Translated from the Spanish by Gwendolyn Díaz-Ridgeway
July 2010
I have been an unabashed and stubborn traveller, full of passion since childhood and its mental adventures. Imagination was my first vehicle: I explored the neighbours’ roofs or the vacant lot around the block, inventing journeys through wild jungles and oceans.
Over the many years—the many, many years, although I am not aware of time spent as loss but as accumulation—I tackled all kinds of vehicles. From the great ocean liners to cargo ships, the Egyptian felucca, propeller planes and jumbos, and rickshaws and tuk-tuks and even the odd tame camel, not to speak of noble horses for chariots or for riding bareback. I travelled by animal traction, vegetable and even human blood traction (the ciclotaxis). Everything, except traction of one’s own blood.
That was the case until March of 2010, when I undertook a long trip to the bottom of the night and my means of transportation was a virus. An anonymous, undetected virus, although fortunately finally expelled from my system; a virus that lodged in my brain and wreaked havoc as long as it lived. That is to say it accomplished its virus work and transported me to the dark recesses of my self, erasing the memories of the trip with a stroke of the pen. Or almost. That’s why I’ll try to rebuild the trip now that I can. And I dare. Because until a week ago I did not want to know anything about anything, and now I want to know. This is what being in life is all about. And the return to writing.
I’m recovering it, the writing, and once again I’m going to the encounter of that saying which allows us to see words in all their intricacy. For when emerging from the long lethargy, I was convinced that I could never write again, and did not care; impossible to remember that writing is a way of thinking, of reformulating the so-called reality, squeezing it to extract some meaning. Like someone who squeezes a lemon, say, or makes jelly from a fruit that is otherwise unpalatable. Is sugar added to reality in order to sweeten it? Absolutely not. It’s just a metaphor, an attempt to access and decipher the symbol. Enthusiasm is required to derive some meaning beyond skill or talent, and that’s what was missing, what the disease had erased: enthusiasm. There was none left, not even a drop, not even the concept the word enthusiasm encloses.
A certain day in April I opened my eyes and found myself bristly with tubes in a white room, in a white bed, everything white, even the people there, my daughter Anna Lisa among others, everyone wearing white oilcloth gowns and white chinstraps. I looked around in fear. Do not worry, Anna Lisa told me, it’s to avoid infecting you, you had meningitis, you’re now recovering.
Meningitis. Damn it! In February I had returned from a trip to South East Asia with my rowdy eighteen-year-old grandson, Gaspar. Bangkok, all of Burma (sorry, Myanmar)…I relived the many instances in which they advised me not to travel, for I had recently broken my left wrist. But such a slight inconvenience was not going to deter me. Nor would I interrupt that trip when, in a crummy Burmese city on the way to the mysterious Inle Lake, I stumbled and, trying to protect the injured wrist, I fissured the healthy one. Even so I kept on going, with both bandaged hands raised high for good circulation. Not as a sign of surrender, no, for it took me a while to give up on the trip. Having soup through a straw and sitting on a bench to shower, I managed to keep on the move and arrived with Gaspar at Angkor Wat, in Cambodia. There, among the ruins of ancient Khmer temples in the midst of luscious forests and lianas, I concentrated on looking for the impossible: the golden fur and the wise eyes of the Zelofonte, that mythical, angelic animal conceived by my mother in her last novel, a legacy of humour, eroticism and hope.
And shortly after my return: meningitis.
What a way to go in search of myths, immersed in the sea of unconsciousness, with just very fleeting moments of perception. In and out, going and coming, nights that were like days of restlessness and days like lethal nights. Times of not being able to put together a sentence, not being able to respond correctly to a simple question: I was born in the year 1209, the address of my childhood house; had three children instead of one, unconsciously appropriating my two grandchildren.
I slept, or fell into a coma or semi-coma, hibernated. Every so often a phrase slipped out of my mouth without my registering it. ‘Visitors aren’t allowed,’ I would mumble. Impossible memories, ungraspable as the moment when the disease was triggered with fever and fierce headaches, according to what they tell me, long before they took me to the clinic.
