Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

We could hear explosions in the distance, but Rashid did not slow down at all. We came to a shopping street, Ben Yehuda, and turned into some narrow side streets that were quite lively, couples in the darkness, people on their own enjoying the night. We walked past some old doors until Rashid entered one and said to us, here we are, welcome to the Diwan, the curtain rises!

In my mind, I categorized the bar as noisy postmodern, dark and insalubrious, and its clientele as fringe characters, drunks, drug addicts, mentally unbalanced people addicted to prescription drugs, tranquilizers, and psychoactives, people who had had tough childhoods and had crossed the thin line between reality and the mental hospital, just like in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest , and in the case of the women, with the addition of being easy lays, not forgetting that some of the habitués of these bars usually belong to various high risk groups, people with AIDS or carriers of multiple staphylococcus, pneumocystitis, various kinds of gonorrhea, hepatitis B or C, candida albicans, Kaposi’s sarcoma, anyway, all of this might well have been in the Diwan, but I said nothing and walked to the counter with a certain reluctance and a vague feeling that I was crossing a line, until I was able to take my first slug from the glass of whiskey Rashid put in my hand. Then we went to the back of the room, where music was playing loudly, and sat down.

Rashid stopped to say hello to some acquaintances of his, so I asked Marta, do you like the place? and she said, very much, it’s the kind of bar I go to in Reykjavik, where I can chill out, a space where nobody looks at anyone and everyone respects everyone else, not like those awful places with leather armchairs and indirect lighting where people go to see and be seen; I have a long history of love affairs and friendships in bars like this, and what about you? do you like it? I forgot what I had thought when I came in, because I had already stopped feeling nervous, so I said, it’s a typical bar of our time, when the archeologists of the future want to figure out our civilization they’ll find traces of places like this, which are exactly the same in different parts of the world, do you live in Reykjavik? and she said, no, in Paris, I’m their arts correspondent, that’s why they sent me to cover the conference, I’m a graduate in philosophy and letters, and philology too.

When I heard that I said, I’m a philologist too, that makes us colleagues. I proposed a toast to the noble science of philology and I said, the only thing I’ve read from your country is Paradise Reclaimed by Halldór Laxness, oh, and Meek Heritage , too, but Marta shuddered and said, that novel isn’t by Laxness, it’s by Frans Sillanpää, who’s Finnish, you’re confusing them because they’re both Northern, just like everyone does, and she added, bitterly: the rest of the world doesn’t distinguish between Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland, and yet they’re so different! You’re right, I said, I confused two writers, but not your countries. She took a sip of her whiskey and said, I’ll forgive you if you change this shit for something stronger for me, this is no time to be drinking something that’s only forty proof! I stood up and went to the bar. I saw a green bottle with a sinister name, Black Death. I asked for a glass of it and took it to Marta.

She took a sip of it and her cheeks turned very pink, and she cried, Brennivín! they have this at the bar? drinking Brennivín is the most patriotic thing an Icelander can do, and added, I have to confess something, this drink has a connection with the first time I got drunk and also, predictably, lost my virginity, it all happened on the same night. I’d been drinking a bit and dancing in an old disco called Nasa, in the center of Reykjavik, where underground bands played like Björk’s Sugarcubes, Juliette and the Licks, Ghostigital, who play really weird rock, and there I was, only fifteen, and I wanted to drink up the world in one go or snort it into my brain with a line of coke; what I did was drink and drink until a guy wearing a helmet with horns and a leather vest took me on the dance floor and whirled me around and around; my feet literally lifted off the ground. From there we went to the men’s bathroom to have sex, he was nice and he treated me quite well; it hardly hurt at all. The next day he gave me a couple of aspirins and drove me home on his motorbike. I never saw him again.

Rashid came to the table with more whiskey, and said, what do you think of this bazaar of disturbed lives? It’s like a warehouse of humanity, the equivalent of the Museum of Mankind, only with living species that aren’t yet completely extinct, don’t you find it interesting? I noticed a woman bobbing up and down on the edge of the dance floor. Her head was shaved, and she was wearing an Indian skirt and military boots. I found it strange to see thick hair under her armpits and on her legs, it had been ages since I had last seen a hairy woman. No woman had hair now on any part of her body and I had almost forgotten they had any.

Suddenly Marta cried, hey, I’ve just had a brilliant idea, how about doing the interview right now? I looked at her and said, my God, you work late, to tell the truth I’m tired, but she insisted, I won’t tape anything or make notes, it’s just a first approach, I’ll use my memory.

And she began: why do you write? The question fell like a stone into water and I was not sure what to say, why do I write? or rather, why did I write before, when I wrote? To tell the truth, I do not have any very clear idea of why I do it, so I said, I don’t know, but she insisted, there must be some reason, it may be that you don’t see it immediately but there must be one, think and you’ll find it, it’ll come, we’re in no hurry. She asked Rashid the same question, how about you, why do you write? And, although he seemed more distracted than I was, he replied without hesitation: because it would be much worse if I didn’t. I was impressed and said to myself, damn it, now that’s a convincing answer.

Marta smiled and looked down, a sign that she was pleased with the sentence and wanted to remember it, then continued: and what would be much worse? Rashid, who must have thought he had already won the game, looked surprised, but said, my life would be much worse, and the lives of the people around me, and probably literature.

Marta replied: do you consider yourself a great writer? I’m not the one who thinks that, said Rashid, it’s the press and my readers who consider me a great writer, at least that’s what they say to my face. They may be lying but that’s what they say, and I believe them, because nobody is forcing them; my books are successful in a dozen languages and that must mean something, mustn’t it? He took a long slug of whiskey and said, I don’t want to appear arrogant, I don’t think my books are important, but I like them, that’s why I write and publish them. Other people think they’re important.

Again Marta looked at me, as if to say, it’s your turn, do you have your answer yet?

I can think of a thousand reasons not to write, I said, in fact I haven’t written for quite some time now; things like illness or boredom, irritation or fatalism, or remembering that all human enterprises are doomed to disappear, however long they last. . Thinking that doesn’t exactly inspire one to write.

And are you going to start writing again now? she asked, and I said, perhaps I’ll try a new genre, biography for example, this conference may be a sign.

And why would you start writing again?

There are things we do without any reason or for the most trivial of reasons, I said: going out and walking along the road during the rush hour and looking at people in their cars; showing up in midafternoon at the box office of a movie theater or browsing in bookshops or sitting on a balcony watching people on their way home, and repeating to yourself in your mind, why am I doing all this? why today did I walk to a bookshop or go to a movie theater and just as I got to the door decide not to go in? We do things that have no meaning or only acquire meaning over time, perhaps because deep down we want to change our lives at the last moment, when everything appears fixed, like those roulette players who one second before the close of bets nervously shift a tower of chips, from one number to another, and then bite their fingers; because we’re searching for some kind of intense experience, or because we want to be someone else, yes, to be someone else, there you have your answer: I write to be someone else.