Life tells you “don’t try it”, until finally it tells you “look at it”, and that is what happened last night, prior to my farewell to life in Cádizperhaps the most beautiful and smallest city in the world. Full of light and shadows, like a lady or like a child. I’m leaving, that’s life. When I arrived, I said that it was embarrassing to go far from Cádiz, but here I am, leaving.
A city where, the first time I came, I felt like it was part of my island, where sad, happy students came to learn medicine. Then life, I caught a glimpse of it, rather, at night. She was so beautiful, so beloved, so nocturnal, that she seemed to be waiting for joy or sadness, but she was always alert, on the lookout, like a bird that came in the clouds. Columbus ships before reaching La Gomera.
This time I came to a Language Congress, the one that has been held here instead of in Arequipa, Peru, because things are hot there. Things have been better here for a while, but Spain lives as if it were bad. There is evil in corners of life, everything is upside down, but it’s a lie. Almost everything is better than anywhere, although people live complaining to get by, but it’s a lie.
Cádiz, for example, is happy, as are other islets of happy islands, or miniaturized continents in which the good and the bad fit. In the morning, however, the ferocious horses wake up, and the television, the radio or the newspapers return to say that everything is getting worse, and it is not true. It is worse where they kill and where they obey those who order the killing. Children go to school and come back and no one chases them. They persecuted when napalm was used and they persecute in horrible countries that do not get away with it, although they continue to kill, with their rifles to end everything.
I’m leaving Cádiz this morning. When you see that there is no light on this support, it is because I have left. Friends will remain, recalling conversations from the night, poets to whom I have given my energy, human beings whom I have just met at the bars, and everything you see that I left behind is essentially like an hourglass that I cling to lest the hours I have left be taken from me.
Leaving Cádiz is living from another game, and one day I will have to say it with fewer words, because the truth is that I am already leaving and I do not want to give more details of the farewell. Hopefully one day, early, I’ll tell you that Cádiz is leaving with me, but I’m leaving alone, like a board of children playing hide-and-seek.
Yesterday very early in the morning I went to one of those parties that work has in store for me. I was going to accompany my friend the writer gonzalo celorio, perhaps the most lucid, and calm, of the companions. We went where only silence or words awaited us. There weren’t even chairs where we could sit well, until they sat us down, and I immediately felt that I was going to be chatting with him about the will that maintains him: literature.
Earlier in the morning, I heard him enter a room where there were Mexican dictionaries (Dictionary of Mexicanisms) in which he has collaborated. Those dictionaries were shiny, like silver, blue or gold, and I opened one of them, a box like brandy waiting for us. Nobody believed what I found immediately after I took out the dictionary from the yellow material that kept it, so that as soon as I opened the package and found what came in the corresponding meaning, someone said: “He has invented that.”
I hadn’t made it up. The definition that awaited us said exactly this: fuckingputamadrazo. I think the only one who believed that it was written there was Juan Marsé’s donkey, this little silversmith Without obsessions, it has accompanied me since I arrived on Monday to feel that Cádiz is my homeland, or my sun, or my nights, or a farewell.
One day, perhaps, when I return to Cádiz, I will tell here or anywhere why now, at this time of night, I feel so happy to have accompanied the donkey to say hello to the city to also say that we’ll see each other again.
Goodbye, or not who knows.