Thursday, June 21, 2012

Just human

Tons and tons of changes have taken place since 1979, the year Torcuato Luca de Tena published Los Renglones Torcidos de Dios. The way the novel is written takes you back in time. The writing is formal, clean, sentences start and finish, characters are cordial, even when upset. As you turn the pages, cigarettes and the almighty mixture of bleach and smoke smell clung to hospitals and jails are given off. Martin Amis would classified the novel as type A, because of the prominence of the plot. The plot, by the way, is a winding road, with surprises at every corner, but not outlandish. Characters are closed to death, however, and perhaps this is the only clear distinction between the world of the mad and that of us -the sane... Setting the circumstances and the routine at the asylum aside, the fellowship of daily death and violence are like the two immovable and gigantic moons that tells that you are in a different planet, i.e.: the reality of the psychiatric hospital does not belong to the real world. Death comes to the mental patients always unnaturally, in the form of suicide or homicide. Evil inhabits their hearts and is ready to jump outside violently. Cruelty, knifes, sharp rocks, gripping hands and the menace of rape are all faces of the same primitive weapon of violence.


Despite the story and the atmosphere, Los Renglones Torcidos de Dios is an entertaining novel. It is harsh at times, and tender and moving at occasions. Always gripping. In tidy writing, Luca de Tena describes the functioning of the mental institution and their characters vividly, brings the drama of the lunatic, their actions and the scenery they create clearly and, sometimes, punches you in the nose, although not too peevishly. The characters in "the Cage", for example, are hardly human, but the ink of the author does not dramatize them. The big erratas of God in writing the lives of Ofelia "the Gorilla", "the Cyclops" and the "Hanger-Woman" (a woman without spinal cord) do not need much drama that what it takes to write it. The portrait is classic, we can say, and the style consists of reporting it without hallucinogens, like Courbet did perhaps in his paintings. Like Vallejo-Najera wrote in his books. Despite the title of the novel -out of the statement of one of the characters, Sergio Zapatero, the "Astrologer" who, by the way, was finally brought down to death by his disease- there seems not to be any grievance against God, but just a respect to His Mystery.

Los Renglones Torcidos de Dios is an humanistic manifesto. In the prologue, Vallejo-Najera states that confinement in the mental institution is the main motive of the novel, but I can see much more than this. Alice Gould is dismissed by unanimity in spite of the fact that all doctors knew she is paranoiac. And, in return, after months of determined fight to escape the institution, Alice comes back to it within 12 hours of her departure because she has found happiness there or, at least, the path to it. The last two chapters are entitled "the truth of Alice Gould" and "the other truth", respectively.

This is quite significant, that is, that happiness is not reserve to those who are sane or, better, that you do not need to be sane in order to reach a happy state of satisfaction. And also, that humanity is more than logic and reason, to the point that truth is not an absolute value. I come this way to a theme I was fascinated with years ago: probably Love and Its Mystery, so unique to the human condition, is the only absolute value. Everything else is dispensable. Death and, even worse, Deterioration -the condition to lose your prime without a purpose or success, does not really matter. In those days, I found this argument quite definitive to understand what "God is Love" really means.

In the same way that a man and a woman, extenuated beggars, without a penny, ill and hopeless share their emptiness in something resembling love, the stream of Life is not abhorrent to the inhabitants of the mental institution. They love, hate, cry, laugh, get upset and disappointed, feel euphoric or terribly depressive; from time to time, they commit themselves or plan among themselves to walk around, to look through a window or to harm somebody; they are obedient or naughty, they can be convinced or not, they are also able to trust and follow and they can plot against. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. They get better or they get worse. In a word, they are human. Alice -and most of the sane as well- fall soon infatuated by this soil, and her happiness roots down and blossoms in it.

Sometime in 2001 or 2002, C. and M. did their practical training as psychologists in the Psychiatric Hospital of Salamanca, and I come to remember those days now because they use to bring back home drawings or letters that the patients did for them and spent hours talking about their habits, antics or manias, even about their hands, the way they laughed or the bad words they used. They seemed fascinated about the human side of it. In the same way, the story of Alice Gould is all about it.

And this is why this book is just human.

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Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Spread

I pictured Antonis Samaras in ITV last night speaking in English. His voice went on but my mind followed its own discourse, like a voice-over above the action: "he speaks English", I thought, in wonder. The spread of Spain's debt has reached a historical mark today, but I really doubt that 10 % of Spanish population can tell you that spread is called "spread" in English. The case is quite different from that of Greece. My friend E. commented a few weeks ago: "even the 90 year-old Greek men chatter the spread this, the spread that". The retrospective antics of the Spaniard towards the Shakespeare's language is well portrait in this example, I reckon.

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Sunday, June 17, 2012

Martin Amis AM

I have ready to be read Money (1984) _It will be my first Martin Amis' novel. With this said, that is, that I have no account nor prejudices of this writer, let me comment on the interview I assisted at The Bloomsbury Theater last Monday, An Evening with Martin Amis. And let me call this commentary AM, that is: Martin Amis, ante meridian.

