Bautizo

Kinch, the fearful Jesuit, autor de los diarios (hasta ahora) anónimos.

Diario, May 23, 2012

Day after I returned from the City, I feel of no belonging in this farm-shaped-like-a-city place. I no longer belong here; my mind is falling apart. I dreamt Baudelaire’s dream: He is in a carriage and is left with an obscene book in hand in a brothel that is at the same time a museum. There were prostitutes, sculptures, and paintings. The poet is walking around and meets a monster that has such a big penis that has it all around his body –the monster was crying his grieves and frustration to the poet. I was in a museum last Saturday and I had the greatest time ever with Reger’s suggestion on Credi’s painting. I think that it was the noxious effect of this place what made me dream Baudelaire’s. There is too much light in here! In the dream I was with a book that I don’t remember either it was good or not, just with a book sitting down in the middle of a banquet hall. People were dancing ridiculously –they were dancing and I was tapping to the beat of the music; I love that music and that was the worst part, I was compulsively determined to enter the dance, but I cannot get up –the book was too heavy.


A habit I have adopted lately: to look for a painting that depicts a given situation, or at least resembles it. Two of Albretch Dürer:

Melancholia I

Self-Portrait of Man of Sorrows

Diario, Mayo 20, 2012

     El sábado en la mañana, tomé el primer avión a New York. Del aeropuerto a la ciudad en el AirTren: sesenta minutos exactos a Penn Station y de allí sin sacudirme el polvo del camino y el estómago vacío a Barney Greengrass, en Amsterdam Avenue y la setenta calle, un regalo de Norman Manea. Ordené scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and orange juice para seguir a Manea pero añadí un borscht, caldo de Europa Central, agua mineral, café esspresso y un cigarro caminando a través del Parque Central hacia el Metropolitan Museum.


     Casi las dos de la tarde. Donación y entrada a uno de los edificios en el que la solemnidad no está reñida con la gracia. Llevé a Lorca conmigo y su “Poeta en Nueva York”, lecturas como intermedios, recesos de la función del arte. Al rato llega Reger y nos sentamos frente a “Ugolino and his sons” de Carpeaux. Apenas hablamos, saludos de cortesía. Después de un buen rato en silencio se vira y me pregunta qué buscas? A portrait of a woman, dije, su rostro a más no poder. Un rostro no más, güerito? A Reger le gustaba fingirse mexicano. Bueno, pues, aquí tienes varios pero creo que te sentaría la mujer de Lorenzo de Credi. Ve a verla, me animó. Nos despedimos no más. European Paintings, me indicó solemne el acomodador, third floor, west side. Allí estaba, de luto con anillo de oro suspendido entre sus dedos; como anillo al dedo, pensé. De luto y con anillo de compromiso de hombre: “This damaged but evocative portrait has been identified as the widow of Credi's brother, who was a goldsmith. This would explain why she is dressed in black and holds a ring. The juniper bush (ginepro) behind her could refer to her name, Ginevra di Giovanni di Niccolò. The picture was inspired by Leonardo's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.” La mirada (de ella) no está con el retratista y su boca exige ser besada; la dualidad del espíritu débil y la carne impetuosa; lo que trasciende y lo que no puede. Allí, sentado, como Reger [pero Reger mira un anciano de barba blanca] sentado estaba y miraba esa viuda con el anillo suspendido y no sé por qué, quizás fuera por el falso acento mexicano de Reger, dije la chingada se lo llevó. Afuera del museo una fina lluvia caia pacientemente. Faltaban aún casi cinco horas para tomar el avión de regreso a casa y decidí subir hasta la 110 calle y buscar en la avenida de Amsterdam, un pastry shop húngaro al que un amigo cura me había invitado una vez. Sentado en portal del café, que ahora me pareció menos glamoroso, Lorca paseó sus versos de Poemas en la soledad de University Columbia: Tropezando con mi rostro distinto de cada día. / ¡Asesinado por el cielo!

     Manea tenía razón, el Barney Greengrass del Upper West Side sirve unos scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and orange juice que bien valen este viaje; así como el viejo Met, uno de los templos del arte. Y tu rostro tan distante, y las manos de amarme; el anillo solo.

