Exchange: Saldaña París vs. Morales
A few months ago, Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña París and Spanish writer Cristina Morales exchanged emails on erotic dreams, commissioned texts, and life in writers’ residences. Read their correspondence here.
From: Cristina Morales
Barcelona, August 3, 2014
Dear Daniel,
It was very fitting that Mas Traviesa or Más Traviesa magazine ask that you exchange some letters with a colleague in order to publish them, because those letters are already written, and they’re even recent and talk about current affairs and are peppered with the little felonies and appetizing intimacies of the correspondents, which would certainly interest the naughty readership of Mas Traviesa or Más Traviesa.
When you proposed me as a correspondent for that publication I thought exactly that: so great that the task has already been completed. Let’s reread the letters you and I have been writing to each other for some months now without the mediation of anyone, and let’s select the ones we like the most. Let’s touch up the parts where we go overboard, take out the proper names which compromise us, strive for depth, perhaps, in something which might deserve nuance, and there we go. That’s what I wanted to communicate to you, but, a beautiful thing about written communication amongst writers, we didn’t understand each other. In your last letter you list the subjects we have, in fact, already discussed with each other, but it’s more of a hyphen inviting to write about something new. And I second your idea, Daniel, because last night I glossed over our previous letters (on my desktop there’s a folder called “letters to daniel”, although it includes both the letters sent to you and the ones received from you) and as I began reading my letters I felt vertigo, and could only read yours, and with those in mind be able to remember what mine might have said. I now realize I never reread a letter, nor did I do so when there were envelopes, before slipping the letter inside; nor do I do it in times of email, before clicking Send, nor do I do it in these vital Word times of mine before I click Attachment. Reading letters I’ve sent to others feels like singing in a karaoke bar, that place where the laminated lists of songs are always so greasy.
So I propose that this letter is the one to be published first in our correspondence, and I proceed with your list: let’s go back to the bra that I left in your house and has still not shown up, to the real Daniel who inhabits your last fiction, to the shitload of money we don’t make with literature and to the illness of the nerves which attacks your ideological sentiments. And I add: let’s tell these naughty readers that I began our correspondence on a desperate, cold night in which only you lent me your ears, eyes, voice, with your poems. They’re forming the perfect idea, that we are Transatlanticmelancholic lovers.
But first explain one thing to me: what is this you tell me that “epistolary exchanges among writers are kind of fashionable right now?” Is it really true, even if I can barely get anybody to answer a somewhat long email, let alone a text message, and among those anybodies many are writers, because many of my few friends are? Is it perhaps a vintage fashion, like the return of bikes with baskets, or the Utah Quaker beard? In Barcelona one hears of hipsterization. Is it that?
In any case, Saldaña, notice that our transatlantic love affair has become a threesome. Now it’s you, me, and the reader. And if instead of reader we speak of readers, the thing becomes nothing short of an orgy. And you know that in threesomes, let alone in orgies, there’s always someone who at some point just watches.
An iliac crests bumping hug,
Cristina
PD: What I most like of Teresa de Jesús is her Book of Life, her first work; and what most delights me about it is that the woman even laughs at the Inquisition, which is not nothing. When a rich lady gives her some jewelry, the woman mocks the lady’s banality. When her confessors tell her that her visions are a thing of the devil, the woman laughs at the confessors’ blindness. When they tell her to fear the demons, she writes, literally, “that they shall fear me”. When they tell her this or that thing is resolved with money, she laughs at money. When the steps of the inquisitors can be heard all around her, the woman says she’s waiting for them sitting. And she laughs at herself, of how clumsy she is and how poorly she writes. But I’m not doing a biography of the saint, Daniel, but rather something much more sinful: a fiction of her.
PD2: I’m exalted by what you say, that the memory of our correspondence exalts you.
From: Cristina Morales
Barcelona, August 12, 2014
I’m at an antique-looking shoe store run by sisters who’ve extended their youth thanks to makeup, fashionable clothes, and light, progressive chitchat. I go for the cheapest shoes, some 18 euros. I’ve tried the right shoe on and ask the salesperson to bring me the other one. Bad luck, the other one is not there. She then shows me other models, very pretty, made of leather, very soft colors, but three times the price. I tell her I can’t pay for them, I’m sorry. While the salesperson was coming and going looking for the shoes, I noticed some shelves in the store which had, instead of shoes, books. They’re quite used and one of them has a library’s sticker on the spine, but they’re not all bad or outdated titles. There’s one that interests me: a novel by Anagrama with a cover that looks like Daniela Ástor y la caja blanca by Marta Sanz, where a black and white picture of a five-year-old Marta Sanz hugging her naked chest appears, although it’s really written by the poet Luna Miguel. In the inside cover I expect to see the Miguel picture I know, but instead there’s a girl who looks like a female Canadian logger with an incredibly innocent smile.
There’s another book on the shelf which interests me: the author is Daniel Saldaña along with someone else I can’t remember. And it’s not a book exactly, but something closer to a coupon booklet for tourists. The binding consists of one staple, and it doesn’t have a single letter, just drawings, illustrations of the country and jumping puppets. Since it’s small, I fold it a bit and stick in my pocket so that the sisters won’t find out. When they finally come back empty-handed, with no shoes that might interest me, I ask them if, after so much waiting and distress given I didn’t get the left shoe, they could give me the strange Luna Miguel book. They say all right. Somehow they realize that I had put the booklet by Saldaña and the other author in my pocket, and one of the sisters takes it out, wrinkled, but returns it to me as if nothing’s happened. So I leave the shoe store with no shoes but with two books.
Next thing I’m with you in DF, in an apartment which is not the one you have and I know but another one, a mix between my apartment in Barcelona and yours, with lots of light and windows. I just arrived, it’s spring, the weather’s really nice. And the library is closing, Daniel, and I have to return this computer they’ve lent me and stop halfway through my retelling of last night’s dream. I’ll continue as far as logistics allow, although I like sharing dreams with their protagonists on the day after dreaming them, and if possible the following morning. It sucks to rush.
From: Cristina Morales
Barcelona, August 12, quarter after nine at night
You and I in DF in an awesome apartment, all glass, pure soap opera luxury. I’ve come from Barcelona to see you and you have come pick me up and now we’re finally alone. I feel like coming has been worth it and feel how I did in my best days as a fanatic lover, when I was 20 and took airplanes and buses and put on costumes and spent the money I didn’t have just to fully enjoy myself and the feeling of freedom and being queen of the world and making the other person fully enjoy himself, but that in second place. We fucked in the middle of the living room around midday. So it’s an incredible fuck. It is, in fact, the same fuck I had with my husband on the night of this dream, that is yesterday, in the middle of my living room: both standing, with no other support than our legs or the support of the other person. In the dream you and I fucked like this but very lightly and silently and dispassionately, and almost fully dressed. As soon as we are done fucking, you get a call on your cell phone. I can hear the speaker’s voice: it’s your woman and you refer to her as Julia or Juliana. You tell her yes, I just arrived, I’m at your place, and when I hear this I exclaim Hi!, and greet her. “She says hi,” you tell Julia or Juliana.
