The two days I spent before the panel, however, were not wonderful, were definitely my own; a low-level but constant panic had come upon me; I couldn’t stop grinding my teeth. Maybe I could just be silent, not say a single word, but use my face to modulate my silence and let that be my contribution; surely the more distinguished panelists would hold forth, hold court. I didn’t answer the buzzer and I didn’t leave the apartment. I wrote out a few sentences of wide applicability with the help of my dictionary and attempted to commit them to memory: “No writer is free to renounce his political moment, but literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction.” I searched the internet for short quotes from Ortega y Gasset, who I had at one time thought was two people, like Deleuze and Guattari, Calvin and Hobbes. I figured out how to say: “I’m hesitant to speak about the Spanish condition as if I were an expert; to do so would be to fulfill the stereotypes regarding American presumptuousness.” Each time I mangled a quote, I grew more nervous. I was less concerned about exposing my ignorance of Spanish poetry than I was about exposing my ignorance of Spanish period. I might be able to produce several grammatically perfect sentences on the cuff, or is it off, but I might not; better to mimic spontaneous if oblique pronouncements than to rely on real-time fluency.
On the day of the panel I left the apartment almost two hours early. I walked to the foundation’s building, which was not far from Teresa’s, then circled the block, practicing my memorized passages, reminding myself to breathe. I had three tranquilizers in the pocket of my jeans. I put my hand in my pocket to confirm their presence and contact with the denim made me exclaim internally: Why, in the name of God, was I wearing jeans? And worse: a T-shirt. In two days of panicky anticipation I had failed to concern myself with my appearance. I felt nauseated as I imagined the men in suits, María José and the professor in pantsuits; Teresa would appear elegant in whatever she wore. I asked a man at a kiosk for the time; I had a little more than an hour; if I hurried, nearly ran, I could make it. I was telling myself it was a terrible idea to get sweaty and risk being late, but I was telling myself this as I rushed back to my apartment, flew up the stairs, and looked for my suit. Thankfully, and uncharacteristically, I had hung it up after the single time I wore it, and if it wasn’t pressed, it was nevertheless passable. I changed as quickly as I could, checked myself in the mirror, and flew back down the stairs. I slowed down a block from the foundation, wiped the sweat from my face, and tried to catch my breath.
I entered the building and made my way to the auditorium; to my horror, it was considerably larger than I expected, seating perhaps two hundred people, and it was full; I had anticipated a glorified conference room. I saw someone setting up a video camera on a tripod. There was a little stage, and on the stage a table with chairs, placards, a swan-shaped jug of water, glasses, and individual microphones; the stage was intensely illuminated. Four of the six panelists, including Teresa, were already seated, chatting with one another. I hesitated near the door, a little dazed; María José saw me, approached, and said, perhaps sarcastically, that I looked very elegant, then asked me to take my seat. The other fellow, she told me as she walked me toward the stage, was not able to join us. She arranged this, I told myself, enraged; as the only American, I would have to speak and the panelists or audience members would, if only out of politeness, ask me for my “perspective.” I took my place at the table and received Teresa’s smile; she looked no less comfortable on stage than in her living room, although she was wearing some kind of charcoal ensemble that made me glad I’d changed clothes. I tried to smile back and saw the other panelists had pens and paper, presumably to take notes, whereas I had brought nothing, a sign of presumptuousness.
A movie I had never seen.
Soon María José ascended the stage. The crowd quieted down as she walked to a standing microphone I had not seen. She thanked everyone for coming to tonight’s discussion. She then proceeded to introduce the panelists, noting, when she got to me, that a bilingual selection of my poems was shortly forthcoming, and she said we would begin the evening by asking each of the panelists to speak informally for one or two minutes about the topic, “literature now.” We would begin with Javier Torres, who was seated on the end of the table nearest María José, and work our way across; I was second from last.
Again the anger rose inside me; surely María José had told the other panelists to prepare a few minutes of remarks, but had somehow neglected to say as much to me. But as Javier Torres began to speak in his politician’s voice, a voice that fit his headshot perfectly, a voice that sounded like it came not from a body but a screen, my anger was nothing compared to my anxiety; I had no idea what to say. I reached into my pocket for my tranquilizers and realized, no doubt blanching, that I had failed to transfer them to my suit pants from my jeans. I felt a surge of terror so intense I was dizzy; it was like I was looking down into the space between the winding stairs of the Sagrada Familia, a view I’d never seen. Somehow Teresa, next after Javier, was already speaking; soon it would be my turn. The audience was invisible from the stage because of the lights but I could sense its presence, its attentiveness; Teresa made a joke and they laughed and the many-headed laughter was terrible to me. Elena López Portillo was talking now; I wiped the sweat from my brow. If I’d brought paper, I managed to think, I could have composed something coherent. Use your memorized lines, I told myself, but could not remember them. I was going to flee or vomit or faint.
But a line materialized. Elena López Portillo had ceased to speak and I could feel a change in pressure on my face, the effect of the audience focusing its eyes upon me. I heard myself say, my voice sounding to me as though it issued from the back of the auditorium, from deep within the audience itself, “Ortega y Gasset wrote ‘By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.’” I paused, and could feel the silence tighten, as the audience attempted to take the quotation in. I was encouraged enough by my own prefabricated fluency and by the fact that I did not sound nervous or crazy, to add: “My fear about this panel is that we are in a hurry to define a period, to speak of literature now; every period, like every concept, is in itself an exaggeration. I hope to hear from others what changed on March 11 that permits we to speak,” my grammar faltered, but I could see the sentence’s end, “of a new now, of a new period, without dislocation.” I stopped there, making my brevity seem the issue of my pithiness and courage, the courage to contest the concept of the panel, when in fact I didn’t want to use up any more of my quotations. A murmur of interest ran through the crowd; a current of adrenaline coursed through my body. I glanced at Teresa as Francesc Balda began to speak and I thought her smile communicated pride in me. Now I could attempt to listen to the other panelists; Francesc Balda began by stressing the importance of my point; he shared my healthy suspicion of neat distinctions between a pre-this and a post-that; indeed, perhaps literature’s role was to help us keep our perspective, to take the long view, to allow us to link our “now” to various past “nows” in order to form an illuminating constellation. He then went on to describe something about Catalan literature and its relation to political violence that I failed to follow.