If brief, better

     I am on old dying man, eighty-four years old with an unaccomplished promise. I barely walk and my tongue twists as my left hand shakes as broken fan. In my days I dreamt about writing poetry and essays -I just wrote a number of academic prose with the sole purpose of getting degrees. I am self-secluded in this countryside not-much-worthy little house with a minimum of contact with the outside world. I ended up here on my own responsibility and it is time to go out to finish what is still undone.
     Once I had a lover who wanted to be abducted from her irrelevant life (or was  I the wanted to be kidnapped?). I didn't do it. It was long time ago. I wonder if I am able to do it and bring my lover back here to wait for the expected lady-in-black. There is small, ridiculous problem: I don't know for sure where she is. I think she is back to her native country, which is also mine. I haven't been there for the last forty years. I ceased to be what I was, even my native language makes me some unexpected turns.
     How can go there after this absence and commit a crime, even if it is a love crime? But I have a plan. I will go there, book in the cheapest hotel, and begin walking around to see if I can run into her. I hope I will. She always finds a way to find me. I will look aside when I glimpse at her. She will recognize me because I'll be speechless and run away... as always ... to keep the promise broken.

Diario, May 16, 2012

     Ayer, precisamente, en la mañana leía una entrevista de Carlos Fuentes en el diario español El País. Hablaba sobre su producción literaria y sobre cómo escribir mucho lo mantenía joven, sino “se lo lleva a uno la chingada” –y se lo llevó ayer, unos días después. Escritor cosmopolita, sin la gracia y la osadía intelectual de Paz, que miraba América Latina con ojos mexicanos y bifocales de la academia norteamericana; aun así, Fuentes fue uno de los más lúcidos y competentes intelectuales públicos del mundo latinoamericano, tenía una mesura envidiable. Debió haber sido un profesor excelente y lamentaré no leer más sus artículos de prensa.

     Tengo deudas literarias con él –nunca fui un lector disciplinado de su obra ni novelística ni de ensayos. Últimamente, mis deudas mexicanas me agobian.

Diario, May 14, 2012

De-función –negación, según RAE, de la capacidad de actuar propia de los seres vivos y de sus órganos.


Pintura con la sangre de Amy Winehouse y de Pete Doherty: juntos en la vida (pero no en la muerte), en la droga y el alcohol; el arte junta lo que separa la biología.

Diario, May 11, 2012

Dejé de leer a Roth y me puse a mirar Full Metal Jacket de Kubrick.

Ayer, a causa de una conversación, volví a leer algunos textos de Borges que aparecen recogidos en Elogio de la sombra: el amor de los libros, la paciencia ante la vejez.

Leer a Pound:

A Virginal

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of æther;
As with sweet leaves; as with subtle clearness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness
To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.
No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers.
Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,
As winter's wound with her sleight hand she staunches,
Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:
As white as their bark, so white this lady's hours.

Diario, May 4 2012

No es que me sienta solo -es que estoy solo. Tan solo que estoy escribiendo esto.

Diario, May 3, 2012

I was about to write an email and I could not do it.


On the Heights of Despair – Cioran dixit: “Tears do not burn except in solitude.”

Why do I mix Cioran’s and Roth’s readings? Perhaps their books were placed next to each on my night table. I could have chosen the Bible. The Bible never leaves my night table. Cioran is almost never there. I found Cioran a little bit repetitive. And Roth’s narrative is aligned with that sort of unbearable lightness that makes literature a propitious scenario for eroticism.

Diario, May 2, 2012

Nothing. Nothing happens. I was just listening “The Grateful Dead” and this fortifying song, Touch of Grey with its chorus: I will get by, I will get by, I will get by, I will survive.


Oblivion. That’s what it seems I deserve. Mis palabras hasta el cansacio. Como un grito en el desierto: el amor que no es amado.

Diario,, May 1, 2012

Un día estaba sentado en una barbería cubana de Miami. Entro un hombre ya viejo, flaco, macilento y un barbero le preguntó qué tal? cómo estás? El viejo, flaco y macilento respondió Ahí, entero como el picadillo.


Another on The Human Stain

Seventy-one years old Coleman Silk on his thirty-four lover:

“It’s the wisdom of somebody who expects nothing. That’s her wisdom, and that’s her dignity, but it’s negative wisdom, and that’s not the kind that keeps you on course day to day. This is a woman whose life’s been trying to grind her down almost for as long as she’s had life. Whatever she’s learned comes from that.” (The underline is mine: it is being dedicated to a devoted soul.)

It could not be the best written or the most representative, or the deepest piece of American literature displaying what I like to call the secular spirituality of the American people. It is simply the hardest and the most common way to learn from life through suffering and disenchantment how to live hopeless. While reading this passage, I was thinking on what it is said that this the most religious country, but I think it is the most faithless one. Religion as opium? Anyways, Coleman Silk’s lover has been beaten almost to death by life events and circumstances; but a driving force keeps her alive, sex. She makes love as the only possibility to redeem from the mishaps of life, but what really makes this lover the perfect one is the veil of vital pessimism that covers her body and makes her give and feel all pleasures with no restrictions.