Today (yesterday) I had a fleeting visit from Chl. We’ve not been seeing much of each other. I don’t know if I was already in an unusual state, because today saw some changes, permanent ones I hope, to my sleeping hours and my relationship with the computer, but if I was, I didn’t notice. The fact is that when I saw her I felt strange, dizzy, and little by little I realised I was becoming deeply distressed, almost to the point of shedding a few tears. At the same time, there seemed to be something undefinable and strange about her, almost as if I didn’t know her. Maybe the treatment she’d had done at the hairdresser was something to do with it; her hair looked too smooth and limp. As a side point, she’s going to the hairdresser too much; something like three times a week, or so she says. I shouldn’t care, but I do care, and it bothers me that I do. The expression on her face today, especially in her eyes, which are usually wonderful and frank, open and transparent like a girl’s, was rather evasive. I had the feeling she was hiding something. I often have that feeling these days, and I try not to take it seriously, but today my impression seemed entirely true and accurate. She stayed for a few minutes, ate a few slices of my cheese and drank a coffee, then she put her raincoat back on and left. I didn’t want to go with her to the bus stop. There have been a few times lately when I haven’t wanted to go with her, perhaps because I barely leave the house all day and feel infinitely too lazy to go out at that time. I always offer her money for a taxi, which every now and then she accepts, and then I don’t worry so much; but today I didn’t offer her anything. Suddenly, looking at her, I was overcome with distress and had a feeling of irreparable loss. That feeling must have been brewing for a while now; not for nothing did I disappear several weeks ago.
A few days back I wrote this about Chl to an invisible email friend, replying to a message she’d sent me:
… today she arrived resplendent; the therapy is setting her more and more on the right path. She said we needed to talk … and we all know what women mean by that. She said, ‘I think it’s time to end what we have.’ I laughed uproariously, with thunderous guffaws. ‘What we have ended a long time ago. It’s dead and buried, six feet underground.’ She laughed, too, but she was worried. ‘But I don’t want to stop seeing you, or going for walks with you, or making you milanesas.’ I laughed thunderously once again: ‘So what will be different?’ Well, it seems what will be different is saying it out loud, making the reality of the situation official. It’s the strangest break-up I’ve ever experienced.
Weeks of that; mourning for Chl, and for the dead-dead. A hidden, subterranean sort of mourning, which doesn’t show how much it hurts. I think I stopped writing in this diary when my invisible friend died; the final straw. And today that grief has hit me all at once. Chl left hours ago, and I’m still in the same state, as if I’m about to start weeping. I should actually do it. I should relax my control.
The mystery of the disappeared corpse: the day I announced it, I raised the blinds and saw that the dead pigeon was gone from the roof. Near where it used to be there was an empty plastic bottle, and I have no idea how it got there. A family-size soft-drink bottle, which the wind had been blowing from place to place. There was also a small rod a few inches long, which looked like it was made of wood, probably left behind by the men who installed the mast. And a few other pieces of rubbish coming and going in the wind. All that was there, but the corpse was not, which I found deeply surprising. If someone had been intending to clear the flat roof, they wouldn’t only have moved the corpse; how hard would it have been to take the bottle and the rod as well? I also thought the corpse had been there for too long to make appealing prey for a rat; it’s now an unrecognisable pile of squashed, congealed feathers. I was surprised, but I didn’t let myself get carried away by the mystery, and decided instead to see it as a relief. It certainly cheered me up to be able to look out of the window without immediately seeing the ugly, pathetic and spine-chilling presence of death.
But the other day, when I raised the blinds, the bottle had disappeared and the pigeon was back in its place. Rather than speculating about shadowy machinations, I’d like to think that the bottle had been blocking my view of the most visible part of the corpse, the pale part, and that the dark part had merged with the shadows on the floor of the flat roof, with the help of the cloudy sky. It’s the most reasonable explanation. As for the bottle, it’s simple; the wind moves it around, and it must have blown over to a part of the flat roof I can’t see. Today it was back again, in the same place as before.
