“Writing takes a very long time… Until we finish,” wrote Marguerite Duras. We don’t know if they created us for this, or if we were alone, or if we convinced ourselves that we were born for this, or if this is what, for whatever reason, we wanted to do. We didn’t show anyone the way, or many of us walked a few miles, but there was still confusion and no one knew exactly what to do or how to do it anyway. So we move forward very alone or very accompanied or with the support of everyone, and in one way or another we arrive somewhere. But nothing prepared us for what was to come. Neither for the good nor for the bad. Not for the euphoria of the day that ends with two pages written, not for the sadness of the day that slips away without a single word, not for being the monster who demands silence and isolation, not for being the same guy but now I want to go out and see friends. It’s a beautiful day in the South, a day for sitting in the sun or walking a dog (something alive and completely personal by riding a belt), and yet I’m in my office because I don’t want to do these things with anyone. I want to try to do things, but mostly I want to stay here because I read a fragment of The temptation to failthe diary of Julio Ramón Ribeyro, who took me to paradise: “As in my best moments, immensely alone, listening to Vivaldi (…) at full volume, in the middle of an irremediably disordered house (a scene of anoche with Hinostroza, Calderón, Rojas and Burgos), writing a long free and disorganized story, reheating cacerola de ayer rice, pucho in mouth and burdeos in hand, in this summer, may God protect me and allow me to live my life in the steppe for a long time. Happiness tells me a tarascón. Yes, this life in the steppe. The sky remains wide and calm in its bath of immaculate light. I’m wasting a treasure. But the treasure is there.
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