Rotten fruit, by Juan José Millás


Yesterday I broke a sinister notebook. I found it by chance among the books stacked on the floor of my study. It contained some sort of diary i wrote years agoin a bad time. It was written from a dark soul that was scary. I perpetrated it in an apartment whose living room had curtains that gave the impression of covering a large window. When you ran them, you noticed that there was no window. Despite everything, I rented the apartment because it was cheap and I lived in it for a couple of years. He often thought what it would be like to throw himself out of that non-existent window. One night I dreamed that the apartment door was also for decoration and I woke up full of anguish. I went to see it and verified that it was a practicable door and that, therefore, I could escape whenever I wanted from that hole.

Related news

When on trains i use the bathroomI always imagine that the door, after closing, will be mysteriously sealed and I will not be able to return to my seat. My cries for help will not be heard over the noise of the train. The notebook I destroyed was like this claustrophobic. I couldn’t get out of it, which is the same as being trapped inside a novel. Are there sinister salads, sinister stews, sinister squid in ink? Is boiled chard sinister? Sometimes I take longer than necessary to throw away old food. I leave it there, covered with plastic wrap in the hope that it will hold. Little by little, that food that was left over from Tuesday of the previous week is becoming sinister. I don’t want to see her, that’s why it takes me so long to get rid of her.

So I stopped seeing the notebook in which my writing had been rotting. A notebook in which I spoke of a room with curtains that covered a non-existent window through which I committed suicide every afternoon. I couldn’t bear to read it as I couldn’t bear to eat a stew from a fortnight ago. So I tore off its leaves, which I later broke into a thousand pieces that ended up in the garbage can of organic waste. But the false window, which produced so many reverse suicides, stayed inside my head like the taste of rotten fruit stays in the throat.


Leave a Comment