I didn't have time to feel ashamed, because before that could happen a cold fury seared my throat. 'You're not a very good whore,' I heard myself spit out. 'You spend all night leading me on and now you leave me in the lurch. Go to hell.'
I slammed the car door and, instead of going into the hotel, began to walk. I don't know how long I was walking, but by the time I got back to the hotel my fury had turned to remorse. The effect of the alcohol, however, had not yet dissipated, because the first thing I did when I got to my room was to call Marcos' house. Luckily, it was Patricia who answered. Stumbling over my words, I begged her to forgive me, pleaded with her to ignore what I'd said, claimed I'd had too much to drink, asked for her forgiveness again. With a cold voice Patricia accepted my apology, and I asked her if she was planning to tell Marcos.
'No,' she answered before hanging up. 'Now go to bed and sleep it off.'
I won't go on. I could go on, but I won't go on. I could tell more anecdotes, but I don't want to forget the bigger picture. A few days ago I read a poem Malcolm Lowry wrote after publishing the novel that brought him fame, money and prestige; it's a truculent, emphatic poem, but sometimes there's no alternative but to be truculent and emphatic, because reality, which almost never respects the laws of good taste, often abounds in truculence and emphasis. The poem goes like this:
Success is like some horrible disaster
Worse than your house burning, the sounds of ruination
As the roof tree falls following each other faster
While you stand, the helpless witness of your damnation.
Fame like a drunkard consumes the house of the soul
Exposing that you have worked for only this —
Ah, that I had never suffered this treacherous kiss
And had been left in darkness forever to founder and fail.
Many years earlier Rodney had warned me and, although at the time I interpreted his words as the inevitable moralizing discharge of a loser drenched in the sickly mythology of failure that governs a country hysterically obsessed with success, at least I should have foreseen that no one is immune to success, and that only when you have to confront it do you understand that it's not just a misunderstanding, one day's cheerful disgrace, rather it's a humiliating and disgraceful misunderstanding and disgrace; I should also have foreseen that it's impossible to survive it with dignity, because it consumes the house of the soul and because it's so beautiful that you discover that, though you kid yourself with protests of pride and cleansing demonstrations of cynicism, in reality you've done nothing but seek it, just as you discover, as soon as you have it in your hands and it's too late to turn it down, that it's only good for destroying you and everything around you. I should have foreseen it, but I didn't. The result was that I lost respect for reality; I also lost respect for literature, which was the only thing that had given reality meaning or an illusion of meaning up till then. Because what I thought I discovered then is exactly the worst thing to discover: that my real vocation wasn't writing but having written, that I wasn't a real writer, that I wasn't a writer because I couldn't be anything else, but because writing was the only instrument I'd had at hand to aspire to success, fame and money. Now I'd achieved them: now I could stop writing. That's why, perhaps, I stopped writing; for that reason and because I was too alive to write, too keen to drain success of its last breath, and you can only write when you write as if you're dead and writing is the only way to evoke life, the last strand that unites us with it. So, after twelve years of living only to write, with the exclusive vehemence and passion of a dead man who won't be resigned to his death, I suddenly stopped writing. That was when I really began to be at risk: I found out that, just as Rodney had told me years before — when I was so young and unwary I couldn't even have dreamt that success might one day crash down on me like a burning house — the writer who stops writing ends up seeking or attracting destruction, because he's contracted the disease of looking at reality, and sometimes of seeing it, but he can no longer use it, can no longer turn it into sense or beauty, no longer has the shield of writing to protect himself from it. Then it's the end. It's over. Finito. Kaput.
The end came one Saturday in April 2002, exactly a year after the publication of my novel. By then it had been many months since I had completely stopped writing and begun to relish the jubilant toxin of triumph; by then the lies, infidelities and alcohol had completely poisoned my relationship with Paula. That night the proprietor of a literary magazine that had just awarded me a prize for the best book of the year gave a dinner in my honour at his house in the country, in a village in L'Emporda; there was a large group of people gathered there: journalists, writers, film-makers, architects, photographers, professors, literary critics, friends of the family. I attended the engagement with Paula and Gabriel. This was unusual and I can't remember why I did: maybe because the host had assured me on the phone that it was going to be almost a family party and that other guests would also be bringing their children with them, maybe to quiet my guilty conscience for cheating on Paula so often and barely spending any time with Gabriel, maybe because I judged that this domestic image would endorse my reputation as a writer impervious to the trappings of fame, a reputation for incorruptibility and modesty that, as I discovered very early, was the ideal tool to win me the favour of the most powerful members of literary society — who are always the most candid, because they feel their status is secure — and also to protect me from the hostility that my success had elicited among those who felt neglected because of it, who felt I'd snatched it away from them. The fact of the matter is that, unusually, I attended the dinner with Gabriel and with Paula. They seated me across the table from the host, an elderly businessman with interests in Barcelona newspapers and publishing companies; Paula was beside me, and on the other side was a young radio journalist, the host's niece, who, following her uncle's instructions, made sure the whole conversation revolved around the causes of my book's unexpected success. Since the journalist practically forced all the guests to participate, there were opinions of every stripe; as for me, happily settled into my position as protagonist of the evening, I confined myself to commenting with hesitant approval on everything that was said and, in a gently ironic tone, begging our host every once in a while that we change the subject, which was interpreted by all as proof of my humility, and not as a ruse designed to prevent the discussion of my merits from flagging. After dinner we had coffee and liqueurs in a large entrance hall that had been fitted out as a reception room, where the guests mingled in smaller groups that assembled and reassembled at the whims of the various conversations. It was after midnight when Paula interrupted a conversation that I, whisky in hand, was having with a screenwriter, his wife and the host's niece about the cinematic adaptation of my novel; she told me that Gabriel had fallen asleep and that she had to work the next morning.
'We're leaving,' she announced, adding without conviction: 'but you stay if you want.'
I was already probing for arguments to try to convince her we should stay a little longer when the screenwriter interjected.