Spirit
TELL ME YOU LOVE ME EVEN IF YOU’RE LYING BY MONTSERRAT ROIG
Art by Tony Brinkley
Translator’s Note
When I travel in Catalunya and tell people I’m working on a Montserrat Roig translation, pretty much every person I encounter is familiar with her writing and excited for it to reach a wider audience. Her body of work is extremely varied and extensive—from post-war novels to short journalistic pieces to an investigation into the lives of Catalans in Nazi camps during the Second World War—and we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of it in English. In deciding which of her books to translate, I settled on Digues que m’estimes encara que sigui mentida because it speaks so eloquently to her development as a writer, reckoning with the many turns her life and work took as she got older, traveled widely, and started putting her early life as a kid growing up secluded in her middle-class Barcelona neighborhood into context.
Montserrat Roig is one of titans of 20th century Catalan literature, and she dedicated her career to advocating for Catalan as both a literary language and method of everyday communication—she wrote extensively about linguistic repression, specifically how staunch monolingualism informs anti-immigrant policy in Spain. She was also a reporter and frequently wrote columns on feminism and shifting familial and gender norms in her native Catalunya.
Digues que m’estimes encara que sigui mentida, the last book she published before her death, revolves around the question of what it means to be a writer, refusing to be satisfied by platitudes or easy answers. Just when you think Roig has reached a satisfying conclusion, she subverts it and digs deeper, focusing on her development as a writer, as a woman, and as an activist working under the long shadow of Franco’s dictatorship.
Digues que… examines how she came to be a writer and what her writing process looks like on the page; specifically, she walks the reader through how she conceives of reality vs. memory and historical vs. individual truth. While Digues que… was a timely collection about 20th century Catalunya, its themes resonate much more broadly. The way Roig grapples with her intersecting identities to find her confidence and voice is a universal story, and her attempt to reckon with the effects of fascism and authoritarianism after a period of extreme repression transcends its Catalan context. She does an incredible job using the slipperiness of memoir to approach themes of historical memory in novel ways, a necessity given she wrote during a time when frank political discussions were discouraged, before truth and reconciliation commissions were proposed as a way for Spain to reckon with its past. In translating these essays, I try to maintain the ambiguity in her prose, resisting the urge to flatten her meaning by reaching for easy conclusions or tamping down the digressive way her mind works, because I think for this collection form truly follows function—the open-ended, ambiguous way she circles around these complicated topics allows the reader to reflect on her own positionality, her own relationship to language and culture, memory and childhood. That’s the beauty of Montserrat Roig.
Eva Dunsky
Tell Me You Love Me Even if You’re Lying
Translated from Catalan by Eva Dunsky
Unless otherwise noted, all foreign-language quotations in this text have been translated by Eva Dunsky.
In reaching for reason and sense,
literature should be capable of
enchantment and deception; it should
have a certain “pathos”
Enrique Lynch, La lección de Sheherezade
Some call me a storyteller because I lie. Or a liar because I tell stories. It’s not that I make them up, but I exaggerate. If I say an old woman is 350 years old, everyone knows I’m exaggerating, but they like to imagine the 80 year old has been alive for 350 years.
There’s a story about an old woman so thin she’d get lost in her bed. She never stopped talking, mostly stories from when she was young, and they gave her pieces of candy to shut her up. She made animal noises at night. A wolf’s howl at four in the morning. A rooster’s crow at six. There were nights she became each animal of the forest. This old woman exists. The person who told me her story didn’t realize she had literature on her hands. She told stories but didn’t consider herself a storyteller; other people had accused her of exaggerating. Depending on how she wrote the story, and whether or not she published it, she might’ve been accused of making it up.
Thousands of stories disappear each day, like dying August leaves that can’t hold out for fall; thousands of slightly exaggerated stories you won’t find in schools or textbooks. Had they not been exaggerated, they wouldn’t be believed. People will keep telling stories, if only when regaling a neighbor with what happened on T.V. that day. If they can’t think of life as a story, they won’t be able to withstand it, and it takes a slight lie to imagine we’re chasing a bit of truth. Allegedly smart people, those who see life as “the real thing,” don’t accept this convention. They’ve invented a notion of what’s real and don’t believe in reading novels; they complain about having to wait for the last page to discover how the story ends. An engineer said as much to me: “It’s so annoying reading novels when on the last page they explain everything!”