When I raised the blinds at the beginning of my day, which still isn’t over, I saw the widow for the first time in months, a few feet away from the corpse. On the railings furthest from my building was another pigeon, gazing out over the bay. That pigeon flew off. The widow stood there a while longer, only moving to arrange her feathers nervously with her beak from time to time. She didn’t get any closer to the corpse. She seemed rather distracted, or confused. Or as if she were waiting for something to happen. Then she flew onto the railings and stayed there for a bit, more or less where the other pigeon had been, also looking out over the bay. I looked out over the bay myself, but I didn’t see anything interesting. Then I stopped staring through the window because I was very behind; I’d woken up extremely late, thanks to a mosquito that bit me just as I was dozing off at 5 a.m. I got up, looked for it, found it – a miserable mosquito, small and sickly looking, but an effective biter nonetheless – and took it out with a good wallop. But I couldn’t go back to bed right away; I was overexcited, I’m not sure why. I smoked a cigarette, and then went back to bed and read until 7.30 a.m.
It would be very hard work attempting to fill the gaping expanse of my diary in recent times with anecdotes – I don’t know if it’s been weeks or months since I stopped writing with any regularity.
I could at least write that around the middle of April my workshops started again. I have a few students; only on Thursdays, in the morning and afternoon. After which I’m a wreck, as always, until Sunday. Then I start trying to piece myself back together.
I’d like to be better at keeping my life, my schedule and my interests on track. But it seems ever more difficult, more unattainable. The control I have over my mind is negligible, almost non-existent. I do everything entirely automatically.
I’m drugged, and sleepy, because at 9 p.m. I started taking little pieces of Valium, with the aim of going to sleep early because tomorrow I have workshops from four thirty in the afternoon. I’ve taken about 4 milligrams, according to my calculations, which is enough to flatten out my mind, though without putting me to sleep too drastically. In a few moments’ time, I’ll take the final milligram to complete the dose, and go to bed.
Today Chl came with a load of steaks (the butcher in her neighbourhood has much better meat than I can find in the market) and lots of milanesas she’d made. The girl’s a saint. But this novel is drawing to a close …
She brought me a bag of videos I’d lent her; this afternoon, while I was looking for an item of clothing, I found the odd garment of hers in my wardrobe. And when she was here this evening, she found a few more of her things of her own accord, and I remembered the clothes and gave them to her, and I remembered a few more of her possessions that were in the other room and handed them over as well. Concomitantly – a horrible word – I found, after she’d left, that she’d put the comb I kept at her house in the bag with the videos. That made me very sad. I thought: ‘The novel is coming to an end.’ And this novel is also coming to an end, because it seems that they’re one and the same.
Chl was so beautiful today.
There they go again with Beethoven; again with the ‘Ode to Joy’, Freude, Freude. It makes me think of Germans doing gymnastics, following orders from a horse-faced instructor. They played the same thing yesterday. It’s like a nightmare, only this part of the nightmare is the least abrasive; I wouldn’t say I’ve come to enjoy Beethoven, or at least not his symphonies, though I’ve heard the odd sonata that’s decent enough, but I’m classifying him as a lesser evil. It’s a few weeks since I switched from Radio Clarín to SODRE, coinciding more or less with the beginning of SODRE’s continuous transmission; instead of playing the national anthem at midnight and then going off to bed the way they used to, they carry on continuously, following the example of Clarín. Clarín has become unbearable; they’re always repeating the same things (and I see now that SODRE does it, too, but I’d been listening to Clarín for years and I knew it all off by heart) and they’ve included a few unbearable, melodramatic adverts, which seem entirely out of place. It’s all in terrible taste. But sometimes I need to go back to Clarín; first I give SODRE on FM a go, and sometimes it’s fine, but there they do play the national anthem at midnight and then go to bed. They have a slimy announcer with a persuasive voice, the sort I can’t stand, though fortunately they don’t have many advertisers. But where the real nightmare begins, on both SODRE stations, and especially the AM one, is with opera. Opera seems to be back in fashion at the moment, or perhaps it was never out of fashion; but I’m amazed at how many hours a day they dedicate to those vociferous men and women, whether in an opera proper or in songs butchered by low barreltones, hollow tenors or, worst of all, the most absolutely unbearable, sopranos. All people whose necks I’d gladly wring with my own hands. I can’t imagine what kind of perversion, inner demon, abnormality or defect could bring people to come out with those monstrous, repulsive shrieks, to force the voice in that anti-natural, insolent, over-the-top way, as if they were competing in an Olympic event, showing off their physical strength, trying to break some kind of record. Nothing could be further from, more separate from or more opposed to art. How that stupid sport has managed to get mixed up in music is something I’ll never understand, and nor do I want it explained to me. It makes me ill. Sometimes I leave the radio on and go to the bathroom, and the people of SODRE take advantage of the situation to slip on a soprano, and there I am, suffering, wondering whether to interrupt the important activities I’m engaged in and turn the radio off, or to put up with even more of it. The same thing happens when I’m concentrating on the computer; I often become disengaged from the world around me and fall into a kind of trance, and then from one moment to the next I notice I’m not feeling good, I’m on edge, all is not right with the world, and finally I realise there’s opera on the radio and they’ve been bombarding me for ages with their disgusting vocal exercises.
