Andrés Trapiello has announced that this coming spring a new volume of his diaries will be released—the twenty-fifth. It will be titled De todo tiene (It Has a Bit of Everything), a phrase taken from Don Quixote. When the ingenious hidalgo arrives in Barcelona, in the famous episode of the talking head—one of the novel’s most memorable passages—he asks whether the adventure of the Cave of Montesinos was truth or lie, and the response given by that Cervantine monstrosity, the head itself, was simply: De todo tiene.
The phrase serves as a fitting corollary to the books Trapiello has chosen to publish under the title Salón de pasos perdidos (Hall of Lost Footsteps), his diaries, which are, as he likes to say in a Galdósian vein, a “novel in progress.” I have spent many hours of my life reading these books. I have hunted them down even when some were no longer for sale anywhere; I have made friends in various places solely because they shared the same guilty inclination; I have been blocked from readers’ groups where no comment outside the norm is tolerated; I have paid dearly for shipments from Spain; boxes arrived at my house full of European coughs and fevers in the middle of the pandemic; and even a hint of sex-doll trafficking—which in the end turned out not to be such—managed to slip into the comings and goings.
If anyone felt the need to justify the time spent reading writers’ diaries, they would have to begin, in Trapiello’s case, by acknowledging the chain of life-stories they contain and, above all, the narrative exercise they enact. These are accounts mostly written in the first person, sometimes in the third: travels across Europe and the Americas are narrated, as well as constant returns to a country house in Las Viñas (Extremadura) and to León, his hometown. There are deaths, disagreements (many of them) with writers and journalists, ETA violence, rigged literary prizes, secondhand bookshops, books, books, books.
They also contain a great deal of essayistic writing, and it is there that the author appears as an excessively demanding reader—often bordering on autism—lashing out indiscriminately. In the seventeen volumes I have read so far, his main targets include Juan Benet, Javier Marías, Octavio Paz, Juan Manuel de Prada, José Saramago, José Ángel Valente, Jaime Gil de Biedma, Pere Gimferrer, Carlos Barral, Ernst Jünger… But it must also be said that he is a man of tenacious loyalties: Ramón Gaya, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Carlos Pujol, Manuel Borrás, García-Alix, Galdós, Baroja.
Trapiello has given diary-writing another dimension, one that rearticulates the “autobiographical pact,” granting prose a flight that tends to renounce the diary as a mere draft of a work or notebook of jottings, and to blur the old dichotomies of truth and imposture, reality and fiction. Beckett once said of Proust that “the man with a good memory never remembers anything because he never forgets anything.” The kind of diarist Trapiello is aspires to exhibit memory, wants to narrate everything; and the seasoned reader, never overwhelmed, is struck by the fact that in Spain—a land that gave us Cervantes and Galdós—he is not regarded as a great novelist, or so it seems. This is a contradiction, because one could venture to say that these diaries are the great Spanish novel of our time.
“One keeps a diary because one has not renounced life, because one believes that things should always happen differently from the way they do. And then we turn to our notebook and lie to ourselves,” Trapiello writes in Los caballeros del punto fijo (The Knights of the Fixed Point, volume five, 1991). Put another way, diary-writing for him is not a means of fixing the events of a year—he clearly does not fix them stricto sensu, but recreates them, allows them to be reborn through the novelist’s perspicacity—rather, it sustains them in the present, makes them resist the gentle friction of time and humanity’s inclination toward forgetting.
Some time ago it was reported that in Spain four out of every hundred readers choose the essay as leisure reading. The problem lies in assuming that a label—“essay”—already negates pleasure. And what, then, of diary reading? Writers’ diaries have a long tradition and have oscillated between being a classic catch-all drawer—where scissors and discards fit side by side—and a mere notebook of notes. Consider, if not, Emilio Renzi’s diaries (Ricardo Piglia), which achieve their fullest definition when the writer has begun to look death straight in the eye.
In the aforementioned volume, Los caballeros del punto fijo, there is a passage about César González Ruano. Someone recounts an anecdote about the man being honored, and Trapiello writes: “It was surely a fantasy, one of those things we all tell knowing it is false precisely because the pleasure of telling it absolves us of any greater responsibility toward reality.” The diarist’s insistence on telling us that what he offers are in fact novels and not diaries bears witness to that narrative will others have criticized, considering the novelist’s gaze incompatible with that of a diarist, perhaps confusing him with that “notary of a stupid fauna” to which Lorenzo García Vega once alluded in describing the mission of diary-writing.