But here’s the thing: the last page explains nothing if you haven’t been weaving the plot alongside the author. In Scheherazade’s Lesson, Enrique Lynch cites Plutarch (in Frank Cole Babbitt’s translation): “For he who deceives is more honest, because he has done what he promised to do, and he who is deceived is wiser, because the mind which is not insensible to fine perceptions is easily enthralled by the delights of language.” We feel intense pleasure when we lie. When we lie credibly, when we truly seduce someone, it’s possible they know we’re lying and demand we keep on with the lie.
Tell me you love me, even if you’re lying.
Johnny Guitar asked this of Joan Crawford, and she told him she loved him, even though she was lying. But there was truth in that lie. Lying, or rather literature, is a drug. We go a bit crazy if we don’t get our fix.
An internationally renowned literary critic who’s like a father to me once said: “Montserrat, I’m afraid you’ll never be a great writer. You don’t do drugs, you don’t drink, and you’re not even a lesbian.”
He then listed several compelling reasons why I’d never make it. Under the critic’s paternal tutelage, I got lost in a stack of great writers’ biographies and autobiographies—they were all drug addicts, homosexuals, or had died with livers perforated like watering cans. But I secretly read other biographies as well, and I found people who wrote beautifully but lived more or less decent lives: good mothers and fathers who paid their bills on time.
For several days I couldn’t sleep: my life was banal, nothing mysterious about it. I love to drink, especially good wine and cava, but if I drink too much I’ll regret it the next morning. I often regret my decisions. When it comes to drugs, I only tried hash because an architect I was in love with had promised me paradise. He assured me I'd experience celestial harmonies, soaring Gregorian chants, shades beyond the rainbow…which is to say the entire obscured universe would be revealed to me in sound and color. I smoked his joint with the appropriate reverence, all too accustomed to heeding male advice. I closed my eyes and got ready to give myself over. To chill out, as they say in North American movies…but I didn’t feel or see anything, certainly not colors beyond the rainbow.
In time I discovered the need for a unique frame of mind: one must learn to see, touch, smell, and hear as brand new what at first seems old and worn out. To regain this capacity for childlike wonder requires a certain mental gymnastics. Walter Benjamin once said that “thought is a powerful narcotic…” The drug enhances terror and restlessness; it’s nothing more than a miserable miracle, as Henri Michaux wrote. I’ve snorted coke a few times, and according to friends, once devised a new theory about Don Quijote—they must’ve been lying, as these days it’s impossible to say anything new about Don Quijote—but I don’t recall the experience at all. What was the point of such lucidity if afterwards I couldn’t remember?
So I failed at two of the requirements for good writing that the critic had laid out. In terms of the third…there’s simply too much literature in the third. These days, women have discovered the solidarity of friendship, complicity, a secret finally shared. We commune in raised voices, having vowed to stop whispering. And we’ve confused friendship with love. Love is too cruel to contain the tenderness of friendship. “With love, the more distant the more beautiful,” said Mercè Rodoreda in El parc de les magnòlies. Like magnolias, love is beautiful on the branch, but once snipped it’ll wither in the time it takes to blow out a match. The critic reached me too late: I love (some) women too much to fall in love with them. According to the criteria of my beloved critic, I’d be a disaster as a writer.
The Spanish novelist Juan Benet once told me, imitating his beloved Faulkner, that to write well one must kill their mother, burn down their house, or rape their sister—at least that’s how he saw it. It was always something else: not only did I have to get high or drunk each night with the goal of irreversible liver damage, either that or go to bed with my unsuspecting neighbor, but I’d have to forge ahead without a home or mother. or assault one of my five sisters. (Like Faulkner, Juan Benet didn’t consider that there are also female writers. And what should they do, rape their brothers?) In other words, to be a good writer who composes “the unattainably well-written page,” an unforgettable set of phrases, one must lead a difficult and exhausting life. With so much work ahead, who could find time to write?
