Julio Martínez Morales, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994. I'm going to tell you something about the honor of poets as I stroll now around the Feria del Libro. I'm a poet. I'm a writer. I've made a fair name for myself as a critic. At a guess, 7 × 3 = 22 booths, but in fact there are many more. Our sight is limited. And yet I've managed to make a place for myself under the sun of this feria. Left behind are the wrecked cars, the limits of writing, the 3 × 3 = 9. It hasn't been easy. Left behind are the A and the E, bleeding to death hanging from a balcony to which I sometimes return in dreams. I'm an educated man: the prisons I know are subtle ones. And of course poetry and prison have always been neighbors. And yet it's melancholia that's the source of my attraction. Am I in the seventh dream or have I truly heard the cocks crow at the other end of the feria? It might be one thing or it might be another. But cocks crow at dawn, and it's noon now, according to my watch. I wander through the feria and greet my colleagues who are wandering as dreamily as I am. Dreamily× dreamily = a prison in literary heaven. Wandering. Wandering. The honor of poets: the chant we hear as a pallid judgment. I see young faces looking at the books on display and feeling for coins in the depths of pockets as dark as hope. 7 × 1 = 8, I say to myself as I glance out of the corner of my eye at the young readers and a formless image is superimposed on their remote little smiling faces as slowly as an iceberg. We all pass under the balcony where the letters A and E hang and their blood gushes down on us and stains us forever. But the balcony is pallid like us, and pallor never attacks pallor. At the same time, and I say this in my defense, the balcony wanders with us too. Elsewhere this is called mafia. I see an office, I see a computer running, I see a lonely hallway. Pallor× iceberg = a lonely hallway slowly peopled by our own fear, peopled with those who wander the feria of the hallway, looking not for any book but for some certainty to shore up the void of our certainties. Thus we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation. Herds. Hangmen. The scalpel slices the bodies. A and E × Feria del Libro = other bodies; light as air, incandescent, as if last night my publisher had fucked me up the ass. Dying can seem satisfactory as a response, Blanchot would say. 31 × 31 = 961 good reasons. Yesterday we sacrificed a young South American writer on the town altar. As his blood dripped over the bas-relief of our ambitions I thought about my books and oblivion, and that, at last, made sense. A writer, we've established, shouldn't look like a writer. He should look like a banker, a rich kid who grows up without a care in the world, a mathematics professor, a prison official. Dendriform. Thus, paradoxically, we wander. Our arborescence × the balcony's pallor = the hallway of our triumph. How can young people, readers by antonomasia, not realize that we're liars? All one has to do is look at us! Our imposture is blazoned on our faces! And yet they don't realize, and we can recite with total impunity: 8, 5, 9, 8, 4, 15, 7. And we can wander and greet each other (I, at least, greet everyone, the juries and the hangmen, the benefactors and the students), and we can praise the faggot for his unbridled heterosexuality and the impotent man for his virility and the cuckold for his spotless honor. And no one moans: there is no anguish. Only our nocturnal silence when we crawl on all fours toward the fires that someone has lit for us at a mysterious hour and with incomprehensible finality. We're guided by fate, though we've left nothing to chance. A writer must resemble a censor, our elders told us, and we've followed that marvelous thought to its penultimate consequence. A writer must resemble a newspaper columnist. A writer must resemble a dwarf and MUST survive. If we didn't have to read too, our work would be a point suspended in nothingness, a mandala pared down to a minimum of meaning, our silence, our certainty of standing with one foot dangling on the far side of death. Fantasies. Fantasies. In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats. Castrated cats wedded to cats with slit throats. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a cryptographic exercise.
