We were talking about Ernest Hemingway and wondering how much of him was in David Bourne from The Garden of Eden. It is a posthumous novel that remained unpublished until 1986. Neither Crespito nor Gatúbela have read it. Gata has. It was suggested by Cabellera Espumosa, who read it because I lent it to him. How ambitious.
I worry about whether it’s true that Lord Byron’s heart was buried under his statue in the Garden of Heroes in Misolonghi. Compared to the multitude of insignificant events that swirl around us like a hurricane of banality and trivialization, the heart of a poet is everything, or almost everything.
A discreet writer is usually an intense writer. Whatever is associated with my presumed intensity, could it be a sign of misery and tribulation gnawing at my insides, using a battering ram of words that leave a feeling of concavity and sinking, of abyss and discouragement, of melancholy and fatigue?
I can share the epic nature of my defeat with a few people.
It is curious that the graphic on the cover of El regreso was created by Antonia Eiriz. Calibrating, from death, the landscape that Calvert Casey paints when he writes “En San Isidro,” Eiriz’s creatures have come to acquire a condition of support, of companionship. Poverty, freedom, expansion, the urgent need to survive within a joy denied until the end. San Isidro, a neighborhood, and the specters, thinking and alive, of Antonia Eiriz. The wound that no one wants to talk about. San Isidro and Antonia Eiriz, what colossal fusion survives there?
Francis Bacon says he likes those who investigate, dismantle, and strip down. “Hey, how hard it is to find a good wine here!” he exclaims as he looks at a book on Egyptian statuary.
Where to put the tics that turn suspicion and assumption into narrative acts brimming with truths mixed with the rubble of the uncertain or the improbable?
Brunetto Latini, enlightened chancellor of the Republic of Florence in Dante’s time.
There were reproductions, in black-painted plaster, of the famous “water vessels” of the Mochicas. Water, as if coming out of a porrón, flowed from obvious, thick pre-Columbian glands, and figures like these invited very sensual fellatio.
There are greenish tones in some of Rembrandt’s skins, just as there are clearly green skins in Matisse.
Provisional conclusion: as far as the writing I produce is concerned, there is a delicate balance between symbols and actions.
“You’re a fucking asshole,” she blurts out. As she raises her voice from a shadow that suddenly darkens part of my room, I don’t know which of these venerable goddesses (Eumenides with razor-sharp teeth) is addressing me.
And I’m going to say goodbye now, because all this has gone on too long. I hope you’ll forget about me in a reasonably short time.
But just in case it slips my mind, I must say that I wish all you sons of bitches who know your sins a long and pleasant stay between the fire and ice of hell, torn apart by beasts with unimaginable jaws.
“The smell of human blood flatters me,” murmurs a character from Aeschylus.
I still don’t know if I’m still here, absorbed, thinking not about what happened to me, but about how the events fit into the ultimate meaning of my life. And that detail, that kind of retrospective suspicion, is what today leads me to think about my elaborate search for a freedom that is ultimately as enigmatic as it is adverse, and which thickens where my self manages to blend with the world.
Everything is in the right place, and I am happy to know it.
Keep shining, crazy diamond. That’s what they shout at me, I think.
You: my hortus conclusus.
De profundis clamavi ad te Domine.
Excerpt from the book Unplugged (fanfare for an ordinary man) (Editorial Casa Vacía, 2025).
Image: Alberto Garrandés.
