The Luminous Novel E-Book

Mario Levrero

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 1053

Beschreibung

'Perhaps the luminous novel is this thing that I started writing today; just now. Maybe these sheets of paper are a warm-up exercise. […] But it's quite possible that if I go on writing – as I usually do – with no plan; although this time I know very well what I want to say; things will start to take shape; to come together. I can feel the familiar taste of a literary adventure in my throat. I'll take that as confirmation; then; and start describing what I think was the beginning of my spiritual awakening – though nobody should expect religious sermons at this point; they'll come later. It all began with some ruminations prompted by a dog.' A writer attempts to complete the novel for which he has been awarded a big fat Guggenheim grant; though for a long time he succeeds mainly in procrastinating – getting an electrician to rewire his living room so he can reposition his computer; buying an armchair; or rather; two: 'In one; you can't possibly read: it's uncomfortable and your back ends up crooked and sore. In the other; you can't possibly relax: the hard backrest means you have to sit up straight and pay attention; which makes it ideal if you want to read.' Insomniacs; romantics and anyone who's ever written (or failed to write) will fall in love with this compelling masterpiece told by a true original; with all his infuriating faults; charming wit and intriguing musings.

Leseprobe

First published in 2021 by And Other Stories Sheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Originally published as La novela luminosa Copyright © heirs of Mario Levrero, 2005 Translation copyright © Annie McDermott, 2021 Arranged with Agencia Literaria CBQ, SL, Madrid, Spain

All rights reserved. The rights of Mario Levrero to be identified as author of this work and of Annie McDermott to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted.

ISBN: 9781913505011 eBook ISBN: 9781913505028

Editor: Lizzie Davis; Copy-editor: Bella Bosworth; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Steven Marsden.

Quotations from the following sources gratefully acknowledged: Rosa Chacel, Obra completa vol. 9: Diarios; Somerset Maugham, ‘The Lotus Eater’; Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence; Saint Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle (or The Mansions); Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters; lyrics from ‘Yo en mi casa y ella en el bar’ by Los Náufragos; Constantine P. Cavafy, ‘The City’, translated by Lawrence Durrell; William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads; JD Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction; lyrics from ‘El monito’ by Julio de Caro. Whilst all attempts have been made to find the copyright holders of quoted passages and secure permission where relevant, the publishers would welcome approaches in the case of omission.

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s PEN Translates programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Acknowledgements

To the Powers that allowed me to have luminous experiences.

To the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

To all those who agreed to feature as characters in the ‘Diary of the Grant’, especially Chl.

To the guinea-pig readers who helped me edit the ‘Diary’, especially Eduardo Abel Giménez, Carmen Simón, Mónica Suárez and Fernanda Trías.

To the people who encouraged me to apply for the Guggenheim grant, in particular Malaro Díaz, Hugo Verani, Julio Ortega, Fernando Burgos and Rómulo Cosse; and to Mariana Urti, an impeccable secretary throughout all the paperwork from the Foundation.

M. L.

Any people or institutions who feel affected or injured by the opinions expressed in this book should understand that these opinions are nothing but the ravings of a senile mind.

M. L.

Contents

Historical Preface to the Luminous NovelPrologue: Diary of the GrantAugust 2000September 2000October 2000November 2000December 2000January 2001February 2001March 2001April 2001May 2001June 2001August 2001The Luminous NovelChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter Three-to-FourChapter Four-to-FiveFirst CommunionEpilogue to the DiaryTranslator’s Afterword

‌Historical Preface to the Luminous Novel

I’m not sure what exactly the origin was, the initial impulse that led me to attempt the luminous novel, although the beginning of the first chapter says expressly that the impulse arose from an obsessive image, and the image is clear enough to allow the reader to believe this statement. I myself ought to believe it unreservedly, because I have a very strong memory of both the image and its obsessive quality, or at least its recurrence over a long enough period to have suggested the idea of obsession.

My doubts relate more to the fact that now, when I look back on that time, another completely different image occurs to me as the source of that impulse; and judging by this image, the initial impulse arose from a conversation I had with a friend. I’d told this friend about an experience of mine that had been extremely transcendental, and I’d told him how difficult it would be to turn it into a story. According to my theory, there are some extraordinary experiences that can’t be written about without becoming denatured; it’s impossible to set them down on paper. My friend insisted that if I wrote it just as I’d told it that night, I’d have a beautiful story; and that not only would I be able to write it, but that writing it was my duty.

In fact, these two images don’t contradict one another, and they’re even both supported by an attentive reading of the first lines of that first chapter – an attentive reading that I undertook just now, before beginning this paragraph. It seems that the opening of the novel contains both elements, but they don’t mix, because I didn’t yet know, when I started to write, that I was writing about that transcendental experience itself. I talk about the obsessive image, which relates to a particular arrangement of the items I need for writing, and later, separately, I talk about a parallel desire to record certain experiences I describe as ‘luminous’. It takes me a few more lines to wonder if what I’d started writing because of the first impulse wasn’t actually that other text I’d been wanting to write. But there’s no mention of my friend, which strikes me as unfair – although he’s no longer my friend, and from what I’ve heard is going around the place bad-mouthing me. It’s very likely that at that moment I’d completely forgotten my friend’s suggestion, authorisation or demand, and was quite convinced that writing that story was something I wanted to do.

I find it surprising that now, after all this time, I can see the cause-and-effect relationship so clearly: my friend encouraged me to write a story I knew would be impossible to write, and he imposed it on me as a duty; that imposition remained, working away in the shadows, rejected outright by the consciousness, and eventually it began to emerge in the form of that obsessive image – and all the while it was cunningly erasing its tracks, because impositions invariably generate resistance. To remove that resistance, the imposition coming from outside me disguised itself as a desire coming from within. Although, of course, the desire already existed, since something had made me tell my friend the story I told him; maybe on some secret, subtle level I knew my friend would find a way of obliging me to do what I thought was impossible. I thought it was impossible then and I think it’s impossible now. It being impossible wasn’t reason enough not to do it, as I knew full well, but the prospect of attempting the impossible made me feel very lazy.