Pablo del Valle, Feria del Libro, Madrid, July 1994. I'm going to tell you something about the honor of poets. There was a time when I didn't have money or the name I have now: I was out of work and my name was Pedro García Fernandez. But I was talented and I was friendly. I met a woman. I met many women, but I met one woman especially. This woman, best left unnamed, fell in love with me. She worked for the post office. She was a postal official, I would say when my friends asked me what my girlfriend did. But it was really a euphemism so I wouldn't have to say that she was a mailwoman. We lived together for a while. My girlfriend left for work in the morning and didn't come home until five. I would get up when I heard the soft noise the door made as it closed (she was considerate of my sleep) and start to write. I wrote about lofty things. Gardens, lost castles, that kind of thing. Then, when I got tired, I would read. Pío Baroja, Unamuno, Antonio and Manuel Machado, Azorín. At lunchtime I would go out, to a restaurant where they knew me. In the afternoon, I revised. When she got back from work we would talk for a while, but what did a man of letters and a mailwoman have to say to each other? I would talk about what I'd written, what I was planning to write: a commentary on Manuel Machado, a poem on the Holy Spirit, an essay taking its first sentence from Unamuno: Spain hurts me too. She would talk about the streets she'd been on and the letters she'd delivered. She talked about stamps, some of them very rare, and the faces she'd seen in her long morning carrying letters. Then, when I couldn't take it anymore, I would say goodbye and head out to hit the bars of Madrid. Sometimes I would go to book parties, more for the free drinks and hors d'oeuvres than anything else. I would go to the Casa de América and listen to the smug Latin American writers. I would go to the Ateneo and listen to the contented Spanish writers. Later I would meet up with friends and we would talk about our work or go together to visit the maestro. But over the literary chatter I kept hearing the sound of my girlfriend's sensible shoes as she quietly made her rounds, toting her yellow bag or pulling her yellow cart after her, depending on how much mail she had to deliver that day, and then I'd lose my concentration, and my tongue, which seconds before had been sharp and clever, would turn clumsy, and I'd fall into a sullen, helpless silence that the others, including our maestro, would luckily take as evidence of my pensive, introspective, philosophical nature. Sometimes, on my way home late at night, I would stop in the neighborhood where she worked and retrace her route, I'd mimic her, I'd ape her, marching with a step that was at once soldierly and ghostly. In the end I'd find myself throwing up, in tears, leaning against a tree, asking myself how I could possibly live with a woman like her. I never came up with any answers, at least the ones I came up with never felt true, but in fact I didn't leave her. We lived together for a long time. Sometimes, when I took a break from my writing, I'd console myself that it would be worse if she were a butcher. I would have been happier if she were a policewoman, mostly because it would've been more fashionable. A policewoman was better than a mailwoman. Then I'd keep writing and writing, in a rage or near collapse, and little by little I mastered the rudiments of the trade. And so the years went by and the entire time I lived off my girlfriend. Finally I won the New Voices of the Council of Madrid Prize and overnight I found myself in possession of three million pesetas and an offer to work for one of the capital's most distinguished papers. Hernando García León wrote a rave review of my book. The first and second printings sold out in less than three months. I've been on two television shows, even though I think one of them brought me on to make fun of me. I'm writing my second novel. And I left my girlfriend. I told her we weren't right for each other and that I didn't want to hurt her and that I wished her the best and that she knew she could always count on me if she ever needed anything. Then I packed my books in cardboard boxes, I put my clothes in a suitcase, and I left. I can't remember which great writer said it, but love smiles on a winner. It wasn't long before I was living with another woman and renting an apartment in Lavapiés, an apartment that I pay for myself, where I'm happy and productive. My current girlfriend is studying English literature and writes poetry. We spend a lot of time talking about books. And sometimes she has great ideas. I think we make a wonderful couple: people look at us and nod their heads. We embody optimism and the future in a certain way, a way that's pragmatic and thoughtful too. Some nights, though, when I'm in my office putting the final touches on my column or revising a few pages of my novel, I hear footsteps in the street, and I think, I could almost swear, that it's the mailwoman out delivering mail at the wrong time of day. I go out onto the balcony and I don't see anyone there or maybe I see some drunk on his way home, vanishing around a corner. Nothing's wrong. There's no one there. But when I go back to my desk, I hear the steps again, and then I know that the mail-woman is working, that even though I can't see her she's making her rounds and she couldn't have picked a worse time. And then I stop working on my column or my chapter and I try to write a poem or spend the rest of the evening writing in my diary, but I can't. The sound of her sensible shoes keeps echoing in my head. You can hardly hear it, and I know how to make it go away: I get up, walk to the bedroom, take off my clothes, and get into bed, where I find my girlfriend's sweet-smelling body. I make love to her, sometimes with great tenderness, sometimes violently, and then I sleep and dream that I'm being inducted into the Academy. Or not. It's just a manner of speaking. Actually, sometimes I dream I'm being inducted into Hell. Or I don't dream anything at all. Or I dream that I've been castrated, and that with the passage of time two tiny testicles, like colorless olives, sprout back between my legs, and I fondle them with a mixture of love and fear and keep them secret. Day chases away the ghosts. Of course, I don't talk to anybody about this. I pay for my relationship with the mailwoman with a few nightmares, a few auditory hallucinations. It could be worse. I can handle it. If I were less sensitive, I'm sure I wouldn't even remember her anymore. Sometimes I actually have the urge to call her, to follow her on her route and watch her at work, for the first time. Sometimes I feel like meeting her at some bar in her neighborhood, which isn't my neighborhood anymore, and asking about her life: whether she has a new lover, whether she's delivered any letters from Malaysia or Tanzania, whether she still gets the same Christmas bonus. But I don't do it. I settle for hearing her footsteps, fainter and fainter. I settle for thinking about the hugeness of the Universe. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a horror movie.