Cavalry’, or perhaps ‘Light Cavalry’; the passage that bursts equally unexpectedly into the original work, which I’d listened to a few days before. It imitates a horse’s gallop, and in the past it was used in cowboy films to soundtrack the scenes where the cavalry come to the rescue.
The record went on and on, and Vargas, standing a few steps away from me, didn’t alter his facial expression. ‘Wait and see,’ it seemed to be saying, always in relation to that record.
(Now I’ve been interrupted again, not by the fly but by my old friend Georgette, from Paris, upset by Tola’s death; the shock waves have reached as far away as that. Here the laments can still be heard, all around.)
I’d finished some paperwork, at the counter in an office; I don’t know what the paperwork was about, though I have the strange sensation that I’d enrolled in a club or association for people who do sport, and that there was just one administrative detail left to provide before I could gain access to the social area. I have no idea how big the office was, either; all I could see was the counter and, behind it, the young woman who’d served me. The young woman explains that I have to go to another office to finish the paperwork and receive the document accrediting me as a member. She explains that I need to go down some stairs. I don’t understand the explanation very well. She comes out from behind the counter and points, rather impatiently, and a little mockingly, at a door to my right, through which you can see the beginning of a staircase leading down to a lower floor. There’s some uncertainty as to whether I should go down that staircase or another one that’s out of sight and can be reached via a small corridor. The young woman explains things to me with total clarity, but now I don’t remember which of the staircases I went down.
In the office on the floor below, the scene is repeated: a counter, and a woman behind it. This woman looks a little older than the other one. She attends to me and, after a few stages I don’t remember, shows me a piece of paper, holding it some distance away from my eyes. She says this is the document she’s going to give me, but that for some rather bureaucratic reasons, which I don’t understand, she wasn’t able to use the right kind of paper, and had to use another, lower-quality kind instead, and as a result the document won’t last long. As she speaks, I notice that on the document, where she’s holding it with her thumb, a small mark is slightly smudging the letters. She hands me the document, and I go out into the street. As I walk along the pavement, away from the building, I think about that last woman, whom I’d found very pleasant and attractive. I think about how I’d like to see her again, and I know that at that moment she’s walking behind me, accompanied by a small boy who’s her son.
On Friday evening Chl reappeared, now back in the city for good. She came to visit, and this time her presence made it impossible for me to relax; she was very tense, on the verge of hysteria, and with a series of urgent issues to resolve. She spent the whole time trying to speak on the phone to people who weren’t answering her calls, and anxiously chewing gum. An entire pack, twelve pieces of gum.
Yesterday, Saturday, she was a little calmer. I’d dreamed about her that morning, a cornucopia of sex scenes. The dream wasn’t very clear and there were no particular emotions associated with it, and it brought me no pleasure either asleep or awake. It didn’t seem like a ‘familiar’-style ‘visit’, just a standard wish-fulfilment dream.
We tried to resume our Saturday routine, but, just as she’d predicted when she arrived – an hour and a half before we set off – the moment we stepped outside it began to rain. We’ve had this experience a few times: going out, walking a block or so and then having to turn back because of the rain.
She brought me milanesas. I ate milanesas. In two sittings; the last one very late, in the early hours of the morning, a long time after she’d gone home.
It was raining almost constantly for about five days, with the odd brief interruption. Today it’s not raining, but it’s completely overcast. N will be here soon to join me for a walk; I haven’t been out in all this time, except for yesterday’s frustrated attempt, and today’s attempt may well be frustrated too.
I have some work ahead of me: the article for the magazine, the project, this diary, organising the workshops … It’s difficult to face it all, especially now autumn’s begun. Now autumn’s begun I’ve also felt a few twinges of anxiety, as if the defences I developed for the summer weren’t also applicable to the autumn. And the thing is, they’re not. I’m still tied to the reading of detective novels and the computer, but I’m starting to find the detective novels boring and exasperating, and as for the computer, generally all I do is play games, carry out pointless tasks and worry about insignificant details.
These sources of anxiety interest me; they must hold the key to some sort of solution.
