A number of enigmas are still floating in the air like ectoplasm. If Pe went to eat in a cheap restaurant, why didn’t she end up with a case of gastroenteritis? And why did Pe, who isn’t short of money, go to a cheap restaurant in the first place? To save money?
We’re lousy in bed, lousy at braving the elements, but good at saving. We hoard everything. As if we knew the asylum was going to burn down. We hide everything. The treasures that Pizarro will return to rob over and over again, but also utterly useless things: junk, loose threads, letters, buttons, which we stash in places that are then wiped from our memories, because our memories are weak. And yet we like to keep, to hoard, to save. If we could, we’d save ourselves for better times. We’re lost without mom and dad. Although we suspect that mom and dad made us ugly and stupid and bad so they could shine by contrast in the eyes of posterity. Saving, for mom and dad, meant permanence, work and a pantheon, while for us, saving is about success, money and respectability. We’re only interested in success, money and respectability. We are the middle-class generation.
Permanence has been swept aside by the rapidity of empty images. The pantheon, we discover to our astonishment, is the doghouse of the burning asylum.
If we could crucify Borges, we would. We are the fearful killers, the careful killers. We think our brain is a marble mausoleum, when in fact it’s a house made of cardboard boxes, a shack stranded between an empty field and an endless dusk. (And, anyway, who’s to say that we didn’t crucify Borges? Borges said as much by dying in Geneva.)
And so let us do as García Márquez bids and read Alexandre Dumas. Let us follow the advice of Pérez Dragó or García Conte and read Pérez Reverte. The reader (and by the same token the publishing industry) will find salvation in the bestseller. Who would have thought. All that carrying on about Proust, all those hours spent examining pages of Joyce suspended on a wire, and the answer was there all along, in the bestseller. Ah, the bestseller. But we’re lousy in bed and we’ll probably put our foot in it again. Everything suggests that there is no way out of this.