Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

Of course, as was only to be expected, I did not find any of my friends, but I did see a series of names that drew my attention, and I copied them into my notebook:

Leonidas Kosztolányi.Hungary, 62 years old, antiquarian, specialist in 17th-century rolled plate glass and marquetry. Lives in Budapest. His most recent works are The Life and Achievements of Baron Sarim Bupcka, The Calends of Ptolemy, Return from Tasmania, and a Dictionary of Brevity.

Edgar Miret Supervielle.France, 64 years old, bibliophile, specializing in Jewish religious texts. Has spent much time in Israel, Lithuania, and New York. A great lover of chess, he is the author of Life of Boris Alekhine and From Nabokov to Stefan Zweig: Writers and Chess . On other subjects, he has published The Essential Thought of Ben Yehuda and a three-volume biography of Herod Antipas.

All of them had sent extensive résumés, full of details of travels and stays abroad. Mine by comparison was fairly concise, just a list of books and the few jobs I had done.

The shortest was the following:

Kevin Lafayette O’Reilly.Island of Santa Lucia. Author of Memories of the Purple Ghost . I am black.

And the most eye-catching:

Sabina Vedovelli.Italy. Porn actress and founder of Eve Studios. Among her many films are The Graveyard of Lost Sex and the trilogy Screw Me, Screw Me, I Don’t Want This to End! (sketches for a “Pornography of the Left”). Author of Kevin McPhee: The Legend, Marcello Deckers or the Modern Priapus and Aaron Sigurd, the Twelve-and-a-Half-Inch King .

I looked her up on the internet and found 320,000 results. There was a website of her production company, which listed her movies, and another that seemed to be her official website, the name of which, translated from Italian, would be something like www.letmesuckit.com. It contained photographs, short videos, and a section for short stories, entitled Holocaust of the Hymen . I opened one from Mexico, which read as follows:

I was by the side of the swimming pool, wearing only a tiny G-string that plunged into my shaved cunt and no top because they leave ugly marks on the back. Frank was swimming, taking no notice of me until he came closer and said, what’s up, Mireyita? I turned without saying anything, just stuck my ass in his direction, I wanted him to see that I was still a virgin and get the message, the idiot. Frank emerged from the water, opened my legs and thrust it into me, all the way, or as they say in Sinaloa, all the way up to the glottis and back again. It didn’t hurt because I was wet, and I’m not referring to the turquoise water of the pool but my own fountain, because with his muscles and his pale skin and his mummy’s-boy face he made me sopping wet, and I would have given my life for his wretched cock to be ten or twenty inches longer and reach all the way up to my duodenum. Then, when he came, he shot so much spunk into me that I was dripping for the next three days.

Apart from the writings, there were photographs of Sabina Vedovelli. In one of them a man had his arm up her anus and she was smiling and biting on a white nurse’s cap. The man was wearing a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck. It was going to be strange, meeting her at the conference.

Let me continue with the most striking of the delegates. In some cases, this will serve as an introduction to future characters, insofar as time, as in the novels of Balzac, can be measured in pages.

Moisés Kaplan.Colombia, 64 years old. Historian, philatelist, and stamp collector. Divides his time between New York and Tel Aviv. His best known books are: From Palestine to the Aburrá Valley, Biography of Antón Ashverus, and a book on grammar entitled Against the Diphthong and the Hiatus .

José Maturana.Miami, 56 years old, former evangelical pastor, former convict, former drug addict. Served seven prison sentences for armed robbery in Florida and Charleston before finding the light with the help of Reverend Walter de la Salle, founder of the Ministry of Mercy, a church and advice center for drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, depressives, the suicidal, the violent, the antisocial, pedophiles, and other deviants who wish to find redemption through faith. Among his works are Miracle in Moundsville, Christ Stopped on Crack Drive, and The Redeemers of South Miami .

By that point, I had lost all sense of reality. The delegates and their bizarre lives seemed straight out of a play by Tennessee Williams, one of those waterfront dramas where everyone is drunk and desperate, women and men endlessly lust after each other, and everything is profoundly tragic, but I also thought: this is where I belong, when you come down to it, with my illness and my solitude and my novels, what will the former pastor think when he reads my biographical sketch? The ICBM was right to invite me, even though, and there was no doubt about it now, they had made a mistake, a big mistake.

Just before dawn — staring up at the wreaths of smoke from the cigarillo I was forbidden to smoke — I told myself that perhaps the people in the ICBM saw something in my work of which I was unaware, something that did have a connection with biography and exceptional lives and might be about to manifest itself, like so many things we ourselves are unaware of but are obvious to other people: the white whales or Moby Dicks we carry inside us and cannot see, and so I told myself, I will have to be very much on the alert. At that hour of the night, I came to the conclusion that I would not miss the conference for anything in the world, that I would be there from the first day to the last.

The next day I woke up very late, almost noon. On my desk table, next to the telltale ashtray, I found a bottle of gin with almost nothing left in it — I did not think to mention that before — and I realized that much of what I had been thinking (the reference to Moby Dick, for example) was due to that perverse analyst and futurologist to which Malcolm Lowry refers in one of his poems, when he says, “The only hope is the next drink,” good old Lowry, but anyway, it was time to continue thinking about the topics to be treated at the conference, so after a light snack I went back to work, and in the course of the next few hours I looked at books by Voltaire, Goethe, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , which I have never read, but which other people have told me about and from which I remembered a quotation I could not find; plus, as always, the diaries of Julio Ramón Ribeyro and his extraordinary Prosas apátridas , as well as Cioran and Fernando González, the “philosopher from somewhere else.”

I read and read, jumping from one book to another, and as often happens to me I ended up rereading poetry by Gil de Biedma and paragraphs from Graham Greene, two or three maxims by Cortázar and verses by León de Greiff, the great León, who had the courage to write the following:

Lady Night, give me Sleep. May my Weariness sleep long

And I with it, (Oh, Night! Let us sleep forever:

Never wake us, tomorrow or ever!)

And so I went on, book by book, phrase by phrase, from Epictetus to Les Murray, from Musil to Panait Istrati, from Bufalino to Malraux, sometimes only a paragraph or a sentence, and then I thought again about the biographical genre and took from the shelf Primo Levi by Ian Thomson, and Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life , by Howard Sounes, the life of poor lonely old Bukowski, with his monstrous acne — worse than mine, pitted with craters as my cheeks are — his alcoholism and his love of desperate people and the dark corners of bars. Time passed, and the sky of Rome was filling with dark, terrifying black holes, like something out of a painting by Caravaggio, and I started to wonder if those written lives were real or if their only reality was in the writing itself, the fact that they had been turned into words, into filled pages destined for people almost as desperate as themselves, sadly normal people who populate this world of illusions, clocks, and threatening sunsets like the one that now appeared outside my window, over Via degli Scipioni, and reminded me that it was time to go down and have dinner.