Next thing, I’m with your woman in a fancy, over-the-top house. Julia(na) is Asian, with a flat face, like a Filipina. She has straight, very black hair, speaks to me very kindly and walks me through the rooms in the little mansion where the party’s taking place, and the whole time I’m certain she knows you and I are sleeping together. The house has a lot of furniture in a variety of styles, stairs where you don’t expect them and a certain silly disorder, like that of a loony housewife. The next room we enter is the living room of my house in Barcelona: two armchairs recycled from the trash, two chairs recycled from the trash, a low table recycled from the trash and the enormous postwar wooden piece of furniture which the owner left for us and is an authentic black hole. You then show up in your pajamas, but not like you’ve just woken up, but rather with the energy of a superhero. The pajamas are a pink bubblegum color with pastel print and you’re not physically yourself but my husband, but, I insist (the dream insists), it’s you. You come looking for me so that we get out of there, and Julia(na) clearly knows we have something going on, but she’s not opposed nor does she make a scene or anything, rather she resigns herself bureaucratically. You say hi nonchalantly, goodbye, we’re leaving, we’ll be back, everything ok?, yes, thanks for everything, chao, chao. End of the dream.
We’re now three Mas Traviesa letters to zero (or, maybe, when I go downtown to get wifi to send you this one, you will already have responded, and it’ll be three to one). I consider these three last ones publishable (distinguished from the previous ones because they have a letterhead with time and place), with those meta-epistolary mentions included, and I’m not opposed to the idea that this turns out to be an asymmetrical correspondence. So, it’s three to zero. Write as much as you like when you like, of course. But let it be known I miss you, that I see myself as a swordsman without an show room, a boxer without a rival, without even a sparring, a boxer training in front of the mirror.
I forgot to be surprised in my previous letters by the fact that my bra didn’t show up in your house. I can’t swear I didn’t leave it in the Xalapa Xalapa hotel (great creativity by the hotel management, great identification of the particular interests with those of the whole, brilliant exercise in marketing, brilliant liberal exercise), nor can I swear remembering having it in DF, while staying at your apartment, but when I opened my suitcase in Barcelona I could’ve sworn it and could visualize it on top of your drawers. That must have been my second supernatural phenomenon, with my underwear disappearing and my temporary residences during 2013.
This letter does not even mention literature.
Big hug,
Cristina.
PD: The computer’s clock tells me I’ve taken exactly one hour to write this. Am I slow or fast? Take into account I don’t reread or edit.
From: Daniel Saldaña
México DF. Wednesday, August 13. 00:26 am.
Three to one, it is. I’ll take that —provisional— score which you’ve chosen with healthy unanimity. But I’ll humbly try to tally up my point on my side of that imaginary blackboard which is adding up our correspondence. Additionally, according to the categories of my improvised value system, this letter is worth double because I’m writing in my pajamas, which is not nothing.
Today I talked with a guy who told me about his personal version of Shintoist animism. I never understood well what it was all about, really, but I projected the core of his conversation towards my own interests, and then I remembered a certain river in Chiapas, near Palenque, very rich in mineral salts (I’m falsifying the scientific explanation), which has a riverbed where things become sedimented and even petrified in a relatively short time period—relative compared to how long things take to become petrified, of course—. Anyway: that river had items of daily consumption, which had fallen inside perhaps five years ago, covered with a firm layer of moldy rock, and one could find Coca-Cola bottles or plastic straws turned into instantaneous fossils, and that slight deception by biology seems to me the metaphor of an aesthetic: to make the most trivial thing, pulled out from the contemporary world, seem old and even venerable. I don’t know why I’m talking about this.
Anyway. Your bra, I swear (wow, how solemn I become), did not show up in my house. Not in the aforementioned bone color nor in any other. But I accept it might be my fault: lately, lots of things I’d thought to have shown up don’t show up at all in my home, and the regime of losses has become ridiculous. I’m losing things that up to two seconds ago were part of my field of vision. Like an idiot. In an attempt to remedy it I’ve bought boxes, even little boxes, as if separating the things in compartments were enough to hold on to them.
Changing the subject: I’m leaving soon to the country, Cristina, and this terrorizes me. Must I give in to my bucolic drive? Write about the sounds little frogs make? Little fucking FROGS?
I’ll leave it here tonight. But please accept this letter, even if it’s insufficient following the three you scored against me.
Kiss,
D.
From: Daniel
Wednesday, August 13, 2014. 6:35 am
Cristina:
I’m back in action after almost six hours of sleep and now without the blood-alcohol level that dictated the first letter to me (white tequila, four shots during dinner). These, besides, are my writing hours, the only part of the day where I get to sit down with somewhat of a discipline, somewhat sleepy, to work one or two hours straight without falling into the temptation of watching porn or going into social networks (which is the same thing).
I like your dream. I like Julia(na), my flat-faced Filipino woman. Lately I’ve been coming up a lot as a fictional character, Cristina, and not only in my own writing. This makes me a bit nervous, but it amuses me. A Portuguese friend, Joao Tordo, published a novel whose protagonist is some Saldaña París, Mexican writer living in Galicia and previously married to some Teresa. And then a friend asks me if she can use me in a story and I tell her only if I’m a pirate. And now your dream, which is not exactly fiction because dreams happen and are not modifiable, but anyway.
My aches and pains are back with renewed vigor. Now my hands —I don’t know if I told you about this in a previous email, a pre-Traviesa one— swell up mysteriously during the night and I wake up with very restricted movement and a terrible fucking pain. Today, in fact, I have to go to the doctor and see what the hell is going on. In the meantime, one of the pain’s effects is that I can’t point at things. I’ve been not pointing for several days now, not pointing with my index finger. A kind of laughable thing. Taking this into account, I decided I had to do some kind of physical activity and —oh, shit— got into yoga classes. I’m not used to doing anything at which I feel so clumsy (except having relationships with partners), but I must accept with some embarrassment that I’m having fun and that yoga has granted me a kind of respite from my neurosis.
I envy your ability to remember dreams so precisely. Just yesterday I was telling someone I’m sick of sleeping, in general, because I never remember anything of what goes on during those six hours. When I went to the psychoanalyst I remembered my dreams a bit more, but when I went to the psychoanalyst my dreams were terrible. My psychoanalyst was a sadist (her only virtue) who would lead me out fifteen minutes into the session and charge me a fortune. I understand that in Spain you don’t have as many Lacanians, right, Cristina? I might emigrate. Seems like a good enough reason.
7:12 in the morning. You wrote your letter in one hour, you tell me. A healthy slowness. Yesterday, besides being kind of drunk, I wrote too hurriedly, but it was burning me to have three of your letters back to back in my inbox, unanswered, and falling behind in this exchange that was starting to look like your monologue. Although it wouldn’t have been bad at all to only send Traviesa your letters, following a month of silence on my part.
Tell me how your fictionalized Teresa de Jesús is working out. I’m interested in that project. And I like the fact that it’s commissioned. I would like, I think, to write a commissioned novel, with an assigned subject or character; perhaps it’d be easier like that (is it?).
Hug,
Daniel.
