Count the present days until today arrives (FIRST NIGHT)
MORELL
(greeting Bernarda chivalrously and taking a seat beside her)
The city's hotels are truly packed---and so many people on the street outside!
BERNARDA
(a smile that was intended to be false, as if looking through it into Morell's empty gaze, suddenly turned drooly and parted its lips)
MORELL
(leaning over her, he touched her forehead, which seemed to everyone like a magic trick that had the power to infantilize her --- in fact, a slight tremor ran through Bernarda's body)
Shall I begin the presentation, or shall I?
(First of all, we must say that since his first novel, in the 1970s, Argentine and Spanish critics have been praising Morell --- despite the growing success of his debut, which quickly took over the entire world, his publishers pressured him to publish a new novel soon, and without much fuss over deadlines, he became an intrepid machine for writing and selling books (three, even four a year, by 1986)
...and through a rather disorderly life (Morell emphasized, now speaking directly to the public about his working method) Always traveling all over the world, thrown into the middle of an extremely bohemian diplomatic circle, of RADICAL literary bohemia, in which even characters like W. Burroughs appeared from time to time, like ghosts; in Mexico, if I remember correctly, he appeared reading some new fragments he had just published on a record --- it was a complete uproar, however --- no very serious or committed interaction, for a long time we felt the increasing consequences of the commodification of literature, its trivialization and loss of function and political impact --- my vocation as a writer blossomed thanks to an early wandering provided by the big money already with the first books --- I went to the United States, became friends with Ross McDonald, got involved with a gigantic Chinese commercial office in Los Angeles, they had just acquired several studios in Hollywood --- that's why many accuse us of being Tongs, and that I worked and was a famous agent financed by the Chinese mafia --- ---someone, I couldn't even name who, managed to get ECHO MADE IN THE SHADOWS, my sixth book, a crime novel that was an immediate success in America, filmed by a Hollywood studio, really, and then they started with this nonsense --- at the time I threatened to dedicate myself exclusively to film, to make more money, and faster, by writing scripts directly to be filmed, surrounded by assistants, I remember throwing away several finished novels, searching for elements to finish one or two commissioned scripts --- I only returned to writing serious literature after that accident in a hotel in Rio de Janeiro.
(Here, Morell stopped speaking suddenly, thought for a moment, and looked at Bernarda with an almost invisible evil smile on his lips)
And you, young lady? How did you find your way into literature? Introduce yourself, beautiful soul! Tell us about yourself! Let's look at some of your poems.
(and he picked up Bernarda's book from the table beside him, opened it to a random page, and read into the microphone)
By dint of mischief
ResponderExcluirMeasuring disdain,
Rudeness in tow
Anywhere
Within reach
A measure of man,
Of the world, even in a space
MINIMUM
I find his total book,
The crackling silence
Of his style
Crawling,
The solitude
Of his absolute air
Constrained
To nutrition,
To empty sex
And his hallucinations
Verbal
Of machines
Dead.
(For a moment, the audience awaited Morell's judgment on the poem he had just read; however, seeing that he would say nothing, they applauded politely, half-understanding.)
BERNARDA
ResponderExcluirYou chose a very dry poem (she said, letting an endless torrent of nakedness of a soul caught red-handed gush from her indecisive facial expression --- one could say that her own NAKEDNESS "circumscribed" her, at that moment, to paraphrase her own poem)
MORELL
Let me guess: conflicts of the soul, psychological dramas, problems of conscience, spiritual crises involving sex and sin --- combining an almost quixotic mystical tendency that tends to see the dry and empty men of the world feeding on poisonous illusions, always tied to an indiscreet machinery that sucks them dry, the neuro-advertising machinery of volatile and stateless capital --- tied to windmills like Quixote's, but subjugated, without any animosity, radars and electrodes, in fact, tied to their temples, forcing them to dream of Dulcineas of crystal, often raving about atomic armor in front of the television.
