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Brother Benito is periodically absent from the convent. He has read Matthew G. Lewis’s novel The Monk and dreams of being confronted by the temptations that lure the novel’s protagonist to his perdition but has had no such good fortune . . . although the presence of the Count may change this mediocre fate. Although he would never confess as much, he likes to travel, to break the tedious monotony of the monastery. On his journeys, he revels in his status as a living saint, a guide to the most important souls in the country and a prestigious counselor to important people. A cruel seducer of misguided men and women. But, for all his dealings with the rich and powerful, not once has he come face-to-face with an evil against which to pit his faith and triumph, to be the living saint that people say he is.
Strangely, the journey that follows the Count’s visit is fruitless, both for Brother Benito and for his followers. The monk is distracted, he is no longer thinking about Lewis’s The Monk, he cannot get the Count out of his mind. And he finds this thought deeply distressing. As a penance, he prolongs the journey, thus keeping his burning desire to return to the monastery at bay. Perhaps the devil has chosen this extraordinary Count to tempt him. And he finds some solace in the fear this thought stirs in him.
lol
After that, things got hot and heavy. What I mean is, up to that point, we’d talked a lot, but in the two hours the business magnate spent resting in my company, we barely talked at all. He was too busy paying homage to three of the most important orifices of my organism. I’m not going to tell you which ones.
lol
[...] Queti started out with me in porn, but she had serious problems with her figure. She started popping every kind of amphetamine she could lay her hands on, but even then she could barely control her appetite. Now she doesn’t care anymore because she’s decided to give up porn and devote herself to music. Sex means nothing to her now. Her real hobbies are fatty foods, soft drugs, and rock and roll. When it comes to fats, her favorites are bacon, Galician empanadas, and tripe. With drugs, she keeps telling me “hard” drugs are so passé, that “the latest thing” is soft drugs, but at, like, OD levels. In other words, she smokes a pound of weed before leaving the house, and when she goes to a club, she’ll drink, like, four quarts of alcohol (she considers alcohol a soft drug). All this, together with entire bottles of Minilip, Bustaid, and Dexedrine. She’s not trying to lose weight anymore, but she still takes amphetamines out of force of habit.
So, the other day, we were in one of those nightclubs that have a restaurant upstairs, waiting for Queti to be served the second banana split and they’re playing “Controversy” by Prince so, over the bass line, we started improvising a rap. It was something like “Suck it to me. Suck it to me babe. Suck it to me. Suck it to me now. After dinner. Before dinner. After lunch. Before lunch. After breakfast. Before breakfast. After flan. Before flan. Suck it to me,” and so on. We really got into the groove and I have to admit it wasn’t half bad. She said we should record a single. Side A: “Bloated by Fats” (referring to her face), Side B: “Cheekbones by Drugs” (meaning mine). Since she’s decided to be fat, Queti has lost the ability to appreciate great cheekbones like mine. The single more generally would be called “Pure Trash.”
lol
Back in Madrid, I found out people had been trying to track me down to make a photo-novel, Sows. In the plot, I’m a girl who’s living on the outskirts of Madrid, my father has a farm rearing pigs, and I’ve spent all my life around them. My father hires a farmhand to help me with the work and the farmhand falls in love with me and my father falls in love with him, which complicates things a lot, because while I don’t have the hots for the farmhand, I sure do have a thing for pigs. I’ve just never known any other kind of love. Just as he’s about to propose to me, I confess my bestial tendencies. And before he has time to be heartbroken, my father shows up, punches him, and kills him. I flee in terror, leaving my father with the dead farmhand. I’m hitchhiking, and I get picked up by a guy. After talking to him for a bit, he comes to the conclusion that I’m his daughter. When I was a baby, the nanny sold me, and no one ever heard of me or the nanny ever again.
lmao
The minute Beau steps out the door, I feel my cheeks start to burn and the nervous jolts rip through my chest. I don’t think about it for a minute. I take another sublingual Trankimazin. I need something to pass the time. And I don’t want to take advantage of Beau. I’m seeing him tonight anyway. I quickly scan the cinema show times for a comedy. I settle on Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It starts in half an hour.