Maybe my friend was right, but for me things are never straightforward. Now I see myself, in my imagination disguised as a memory, simply writing the story I’d recounted to my friend, exactly the way I’d recounted it, and watching it fail; I see myself ripping to shreds the five or six pages the story would have taken up, and this could even be a genuine memory because I have a sense of having written that story once before, though there’s no longer any trace of it among my papers. And that’s where the obsessive image must have come from, showing me the way to arrange myself in order to write it successfully, and it’s also where the desire to write it must have come from, only by then it was transformed into a desire to write about other transcendental experiences, laying them out like a staircase in order to reach the story I wanted to write, or felt I should write, the one I might have written and destroyed. What I mean is that probably, deep down, I understood that the failure of my story was due to the lack of anything around it, the lack of any context to set it off, or of a particular atmosphere created by a vast array of images and words, which could reinforce the effect the anecdote was meant to have on the reader.

This was how I came to make life difficult for myself, because that context, that atmosphere and all those images and words were carrying me in unexpected – though very logical – directions. These processes are explained brilliantly in The Interior Castle by Santa Teresa of Ávila, my patron saint, but obviously it’s not enough for anyone to have the processes explained: you have to experience them for yourself. Experiencing these processes is how you learn about them, but it’s also how you make mistakes and lose your way. I think that in the chapters I’ve retained of the ‘luminous novel’, the way is lost at the very beginning, and those five lengthy chapters are nothing but an energetic attempt to find it again. An energetic attempt, yes, and even a worthy one, especially if we consider the circumstances that accompanied it, surrounded it, and eventually left it mutilated.

The thing is, I had to be mutilated as well, and I was. Most of the actions that shaped the circumstances of my beginning the luminous novel had to do with my then-future gallbladder operation. Once I’d accepted that the operation was inevitable, the first thing I did was talk to the surgeon about postponing it for as long as possible, and I managed to get an extension of a few months. In those months, I finished four books I’d been putting off for a considerable time, and I also launched myself into the furious writing of those chapters of the luminous novel. It was clear I was very afraid of dying in the operation, and I always knew that writing that luminous novel was an attempt to exorcise my fear of death. I also tried to exorcise my fear of pain, but I didn’t manage. I was more successful with my fear of death. I can’t claim to have gone calmly into the operating theatre, because I was still very frightened of the pain, but the idea of death no longer scared me after I’d written those first five chapters (which actually turned out to be seven). My fear of death comes back every now and then, especially when I’m enjoying myself, but I went into the gallbladder operation, in that respect, with my head held high. At the same time, the idea of death had been a useful incentive to work, against the clock, like a thing possessed. I was able to put my affairs in order, or at least to put my writing in order while disregarding everything else. It was during that time that I accumulated a debt, which for me was considerable, and that debt was what then took me to Buenos Aires, to work.

The definitive mutilation didn’t come, then, on the day of the operation, but the operation itself was a significant mutilation, since I was left without a gallbladder, and worst of all I ended up secretly convinced I’d been castrated. A long time afterwards I freed myself from this secret conviction – and at the same time, the secret stopped being a secret – in a dream. In this dream, the doctor who’d sent me to the surgeon returned my gallbladder to me in perfect condition, inside a jar. The gallbladder, whose real form I’ve never known, in the dream looked a lot like male genitalia. Things had come full circle.

At first, I did everything I could to avoid having the operation. The doctors were categorical, but then doctors are always categorical, especially surgeons, and everyone knows that surgeons are paid a lot of money for operations. I once read something about this by Bernard Shaw, with which I fully agreed: he said it was absurd that the person who decides whether or not an operation is advisable is none other than the surgeon who’ll be paid a hefty sum to carry it out. But the truth is that I was suffering more and more often from gallbladder infections, which left me feverish and worried about dangerous after-effects. Eventually, the message reached me by means of a book – it’s astonishing how every time I’m facing a difficult problem, the information I need appears at exactly the right moment. I was browsing through some books, as I often am, in search of detective novels, on the sale tables outside a bookshop on Avenida 18 de Julio. Suddenly a title caught my eye, seeming to twinkle in the light: DON’T OPERATE UNNECESSARILY, the book was called, and if it wasn’t called that it was called something very similar. It wasn’t cheap, and I didn’t have much money at the time. All the way home, I was weighing up whether or not I should buy it. Buying new books (this was a new book, even though it was on one of the sale tables), and, what’s more, books that don’t belong to the detective-novel genre, is a long way from my usual principles and habits, not to mention my economic capacity. But I was still thinking about the book when I got home. The next day it was the same. In the end I made up my mind, went back to the bookshop and picked the book up again, but it occurred to me that I didn’t necessarily need to buy it. I looked at the contents page and saw there was a chapter devoted to the gallbladder. The rest of the book didn’t interest me. It wasn’t a very long chapter. I’m an extremely fast reader. Glancing over my shoulder and seeing no shop assistants paying much attention to what I was doing, I nonchalantly opened the book, like someone flicking through the pages whilst deciding whether or not to buy it, and turned to the first page of that chapter. Everything was resolved in the first few lines. The chapter began by saying that gallbladder operations are some of the only operations that really are necessary. Then it gave some advice about not operating if you don’t want to – different methods of attempting a neural control of the bile ducts, to let gallstones come and go at will without getting blocked in the sphincter of the duct, and other things like that – but it concluded by saying that having gallbladder trouble is like having a ticking time bomb inside you that could explode at any moment and require an urgent operation – which, of course, is hardly the safest kind. I closed the book, left it in its place on the sale table and went home pondering my acceptance, which was already a done deed.

