At about one in the afternoon, I dropped Mann’s book on the floor and in a few seconds, without even forcing my imagination, I was on the byroad, walking in the mist over the snowy peaks of Matz. At ten past one, another mountain: I thought about Pico’s volcano and its tireless moles. At twenty past one, the telephone rang and I felt at home again. It was Justo Navarro from a chalet in the Sierra Nevada. At a quarter to two, I emerged onto the street, went to the bank, where I changed my investment fund and chatted to the branch manager for some minutes. I talked to him about snowy mountains as well, since his two daughters, he told me, went skiing in La Molina every weekend.
On coming out of the bank, I wanted to see myself as a businessman, something I have never been but, like everything I haven’t been, I like to try to be. Someone passed by and greeted me, “Hi there, Walser.” I then slowed my businessman’s powerful pace and, forgetting about my brand-new investment fund, began to move like a peaceful being, like a walker of Swiss nationality who liked to stop to contemplate all the vistas afforded along the way: a Helvetic walker with a pagan calm, on a direct path toward the abysses, or perhaps, as Dickens said — not in vain, in the world inhabited by Rosario Girondo, was December 25th approaching — toward “the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
I bought the papers and, walking along my street’s sunny pavement — the other side always looks like a byroad in permanent mist — I told myself that my name was Walser, but also Girondo. I was two people, like Kaspar Hauser in the streets of Nuremberg. But in my case, which is not that of Hauser, with all my memory intact.
At the airport I bought Tales from the Mountain by Miguel Torga. “Pursued all day by the mountains,” I wrote on the airplane — in the absence of other blank paper, on the bag Iberia provides for passengers who need to be sick.
I had left this diary at home, but carried photocopies of everything I wrote during the last year in my suitcase — I planned to read excerpts in Granada. So Iberia’s sick-bag became a scribbling pad of ideas destined for this diary. I jotted down, for example, in microscopic writing and telegraphic style that I elaborate here a little to make it more intelligible, “The prehistoric wind of the Icy Mountains blows in Walser as in Kafka. In reality both of them were doomed to a journey without a point of arrival. Their prose had something indefinitely extendible and elastic and a desire to comment on life from top to bottom, to comment on it all, to chase after even the most trivial details with a clear tendency toward the infinite, which made it ridiculous to search for conventional endings to their stories. I like novels that have no end. The reader who seeks finished novels — Unamuno said — does not deserve to be my reader, since he himself is already finished before he’s read me. In short, I recall that Walter Benjamin maintained that every finished work is the death mask of its intuition.”
In the evening I had dinner in Granada with some friends and we talked at length about Mulhacén Peak, where legend has it they buried the last Nazrid king, who from this magnificent viewpoint could dominate the jagged outcrops of Alcazaba and Veleta, the white villages of the Alpujarras, the meadows next to the Guadix desert, and, of course, the Alhambra and gentle slopes of the Sierra Nevada rising out of nothingness.
It was a mountaineering evening and, after a few hours’ sleep, the following morning …
“I have to report that one fine morning, I do not know anymore for sure what time it was, as the desire to take a walk came over me, I put my hat on my head, left my writing room, or room of phantoms, and ran down the stairs to hurry out into the street.”
This is how Walser’s “The Walk” begins, and this is how yesterday began for me. My appointment at the university was at noon, but I rose very early and decided to go for a morning walk through the streets of Granada. I symbolically put il cappello in testa (as it says in the elegant Italian translation of Walser’s book) and went out into the street, diretto in strada.
An imaginary blue hat on my head and straight into the street. As far as I can remember today (as I write this in the cold early morning, warmed by the poor heater), my spirits as I went out into the street yesterday were luminous and gay, like the self-same morning. The early world extending abruptly in front of my eyes seemed to me as beautiful as if I were seeing it for the first time. I had not yet taken twenty or thirty steps from a still-empty square when it occurred to me to look up, toward the paths of imaginary gravel that led to the Sierra Nevada, and suddenly I mentally walked along endless, straight roads, over jagged, red stones seen in childhood, until I reached a solitary, strange and remote valley that, as I scoured it, gave me the sensation that a distant historical age had just returned to the world and I was a medieval pilgrim.
It was hot, and the slightest human trace, the slightest indication of industry, culture or effort, was nowhere to be seen. A marvelous but terrifying sensation. I thought that it was better to be alone than that suddenly, for example, Emily Dickinson should appear in the wake of a strange, thick fog, walking her dog. I was alone and enjoying being so, and from time to time I thought about the art of despising art, which Pavese spoke about in reference to the world of private journals: “The art of despising art — The art of being alone.”
With this art in mind, I began to traverse rustic, stormy places that alternated with others that were peaceful and, it seems to me, absurd. And so, thinking about this art of being alone, I arrived at Granada University, at exactly midday, dreaming that I was dressed as a mountaineer, with a stick in one hand and a blue hat on my head.
In this way I arrived at Granada University. In one hand, the imaginary — the stick — and in the other, the real — the photocopies of my diary. Only in my mountain waistcoat did the real and imaginary merge: sewn into this waistcoat, in the form of an impeccable check, I carried my savings on the way to the wide, fresh, and luminous world of nothingness.
It’s not surprising that, arriving in good health, in such an early, mountaineering spirit, I should choose first to read the opening pages of my Diary of a Deceived Man: “At the start of the twenty-first century, as if I were walking to the rhythm of literature’s most recent history, I was alone and without direction …”
I read excerpts from my diary for an hour and, when I finished, a beautiful young student called Renata Cano — at first I thought she was called Renata Montano — came up to tell me, in a voice as pure as the driven snow, that she had been moved at the end of my Theory of Budapest by all those elders who appeared, almost all of them single, almost all of them childless, almost all of them plagiarists and fakes, and all, absolutely all of them, deceived.
I am very old. You see, in Budapest I aged twenty years in one go. In any case, the words of Montano — I have her permission to call her this — comforted me enormously. I can’t sleep, possibly because I’m unable to forget Renata’s words and yesterday’s lunch with her at that inn near Puerto del Suspiro del Moro, where we talked about snowy peaks, in particular those of Kilimanjaro, and also about other peaks, those that are reached only through love, passion.