When I was barely out of my teens, I spent a few happy years interviewing a group of well-known authors writing not only in my language but in Spanish as well. Naively, I asked why they wrote. The majority looked at me dismissively and changed the subject. With good reason. This question unsettles the wise and satisfies the pedants. That’s the honest truth, and I didn’t realize it until people started asking me the same thing. It’s an obscene question that requires obscene answers. In any case, the younger and less experienced writers offered the following theory: “the writer is a person who suffers so deeply they have no choice but to write.” So it wasn’t work, or love, or pleasure. It was a terrible punishment. These writers invariably suffered: they bore pain, and God made them atone for it through literature. Only they saw how the world had gone insane. Only they remained aware at every moment of our crushing mortality. They were this awareness; they monopolized it and forgot about those readers impressed by the delights of language.
Over the years, I learned no one can explain why they write. We can’t even come up with theories. To write is to keep going. It’s a fallacy to think crazy people are geniuses just because they’re crazy, that they’re the only ones affected by the moon’s fluctuations. Only those who aren’t mad themselves would praise insanity; they’ve read about it in books and confuse imaginary acts of insanity with pain. Pirandello wrote a story about a poor farmer who succumbed to his moonsickness. Others dismissed him: they didn’t understand how the full moon, unrelenting and imperious, had tortured him since childhood. Only one friend implored them to leave him alone: “Let him be. He’s suffering.”
These days, literary idealism manifests as a fascination with writers who went mad because they were geniuses, when really it’s the opposite: the genius understands their madness and knows how to control it. In Language and Pleasure, Jesús Tuson writes “the poet knows he’s a poet and can interpret his texts, tell us which sensations or desires made him take up the pen, show us what literary tools he used and even demonstrate that literature is nothing more than a game.”
Writers control their madness through the written word; they know they’re crazy and therefore they aren’t that crazy, or they’re only crazy because they still think they can write. We should take care to remember the suffering of Antonin Artaud bashing his head against the wall as the ghosts of depression closed in, or what Virginia Woolf describes in her diary, how terrifying it was to realize her schizophrenia symptoms had returned. Gérard de Nerval hanged himself in a dark alley in Paris because he thought dying would alleviate his despair. Then came the starry-eyed Nervalists, the bourgeois who curled up on their couches and reveled in the idea of death because they feared life. The poet is a person who dreams, and the madman never remembers his dreams.
Mario Vargas Llosa, encouraged by the Flaubertian theory of writing, coined the following phrase: “Writers are like vultures that feed on the social carrion of human suffering.” If that’s true, then the world is full of gossips who neglect that they’re writers. But the Peruvian’s phrase, which could no doubt be put more simply, made me think. Could it be that writers can’t stand being happy—and even less the happiness of others—because this material is difficult to make into literature? Is it true we tend to see the “big themes” of literature as unhappiness, death, and the passage of time—ah, the hierarchy!— whereas happiness, fleeting but no less luminous, we leave for the best-selling romance novels and TV movies?
Patrícia Miralpeix would say happiness is like a transition whose cause we can’t pinpoint once it’s passed. We remember how we feel in pain’s absence, but not what we feel. It’s unhappiness—the passage of time; the idea of death—that pushes us to write. It’s true that writers are a bit like vultures. We contemplate human suffering and turn it into story. One day, Flaubert woke up quite pleased: he needed to describe a funeral and felt lucky that his friend, a doctor named Pouchet, had just lost his mom. He writes to Louise Colet: “Comme il faut du reste profiter de tout (emphasis Flaubert’s) je suis sûr que ce sera demain d'un dramatique très sombre et que ce pauvre savant sera lamentable. Je trouverai là peut-etre des choses pour ma Bovary.” On the one hand, he felt sorry for his wise friend and felt the pain of his mother’s death. But on the other hand, he was a writer devouring the carrion of other people’s emotion. You make use of everything in literature.
Conscious of the finite, you try to trap time. Behold the pleasure and punishment of writing. When constructing the plot, I pretend time extends forever, although I know it doesn’t. I dream I possess words, and through them, the whole world.
I kept searching for different ways writers had described their task. Graham Greene, for example, is convinced writing is therapy: “Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, panic and fear which is inherent in the human situation.”
One night over dinner, I mentioned this quote to Jorge Ibargüengoitia, the Mexican writer who wasn’t afraid of airplanes and died in a plane crash near Madrid, at Cerro de los Ángeles, while en route to Colombia. Ibargüengoitia was convinced there are people who don’t write because they can turn their real lives into art—we shouldn’t ask why they don’t write, make music, or paint to escape the madness, melancholia, panic and fear inherent in the human situation. They’re the artist’s audience and they don’t care whether she writes as therapy or not.