Luckily there were no opera fans in my family; I’d almost say I was completely unaware of its existence for many happy years. In contrast, my cousin Pocho’s father tortured his son systematically, night after night, during and after dinner, with operas broadcast on the radio (SODRE, no doubt). My cousin Pocho, when he was a boy, covered his ears and yelled for someone to turn off ‘those shouting men’. ‘Shouting men’, shouting men and women, is a perfect description of opera. And the way they shout, too; so enthusiastically.
Operas generally have interesting overtures. They should stick to those. The overture sounds like the only point when the composer feels at liberty to give free rein to his imagination. Then come the dramatic acts, and he’s back in the service of some stupid libretto. Inspiration is replaced by manual labour, brick upon brick. Yesterday they played the overture to the third act of Lohengrin; I like it, despite all the Wagnerian pomposity. Maybe I like it because I had the record when I was younger, on a 78, and used to listen to it a lot.
Now Beethoven’s over and they’re playing some fairly outlandish contemporary thing. There are various worthwhile examples of contemporary music, but what they play on SODRE, at least, suffers from the malady that’s unfortunately so common in this kind of music: it’s too cerebral, with too many calculated effects and a total lack of inspiration, freedom and joy. Strange, disconnected sounds, and long pauses, as if to create a sense of anticipation that’s very unlikely to lead anywhere pleasant.
True, they sometimes play something by Bach, Vivaldi or Brahms, or other minor but very interesting geniuses. I’ve been surprised by Dvořák; I didn’t know him well – only his symphony From the New World, which I like – and lately I’ve found myself listening attentively to very peculiar pieces of music whose origins I can’t identify, and sometimes I end up standing by the radio in the early hours of the morning, putting off going to bed, listening to that music and waiting for the announcer to reveal what it is, and very often it’s Dvořák. And now I’m going to bed, while the radio carries on doling out disjointed and almost meaningless sounds, which are completely unsuitable for this time of night, or morning, when you want something warmer and friendlier, whether you’ve just got up and are about to have breakfast, or whether, like me, you’re on the way to bed.
As I was saying, my friend, this novel is coming to an end. I saw Chl again fleetingly yesterday; she turned up half asleep, drank a coffee and then left, but it was enough for me to feel how horribly tied to her I am. My sexual urges, which are normally dormant, awaken the moment I see her; and when I say ‘sexual urges’ I don’t just mean desire, but much more besides. She’s still the only female presence that can move me to my very core; she’s still a part of me, body and soul. Today I woke up feeling a kind of cosmic disorientation that gradually turned into nervousness, and later into fury; I reacted violently to the slightest upsets, and when I spoke to people, even just over the phone, I did it in a kind of bark. Later, intrigued by the lack of news, I called Chl; I was hoping to see her again today, but she reminded me of something I’d never known; that she’d invited NNN – the individual whom I’ve thought for some weeks is her current partner – round for dinner, to eat one of her stews. She says she told me yesterday, and it’s very likely that she did and I didn’t want to take it in, and now an immense sadness has been added to my fury. I want to burst out sobbing. She’s revealing her cards very slowly, and I think I’d rather have the truth all together, all in one go. I didn’t manage to extract any more information during that phone call, but something in her way of expressing herself, and the way she carefully avoided giving clear, direct responses, makes me 98 per cent sure I’m right.
And it makes me even more furious that it’s making me furious at all. I understand the sadness, but not the fury. Or the jealousy.