The rain didn’t start again, which meant I could go for a walk with N. My body was complaining the whole time; every bit of me hurt. And I didn’t manage that corporeal harmony I can normally achieve after walking a few blocks, that certain elasticity and coordination. Today my legs and feet seemed to be moving arbitrarily, or at least uncoordinatedly, and at no point did I feel particularly stable. I couldn’t devote myself to observing my surroundings; lacking the reflexes to move easily through the streets, I was concentrating hard on the conversation with N and enclosed in a kind of bubble. The only thing keeping me whole, it seemed, was the movement; I felt that if I stopped unexpectedly, my relationship with the rest of the world would be plunged into a sudden chaos, or something like that, as if in fact I were the one maintaining that veneer of order in the world through my own efforts. Later on, at the boliche, sitting at one of the outside tables, N made me laugh uproariously a few times. She’s always funny. Even when she’s also slightly tragic. Her way of recounting what could be described as ‘her misfortunes’ is funny as well. Although on more than one occasion I sensed her deep sadness, and felt it as if it were my own.
N said goodbye at the entrance to my building and got into her car. When I went inside, the lift was on its way down. A white-haired woman emerged, dressed in a black coat. Her plain attire and humble demeanour made me think she was a maid, and perhaps she was. I was taken aback when, after saying hello, she asked: ‘Are you the teacher?’ I replied that people often call me a teacher, but they’re wrong. Then she asked if I ran writing workshops. When I said I did, she told me that people had recommended she come to them. She said that she wrote, and she said it very shyly, as if she were confessing a sin. She also said that unfortunately she couldn’t come to my workshops because she had to work. She knew perfectly well who I was, and seemed to have read some of my books. When we said goodbye, she called me ‘teacher’ again. I asked her not to give me that title, because I’m just a writer somehow trying to convey his experience to a few students. She shook her head as she walked away, saying: ‘The greatest are always the humblest.’ This warmed my heart, not because it made me feel like one of the greatest, but because of the goodness of that woman. When a person is truly good, they always find a way to lift other people’s spirits.
Today my ‘invisible friend’ died.
I really don’t feel like writing. I don’t feel like doing anything else, either. Yesterday was one of my lowest days, at least recently – at least since my move. I was awake in the early hours of the morning, busy with one of my delirious, obsessive tasks: a program I installed not long ago had dared to add a nefarious procedure to my computer; a procedure I won’t describe in detail, as per my decision not to try the reader’s patience with these things. I knew the intrusion could be removed by means of the famous Windows Registry, but I didn’t know how. After working away for a while, I managed to remove one of the intrusive parts of the program, but the other one was stubbornly clinging on, and I had to go to sleep without solving the problem. I only managed to solve it in the early hours of this morning, thanks to a sudden flash of inspiration that took me straight to where the clues to the answer were hidden. However, after getting rid of the problem, I felt none of the happiness I usually feel in such situations, and I think I know why: it seems that the whole sudden obsession, although very legitimate in itself, very mine, I mean, in that I know I’m hypersensitive to intrusions into my computer, was really masking something else. Or indeed, various other things.