It’s therapy, no doubt about it. At the start. But then why do we keep going?
Writing is a privilege, and it can be difficult to forgive one for indulging. Those ubiquitous Gothic cathedrals—which reach God thanks to darkness, to the sad sentiment of life as agony rather than the joy of not dying—unsettle the concept of pleasure. Because as you write, it seems like you’re punishing yourself. You fight against words so they don’t feel like stones, like gnawing on hard pieces of stale bread; you let yourself go, short of breath, imagining you’re soaked in sweat and panting like a dog. You know you won’t ever cross the finish line, you have no faith in your talent, you don’t want aimless flattery, you would kill yourself if confronted with a bad review…you’d get drunk on pleasure, snort a line of good cocaine, invite your neighbor over for dinner and seduce her. You’ve read that you live again through literature but suspect this is nothing more than empty consolation; you realize that wanting to live is what makes life slip through your fingers. You discover that we can’t grasp time in all its purity, and then all at once, the promise of capturing time in all its purity has you trapped. You know the logic of quotidian life is a deception, but it’s all we have to invent the dream. So you come back to it. You keep writing and fighting the words, so they don’t seem like stones, so they don’t feel like…
With each passing year, you toss these stones in the well instead of making words fly. We can’t move the stars to pity, as the master Flaubert would say. But we keep repeating that the task of a writer is no harder than that of a doctor, a real doctor who loses sleep over incomprehensible diagnoses. Falsely humble writers proclaim scientists are the intuitive ones, those who singed off their eyebrows to make sense of life’s great enigmas. A writers’ pain is no more aesthetic for being expressed through metaphor. Gothic cathedrals can be dark, uterine, impotent. But there is also light in this kind of architecture, filtered through towering stained-glass windows, weaving between the columns of the mosques. Darkness pursues light and light seeks darkness.
There’s really no need for a moral code as rigorous as senyor Stephen Vizinczey’s. When asked to enumerate “sensible and practical tips for those new to the occupation of writing,” the Hungarian set forth ten commandments, the first of which is this: “don’t drink, don’t smoke, and don’t do drugs.” I happen to agree—not for ethical reasons, but for efficiency’s sake. If you want to write well, you don’t have time to do anything else. But a drunk writer can be great, even if the era of drunk writers has already passed, just as a gay writer can be great—but we can’t forget about the many gay people who have never felt the need to write.
The only drug that doesn’t kill you (though it will harm you); the only alcoholic vapor that won’t erode your mind or damage your liver; the only love that won’t eventually disgust you; is good literature. Solitary pleasures, shared vices. The reader owns the words and defies finitude, they accept both sordidness and beauty as one, and most of all, they remember what came before. If anything is an act of love it’s memory, says Joseph Brodsky about Nadiedja Mandelstam, the widow of the Russian poet who was disappeared in a Stalinist camp.
It pays to remember, and to evoke, that no art is more temporary than literature. Remembering may hurt us but perhaps, at the end of a long and slow writing process, we’ll discover that there’s something or someone on the other side, some heart that still beats, still exists.
Digues que m’estimes encara que sigui mentida
By Montserrat Roig
El discurso, para servir a los propósitos del entendimiento
y tener sentido, debe ser capaz de engañar, de hechizar, debe ser en cierta manera “patético”
Enrique Lynch, La lección de Sherezada
Hi ha que em diu creadora perquè menteixo. Hi ha qui em diu mentidera perquè m’invento històries. Bé, no me les invento, les exagero. Si dic que una vella té tres-cents cinquanta anys, tothom sap que això és impossible, però, a la gent, li agrada d’imaginar-se que la vella que té vuitanta anys en fa tres-cents cinquanta que és viva.
Em van explicar la història d’una vella que era tan prima, tan prima, que es perdia dins el llit. La vella no parava d’enraonar, explicava històries de quan era petita i, perquè callés, li donaven caramels. A la nit, imitava els sons dels animals. A les quatre de la matinada, feia el llop. A les sis, feia de gallina. Hi havia nits en què era tots els animals del bosc. La vella existeix. La persona que m’ho narrava no sabia que feia literatura. Era una persona que creava i no es deia a ella mateixa creadora. Els altres l’acusaven d’exagerar. Segons com hagués escrit aquesta història—i l’hagués publicada—, li haurien dit que feia creació.