In the taxi, I make a few calls, get the name of an on-call psychiatrist. I can see him this evening. Right now, I need something to feed my head. I call Patricia, she asks me how I’m feeling, I tell her about my visit to Gabriela and ask whether I can come see her. She says of course, she’ll be at home all day with Lorena, her four-year-old daughter. That should take up the next four hours. I call Beau to tell him everything’s fine, and that I’m going to see Gondry’s movie.
When the taxi gets to the city center, the streets are teeming with crowds of people. It’s like a protest march where every demonstrator has a different slogan and a different cause. Utter chaos. I feel horrendous. The taxi is stuck in traffic. I pay the driver and get out. I run the last stretch to the cinema, pushing my way through the crowd.
Neither Michel Gondry nor his movie is to blame for not distracting me from the successive waves of suffocating panic.
amazing
I introduced her onstage in dozens of cities. I remember each and every time, the moments in the dressing rooms before the concert. She had given up alcohol and I’d given up cigarettes, and in those moments, we were like two sets of withdrawal symptoms. She’d tell me she longed for a glass of tequila, to warm up her voice, and I’d tell her that I could literally eat a pack of cigarettes just to ward off my panic, and we’d end up laughing, holding hands, kissing. We kissed a lot, I am intimately familiar with her skin.
sweet
I have come to this place of almost total isolation as a result of not replying to others, of not having worked on genuine friendships or neglecting the ones I had. My solitude is the result of never having cared about anyone except myself. And little by little people disappear. On days like today, my loneliness is a terrible burden, it doesn’t matter that I’m accustomed to it, that I’m an expert loner. I don’t like it, and it often distresses me. That’s why I need to be constantly involved in working on a film, but although that’s fine right now, with three projects lined up, there are always holidays, there’s bloody Holy Week, when all activity grinds to a halt because people in my office are off, and my brother and the few friends I have leave Madrid.
:(
I shake off my boredom, get dressed, and go out into the street. Madrid is empty, except for the pavement opposite where I live and walk, the Paseo de Pintor Rosales, where there are a lot of people lounging on café terraces or strolling around, families with children. On a bench I see a Latin American couple, engaged or recently married, they are both very short and are looking excitedly at the passersby. I also see a lesbian couple, almost identical in their neutral dress style, their casually masculine hairstyles. They’re also quite short. They are older. I’d love to know more about them. I’m glad that they have found each other. I am always impressed by the silence of couples.
“To write, you must refuse yourself to others; refuse them your presence, your love. You must disappoint your friends and your children. For me, this discipline is a source of satisfaction, even happiness, and at the same time, the cause of my melancholy,” Slimani says in her book. I don’t agree, or not entirely. I’ve taken this paragraph literally and it’s brought me no happiness or satisfaction, but lots of melancholy. It’s unpleasant, at least to me, to realize that you’re begrudging with your time, even if the business of writing and directing films is one that completely absorbs you. Maybe Leïla Slimani is right that her work and mine require countless hours of isolation, but I deeply miss the contact with other people’s lives, and it’s difficult to go back to how things were, to a time when I was a social creature and led a more communal life, because as you get older, not everything works in your favor, it’s not enough to meet people. Picking up the phone and randomly calling the usual friends isn’t always an incentive. And I think that’s very detrimental, especially for someone like me, who has fed on everything going on around me to write my screenplays—my mother, my childhood, my time with the priests in Catholic school, my years as a young adult in Madrid, the countless friends I hung out with during La Movida, the conversations overheard, the weirdness of some of those friendships, the pain that was caused by intimate personal relationships. If there was one thing I knew for certain when I was young, it was that I’d never be bored. Now I am bored. And that is a kind of defeat.
from The Scent of Flowers at Night i think
I like writers who talk about the act of writing and constantly quote from other authors. Slimani’s book is full of reflections about writing. “I don’t think writers write to gain relief,” she says. I agree. “A writer has an unhealthy attachment to their sufferings, their nightmares. Nothing would be more terrible than being cured of this attachment.” I’m not sure. It’s true that you don’t write when you’re happy, or write about happy characters. Tension and conflict are like beats in music, they are indispensable, they give the story a sort of framework, a structure and a rhythm.