JULY STORIES
July has been a strange month. The other day I went to the beach and I saw a woman of about thirty, pretty, wearing a black bikini, who was reading standing up. At first I thought she was about to lie down on her towel, but when I looked again she was still standing, and after that I didn’t take my eyes off her. For two hours, more or less, she read standing up, walked over to the water, didn’t go in, let the waves lap her shins, went back to her spot, kept reading, occasionally put the book down while still standing, leaned over a few times and took a big bottle of Pepsi out of a bag and drank, then picked up the book again, and, finally, without ever bending a knee, put her things away and left. Earlier the same day, I saw three girls, all in thongs, gorgeous, one of them had a tattoo on one buttock, they were having a lively conversation, and every once in a while they got in the water and swam and then they would lie down again on their mats, basically a completely normal scene, until all of a sudden a cell phone rang, I heard it and thought it was mine until I realized it had been a while since I had a cell phone, and then I knew the phone belonged to one of them. I heard them talking. All I can say is that they weren’t speaking Catalan or Spanish. But they sounded deadly serious. Then I watched two of them get up, like zombies, and walk toward some rocks. I got up too and pretended to brush the sand off my trunks. On the rocks, I watched them talk to a huge, hideously ugly man covered in hair, in fact one of the hairiest men I’ve ever seen in my life. They knelt before him and listened attentively without saying a word, and then they went back to where their friend was waiting for them and everything went on as before, as if nothing had happened. Who are these women? I asked myself once it was dark and I had showered and dressed. One drank Pepsi. The others bowed down to a bear. I know who they are. But I don’t really know.
A.G. PORTA
There’s a new novel out (Braudel por Braudel [Braudel by Braudel], El Acantilado) by my friend A.G. Porta, whom I’ve known since his son was practically an infant and now the kid is twenty-one or twenty-two, a film student, and is taller than his father and taller than me, too. I remember that I met A. G. Porta in 1978, at the offices of a fringe Barcelona publishing house that only published poetry and that resignedly called itself La Cloaca, or The Sewer. It wasn’t a great start, but for us — poets at the time and the foosball champions of Barcelona’s fifth district — it was at least a promising start. I’ll never forget that when I didn’t have a cent my friend would show up at my apartment on Calle Tallers with yogurt and cigarettes, sensible gifts. Then the years went by. I left for Girona and later Blanes, and A. G. Porta stayed in Barcelona. But my first novel is also his first novel, for the simple reason that we co-wrote it. Its title: Consejos de un discipulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce [Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Joyce Fanatic]. Many times I’ve been asked which of us was the Morrison disciple and which of us was the Joyce fanatic. A. G. Porta, clearly, was the Joyce fanatic. He’d read everything by Joyce and in fact his subsequent long silence is in some way a product of his reading. I remember that for many years he wrote or collected random sentences from Ulysses with which he assembled poems that he called readymades, à la Duchamp. Some were very good. Now, at last, he’s written another novel. Braudel por Braudel is about life, about the flow of life, about appearances, about deceit, and about happiness. His writing is as clear as a Hockney painting. Whoever picks up the novel won’t be able to put it down until the last page.
FRIENDS ARE STRANGE
One is prepared for friendship, not for friends. And sometimes not even for friendship, but at least we try: usually we flail in the darkness, a darkness that’s not foreign to us, a darkness that comes from inside us and meshes with a purely external reality, with the darkness of certain gestures, certain shadows that we once thought were familiar and that in fact are as strange as a dinosaur.
Sometimes that’s what a friend is: the distant shape of a dinosaur crossing a swamp, a dinosaur that we can’t grab or call or warn of anything. Friends are strange: they disappear. They’re very strange: sometimes, after many years, they turn up again and although most have nothing to say to us anymore, some do, and they say it.
Recently I had the rare privilege of seeing an old friend again. I met him in Chile, in 1973, and I saw him again last year. After the usual niceties, my friend launched into his story, telling it to my wife and me. It was a story full of danger, adventure, prisons, bloodshed. At a certain moment he recalled a night on which two kids dodged the bullets of a night patrol, leaping through the yards of a suburban neighborhood. My wife was listening carefully. I started to listen carefully too. It didn’t sound real. One of those kids was my friend. When I asked him who the other one was, he said: Don’t you remember? No, I didn’t remember. The other one was you, he said. At first I didn’t believe him. That night had been erased from my memory. But later I remembered and it was then that I saw the dinosaur or the shadow of the dinosaur slipping across the swamp with every gun in the world pointed at its head.