Hi ha milers de narracions que cada dia desapareixen—com aquestes fulles que moren a l’estiu sense esperar la tardor—, milers d’històries que es conten de manera una mica exagerada perquè, si no s’exageren, no resulten creïbles. Però mai no arribaran a les universitats i als llibres de text. Les persones continuen narrant, encara que sigui explicant a la veïna el telefilm que cada dia veuen a la televisió. Si no contemplessin la vida com a representació, no ho resistirien. Cal una mica de mentida per imaginar-nose que perseguim una mica de veritat. Els cervells que no accepten aquesta convenció, creuen que la vida és “real.” S’han inventat la noció del “real” i no suporten llegir novel.les. Et diuen que és una bestiesa, això d’haver d’esperar a la darrera pàgina per saber com acaba la història. Un enginyer m’ho va dir, això. Em va dir: “quina bestiesa, això de llegir novel.les…si a la darrera pàgina t’‘ho expliquen’ tot!”
Però és que a la darrera pàgina no t’expliquen res si abans no has teixit, amb l’autor/autora, la trama. A La lección de Sherezada, Enrique Lynch cita Plutar: “qui enganya és més just perquè fa allò que va prometre i qui és enganyat és més savi, car aquell qui té sensibilitat és fàcilment impressionat per la voluptuositat de les paraules.” Sentim un gran plaer quan mentim. Quan fem la mentida creïble, quan seduïm l’altre, que potser sap que mentim i que ens està demanant que continuem mentint.
“Digues que m’estimes encara que sigui mentida.”
Li va demanar Johnny Guitar a Joan Crawford. I ella li va contestar que l’estimava encara que fos mentida. Però, mentre mentia, li deia la veritat. La mentida, és a dir, la literatura, és una droga. I, si ens en falta, anem una mica penjats.
Una vegada, un crític literari que m’ha fet de pare i que coneixen fins i tot a l’estranger, em va dir: “Montserrat, em temo que mai no seràs una bona escriptora. No et drogues, no estàs alcoholitzada, i em sembla que no ets ni lesbiana.”
L’ home etzivaba raonaments brillants i em va fer pensar que no arribaria ni tan sols a ser una escriptora. Vaig perdre l’oremus tot escorcollant, sota el tutelatge paternal del crític, un munt de biografies i autobiografies de grans escriptors i grans escriptores. I tots eren drogaaddictes, homosexuals o havien mort amb el fetge fet una regadora. Però, clandestinament, vaig llegir altres biografies: i am vaig trobar amb gent que escrivia molt bé però que havien dut una existència d’allò més decent: excellents pares i mares de família. Fins i tot pagaven les factures amb puntualitat.
Durant uns dies vaig perdre el son: la meva vida era vulgar—no hi havia res de misteriós. M’agrada molt beure alcohol, sobretot vi del bo i cava, però si en faig un gra massa a l’endemà me’n penedeixo. Tendeixo sovint a penedir-me de tots els meus actes. Quant a la droga, no he passat de l’haixix i més que res perquè un arquitecte que m’agradava molt m’havia promès el paradís. Em va assegurar que sentiria música celestial, una mena de cant gregorià dolç i esponjat, que captaria més colors que els que veiem a l’arc de Sant Martí…És a dir: que se’m devetllaria, en imatges i sons, tot l’univers que ens oculta la realitat. Vaig fumar el porro prou concentrada—acostumava a fer cas dels consells paternals que em venien per via masculina. Vaig aclucar els ulls, disposada a abandonar-me, lassa. Relaxada, com diuen a les pel.lícules nord-americanes…No vaig sentir res, no vaig veure res, no vaig captar els colors que no són a l’arc de Sant Martí.
Amb el temps descobriria que cal una predispocició especial per a mirar, tocat, olarar i escoltar com si fos nou, allò que a la primera de canvi ens sembla vell, repetit, exhaurit. Per a tornar a la capacitat de meravella de l’infant, cal molt d’aeròbic mental. Ja ho deia Walter Benjamin, “pensar, que és un narcòtic eminent…” La droga potencia el terror, la inquietud, no és més que un miracle miserable, com va escriure Henri Michaux. He esnifat coca un parell de vegades i, segons m’han dit, vaig elaborar una teoria inèdita sobre El Quixot—em devien enganyar, avui dia ja no és possible dir res de nou sobre El Quixot—, però no recordo res. Aleshores, ¿quin benefici en treia, de tanta lucidesa, si després no ho podia emmagatzemar?