I believe that when one writes diaries—especially ones as substantial as these—certain small sins are committed: one is moralistic on one page and antimoralistic on the next; one is lenient in judging a writer in one entry because one feels affection for him and harsh ten pages later because one feels antipathy—sometimes this even happens with the same author, as in the case of Brodsky in La cosa en sí (The Thing Itself, 2000). In one volume he attacks Vargas Llosa, only to dedicate a book to him later. In another he deems the Mariano de Cavia Prize a musty relic—until it is awarded to him in 2022 and everything becomes praise and gratitude. Love and contempt for cities such as London and Paris coexist in Las nubes por dentro (Clouds Within, 1990) and Los caballeros. What would be unacceptable in an essayist for its arbitrariness, the diarist resolves with humor, having understood that humor is a great ally in moving through life as a voyeur, capturing stories and leaving his judgment on each thing.
Some of the most successfully rendered moments in these diaries are the family scenes. His wife appears constantly as interlocutor and as a character in her own right, as do his two children, whom we have seen—or rather “read”—grow year by year with each volume. Trapiello has even narrated encounters with other women that came close to ending in a sexual escapade (Los caballeros and Las inclemencias del tiempo), but, guided by narrative mastery, something always occurs that prevents consummation, allowing the narrator to return to his notebook, leave his testimony, and go on with his life as if nothing had happened—because his wife believes he has invented everything. The novelist-diarist already has his alibi. As a character says in another volume: X is the opposite of a snob. A snob gives you what he does not have. X, on the other hand, gives you more than you want to take: anecdotes, history, even intelligence, experience, sensitivity.
One of Trapiello’s great virtues lies in his portraits and character sketches. Take, for example, that of his priest uncle, which occupies several pages in Los caballeros. Others include La Pasionaria in El tejado de vidrio (The Glass Roof, 1989); the publisher Valentín Zapatero in Las nubes por dentro; Rosa Chacel in Los hemisferios de Magdeburgo (1994); and his father in Siete moderno (1998). One has the impression that the author could fill an entire three-hundred-page book recounting the life of a single figure, and one would drink those pages down and ask for more. Such is the grace and success of this extraordinary blend of essayist and novelist.
In one of these volumes (Do fuir, 1996), an extended account is given of a trip to Havana during the Libros de España en Cuba events, accompanied by a sizable delegation of Spanish writers. If we take the author at his word, his stance was admirable. During a public reading at the Capitolio, he was the only one to raise his voice against censorship and repression normalized under a repugnant dictatorship. His words were answered by a deputy named Cintio Vitier. The book points out the many inconsistencies of his fellow travelers (one boasted of sleeping with a jinetera in a room next to the girl’s sick grandmother) and highlights the devastation he encountered in Cuba.
Visits to Cintio and Fina—Vitier silent while the poet expounded like a Stalinist in a sacristy—and to the houses of Lezama and Dulce María Loynaz struck him as illustrative of Cuban intellectual and social decay. All his excursions ended in the Plaza de Armas, engaged in transactions with secondhand booksellers. He befriended Antón Arrufat and praised his book De las pequeñas cosas, later published by Pre-Textos in Valencia with a prologue by Trapiello himself. Yet Trapiello disappoints on two counts: he subscribes to the thesis of Cuba as a vulgar American brothel before 1959, that interested caricature promoted by many in order to avoid acknowledging that between 1902 and 1952 the island experienced its only democratic period; and he states that he does not wish for Cuba the Spanish solution—which I assume refers to the Transition, so exemplary to many.
Regarding Bioy Casares’s diaries on Borges, someone once said that in them the coarse noise of the street filters in through the windows. As a reader of diaries, I could not bear it if the noise of the world did not stain the page I am reading. Nor would I accept—contrary to Piglia—that a writer must first elaborate a fictional and essayistic body of work before considering the possibility of keeping diaries. Diaries can be—and are—both. It is also true that not every writer is suited to diary-writing, with its mixture of immediacy, prominence, reflection, writing, things to say.
I know that the great danger of this journey is that everything I read by Trapiello comes to seem like loose or lost pages of a diary, or that his other books—even his poetry—appear as an annexed saga to the Salón de pasos perdidos. I suppose this is a risk one accepts, one that never excludes pleasure. Why, then, did one launch into the enormous enterprise of devouring volume after volume of books about a Spain where I do not live and to which I have traveled only once? The answer can be summed up in a single word: literature. But I also believe that when I read the first volume, I knew it was precisely what I did not know I wanted to read.