Hospitalised for over ninety days, outside time. And just one single perception or hallucination or satori in that long period of not being anywhere, as in an immeasurable pit, barely breathing, almost a cyborg plugged to various tubes. The only perception I had, the only one I could rescue from the pit, was not unpleasant: I wandered through a soothing mist. I moved along quietly, weightless. Till all of a sudden I reached the black curtain. A curtain black as deep as there is no other black, pure coal, tar, impossible and ductile. The mandate was to keep on moving, to go through the curtain. But I realised that what awaited me on the other side was death. Death as I used to hope for: total disappearance. But it was total disappearance in the most absolute blackness, something impossible to conceive, to accept. I do not want this at all! I panicked, when a long list of works to complete, of writing yet to be done, stopped me short.
The black curtain was my only hallucination but it filled me with the memory of no-time as I wandered along.
Time and space with equal density and flatness, without elapsing. We are the ones who move on, and when I thought I was going through the twilight of space I was moving in time without measure, through that brown, cottony mist, walking in time because the space was reduced to a hospital bed, undetectable, while that which used to be me circulated in time and was well accompanied by the lukewarm penumbra.
Alone I walked. Or better still, I progressed without effort in the cottony softness, alone as they say that the dead are alone and it was pleasant and I did not care at all, alone while around me—surrounding that shell on the bed from which I was absent—there were people, always people, and I could not know, nor did I care.
And so, now, the fear of dying in solitude has lost its punch.
The spongy mist does not admit company, but that is only one possibility among many. There are thousands of ways to die and it is impossible for me to know if I was one step away from death as I walked without substance until I reached the black curtain, that wall of horror. And I stopped—not to contemplate or rest or something like that—I stopped in panic and knew: so much writing awaited me before crossing the barrier.
And what for?
Why write more than what I’ve already written?
Only now I know about the need to write as a means to continue re-drawing myself.
To keep in place this contour of mine.
To travel, as now, with the journey of the pen on soft paper, to walk with the pen on the smooth surface of the paper, smooth as a cloud, as warm mist.
As for walking, I have walked a lot and in the most varied ways over the years.
I walked on fire—but that’s another story. I walked in the sea of sand and even into the bowels of the earth. I walked through iridescent caves in a mine of rock salt, through tunnels and dykes I walked, and through the caverns of a copper mine in Atacama (Ata/cama, what a word in Spanish! tied to the bed).
I was a fish trapped in the net of that bed, a bed of grief, pain, rage.
In the nothingness of the lucid penumbra.
To be one and already be another, as one who unfolds
That is to write:
The reflection of a light that urges and harasses us.
It was just a moment in the long days of unconsciousness, or it seemed only a moment but maybe the wandering took all the time of not being there or anywhere.
Of those mental wanderings I have dozens of images of my poor ramshackled brain, like jumping potholes, but that is not perceived at first glance. In these technicolour images any brain seems neat, ordered in its box, and yet mine was deconstructed, thanks to a damn virus. My brain: a puzzle of a thousand pieces, reassembled now to keep on writing.
This is the real mandate
The desire
The urge for a scaffolding of words that will sustain me.
The word is my skeleton, it keeps me erect, it gives me form and consistency.
The word is my muscle, it moves me through life.
The word is me although ‘me’ is not the exact word.
A tide rises, overwhelming, and when it completes its course it retreats leaving one dry on the dry beach with some dead fish and various algae; a flotsam so that the existence of the sea will never be forgotten.
That high tide.
And the word, and love, and the gratitude that also sustain us.
Good: we can keep on writing, that is to wander without a fixed course with laughter in tow.
The writing of laughter and its design; tinkling of bells, sonority of Tibetan bowls.
Laughter. Writing. Why is it that sometimes we want to separate them if they fulfil a similar purpose?
They save us, each in their own way.
Save us.
One looks back, wanting to tell everything without hesitation and there is nothing left, everything has been told a thousand times.
Hands empty.
It is our fate:
To start again with the simplicity of the first letter.