Vaig fracasar, doncs, en dues de les condicions que m’exigia el crític per tal d’escriure bé. Quant a la tercera…Ui, hi ha massa literatura, en la tercera. Les dones, avui, hem descobert l’amistat entre nosaltres, la complicitat, el secret per fi compartit. Enraonem en veu alta, hem deixat de xiuxiuejar. I hem confós l’amistat amb l’amor. L’amor és massa cruel perquè tingui la tendresa de l’amistat. “L’amor, com més lluny més bonic,” diu la Mercè Rodoreda a “El parc de les magnòlies.” Si, l’amor és com les magnòlies: molta olor mentre són a la branca, però si les culls se’t tornen negres al temps de bufar un misto. El crític m’ho havia dit massa tard: estimo massa les dones, algunes dones, per a enamorar-me’n. Vaig arribar a la conclusió que, segons la definició del meu estimat crític, jo seria un desastre com a escriptora.
Una altra vegada, el novel.lista espanyol Juan Benet em va dir, tot imitant el seu adorat Faulkner, que si per a escriure bé era necessari matar la mare, cremar la pròpia casa o violar la germana, doncs, que ell ho faria. Cada vegada m’hi embolicava més. No tan sols havia d’emborratxar-me totes les nits tenint com a meta una cirrosi irreversible, drogar me o bé anar-me’n al llit amb la veīna que no en tenia cap culpa, sinó que, a més havia de quedar-me sense casa, sense mare i forçar una de les meves cinc germanes—perquè Juan Benet, com Faulkner, no tenia en compte que també hi ha escriptores…, i aleshores, què, han de violar el germà? És a dir, per arribar a ser una bona escriptora, a construir “la inabastable pàgina ben feta,” un conjunt de frases d’aquelles que no s’obliden, havia de portar una vida duríssima, esgotadora. I ¿d’on trauria el temps per escriure, si tenia tanta feina per endavant?
Quan no era més que un cadell, vaig passar-me llargues temporades bo i entrevistant una bona colla d’escriptors cotitzats, no solament de la meva literatura, sinó també de la castellana. Era una ingènua i els preguntava per què escrivien. La majoria em miraven un pèl esborronats i canviaven de tema. I tenien raó. La pregunta inquieta els veraços i satisfà els pedants. És d’allò més beneita i no ho vaig comprendre fins que no me la van començar a fer a mi. És una pregunta obscena que requereix respostes obscenes. De tota manera, hi havia escriptors més joves, o més desprevinguts, que m’elaboraven la següent teoria: “l’escriptor és un ser que pateix, i pateix de tal manera que el sofriment l’aboca, sense remei, a escriure.” No era, doncs, un ofici, un enamorament, un plaer. Era un càstig terrible. Ells, els escriptors, patien indefectiblement. Eren els portadors del dolor i Déu els ho feia expiar a través de la literatura. Només ells veien que el món s’havia tornat boig, només ells coneixien, a cada minut, la consciència del fet que som mortals. Ells “eren” la sensibilitat. N’havien fet un monopoli i s’havien oblidat dels lectors, aquells qui són impressionats per la voluptuositat de les paraules.
Vaig aprendre, amb els anys, que ningú no pot explicar per què escriu. No hi podem elaborar teories. Escriure és un anar fent. És com pensar que els bojos pel sol fet de ser bojos, ja són genis. Que només ells són influïts pels mals de la lluna. Només els que no són bojos elogien la bogeria. Ho han llegit als llibres i confonen els actes de bogeria, que solen ser fruit de la imaginació, amb el dolor. Pirandello va escriure un conte sobre un pobre pagès encomanat del mal de lluna. Els altres el rebutgen perquè no comprenen que la lluna plena, turmentadora, insistent, l’havia envaït des de menut. Només un amic diu: “deixeu-lo, que pateix.”
L’idealisme literari ha arribat als nostres dies amb la fascinació d’escriptors que enfolliren perquè eren genis, quan es tracta del contrari: el geni coneix la seva bogeria i la sap controlar. Jesús Tuson diu a El llenguatge i el plaer: “el poeta sap que ho és i pot interpretar-nos els seus textos, dir-nos quines sensaciones o quines necessitats l’han empès a agafar la ploma, declarar-nos quines eines lèxiques ha fet servir i fins i tot dir-nos que allò no és res més que un joc.”
