He craft of writing. The messy table. Books, clippings, notebooks upside down. A photo of Onetti and another of Mercè Rodoreda, both in black and white. A plastic cigarette, with an orange tip, to chew on menthol anxieties. An empty cup. The eraser, exhausted. And a tiny statuette of Santa Rita, patron saint of impossible causes, just in case. There are bad days at the desk. Bearable days of discipline, that pebble-gray habit. And very occasionally, from figs to figs, an instant of rapture in which the sentences sprout whole, with the joy of a trout river.
The only certainty, as the Mexican well knows Juan Villoro, is that the books do not want to be written —neither do the articles, but this is my harvest— and they conspire in a leathery rebellion. “They resist, they pull out their nails, they bite”, in a rejection that repels but also captivates. The gift, the whip, vice and condemnation, pleasure and resignation.
The “hairy doubt”
Each written page shelters shadows, intuitions, hours of plowing and furrowing and some scratch from that vermin that mercedes abbot called the “hairy doubt.” Effort lives (or, at least, should) in every written page. For this reason, I raise a glass, imaginary at this time, for the writers, who today celebrate their day. For the good and the regular, for the consecrated teachers, for those who are on the way, for the apprentices, for those who, in any case, make an effort, for those who believe in henry james: «We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our uncertainty is our passion and our passion is our goal. The rest is the madness of art. Do what you really can. It’s not little.
Other lives
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Nothing would make sense without the reader, without the thousands of onlookers that will crowd the streets on this day of Sant Jordi, even crazy, maddening, excessive and mega-commercial, as it has become. And blessed be: 1 out of every 3 books sold in Catalonia does so within the framework of this festival. Everything would fall apart without those beings eager for stories to learn, escape, reflect, laugh, search or find, live other lives, imagine them. Those people traversed by a wonderful habit, like Margo Glantzalso Mexican: «This is how it happens to me: a page from certain books is like a dagger, slowly entering my heart».
For them, for the readers, a toast, this time with a crystal glass and filled to the brim with red wine, ruby red in color, brilliant as the blood that the dragon shed. Health.