From: Cristina
August 27th, 2014, Barcelona
Dearest Daniel:
What has the doctor said about your pains? As soon as I read your message two weeks ago I wanted to ask you. I read your letter on my cellphone during a showing in an outdoor cinema. The Chilean movie they were showing (I am from Chile) was, not horrible, but whatever comes next, and I got to read your letter twice or three times (the first reading is always extremely fast, a tentative reading from which I only get sensations, guesses about your mood and your perception of my previous letter) and smoke joints and drink a bottle of wine. But the little high didn’t allow me to write well, and even less so on my cell phone’s small screen. I hope the doctor prescribed the good kind of chemicals. One must learn to combine chemistry and yoga. Your body will undoubtedly appreciate some stretching and torsions. I can’t live without dancing. I’ve done contemporary dance (can “doing dance” be taken as a synonym of “dancing”?) for several years, without ever going beyond an intermediate level. Otherwise, these hours and hours and hours and hours that I spend sitting down, reading and writing, would have me crippled by now. I also bike everywhere, because riding the subway without paying makes me very nervous: the people of the metropolitan transportation company (the same people who demolished the okupa Can Vies house in my neighborhood) have managed to instill in me the fear for the ticket inspector and the hundred-euro fine. For some weeks now I’ve been in this struggle: to ride the subway without paying (that’s the easy part) and without being afraid (that’s the hard part), because the good beaches are far and you must take the train or die cycling under the August Mediterranean sun.
I never did yoga nor had to deal with Lacanian lackeys, not sure how many of them are in Spain. Oh, I remember how I wanted to start my letter on the night of the outdoor cinema: How is it that you want to live in Spain? Don’t the news of 27% unemployment rate, the disappearance of labor rights and scholarships, the waiting lists at hospitals, the direct and indirect tax hikes, the liberalization of the basic goods market, and—what concerns us professionally—the decrepitude of the publishing world, reach Mexico? Of course, this last aspect does not interest a media which, among other things, belongs to the publishing emporiums. Come live in Spain, yes, but if you don’t have to work to live. In that case, perfect, because this is a country of waiters whose only vocation is to carry a tray overflowing with overflowing glasses of beer, mmmm, how good they are at noon on a terrace with a view of the sea or of the plasma screen where a Barça game is showing. Without disregarding this shit, I tell you: if you came to live in Barcelona, I’d be ecstatic, would show you everything, instill my hatred of the subway and tourists in you, would take you to the parties at the okupa houses, we’d go skinny dipping at the beach, sneak into all the receptions organized by publishing houses (only times when I can drink alcohol, since drinks are so expensive at bars—7, 10, 15, 18 euros for a Barcelona gin and tonic), and steal books from malls. I don’t have it in me to steal them from anywhere else.
The publishing world is decrepit and I can’t complain, because right now I have a commission, but I want to complain, but not in this Mas Traviesa letter, which might be published. Once again, the fear. How many times has the fear shown up in this letter. You ask me about my Teresa de Jesús, whether having an assigned subject and character make the writing easier. Not one bit. I’d written little things on commission, that is, stories, but with flexible requirements: minimum and maximum length, a due date and a subject of my choice. But in this case I’ve even been told it has to have a particular tone, a first-person voice of a specific age, certain main events, explanatory clarity and, of course, though provisional, a specific title. I almost didn’t accept the commission given how constrained I felt. I even shed some tears and had an existential debate, even had small conclaves with fellow writers, took lonely walks. But then, in the utmost Teresian style, I made up my own mind: I broke down the commission’s barriers and used them to make a barricade from which I now shoot. Now I’m happy, I’ve almost finished the novel, which I’ve written with a lot of emotion. Satisfied with the work. It’ll be quite another thing to hear what the publishing house says when they read it. That will be another stage. If there’s something they don’t like, how far am I willing to go in order to make changes or admit them? They call it editing and, once again, I fear it.
I hope your hand is better, Daniel. I wish it from the bottom of my heart. Because, of course, with the hand in pain, can you write?
Kiss, kiss
Cristina
PD: Perhaps you’re not interested one bit, but I feel like sending you this portrait of two of the characters from my Teresa de Jesús: Antonio Ares Pardo and Luisa de la Cerda. I find this painting, of unknown provenance, hypnotic.
From: Daniel
September 23, 2014
Dear Cristina:
I like the extremely slow rhythm of our correspondence (which, I suspect, has begun to worry our friends at Traviesa, who write to ask what’s going on). It’s not that I like it because it emulates the unhurried rhythm of postal letters, a kind of nostalgia I’m not interested in, but because between one mail and the next many things happen, and it’s therefore easier to avoid the useless trifles and focus on things that matter, which are the recurrent ones ringing inside of us, such as the fears you list in your previous letter.
Now I’m out in the country, north of New York, submerged in a bucolic lifestyle, more or less. I spend the day counting deer and swearing at them from a distance, because insulting nature from the comfort of a dwelling has always seemed to me an amusing activity.
I’m here to write, supposedly, but the truth is that I write less and less, I read more and spend more time wondering whether I really want to start writing a novel right now. Plus, I find a slight pleasure in not taking advantage of this residence which some gringo millionaire is sponsoring; the naïve trust these people place in Efficacy as a guiding concept for everything they do turns this into too tempting an invitation to be lazy. If I wrote pages I’d be fulfilling my duty, and I’d end up by despising the written pages a little bit, since I’d consider them a product of progress.
But in truth I’m bragging of an ideology I don’t really ascribe to. I’ve written a few pages, making sure that at least they’re not about anything.
My hand got better with a healthy shot of cortisone, and though I’ve had occasional pains in the joints, I’m starting to get used to the idea that the condition has its origin in my neurosis and the best thing to do is take two Ibuprofens and a tranquilizer halfway through the afternoon, sleep eight straight hours and wake up in a gentler fashion, as if straightened out by the artificial sleep. Perhaps this resignation has to do with the fact that, since our last email exchange, I’ve turned 30. (Or it has nothing to do with that, really, and I only take advantage of this paragraph to communicate my shock at this piece of news; I am superstitious about round numbers, like all simple souls, and now I walk through the fields with the solemn face of someone who’s “going through something”.)
To experience the fears you mention in such a clear manner makes me think you’re a brave woman. At least I’ve formed that idea about you, maybe because of the self-confidence that comes through in your writing, and because you steal books. I used to steal books, in Madrid, but I got over it (or maybe I just started making a bit more money, who knows) and now it’s more common that I buy them, borrow them, or steal them from my job, which is almost something legitimate.
I don’t think I’ll go live in Spain, really. Or maybe in a long time. It’s just a craving that gets a hold of me every once in a while, but disappears as soon as I consider the matter rationally. The Spain I’d like to go back to, they tell me, no longer exists, so it doesn’t make much sense to go all the way there to have a terrible time if I can do the same anywhere else. Except maybe in these fields plagued by deer, in this residence where they feed me three times a day and where I can lock myself in my room to masturbate and be happily unproductive for several hours a day.
I would like to, however, get to see your Barcelona, although I can’t promise I’ll sneak into the subway without paying (I believe my fears paralyze me a bit more than yours do you).
I already want to read the result of the novel you’ve been assigned to write. I can’t tell very well where it’s going. But I want to read the version that precedes the aforementioned editing, which I hope won’t turn out to be too wild.
Country kisses,
Daniel.
PS. Actually, today I don’t feel like speaking of the craft one bit, if such a thing exists, so forgive me if this letter is insubstantial or boring.
From: Cristina
Barcelona, September 27, 2014
Daniel:
I reply to your last letter without having it in front of me. I read it in a library computer, and since that computer had OpenOffice instead of Word, when I saved it on a USB drive and tried to open it at home, more calmly, my own computer didn’t recognize that ODT file, and Word just flashed blue and told me it didn’t know what the hell I was feeding it. It’s probably that my Word is quite old.