The same reprehensible part of me has been calling the shots for too long now, and it’s time for a coup d’état in my psychological make-up to put someone reasonable in charge. That spoilt child, that primitive reptile, that aching, suffering mass has to be got rid of, pushed under and made to relinquish all power over my behaviour once and for all. What have I been doing over these long months? I’ve been collecting computer programs, downloading them from the internet. As I learn to use them, I’ve been writing descriptions of them and organising the descriptions in a database, but there are so many of them; by now I’ve acquired precisely 394 programs, and I’m still hunting for more. I have programs of all kinds, some dreadful, others brilliant; some free, others paid-for; though I normally trick the paid-for ones so I don’t have to pay. I trawl the internet looking for cracks for these programs on pages of cracks. I’ve even opened programs to examine them in a hexadecimal viewer so I can try to modify them, and sometimes, though not very often, I’ve succeeded. I’d like to look into this more; how to crack and patch programs. This exhilarating activity has filled hundreds of late nights, or early mornings. Pornography has fallen by the wayside; I no longer have any interest in downloading so much as a single photo, and I even deleted the obscene contents of two or three ZIP disks, which means that all those hours I spent searching, and all that money I spent on the telephone bill, have gone to waste.
I understood this lack of interest in photos, whether soft-core or hardcore, as a positive sign. And so it was, or would have been, were it not for the fact that it cleared the way for a new kind of addiction. I’ve become hooked on these little robots, their jolly colours and the way they work, often so precisely and elegantly, on tasks I could very easily do without but which have now become essential, such as clearing the hard drive of junk files, cleaning the Windows Registry, defragging the hard drive, manipulating files in programs that are considerably better than the infernal Microsoft programs, swapping icons, creating new icons, retouching old icons, adding sounds, and filling the edges of the screen with toolbars that hide themselves when they’re not in use, and which allow me to open any one of the infinite programs I’m accumulating at the click of a mouse.
Admittedly, I don’t use them all; not even close. I’d say I end up uninstalling most of them, but while I learn how they work and how useful they might be, I keep them handy in those toolbars.
That’s what I’ve been doing over the past few months, as well as reading detective novels, still at an average rate of one per day, and not much else. I’ve been going to bed at an average time of around 7 a.m., and getting up at three in the afternoon, though sometimes four, or five, or even six. Tomorrow, Thursday, I have a workshop; I’ll need to get up early. That means being on my feet by about 2 p.m., which, given the circumstances, is a heroic act I’m never sure I’ll achieve. I’ve managed until now, and I hope I manage tomorrow.
But the fury is still overwhelming, and the sadness, and I’m groping blindly at the keyboard in search of a way of finishing this novel, of giving it a decent ending, even if it’s unlikely to be a happy one.
I couldn’t sleep in the early hours of this morning, though I was dying of exhaustion, with my eyes glued shut and weepy from lack of rest. What’s more, I had to get up a lot to go to the bathroom and urinate, which to my surprise I did abundantly. I was cold and covered myself with the thermal duvet; that, combined with the gas heater, soon made my legs horribly uncomfortable, since I can’t stand them being too hot or under any weight, and I had to get rid of the duvet and use a thin blanket instead, which left me with cold feet. I got up to fill the hot-water bottle, for the first time this year. When I went back to bed I started coughing and felt short of oxygen, so I got up again and turned off the heater. Then I realised the cough was mainly caused by the gastric reflux, which means I have to sleep practically sitting up, and that always gives me a sore neck and shoulders. Once I had everything more or less sorted and thought I’d finally be able to sleep, I realised I couldn’t; I felt strangely uneasy, and was tossing and turning as a result. Then I realised I really did have a stomach ache, or what’s known as ‘a bad case of indigestion’. I wasn’t surprised, because I remembered I’d had dinner quite late, and I’d eaten a spectacular stew Chl had brought round. The stew wasn’t made for me, but rather for the person I consider my rival, that young man who’s been visiting her a lot lately; the fact she cooks for him makes me uneasy in a way I think I’ve already mentioned in this diary. According to Chl, the young man stood her up, and so I claimed the stew for myself – a sad victory over the enemy. And because of that, and because of the slightly less psychological matter of the high levels of fried food and red peppers in the stew, it’s not surprising it didn’t agree with me. However, I think I stayed up for long enough after eating that I would have digested a good deal of it, were it not for the fact that immediately after the stew I had a steak and my classic tomato with garlic and onion. Since I recently cut out bread, I had to accompany this with a huge quantity of biscuits, which didn’t really agree with me either, because for a while I haven’t been able to find my preferred brand. I can digest my preferred brand of biscuits with no trouble at all. And on top of all that, before going to bed, I had some spoonfuls of peach jam. I don’t usually eat jam; it’s a rare occurrence for me. But when I’m seized with the urge, I can’t resist. And jam, of course, can’t be eaten by itself; there’s no fun in that. So I had to send a few more biscuits down after it. All this was working its way through me while I was trying to sleep, hence the tossing and turning. It was impossible to get comfortable. My eventration was so swollen I thought it was going to burst. When I woke up at around five in the afternoon, after finally getting to sleep at 7 a.m., I had a horrible taste in my mouth and understood better what the trouble had been. But while I was trying to sleep and imagining I had insomnia, I thought about this diary.
