Saturday, April 23, Sant Jordi. Splendid proclamation of Imma Monso in the Saló de Cent of the City Council: «I want a mestizo literature, insubordinate, without labels […]. An uncomfortable literature. that, as a reader,[…] I get restless when I look for help, that I scratch myself when I look for company». The four seasons of the year have fit into a single day. At about two in the afternoon a bizarre hail, I’m late for lunch and not a single pious taxi shows up (Barcelona’s problem with taxis is pataphysical). In spite of everything, the joy of take back the party, the bodies, the ritual, the smiles without a mask. Some of the best phrases of the day are pronounced by two Basques: Fernando Aramburu (“you don’t know how to rain”) and a Bernardo Atxaga who endures the hustle and bustle stoically (“as a priest told us at school, ‘man’s life on earth is a military'”).
Wednesday, 27. I wake up without bread; not even in the freezer. breakfast in one of those fake bakeries that spread like amanitas muscarias through the epidermis of the city. At the next table, a man speaks on his mobile: «Look, I have a seizure of 26,000 euros, and I prefer to do it with you. It’s not about being a mercenary, it’s about pure survival, because I need it.” As he gets up from his chair, I notice that he’s wearing a security company uniform. There he hides the seed of a disturbing story.
Friday, 29. The writer William Saccomanno yesterday opened the Buenos Aires Book Fair with a speech peppered with several charges of dynamite, among them the fact of having suggested to the organization the charging of fees for the inaugural dissertation. Although finally noticed them, there were those who opposed it on the grounds that pronouncing the proclamation meant “prestige” for the author. «I imagined myself in the supermarket -refuted the Argentine- trying to convince the Chinese that he was going to pay for the purchase with prestige». As in other fungal invasion, culture is being stripped of its surplus value. It’s a way of taming her.
Monday, May 2. The scandal over espionage on independence leaders with the Pegasus ‘software’ rises to the top with the revelation that they have also been combedThe mobile phones of the President of the Government and the Minister of DefenseMargaret Robles. A good script twist, from a Netflix series. In the afternoon, as if he were playing CNI, I catch a fragment of conversation between retirees on a terrace:
“Well, I don’t want to die.”
“And why, if you were born for that?”
Philosophical talk is priceless, but the owner of the bar, who makes potato omelettes and fries bacon, even if it’s Chinese, charges them for the beers. By chance, I find out later that the writer Imma Monsó has not charged a euro for the proclamation of Sant Jordi; nothing, not a penny.
Monday, 9. I catch myself changing the channel: I don’t want to see the parade on the Red Square in Moscow which commemorates the triumph over Nazi Germany, a victory that the USSR paid for at a very high price: 27 million dead. I don’t want to see it because it hurts now that indecent display of military muscle. I turn off the TV: I also don’t want to swallow the Azov Battalion’s laundering or other such freeze-drying. I read ‘The Little Life’ (Anagram) in bed, where J. Á González Sainz he says that we don’t look back, as we should, and that each age overcomes its own destitution with a “sweeping wave of stupidity and wickedness that dwarfs any previous destruction.” The quilt is too much.
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Tuesday, 10. Guillotined the head of Paz Esteban, head of the CNI, to shelve the cisco Pegasus, without knowing who spied on whom or what Morocco paints in all this. Something’s going on in the sewers. I go to the La Central bookstore, on Mallorca street, to present the book of Julia Soria, ‘Campos azul’ (Alba), a beautiful novel of initiation in a Sorian village and a tribute to the generations of women we left behind, mothers and grandmothers, peasants, poor, illiterate and without a complaint. Was the grandmother happy?, wonders the protagonist. “She Asks stupid where they are because she shouldn’t even know what she meant by that.”
Thursday, 12. Regarding happiness, we don’t know how to look back. Our time —I continue with ‘The Little Life’—, has manifested his indigence “through the most showy opulence”. The strength of technology hides our immense fragility. Pegasus, metaverse, algorithm, ‘shit’.