Since I don’t have internet and can’t read it again, and since it’s really nice to be wearing pajamas on a Saturday morning, I respond to what I recall: that you were in a writers’ residence in New York, not in the middle of skyscrapers but in the middle of the country (that New York has land that is not developed surprised me a bit), that you hated the deer’s silence, that you’ve been grabbing your balls, that you call me a brave woman, that you’d like to read my commissioned novel before a it’s subjected to a posterior (God forbid) remodeling by the person who commissioned it. That I might find your letter boring, you said too, and you made fun of Efficacy or Efficiency (I remember the capital “e”). And that you’re not really thinking about moving to Spain because the Spain you remember no longer exists, you’re told. That threw me off too: it sounds like something spoken by someone who was last in Spain twenty years ago. I guess the transition into decadence hasn’t been too jarring for me since I’ve seen it happen in front of my eyes (and this makes me suspirious—I don’t know how to use the verb suspire, I’ve adopted it recently after reading a novel by Alberto Olmos many times—, it makes me suspirious, I say, of whether any transition took place at all in the honorable Spanish Transition—the capital letter is from the books of History.
I close this tedious parenthesis outside of it: I wonder why Franco’s death was called the Spanish Transition and why what’s going on now is called a crisis, without any historical capital letters. It’s clear why that’s the case and we won’t stop for that in what is maybe the last letter in our Mas Traviesa correspondence, but I’ll say what I was getting at: the other day I read an interview of a Spanish poet of my age who said that our generation is harmless because it hasn’t suffered at all, everything has been handed to us. I had to recognize once again that not everyone who’s 28 and has two degrees is struggling to survive in Spain. And I got mad once again because someone who’s 28 and has two degrees was speaking in the plural form, as a spokesperson of all of us who are 28 and have two degrees would, daring to say what “we are” or what “we are not”, what “we have” and what “we don’t have”. I detest this, the desire to be a spokesperson, which hides a vocation for politics and leadership. It’s not worth getting into the meaning of the Spanish poet’s declaration: that we’re harmless. It’s not worth it, but let’s spend a line on it: harmless for whom? What does this poet who speaks for his generation think that harm means? What generation does he think was harmful, and harmful for what or against what? I take my hat off and even take my undies off: all good spokespersons must leave things half-said, unless things are stated clearly and directly and someone feels excluded, and the comfortable generalization is ripped apart. It’s easy to speak in the plural (the fantasy of what’s universal, universal subjects, universal literature, Miss Universe). The difficult thing is to speak from an utterly first person point of view: tell me, sir spokesperson of my generation, how much money do you and your family get to spend each month. Tell me if you get excited when Pablo Iglesias shows up on TV (the political leader in vogue in Spain). Tell me if you yell out the goals of the hopeless Spanish national team. I said we’d spend a line on it and I’ve already spent ten. I’ll be quiet now, I’m getting upset.
I was moved, I mentioned to you in a quick email, by the letter I now remember. I’m moved precisely by the radical individuality with which you face and judge your writing: your eye alone, with no magnifying glass. Your giving way, or not even that: your rejection of a logic of production, in this case literary. One of my friends asks why the hell it’s frowned upon that he stays home all day alone shooting heroin. Why does it have to be frowned upon, then, that Daniel Saldaña smokes through an entire artist’s residence looking at the deer. It has an aristocratic air to it, living off the interest (in your case, from what you’ve already written), but that of an unruly aristocrat: a Bakunin. A prodigal son, Saldaña. Do you like to think of yourself as a Cioran, never working, always living off his wife and off his scholarships? But oh, I’m afraid it’s a short-lived fantasy: as short as the support from the Yankee patron. It’s been quite some time since I’ve gotten an artist’s residence, but at some point I began using them as vacation, because in reality one spends the day working (writing, cooking, cleaning, translating), and now on top of everything one has to balance the books with Efficacy during some weeks of paid expenses. Of course, take it for granted that I’m wishing to receive a scholarship again, and god bless artist’s residences. I don’t dignify work, nor do I believe that work dignifies anything, pfff.
You also mentioned we must find an ending to our correspondence in order to send the letters to the magazine. That was my intention, to find an ending, but you see me now, I’m a spoiled novelist and just keep coming up with new discursive lines. You’re more brief, you’re a poet and have better aim. Close this correspondence with a final letter, Daniel, if you’re up for it. And if you’re not up for it, here’s a hug that will bring us close beyond these letters, and this right here’s the ending.
From: Daniel
September 30, 2014.
My dear:
I’m still in the place with the does, or the deer (I don’t know the difference; I can barely tell them apart from the moose). I’m still not doing much, just grabbing my balls, as you say, literally and figuratively.
Sometimes, when you get to repeat it, what I write sounds ridiculous; my dramatics are magnified when I read it in others. What I mentioned about wanting to go to a Spain that no longer exists: I meant, with too big a set of words, that when I lived there the crisis hadn’t set in yet, or at least wasn’t official. And, at another level, I thought as I said it that the people who were there when I was there are no longer there, they’ve left to other countries (and I’m a bit lazy when it comes to making new friends; you were an unusual exception to my reticence with regard to what’s new, in fact. It’s been a year since that: we were in the Hay Festival of Xalapa around these days, right?).
I’m also annoyed quite a lot by that spokesperson vocation you talk about, and I see it everywhere lately. The need of some writers to mark the diameter of the discussion that should be had, in order to say that everything outside that does not matter. And the pedagogical drive in others, damn. I recently saw a Mexican author on Twitter list the four recently published books of Mexican narrative which “we should all be discussing”. Why doesn’t he discuss them and leave us alone, free from his damn prescriptive need!
We had a kind of meeting with the gringo millionaire who sponsors the residence, and the situation, as expected, brought out the punk in me a bit. A handful of snobs discussing literature in commercial terms: how much this author sells and sold, how much did this other one get as an advance. Wall Street investors in the editing business. After dinner, once he had basically told us that the countries the invited residents come from are a piece of shit, the millionaire said that his son is in jail and is mentally ill. Wow. I had been about to ask him for work, picking apples in one of his farms, when he goes ahead and destroys my American dream.
You trust me too much if you think I’ll close off this correspondence in a strong manner, my dear. These days, I again have a strange mistrust of my own writing. I reread myself and everything seems tedious and forced. Oh well, I guess there’s streaks.
I began reading your Santa Teresa biography. I’ll go into it in another letter, so as to not give too much to the readers before the book is published. For now I’ll only say that I’m excited about reading you behind that other voice, kind of hiding but showing up every once in a while with statements which fit you perfectly, which make me recognize you.
I had a weird dream last night, Cristina, one where you showed up, and that’s why I woke up and started writing these final lines instead of gulping down coffee in front of the deer or doing yoga on the room’s carpet. We were in a country in Eastern Europe, I think, precisely in a residence for writers where we’d coincided. It was a house of very thick, cold walls, of raw cement, and we were there alone, in pajamas, at night. We met in the kitchen and stayed there talking, but suddenly there was an earthquake and we had to rush out to a patio in front of the house. The earthquake quickly degenerated into a social uprising with looting and malevolently gratuitous crimes (this might’ve been caused by a book by Jelinek I was reading before falling asleep). You kept telling me to walk the streets and record the chaos going on, to which I replied I never left my house in pajamas, and the end of the world wouldn’t be the exception. In the end we said goodbye on the patio in front of the residence, and you left towards the uprising while I returned to the house with the cold walls, convinced that my slippers weren’t thick enough to spend too much time outdoors.