PLANES
The other day I was on my way back from America and it was night and the plane was over Brazil, I guess, and everyone or almost everyone was asleep; the plane was flying with the cabin lights dimmed and there was a movie on the TV, a comedy, I think, that played silently except for the insomniacs, except for the fanatic omnivores of film, when suddenly a voice came over the speakers and told us to fasten our seatbelts and then a stewardess who only spoke English hurried down the aisle waking us and telling us to put on our seatbelts, and the seatbelt lights came on, ordering us to fasten our seatbelts and not to unfasten them until further notice. And we did as we were told, and the plane entered a patch of turbulence that didn’t wake us up although in our dreams we felt the creaking of the plane, the vibrating, as if another dream had invaded our dream or as if we were sick in the middle of the dream (inside the dream) and that was all there was to it. But then the plane shuddered all along its length and we began to drop. My wife, one of the insomniacs, clutched our son and me. I woke up just when all the plane’s lights (already dim) went off, including the TV and its movie. I woke up and it was dark and there were screams in the dark. The plane was dropping at an impressive speed, although the word impressive is meaningless here. The sense I had, huddled with my wife and son, was of reality. A dense, heavy, irrevocable reality. There was nothing fake. No lights, no movies, no stewardesses telling us what to do. Cries and whimpers, yes. An old sense of reality familiar to all human beings. Then, ten seconds later, the plane leveled out. Some people went back to sleep. Others asked for whiskey. One of the passengers claimed to have seen a stewardess praying on her knees in the kitchen.
DIMAS LUNA, PRINCE
Just now I was talking to a prince. His name is Dimas Luna, but his friends sometimes call him Dimas Moon. I think he’s descended from popes, although his lineage can be traced not to Valencian lands but to the dry plains of Toledo. It hardly matters: he carries in his blood the benignity of a certain long-lost Vatican and it shows in the way he treats others, whether friends, customers, or employees. Meanwhile, his curiosity is boundless: as far as I know he never went to college, and during the radiant summers of Blanes he speaks more than four languages. Now, with the arrival of Russian tourism, he even attempts a few words in the language of Pushkin, who would doubtless roll over in his grave if he heard him. His guardian angel is the Mediterranean. His great love, the movies. For a while he invented the strangest cocktails. I think he even won first prize at a competition in Lloret de Mar with a combination that included vodka, milk, and some sweet liqueur, plus other purely decorative things that I can’t remember. With Dimas Luna in Blanes I know that no one will ever be completely alone. The spirit of the Spanish tavernkeeper lives on in him unchanged: he came to the world to have fun, to do good, and not to give anybody a hard time.
ANA MARÍA NAVALES
I knew a few things about Ana María Navales. I knew she was a poet, I’d read a few of her poems somewhere, an
d I knew that she enthusiastically and successfully edited the Aragón literary journal Turia. A while ago two books of hers came into my hands: El laberinto del quetzal [The Labyrinth of the Quetzal], published by Calima Ediciones in 1997, and Cuentos de Bloomsbury [Bloomsbury Stories] (Calambur, 1999, though there is a previous edition). El laberinto del quetzal is a novel and I haven’t read it yet. The Cuentos de Bloomsbury are stories that revolve around the eponymous English group, and appearing in them are, of course, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell, the extraordinary Katherine Mansfield, the disturbing and lovely Vita Sackville-West, but also other figures, lesser known or — at least to me — scarcely known at all, like Ethel Smyth, suffragette, or Mark Gertler, painter, or Richard Kennedy, apprentice printer. Clearly, Ana María Navales knows everything there is to know about her subject or subjects. At no point do her stories seem ventriloquized or threaten to become funeral rites. They are elegant and perceptive. She’s bold enough to write in the first person, even when that first person is the voice of Virginia Woolf, and the result is first-rate and often unsettling. These are, as might be expected, stories in which literature and art have an important place. But they are also texts that radiate a deep love of life and freedom. Special mention must be made of the story “Mi corazón está contigo” [My Heart Is With You], a cruel and unflinching tale in the innocent guise of a letter written by Virgina Woolf to the now aging suffragette and feminist Ethel Smyth.
HELL'S ANGELS
A long time ago, in 1966, the American journalist Hunter S. Thompson wrote a book about the Hell’s Angels, the West Coast motorcycle gang, in which perplexed readers learned about some of the peculiarities of that most violent of urban tribes. The Hell’s Angels traveled the country on Harleys, drinking huge quantities of beer and getting into fights that today seem more picturesque than bloody, although some of their skirmishes were probably bloody too, the enactment of an aesthetic born out of the mythology of Westerns, out of the legend of desperadoes who, in unison, chose freedom and excess, white proletarian kids, macho and racist, uneducated and underemployed, perhaps the future members of the Aryan brotherhoods that sprang up in the prisons of the United States when the dream of the Angels, the endless highway, perished of its own inanity. Thompson lived with them for a few schizophrenic and exhausting months, and the result is this wild book (wild like all his books, since Thompson was, incidentally, always wilder than the Angels). Eminently readable even thirty years later, it lets us relive the Dionysian gang’s parties in the California of the beatniks and the first hippies, the orgies and the crude sexual commerce in which the Angels were experts, the police raids, and the vain and naïve attempts of Allen Ginsberg to ideologically redirect the cold-blooded gang. What became of the Hell’s Angels? There are still some on the West Coast but they don’t scare anybody. Their fame is just another Hollywood souvenir. Any gang of Chicanos or black kids (once so despised by the swastika-blazoned motorcyclists) could wipe them out in a single night.