I wrote that luminous novel by hand, and when I finished a chapter I typed it up on my typewriter, making minor changes and corrections in the process. One chapter was originally written on the typewriter. And there was one chapter I didn’t think was very good and destroyed, but, as the reader who gets that far will see, I soon have regrets and include a summary of it in the replacement chapter; I must only have destroyed the copy, though, because I evidently then retype the original and put it back where it was. But I also kept the summary in the chapter that followed, which complicated the numbering of the chapters. I’m not entirely sure at what stage in the interminable edits the five surviving chapters ended up in the form they’re in today (the two destroyed chapters disappeared without trace); I was carrying this truncated novel around for sixteen years, and every so often I’d embark on a new set of corrections that added or removed things.

In the year 2000 I received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to carry out a final edit of those five chapters and write the nine chapters necessary to finish the project. The edit was completed, but the new chapters weren’t written, and the comings and goings of the year I spent enjoying the grant are written up in the prologue to this book. During that period, which lasted from July 2000 to June 2001, all I managed to produce was a story called ‘First Communion’, which almost became the sixth chapter of the luminous novel but didn’t quite: I’d changed my style by then, and many of my views had changed as well, so I kept it as a stand-alone story. It continues the luminous novel, in a sense, but it certainly doesn’t complete it. The prologue, too, the ‘Diary of the Grant’, could be seen as a continuation of the luminous novel, though only in terms of the subject matter.

I thought about collecting all the related material together in this book, and including my Diary of a Swine and Empty Words alongside it, since these texts are also, in a sense, a continuation of the luminous novel. But that struck me as excessive, and in the end I decided to focus exclusively on unpublished texts. It’s still lacking – it will probably forever be lacking – the series of chapters that weren’t written, among them the retelling of the story I told my friend, which gave rise to the luminous novel.

I was right: the task was and is impossible. There are some things that can’t be written about. This whole book is the testimony of a monumental failure. The system of creating an environment for each luminous event I wanted to describe took me down dark and even sinister paths. In the process, I underwent countless moments of catharsis, recovered many fragments of myself that had been buried in my unconscious and managed to do some of the crying I should have done long ago, and it was without doubt a significant experience. Even now, I find the text moving and therapeutic to read. But the luminous events, once written down, cease to be luminous; they disappoint, they sound trivial. They’re out of reach of literature, or at least of my literature.

I believe, ultimately, that the only light to be found in these pages is the light that the reader will give them.

M. L., 27 August 1999 – 27 October 2002

‌Prologue

Diary of the Grant

‌August 2000

Saturday 5, 03:13

Here begins the ‘Diary of the Grant’. I’ve been trying to do something like this for months now, but systematically avoiding making a start. The aim is to set the writing in motion, no matter what it’s about, and keep it up until I’ve got into the habit. I have to associate the computer with writing. The most-used program needs to be Word. This will mean taking apart a series of cybernetic habits that have consumed me for the past five years, though I shouldn’t think of it as taking anything apart, but rather as putting this together. Every day, every day, even if it’s only a line to say I don’t feel like writing anything, or I don’t have time, or to make any other excuse. But it has to be every day.

I almost certainly won’t manage. Experience has taught me that. And yet I find myself hoping things will be different this time, because the grant is involved. I’ve already been sent the first half of the money, which will be enough to keep me until the end of the year in a reasonable life of leisure. As soon as I knew for certain I was getting the grant this year, I began more or less clearing my schedule, getting rid of some things altogether and spacing others out, so as to leave very few days each month when I have any commitments at all. You see, a life of leisure takes time to arrange. It doesn’t come about just like that, from one moment to the next, simply because you have nothing to do. At the moment my instinct is to fill every gap, devoting all my free time to stupid, pointless activities, because, almost without realising it, I have become like those people I always look down on: intensely afraid of my own selfhood, of being alone with nothing to do, of the ghosts in the basement pushing at the trapdoor, eager to poke their heads out and give me a fright.

One of the first things I did with this half of the grant money was buy myself a pair of armchairs. In my apartment it used to be completely impossible to sit down and rest; for years now I’ve had my living space set up like an office. Desks, tables, uncomfortable chairs, everything there to encourage work – or playing on the computer, which is a kind of work.

I had the electrician come and change the position of the plug sockets so I could move the computer out of sight, out of the central area of the apartment; I’m typing this now in a little room by the bedroom, and in the central area, where the computer used to be, there’s now a strange armchair, very soft and springy, its fabric a lovely greyish blue. The two or three times I’ve sat in it, I’ve fallen asleep. You relax, you can’t help but relax, and then, if you’re at all sleep-deprived, before you know it you’re dead to the world and dreaming. But this armchair is another thing I’ve been avoiding. As for the second one, I haven’t sat in it at all yet, except to try it out. It’s the kind known as a bergère, with a tall, rather hard back that makes it just right for reading. I only really intended to buy one armchair, but when I was testing them both out in the furniture shop, switching back and forth between the two, I realised it wouldn’t be that simple. One chair was perfect for reading; the other was perfect for resting and relaxing. In one, you can’t possibly read: it gets uncomfortable and your back ends up crooked and sore. In the other, you can’t possibly relax: the hard backrest means you have to sit up straight and pay attention, which makes it ideal if you want to read. For many years now, I’ve only ever read at mealtimes, or in bed, or in the bathroom. Admittedly, I’ve also been steering clear of this armchair. But its time will come, just as the time for this diary has come.