And that’s it. I won’t write any more.
Yours,
Daniel.
Previous entries:
From: Cristina Morales
Barcelona, August 3, 2014
Dear Daniel,
It was very fitting that Mas Traviesa or Más Traviesa magazine ask that you exchange some letters with a colleague in order to publish them, because those letters are already written, and they’re even recent and talk about current affairs and are peppered with the little felonies and appetizing intimacies of the correspondents, which would certainly interest the naughty readership of Mas Traviesa or Más Traviesa.
When you proposed me as a correspondent for that publication I thought exactly that: so great that the task has already been completed. Let’s reread the letters you and I have been writing to each other for some months now without the mediation of anyone, and let’s select the ones we like the most. Let’s touch up the parts where we go overboard, take out the proper names which compromise us, strive for depth, perhaps, in something which might deserve nuance, and there we go. That’s what I wanted to communicate to you, but, a beautiful thing about written communication amongst writers, we didn’t understand each other. In your last letter you list the subjects we have, in fact, already discussed with each other, but it’s more of a hyphen inviting to write about something new. And I second your idea, Daniel, because last night I glossed over our previous letters (on my desktop there’s a folder called “letters to daniel”, although it includes both the letters sent to you and the ones received from you) and as I began reading my letters I felt vertigo, and could only read yours, and with those in mind be able to remember what mine might have said. I now realize I never reread a letter, nor did I do so when there were envelopes, before slipping the letter inside; nor do I do it in times of email, before clicking Send, nor do I do it in these vital Word times of mine before I click Attachment. Reading letters I’ve sent to others feels like singing in a karaoke bar, that place where the laminated lists of songs are always so greasy.
So I propose that this letter is the one to be published first in our correspondence, and I proceed with your list: let’s go back to the bra that I left in your house and has still not shown up, to the real Daniel who inhabits your last fiction, to the shitload of money we don’t make with literature and to the illness of the nerves which attacks your ideological sentiments. And I add: let’s tell these naughty readers that I began our correspondence on a desperate, cold night in which only you lent me your ears, eyes, voice, with your poems. They’re forming the perfect idea, that we are Transatlanticmelancholic lovers.
But first explain one thing to me: what is this you tell me that “epistolary exchanges among writers are kind of fashionable right now?” Is it really true, even if I can barely get anybody to answer a somewhat long email, let alone a text message, and among those anybodies many are writers, because many of my few friends are? Is it perhaps a vintage fashion, like the return of bikes with baskets, or the Utah Quaker beard? In Barcelona one hears of hipsterization. Is it that?
In any case, Saldaña, notice that our transatlantic love affair has become a threesome. Now it’s you, me, and the reader. And if instead of reader we speak of readers, the thing becomes nothing short of an orgy. And you know that in threesomes, let alone in orgies, there’s always someone who at some point just watches.
An iliac crests bumping hug,
Cristina
PD: What I most like of Teresa de Jesús is her Book of Life, her first work; and what most delights me about it is that the woman even laughs at the Inquisition, which is not nothing. When a rich lady gives her some jewelry, the woman mocks the lady’s banality. When her confessors tell her that her visions are a thing of the devil, the woman laughs at the confessors’ blindness. When they tell her to fear the demons, she writes, literally, “that they shall fear me”. When they tell her this or that thing is resolved with money, she laughs at money. When the steps of the inquisitors can be heard all around her, the woman says she’s waiting for them sitting. And she laughs at herself, of how clumsy she is and how poorly she writes. But I’m not doing a biography of the saint, Daniel, but rather something much more sinful: a fiction of her.
PD2: I’m exalted by what you say, that the memory of our correspondence exalts you.
From: Cristina Morales
Barcelona, August 12, 2014
I’m at an antique-looking shoe store run by sisters who’ve extended their youth thanks to makeup, fashionable clothes, and light, progressive chitchat. I go for the cheapest shoes, some 18 euros. I’ve tried the right shoe on and ask the salesperson to bring me the other one. Bad luck, the other one is not there. She then shows me other models, very pretty, made of leather, very soft colors, but three times the price. I tell her I can’t pay for them, I’m sorry. While the salesperson was coming and going looking for the shoes, I noticed some shelves in the store which had, instead of shoes, books. They’re quite used and one of them has a library’s sticker on the spine, but they’re not all bad or outdated titles. There’s one that interests me: a novel by Anagrama with a cover that looks like Daniela Ástor y la caja blanca by Marta Sanz, where a black and white picture of a five-year-old Marta Sanz hugging her naked chest appears, although it’s really written by the poet Luna Miguel. In the inside cover I expect to see the Miguel picture I know, but instead there’s a girl who looks like a female Canadian logger with an incredibly innocent smile.
There’s another book on the shelf which interests me: the author is Daniel Saldaña along with someone else I can’t remember. And it’s not a book exactly, but something closer to a coupon booklet for tourists. The binding consists of one staple, and it doesn’t have a single letter, just drawings, illustrations of the country and jumping puppets. Since it’s small, I fold it a bit and stick in my pocket so that the sisters won’t find out. When they finally come back empty-handed, with no shoes that might interest me, I ask them if, after so much waiting and distress given I didn’t get the left shoe, they could give me the strange Luna Miguel book. They say all right. Somehow they realize that I had put the booklet by Saldaña and the other author in my pocket, and one of the sisters takes it out, wrinkled, but returns it to me as if nothing’s happened. So I leave the shoe store with no shoes but with two books.
Next thing I’m with you in DF, in an apartment which is not the one you have and I know but another one, a mix between my apartment in Barcelona and yours, with lots of light and windows. I just arrived, it’s spring, the weather’s really nice. And the library is closing, Daniel, and I have to return this computer they’ve lent me and stop halfway through my retelling of last night’s dream. I’ll continue as far as logistics allow, although I like sharing dreams with their protagonists on the day after dreaming them, and if possible the following morning. It sucks to rush.
From: Cristina Morales
Barcelona, August 12, quarter after nine at night
You and I in DF in an awesome apartment, all glass, pure soap opera luxury. I’ve come from Barcelona to see you and you have come pick me up and now we’re finally alone. I feel like coming has been worth it and feel how I did in my best days as a fanatic lover, when I was 20 and took airplanes and buses and put on costumes and spent the money I didn’t have just to fully enjoy myself and the feeling of freedom and being queen of the world and making the other person fully enjoy himself, but that in second place. We fucked in the middle of the living room around midday. So it’s an incredible fuck. It is, in fact, the same fuck I had with my husband on the night of this dream, that is yesterday, in the middle of my living room: both standing, with no other support than our legs or the support of the other person. In the dream you and I fucked like this but very lightly and silently and dispassionately, and almost fully dressed. As soon as we are done fucking, you get a call on your cell phone. I can hear the speaker’s voice: it’s your woman and you refer to her as Julia or Juliana. You tell her yes, I just arrived, I’m at your place, and when I hear this I exclaim Hi!, and greet her. “She says hi,” you tell Julia or Juliana.
