Count the present days until today arrives (BARD)
(On the way to Salvador, the capital of Bahia, on the plane I wondered how close Natasha had dared to get to me, almost on a second honeymoon with Blanca, contradicting all those conversations we'd had over nearly five years of extramarital affairs --- and on top of that, threatening to suddenly appear between us, scandalously demanding answers to something no one could be sure of --- I mentally prepared myself for the image of two people going crazy in a hotel room, between bottles and recriminations --- what if it were true?, I wondered, what if she were actually pregnant with my child? How could I overcome so much unexpected resistance to try to establish myself in the world of literature as a star? --- and did I really want to be a star? In fact, I really wanted to be rich, first and foremost; I didn't feel particularly conditioned by the spotlight, I wouldn't be capable of any humiliation or anguish just to focus the world's attention on me --- all this had happened by chance, largely due to alcohol (here, a big sip from my glass of whiskey) and the alcoholic hatred that exploded in me, without premeditating any of it, at the event with Morell --- --- Now, however, on my way to meet Natasha, I felt capable of planning everything down to the smallest detail, like a good cop does during a jam --- this made time pass slowly, slipping away in a darkness of damp blindness that I had learned to consider the secret core of life, of a shadow speaking to itself in rarely flattering terms: "Always women involved in everything, looking for men to protect them while they are used by them for capricious purposes; moving hysterically through the toxic environments of a society that prepares for self-destruction every day, infiltrated entirely by aliens from the CIA, MI6 (NATO in general, now dangerously Germanizing), Ukraine, China, Iran, Israel, North Korea and Russia, from the Black Sea like Toby and who knows who. How can I quickly change my concept of Natasha and avoid a harsh friction? How can I not lose the proper perspective, at this crucial moment in my career, which demands above all regulated sex and a peaceful married life? Blanca had easily accepted the justification for the meeting with ed agents of the Brazilian publisher in Salvador, besides being fully occupied and truly entertained in her new role as "businesswoman," discussing contracts and evaluating possibilities for translating my books into other languages. Apprehensive, obscurely excited. We made love before I left. In a way, the dominance I granted her quickly calmed her nerves and suspicions, to the point of revealing new facets of appeasing behavior toward everything other than MONEY and THE FUTURE. How soft and easy her body had seemed to me the night before; how many wonderful and gentle expressions of renewed love in the act of fame and wealth: "The world is perfect, Bard!" she had said over dinner last night, which made me think of the kind of dementia our life was slowly beginning to sink into, and then, in our suite, in bed, bringing together in that single spot of pink flesh between her legs everything relevant to my body among the lustful matters of existence, any and all residual COMMUNISTINITY in me from nonsense not passing. Deep down, I appreciated seeing Blanca enjoying personally commanding this new aspect of our life; dealing directly with money gave her a warm pleasure in other things in life, and on the few occasions when a worry came to overwhelm her, it didn't quite affect her true spirits, as it had in the past: she invariably behaved like a well-bred madrileña enjoying a joyful emotional and material tranquility in an honorable and star-studded pasture, slightly inclined towards the opulent features of expensive hotel rooms. And now, Natasha had come all the way from Spain to harshly test our newfound "marital fortress" ---
--- At Salvador airport, I bought a local newspaper (something I hadn't done in ages, reading a paper newspaper) and read it in the taxi: What a violent city! Beautiful and violent! A scene from a mafia movie. I remembered more than one lecture I'd attended in Barcelona on drug trafficking in the Third World, when I was still working for the Spanish investigative police. The multiple and fragmented nature of its bases in Brazil apparently differentiates the drug trade here from the Colombian, Mexican, Sicilian, Peruvian, French, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Lebanese, and Russian cartels; and since the beginning, they've been linked to politics, along with which they seek to exploit the social problems generated by the weakening of the State, the rise in unemployment and underemployment, and the proliferation of the informal economy, which contributes to the incorporation of the poor into the world of drug use. Using "guerrilla" strategies, drug traffickers "spread terror" here, with agile and operational groups linked to foreign mafias and the smuggling of gold, precious stones, fine woods, the market for stolen cars, luxury consumer goods and weapons, in addition to bank robberies that they called in the report "the new banditry" ---
ResponderExcluir--- Looking out the taxi window, I noticed an excess of cars amid the city smoke; an excess of poor people, of crumbling shacks, of expectations of violent crime, of festering anomie floating in the smell of tropical fried food --- until the driver turned onto the beach avenue and I felt like I was in paradise --- it was ten in the morning when I arrived at the hotel Natasha had recommended, the Wish, according to the taxi driver currently the most upscale in the city --- I truly felt like I was inside a five-star aquarium full of calming wavy reflections on the walls, as I made my way to the reception: "Please, Miss Natasha Vergunov, room 602" --- the calm was short-lived, when the receptionist replied: "Miss Natasha left yesterday at 5:00 p.m. and has not yet returned" --- fraught with foreboding and suspicious to the bone, I called her several times without getting an answer, and fired off at least 40 fragmentary messages on WhatsApp --- NOTHING! --- from calm to the most advanced state of paranoia in five minutes, I mentally projected myself throughout the entire day in an extremely nerve-wracking labyrinth of comings and goings from the hotel to the touristy bowels of that sunny and unknown city for me ---