I was able to begin it today thanks to my friend Paty. Some time ago I told her about Rosa Chacel, whom I discovered by chance at a second-hand book sale. I thought Memoirs of Leticia Valle was an extraordinary novel and lent it to all my witch friends, because I was in no doubt whatsoever that Doña Rosa was a genuine witch, in the good sense of the word. Paty is one of my witch friends, and of course she loved it. In return, a few days ago she left me a Rosa Chacel book I hadn’t heard of with the caretaker downstairs, Money Box: The Way There. It’s the first part of an intimate diary (if you can call it that, since Doña Rosa Chacel doesn’t give away many intimate details), the second part of which is called Money Box: The Way Back. Paty emailed to explain that she’d sent me the book to help with the grant, since Rosa also received a Guggenheim fellowship at one point and all the ins and outs of the experience are recounted in the diary. In fact, even before reaching the part about the grant, which comes halfway through the book (and I have most of the second half yet to read), I noticed that this diary was inspiring me and making me want to write myself. I’m amazed at how much Rosa and I have in common. Impressions, feelings, ideas, phobias, discomforts; all very similar. She must have been an insufferable old woman. There’s a photo of her on the back cover; she looks surprisingly similar to Adalgissa (I’ve never known how to spell that name; I think there’s an H in there somewhere. Perhaps: Adalghissa), whom we used to call ‘the fat aunt’ when I was a boy. She was actually my great-aunt, the sister of my maternal grandfather. But the difference between Rosa and the fat aunt is the way they look at you; although Rosa’s eyes are partly hidden by her round spectacles and slightly drooping eyelids, you can see the powerful intelligence of the brain behind them. The fat aunt, in contrast, was not very intelligent.

Saturday 5, 18:02

Today I woke up filled with enthusiasm about this diary, very keen to get started and thinking of all kinds of things I wanted to discuss; however, it’s now six in the evening and I’m waiting for a friend, who’ll be ringing the doorbell at any moment, and until a minute ago I hadn’t written a single word. Instead, I’ve been playing a card game called Golf on the computer. I think food is what always leads me astray; today it was breakfast, but I realised last night that it’s often after my dinner-lunch that my flights into alienation really take hold. As soon as the digestive process begins, my conscious, volitional self evaporates to make way for that rebellious escapist who wants nothing more than to fall into a trance over absolutely anything at all. It’s definitely worse at night; I can’t do anything to stop it, and it goes on almost until dawn.

Today I also woke up determined not to reread what I write here, or at least not very often, so this diary really is a diary and not a novel; that is, to remove the need for continuity. I realised straight away that it will still be a novel, though, whether I like it or not, because these days a novel is practically anything you can put between a front and back cover.

There goes the lift. Now the bell. My friend is here.

Saturday 5, 22:28

My friend came, my friend left, I played a round of Golf, had lunch-dinner, and then for the first time I sat down to digest my meal in one of the armchairs. Every other time I’ve tried this armchair out I’ve fallen asleep. Today was almost no exception, but I just about managed to stay awake. I listened to D’Arienzo butchering a few tangos on Radio Clarín, from fairly far away because I still haven’t arranged things so I can have the record player in the new living room. As I sat there I remembered a dream I had this morning, and the memory of the dream made me do something I’ve been senselessly putting off for about a month: telephone my recently widowed friend Jorge. I think calling him is so hard because of how painful I find the memory of my friend Elisa, his dead wife, even though I have evidence that she’s perfectly content where she is now; after all, it’s well known that the pain we feel at other people’s deaths comes from the implicit reference they make to our own, although why the idea of one’s own death has to be so frightening is something I still haven’t got to the bottom of. In my case it probably relates to my fear of the unknown, of finding myself deprived of all the reference points I so rely on. Dying must be like leaving the house, something I find it increasingly difficult to do, but without the hope of ever returning home. Perhaps, in my unconscious, the image forms of my dead self as a kind of rootless and disconsolate ghost who can’t find anywhere it belongs, just as I haven’t found anywhere I belong in life. Since non-existence alone can’t frighten us because there would be nothing there to frighten, it might be that we’re scared of death because we see it as another birth; and indeed, faced with the prospect of being born a second time, well might we clasp our heads in our hands and cry, ‘Oh, no! Not again!’ Not that I have any great complaints about life; far from it. I just wish I hadn’t always suffered from such a terror of the unexpected and the unknown, all the time, even when I’ve had no real reason to think there’s anything nasty in store.

I spoke to my friend. Among other things, we said we’d meet up in about a week’s time, since for me the week beginning tomorrow is already looking quite complicated. So is the week after, in fact, because I keep complicating it by arranging to meet up with people; for example, I spoke to Julia yesterday, and we also agreed to see each other that week. Julia is an old friend, though not as old as me, and needless to say, that isn’t her real name.

I can’t remember exactly what was going on with my friend Jorge in the dream; I know we were talking, sitting together in a semi-enclosed space a bit like the structure we used to call ‘the gazebo’ when I was a child, which was attached to the house my grandparents had by the seaside. The roof looked like it was made of branches – living branches, I mean, still part of the tree – and the walls were also formed of a kind of vegetation, though I seem to remember there being some mesh there as well, like chicken wire. There were two ways in: one, a kind of narrow door by the boundary separating my grandparents’ land from the neighbours’ (this door may just have been a hole in that wall of foliage that we – that is, my cousins and I, skinny children who could slip through all kinds of unlikely apertures – had forced open), and the other broader, almost the width of the gazebo itself, on the left, like an extension of the side of the house. What a terrible description; I’m sure it’s completely impossible to understand.

Sunday 6, 00:09

I was interrupted by a minor incident caused by the strange behaviour of a program I made on the computer (in Visual Basic, to be precise) to monitor when I take my medication (for the curious reader: I’m taking antihypertensives, in the form of half a 20-milligram tablet twice a day; and antidepressants, in the form of one 150-milligram tablet every day. I started taking the antidepressants a month ago, not because I thought I needed to take antidepressants, but because they were widely advertised as a major help with giving up smoking. I haven’t stopped smoking, at least not yet, but I have discovered that I needed to take antidepressants because I was depressed and didn’t realise it). The program closed, disappeared from sight and uninstalled itself without completing its function. And it’s a good thing it did all that then, when I was alert and able to see what had happened. I checked through the program and found the error: as usual, the computer was right and I was wrong. I think I’ve fixed it now, but I’ll only know for sure tomorrow evening, because I don’t want to go changing the clock on the computer.