I have a big problem with this diary. Before going to sleep I was thinking that its novelistic structure means it should be coming to an end by now, but its diary-like quality doesn’t allow that, for the simple reason that nothing exciting has happened in my life for some time that would make a suitable ending. I can’t just write ‘The End’; there has to be something, something special, an event that enlightens the reader about all that’s been said, something to justify the hard work of reading this mountain of pages. An ending, in other words.
When I woke up today, I carried on thinking. It occurred to me that I should do something; since there’s no sign of anything new, or any change or interesting surprise, I should take matters into my own hands and create a suitable topic for the ending. Then I decided that wasn’t really allowed. I can’t go out into the street dressed as a monkey to generate an interesting and unusual anecdote with which to finish the book; I can’t start structuring my life around the diary and the need to finish it. I also thought about how the ideal ending would be something like this:
‘I’m tired of this situation, I’m tired of this grey life, I’m tired of the pain caused by this strange relationship with Chl, the knowledge that I’ve lost her even though she’s right there, the sexual tension every time we meet, which doesn’t lead to anything except this absurd addiction to the computer; I’m tired of myself, of my inability to live, of my failure. I didn’t manage to finish the grant project; it was a bad idea, it can’t be done, I didn’t realise that time can’t go backwards, or that I’ve become someone else. The writerly role is stuck to my skin but I’m not a writer any more, and I never wanted to be one. I don’t want to write, I’ve said everything I wanted to say, and writing has stopped being fun and giving me an identity. It’s not true what my friend Verani says in some essays, particularly in his work on Empty Words: that my desperation arises from not being able to write. I can write; look, I’m writing now and I’m doing it well. I can write whatever I like; no one disturbs me, no one interrupts me, I have all the equipment and all the comfort I need; I just don’t want to, I don’t feel like it. And I’m tired of playing this role. I’m tired of everything. Life is no more than a stupid, unnecessary, painful burden. I don’t want to suffer any more, or carry on with this miserable life of routines and addictions. As soon as I close these quotation marks, then, I’m going to shoot myself in the head.’
That would perhaps make the book sell very well; in this country, death whips up an exceptional interest in the work of the person who died. It’s the same with people who go into exile. But I’m not interested in selling books. I never have been. And what’s more, I’m not actually tired of life. I could carry on living exactly the life I’m living now for all the time the good Lord allows me, indefinitely even. It’s true that some of my behaviour annoys me, but it’s also true that I don’t work very hard to fight it. I’m happy, really, I’m comfortable, I’m content, even within a kind of overarching depression. My emotional dependence on Chl stops me attaching myself to other women, but that could also be a clever move on the part of my unconscious to protect me from further complications and problems. Felipe came today with another load of books. We were chatting, and he said: ‘People love you.’ And it’s true, and I told him that I can’t reconcile feeling universally loved with my paranoia, my famous paranoia. I don’t think I could ask for more than I have, or feel better than I feel. I hope God grants me many years of health; and in the meantime, nothing could be further from my intentions than picking up a gun and shooting myself in the head – especially considering that I might not even know how to pick up a gun. That ending for the novel, then, will have to be ruled out.
So the problem remains. I don’t know what to do to keep hold of the reader, to make them carry on reading. Something had better happen soon, or all this work will have been in vain.
