Count the present days until today arrives (BERNARDA)
(What chaos the first night of the event was; despite having enjoyed my entourage with Morell, and having been flattered by their praise and the audience's positive reaction to my verses, my feeling upon leaving that table was that a dissolving, hallucinogenic principle had suddenly taken over reality --- and as Bard screamed in Morell's face, next to me at the table, I couldn't help but feel diminished, a mere woman supporting a man's world, vaguely committed to defending the cardinal virtues of free verse against the concentrated force of the night's dangerous gemstones, still hot from the day's tropical sun --- my part in the feast, already modest by nature, was reduced to the nullity of an empty, forgotten Mallarméic chapel, in whose uninhabited center only solitude and madness; I wished, at that moment, only to "exist," to ACT, as a prophylactic measure of solidity and intensity against solitude and indifference of the macho, police-like world, of its lucid madness and its harshness of a desert bombarded on all sides --- my Baudelairean devotion seemed completely anesthetized by the great neurosis between Bard and Morell, which had attracted all the attention; I looked at the people in the audience and did not feel even the slightest bit drawn to the activity to which I had dedicated my whole life: WRITING --- I felt dragged and undifferentiated by muddy centuries that, amid rust-colored rocks, the Tagus River within me accumulated in its "gothic solitude" --- Such opium-house symbolism! I was not even a commodity there, where men's greed covered everything; it was as if my little book had never been put up for sale anywhere in the world --- I was, at that moment, Garcilaso de la Vega Street, where you never see anyone, nothing but the remains of extreme luxury from dead centuries, the ruin of so many tormented Arab souls suddenly converted into a white, moonlit solitude --- and if, as Antonina used to say, back when she decided to remodel her body with yoga: "Each of us is many people merged into NOBODY", then... --- My God!, I don't even know what to say anymore, everything became so chaotic when I arrived at the hospital and they informed me that, after suffering two new heart attacks while I was at the event, Antonina had not resisted and had died --- I became nervous, I almost suffocated ---
ResponderExcluir--- I spent the entire night thinking that Antonina had no one in her life, no family, no distant relatives, nothing, I was her only regular companion in a decade; we were like sisters, and if that conversation that kept recurring between us, in a typically Madrid-like tone of mockery, that I was his "sole heir," now came back to me as the most serious thing we had ever discussed in our lives (while I was thinking about who to call in Spain -- there really was no one!), like echoes of an iron death, without remains --- a silent, deaf death, like a baroque pictorial explosion that fails at the moment of the resurrection of the naked crucified man --- Santa María La Blanca --- the Jewish face of Spain --- a morbid, stagnant silence and solitude, like a hospital dawning at the end of the world, behind the striped awning of the bakery where I went to have coffee and think about the funeral and documentary arrangements --- notify the embassy, bury her here in the very town where she had died, collect her belongings from the hotel and pay the bills ---
--- The day passed quickly, so eschatological, intense capture of sea rocks in a gloomy and closed mental silence, under the incessant flow of meaningless images from the previous night that I saw on the internet and on television --- what a world full of ambushes, entropy reigning over all the earthly burden of ambitions and decadence, BAROQUE IN EVERYTHING --- Anyway, I'll spare the reader here the maximum of useless details, and I'll move on to the point where I buried Antonina in the city's small Catholic cemetery and finally found myself in my hotel room with her travel belongings --- there were relatively few clothes, in addition to an absurd amount of medicines, not just prescription ones, also for her heart, diabetes, hormonal disorders, and others --- apparently, she had been hiding her true state of health from me and died suddenly --- universal darkness enveloped me in the room, among Antonina's belongings, when I took the immense manuscript from inside the brown package --- on a loose page in the middle of the notebook, was written in red:
ResponderExcluir'I can dominate the characters in my book, the environments in which I make them immerse themselves and suffer, laugh, be amazed, and all the reflective and self-reflective, polyphonic interlude, the interlude and the free indirect discourse, the flow of consciousness, but never the deep meaning of what I am writing; so dominated by what I've been doing in this notebook for the past ten years, so given over to my secret spontaneous creative trance that --- this minutely spiritual drug that slowly eats away at me --- that --- I don't know, the instigating element is often spontaneous --- I never stay long in front of the paper waiting for the words to come, or even fighting with them, which is why I'm always suspicious that I've taken the wrong path of my novel and entered some kind of bizarre and unintelligible poetic "smog" or prosaic pollution --- only through the comforting haze of alcohol and mental medicine do I navigate in the safety of an indescribable internal coherence --- It was then that I realized: THE TOTAL BOOK OF ANTONINA EXISTED! --- and now I was its sole custodian,
ResponderExcluirno one knew of the existence of the work, possibly unfinished, which after ordering a coffee from the hotel service, I began to devour as if nothing else existed in the world, as if Antonina herself had not just died and been buried by me in this tropical marine jungle --- In fact, thirty pages later, it was as if SHE HAD NEVER EXISTED TOO or if her SOUL HAD BEEN ABSORBED BY MY BODY and WE WERE NOW WRITING TOGETHER THE WONDER THAT WAS BEFORE OUR EYES --- I perceived in each sentence the unquestionable magnitude of what was written, refusing to seek any additional information beyond the text --- I decided that I would only return to Spain after exhaustively reading and rereading the manuscript --- To tell the truth, I blushed with shame with each red highlight I made in Antonina's beautifully calligraphed text, for future "reconsideration", something that unconsciously prepared my soul and my entire person for to deliver a "Trafalgar blow" to the European publishing market, under my own name --- I had already felt a "different time" occupying the scene of my life for hours, it was intoxicating to imagine myself occupying the throne of those other people's words --- even falling asleep, during the early hours of the morning, I continued reading and rereading it fiercely)
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