Thinking of Joe Brainard's "I remember" [whose model was followed by Georges Perec and so many others], we asked Spanish writer Sergio del Molino to share with us some of his memories. This is what he sent us.



I remember Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente caressing a wolf as he looked at the camera. A chiropractic caress which the wolf must have felt on the inside of his backbone.

I remember my father watching Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente caressing a wolf on television, holding on to the arm of the sofa as if it were the neck of a wolf which wasn’t there. My wolfless father, envying Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente and his parka and his wolf and his smell of warm embers and his Castilian voice. Much more of a father than he’d ever be. Much more of a man. Much more.

I remember my first patch of psoriasis.

I remember the first time I was satiated. There was food and I didn’t want to keep on eating. I felt extremely full, like vomiting, and also felt the desire to have those dishes taken away from my sight, and the awareness that that’s what being an adult was: having food on the table and not wanting to eat it.

I remember being the Madrileño in Valencia.

I remember the fingers missing from the right hand of the kid who would fill our boxes with firecrackers every morning during the Fallas parades. The little finger, the phalanx of the index finger, and half of the ring finger. With his amputated hand, he’d fill boxes with firecrackers that us kids would blow up with five-fingered hands.

I remember a wall with white tiles and a red wooden door and my mother talking with my godmother and two beers and a please behave son and one of those sad rains which slowly fall on Madrid when they do fall.

I remember my hand shaking the hand of Angus Young.

I remember my mother crying for four hundred kilometers and my father never once taking his eyes off the road.

I remember being the Valenciano in Zaragoza.

I remember knowing that Horacio Oliveira was a huge son of a bitch from page ten.

I remember she said she had a boyfriend, and still then, we fucked again that night, and she then asked me why I had fucked her after knowing she had a boyfriend, and I didn’t answer because I knew there wouldn’t be a third time.

I remember that the brochures I gave out that morning said that addiction to gambling was an illness which deserved recognition.

I remember that my anachronism was much more understandable and recent than hers. Or so she thought.
I remember the morning when my younger son surpassed the age of my older son.

I remember the third floor of the Children’s Hospital. Room: all of them.

I remember being the Zaragozano in Madrid.

I remember Flanders and Fabiola, a sunny morning, drinking martinis and watching the grass in utter amazement, and hearing my own laughter after leaving the cemetery with rolled-up sleeves, feeling like I’d been hugged by an entire city.

I remember a room in a Sultanahmet hotel. In the floor upstairs they were having sex, making a lot of noise, and my wife cried quietly next to me, as I shook the sheets off and lay naked in bed.



Other entries:
Hernán Ronsino
Ezio Neyra
Carolina Sanín
Andrés Felipe Solano
Carmen Boullosa
Sebastián Antezana
Martín Kohan
Sergio Chejfec
Margo Glantz