That night, in my hotel room, I turned all these things over in my mind and mentally thanked Tongoy every quarter of an hour for having moved me, albeit only slightly, away from my literatosis—this is how Onetti terms the obsession for the world of books — and for having reminded me how uncertain the future of literature was. That night, in front of the mirror that reflected my sorrowful face, I ended up concentrating my thoughts on the most mundane and stupid province of literature’s Montano’s malady, and I told myself that this geographical zone had existed for many years; Milton, for example, already spoke of it when he claimed to have visited a nebulous gray zone, a province whose inhabitants were in the habit of crushing the literary tradition’s elegance of spirit and most noble currents. Schopenhauer also seemed to have visited this mundane and stupid province when he said that literature was like life: whichever way one turns, one immediately comes face-to-face with the incorrigible mass of humanity, which multiplies everywhere, filling and staining everything, like flies in summer, and hence the proliferation of bad books, what he termed parasitic tares.
Such tares are rife in the most mundane and stupid province on the map of literature’s Montano’s malady, a highly complex map where we find a wide variety of provinces, warrens, nations, bends, woods, islands, shady corners, cities. The truth is that, since that night in the hotel in Valparaíso, I have frequently toured this map; I have often toured this map that I am slowly drawing and which also, by the way, almost on the outskirts — I haven’t even drawn it yet — contains a slum called Spain, where a kind of traditional, nineteenth-century Realism is encouraged and where it is normal for a majority of critics and readers to despise thought. A pearl of a slum. And as if this were not enough, this slum is connected by an underwater tunnel — which cannot even appear on the map — with a particular territory that recalls the island of Realism discovered by Chesterton, an island whose inhabitants passionately applaud everything they consider to be real art and cry, “This is Realism! This is things as they really are!” The Spanish are among those who think that, if you repeat something often enough, it will end up being true.
“OK, now I’m boarding the aircraft,” I said tremulously. “It’s a single-engine plane,” Margot pointed out to me. Single-engine! The phrase inspired me with terror. It made my hairs stand on end. The plane was a Piper Dakota, which Margot occasionally borrowed from the management of Chile Aeronautics, where she had good friends who were prepared to turn a blind eye to her advanced age. I felt an understandable fear, but also, I must confess, a certain attraction toward danger.
“Danger is the axis about which the sublime life rotates,” I observed. “Stop talking such rubbish and get in!” Margot ordered me. I obeyed. Inside the airplane, Tongoy was more panic-stricken than I was. In a few hours I would leave Chile, where I had already spent three fairly happy weeks, although they were overshadowed by the disquiet I felt after each phone conversation with Rosa, who sometimes would suddenly hang up, other times — if I dared to ask what the matter was — would threaten to hang up, and who never seemed to welcome the prospect of my return.
My Chilean happiness overshadowed by Rosa’s inexplicable attitude, that day I boarded the intrepid Margot’s Piper Dakota. The sky was overcast and the light, shining behind the low clouds, resembled a merciless, steely sword. Our flight would take us to the sun; we were heading from a cloudy Santiago to a San Fernando where the weather was good.
As soon as the single-engine plane took off, I began to have literary thoughts or, to put it another way, in order not to think about death, I began to think about the death of literature. I recalled Saint-Exupéry — so despised by Margot — the writer who for a period conveyed Chilean mail to Patagonia, crossing the Andes at night. And I reflected on Saint-Exupéry’s meeting with Julien Gracq in Nantes and on the pamphlet Gracq would write years later, “Literature in the Stomach,” in which he maintained that literary art was the unfortunate victim of massive dumbing down, and subject to the perverse, uneducated rules of the unliterary.
Certainly all this was very interesting, I mean my literary thoughts during the flight, and it was very interesting because, since I had moved Montano’s malady from a private to a public level, my own highly personal literary illness had taken a discreet backseat, but at the same time, though it may seem paradoxical, it had grown in strength and intensity, which did not worry me, quite the opposite, since my concern for the larger Montano’s malady allowed me to have my own Montano’s malady at my ease and without the slightest remorse. To put it another way, I had begun to enjoy — and continue to enjoy very much — my recently adopted and highly responsible moral stance in relation to the grave situation facing the truly literary in the world. And I was, and still am, delighted to find myself at the service of a noble, superior cause that also afforded me a perfect excuse to keep having, even to reinforce, my own Montano’s malady, now more than fully justified by the cause of the common good, and furthermore saved me the bother of having to apologize for being “so literary.”
At this point I don’t think anyone will be surprised if I say that the flight of that single-engine plane began to open itself up to interpretation as a fragmentary text. What is more, I told myself that, as soon as I returned to Barcelona, in this diary that I had left asleep at home, I would write down a series of fragments or notes on the art of being in the air, an art that for me was a question of pure balance. The single-engine plane that Margot piloted, like any other plane, flew thanks to a highly unusual series of balances and forces and was something of a metaphor for literary creation. After all, anyone writing with a sense of risk walks a tightrope and, as well as walking it, has to weave his own rope under his feet. AH this came to me up above, and it also occurred to me that, just as every flight contains the possibility of falling, so every book should contain the possibility of failing. This is what I thought and shortly afterward, carefully watching Margot handle the controls with some virtuosity, I began to wonder what will happen to us when humanism, on whose broken and ancient rope we have been reduced to unsteady walkers, and literature disappear.
I was wondering about this when Tongoy interrupted my concern for the other inhabitants of this world — or my navel-gazing, whichever you prefer — and announced that he was preparing in mid-flight to imitate the dragonfly-man he had played in Fellini’s film. That way, he said, at the speed of this famously fast-flying insect, he would plunge headlong into the void. I didn’t find the joke funny. And, to tell the truth, I didn’t get over my fear until we landed and, seeing how the earth welcomed us back, I could regain the marvelous sense of security that gravity affords, though we sometimes forget it.
Back on terra firma, I looked up at the cloudless sky of San Fernando and saw a bird go by. I followed it. And it seemed to me that following it enabled me to go wherever I liked, to pretend I had all that mobility. A few hours later I was flying in the direction of Barcelona, occupied in drawing an initial sketch of the geography of literature’s Montano’s malady, with its abject zones in the shade, its provinces, churches, islands, gullies, volcanoes, lakes, warrens, bends, cities. By the time I reached Barcelona, I had turned into the topographer of Montano’s malady.
As I feared, Rosa was not waiting for me at the airport. She had hung up the last time we spoke, she had hung up after telling me that she didn’t like the way I kept repeating my estimated time of arrival. The lights at home were all switched off, except for those in the kitchen, where I came across a cold dinner that Rosa had left out for me, a dinner consisting entirely of a grotesque bowl of soup containing letters, a terrible soup, a soup as chilly as the reception being offered to me, a cold soup with a note from Rosa beside it: “The sky is a very beautiful faded pink color and the air is cold as I write you this note to tell you that this afternoon I have taken off with John Cassavetes, I have gone with him to Los Angeles. Farewell, dear, farewell. Have fun!”