I felt so angst-ridden that I would have given anything — here on the island of Fayal, where I am a manuscript — to return to my childhood, to the simple days when I was fascinated by space and those starry night skies. I would have given anything to return to the days of childhood when I journeyed through the space of the infinite universe and never felt the need to interpret it, let alone to transform it into a concept or literary quotation. I would have given anything, yes. Melancholy here in Fayal, as I think about those simple days in space.
At the break of day, the air was so clear that, without the help of my binoculars, I could see the foam created by the waves that were breaking against the bow of a boat sailing in the distance. For the first time in ages, an image simply existed. As if I were suddenly cured. A moment’s joy at dawn. I felt so alive suddenly that I could have swum to the boat and got on board. The early morning sun shone, the surface of the water was a mirror.
This lunchtime Rosa, in a break from filming, came into the room to fetch something she had forgotten and found me sprawled on the sofa, sleeping beside the great map of Montano’s malady, which was lying completely unfolded next to me.
“What is that?” she asked.
I immediately came out of the pornographic dream I was having and, still half asleep, understood that she was asking me about my wet trousers, not about the map.
How many years was it since my last emission like this? I had just come in my sleep and soiled my underpants, and that is why the last thing that occurred to me was that she might be interested in the map.
“What is that?”
It was twelve o’clock or a quarter past twelve. Half an hour previously, I had fallen into a deep sleep while working on the map. I had fallen asleep while attempting to perfect the palm trees of an oasis in a South American desert, where the wind blew and human footprints and the marks of horses’ hooves from remote times had remained completely untainted by the influence of literature: an oasis in which all traces of time and culture had been preserved.
“What is that?”
I had fallen asleep while drawing this Latin oasis of Montano’s malady. The excesses of last night in Café Sport had suddenly overpowered me on the sofa. It was a very curious labyrinthine path along which I had reached the no less curious ejaculation. There I was, working on those important details in the Latin oasis, when my brain abruptly ceased to function with agility and I felt so sleepy that I thought I was going to lose consciousness. I closed my eyes and soon fell asleep, with the map dangerously and completely unfolded next to me, my pencil on the floor. I dreamed that I was at the bar in Café Sport, drinking an exquisite Sinhalese tea. Suddenly someone gently took my arm from behind and, turning around, I encountered a faceless man, who I thought could be me. And, in effect, when I looked closely, I saw that it was me, though I bore a slight resemblance to the writer Ricardo Piglia.
“To recall with a memory that is not our own,” I heard him whisper in my ear, “is a variant of the theme of the double, but it is also a perfect metaphor for literary expression.”
“Allow me,” I said to him, “to laugh at this situation and mention that you do not need to remind me that I always converse with the man accompanying me.”
Piglia (meaning me) did not even raise a smile. He gave me a kind of order in a very serious tone:
“What you should be drawing are the somber classrooms of certain North American universities where they devote themselves to deconstructing literary texts.”
“OK,” I said, “I’ll draw them when I’ve finished the oasis. By the way, what does ‘deconstructing’ mean?”
“No, you’ll draw them right now.”
I looked at him, and it was no longer Piglia or me. Now I had a tedious dwarf in front of me who was telling me that I had to draw him, because he was the king of the moles. Suddenly, perhaps because I leaned too hard against the bar in Café Sport, a strange mechanism went off and shortly afterward I found myself on the other side of the bar, with the sensation that I was no longer in the bar but in a luxurious hotel room.
I was still accompanied by the tedious dwarf, who did not stop talking, he was an awful bore.
“I’m not the king of the moles,” he was saying. “You don’t need to include me in your map, which, by the way, is so detailed, so well done. If there is anyone who should be out of your map, it’s me. I’m an old-fashioned critic, someone who’s against the fierce, cabalistic jargon that has pervaded university circles in the United States, where professors and critics talk of the literary with such indifference to the aesthetic, moral, or political ingredients of literature properly understood that it could be said to have disappeared under the debris of theory. Do you follow me?”
“Not a lot. I think I only understand that you’re an old-fashioned critic.”
“A sad old critic,” said a woman with a voice of velvet, emerging from behind a curtain also of velvet. I recognized her body, though I could not see her face. The woman quickly removed her clothes, except for a black bra, slowly came toward me, and I heard her say in a drawl — which I also recognized — but with a dove’s serenity:
“I will spit on your grave.”
Only when she knelt down in front of me could I see her face. It was Rosa. She unzipped my trousers, took out my penis, and placed it in her mouth, a much bigger mouth than she has in reality. As she moved her tongue, her exquisite blonde hair swung from side to side in a dazzling, frenzied display. I did not want to come. But I couldn’t help it. And then I woke up.
“What is that?” Rosa asked.
I was terrified, I didn’t know what I could say to her. I decided to blame her, a ruse to try to get out of a tight spot.
“You know better than I do,” I said.
Only then did Rosa take the map and show it to me, and only then did I see that she was asking me about the map.
I breathed a sigh of relief, but could not relax, since it wasn’t going to be easy to explain to her why I devoted myself to drawing moles, provinces, slums — one of them called Spain — woods, bends, islands, underwater tunnels, devilish caves, warrens, intelligence services, Latin oases, shady corners. No, it wasn’t going to be easy to explain why I devoted myself to such meticulous drawings.
“World map of Montano’s malady,” she read aloud. “What on earth is that? Have you drawn here your mental problem in the form of alphabet soup?”
Anyone would think I had been with another woman. I was terrified, although I told myself that ultimately it was preferable that she should be asking me about the map and not, as yesterday, asking me if I knew how long it was since we had made love. Had she repeated her question today, I would have been forced to tell her something that was fairly close to the truth, I would have been forced to tell her that this map and Montano’s malady, being all-consuming, were the clearest reasons why we had not made love since the end of the previous century.
I realized that there was only one way to resolve the situation satisfactorily, and that was to make love to her without further ado, to try in this way to make her forget the map. But nor could it be said that this was the ideal solution at this point in time, since the emission had left me in no condition to confront the sexual act with any degree of self-confidence. It occurred to me that I should be praying for Rosa to not even think about unzipping my trousers, this could result in a catastrophe at least as big as that prepared by Montano’s malady, day by day — although I had the intention of seeing off the literary.