But I wanted, and still want, to write about the dream involving my friend Jorge, which took place somewhere similar to that gazebo from my childhood, though it wasn’t exactly the same. As I said, we were sitting and chatting about something, I don’t know what. There was another character: a naughty child, a mixture of various characters who either are children or suffer from infantilism, since at times he seemed like the embodiment of my old friend Ricardo, that diminutive individual who was the inspiration for Tinker in my novel Nick Carter. Anyway, this boy in my dream, among other annoying things, had thrown a key ring full of keys over his shoulder into an expanse of nothing but sand and weeds: a gratuitous, unjustifiable act of rebellion. Worst of all was the fact that, originally, the person who threw the keys had been me. Then I split off into an adult who was horrified at this child’s behaviour. I must have created the child character to hide the fact it had been me all along. At some point later on I thought about looking for the keys, but I don’t remember doing it; I do remember how lazy I felt at the thought, knowing that they wouldn’t be easy to find, half-buried in the sand and hidden by the weeds. However, not long afterwards I had the keys in my possession. When that child character threw them away, I wondered how he’d manage to get back into the house. I suppose that was part of my strategy of dissimulation. I’m glad I got them back, because they had a strong sexual symbolism. When I got them back, or realised I’d got them back, they were already in my pocket; I took them out and examined them carefully. I was surprised to see there were various keys, a considerable number; the key ring divided them into two groups, one of which was like an extension of the other, connected to it by a little chain. There was also a strip of dark-green paper, attached to the key ring without any purpose I was able to work out.

The presence of my friend Jorge in that dream made me decide to telephone him, and I’m glad I did, because it was one of the things I’d been putting off indefinitely for no valid reason.

The other thing I’ve been putting off, and which I continue putting off, at least so far, is shaving. My beard is far too bushy and my mouth fills up with bristles when I eat, which I find intolerable. But I don’t just want to trim it, because then it would look too neat, too intentional, when in fact letting my beard grow this long wasn’t a deliberate choice; I simply let a lot more time pass than I should have done without shaving. By now it would be very difficult, very arduous, to get rid of my beard, and my face would be left itchy, red and burning until at least the next day. But I have to do it. And I will. Very soon.

Sunday 6, 17:20

Absolutely zero interest in writing today. I woke up already feeling a bit crooked, i.e. with that unsteadiness I’d forgotten about and which must therefore relate to my blood pressure, since it went away when I started taking the medication last month. Why it came back today in spite of the medication I have no idea, unless it’s something to do with my routine. My doctor told me not to take the tablets in the early hours of the morning; I’m supposed to take them by midnight at the latest. But this means I can’t space them out enough; there’s meant to be twelve hours between them. My plan is to take the first at eleven in the morning and the second at eleven at night. But I’m never awake at eleven in the morning, so I normally end up taking the first at two or three in the afternoon. The next one then gets pushed back to 11.30 p.m., or midnight, but that leaves a gap of more than twelve hours until the next: fifteen or sixteen hours even, which could be why it doesn’t have the same effect. I’ll have to think about going to bed earlier … ha.

Well, I’m still crooked and I don’t feel like writing. Chl will be here soon (which is a whole other story that ‘isn’t for telling here’, as Rosa Chacel says in her diary every so often, always leaving you wanting to know more); she’s bringing me a pea stew she made at home. Chl makes wonderful stews, but she says this one didn’t turn out very well; apparently the peas are a bit hard. Still, I’ll have to eat it anyway, because for too many days I’ve been living on meat alone (and tomatoes with garlic); the diet doesn’t bother me as such, but all the meat is a bit frightening.

Monday 7, 02:31

Today it’s still yesterday. By which I mean that the day I began on Sunday still isn’t over, even though the date has changed. I have no idea how to sort out the chaos of my sleeping hours. A few days ago my doctor offered to put me in touch with her colleague, a psychiatrist who specialises in treating addictions and other behavioural disorders from a behaviourist approach. I thought this sounded interesting, since at sixty years old I’m not sure I have the energy for any more of the psychoanalytical approach, which, what’s more, was no help at all with this particular disorder a few years ago (though it was very helpful in other ways). This psychiatrist also had the advantage of being contactable via email; one of the major obstacles created by my disrupted sleeping hours is the difficulty in communicating with people at what they consider a reasonable time. I wrote to him, briefly explaining this difficulty and requesting an appointment some time after 7 p.m., the later the better. He answered right away; when I woke up the next day and began my routine by checking my email folders, the reply was already there. He told me, very politely, that his last appointment slot was at 6.30 p.m., and offered me some dates in the near future. I didn’t like the way he presented his schedule as something preordained, as if he were explaining a genetic characteristic that no one in their right mind would expect him to be able to change. As if he’d said: ‘I have one leg shorter than the other.’ Or could it be that his own behavioural disorders cause him similar difficulties to the ones mine cause me? And if so, have his behaviourist techniques not helped him to correct those disorders?

But there was more: he explained that he was attaching some .doc files to his email with forms for me to fill in before our first meeting, so he could ‘get on with the diagnosis’. I didn’t like the sound of this either. I can’t get used to the idea of someone reaching a diagnosis without having had any direct personal contact with their patient whatsoever. I don’t want to be categorised like that, and to encounter someone when I go along for the first appointment who’s already formed an idea of what I’m like, an idea that won’t easily change. The doctor would see his diagnosis and not the person I am.

