This tremulous and extravagant exchange of ears by way of credentials — with Gombrowicz in the background — was the start of a great, unexpected friendship.
“My dear Mrs. Girondo,” Tongoy said suddenly, with a huge, horrific happy smile, “welcome to the Brighton.”
Thursday
BUT IT’S RAINING!
The rain is falling on Barcelona, though with less wind and less cruelty than yesterday, when I went to the Avenida Palace to meet Rita Gombrowicz. It may seem a very curious coincidence or a very fortuitous chance, but the fact is that, as I was absorbed in the entry for Gombrowicz in this dictionary, Rita, his widow, arrived yesterday in Barcelona, and I went to see her at her hotel, the Avenida Palace. It may seem a very fortuitous chance, but in truth I had known for a month that Rita Gombrowicz was going to come to Barcelona and that she and I had to present a book by her husband in the bookshop La Central. To be honest, knowing this made me linger over the word Gombrowicz, because I did not want to find myself commenting on another author of private journals — Kafka, for example, the next entry in this dictionary — with Rita in Barcelona.
Yesterday I went to fetch her from the Avenida Palace. It was a very unpleasant afternoon, rain and a strong wind, a rare winter’s day in the middle of spring. I had seen only old photographs of Rita, images from the 1960s, from the time she went to live with Witold Gombrowicz, but I immediately recognized her. Inclined as I am to mythologize writers (Gombrowicz has always been a myth for me, which is not to say that he has influenced my writing, I made this very clear in Tunquén), I was nervous at the beginning of the meeting with Rita, but soon there arose between us a mutual current of sympathy and intimacy, as if we had known each other our whole lives.
It was raining steadily outside, it was raining in an aggressive way that was not at all melancholic, but the conversation in the hotel foyer turned nostalgic and persistent, seemingly enveloped in a strange melancholy invented by a rain that was not the rain outside, and gradually the meeting with Rita inclined toward intimacies: “He was someone,” she said of her husband, “who worked a lot on himself, creating his own style. He belonged to a group of writers whose work is the reincarnation of their own personality.”
We proceeded to talk about the close relationship between life and work, and we discussed writers who devote themselves to creating their own style. I didn’t wish to say anything about myself, but if there is one point I have in common with Gombrowicz, it is the origin of my literary style, based — as in his case — on a radical departure from the boring and conservative family discourse.
Gombrowicz’s style would have been nothing without the participation of his mother, who was naive, gluttonous, comfort loving, and whose culture was more fashionable than anything else. She was all this by nature, but she believed that she was lucid, intellectual, frugal, and heroically ascetic. “It was she,” wrote her son, “who pushed me to pure folly, to the absurd, which would later become one of the most important features of my art.” Together with his brother Jerzy, Gombrowicz very quickly hit upon the ideal way to wind her up: it involved systematically affirming the opposite of what she might say. Their mother had only to declare that the sun was shining for the two brothers to reply in unison, “But what are you saying? It’s raining!”
It is no surprise that, years later, Gombrowicz declared that he did not worship poetry and was not overly progressive or modern, or the typical intellectual, or even a nationalist, Catholic, Communist, upright man, nor did he revere science, art, or Marx: “Who was I then? Frequently I was simply the negation of everything the other person said.”
In my case, I learned, every day more skilfully, to interrupt my father’s boring discourse on, for example, our country’s dreams, its bungles and culture. I became the negation of everything he would propose, suggest, lay out, or declare. But, since my father’s discourse hardly ever flagged and was one-sided — only he could speak at home — I barely had time for my interjections, which took advantage of short pauses in my father’s discourse to slip in small tributes to folly, always trying to unbalance him. “You’re no son of mine,” my father would say. And also: “I don’t know why you always have to be different in front of me.”
To counteract the constant appearance of clichés in my father’s discourse, I had to — and this is what I did — concentrate all my energy on snippets of homespun skulduggery, short and avant-garde skirmishes with which I built up a nonconformist and eccentric literary style: an avant-garde style to begin with, which with time has simmered down. A style opposed to family boredom, that of my parents’ home, but also to the crushing boredom of the country in which I had chanced to be born. A contradictory style, an attempt always to say something different, with humor if possible, to break with the lack of irony in the head of the family’s antiquated and one-sided monologue. A style without too many flesh-and-blood literary characters. A style in revolt against everything, most of all against the sleep-inducing Spanish realism, a style that was always ironic toward the marchionesses and proletarian women, lovers and prostitutes, coming and going at five in the afternoon in today’s Spanish novels.
I originate from the avant-garde movement and the skirmishes that family boredom forced me into. And, although I later simmered down, I have devoted my whole life to shunning the established order and trying to create my own style and to say something different. I hate it, for example, when taxi drivers talk to me about the weather and abruptly initiate a string of set phrases. Just yesterday, when I was heading toward the Avenida Palace, the taxi driver said something to me about the gallons of rain that had fallen. During a pause in his leaden discourse, I hijacked the conversation and said (knowing that this would confuse and silence him), “Just today I was given the opportunity to kill bad weather. Do you know what I did?” Anxious silence, bewilderment. “I simply washed the weather’s face. That’s why it appears to be raining. You may not have realized that, in fact, it’s not raining.”
Thanks to my style, I can survive even in a taxi. With the taxi driver talking to me about the weather, I must have reached the Avenida Palace yesterday at about seven in the evening. The presentation in La Central was at eight, and Ferdydurke the book we were going to speak about. First we discussed other matters in the hotel, and did so with the steady, persistent rain of unexpected melancholy.
The real rain was waiting for us outside, when at about half-past seven we started walking along the Rambla de Catalunya, toward the bookshop. We were protected from that real rain by the red umbrella that had accompanied me in the rain in Nantes and had witnessed the birth of Montano’s Malady, an umbrella to which I had since attributed creative powers.
A single umbrella for two fans of Gombrowicz. But two rains for them. And even an imaginary sun.
“It’s not raining,” I said. “The sun’s coming out.”
Rita understood me, she grasped the tribute to Gombrowicz’s anti-maternal style and joked, with a happy and unforgettable wink:
“But it’s raining!”
The red umbrella started trying to unbalance me, the wind shook it from side to side and never have two fans of Gombrowicz gotten so wet. In the face of such an assault, it occurred to me to say to Rita that our umbrella wanted to commit suicide. “Clearly you’re not only concerned about flesh-and-blood characters, you also see a soul in umbrellas,” she said. I would have replied that in my books such characters are conspicuous by their absence, but I preferred not to speak about me and asked her if she was particularly interested in the flesh-and-blood people who appear in novels. She stopped abruptly in the middle of the street, in the rain, almost taking root in the wet tarmac while, among the gusts of wind, she considered her response. “I’m interested,” she said slowly, “in the traces of tears but not the tears. I’m interested in what flesh-and-blood characters leave in writing, and not so much in them.”