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[...] I noticed one night that she was letting me have my way with her just to please me, but she wasn’t enjoying it; that in fact she wanted to think about other things besides my unwelcome sexual advances, but, because of her saintly character, she couldn’t say so. Anyway, I realised this of my own accord a second before what would undoubtedly have been another rape, and I set my jaw and repressed the urge and lay back next to her and took her hand. She smiled, immensely relieved, and nestled her head into my chest. [...]
Anyway, when this girl I barely knew got wind of the situation, she immediately and without hesitation stole a considerable amount of paper from the office where she worked and sent it to me. Admirable sensitivity; an incredible capacity for understanding. (If she’d sent money, my weak flesh would have made me buy food, pay the rent or something like that. Perhaps she couldn’t send money, and was only able to help me with what she had to hand, even though it wasn’t hers. But I’m sure anyone but her would have done anything but that, which was the best possible thing to do. Because those sheets of paper went far beyond just meeting a need: they made me feel that my writing was more important than I am myself, which, independently of the objective value of my writing, is true. Because whether it’s good, average or bad, it transcends me.)
I’d discovered some time ago – long after the business with the dog, and long before woman A – that my depressions corresponded to punishments for certain misdeeds. I’d developed a whole theory about it, and the theory helped me through the crises. I’m not saying it was true; I’m just saying it worked. In simple terms, the theory said that God holds people prisoner within their own selves. You’re still free to come and go and stay alive by whatever means you choose, but you remain a prisoner in the area – so to speak – where you made the mistake. In this case, my mistake had been sexual; as a result, I had to serve my punishment, secretly, depriving myself of the pleasure of sex, and even of women’s affection. I had an intimate, though vague, sense of how long my punishment would last. And after going through enough of these crises, I learnt to accept them. Trying to swim against the current was the worst thing I could do, because not only would I not escape the punishment, but my life would also start to fall apart all over the place. When I accepted things, everything went on as well as could be expected considering my depression (which, thanks to my trick of acceptance, usually turned into a melancholic state that was almost pleasant) (‘Transform Your Depression into Melancholia Through Acceptance and Get Your Life Back!’ my Reader’s Digest article could be called).
c) Because, sneaking a peek at the topics I’ll have to cover almost immediately if I carry on writing, I realise I can’t go on dodging certain ideological positions – positions that would very much annoy some powerful groups: the government, the opposition, the far left, the left, the centre, the right, the far right, and even that anonymous floating mass which appears in keys to surveys as ‘undecided’ or ‘don’t know/no response’. They would probably also annoy the Catholic Church, the Masons, the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, the various occult sects, the Rotary Clubs and the Lions Clubs, and most likely a few social clubs, sports clubs and boules clubs.
lol
In the dream, her eyes seemed to accuse me of something; to pierce me, burn me, destroy me. But her gaze was still there, in spite of those tricks from the censors; the censors who must have woken me up, calling desperately on the resources of my clumsy waking state to put a stop to things. But her gaze was still there. There was nothing accusatory, or piercing, or burning, or destructive about it. There was only love, love that I wasn’t ready to accept. Love, what’s more, that wasn’t necessarily aimed at me, although I was part of what she loved – which was probably everything in the world, because her capacity to love hadn’t yet been destroyed. Until that moment I’d never seen love in anyone’s eyes. Not even in films. They weren’t the shining eyes of a girl in love, but a docile loving gaze. And the gaze was still there. And it was still there. And it is still there. And it’s still here now, I promise you it’s still living inside me, you glorious girl; it doesn’t matter that I never saw you again, it doesn’t matter if you’ve become a plump woman laden with children and your gaze has turned bovine. That girl is alive, I promise you, and she always will be, because there’s a dimension of reality in which these things don’t die; they don’t die because they’ve never been born and nobody owns them and they’re not subject to time and space. Love, the spirit, is an eternal breeze, fluttering down the empty tubes that we are. It’s not your photograph I carry in my soul, featureless girl; it’s your gaze, the very thing that was never yours, that was never you.
As I smoked that cigarette and waited for my pulse to slow down, I didn’t know – I couldn’t know – everything that was at stake at that moment. Had I known, I would probably have found the strength to repress, to suppress, the image of those eyes once and for all. Because at that moment the end of my marriage was secretly being decreed, along with my forthcoming marginalisation – to the very edge of society – and what many, including me, see as ‘my madness’. Strangely enough, until that moment it hadn’t occurred to anyone to say, or presumably to think, that I was mad. And yet I was absolutely out of my tree. My consciousness was narrower than the head of a pin. No one applauded when I ended my marriage, quit my job and began spending my time drifting around and doing ‘strange things’ – but I’m getting it wrong again: there was a rambunctious and brutally frank Galician man who congratulated me heartily, roaring with laughter, when he heard about my divorce; and I have him to thank for what little oxygen I was able to breathe during that long and difficult time. On the faces of everyone else I knew, both family and friends, was written blame, suspicion or pity, or a combination of all three.