BERNARDA
ResponderExcluirPerhaps a certain impossibility of "embracing" the modern human being, in the terminal and irreversible forms in which he now presents himself --- incapable of forming with him "a wave," in the current of mud that drags our world toward the abyss --- prey (I) to a certain corrosive, revealing Fire, captive to the books lined up on my bookshelf, to my gentle dog on the rug at my feet; finding magical moments of inspiration amidst such a general disposition to hate --- disconnecting myself from the superficial life of everyday life to try to hover like a transcendent mist in a dry, brick-like language.
(On Morell's face, now, the perfect simulation of a lofty metaphysical inquiry --- the audience applauded Bernarda, while Bard approached the table and took a seat)
MORELL
ResponderExcluirAmazed! Ladies and gentlemen, I even think that if Machiavelli had lived a little longer to marry Saint Teresa... imagine the "God's Fool" or "God's Vampire," as Teresa was known, in her bed of mystical linen, strewn with raptures, being questioned by the author of Mandrake. Saint Teresa: "My sagacity for any evil thing is mucha." Machiavelli (with a pharaonic breath): "Don't think I've come to interrupt your pious meditation without reason, O future skeleton of a bitch." However, Saint Teresa spoke less and worse than Saint John of the Cross. In prose, Teresa is equal to no other mystic. Her visions of God and the Devil reached a physical, vital, and hallucinatory level. Furthermore, in Teresa's Letters and in the Book of Foundations, there is also the haughty tone of someone accustomed to conversing directly with God, addressing King Philip II, as diplomatically or even more so than the "Divine Old Nick" in The Prince, as Catherine de' Medici certainly saw him when she urged her sons to put theory into practice on St. Bartholomew's Day. Between you and me, the Protestants' mistake was indeed to eliminate celibacy. Doesn't that seem obvious to you? --------------------------------
-------------------------------------Surrounded by his wife and children, the Protestant pastor today exerts, at most, among the families of his cult, the vague psychological influence of a good clinician. With unrestricted access to the sins of the flesh, he has lost that influence of a medicine man, a healer, a shaman, a miracle worker directly connected to God, a "living pillar of the temple of God," which the most lazy seekers try to restore hysterically through dramas of psychic control, screaming and with very little success. God today turns his back on these archimandrites of exalted faith whenever they have to interrupt their Bible reading to take their wife to the gynecologist.
ExcluirBARD
ResponderExcluir(If what Proust wrote in Sodom and Gomorrah is true --- "And in every clan, whether worldly, political, or literary, there develops a perverse facility for discovering, in a conversation, in an official speech, in a novel, in a sonnet, everything that the honest reader would never have dreamed of seeing" --- I can say that the trigger for my outburst in the debate with Morell was the confirmation, through a slip of the tongue on his part, of my long-held suspicion that the old man was a CIA agent; and that if he had come all this way to share with us his rich and irregular life as an agent provocateur, as if we were a flock of sheep that every year supplied wool to the publishing market, HE WOULDN'T GET OUT OF THE JOKE TOTALLY UNHARMED THIS TIME! --- Morell really didn't deign to discuss the issue when he referred to the character Horace, from his last book, as being "neither misogynistic nor homosexual" and "timeless" for the cold, or hours and hours wasted with 'rubbing' (laughing about it here), --------------------------------------
---------------------------------and I quickly warned the audience: --- ''Stateless, fugitive from several nations, always faced with the sad spectacle of the smoking ruins of this or that country, APRAZADO, 'atavis edite regibus', generalist 'pro bono' in the cultural milieu of any people, always walking slowly in the midst of important negotiations, he and his entourage of 'attachés'; in short: a destabilizing agent, a CIA man'' --- I don't remember who, whether Blanca or some organizer of the event, told me to leave when I stood up and stuck my finger in Morell's face, who remained impassive, trying to eliminate any and all resistance to his natural magnetism with a crystallized smile of expectant condescension, as if to say: ''And you think that Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz and Carlos Castañeda were exactly what?'', triumphing precisely because of what I was horribly lacking at that moment: culture and style --- ''Fuentes betrayed himself with Hydra Head with the immediate support of Le Carré, in what experts judged to be an orchestrated movement'' , concluded Morell -----------------------------------------
