At that moment, in spite of the dizziness, I felt like Nietzsche when he had his Eternal Return epiphany. An inexorable succession of nanoseconds, each one blessed by eternity.
What is chope? What does a chope roll consist of? Is the bread rubbed with tomato and a few drops of olive oil, or is it just plain bread that is wrapped in aluminum foil, also known by its brand name as albal? And what does the chopeconsist of? Mortadella cheese, maybe? Or a mixture of mortadella and boiled ham? Or salami and mortadella? Does it contain chorizo or sausage? And how did the foil come to have the brand name albal? Is it a family name, the name of Mr. Nemesio Albal? Or is it an allusion to el alba, the dawn, the bright dawn of lovers and workers who, before setting off for their daily labor, put a pound of bread and the corresponding ration of sliced chope into their lunch boxes?
Dawn with a slight metallic sheen. Bright dawn over the shithole. That was the title of a poem I wrote with Bruno Montané centuries ago. The other day I came across the title and the poem attributed to another poet. Honestly, honestly, what are these people thinking? The lengths they go to, tracking, poaching, harassing. And the worst thing is, it’s an appalling title.
But let us return to weak thought, which goes down like a treat on the scaffolding. It’s pleasant to read, you can’t deny that. It isn’t short on clarity either. And the socially weak or powerless understand the message perfectly. Hitler, to take another example, there was an essayist or philosopher — take your pick — who specialized in weak thought. He’s always understandable! Self-help books are in fact books of practical philosophy, enjoyable down-to-earth philosophy that the woman and the man in the street can understand. That Spanish philosopher, who analyzes and interprets the ups and downs of Big Brother, is a readable and clear philosopher, although in his case the revelation came a couple of decades late. I can’t recall his name for the moment, because, as many of you will have guessed, I am writing this speech on the fly a few days before delivering it. All I can remember is that the philosopher in question lived for many years in a Latin American country; I imagine him there feeling thoroughly sick of his tropical exile, and the mosquitoes, and the ghastly exuberance of the flowers of evil. Now the old philosopher lives in a Spanish city, somewhere north of Andalusia, enduring endless winters, muffled in a scarf and a woolen cap, watching the competitors in Big Brother and taking notes in a notebook with pages white and cold as snow.
For books about theology, there’s no one to match Sánchez Dragó. For books about popular science, there’s no one to match some guy whose name escapes me for the moment, a specialist in UFOs. For books about intertextuality, there’s no one to match Lucía Extebarría. For books about multiculturalism, there’s no one to match Sánchez Dragó. For political books, there’s no one to match Juan Goytisolo. For books about history and mythology, there’s no one to match Sánchez Dragó. For a book about the ill-treatment of women today, there’s no one to match that lovely talk-show host Ana Rosa Quintana. For books about travel, there’s no one to match Sánchez Dragó. I just love Sánchez Dragó. He doesn’t look his age. I wonder if he dyes his hair with henna or ordinary dye from the hairdresser. Maybe his hair hasn’t gone grey. And if he hasn’t gone grey, how come he hasn’t gone bald, which is what usually happens to men whose hair doesn’t lose its original color?
And now for the question that has been tormenting me: Why hasn’t Sánchez Dragó invited me to appear on his TV show? What is he waiting for? Does he want me to get down on my knees and grovel at his feet like a sinner before the burning bush? Is he waiting for my health to deteriorate even further? Or for me to get a recommendation from Pitita Ridruejo? Well, you watch out, Víctor Sánchez Dragó! There’s a limit to my patience and I was a gangster in a former life! Don’t say you weren’t warned, Gregorio Sánchez Dragó!
Hear this. To the right hand side of the routine signpost (coming — of course — from north-northwest), right where a bored skeleton yawns, you can already see Comala, the city of death. This speech is bound for that city, mounted on an ass, as all of us in our various more or less premeditated ways are bound for the city of Comala. But before we get there, I would like to relate a story told by Nicanor Parra, whom I would consider my master if I was worthy to be his disciple, which I’m not. One day, not so long ago, Nicanor Parra received an honorary doctorate from the University of Concepción. The honor might have been conferred by the University of Santa Barbara or Mulchén or Coigüe; I’ve been told that in the '90s all you needed to start up a private university in Chile was to have finished primary school and secured the use of a reasonable sized house; it’s one of the boons of the free-market system. The University of Concepción, however, has a certain prestige; it’s a big university and still a state-run institution as far as I know, and a tribute to Nicanor Parra was organized there and they gave him an honorary doctorate and invited him to conduct a master class. So Nicanor Parra turns up and the first thing he explains is that when he was a kid or a teenager, he went to that university — not to study, but to sell sandwiches (sometimes called sánguches in Chile), which the students used to wolf down between classes. Sometimes Nicanor Parra went there with his uncle, sometimes he went with his mother, and occasionally he went on his own, with a bag full of sandwiches, wrapped not in albal foil but in newspaper or brown paper, and perhaps he didn’t carry them in a bag but in a basket, covered with a dish cloth, for hygienic and aesthetic and even practical reasons. And addressing that roomful of smiling southern professors, Nicanor Parra evoked the old University of Concepción, which was probably disappearing into the void, and continues to disappear, even now, into the void’s inertia or our perception of it; and he remembered his younger self: badly dressed, we can assume, wearing sandals and the ill-fitting clothes of a poor adolescent, and everything — even the smell of that time, a smell of Chilean colds and southern flus — was trapped like a butterfly by the question that Wittgenstein asks himself and us, speaking from another time, from faraway Europe, a question to which there is no answer: Is this hand a hand or isn’t it?