I’d already turned the computer off and begun my bedtime ritual when I heard the SODRE announcer saying ‘soprano’, a key word that always has me sprinting furiously for the radio to switch it off, effing and blinding, but then I heard him saying ‘Villa-Lobos’ and I smiled. As a result, I turned the computer on, because I’ve lost the habit of writing by hand, and it didn’t occur to me that writing by hand would have been much quicker and easier, and now here I am, writing in Word to set down my opinion, which is somewhat radical, and subject to alterations if more information is added to my squalid musical knowledge, that Villa-Lobos is the only musician who has managed to use a soprano – in his Bachianas Brasileiras – artfully and elegantly, without damaging the ears or spirits of his listeners, and without giving me homicidal urges. I also share his love of cellos.
Worm dream; must write it down.
The dream, as usual, was long and complex. I’m sure it was full of very interesting and significant situations, but it was erased when I woke up. Only a few images remained, and almost all of them were gone before long. Now the only thing left is the part relating to the worm.
At what I’ll call the beginning of the dream, to show that it’s quite a distance from the end, I was going into a room, probably a kitchen, though I can’t be sure; I could only see part of it. On the floor was an enormous light-coloured wicker basket. There were a few objects inside it, a plate and something else; but most importantly, and this I did see very clearly and remember well, there was a big, fat worm, a greenish yellow in colour. It was disproportionately large – around one and a half feet long or more, and some four inches in diameter – which made it seem more like a toy worm, or a tacky decoration, but it was real. Someone had stabbed it, and the big knife, like the one I use to cut raw meat, was still buried in its body; the body had been cut in two, but not all the way. The part on the left was longer than the part on the right, and on either side of the knife you could see a circle of that sliced flesh, which was lighter in colour than the outside of the body. The worm was completely still, which made me think it was dead, and there was no blood or any kind of bodily fluid in sight that the wound could have secreted. The cut was clean, and what you might call dry. It was a disturbing sight, but I was busy with other things and couldn’t hang about; somehow or other the dream went on and on, and a lot took place. Towards the end, I went back to that room, and I saw the sliced-up worm in exactly the same state as before. I felt upset again, and had a sense that this was the wrong way to go about things, that if someone wanted to cut a worm in half they should do it properly and not leave the job unfinished. Then I moved closer, leant over the worm and pushed the blade of the knife down hard. The worm was divided into two entirely separate pieces. At that moment, both pieces of worm started moving, as if the fact of still being joined by a small ligament had immobilised them, and on being cut in half they’d recovered their freedom. The two parts were moving in different directions, both apparently whole, healthy and normal.
When I woke up and remembered the dream, my first thought, of course, was about the castration complex. Then I realised there was another, more important theme, albeit still linked to castration. I saw clearly that this worm had been made up of me and Chl, that someone (Chl) had begun to cut it, to separate the two parts, but hadn’t managed to finish the job, and that it was up to me to make the final cut and get us back our freedom. It’s like being castrated, yes; more broadly, it’s like being mutilated, or without the ‘like’: it is a mutilation. Necessary, however painful it might be. But in the dream there was no pain.
Now, yes, I am feeling a little pain, but most of all I’m worried: I didn’t hear from Chl yesterday, Saturday, or today, Sunday (I know it’s now Monday, but my Sunday hasn’t finished yet). During the day I didn’t feel the need to call her, and that attitude seemed to be in keeping with the separation shown in the dream; the dream, I thought, wasn’t advising me to make that cut, but simply demonstrating that I’d already done it, or that I was doing it at that moment. But at 10.20 p.m. I started to worry, after returning home tired from a walk with E. There were no messages on my answerphone. Then I called Chl’s house and left a message. At midnight on the dot, very worried indeed, I called her on her mobile; no answer. I called her house again and left another message; I could tell by the number of beeps that no one had listened to the previous one – although perhaps someone had heard me leaving it. In the new message, I asked her to call me as soon as she was able to talk. But she hasn’t yet, and I know I won’t hear anything until tomorrow now, or rather until this afternoon, when I wake up and call her work, and find out about the horrible things that have happened to her, or, more likely, hear a story I won’t believe. But right now I just want to know she’s alive and well.