“I’ve been waiting for you all afternoon.”
It can be said that your escape has ended, but also that you continue to journey at home, along the byroad.
The world for you, after your slow homecoming, has turned into a foreign country where there’s no longer the need to flee or to return home either.
Before the world was a foreign country, literature was a journey, an odyssey. There were two Odysseys, the classic one, a conservative epic going from Homer to James Joyce, in which the individual returned home with an identity, despite all the difficulties, reaffirmed by the journey across the world and also by the obstacles encountered along the way: Ulysses, in effect, returns to Ithaca, and Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s character, also, though in his case he did so in a kind of circular voyage of Oedipal repetition. The other odyssey was that of Musil’s man without qualities, who, unlike Ulysses, moved in an odyssey without return, in which the individual hurried forward, never returning home, continually advancing and getting lost, changing his identity instead of reaffirming it, dissolving it in what Musil called “a delirium of many.”
Now you live a double odyssey in a foreign country and along one of its byroads you walk in the mist at dusk, seeking Musil. Sometimes you catch sight of Emily Dickinson, who flees from something and whispers the word fog as she walks her dog. Sometimes you don’t see her, because she is sewing at home, she is the Penelope of the conservative epic.
You continually advance and get lost and change your identity instead of reaffirming it, and you dissolve in a delirium of many along the byroad — in the sitting room at home — amid the fog, under the mist. With the television switched on, but without the sound, so from time to time you lift your eyes and perceive an image, but do not retain it, it’s a kind of continuous visual track, in the background, as there was background music before.
I am with my favorite homely vases, in front of the abyss, in a directionless present, like the pages of this diary, which are paradoxically so attentive right now to the calendar. Early morning on September 26th. The world is in flames, up in arms. At the start of the twenty-first century, as if I walked to the rhythm of literature’s most recent history, I am alone and without direction on some byroad, at dawn, heading inexorably for melancholy. A slow, enveloping, increasingly deep nostalgia for all that literature once was merges with the thick mist in the early morning.
At the start of the twenty-first century, as if I walked in rhythm to the conspiracy of the Great Wall, I notice the cold that is usual at this hour and season in this house and switch on the heater and drape my shoulders in a shawl and wander mentally with my eyes closed and wonder what unknown I carry in me. I’m at home, but also on the byroad. With my homely vases, but in front of the abyss. Call me Walser.
OCTOBER 25
I place my hand on my temple because what I can’t believe is that the moles are working away inside my brain as well, injecting me with the sickness of Teste (from the Latin testa, skull), an acute and furious, frightful pain caused by the opening of underground galleries in my mind: a wedge of ninety degrees, of burning metal, driven into one side of my head. The wedge is the artwork of the enemies of the literary who dominate my city: haughty illiterates, managing directors of publishers that give shape to the black bottom of Nothingness. But the resistance to Teste’s disease is under way and gathering strength, it’s already here, it’s already in this foreign country where I’m on a double odyssey, where I dig in with my fellow conspirators, it’s already here in Action Without Parallel and the wall being built by Chinese conspirators. I’m going to resist, I need literature in order to survive and, if need be, I’ll embody it myself, if I’m not already doing so. “To suffer is to give something supreme attention and, to a small extent, I’m a man of attention,” we read in Monsieur Teste. The supreme attention I devote to literature and to my Montano’s malady has caused me to suffer, has given me a Teste-ache, but it’s worth it because Action, the wall and myself have now turned all our attention to the moles and their confident bosses. And both moles and bosses are in a bad way, they have it coming.
NOVEMBER 25
Unable to sleep at four in the morning, I switch on the heater due to the cold in the house and drape my shoulders in a shawl. I remember when I used to like writing at this silent hour of the night and decide to pick up this diary I left off one month ago, to go over the last three days, which have been “very mountainous,” I think it could be said that they have been traversed with the help of a continuous breeze from the most diverse mountains.
The day before yesterday, I had to travel to Granada in the afternoon. I got up as normal at eight in the morning, I got to my feet as soon as the alarm sounded, with its customary stridency, and Rosa turned it off with her no less-customary smack.
A wonderful smack.
We had coffee, biscuits and orange juice for breakfast. At nine Rosa went to work. Her first appointment was with a writer of journals who has dared to publish, for example, that the letters always flicker and blur in front of his eyes and he often has the sensation that everything is going to become paralyzed inside his body. While this is an idiocy or a poor imitation of some disturbed German writer, the worst part is that he writes such things because he believes they make him look interesting, and this may help him to get on in his career and ascend in the social scale, clothed in the purple mantle of a “tormented writer.”
I felt sorry for Rosa, who was going to meet this sad case, a friend of Pico’s moles and of the haughty illiterates. Few writers turn people off literature so much as this one. I felt sorry for Rosa and she did not thank me for it, but became annoyed. “He’s a client,” she said. Some people are very amusing when they get worked up and Rosa is one of them. I live with her due to lack of evidence, and it’s not that I haven’t searched for it deliriously, but the fact is there is nothing that proves her treachery.
I prepared my suitcase, although it was hours before I had to go to Granada. I started to reread El quadern gris by Josep Pla. I was due to talk about private journals at Granada University, most of all about my own, and I decided to have another look at Pla’s. “Mountainous” hours and even days were approaching, but I couldn’t tell at that moment when I opened Pla’s journal and read, “I don’t think it can be denied that the mountains are well made. If somebody disagrees and is of another opinion … tough luck! Some people are never happy.”
At midday, I turned on the computer and came across an e-mail in which I was again invited, this time with plenty of warning, to the Literature Festival that takes place every year in June on Matz Peak in Switzerland: open-air readings, all of them after midnight, probably Tyrolese songs and a journey by airplane, train, coach, and cable car before reaching Matz Peak and the high climate created every year among writers, all of whom are German speakers. “You will be the only foreigner, an interesting situation, you might write something about it. Intellectual inspiration and the spirit of the mountains,” it said in the e-mail, this time written in correct English, sent to me by my Swiss-German publisher.
As I went down to the lobby to collect the day’s mail, I thought about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and the kind of young sufferer of literature-sickness that appears in it: a young man who, Mann tells us, was sent home from the sanatorium on top of the mountain in an experiment to see if he had been cured. The young man returned to the arms of his wife and mother, to the arms of all his friends and relatives. But he spent the day on his back, with the thermometer in his mouth, and did not worry about anything else. “You don’t understand,” he would say, “you have to have lived up there to know how things must be done. The essential principles do not exist in this house.” In the end his mother, tired, tells him to go back up there, her useless son was now no good for anything. The young man returned to his “homeland,” as all the patients called the bewitching sanatorium.