Place: Wilmer Urrelo Zárate
We asked Wilmer to write about an especially intriguing place he'd visited. He sent us this brief text on the booksellers found in La Paz, a city he admits to hate.
I’ve said it many times and I don’t regret it: I hate the city of La Paz, otherwise known as La Maldita. I hate this ugly, cold city that’s fucked by elevation (“playing at this elevation is inhumane” a soccer player said once, and how right he was).
A city full of people evil by nature and envious by choice.
But, it’s not all bad inside the bad. If there’s something in La Maldita that’s a central part of my life (and as a result is something I love) it’s the people dedicated to the sale of used books, named, pompously, the Asociación de Libreros Mariscal de Santa Cruz.
When I was young, which is to say many years ago now, after school I would go directly to the place where they gathered: in those days they were over on Montes Avenue and there I found a good portion of the books that made me decide literature was the thing for me. I found, for example, the first, and until now the only, edition of Días de papel, by Edmundo Paz Soldán. I bought almost all of Dostoyevsky, novels by Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, books by Jack London, and even (shoot me!) Marx’s complete works. After a few years, La Maldita got hungry, or something like that, and began to chase them off: the booksellers, scared, escaped to a little street (now gone), just behind some ladies selling flowers. This writer was older in those years and there I got to know some great books and others less so. Among those I remember fondly are Vicente Leñero and the unparalleled Los abañiles, Antonio Muñoz Molina and the mammoth El jinete polaco, and the great Cheever and that novel that at first I didn’t like but that later, after reading his diaries, I understood completely: Falconer. There were many novels, many books. My library must have some 2000 volumes and I say this with pride: the majority of them, the ones I love, must have come from there.
After a time La Maldita, hungry and sluggish, drove them from there and managed to corral them on a dark pedestrian pathway full of pickpockets and La Pazean piss and shit, a pathway that can be found just behind La Casa de Cultura and there began their downfall. I would go everyday and the books, the “new releases,” as we called them, never came. What books did I buy in that fateful era? Better not to remember. Or better to. Sometimes, without meaning to, new books from the bookstore even arrive there. There I bought, for example, Casi nada, by the great Daniel Sada.
Thanks to them, to my friends the booksellers, I went back to being a book addict. An addict in the broadest sense of the term. Addicted to any book (minus self-help, of course). Addicted to appreciating the physical books themselves. Is there anything more beautiful than books from Santiago Rueda Publishers? Anything more moving than the editions destined for the collection that published Réquiem por un campesino español by the more or less unjustly forgotten Ramón J. Sender?
Finally La Maldita managed to trap them. Made them change locations again thanks to the middle-class politics of the warden who is mayor of this city: they were put in a dark gloomy market… yes, a well-written metaphor: La Maldita swallowed them up! They are there, my friends, prisoners inside cold and damp walls.
In these new circumstances, the books appear to come back, but it’s not like before. Something, the gastric juices of La Maldita, has killed them.
Will that be their final destiny?
Other entries:
[Pilar Quintana]
[Mercedes Cebrián]
[Ronaldo Menéndez]
I’ve said it many times and I don’t regret it: I hate the city of La Paz, otherwise known as La Maldita. I hate this ugly, cold city that’s fucked by elevation (“playing at this elevation is inhumane” a soccer player said once, and how right he was).
A city full of people evil by nature and envious by choice.
But, it’s not all bad inside the bad. If there’s something in La Maldita that’s a central part of my life (and as a result is something I love) it’s the people dedicated to the sale of used books, named, pompously, the Asociación de Libreros Mariscal de Santa Cruz.
When I was young, which is to say many years ago now, after school I would go directly to the place where they gathered: in those days they were over on Montes Avenue and there I found a good portion of the books that made me decide literature was the thing for me. I found, for example, the first, and until now the only, edition of Días de papel, by Edmundo Paz Soldán. I bought almost all of Dostoyevsky, novels by Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, books by Jack London, and even (shoot me!) Marx’s complete works. After a few years, La Maldita got hungry, or something like that, and began to chase them off: the booksellers, scared, escaped to a little street (now gone), just behind some ladies selling flowers. This writer was older in those years and there I got to know some great books and others less so. Among those I remember fondly are Vicente Leñero and the unparalleled Los abañiles, Antonio Muñoz Molina and the mammoth El jinete polaco, and the great Cheever and that novel that at first I didn’t like but that later, after reading his diaries, I understood completely: Falconer. There were many novels, many books. My library must have some 2000 volumes and I say this with pride: the majority of them, the ones I love, must have come from there.
After a time La Maldita, hungry and sluggish, drove them from there and managed to corral them on a dark pedestrian pathway full of pickpockets and La Pazean piss and shit, a pathway that can be found just behind La Casa de Cultura and there began their downfall. I would go everyday and the books, the “new releases,” as we called them, never came. What books did I buy in that fateful era? Better not to remember. Or better to. Sometimes, without meaning to, new books from the bookstore even arrive there. There I bought, for example, Casi nada, by the great Daniel Sada.
Thanks to them, to my friends the booksellers, I went back to being a book addict. An addict in the broadest sense of the term. Addicted to any book (minus self-help, of course). Addicted to appreciating the physical books themselves. Is there anything more beautiful than books from Santiago Rueda Publishers? Anything more moving than the editions destined for the collection that published Réquiem por un campesino español by the more or less unjustly forgotten Ramón J. Sender?
Finally La Maldita managed to trap them. Made them change locations again thanks to the middle-class politics of the warden who is mayor of this city: they were put in a dark gloomy market… yes, a well-written metaphor: La Maldita swallowed them up! They are there, my friends, prisoners inside cold and damp walls.
In these new circumstances, the books appear to come back, but it’s not like before. Something, the gastric juices of La Maldita, has killed them.
Will that be their final destiny?
Other entries:
[Pilar Quintana]
[Mercedes Cebrián]
[Ronaldo Menéndez]