All this was decided imperceptibly while I was remembering the dream gaze and the real gaze, which were one and the same, and smoking a cigarette, and accepting that gaze. By the time I turned off the light to go back to sleep, I’d surrendered to it entirely. It extended over my whole being, opening up ever more avenues of sensitivity, preparing me for a new destiny. Afterwards, I did the right things. I didn’t look for the girl; in fact, I forgot all about her for a while, and even when I did remember her, it never occurred to me to go looking for her. Certainly not. I did all the right things. I had to destroy everything I’d been, thought, believed and felt. I had to get rid of every trace of that delirious life I’d been dragging along like a clumsy worm behind me for the past twenty-five years. I didn’t do it consciously, deliberately; I should have done. Accustomed as I was to my narrow consciousness, I carried on within its limits; but that gaze had injected me with the dimension of love, which everyone knows works of its own accord. My narrow consciousness fought back against the dimension of love; it shouldn’t have done. The battle was lost – or rather won – because God didn’t allow that dream to go unnoticed. stop right there! do you expect us to believe you’re going to tell us about luminous, mystical, spiritual experiences, when you’ve talked about nothing but women, destruction, alcohol and prostitutes? all that’s missing is drugs! go on, minions, take this miserable wretch and throw him into the most pestilent dungeon! Little old ladies in dark-green shawls are whacking me on the head with their umbrellas. You can hear the beating of a drum. A multitude of mothers with their children in their arms, their eyes full of tears, silently mouth the letters of a curse. The pyre is ready. While my body burns in resignation, I think: ‘They weren’t patient enough, they weren’t curious enough. If only they’d carried on reading … ’ And I raise my eyes to the heavens, wanting to exclaim piously: ‘Forgive them, oh Lord, for they know not what they do,’ but a final flicker of consciousness makes me shout instead: ‘The bastards! The fucking bastards!’
Young people, listen closely: there’s nothing good about alcohol, cigarettes, prostitutes, pornography or drugs. They destroy you, body and mind. Don’t think for a second they could be tools of liberation: on the contrary, they lead to dependency and alienation, they ruin you and, in the end, they kill you. My only tool of liberation was that loving gaze God sent me in the eyes of a woman; the rest of the story was nothing but one long mismatching of my means and my ends: ignorance; solitude; lack of support and affection; an enormous world which that gaze released within me and which I didn’t know how to control. I had to destroy myself because I didn’t know about the tools I could use to build myself up. It’s not a fail-safe method. Don’t try to follow in my footsteps. Besides, it was only one liberation, nothing definitive.
Only your soul, young man, can show you the way. Wind it up, set it in motion, and let it be whatever God wants. The sublime, that dimension we never consider, that thing we’re missing: it’s nowhere and it might be anywhere; here today, there tomorrow, gone completely the day after, and in twenty years it’ll be back again, or perhaps it won’t; it all depends on the Grace of God – and how you’re getting on with yourself. Once, perhaps by chance, Grace brushed against me in a church. I was thirty-six years old, and that experience, which I’ll write about in due course, made me take Communion for the first time. Not even churches are off limits to the hand of God.
the last line kills me
I’m not sure if you can tell, but I’ve breathed life into a deranged monster that’s now pursuing me relentlessly. Of course, of course there was a reason why I resisted and prevaricated so much before writing the first lines of this novel. The most ridiculous episodes of my life are all flooding into my head and they won’t leave me alone; I can hardly eat or sleep, I wake up very late and go to bed when the sun’s already risen; yesterday I saw serious signs that more biliary colic is on the way; and since even before starting to write, I’ve been in a constant flu-like state, which is obviously false: an excuse to waste all my time writing. I live for the novel; I think about it all the time; I write up neat versions of the drafts, making additions and cuts, and I think and think and think and think. My life has turned into a speech, an uninterrupted monologue completely beyond my control. I’m in thrall to the delirium, the search for catharsis, the demands of the work I must do, whether I like it or not, with the single vague hope of one day reaching a full stop and finding myself empty, exhausted, cleaned out – and ready for another. Because the point is that none of the luminous experiences and none of the liberating experiences have served to make me say ‘Enough now’, ‘I’ve made it’, ‘That was the one’. What’s more, although there was a time when I tried – and oh, how I tried – to reach something that would allow me to say ‘Enough’, ‘I’ve made it’, I’m now very aware that we only get to this point when we die, and I recoil from that even more than from the very demon itself. Readers, do not be deceived: I have no great wisdom to pass on, and I hope I never acquire any. The name of wisdom is: arteriosclerosis.