Next thing, I’m with your woman in a fancy, over-the-top house. Julia(na) is Asian, with a flat face, like a Filipina. She has straight, very black hair, speaks to me very kindly and walks me through the rooms in the little mansion where the party’s taking place, and the whole time I’m certain she knows you and I are sleeping together. The house has a lot of furniture in a variety of styles, stairs where you don’t expect them and a certain silly disorder, like that of a loony housewife. The next room we enter is the living room of my house in Barcelona: two armchairs recycled from the trash, two chairs recycled from the trash, a low table recycled from the trash and the enormous postwar wooden piece of furniture which the owner left for us and is an authentic black hole. You then show up in your pajamas, but not like you’ve just woken up, but rather with the energy of a superhero. The pajamas are a pink bubblegum color with pastel print and you’re not physically yourself but my husband, but, I insist (the dream insists), it’s you. You come looking for me so that we get out of there, and Julia(na) clearly knows we have something going on, but she’s not opposed nor does she make a scene or anything, rather she resigns herself bureaucratically. You say hi nonchalantly, goodbye, we’re leaving, we’ll be back, everything ok?, yes, thanks for everything, chao, chao. End of the dream.
We’re now three Mas Traviesa letters to zero (or, maybe, when I go downtown to get wifi to send you this one, you will already have responded, and it’ll be three to one). I consider these three last ones publishable (distinguished from the previous ones because they have a letterhead with time and place), with those meta-epistolary mentions included, and I’m not opposed to the idea that this turns out to be an asymmetrical correspondence. So, it’s three to zero. Write as much as you like when you like, of course. But let it be known I miss you, that I see myself as a swordsman without an show room, a boxer without a rival, without even a sparring, a boxer training in front of the mirror.
I forgot to be surprised in my previous letters by the fact that my bra didn’t show up in your house. I can’t swear I didn’t leave it in the Xalapa Xalapa hotel (great creativity by the hotel management, great identification of the particular interests with those of the whole, brilliant exercise in marketing, brilliant liberal exercise), nor can I swear remembering having it in DF, while staying at your apartment, but when I opened my suitcase in Barcelona I could’ve sworn it and could visualize it on top of your drawers. That must have been my second supernatural phenomenon, with my underwear disappearing and my temporary residences during 2013.
This letter does not even mention literature.
Big hug,
Cristina.
PD: The computer’s clock tells me I’ve taken exactly one hour to write this. Am I slow or fast? Take into account I don’t reread or edit.
From: Daniel Saldaña
México DF. Wednesday, August 13. 00:26 am.
Three to one, it is. I’ll take that —provisional— score which you’ve chosen with healthy unanimity. But I’ll humbly try to tally up my point on my side of that imaginary blackboard which is adding up our correspondence. Additionally, according to the categories of my improvised value system, this letter is worth double because I’m writing in my pajamas, which is not nothing.
Today I talked with a guy who told me about his personal version of Shintoist animism. I never understood well what it was all about, really, but I projected the core of his conversation towards my own interests, and then I remembered a certain river in Chiapas, near Palenque, very rich in mineral salts (I’m falsifying the scientific explanation), which has a riverbed where things become sedimented and even petrified in a relatively short time period—relative compared to how long things take to become petrified, of course—. Anyway: that river had items of daily consumption, which had fallen inside perhaps five years ago, covered with a firm layer of moldy rock, and one could find Coca-Cola bottles or plastic straws turned into instantaneous fossils, and that slight deception by biology seems to me the metaphor of an aesthetic: to make the most trivial thing, pulled out from the contemporary world, seem old and even venerable. I don’t know why I’m talking about this.
Anyway. Your bra, I swear (wow, how solemn I become), did not show up in my house. Not in the aforementioned bone color nor in any other. But I accept it might be my fault: lately, lots of things I’d thought to have shown up don’t show up at all in my home, and the regime of losses has become ridiculous. I’m losing things that up to two seconds ago were part of my field of vision. Like an idiot. In an attempt to remedy it I’ve bought boxes, even little boxes, as if separating the things in compartments were enough to hold on to them.
Changing the subject: I’m leaving soon to the country, Cristina, and this terrorizes me. Must I give in to my bucolic drive? Write about the sounds little frogs make? Little fucking FROGS?
I’ll leave it here tonight. But please accept this letter, even if it’s insufficient following the three you scored against me.
Kiss,
D.
From: Daniel
Wednesday, August 13, 2014. 6:35 am
Cristina:
I’m back in action after almost six hours of sleep and now without the blood-alcohol level that dictated the first letter to me (white tequila, four shots during dinner). These, besides, are my writing hours, the only part of the day where I get to sit down with somewhat of a discipline, somewhat sleepy, to work one or two hours straight without falling into the temptation of watching porn or going into social networks (which is the same thing).
I like your dream. I like Julia(na), my flat-faced Filipino woman. Lately I’ve been coming up a lot as a fictional character, Cristina, and not only in my own writing. This makes me a bit nervous, but it amuses me. A Portuguese friend, Joao Tordo, published a novel whose protagonist is some Saldaña París, Mexican writer living in Galicia and previously married to some Teresa. And then a friend asks me if she can use me in a story and I tell her only if I’m a pirate. And now your dream, which is not exactly fiction because dreams happen and are not modifiable, but anyway.
My aches and pains are back with renewed vigor. Now my hands —I don’t know if I told you about this in a previous email, a pre-Traviesa one— swell up mysteriously during the night and I wake up with very restricted movement and a terrible fucking pain. Today, in fact, I have to go to the doctor and see what the hell is going on. In the meantime, one of the pain’s effects is that I can’t point at things. I’ve been not pointing for several days now, not pointing with my index finger. A kind of laughable thing. Taking this into account, I decided I had to do some kind of physical activity and —oh, shit— got into yoga classes. I’m not used to doing anything at which I feel so clumsy (except having relationships with partners), but I must accept with some embarrassment that I’m having fun and that yoga has granted me a kind of respite from my neurosis.
I envy your ability to remember dreams so precisely. Just yesterday I was telling someone I’m sick of sleeping, in general, because I never remember anything of what goes on during those six hours. When I went to the psychoanalyst I remembered my dreams a bit more, but when I went to the psychoanalyst my dreams were terrible. My psychoanalyst was a sadist (her only virtue) who would lead me out fifteen minutes into the session and charge me a fortune. I understand that in Spain you don’t have as many Lacanians, right, Cristina? I might emigrate. Seems like a good enough reason.
7:12 in the morning. You wrote your letter in one hour, you tell me. A healthy slowness. Yesterday, besides being kind of drunk, I wrote too hurriedly, but it was burning me to have three of your letters back to back in my inbox, unanswered, and falling behind in this exchange that was starting to look like your monologue. Although it wouldn’t have been bad at all to only send Traviesa your letters, following a month of silence on my part.
Tell me how your fictionalized Teresa de Jesús is working out. I’m interested in that project. And I like the fact that it’s commissioned. I would like, I think, to write a commissioned novel, with an assigned subject or character; perhaps it’d be easier like that (is it?).
Hug,
Daniel.
