Breathe
By Sandra Romandía
You wake up in the middle of the morning - you ignore the exact time - and your body is there, motionless, almost inert, on the semi-deflated inflatable mattress, with the sheets thrown to one side and feeling the contact of your skin with the velvety vinyl of the room. You feel your mouth dry, but also your eyes, your neck, your hands, your hair, the back of your ears, your thighs, your toenails. You turn to look at your left side and a half-empty bottle of vodka of uncertain brand smiles at you, you deduce then that you might have overdrank your glasses when you see the plastic cup still lying there with a few squirts of red liquid that was probably some sweetened sachet drink mixed with water and alcohol.
You remember that someone you talked to the night before lent you a book, half worn and half damp, A Salto de mata, by Paul Auster. You have been months since you arrived in the big city, Mexico City, from the north of the country where you left and sold everything: your car, your phones, your family, your clothes, your life. You haven't found a job, it wasn't as easy as you thought it would be, but at least you entertain yourself one night or another meeting people and drinking; you think that one day your cell phone will ring or the mail will arrive saying that some journalistic company is hiring you; some morning, afternoon, night that event will happen that will change your life. You get up dragging your feet to the bathroom, then to the kitchen of an apartment in Durango, on the corner of Jalapa, in the Roma neighborhood, which has no furniture because you have enough to pay the rent but not enough to fill it; that will come later - you remind yourself when you see the living room that looks like a dance floor - when you get a job, as a journalist, editor, writer (your dream as a teenager), whatever it is, but it will push your creativity. After opening the refrigerator that is totally desolate like an airport lounge from which the plane departed you see the calendar and realize that many months have already passed and money is running out. "When I reached my thirties, I went through a few years in which everything I touched turned to failure," you will read that same New Yorker's (actually New Jerseyan) pen night, even though you are in your early twenties.
You go back to your bedroom, which has a java as a bureau, and you start reading A salto de mata. You had previously read Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude, the work in which he describes his father's death and how he began to write after it: "We are left with nothing else, the irreducible certainty of our mortality. We can accept with resignation the death that comes after a long illness, and we can even blame it on fate; but when a man dies without apparent cause, when a man dies simply because he is a man, it brings us so close to the invisible border between life and death that we do not know which side we are on", says one of his sentences and you feel an irreducible eagerness to want to live longer, like someone who breathes air for the first time after an eternity under water.
You think of all the books you would have liked to write by then, at 23 years of age, but you don't have any and you think that maybe when your father dies you would start. But your father is far from dying (he would leave this world 15 years later) and you dedicate your day to live the hangover reading the book they have left you, besides sending one or another resume to try your luck.
Then A salto de mata begins to awaken your hidden senses, not the usual ones, but the capacity to imagine, to transmute the character's existence into your own, to breathe from the lungs of another, to adopt the reflections of another. "The writer does not 'choose a profession,' like one who becomes a doctor or a policeman. It's not so much about choosing as it is about being chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not good for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long and painful road for the rest of your life," you read and identify because you know you couldn't be anything other than a journalist and that to get out of it you'd have to be born again. But it's the global crisis of 2008-2009 and no one is hiring you, and the "big media" is laying off staff instead of calling in new ones, and the only thing you get from time to time are small-time freelancers . But there's Auster, telling you that all that happens too, and that even though you have had to get used to buying vegetables and offal to eat at the Merced market, that stage will go away and you will return to traditional menus, even though inside you, like an unruly whirlwind, something is telling you that you may stay like that for the rest of your life, that you may never get out of it, of the unfurnished apartment, of the month-to-month tension of not being able to pay the rent, of the deflated inflatable mattress.