One of those things gradually revealed itself when I woke up yesterday around noon; I felt drained, broken and, most extraordinary of all, I had suicidal thoughts – which, as if that weren’t enough, came back a second time. They left me rather frightened, I have to admit. Then I felt an overwhelming desire for a very long lie-in. I needed it, I thought; I hadn’t let myself lie in for ages, and I was tired of my routines, my computer, my detective novels and myself. The best thing to do in such situations is rest, and, if possible, sleep. But I remembered that a friend was coming over at 5 p.m., as arranged days ago, and later on I was expecting a visit from my doctor, with whom I wanted to discuss, very seriously, once and for all, the problem with my gallbladder, which was still bothering me. And I thought about how the next day, i.e. today, the maid was coming, and after that I had a yoga class, and there were entries in my calendar for the following days as well, and I felt profoundly sorry that I couldn’t allow myself any rest. When hunger set in I got up, and when I got up I noticed my abdomen was monstrously swollen; I was sure the problem wasn’t simply cystitis, but cancer of the gallbladder or intestine, a cancer that was rapidly spreading. And the worst thing of all was my mood; dispirited, unpleasant, a kind of psychological pain. It wasn’t long before the telephone rang: my doctor telling me that Jorge, my ‘invisible friend’, had died, and although we’d never met face to face, I felt just then that we’d had a very close connection, and that our friendship had been much deeper than you’d expect a friendship between email correspondents to be. You have to bear in mind that my friend was a bit of a wizard himself, and telepathic, too, of course. My doctor was very upset. Although her friendship with Jorge was also fairly recent, in her case it had been a far more intense relationship because she’d become his doctor straight away and had been through many delicate medical situations with him. What’s more, my friend had played an essential therapeutic role in her life. He was the one who magically cured my doctor of the pain of our separation when I started living alone, allowing her friendship with me to flourish once more. I realise I’ve told all this very badly, and I apologise for entangling the presumed reader in these attempts to use writing to organise my mind.
I understood, then, that the sudden obsession which had kept me awake until 7 a.m. had been masking my awareness of the worsening health and indeed the dying moments of my friend, and that my suicidal thoughts on waking up were none other than the message of death he was sending out into the world. With this realisation, the extreme discomfort in my abdomen faded. I noticed it was moving towards my stomach, and it struck me that all my discomfort was due to a kind of hidden anxiety that had made me swallow tons of air.
There was another component of the package that produced this obsession: certain slight differences I’d noticed in the way Chl was talking and acting around me, which I’d let pass without analysing properly. When she was here yesterday evening, she told me that the main topic of her therapy session had been me. But she wouldn’t go into detail. She was still anxious; less crazy than on previous days, but very anxious nonetheless, and with a strange look in her eye. Then I had another small revelation – the first of the day, because I still hadn’t solved the cybernetic problem – and I asked her to speak clearly. It was obvious there was something she wanted to say, and the best thing to do would be to come out with it once and for all. At the same time I remembered a very unsettling dream I’d had that morning, in which Chl had been unpleasant to me, looking at me with a repugnant cynicism completely unlike her true personality, whilst declaring that she had a whole list of lovers.
‘It’s that I’m detaching myself … ’ she said, and her eyes filled with tears. Mine did too; I tried to hold the tears in and they stung my eyes.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s natural, and normal, and what I was hoping for all along.’
It felt like I was dying, but I was telling the truth. I’d been recommending she go to therapy from very early on, and she waited two or three years before taking my advice. Now she was reaching the stage of detaching herself from me, and above all, I imagine, of the more important detachment from her father. My darling Chl is growing, or at least she’s doing what she can. She’ll lose a lot … and I’ll lose more; but I think what she’ll gain will be infinitely more valuable. Recovering her libido, for example. And being able to make that list of lovers she spoke of in my dream.
At this dramatic moment, as we both sat red-eyed and tearful, we were holding hands. I felt the warmth of her hand just like in the old days, and I saw that her face was recovering the glorious colours of her usual good health, and her beauty was beginning to shine once more. I realised that the causes of the anxiety which had been torturing her for days were connected to that process of growth.
I hope the process includes both of us, and that I too can, in the end, detach myself from her and grow a little … not much, just the necessary amount.
This morning I had a dream with two parts; they could have been two separate dreams, but I feel sure that one sequence was a continuation of the other, although I don’t know how or why, since I only have a few odd fragments.
I find one of the parts astonishingly cryptic, which must mean it would be perfectly transparent to any expert (latent homosexuality, that sort of thing). It was about a young man who was gay, though he wasn’t at all effeminate and behaved completely normally; he was also a very pleasant person. It was more that the topic of homosexuality was there in a few conversations, or as one of those mysterious kinds of information you get in dreams, which said that the man was part of an organisation of homosexuals, and that he’d come to the city to carry out some of his duties as a member of that organisation. One such duty seemed to relate to a restaurant, or rather, to a place that made meals to sell. I caught sight of a selection of cakes or tarts. I even tried a portion of one, a triangle of pastry with something on top, which might have been pieces of ham or something sweet.
