2023-11-18 00:17:26
There was a time, when I lived in Madrid, that I would go to sleep in continuous-run cinemas, I would lounge around the streets and always carry a book in my pocket. Something that would be unthinkable now.
Because continuous-session cinemas have disappeared and paperback books no longer fit in pockets; Unless, of course, you wear rapper pants à la ToteKing. And all this is relevant because I have just read the essays by Enrique Vila-Matas that the Debolsillo publishing house has reprinted with the title of An absolutely wonderful life. It is a volume with more than 500 pages that, as expected, does not fit in your pocket.
I have read it at times, alternating it with other readings, and there have been hilarious moments, especially when Vila-Matas tells the anecdote about Borges in those times yes when the Beatles were all the rage and Victoria Ocampo brought her first album from London along with a wig that was an exact imitation of John Lennon’s hair. As soon as Victoria arrived in Argentina she gave a lunch to present her musical discovery, inviting her sister Silvina and Adolfo Bioy Casares to the luncheon, who arrived accompanied by Jorge Luis Borges.
It seems that Victoria played the famous first Beatles album over and over again, an explosive work for the time and that included Love me do or the version of The Bamba which the English team titled Twist and shout and that made the guests not stop moving their feet under the table. There was no respite during lunch or even after dinner; When it was time for dessert, Victoria Ocampo took out her John Lennon wig and when she went to put it on Borges, he didn’t let it go. Please, Victoria, we could go that far.
Years later, a journalist would ask Borges who he preferred, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones; a dilemma that has always been an easy resource for interviewers who have not prepared for the interview. Faced with this question, Borges responded very elegantly: “As far as this very transcendental question is concerned, what I always wanted to become in life was a musician as similar as possible to John Lennon. But I think it’s too late to do it.”
Very fine, Borges abandoned all hope of being what he once might have seemed to be for a while. Because when someone with the talent of Borges loses hope, he pulls on the thread of memory as a resource and it is, clinging to that same thread, where I hold on now, writing these things while I return to those cold days in Madrid in which a book sheltered more than a firearm. They were from Alianza, and their covers – the work of Daniel Gil – cleverly explained what you could find inside.
They were the books that I read then, as I said, when I illuminated the nights with movie lights and spent the days warming my hands over the fire. The Maltese falcon, The sand book or that other one by Jack London where a gun appeared on the cover and whose title struck me from the first moment: Murders SL, the novel that London would leave unfinished and that Robert L. Fish finished; a game of mirrors where the character ends up facing himself, just as Borges confronts his past when he faces a man who could have looked like John Lennon while sounds play in the background. The Bamba sung in English. These are things that cross my mind before I go out and buy some ToteKing-style rapper pants.
#Enrique #VilaMatas