Aquell/aquella que escriu és el que controla la seva bogeria a través de la paraula, que sap que és un boig i, per tant, no és tan boig o només és boig perquè encara creu que pot escriure…Hauríem de recordar, més sovint, els sofriments d’Antonin Artaud tot clavant-se cops de cap contra la paret en veure arribar els fantasmes de la depressió, o el que conta Virginia Woolf als seus diaris, de com s’espantava en adonar-se que tornaven els símptomes d’una crisi d’esquizofrènia. Gérard de Nerval es va penjar en un carreró fosc i humit de París perquè creia que una vegada mort desparareixeria la seva deseperació. Després van sorgir la colla ensucrada dels nervalistes, els burgesos que s’aclofaven, arronsats, damunt el sofà i es delectaven amb la idea de la mort perquè tenien por de la vida. El poeta és un ésser que somnia i el boig no recorda els seus somnis.
Mario Vargas Llosa, impregnat d’un sentit flaubertià de l’escriptura, va engendrar la següent frase: “los escritores son como cuervos que se alimentan de la carroña de la infelicidad humana.” Si és així, el món és ple de bocamolls que ignoren que són escriptors. Però la frase recargolada del peruà, que pot ser dita de manera més senzilla, em va fer pensar. ¿Podria ser que els escriptors/escriptores no suportem la felicitat—i encara menys la dels altres—perquè aquesta és matèria difícilment transformable en literatura? ¿Considerm tot sovint com “grans temes” en literatura—ai, la jerarquia!—la dissort, la mort o el pas del temps, mentre que la felicitat, fugaç però no camenys lluminosa, la deixem per als fulletons i els telefilms?
La felicitat, em diria la senyora Patrícia Miralpeix, és com un trànsit. No podem precisar què provoca aquest estat—una vegada ja ha passat. Recordem com ens sentim en l’absència de dolor, però no què sentim. I heus aquí que la dissort, el pas del temps, la idea de la mort ens donen alè per a escriure. Sí, els escriptors/escriptores som una mica corbs. Contemplem la infelicitat humana…i en fem un conte. Flaubert, un dia, es va aixecar content: havia de descriure un enterrament i va tenir la sort que es morís la mare del seu amic, el metge Pouchet. I li escriu a la seva amiga Louise Colet: “comme il faut du reste profiter de tot (el remarcat és de Flaubert), je suis sûr que ce sera demain d’un dramatique très sombre et que ce pauvre savant sera lamentable. Je trouverai là peutetre des choses pour ma Bovary.” Per un cantó, era l’home que sentia la mort de la mare del seu savi amic, el qual tindrà un aspecte lamentable. Per l’altre, era l’escriptor que devorava la carronya dels sentiments d’altri. En literatura, tot s’aprofita.
Consciència de finitud, atrapar el temps. Heus aquí el plaer i el càstig de l’ofici d’escriure. A la trama de la narració, m’invento que el temps no s’acaba, quan sé que s’acaba. Somnio que tinc les paraules i que, amb elles, posseeixo el món sincer.
Vaig seguir buscant què en deien, els escriptors, del seu ofici. Graham Greene, per exemple, està convençut que escriure és una teràpia. “De vegades em demano—va dir—com s’ho fan els que no escriuen, componen o pinten per escapar de la bogeria, la malenconia o el terror inherent a la condició humana.”
Una nit, mentre sopàvem, li ho vaig comentar a l’escriptor mexicà Jorge Ibargüengoitia, l’escriptor que no tenia por als avions i que va morir en un accident d’avió a prop de Madrid, al Cerro de los Ángeles, mentre viatjava cap a Colòmbia. Ibargüengoitia estava segur que hi ha gent que no escriu perquè saben fer de la pròpia vida una obra d’art i que, aleshores, no es demanen perquè no escriuen, componen o pinten per escapar de la bogeria, la malenconia o el terror inherent a la condició humana. Són, afegia, els receptors d’art i tant els fa si els creadors escriuen per teràpia o no.
Teràpia ho és, no hi ha dubte. Però al començament. Després, per què continuem?