Excluir-------------------------------In truth, I couldn't quite articulate the full extent of what seemed to me, if not complete fraud and illegality, at least enough behind-the-scenes state corruption to make honest, hard-working writers weep. "For their services, these guys always have the 'springboards to fame and money' at their disposal; rewards for decades of sabotage, decisive participation in extermination operations and conspiracies, buying consciences everywhere, promises and guarantees of business deals and contracts in South America, Africa, Asia, even Europe," I said. The effect on the audience, at least, was unreal, magnificent (perhaps largely due to Morell, a consummate actor who seemed to be enjoying managing all the exceptional tension I was creating in the room); the audience had faces of every temperament, from the purest and most incredulous to the most corrupt; a parade of sudden masks covered a chaotic flow of disparate sensations, while the few journalists present actually took notes and spoke distressingly on their cell phones --- with demonic expressions that were soon reflected in those of the audience -----------------------------
Excluir----------------------- (anyone who has never experienced such a scandalous general embarrassment doesn't know what this means --- strange emotion, contagious fears, largely founded, even though, from four rows away, I glimpsed Blanca crying in the middle of the audience, imagining myself drinking uncontrollably in the hotel, talking loudly to myself, with my forehead drenched in sweat --- The next day (because I only remember from the next day onwards, from how much I drank before and after the event) the crush of journalists at the reception of my hotel included a series of young girls with glasses, well-read, pleading, passionate, stammering, who at first disgusted and frightened Blanca with their requests for autographs and photos, until she herself began to calculate all this novelty in terms of money and fame --- "It seems that in a single night" (Blanca said to me suddenly) "You managed to make the whole world consider you the center of the universe," and showed me, one after another, editorials from newspapers around the world reporting on the night's event Previously, my name and photo were in all the major newspapers in the world at the same time -------------------------------
Excluir-------------------------
Excluir--- there were pictures of me with headlines like EX-COPPER, SPANISH NOIR WRITER AND FICTION MADE REALITY LIVE and also MORELL REVEALS HAVING WORKED FOR THE CIA IN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW and also MILLIONS OF NEW FOLLOWERS INVADE BARD'S ACCOUNT OVERNIGHT --- etc --- a storm had descended upon my name and my life; Blanca and I remained motionless in the room of that tropical hotel, a couple of idiots watching who would move or speak first --- When Morell appeared on TV before us, his face was a pale blur and his initial silence, after each question from the Washington Post journalist, was difficult to interpret; he seemed to search for an unfindable tone of incredulity in his old voice, even after that confession -- while I calculated that everything about him was deliberate, that he would never repeat a movement; in the 1990s he had already been publicly accused of espionage and political interference in South America and Eastern Europe, but the controversy surrounding his DENIAL of the complaints of one or two obscure governments went unnoticed in the literary world -----------------------------------
------------------------------------'at the CIA sabotage school they probably taught him that a "public" secret agent should never do the same thing twice in a row: it was obvious that this was a planned step, that by imploding his own "cover" in public, Morell was doing nothing more than setting a new secret machinery in motion, a thousand times more cunning (he was already almost eighty, it was time perhaps in the opinion of Control) --- And what path (I asked myself now) would be more attractive to a literary ex-policeman who faces alone a surreptitious machinery that never stops working, than that of a seafood restaurant on the beach? --- me and my little wife, HOW PROSAIC IT ALL IS, after all! --- very showy for the cameras, Blanca looked beautiful at my side, that night, she looked like the wife of a writer recently discovered by the world, perfectly ripe for stardom --- fish, salads, fruits, wine --- two masters of clichés in almost everything, as the costume dictated, born for world fame under the influence of the evil sign of a strange kind of "luck" --- in the middle of the "watched" dinner, however, my laughter, after almost ten years, became spontaneous again --- I realized that now I would be rich, even drinking so much!)
Excluir