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.Pauls, I thought after the tenth reading.You’re one of the best living Latin American writers and there are very few of us who know it and can appreciate it.JAVIER ASPURÚA AT HIS OWN FUNERALNot long ago, I learned of the death of Javier Aspurúa from a friend on his way through Barcelona and from a message that arrived by email.The particulars of this death, as is often true in such cases, were not entirely clear.Aspurúa, I calculate, must have been over seventy.He was sick, according to one of my informants; he only had a cold, according to the other.The point is that one afternoon, as he was convalescing in the town where he lived — Quilpué or maybe Villa Alemana, I’ve forgotten which — a car hit him and he stopped breathing or, in other words, he died.Some friends and acquaintances say that he made his first appearance in the literary world — the professional literary world, such as it is — when he was fifty-five, others when he was past sixty, after an obscure early retirement from some government job.Like an apparition, he sluiced along courses (or irrigation channels, since we’re using hydrographic metaphors) of the strictest propriety.As far as anyone knows, he wrote only book reviews.As far as anyone knows, his complete works appeared in the newspaper Las Últimas Noticias, and, though I may be wrong, a one-hundred page volume might suffice to contain them.I met him in 1999, in Santiago.It was the first and last time I saw him.He was at the offices of Las Últimas Noticias to turn in a review; I was there with Andrés Braithwaite and Rodrigo Pinto.I thanked him for a positive review he’d written of one of my books.He blushed and gazed up at the ceiling.Then we went to a bar and at some point during the night there were more than eight people at our table and we were all talking and pontificating, except for Javier Aspurúa, who sat in silence.Next to him was a plastic bag full of books.At one point, the general conversation didn’t interest me, and I leaned over and asked him what books he’d bought.He handed me the bag so I could take a look: English novels.We talked about some of the authors.Later on Mr.Aspurúa consulted his watch and said that he had to go because otherwise he would miss the last bus to Quilpué or Villa Alemana.I walked him outside.When he was out of sight I thought of the invisible man, but a few seconds later, as I turned and went back into the bar, it hit me that Aspurúa wasn’t the type, and that in fact all his mannerisms, all his shyness, even his reserve, indicated a man who was fully conscious, maybe painfully conscious, of his visibility and the visibility of others.In this sense, I thought, though I thought this much later, maybe on the plane back to Spain, books — the books that he always read with such enthusiasm, an enthusiasm in which one could glimpse the adolescence that never abandons some old people — were like aspirin for a headache or like the opaque sunglasses that some madmen wear to block out everything and find peace, because the truth, experienced day by day as visibility, is exhausting and draining and sometimes brings on madness.Maybe that was his relationship to books.Or maybe not.Maybe what he expected from books, as I’d like to believe now that he’s dead, was messages in a bottle or hard drugs or windows through which, on rare occasions, one sees Alice’s white rabbit skim past like a lightning bolt.According to Braithwaite, who was at his funeral, at some point a rabbit really did run between the gravestones.Not a white rabbit but a gray or brown one, maybe a hare, though from the same family in the end.THE REAL WAY TO GET TO MADRIDOf the many ways to get to Madrid, my favorite is hitchhiking, like when I was Poil de Carotte, in the melancholy words of Renard in his Journal, the time he wet his bed just a little because he was sick and nothing could ever be right again, if it’s possible to wet one’s bed just a little in a world (and in a bed, which is the flip side of the coin on which the metaphor of the world is etched) where the density of voluntary and involuntary acts is anything but sleep or desire, but instead a tangible and in some way irremediable reality: a yellow liquid that runs down your leg, a liquid that the French author, Schwob’s great friend, observes with curiosity and indifference, reminded of himself as a boy, and also of himself as written by himself but so long ago now.Of the many hotels in Madrid, I prefer the ones between the Plaza de Santa Ana and the Plaza de Lavapiés.Just like when I used to hitchhike and I could go for days without eating or sleeping.Although I’m acquainted with better hotels, like the Wellington, for example, which is the hotel where one day I saw the Baroness von Thyssen sitting alone in the lobby, wrapped in a white fur coat as if it were a shield or the kind of rough quilt that bums and the homeless use to protect themselves from the elements in winter, her look rapidly morphing from baroness to commoner.When you think about it, living in Madrid or being there isn’t much different from living or being in Tacuarembó.The air, maybe, is different.It’s so clear that sometimes it blinds the soul, allowing us to see more clearly: the notional streets and the Castilian Spanish, the kind of slang they speak so well in the old capital of the mother country.And the women, the native daughters of Madrid, the blondes and the brunettes, add mystery to a place already rich in mystery, although it’s well known that the Spanish, like Latin Americans, aren’t just poorly educated but also no good in bed.That’s the source of the look one sees in the eyes of the women of Madrid: part sarcasm and part Merimée.The truth is that Madrid is a city that doesn’t exist — despite the warriors and priests who left the capital and never came back, despite the women of Madrid, melancholy and practical in the meseta’s least pragmatic region.Or maybe Madrid is an imaginary city, to which one has to hitchhike, not fly, and to which one can only come when one is twenty-five, not nearly fifty.THE BUKOWSKI OF HAVANATo call someone the Bukowski of Havana might even be flattering in a way, more of a compliment than an insult, but to say such a thing about a writer, a Cuban writer, I don’t know, it could be taken as an open or veiled expression of contempt, because Bukowski, who was an excellent poet, a drunken poet shaped by the reading of bad translations of Li Po, another legendary drunk, has fallen into discredit in recent years, which is something that for the most part seems unfair, since even if he never really shone as a novelist, as a writer of short stories in a tradition that stretches from Twain to Ring Lardner he’s the author of some notable works [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]