Around the same time, Kafka also wrote to Brod regarding great themes and other nonsense: “What am I building? I wish to dig a tunnel. I need to make some progress. My position is too high up there […]. We are digging in the pit of Babel.”
The reader, if he has not already gotten it, might be interested to know that the moles, which the narrator in Montano’s Malady saw in Teixeira’s home on the island of Pico, come straight from Kafka’s world, all I did was give the more or less innocent Kafkaesque moles digging in the pit of the Tower of Babel a twist by turning them into hugely pernicious moles, with their head office in Pico, working away inside the volcano against the literary. I think I did well and it is better to know where the enemies of the literary are hiding themselves.
Having written and sent the article, I went down to the street to take a breather. As a writer, clearly, I live like a housewife. So to get out of the house and go for a walk each day is always beneficial. Otherwise I would end up drowning at home. I went for a wander in the vicinity and unexpectedly bumped into Rosa coming the other way, back from work. We were both overjoyed to recognize each other among the anonymous people in the street. It was preferable to meet there than at home, where there is no surprise and it’s always the same, Rosa comes back from work and we give each other a peck on the cheek. But today in the street was something else, we were both overjoyed. It must have been the best moment in a day, which is — I hope — already finishing.
Around eight, I took a sedative that relaxes me and calms my desire at that time in the evening, and started drinking in an attempt to bring the day to an abrupt close, to wait for tomorrow to return to my routine life as a housewife who gets up at eight, has an instant coffee, reads for encouragement to write, writes until two, then has lunch in the awful restaurant on the corner, later attends to his mail and the telephone and around five writes an article for a living and, with moderate enthusiasm, as the evening draws in, welcomes his wife home, and then watches television and goes mad if he does not take a sedative. If he takes the sedative, he goes mad as well, he just does so in a more relaxed way, without, however, ceasing to notice the grayness of his existence as a writer tied for life to his trade and the monotony of the daily tragedy of his life.
OK, not all the days are exactly the same. Today, for example, I took the sedative and, just as it was taking effect, received a call from a friend — whom I envy, I should like to copy him, lead his adventurous life and possess the intelligent vision he, as a literary critic, has of everything he reads, I said before that I was a frustrated critic — he wished to thank me for having recommended that he read César Aira. “The guy’s crazy, but he’s good,” he told me. I wanted to know why he thought he was crazy. “Well, his humor is completely round the bend,” he said. “Aira’s humor is totally unintentional,” I corrected him, on a war footing, a little nervous and uneasy despite the sedative. “I don’t think so,” my friend the critic replied. At this point I felt obliged to explain to him, having to control my temper — at this stage in the day I am fairly irritable and anything can wind me up further, sedative time is never a good time for me, even though it relaxes me or precisely because of this — I felt morally obliged to clarify one or two things about Aira and I told him — as if I were the critic, no doubt motivated by the envy I feel toward him — that Aira never tires of saying that he writes seriously and people find him hilarious and that is why he has turned into a misanthrope. “It’s strange that you should not see that you don’t exactly have to believe every word Aira says,” he told me, recovering his position as an intelligent man who defeats me in arguments.
For the first time ever, I took a second sedative. I continued talking to my friend, but every time he said something, I silently exacted revenge thinking about the day in Rome when he told me that he was going to commit suicide and I, already envious of him and also distrustful of his suicidal threats, did not lift a finger to dissuade him — I went so far as to tell him that, if he was planning to kill himself because the critic Stanisław Wiciński was miles better than him, he would do very well to take himself out of the picture — I opened a bottle of red Imola wine and sat down in the sitting room of the house in Rome and, having taken my seat, waited to see if by chance the explosion went off.
To return to today, at around ten in the evening, suddenly distressed at not being a critic and above all depressed because Rosa was not talking to me — she was absorbed watching a program on Catalan TV–I started reading Virginia Woolf’s diary and wondering whether or not to include it in this dictionary. For a long time I was lost among all those intelligent and angst-ridden pages she wrote over twenty-seven years, always in the half hour following teatime. “I will go down with my colors flying,” she wrote in the penultimate entry recorded in her diary, three weeks before her suicide. The sentence contains great pride and is very moving, but it is also true to say that the sentence has an unbearable aura of sadness, which managed to depress me even more. I decided to forget Virginia Woolf for today and started reading a story by Samuel Beckett, “From an Abandoned Work,” in which an old man, clearly mad, perhaps stultified by age, attempts to remember a day from his past, from the moment he left home in the morning to the time he came back at night. And one has the impression that three days, not one, have gone by.
Even the old man’s life seemed more interesting than my own and I told myself that I do well to invent when I devote myself to literary creation and renounce realism, because I would be stuck if I had to talk all the time about my gray existence as a housewife who writes. In short, I read the story of this dumb old man created by Beckett and was on the verge of taking a third sedative. Increasingly anxious and sleepy, I ate a potato omelet that Rosa had prepared and went to bed. I dreamed that I was more dumb than Beckett’s old man. Then I woke up and wrote down here what I did today, since I want the reader to have a certain idea of what I am like in my daily life, in which I lead such a monotonous and horrific existence that not infrequently I try to escape from it by writing about realities far removed from my real life. Of course, if I did not write, I wouldn’t have to spend so much time at home, and perhaps then I would lead a less gray life than at present. But what’s the use? “What’s the use of Pentothal,” as my mother would say. I’m not so obsessed about literature-sickness as I was when, for example, I arrived in Nantes in November of last year. That is why I can now say with an easy conscience that, between life and books, I choose the latter, which help me to make sense of the former. Literature has always enabled me to understand life. And for precisely that reason it leaves me outside it. I mean it: I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Thursday (extract from Gombrowicz’s diary)
I got up, as usual, around ten, and had breakfast: tea with cakes, followed by oatmeal. Letters: one from Litka in New York; another from Jelenski in Paris. At midday I went to the office (on foot, it’s not far). I spoke to Marrill Alberes on the phone about the translation and to Russo to discuss the proposed trip to Goya. Ríos called to tell me they were already back from Miramar, and Drabrowski (regarding the flat).