You often wondered what would have happened if you were still living with your parents in that provincial town, walking through life on high heels and slicked-back hair, knee-length skirts and tightly pressed executive shirts, working for an average salary in an average media outlet in an average city, making ends meet with limitations, like average people, but making ends meet (which isn't bad either). Not being there on that mattress at ground level chasing dreams single-handedly. "I believed in my abilities, yet I had no confidence in myself. I was bold and shy, agile and clumsy, resolute and impulsive: a living monument to the spirit of contradiction. My life had just begun and I was already moving in two directions at once," Paul Auster said, and you could totally relate. Although he had not yet written 4,3,2,1, if he had existed you would have appropriated the phrase "When does the great event come that tears at the heart of things and changes everyone's life, the unforgettable moment when something ends and something else begins? That day and the immediate ones to come will offer no different picture.
Then the years go by and you find yourself at a meeting of international colleagues in which they highlight your career, your achievements, your "legacy" as a young journalist. It's Columbia University in New York, the one you saw so far away from the northern Mexican desert city where you grew up, and you realize that time has passed and the air mattress and viscera are finally behind you. Now there is so much work, events, interviews to give, books to write and reports to publish that you don't even have time to phone your mother; you have been living alone with your dog for years and your apartments are getting better and better. You went from one to another, from another to another... from living in Mexico City to Buenos Aires, from Buenos Aires back to the Mexican capital. You have traveled to about thirty countries. You count 10 moves in a little more than 10 years and you realize that life has gone by and it has been worth it. You can't drink a whole bottle of vodka for years, there's no time for long hangovers, you don't wake up without an alarm clock anymore, you don't feel the ground level since that raw morning without an encouraging outlook; you can no longer make plans for backpacking trips, nor do you weigh 10 kilos less due to the forced saving diet you used to have before. You no longer talk to any stranger in the street because there are few spaces to walk alone without hurry or commitments.
You can't conceive of living without having savings in your bank account and a few properties for peace of mind; you feel confident doing what you do and understanding that phrase about the profession, journalism, choosing you and not you choosing it.
"You don't miss the old days. Whenever you get nostalgic and begin to long for the loss of things that seemed to make life better than it is now, I would tell you to stop for a moment and think it over, to examine the Then with the same rigor you apply to the Now, and it doesn't take you long to come to the conclusion that the Now and the Then are, in essence, the same thing," Paul Auster tells you again now in Winter Diary, his 2012 work in which he recounts his life, at more than 60 years old, and the apartments he has lived in, all his moves.
"Your bare feet on the cold floor when you get out of bed and go to the window. You are sixty-four years old. Outside, the atmosphere is gray, almost white, you can't see the sun. You wonder: how many mornings are left? One door has closed. Another has opened. You have entered the winter of your life," and you read that and you think that day will come any minute and you wonder what has been fruitful and what fruitless.
Other years go by and your father dies, and you still don't write any fiction anyway, but you remember the phrase from The Invention of Solitude, "One does not stop longing for his father's love, not even when he is an adult". And you see death always closer but at the same time you know it is far away, you don't reach the fourth decade of life.
Everything goes by and you realize that you have finally met Auster in person at a Guadalajara Book Fair, not knowing that years later life would get even more interesting and you would be at the same dinner with his wife in Monterrey and by then you would have published five books -coordinated or co-authored with colleagues- and you would have presented them at countless fairs.
Then will come all the rest, everything else, everything that until now you live and perhaps you are not able to process, but he always accompanies you at every stage, that writer from New York who left too soon, some would say, but no, at 77 years old he left full of stories and good humor, as his wife would say about his last hours.
"We are left with nothing else, the irreducible certainty of our mortality. We can accept with resignation the death that comes after a long illness, and we can even put it down to fate; but when a man dies without apparent cause, when a man dies simply because he is a man, it brings us so close to the invisible border between life and death that we do not know on which side we stand," Auster completed your thought in Winter Diary .
And you wonder how to let go of someone who has so intimately lived your story yet with whom you never spoke or had any plans to speak. "All contradictions are true," he would say.
The gaps in the diary of our history are also filled with those goodbyes that never were but that somehow will be before the indelible imprint of those who intellectually filled our soul and accompanied our steps.
Goodbye Paul.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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