Count the present days until today arrives (YERMA)

 

(As always, whenever I made a decision, like coming here to promote my book—a serious decision, given its meager impact in Spain, and even in Barcelona—I was in a hurry to confront adversity, the insurmountable obstacle to the fame I coveted, the feeling of abandonment and failure that exhausted me—and this struggle made me feel cruel, treacherous, unfaithful, even if, most of the time, only to myself—I felt secretly inclined to hate, a kind of unspeakable physical demand demanded this attitude from me, not always painful, because I knew how to compromise, even against my will, I knew how to pretend to weigh the pros and cons, all sweetly, constructing arguments as cunning as they were disposable, while waiting (in my imagination) for the “propitious moment,” the one that, slamming a door as it left the scene, would close the matter within me.) whether they gave me the attention I deserved or not (as I thought all of us writers were the same, cut from the same cloth), I knew I could certainly count on that remainder of eternity that in the mirror of my locked room, alone, I would confess to myself, with a touch of cynicism, even my smallest sins, and all with a smiling coldness, feeling and savoring languidly how unreal everything that was slipping through my fingers was, every possibility of life that was slipping away from me --- until dawn, smoking, NOTHING, NOBODY mattered to me --- I would resurface (I thought) for sure somewhere else, abroad, or even in the interior of Spain, flirting with the continuation of my ruin in a criminally double, perhaps triple existence --- being recruited by the secret service of some obscure country, suddenly --- suddenly, a relatively well-known writer in her country, after two or three failures in a row, disappears without a trace, leaving only that ghost of an ordered life that is gradually being reabsorbed by a distant and colorless gaze that, wandering I don't know where, extinguishes under half-closed eyelids any possibility of search or reunion --- new studies, new social positions, suddenly transform me into a hardened type of "field expert" --- My God, either I'm really going crazy, or the only thing people really want in life is to RULE! --- homo hominis lupus --- life is selection, to be able to breathe freely above where others are --- BECOME UNAPPROACHABLE, transform intelligence into cleverness as quickly as possible, before circumstances reduce our most promising impulses to the rite of slow speech, in an inferior self suffering strange and anguishing rarefactions in the game of other people's opinions and their load of resentments not overcome by time, incapable of supporting itself; lost in that point of stagnation where one sighs oppressed, where each remnant of failed passion, instead of causing suffering and pain, bores.)