THE GHOST OF ÀNGEL PLANELLS
Some winter afternoons in the center of Blanes one can glimpse the ghost of Àngel Planells. He appears to be on his way from the house of his nonagenarian sisters to the house of his nephew, the pastry cook Joan Planells, who today owns perhaps the largest collection of his works. Sometimes I stop by Joan’s pastry shop, and we talk about his uncle. A while ago he showed me a photograph of the first surrealist exhibition in London in 1936, at the New Burlington Galleries: in it you can see a small painting by Àngel Planells. The surrealist exhibition of London — Picasso, Domínguez, Dalí, and Miró were among the Spaniards shown — was a landmark in the revolutionary activities of a group that tried to export subversion on a worldwide scale. Later, for Planells, would come the Civil War and long years of obscurity during which, in order to survive, he had to paint horrible still lifes and give painting classes in a Barcelona where compassion was just an empty word in the mouths of priests and church ladies — hell’s cauldron. What did Planells learn in those years? We’ll never know. Maybe he perfected the art of humility. Maybe he learned the vanity of all striving. During the summers, however, he came up to Blanes and spent his time writing and painting at his sisters’ house. Little by little, at a time when surrealism had gone back underground, he turned to his old subject matter. This melancholy return is evidenced by the canvas Mariner esperant l’arribada de no sap què [Sailor Awaiting the Arrival of Something Unknown], dated 1974. It’s possible that at some point I crossed paths with him on the streets of downtown Blanes and didn’t see him. Now I do. Now sometimes I see him walking along our Paseo Marítimo. A slip of a ghost, lost in thought. The painter Àngel Planells, 1901 - 1989.
BLANES CHRISTMAS STORY
In the winter, some of the towns on the Costa Brava are like ghost towns. The tourist areas, especially, lapse into a lethargy that makes them resemble the cities of dreams or nightmares: cities of tall buildings and small apartments where we make the kinds of mistakes we regret forever, not knowing exactly why, just vaguely sensing that we could have done better, or simply not done anything at all, not made the effort, like the battles that Sun-Tzu or Clausewitz advised should never be fought. In fact, S-T or C advised that the only battles we should fight were battles that could definitely be won. The other day, strolling through one of those clusters of empty apartment blocks, I thought I saw a friend. He was coming out of a ghost building built in the sixties and probably afflicted with aluminosis, and he was dressed up as one of the Three Kings. Despite the Magi costume and the fast-approaching darkness, I recognized him and waved. He, however, was slow to recognize me. It had been a long time since we saw each other. He was accompanied, as might be expected, by the other two Kings. With some surprise, I discovered that both were black. My friend introduced them to me. They were two Gambians who usually worked in the fields outside of Blanes and who were for the moment unemployed. I only needed one black guy, he said, but I couldn’t find anyone white to be Caspar. We were the only people on that completely deserted street. So what are you doing here? I asked. I live in one of these apartments, said my friend. This is where I keep the robes, where we change. I gave them a ride. What will happen if a kid tells you there’s one black guy too many and one white guy too few? I asked before they got out of the car. My friend laughed and said that times change. And the kids are the first to know it.
II.
(MAY 1999–JULY 2001)
AN AFTERNOON WITH HUIDOBRO AND PARRA
Soon it will be two years since my friend Marcial Cortés-Monroy brought me to Las Cruces, where we had lunch and spent the afternoon with Nicanor Parra. The author of Poems and Antipoems, originally published in 1954, has a house there on a steep hillside from which one can gaze out at the vast sea and also at the grave of Vicente Huidobro, on the other side of the bay. Actually, to see Huidobro’s grave from Parra’s wooden terrace, it helps to have binoculars, but even without them the grave of the author of Altazor is fully visible or at least as visible as Huidobro would have wanted.
Do you see that forest? asks Parra. Yes, I do. Which one? asks Parra, who not for nothing used to be a teacher. The one up above or down below? The one on the left or on the right? I see them all, I say, as I stare out at a vaguely lunar landscape. All right, look at the forest on the left, says Parra. Beneath it there’s a kind of road. Like a line, but it’s not a line, it’s a road. See it? Now look up and you’ll see the forest. He’s right: I see a scratch that must be the highway or a country road, and I also see the forest. In the upper part of the forest there’s a white spot, says Parra. It’s true: the forest, seen from his terrace, is a dark green color, almost black, its uniformity broken by a white spot near the top edge. I see the spot, I say. That’s Huidobro’s grave, says Parra, and he turns and goes back into the living room. Marcial follows him and for an instant I’m left there alone as a gust of wind blows up from the beach, staring at the tiny white spot wher
e the bones of Vicente Huidobro lie rotting.
Then I feel something tug at my pants leg. Huidobro’s ghost? No, it’s Parra’s cats, six or seven stray cats that come every afternoon to the yard of the greatest living poet in the Spanish language to be fed. Like me, basically.
LICHTENBERG IN THE FACE OF DEATH
Lichtenberg is our philosopher. Sometimes it’s tempting to say that he’s our only philosopher, but there’s also Pascal, who died of pancreatitis, and Diogenes, who was a first-class joker. And yet we (and frankly, when I say “we,” I don’t know what I’m talking about) find consolation in Lichtenberg, in his mirrors, in his mood swings, in his doubts and in his tastes, which sometimes amount to the same thing.