I read the questionnaires, and while I was reading them I composed my responses in my head. The questions addressed a multitude of personal topics and referred to my life history from birth to the present day. Each one had only a limited space for the answer, and yet each one deserved a response that was almost infinitely long, or at least spanning a volume or more, and not the slim ones either. For example: your relationship and its problems. Which relationship? All of them? Wow … Please describe in five lines the problems with every relationship you’ve ever had. He might as well have set the questionnaire out as one of those multiple-choice exams. There were also questions about professional matters: how do I get on with my bosses, with my subordinates, etc. Bosses? Does anyone have a boss in this world? And subordinates? God forbid. In other words, I saw how the whole thing was shaping up: therapy for builders, office workers and executives. If you don’t fit into one of those categories, it’s because you’re mad. There must be something wrong with you if you’re a free person.

The questions were very well formulated. As I answered them in my head I saw my whole life parading past me at full speed, and plenty of things popped up here and there to explain why I have the disorders I do. After the initial shock, I realised that the things I’m fighting against as if they were disorders, without managing to overcome them, are not in fact disorders at all but admirable solutions I’ve been devising, unconsciously, in order to get by. This is an excellent definition of my disorders: they’re the result of all that’s happened in my life, and more than that they’re the price of my freedom. Two plus two equals four. Thank you, Doctor. I replied to him, explaining that our schedules were incompatible but that he’d nevertheless helped me a great deal with his questionnaires, which may not have resolved my behavioural disorders but which had at least made me feel more tolerant of them. That doesn’t mean I won’t go on trying to correct them, at least in part. I’m not asking to start going to bed at midnight and getting up at eight; I’d be happy with getting up at eleven and going to bed whenever I do. And, speaking of which, it’s now three in the morning. I should probably stop writing, turn the computer off and begin my bedtime routine before I get engrossed in something stupid all over again and the next thing I know it it’s gone eight.

But I wanted to say that Chl’s stew is delicious. I’d rather she gave me sexual satisfaction like she used to, but no, she gives me stew. Well, she also gives me good company and plenty of affection for a few hours each week, so I can’t complain. Today we went for a walk and stopped in a boliche for a coffee. I hadn’t left the house in days and was feeling a bit light-headed. Going out helped; I made slow progress, but on the way home the unsteadiness left me and I stopped feeling crooked. In fact, I felt good. I almost let out a few whoops of contentment right there in the street. Afterwards, Chl took a bus home, and I went back to my apartment and played Golf and had another plate of stew. Luckily, and thanks to Chl, the day turned out all right. It stopped seeming so grey and infected, and I stopped feeling at odds with myself. If only there’d also been some sex …

I still don’t understand why I threw the keys away in my dream and then got them back again. This dream is part of a long series that began when I started taking the antidepressants; they’re all seaside-town dreams and happen in similar places, always at night, and always surrounded by vegetation. In one of them I even found myself driving a car with total competence, though a few manoeuvres I made left me worried I couldn’t control it – especially when I challenged some friends in another car to a race to wherever we were going. I got there first, of course, but I have no idea why I challenged them like that, let alone why I was driving a car. I don’t even know how to start an engine.

Monday 7, 16:58

I just came across these lines in the book by Doña Rosa Chacel (or should I call her Aunt Rosa?), about a certain source of suffering in her life:

I try hard to overcome it through narcotics: films and books. How well I understand people who turn to drugs! These ones I use seem harmless, but they’re not. That is, as soon as one uses them to that end, they turn out to be as destructive as the others, because the destructive thing is removing oneself from reality. It doesn’t matter what poison we use to numb the senses: the effect of numbing them is the same.

Replace ‘films’ with ‘the computer’ and they could be my own words.

In this part of the book, Aunt Rosa has begun talking a lot about her dreams; and, as if I were going through a parallel process, I came across the lines quoted above just after beginning the day with some reflections on my own dream (the one about the boy throwing the keys away). In the interpretation that eventually occurred to me, you can see the connection with the topic ‘drugs’.

In one back and forth in my reflections, it suddenly struck me that the child’s intention when he throws the keys away is to make it difficult for himself to return. I think about it in the dream: ‘How’s he going to get back in later?’ And now I see that the keys are the keys in more than one sense of the word, and that on throwing them away my intention is to hide them – but not too much. It’s more about slowing things down; concealing them for a bit but not losing them completely.

This means that the keys to my unwanted behaviours, such as my addiction to drugs like the computer and books, are there, almost in sight, but the small and tiresome task still remains of hunting for them in the sand, among some tufts of grass. In the dream I get the keys back, but then I examine them as if I didn’t quite recognise them.

I think the meanings are nice and clear. Now that I’m proposing a ‘return’ to myself and my writing, and resuming a novel I left unfinished more than fifteen years ago, the dream tells me I won’t be able to manage it without the keys to myself, which I myself had hidden. I didn’t hide them very well – I didn’t bury them in the unconscious – but I’ll have to dig for a while in the subconscious sand before they appear, and then, when they do appear, I’ll have to do a bit more work to untangle them.

Tuesday 8, 04:54

I’ll be brief: today (I mean yesterday and what we’ve had of today so far, of course; my day) was long and difficult. It’s almost five, I’d already turned the computer off when I remembered about this diary and turned it back on again, and meanwhile my waist hurts and the garlic is repeating on me. I spent most of the day playing Golf, believe it or not. I think I’ve explained before that it’s a kind of solitaire. And worst of all it’s a mindless game, almost entirely down to chance. On average, you win about one round in every hundred. I also did some inappropriate things that I don’t want to write about here (including making some improvements to a recent program of mine in Visual Basic). So I’m still hiding the keys, the keys to myself; I’m still putting off confronting the thing that will allow me to do what I want to do.

