To avoid drinking and writing that I am giving up the dictionary, I decide — it’s midnight, a perfect time — to summon the ghosts, to turn into a kind of mailbox able, from now on, to receive their messages, their opinions from the other world. I tell myself that I shall listen to their stories willingly and decipher them should they reach me a little distorted by some rare wave. Here I am, waiting for you, ghosts. Waiting for your visits. In the meantime, I smoke, and smoke, and look at myself in the mirror, next to the open window. Time goes by and no one communicates. And now, Rosario.
The time for spirits goes by, it’s long past midnight, nobody came, it’s a fact. I suppose it was fairly predictable. I shouldn’t have been left so alone on this night of the first Friday in May. I keep smoking in front of the mirror, I imagine that I am conversing with Hamlet, I feel strange, and see that I smoke strangely in front of the strange mirror. And now, José.
Tomorrow is another day.
And now, Rosario.
Who said that?
“Now,” says a voice, “keep smoking.”
Monday
I got up at eight, as usual, just as Rosa with a forceful and very energetic smack turned off the alarm clock. We had breakfast together. A quick instant coffee, cakes from the supermarket, and oatmeal. I laughed at one of her clients, one of those authors she has to put up with daily. As always, she wasn’t in the least amused. “Carry on like this and you can find yourself another literary agent,” she told me angrily.
Around nine, Rosa left for the office and I had another coffee and lit a cigarette and, by way of intellectual warm-up to see if I was in the mood to write — every morning I tend to read a passage from a book I have read previously that I know is not going to disappoint me and generally I end up feeling stimulated by the reading and encouraged to go to my study and to pick up where I left off writing the day before — I immersed myself in some pages by Julian Barnes on childhood memories. In them, Barnes talks of the envy he experienced on a particular occasion reading an extract from Edmond de Goncourt’s diary, where the author said that he had a very clear memory of a morning from his childhood days in which, needing help to prepare his fishing tackle, he went into his cousin’s bedroom and saw her, with her legs open and her bottom on a cushion, as she was about to be penetrated by her husband. There was a flurry of bedclothes and the scene was witnessed as quickly as it vanished. “But the image stuck,” confesses Goncourt, “that pink bottom on a cushion with embroidered festoons was the sweet, exciting image that appeared before me every night …” Barnes states that he is amazed by Goncourt’s excellent memory of something that happened fifty years earlier and, most of all, he feels professional envy at how well preserved that memory is, because Goncourt saw and registered in his mind the embroidered festoons on the cushion. Barnes says that this demonstrates Goncourt’s capacity as a writer; he reads Goncourt’s description and wonders if he would have noticed those embroidered festoons, had he been the one standing there, staring wide-eyed at the couple.
At around half past nine, I stopped reading Barnes and put on some music by Tom Waits, my favorite song by this musician, “Downtown Train,” the story of someone who is lost and wants to find his way back to the center of his city, or at least to the center of something. With music by Tom Waits this morning, I started writing down in the diary my recollections of last Friday, my (not entirely childish) recollections of when I smoked in front of the mirror and called myself either José or Rosario and became drunk as a lord, hearing a booming voice that invited me to keep smoking. It was an interesting and difficult recreation on paper of a drinking spree in which I ended up receiving the visit of a ghost.
I wrote until two in the afternoon, this is my usual timetable. Normally, every day at about two, I go down to the lobby to collect my mail and from there to the newsstand on the corner to buy the papers. I have a quick lunch in a restaurant nearby, where I read my letters and also the press and come into contact with reality, with the news items that the papers carry and which — perhaps because of my matutinal and fictional enclosure — always surprise and puzzle me. On my return home, I listen to the messages on the answering machine — I reply when I have to reply, meaning only when it is strictly necessary — and then I switch on the computer and check my e-mail, and again only answer when it is essential. I do not use the computer to write my literary work, only for e-mail and for newspaper articles.
Letters I received today: two from Buenos Aires (both from Juan Carlos Gómez, El Goma, one of Gombrowicz’s young friends before Gombrowicz left Argentina in 1963; in his two letters today, El Goma, in his aggressive and poorly imitated Gombrowicz style, repeatedly calls me “sleepyhead” for not writing to him or for being so slow to answer him); and one from New York, in which the critic Stanisław Wiciński asks me if everything I write in the book I am preparing “is true word for word.”
Messages on the answering machine: a) From the town hall in Sant Quirze del Vallès, an invitation to deliver a lecture on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, an extravagant proposal since I have never been regarded as an expert on this book; b) three annoying requests from the press offices of three publishers in Barcelona to present three books by authors who are more or less friends or acquaintances of mine, three books I know to be horrendous and which remind me of something Bioy Casares said, how sometimes there are friends who send you their books seemingly in an effort to make you lose your fascination for literature.
E-mails: only one, but a very special one, coming from the Swiss-German publisher that recently began publishing my books. In it, I am invited at the beginning of June to catch a plane to Geneva, then a train, after that a bus, and finally a cable car that will leave me at the top of a Swiss mountain: a long trip to the summit of a mountain — which I shall call Matz Peak — to attend a Literature Festival that takes place there every year — the participants are all German speakers, I would be the only one from Spain, which means I would not understand a thing of what was said or happened there — and to absorb what in the e-mail is called the mountain spirit. It made me think of the hiker Robert Walser, a great walker. And of Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I imagine the writers on Matz Peak in shorts, with lots of torches and Tyrolese songs…. I don’t think I shall go, I think I shall reply that I have a prior engagement that makes it impossible for me to visit Matz Peak, this would seem to be the most sensible course of action, you never know, I might turn up at the peak, after the long journey, and, while I am absorbing the mountain spirit, be murdered or raped. I shall say I can’t go. But what I shall do is keep the e-mail, it really is a very interesting document, which, owing to the lack of proficiency in English, veers from the comical to the profound or unsettling: “I hope all well. Subject: Swiss montains. Precious Rosario Girondo: It would be most kind say to me if you have time to go to the Literature Festival at which we already spoke you. It is a festival in the montains of Swiss, very wonderful, very interesting. A mix of vacations and of intellectual inspiring. My joy if you want to pick up this invitation. (There is people there who speaks Spanglish, at least I …) Much greetings from Zurigo, think about it: is the mountain spirit.”
At five in the afternoon, most days — today was one of them — I write one of the four articles I compose each week to ensure a regular monthly salary. Today I wrote on Kafka’s relations with his friend Max Brod, I wrote it fairly quickly and sent it, having barely revised it, by e-mail. In the article, I discussed how poor Brod would advise Kafka to choose more elevated themes than the ones he used for his stories of rodents, moles, and dogs. I recalled the admirable response by this hero of subordinate aesthetics, namely Kafka: “You’re right, Max, but not entirely, only in one sense. In another, what counts are not proportional numbers, I also should like to be tested in my mouse hole.”