Status Updates From El mal de Montano

“To be a writer is to turn into someone else, into a stranger. You have to begin to translate yourself. Writing is a case of impersonation, of adopting a new personality. Writing is pretending to be another.”

Perhaps this is what literature is, the invention of another life that could well be our own, the invention of a double.

AT THE START of the twenty-first century, as if I were walking to the rhythm of literature's most recent A walking history, I was alone and without direction on some byroad, in the evening, heading inexorably for melancholy. A slow, enveloping, increasingly deep nostalgia for all that literature had once been merged with the mist at dusk. I considered myself a very deceived man. In life. And in art.

Stupidity is loyal and constant, we have known her fron time immemorial, she awaits us in the sweet home to show with us, with imposing resignation, the colossal misfortune not to be intelligent.

O Valéry!

Sad and solitary Madalena. To escape my anxiety, I asked Tongoy what we were doing there. "Visiting Antonio Caiado," Rosa interposed. You'd think she'd have said, "I came to Pico because I was told a mysterious writer lived here. "We watched the four passengers traveling with us disembark from the ferry, getting off the boat with their bags and baskets, in grave silence.

Thursday

BUT IT'S RAINING!

The rain is falling on Barcelona, though with less wind and less cruelty than yesterday, when I went to the Avenida Palace to meet Rita Gombrowicz. It may seem a very curious coincidence or a very fortuitous chance, but the fact is that, as I was absorbed in the entry for Gombrowicz in this dictionary, Rita, his widow, arrived yesterday in Barcelona, and I went to see her at her hotel....

His diary is not many hope to find in a private journal. In his diary, he accom-sickreslished a new inventive form and at the same time invented a new form of writing a diary. And he did this perhaps because, as But was Gombrowicz being sincere when he wrote this? not exactly a masterpiece of sincerity, that quality so a writer, what Gombrowicz feared most was Sincerity, he knew Sincerity in literature led nowhere..

I got up at eight, as usual, just as Rosa with a forceful and very energetic smack turned off the alarm clock. We had breakfast together. A quick instant coffee, cakes from the supermarket, and oatmeal. I laughed at one of her clients, one of those the least amused. "Carry on like this and you can find yourself authors she has to put up with daily. As always, she wasn't in another literary agent," she told me angrily

GIDE, ANDRÉ (Paris, 1869-1951). In an unintentional way, this writer's diary tells the story of someone who spent his life seeking to write a masterpiece and did not achieve it. Or perhaps he did achieve it, and paradoxically that great book would be the diary in which he reflected the daily search for that masterpiece.

The beer must have gone straight to his head, because he suddenly asked me what I was drawing the map of Montano's malady for and why I kept hiding it and didn't show it to Rosa and why I pretended in front of her by making her believe I was enjoying a peaceful, curative rest when in fact I spent the day believing I was the Don Quixote of the Azores, I was more literature-sick than ever and, though I did not realize

In the afternoon of the first day of the century, I abandoned the Brighton's Victorian terrace, I lef Margot and Tongoy getting drunk, and went for a walk on my own in the streets of Valparaiso. Although I struggled against any melancholic thought, it was impossible for me, in the air of the city, in each particle of its air, not to breathe the existence of fatality, terror, mortality.

It's raining outside, the rain is falling on Nantes and this hom room is really very comfortable. But let's get one thing straigh I did not kill Montano's mother. Let there be no doubt. The idea that I murdered her is the classic literary construction someone suffering from my son's illness. It's raining on Nanter and this reminds me of the Barbara song, where it also rained on the streets of this city.