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  • Miguel Anxo Fernández
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  • Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín
  • Xosé Monteagudo
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  • Xosé Neira Vilas
  • Emma Pedreira
  • Xavier Queipo
  • María Xosé Queizán
  • Anxo Rei Ballesteros
  • María Reimóndez
  • Manuel Rivas
  • Antón Riveiro Coello
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  • Anxos Sumai
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  • Iolanda Zúñiga

CHAINS

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(Page 1 of 14) « Prev Next »

GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER (1): “THE FIRST TIME”

 

The sun reflected itself too, as if it were not enough to lash from up above and wanted to make use of the ocean to confuse him. Oh dear! Was it possible that she and he as well… he meant… that both of them… at the same time…? He allowed his eyes to run back once more along the path up to the dunes and stealthily raised his collar so that he could look more directly. Let’s see, he ruminated: a woman at the wheel of a car, most likely a sports car, somewhere around twenty or thirty years old, although before being suggested by that machine of which hardly a bit of chassis can be discerned, the dates are given by that face with big, painted lips, emerging out of an evanescent combination of shawl, scarf, and hat. No, there was no mistaking it. She and he, both of them, had in their hands a book which displayed a cover with the same illustration, ultimately the extremely well-known Tamara in the Green Bugatti, by the no less well-known Tamara de Lempicka. The coincidence would already have been enough in itself to start up a fascinating reflection about chance and even fate, were it not for the fact that the book, effectively the same, was for him not the more or less fortunate selection for an afternoon read, but an object upon which relapsed (in equal parts) enormous quantities of vanity and fatigue. It was his most recent novel, which had just come hot out of the oven as they say, and because of that little impulse to not detach himself from it during its first days of life (a compulsion which he repeated tirelessly volume after volume, without the possibility of knowing if that yielded any type of benefit in the slightest), there he was in the midst of his first reading with a number-two pencil searching for the errors which the printers had overlooked.

It was the first time something like this had happened to him. Because, let’s see… the girl there in front of him, the one with the fuchsia towel—the one who squeezed her knees together as she combed the sand with her toes—went, and forewent any other complementary alternative for sunbathing (sleeping, listening to music, sending messages on her phone) and killed the afternoon—that lazy and most-luminous end-of-July afternoon—finishing up a book. And not just any book, no sir, but one of HIS-goddamn-books. Not one of those fat volumes by Stephen King or by Ken Follett. Not one of those Vargas Llosa titles re-published in paperback in the wake of the Nobel Prize. Not one of those bricks of historical drama with religious conspiracy at their core. Not even one of those manuelorivases with which people tend to clear a bad conscience. The girl was reading ONE OF HIS BOOKS, and even if all of a sudden a tsunami like that of Fukushima were to sweep away the beach (the thought was completely misguided), that wasn’t going to change even a bit what already seemed as unquestionable as scientific fact.

He felt so unexpectedly satisfied that he still spent a good while wondering to himself if there wasn’t something insane about that uncontainable urge to scream clawing up his throat. To scream! He didn’t do that—needless to say—but the electrical current which began to flow slowly through his limbs, causing every last hair on his body to stand up, sought to notify him that, despite whatever the morning’s chewy croissant could have foretold, that day which had only just begun to slosh into the mid-afternoon was going to be—even just for that—one of those storied days where the most repressed desires, where the things which one secretly spends their whole life awaiting…

Well. Of course he was sure that people read his books. How could they not! Right there were the sales reports, the royalty checks, and even those emails by the Biblioteca Virtual Galega people that overflowed from the university—not always from old school friends surprised, when not obviously amused, by the type of job he had searched for. Because, without being in any way one of those cracks who argue vehemently against literary agents, right there was that career that could offer some certainly respectable numbers over time. Thirty? Forty? Fifty-thousand books sold? Twenty years, he ruminated, allow for a great deal. Even to delude himself, disabuse himself, and ultimately console himself with those numbers which, by means of adding up lustra, meetings with the press, and one pious lie or another, shot off some results which could be maneuvered in any conversation without the risk of feeling a sharp silence sliding down his back. Nevertheless (and he returned to the point of departure) it was the first time in his whole career that…

What’s certain is that he had already had occasion, overcoming the mandate of not appearing overly vulnerable, to speak fully with a colleague about that moment in which one manages to truly understand what that with which they are occupying a good part of the day, in general, since the old and confusing adolescent era, consists of. Absolutely. There were those who, despite sum-total certainly less published work, proudly confessed to a pair of encounters with unprepared readers—referring with that descriptor to those who had not anticipated the moment photographing themselves with their books in the same doorway—an adventure which, in terms of setting, displayed such a variety of localizations that it seemed a bit stupid to speak of rules: if some mentioned an airport or a bus or train station, others described a relatively lush park or the relatively appropriate decorations of a bar, of a cafe, of any tavern. He—not seeing himself as any kind of superstitious chimpanzee—knew that only the laws of chance operated in the roulette wheel. Or rather, mathematics (or was it statistics?). Nevertheless (and the adversative became as questionable to him as the fact of seeing some incongruity there), listening to those confessions and hearing his authors touched by a magic wand…

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