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, and 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.