From: Cristina
August 27th, 2014, Barcelona
Dearest Daniel:
What has the doctor said about your pains? As soon as I read your message two weeks ago I wanted to ask you. I read your letter on my cellphone during a showing in an outdoor cinema. The Chilean movie they were showing (I am from Chile) was, not horrible, but whatever comes next, and I got to read your letter twice or three times (the first reading is always extremely fast, a tentative reading from which I only get sensations, guesses about your mood and your perception of my previous letter) and smoke joints and drink a bottle of wine. But the little high didn’t allow me to write well, and even less so on my cell phone’s small screen. I hope the doctor prescribed the good kind of chemicals. One must learn to combine chemistry and yoga. Your body will undoubtedly appreciate some stretching and torsions. I can’t live without dancing. I’ve done contemporary dance (can “doing dance” be taken as a synonym of “dancing”?) for several years, without ever going beyond an intermediate level. Otherwise, these hours and hours and hours and hours that I spend sitting down, reading and writing, would have me crippled by now. I also bike everywhere, because riding the subway without paying makes me very nervous: the people of the metropolitan transportation company (the same people who demolished the okupa Can Vies house in my neighborhood) have managed to instill in me the fear for the ticket inspector and the hundred-euro fine. For some weeks now I’ve been in this struggle: to ride the subway without paying (that’s the easy part) and without being afraid (that’s the hard part), because the good beaches are far and you must take the train or die cycling under the August Mediterranean sun.
I never did yoga nor had to deal with Lacanian lackeys, not sure how many of them are in Spain. Oh, I remember how I wanted to start my letter on the night of the outdoor cinema: How is it that you want to live in Spain? Don’t the news of 27% unemployment rate, the disappearance of labor rights and scholarships, the waiting lists at hospitals, the direct and indirect tax hikes, the liberalization of the basic goods market, and—what concerns us professionally—the decrepitude of the publishing world, reach Mexico? Of course, this last aspect does not interest a media which, among other things, belongs to the publishing emporiums. Come live in Spain, yes, but if you don’t have to work to live. In that case, perfect, because this is a country of waiters whose only vocation is to carry a tray overflowing with overflowing glasses of beer, mmmm, how good they are at noon on a terrace with a view of the sea or of the plasma screen where a Barça game is showing. Without disregarding this shit, I tell you: if you came to live in Barcelona, I’d be ecstatic, would show you everything, instill my hatred of the subway and tourists in you, would take you to the parties at the okupa houses, we’d go skinny dipping at the beach, sneak into all the receptions organized by publishing houses (only times when I can drink alcohol, since drinks are so expensive at bars—7, 10, 15, 18 euros for a Barcelona gin and tonic), and steal books from malls. I don’t have it in me to steal them from anywhere else.
The publishing world is decrepit and I can’t complain, because right now I have a commission, but I want to complain, but not in this Mas Traviesa letter, which might be published. Once again, the fear. How many times has the fear shown up in this letter. You ask me about my Teresa de Jesús, whether having an assigned subject and character make the writing easier. Not one bit. I’d written little things on commission, that is, stories, but with flexible requirements: minimum and maximum length, a due date and a subject of my choice. But in this case I’ve even been told it has to have a particular tone, a first-person voice of a specific age, certain main events, explanatory clarity and, of course, though provisional, a specific title. I almost didn’t accept the commission given how constrained I felt. I even shed some tears and had an existential debate, even had small conclaves with fellow writers, took lonely walks. But then, in the utmost Teresian style, I made up my own mind: I broke down the commission’s barriers and used them to make a barricade from which I now shoot. Now I’m happy, I’ve almost finished the novel, which I’ve written with a lot of emotion. Satisfied with the work. It’ll be quite another thing to hear what the publishing house says when they read it. That will be another stage. If there’s something they don’t like, how far am I willing to go in order to make changes or admit them? They call it editing and, once again, I fear it.
I hope your hand is better, Daniel. I wish it from the bottom of my heart. Because, of course, with the hand in pain, can you write?
Kiss, kiss
Cristina
PD: Perhaps you’re not interested one bit, but I feel like sending you this portrait of two of the characters from my Teresa de Jesús: Antonio Ares Pardo and Luisa de la Cerda. I find this painting, of unknown provenance, hypnotic.
From: Daniel
September 23, 2014
Dear Cristina:
I like the extremely slow rhythm of our correspondence (which, I suspect, has begun to worry our friends at Traviesa, who write to ask what’s going on). It’s not that I like it because it emulates the unhurried rhythm of postal letters, a kind of nostalgia I’m not interested in, but because between one mail and the next many things happen, and it’s therefore easier to avoid the useless trifles and focus on things that matter, which are the recurrent ones ringing inside of us, such as the fears you list in your previous letter.
Now I’m out in the country, north of New York, submerged in a bucolic lifestyle, more or less. I spend the day counting deer and swearing at them from a distance, because insulting nature from the comfort of a dwelling has always seemed to me an amusing activity.
I’m here to write, supposedly, but the truth is that I write less and less, I read more and spend more time wondering whether I really want to start writing a novel right now. Plus, I find a slight pleasure in not taking advantage of this residence which some gringo millionaire is sponsoring; the naïve trust these people place in Efficacy as a guiding concept for everything they do turns this into too tempting an invitation to be lazy. If I wrote pages I’d be fulfilling my duty, and I’d end up by despising the written pages a little bit, since I’d consider them a product of progress.
But in truth I’m bragging of an ideology I don’t really ascribe to. I’ve written a few pages, making sure that at least they’re not about anything.
My hand got better with a healthy shot of cortisone, and though I’ve had occasional pains in the joints, I’m starting to get used to the idea that the condition has its origin in my neurosis and the best thing to do is take two Ibuprofens and a tranquilizer halfway through the afternoon, sleep eight straight hours and wake up in a gentler fashion, as if straightened out by the artificial sleep. Perhaps this resignation has to do with the fact that, since our last email exchange, I’ve turned 30. (Or it has nothing to do with that, really, and I only take advantage of this paragraph to communicate my shock at this piece of news; I am superstitious about round numbers, like all simple souls, and now I walk through the fields with the solemn face of someone who’s “going through something”.)
To experience the fears you mention in such a clear manner makes me think you’re a brave woman. At least I’ve formed that idea about you, maybe because of the self-confidence that comes through in your writing, and because you steal books. I used to steal books, in Madrid, but I got over it (or maybe I just started making a bit more money, who knows) and now it’s more common that I buy them, borrow them, or steal them from my job, which is almost something legitimate.
I don’t think I’ll go live in Spain, really. Or maybe in a long time. It’s just a craving that gets a hold of me every once in a while, but disappears as soon as I consider the matter rationally. The Spain I’d like to go back to, they tell me, no longer exists, so it doesn’t make much sense to go all the way there to have a terrible time if I can do the same anywhere else. Except maybe in these fields plagued by deer, in this residence where they feed me three times a day and where I can lock myself in my room to masturbate and be happily unproductive for several hours a day.
I would like to, however, get to see your Barcelona, although I can’t promise I’ll sneak into the subway without paying (I believe my fears paralyze me a bit more than yours do you).
I already want to read the result of the novel you’ve been assigned to write. I can’t tell very well where it’s going. But I want to read the version that precedes the aforementioned editing, which I hope won’t turn out to be too wild.
Country kisses,
Daniel.
PS. Actually, today I don’t feel like speaking of the craft one bit, if such a thing exists, so forgive me if this letter is insubstantial or boring.
From: Cristina
Barcelona, September 27, 2014
Daniel:
I reply to your last letter without having it in front of me. I read it in a library computer, and since that computer had OpenOffice instead of Word, when I saved it on a USB drive and tried to open it at home, more calmly, my own computer didn’t recognize that ODT file, and Word just flashed blue and told me it didn’t know what the hell I was feeding it. It’s probably that my Word is quite old.