Today I woke up crooked again; that is, insecure and somehow unstable. I called my doctor and she came to see me – a spontaneous offer on her part. But she didn’t find my blood pressure too outrageously high, and she also carried out several very funny neurological tests; I myself added the standing on one leg test, which is used for proving you’re not drunk. It could be the stuffy, stormy weather; it could be a particular strain of flu everyone’s getting this year. It could be a problem with my right ear, which is blocked. And it could also be simple madness. Or not so simple, come to that. Good grief.

Later on, my daughter came. In this ‘Diary of the Grant’ I should record that I’d put aside a tiny portion of the money for her, and she was coming to collect it. She happened to turn up with her current partner, whom I hadn’t met before. He seemed like a very odd person. I don’t mean he seemed particularly bad or unpleasant, just odd. My daughter’s almost at the end of her pregnancy. My fifth grandchild. Good Lord.

According to her, my cousin Pocho cured his high blood pressure by eating garlic. I started eating garlic a few months ago, a little each day, and it’s become a kind of vice or compulsion. It could be that my body sensed it needed garlic. Now I’m going to carry on eating it, safe in the knowledge of its therapeutic qualities. Maybe I should eat more: an entire clove per day. But my stomach has never been good with garlic, which is why I went most of my life without eating it. And now perhaps it’s too late.

I’m still encountering strange similarities between Aunt Rosa and myself. I’m not sure how we can have so much in common, when our personalities are completely different and even opposed. Maybe we only overlap on a particular, somewhat mystical or magical plane. In the diary of hers that I’m reading, and that led me to start a diary of my own, among the countless trivial details there are a few reflections that leave me speechless. For example, something I began writing once and stopped, about the relationship between sex, eroticism and mysticism. Anyway, my waist is killing me. I’m going to bed. Tomorrow I have work. This is a week of work, in fact: workshops on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, ‘live’, and on Tuesday and Wednesday virtually. Shit.

Tuesday 8, 23:42

Just to record that Flaco has died. I was woken by the telephone at who knows what time of the morning; it went to answerphone and I could hear Lilí’s voice, as strident as usual, or more strident than usual, demanding I pick up. I took no notice, of course, and tried to go back to sleep, but I didn’t quite manage, and nor did I manage to wake up. I don’t know how long afterwards the phone rang again, and I heard Lilí’s voice again, and this time I did pick up because I was feeling more awake and I could tell it was important. She said she had bad news, and I thought: ‘Ruben.’ But no, it was Flaco. Completely unexpected.

Now, luckily, I’m able to recover my thoughts from before the shock. In that half-awake state, I saw that my mind had been working away mysteriously as I slept, and now it was delivering an answer. The phrase appeared in my mind: ‘Key number one: my mother’s death.’ And indeed, that must be one of the keys the child threw into the sand in my dream a few days ago. I found that death very painful for many reasons; it filled me with guilt and fear for a long while afterwards, years, even, though in bursts rather than all the time. Fortunately, in a therapeutic setting, I managed to get back the memory of my mother as she was in life, and of many of her good qualities. I was glad, and said to the therapist: ‘I’ve stopped seeing my mother as a pile of bones, and now I can feel her living presence within me.’ Then I had a few relapses, during one of which I was able to talk to Chl about it all, and the next day my mother had completely vanished from my thoughts. It was a great relief. Still, the topic was never really closed, and today something made me see that. I began thinking about how much I missed my mother, or a mother, because for many years she was the person who enabled me to ‘reset’, as it were; when I felt overwhelmed for some reason, or I couldn’t see a way forward, or I had something to sort out, I’d go and visit her in her seaside town and stay for as long as I needed to, usually a week. The first thing I did was go to sleep; even if it was early in the afternoon, I still went to sleep, at least for a couple of hours. I put my need for sleep down to the bus journey, but that wasn’t it; I’d simply been sleeping badly for days and days, and the protective presence of my mother allowed me to relax and sink into a deep slumber. I’d emerge from those two or more hours of sleep as if I’d been drugged, with my brain completely muddled, and then, very gradually, I’d begin the exchange of news with my mother. Often I had to slow her down so she didn’t come out with all her information at once. I’d sleep a lot over the following days as well, and then the point would come when I wanted to return to my Montevideo apartment, and off I’d go. It’s years since I’ve had anyone to look after my sleep like that. And not only my sleep, but also my food; I had nothing to do and nothing to worry about when I was there, beyond eating and sleeping. That’s exactly what I need right now. I’ve been needing it for a long time, but only today do I see and feel it so clearly: I have no way of resetting because I’m always meant to be doing something. And the point is: I’m not sleeping well, and I haven’t slept well for ages. Trying to relax doesn’t work for me either; I can’t control my mind. I don’t know where I’d get a mother from at my age, but I could at least try; someone to watch over me while I sleep and provide me with food for a few days is just what I need for this ‘return to myself’ that I’m trying to bring about.

In the afternoon I went to do, or attempt to do, some shopping. I wanted a couple of little round metal tables to put next to the armchairs, for example. It’s not that I’m getting addicted to buying this sort of thing for the house; it’s necessary, as is the floor lamp I didn’t manage to find today. The idea is to set the place up for reading and relaxing, and for reading I need a suitable light source. The floor lamps in the shops are very expensive, but they’re also very low. I need something a little higher, because I have to use a very bright light, and if it’s too close my head gets hot and I start feeling unwell. A light that’s too concentrated and too white on the paper is no good either; it affects my eyes. I need something very similar to the main light, but a little closer to me and a little less diffuse. Well, that doesn’t exist, so I’ll have to invent something as usual; my solutions are generally effective, but most of the time they’re not very aesthetically pleasing and look like signs of eccentricity. They’re not, though; they’re the practical solutions of a poor man who has to work with what he’s got.

