About Carmen 3

 

BEATRIZ

I was twenty-seven then, when I met K, at that party on the other side of the island (which in the book, he describes in his own way, anticipating a lot of things and chaotically mixing up all the chronologies); I didn't feel old to him, just as I don't feel old now --- especially now that "we've come so far on the path" ---; and we returned to Salvador together speaking that alien language of his, full of his mannerisms and powers of visualization, far removed from any youthful maturity. Fresh and fresh, I realized that, besides being a precocious spiritual seeker, young K was truly "crazy," as they say, that his conception of life was something that no one had ever had or will have --- that bitter poetic taste that he wanted to feel in the air of life all the time, very Dostoevskian, giving those who accompanied him a broad sensation of morbid fascination in the face of something that, in truth, was completely banal for people ---, and it seemed fair, on my part, that we stop on the way, to regain sobriety in a roadside motel, where I tried to dissuade him from all that nonsense teenage film, to send him furiously through life (or he would perish in Salvador, naively enthusing about ridiculous short-term soap opera projects until he lost the original excitement that had driven him. In any case, he could no longer stand the city, its places, and girls, and so he headed southeast in search of new vital acids and antacids). And I can assure you that, after that, he was truly lucky to escape alive from those "atrocious encounters with the unknown" throughout the country, even to Mexico and the United States, never thinking twice about calling home in a hurry to ask for money (many times, however, he managed to earn some on his own, and even multiply what they sent him, which earned him a certain credit with the "family banks" in times of need). --- $160? That's all? --- they answered him on the other end of the line (later, between taxis, drinks here and there, hotel bills, women, nightclub tickets and plane tickets: --- $260? For when exactly? --- and, suddenly, in a place that was a bar and coffee shop, near Columbia University: --- $7,000.00 now, or I'm going to die of hunger in this godforsaken place. And it was New York, you know?).  A paralyzed and permanent vertigo, where his universe "didn't stop expanding for a minute," until the great phantasmagorical journey through nothingness began to be written, and attracted all those "unforeseen problems" with the "politics of the region": namely, the White House, the Pentagon, and Wall Street. Everyone was wondering: "What's the next move now? Chinese, Russians, North Koreans?" and he did nothing, you know? , he simply turned back to his beer, saying he hadn't read the paper in weeks, his eyes locked in combat with the list of relatives he could still pester for "instant loans" to continue his "report" --- a heavy smoke, and the idea of ​​investing everything in cattle when he returned, an idea that only served to cloud his mind and senses, in a din of nightclub sounds and lights, while a powerful vanity grew in him amidst the toxic waste of American society, always lamenting the stifled submissions of the immigrants who still dreamed of "cooperative security" to face the "competitive hysteria" of the failed American Dream. "I DON'T KNOW, ANYONE NEARBY?" and "I DON'T KNOW, I'M LOOKING, LOOKING, LOOKING, AND NOTHING" that constantly made him seem like a writer already half-rotten, off in the head, you know? Not crazy, but rather tedious, uncultured, and vulgar. While the more perceptive pigs were deluded by the smell of blonde, blue-eyed vagina in the plasma TV cage, he saw no perspicacity in it, and somehow he actually managed to become an irredeemable, blasphemous, almost infected scholar, above all this empty pigsty of sounds and images of people and sexual situations that don't exist. "I'm not trying to pave the way for the humanists here, cherry," he kept saying --- typical of a wealth of eager manuscripts navigating a debris of beer cans in an empty room in, where was that again? While he was alone, he knew how to combat intellectual laziness like no one else and opted for the Pascalian bet on transcendence, despite the fact that there is no longer any living writer capable of doing this without revealing aberrant and petty ulterior motives (for profit) --- the “mysterium,” the apocalyptic nihilism, and the sense of disorder and vertigo that the height of the new materialism has brought down upon us appear (again in K, after Dostoevsky and Tolstoy) as central to the play of historical and political energies, despite the axioms of the State, which, through the media and the market, constantly “sing” “LET’S GO FORWARD! LET’S GO FORWARD!” He would never get excited about things like that, not even when he clearly saw himself wasting his paycheck on the entertainment provided by this same social and economic structure that he repudiated, which he spat upon—doubled capacity to drink?, then tripled capacity to lie, not giving a damn: “This whole shit isn’t going to last long, you idiot!” he would say, “So fuck it, how about we talk about some beach now?” His mouth always full of beer, holding it in, confident in a totally blatant "metaphysique du romacier," shamelessly convinced of any and all criticism that came out of his mouth, often along with a lot of drool and beer, oblique about everything, pedantic and somber. "Another crazy night, so what? It doesn't make any difference. We're not brothers, bro."