ResponderExcluir--- and those rhetorical questions of a caffeinated private detective in a new and scalding fight that would summon all my strength --- "It seems she left an envelope here for someone named Álvaro Bard, is that you, sir?" --- "Yes, please.": I opened the completely sealed envelope, and inside, on a napkin, was written in red lipstick only: "IN THE POOL FOR FIVE HOURS STRAIGHT. SCARED!" --- "Can I take a look at the pool?" --- "Of course, I'll accompany you, sir." --- there was no one there at that hour, and the hotel employee was already looking at me with the deepest suspicion, with a quick exchange of glances with invisible security guards around, quick to create instant restrictive provisions to my "curiosity of the moment" --- "I suppose that to have access to the hotel's internal and external camera system, only with the presence of the police here, after 5:00 p.m. today. Right?'' I asked, everything in my interlocutor already being presumed by way of ill will --- ''I'm afraid so, Sir.'' --- incredible how, even with my day already turning into a nightmare, I didn't take my eye off a beautiful woman:
ResponderExcluiras Gore Vidal says in Myra: "At a certain moment, always unpredictable, the world demands a blonde Aphrodite with a perfect body", but the one who had just arrived in the pool area looked more like one of those blue-eyed Argentinian women who arrive in Bahia bored, yearning for wild and anonymous sex --- excruciating irony, my Natasha was prettier than her, and what's important at the time of sex is nothing like what common men think, that despicable and degrading condition of bored, overwhelmed man driven by the expectation of extra-favorable circumstances, almost always pure prostitution in the field of bargaining and carrying out a useless excrescence of true desire --- am I trying to play the distinguished here? --- and I had a strong unspoken code for expressing my desire from a distance, that was exactly how I had connected with Natasha, as if our relationship had begun in a vacuum, with no traceable prior traces, between the total indolence of the an passant memory of the chance encounter in a communal area and the primitive activity of sexual pursuit ---
ResponderExcluir--- and suddenly, there was that Natasha in my life, our almost routine of camaraderie and sexual encounters almost wanting to appear, to replace, even Blanca, from whom, true to her name, radiated a celestial placidity of immaculate whiteness, whenever I returned from a date with Natasha, I immediately regretted it so I could affect calm and disguise that sordid antics as mere expansive alcoholism --- and now, all this was once again coalescing into a demand of the most obstinate urgency, still without a dose of reason to ponder some initial paranoid hallucination of reference, like that of some Pentagon bureaucrat acting as a sullen and restless villain behind it all, Natasha's disappearance and my perhaps imminent vulnerability in a corner of illegal anti-American activity, seeing myself even at this moment wandering aimlessly through the winding streets of a humid, hot and dangerous city, resisting with extreme difficulty the idea of a cashew beer in cashew, along the beaches and with my heart coming more and more to the pit of my stomach ---
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ResponderExcluir-- I wondered if this was the Vita Nuova that awaited me from now on, after fame, victim of a monstrous octopus full of secret arms warring among themselves, always invisibly pouncing into every crevice of my intimate life, determined to widely spread in my soul that seed of fear that had been undermining opponents throughout the world --- opponents whose end had already come or was perhaps near, like mine, and all thanks to a cultural "trench warfare" that led to real war, hunger, death, and the decadence of all humanity --- language, languages, and politics --- the theory of hegemony, the central core of the mature Gramsci, beyond the jargon of the secret service "expert" and the "state formulas," the battle I now had ahead of me, besides finding Natasha in the middle of nowhere, was a fierce struggle to give meaning to words, avoiding this ridiculous trivialization of language imposed by the markets through the media, this oxyto-'cynical' language position to crush, through advertising, and simplify a public already domesticated by the consumption habits of a precarious material and spiritual life at all levels ---
ResponderExcluir--- how can I "get along" with the people through the police intrigues of my books and my investigator alter-ego? --- nothing, however, seems so hackneyed when there is "hot material" to stuff into the story of a dry and tedious police report, not to mention the inspiration in my recent experience --- as much as a dialogue with oneself, for example now, does not bring to the surface: the violent and dark intrusion of sex in my next book was something I already took for granted --- (now, yes, I gave in, sat in a bar in front of the Farol da Barra Lighthouse and drank my first beer of the day, staring fixedly at the cell phone switched on on the table) --- there was a lot of Natasha missing from my last books; in a way, it was how I, subconsciously, had been hiding her from the world, and now that she is truly gone I realize how I mutilated my creativity for ridiculous reasons of social fear --- brutal, bestial love, dominating actions --- I remember that Earl Norman had his detective Burns Bannion circulate frantically through Japan in several books in which descriptions exacerbated to the point of sadomasochism combine atrocious ridiculousness with admirable bad taste, and which broke sales records ---
ResponderExcluir---it doesn't seem that difficult to me to put the issue of the criminal struggle for world hegemony in the mouths of beautiful and willing vampire women like Natasha --- they can very well enter a story, kill a wife, blow up an embassy, throw themselves madly into sex while justifying Gramsci's sharp notes on "Americanism" and the "imperialist uniformization" of culture through what the market demands of the media bought at the root, on the stock exchanges, demands reinforced by the armies of the political and business lobby allied with the secret services --- no problem of translation here of a fair conception of history and man, nor obstacles to the adaptation of strategic concepts to everyday life ---
ResponderExcluir--- in the Notebooks, as far as I remember, it is the diffuse recognition in a literary work that THERE IS a CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD capable of unmasking the ill-intentioned liberalism of the owners of the world through particular stories in which the imagination mobilizes gestures and desires of love and death in a storm of insecurities, instabilities and disintegration of everything that meant anything in the life of the world, because everything was FALSELY conceived from the beginning --- Here (another beer, please!) it is the soul that reveals itself violently, the soul trapped in these effective and abrupt gears of media and market mortification of culture and spirit)
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