Since I don’t have internet and can’t read it again, and since it’s really nice to be wearing pajamas on a Saturday morning, I respond to what I recall: that you were in a writers’ residence in New York, not in the middle of skyscrapers but in the middle of the country (that New York has land that is not developed surprised me a bit), that you hated the deer’s silence, that you’ve been grabbing your balls, that you call me a brave woman, that you’d like to read my commissioned novel before a it’s subjected to a posterior (God forbid) remodeling by the person who commissioned it. That I might find your letter boring, you said too, and you made fun of Efficacy or Efficiency (I remember the capital “e”). And that you’re not really thinking about moving to Spain because the Spain you remember no longer exists, you’re told. That threw me off too: it sounds like something spoken by someone who was last in Spain twenty years ago. I guess the transition into decadence hasn’t been too jarring for me since I’ve seen it happen in front of my eyes (and this makes me suspirious—I don’t know how to use the verb suspire, I’ve adopted it recently after reading a novel by Alberto Olmos many times—, it makes me suspirious, I say, of whether any transition took place at all in the honorable Spanish Transition—the capital letter is from the books of History.
I close this tedious parenthesis outside of it: I wonder why Franco’s death was called the Spanish Transition and why what’s going on now is called a crisis, without any historical capital letters. It’s clear why that’s the case and we won’t stop for that in what is maybe the last letter in our Mas Traviesa correspondence, but I’ll say what I was getting at: the other day I read an interview of a Spanish poet of my age who said that our generation is harmless because it hasn’t suffered at all, everything has been handed to us. I had to recognize once again that not everyone who’s 28 and has two degrees is struggling to survive in Spain. And I got mad once again because someone who’s 28 and has two degrees was speaking in the plural form, as a spokesperson of all of us who are 28 and have two degrees would, daring to say what “we are” or what “we are not”, what “we have” and what “we don’t have”. I detest this, the desire to be a spokesperson, which hides a vocation for politics and leadership. It’s not worth getting into the meaning of the Spanish poet’s declaration: that we’re harmless. It’s not worth it, but let’s spend a line on it: harmless for whom? What does this poet who speaks for his generation think that harm means? What generation does he think was harmful, and harmful for what or against what? I take my hat off and even take my undies off: all good spokespersons must leave things half-said, unless things are stated clearly and directly and someone feels excluded, and the comfortable generalization is ripped apart. It’s easy to speak in the plural (the fantasy of what’s universal, universal subjects, universal literature, Miss Universe). The difficult thing is to speak from an utterly first person point of view: tell me, sir spokesperson of my generation, how much money do you and your family get to spend each month. Tell me if you get excited when Pablo Iglesias shows up on TV (the political leader in vogue in Spain). Tell me if you yell out the goals of the hopeless Spanish national team. I said we’d spend a line on it and I’ve already spent ten. I’ll be quiet now, I’m getting upset.
I was moved, I mentioned to you in a quick email, by the letter I now remember. I’m moved precisely by the radical individuality with which you face and judge your writing: your eye alone, with no magnifying glass. Your giving way, or not even that: your rejection of a logic of production, in this case literary. One of my friends asks why the hell it’s frowned upon that he stays home all day alone shooting heroin. Why does it have to be frowned upon, then, that Daniel Saldaña smokes through an entire artist’s residence looking at the deer. It has an aristocratic air to it, living off the interest (in your case, from what you’ve already written), but that of an unruly aristocrat: a Bakunin. A prodigal son, Saldaña. Do you like to think of yourself as a Cioran, never working, always living off his wife and off his scholarships? But oh, I’m afraid it’s a short-lived fantasy: as short as the support from the Yankee patron. It’s been quite some time since I’ve gotten an artist’s residence, but at some point I began using them as vacation, because in reality one spends the day working (writing, cooking, cleaning, translating), and now on top of everything one has to balance the books with Efficacy during some weeks of paid expenses. Of course, take it for granted that I’m wishing to receive a scholarship again, and god bless artist’s residences. I don’t dignify work, nor do I believe that work dignifies anything, pfff.
You also mentioned we must find an ending to our correspondence in order to send the letters to the magazine. That was my intention, to find an ending, but you see me now, I’m a spoiled novelist and just keep coming up with new discursive lines. You’re more brief, you’re a poet and have better aim. Close this correspondence with a final letter, Daniel, if you’re up for it. And if you’re not up for it, here’s a hug that will bring us close beyond these letters, and this right here’s the ending.
From: Daniel
September 30, 2014.
My dear:
I’m still in the place with the does, or the deer (I don’t know the difference; I can barely tell them apart from the moose). I’m still not doing much, just grabbing my balls, as you say, literally and figuratively.
Sometimes, when you get to repeat it, what I write sounds ridiculous; my dramatics are magnified when I read it in others. What I mentioned about wanting to go to a Spain that no longer exists: I meant, with too big a set of words, that when I lived there the crisis hadn’t set in yet, or at least wasn’t official. And, at another level, I thought as I said it that the people who were there when I was there are no longer there, they’ve left to other countries (and I’m a bit lazy when it comes to making new friends; you were an unusual exception to my reticence with regard to what’s new, in fact. It’s been a year since that: we were in the Hay Festival of Xalapa around these days, right?).
I’m also annoyed quite a lot by that spokesperson vocation you talk about, and I see it everywhere lately. The need of some writers to mark the diameter of the discussion that should be had, in order to say that everything outside that does not matter. And the pedagogical drive in others, damn. I recently saw a Mexican author on Twitter list the four recently published books of Mexican narrative which “we should all be discussing”. Why doesn’t he discuss them and leave us alone, free from his damn prescriptive need!
We had a kind of meeting with the gringo millionaire who sponsors the residence, and the situation, as expected, brought out the punk in me a bit. A handful of snobs discussing literature in commercial terms: how much this author sells and sold, how much did this other one get as an advance. Wall Street investors in the editing business. After dinner, once he had basically told us that the countries the invited residents come from are a piece of shit, the millionaire said that his son is in jail and is mentally ill. Wow. I had been about to ask him for work, picking apples in one of his farms, when he goes ahead and destroys my American dream.
You trust me too much if you think I’ll close off this correspondence in a strong manner, my dear. These days, I again have a strange mistrust of my own writing. I reread myself and everything seems tedious and forced. Oh well, I guess there’s streaks.
I began reading your Santa Teresa biography. I’ll go into it in another letter, so as to not give too much to the readers before the book is published. For now I’ll only say that I’m excited about reading you behind that other voice, kind of hiding but showing up every once in a while with statements which fit you perfectly, which make me recognize you.
I had a weird dream last night, Cristina, one where you showed up, and that’s why I woke up and started writing these final lines instead of gulping down coffee in front of the deer or doing yoga on the room’s carpet. We were in a country in Eastern Europe, I think, precisely in a residence for writers where we’d coincided. It was a house of very thick, cold walls, of raw cement, and we were there alone, in pajamas, at night. We met in the kitchen and stayed there talking, but suddenly there was an earthquake and we had to rush out to a patio in front of the house. The earthquake quickly degenerated into a social uprising with looting and malevolently gratuitous crimes (this might’ve been caused by a book by Jelinek I was reading before falling asleep). You kept telling me to walk the streets and record the chaos going on, to which I replied I never left my house in pajamas, and the end of the world wouldn’t be the exception. In the end we said goodbye on the patio in front of the residence, and you left towards the uprising while I returned to the house with the cold walls, convinced that my slippers weren’t thick enough to spend too much time outdoors.
And that’s it. I won’t write any more.
Yours,
Daniel.
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