Oh, and: I’m not feeling anything. About Flaco’s death, I mean, but also in general. A few hours ago I started to worry about this lack of emotion, of any hint of feeling at all: this nothing. It means I’ve gone back to my usual tactics; submerging, burying anything I don’t like deep under the surface and pretending it doesn’t exist. There’s always a high price to pay. But I don’t know how to summon the emotions.

Thursday 10, 02:13

Just showing my face in this diary. A strange day; not a bad one, but I don’t really know what I did. Yes, I remember I had to go up the stairs (four floors) because the lift was being repaired. I’d gone to convert some dollars to get a bit of small change, and on the way I paid my phone bill. The tables I bought were delivered from the Bazar Mitre. I felt a bit worried when I saw them. Metal, black, low, to go next to each armchair. For my ashtray, book, glasses and coffee. Am I becoming frivolous? Have I been spared from frivolity for all these years simply because I was poor? But no, I don’t want to worry about that. The tables were necessary, just as the armchairs were necessary. I’m beginning to think about myself, though it’s a bit late in the day for that. About the return, the return to myself. To what I was before the computer came along. Before Colonia, before Buenos Aires. I think this is how I’ll gain access to the luminous novel, if such a thing is even possible. A few months ago, during the summer, before hearing back about the grant application, I had to use the I Ching for the first time in twenty-five years. I was plunged into a terrible confusion about what I should do, torn between carrying on as I was and trying to go back to what I used to be. Sometimes I thought trying to go back would only make things worse (and maybe I was right). Anyway, the I Ching never fails; it answered me with a hexagram called ‘The Return’, told me I’d come into a considerable fortune and showed me the right approach (though now I’ve forgotten what it was) (I’ll check).

I checked. The only line that suggests danger is the sixth, which shows the subject confused by the idea of the return. Precisely the state I was in. In other words, at that very moment I stopped being confused and decided to return, nobly, like the subject of the fifth line. The process that produced this hexagram also produced another complementary one, thanks to a moving line. The complementary hexagram was called ‘The Joyous’. All this made me think I was going to get the grant.

Anyway, it wouldn’t do to become frivolous. I won’t buy any more tables. I think I have almost all the furniture I need now, though there’s still something missing. I’m not sure what. A shelf of some kind, somewhere convenient to store the things that are currently spread across all the tables and flat surfaces in the apartment. And maybe in the summer I ought to install air conditioning; I wouldn’t go through what I went through last summer again for anything. People say it was unusually hot, but I think things can only get worse. We’re all going to die burnt to a crisp. If you ask me, the Earth is heating up much faster than people say it is, and they’re not telling us because they don’t want us to panic. Every year it’s worse. The summer that’s just gone almost sent me over the edge. Complete annihilation. All I did was escape and escape and escape endlessly into the computer.

What else happened today? Ah yes, yoga class. Half an hour, because the teacher was late. Since we only had half an hour, she tried to cram in too many exercises and made me do them too quickly. By the end I was exhausted. Now I’m tired and I’m going to sleep. I fell asleep in the armchair earlier, with a full stomach. Now I can go to bed. Exceptional: it’s just gone two in the morning.

I was forgetting to mention that I’ve also been sorting out the virtual workshop yesterday and today. And now I remember, too, that when I was out I went to the bookshop across the road to ask them to order some books by Rosa Chacel. I finished Money Box: The Way There and thought it was wonderful. The other day, I was searching for Doña Rosa online; 365 results that included her name appeared, but not one of them had any useful information, whether biographical or bibliographical. If the bookshop can’t get hold of anything by her, I’ll see if Marcial can send me something from Spain. I find it inexplicable how much I identify with this writer. Everything suggests I shouldn’t: the century, the culture, the interests (at least, the visible ones), the personality, the gender. And yet I’m drawn to her not because she’s so different to me, but because she’s the same. I identify with her. I want to know more about her and read more of her work. All of it, if possible. It’s ages since I’ve been this excited about an author.

Because I’d finished that book and didn’t have anything else I felt like reading, I went to the second-hand bookstall on the corner of my road and, after looking through everything, found eight little detective novels from the Rastros series. Forty-eight pesos. They’re probably awful, but I’m going to read every single one. The first one I chose has a promising title (goddamn it): Everyone Must Die. I didn’t choose it for the title, though, but because it’s the earliest of the set of eight, in a series that got worse and worse as it went on. I saw the title after I’d already chosen it on the basis of its number.

It was freezing at the bookstall. When I was leaving, I asked the bookseller: ‘How do you put up with the cold?’ He smiled and answered right away: ‘Oh, I put up with it. It’s the customers who don’t.’ And he made a sweeping gesture towards the deserted tables. ‘You looked through everything, but other people aren’t like that; they don’t stick around.’

It’s gone three in the morning. And tomorrow I need to be up early: I’ve got a workshop at 4.30 p.m. I hope I have time for breakfast.

Friday 11, 04:14

Every other Thursday I have an intense day of writing workshops: session one, 4.30 p.m.; session two, 8.15 p.m. This is Uruguay, so the four-thirty workshop starts closer to five, and today there was a lot to read, so we didn’t finish until a quarter to seven. A gap of an hour and a half before the beginning of the next workshop; and I have to wash the coffee cups and the glasses, have my lunch-dinner, order the shopping from the supermarket, telephone Chl, make another batch of coffee, brush my teeth …

Working with these groups always wears me out. It’s now almost half past four in the morning, and I’m shattered. I need to make a final effort and go to bed. My back’s aching. My back’s been aching for days. Ever since I began this diary, I think. The two may or may not be connected.

I like my students, I like the workshop. I wouldn’t want to do it every day … Twice a month is all right. Usually it’s once a week, but this year I had to change it because of the grant. I need free time. I still haven’t managed to get much of it. I’m still running away from the vague anxiety I feel whenever there’s any leisure on the horizon. It’s horrible, that vague anxiety.