Escriure és un privilegi. Però es fa dificíl que t’ho perdonin segons on vagis. El predomini de les catedrals gòtiques, que arriben a Déu gràcies a la foscor, el sentiment tràgic de la vida concebut com a agonia i no com a delit de no morir-te, fan trontollar la idea de plaer…, perquè, mentre escrius, sembla com si et castiguessis. Escrius i lluites contra les paraules, que no semblin pedres, que no semblin rosegons de pa dur, et deixes anar, et falta alè i t’imagines que ets una gossa que treu la llengua tota xopa de suor, sabent que no s’arriba al final de la cursa, no tens gaire fe en el teu talent, no vols que t’afalaguin, et suïcidaries davant una mala crítica…t’aniries a emborratxar de gust, esnifaries una ratlleta de coca de la bona, convidaries a sopar la veïna per seguir-la. Has llegit que tornes a viure a través de la literatura i endevines que això no és sinó un consol, i ben ximple, i anotes que, volent viure, és la vida que se t’escapa…Descobreixes que no podem captar el temps en la seva puresa i, tot d’una, el delit de captar el temps en tota la seva puresa t’ha atrapat. Barrines que la lògica de la realitat quotidiana és una enganyifa, però que no en tenim d’altra que ens serveixi per a construir el somni. I, aleshores, tornem-hi. Escriure i lluites contra les paraules, que no semblin pedres, que no semblin…
Passen els anys i cada vegada tires una pedra al pou en lloc de fer volar els paraules. No podem entendrir les estrelles, com diria el mestre Flaubert. Però repetim que l’ofici d’escriure no és pas més dur que el de metge, del metge de debò que perd el son darrere un diagnòstic incomprensible. Falsament humils, els escriptors/escriptores anunciem que els científics sí que són intuïts, ells s’han cremat les celles per a resoldre el gran enigma. El sofriment dels escriptors/escriptores no és pas més estètic perquè el cuinem amb metàfores. Hi ha les catedrals gòtiques fosques, uterines, imponents. Però també hi ha llum a l’arquitectura; s’escapa pels vitralls altíssims, s’escola entre les columnes de les mesquites. La foscor persequeix la llum i la llum busca la foscor.
No cal fer-se un codi tan rigorós com el del senyor Stephen Vizinczey. Li van demanar que esbossés alguns “consells assenyats i pràctics per als que són novells en l’ocupació d’escriure.” L’hongarès va escriure amb aplicació deu manaments, el primer dels quals és: “no beuràs, ni fumaràs, ni et drogaràs.” Hi estic d’acord, però no per raons ètiques sinó per raons d’eficàcia. Si vols ecriure bé, no hi ha temps per a fer d’altres coses. Un escriptor borratxo pot ser un gran escriptor—encara que hagi passat l’època dels escriptors borratxos. Un escriptor/escriptora homosexual pot ser un gran escriptor/escriptora—però no podem oblidar que hi ha molts homosexuals que no han sentit, mai, la necessitat d’escriure.
L’única droga que no et mata—encara que et faci emmalaltir—, l’únic efluvi etílic que no et fa perdre els sentits ni et fa malbé el fetge, l’únic amor que no fa fàstic és la bona literatura. Plaers solitaris, vicis compartits. El lector/lectora posseeix les paraules i desafia la finitud, accepta la sordidesa i la bellesa perquè tot és u i, sobretot, recorda perquè abans algú ha recordat. Si hi ha un acte d’amor, aquest és la memòria, diu Josep Brodski a propòsit de Nadiejda Mandelstam, la vídua del poeta rus desaparegut en un camp estalinià.
Cal recordar, cal evocar, no hi ha art més temporal que la literatura. Podem emmalaltir amb el record però potser, al final del llarg i lent procés de l’escriptura, descobrirem que hi ha alguna cosa, que hi ha algú, a l’altra banda, que encara batega, que encara existeix.
-
Montserrat Roig (1946-1991) was a Catalan feminist writer whose work explores the lives of generations of women coming of age during the social and political upheavals at the turn of the twentieth century, from the Spanish Civil War to the Franco dictatorship. She wrote over ten books, with this collection being the last one she published before she died.
-
Eva Dunsky is a writer, teacher, and translator. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland, The Los Angeles Review, Asymptote, Bookforum, and Pigeon Pages, among others, and she’s at work on a novel. Read more of her writing at https://evaduns.ky/.