CORPORALIZATION MANIFESTO
(Unprintable text)
I’ll only be satisfied when I sit down to write: I’ll find people who share my ideas or whom I’ll convince to agree with me. Then I’ll try to form a group with them, stating at the outset that the results will depend exclusively on the plurality of the project.
The reader lives and the author has died, we’ll proclaim, though our goal will be to resuscitate him, to give him what he never had: body, flesh, presence. And what will die instead is the text, the artistic product that escapes from our hands and becomes merchandise: all the time we spent spilling our blood across the page is transformed into food for publishers, newspapers, critics. That’s why we’re anemic, that’s why we need to suck up the humors of others and end up dissolved in foreign books, that’s why we die every time we read, in handwriting that is not our own, a sentence that belongs to us.
We ourselves will be the project, our own breathing will be that of every character we create. The autonomous world of the text will no longer be able to justify this or that coward, because it won’t exist anywhere but in each moment of our existence. Every time that a respectable voice pejoratively describes the initial action of one of our chapters, for example, it will be passing judgment on our way of life, which naturally will provoke a reaction. Literature is a fight to the death but, since we are the creators and all the others just have fun at our expense, the balance is leaning in our favor from the beginning. As the virtuosos of the world join Corporalism, the indolent will wonder desperately what inexplicable phenomenon has caused the people to cease, suddenly and en masse, producing works of art. And we’ll respond with the joyful silence of those who share a secret.
The reader won’t know that we’re always finishing a creation, at every moment and according to a composite plan prefigured in advance; he’ll only be able to learn of this creation in the records, documents, and expositions charged with making it known that it’s time to unveil the word end. In any event, we’ll take the comments, mutterings, and applause without a care, because to read is to be in the presence of a corpse. We, on the other hand, the ones who survive, find ourselves again at the beginning of the one and only pleasure: we will be fruitful.
THE NOVEL
Carlos was sitting on the sidewalk looking at the ground when Elisa came up in front of him. A patrol car had picked her up around four in the afternoon, they’d asked via the intercom for her to accompany them, because her boyfriend was in trouble. No one said a word to her on the way. Once they got out of the car and entered the cordoned-off area someone spoke to her: there had been a homicide. She froze. Horns sounded in the surrounding streets, a car radio transmitted at full volume a metallic voice that tirelessly insulted someone of an indistinguishable name, while men in uniforms ran from one side to the other and threw crumpled-up pages into the street. The door to an ambulance opened to the rhythm of a piercing alarm, out of it emerged men with gloves, masks, and bags, dozens of bags in their hands.
An officer approached her, muttering that a young man had shot a girl point-blank; he asked her to identify them. She was taken inside a patrol car, where they showed her two photos in which Violeta appeared sitting on a beach, dressed in black, her eyes lost in the ocean. They asked if she knew her: yes, she had spoken to her once. But it appears that your boyfriend knew her better, added the same detective who’d told her first how Carlos had notified them that Violeta was dead, just inside the door of her own house. Elisa paled. Her boyfriend’s explanations weren’t sufficient, and now he was detained as a preventative measure, they informed her. Leaning against the car door, she brought her hand to her head; she felt like it was nighttime in a foreign town, that an unknown man was insisting on sharing a motel room with her, that although he spoke an unfamiliar language she understood him, and yet was unable to find the expression to reject him. She opened her eyes, she felt a little dizzy when she asked to see him. That’s what she said: take me to him, let me talk to him.