The other part of the dream (and now that I think about it, the young homosexual guy in the part I’ve described could be the same male character who appears in this second part) is obviously linked to the news I had from Chl the night before the dream. She was in a huge underground garage, or something like that, and she was trying to drive out of it in a car. I was outside the car, walking ahead, and I saw that some other cars were parked along Chl’s exact route out, with very little room between them; I wasn’t sure Chl’s car would fit past. At the same time, the place where those cars were parked was an outdoor road, and next to one car there was a gnarled old tree. The underground garage hadn’t exactly turned into something else; that stretch of road in the countryside must have begun just after the exit.
Chl’s solution was to buy another car. And do to that, we had to go up in a very large service lift. She went up with a man, perhaps the homosexual, and shut herself away with him in what looked like a normal lift, which was attached to part of the service lift. I stayed outside that lift, or whatever it was, very annoyed at how Chl had shut herself away with that man and left me outside; I was jealous and at the same time I felt rejected, out of place. These feelings were heightened by Chl’s expression, which was solemn and indifferent, and not at all affectionate towards me. It seemed she had to negotiate with that man and I was getting in the way, but nevertheless, I opened the doors to the lift and joined them inside.
Without a doubt, Chl and her therapist (interpretation A), or Chl and her current or future boyfriend, most likely future (interpretation B), and it’s highly plausible that both interpretations are correct (polyvalence of symbols). Chl stopped telling me the specifics of her therapy a while ago, and I noticed how the therapist had made considerable progress when it came to helping his patient recover her libido; I found this extremely annoying, of course, but at the same time, ambiguously, I was happy the therapy seemed to be working. For months I’d been worried about the fact I was still Chl’s main focal point, while the therapist was more of a secondary figure; the therapy would never have got anywhere under those conditions.
My way of processing all this grief is involuntary, and perhaps not very effective, but it’s not something I’m able to choose. Any more than I can choose how to perceive certain things; I found out through my doctor that my ‘invisible friend’, Jorge, had a noticeably swollen abdomen in his last moments – my doctor explained something about the blood having flooded his liver, horrible things I didn’t want to pay too much attention to – and that was how I’d woken up that day, at more or less the time he died. When my doctor called me to pass on the news, I passed on my own news that there was something horrible growing in my stomach, and joked in very bad taste about the possibility I was pregnant, or, more acceptably, that I was rapidly developing cancer.
But of all the grief I’ve been accumulating lately, the most difficult to deal with is the grief for Chl, or rather, for myself in relation to Chl, especially because it’s mixed with a furious wave of paranoid jealousy, which is completely inappropriate. And that’s how I’ve come to be breaking records with my screen time, downloading exotic and almost never useful programs from the internet, making a database to organise everything related to those programs, and other equally trivial things. That’s how I’ve spent the past forty-eight hours. I hope these lines mark the beginning of a change of direction, away from these avoidance techniques.
In a few hours, I’ll have a visit from Pablo Casacuberta and his Japanese friend and film-making partner, Yuki.
I don’t know how we’ll understand one other; the Japanese man doesn’t understand Spanish, and I don’t speak Japanese. Yuki’s English, according to Pablo, isn’t up to much, and neither is mine.
Today I was thinking about Burroughs’ ‘familiars’, and I was reminded of the recent rediscovery of a kind of matter, called ‘dark’ for some reason, even though it’s transparent, which coexists with the matter we know about. Apparently it occupies empty spaces or mingles with the matter we know about because of something to do with lower density – I don’t know exactly how the theory goes. But it’s just a theory, though I read somewhere that some person has found strong evidence to confirm it. I imagine a universe made of this other kind of matter, inhabited by people made of this other kind of matter, and the possibility that under certain conditions, something in one of the universes could be sensed in the other.
Heading out for my weekend errands, but I want to make a note of this so I don’t forget: topic of distorted perception (insect in hair); topic of today’s dream (big rally, photos with my friend [?], loss of camera and other things).