Amis is an unhappy man, I am afraid. He mentioned something about his wife during the conversation, and I remember I thought "God keep her close to him for many years". He seems just the man who does not want to be alone, and getting old is all about it. After so many years of creative writing, controversy, of having one's name in all manuals of English literature around the world, life has spare no recognition, and the trip is now more hostile than ever, looking like a stiff road, across the endless desert, without trees. "Is there anything there after all my searches", Amis might wonder, and my answer is this: "Praise God to spare your wife next to you for ever".

He argued during the course of the interview that evil is more dramatic and effective for the novel that goodness; that mean and distorted characters are far more juicy and beloved to the reader than the virtuous ones; that perhaps only Tolstoy has been able to "swing" with happiness, being tragedy and pain the true motors of drama. From the audience the question came: "have you thought of giving happiness a try in your novels?" But, the answer is a self-evident rhetoric question: what kind of happiness might convey an unhappy writer?

I disliked and profoundly disagreed with his standpoint about the United States lifestyle. Someone asked: "what do you like about New York? What don't you like?". He does like the weather (sic) and he does not like the taxes, the private sector, and all this classical string of things. I guess he has traveled around the world even long before I was born, but only recently he has lived for hardly a year in a country he seems not to know and that he despises as a refugee. Why did he abandon England? Moral decrepitude? He missed the whole point. During the interview, he told in certain detail that when someone phones you in the States by mistake, he would say: "Oh, terribly sorry... Excuse me and have a lovely afternoon". In the UK, without uttering a word, the person would hang up. Apparently, the English audience found this account laughable. I guess Amis made it laughable. But this is exactly the most rotten point. The first two words you learn in any language is "please" and "thank you". You heard of the English gentleman, of modals and manners, but I feel this is becoming history, a long-time forgotten tradition. Ideas to Change the World: Come and Tell Us your Idea to Change the World. This is the type of megalomania that affects the English world. It is quite simple: teach back your children to say "please", and to say "thank you".

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Saturday, June 16, 2012

An Italian romance

Once upon the holy times, the skies split open and an immense thunder shook the Earth. The Holy Ghost came down upon the Head of Him and remained in Him. Years later, in the moment of His dead, the walls of the Temple cracked apart and in the midst of a deafening storm, the Holy Ghost departed the Man and dissipated among men, in the same way a precious and costly perfume diffuses in the air after the container glass falls down and breaks against the floor and scatters in a thousand pieces.

The essence of a culture is in the hearts of their individuals. The glass of perfume is on them, not upon the Head of any abstruse Idea of State, not behind the heroes, the wars of independence or the National Anthems. The path of a nation is always sweet-bitter and its contrivances, deceiving, arguable and disappointing. The land of ideas and identities is barren and the faith in a big destiny, a big trouble maker. But the essence of a culture runs warm in the blood of its individuals and carries on the truth of the present and the immediate past; the lies and violence of the mythological times, ages past, are left behind, it must be!, all the pretensions of the cold Intellect. The contact among individuals, cheek to cheek or heart to heart, the exchange and dissipation of this warmth spirit streaming underneath, the fire of friendship, it is all worthy and real, a true fest of Initiation, like those of the Canadian Waxarika and the Colombian Kogui. Like Indiana Jones on the verge of drinking the blood of the Alliance.

If someone asks me what I know about Italy, for example, I could mention the mafia of the garbage (the first act of corruption of PSOE after Franco in Spain was, precisely, an issue with garbage illegal contracts in Alicante), but mostly I would say that Veronica Baldaccini is from Sardinia, pretty and passionate, who always wanted to do what she does now; that Balotelli, perhaps the only black guy in Italy, was abandoned in Palermo when he was 2 and, later on, fostered by somebody in the North and that he speaks perfect Italian. That serves me to locate Palermo in the map. I would be able to say, also, that the pasta orechiette, a sort of small patches resembling small ears, is original from Puglia, and that you have two varieties of Pecorino cheese, the Roman and the Sardo. The salty and more matured Roman variety is to be grated only.

If you prepare pasta with broccoli you should not add the salt until the broccoli is done; the same water is used to cook the pasta, and broccoli takes ages to boil in salty water and all water would be gone by then. I would not share here the secret to cook pasta al dente, not the simple but magic touch of mantecare, not the way to apply it to a chicken or prawn risotto: it is a culinary secret. I could also say that Robert De Niro speaks perfect Sicilian in The Godfather and that Al Pacino accent is crap. I could follow a conversation linking the recent earthquakes in Bologna with some drilling works in course and I would point out to the entertaining data of the Instituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia  (INGV). Then, we could comment on the predictions of Giampaolo Giuliani and his method to track quakes faster and more efficient and his story: what is it true? What scam?

I can see a group of serious and dour faces playing the Allegro ma non troppo movement of a simphony by Dvorak, Beethoven or Weber and, on the other corner of the room, I can see V., an Italian woman, laughing happily, hardly believing that serious minds could have just invented such a term: it sounds like a funny joke. I can see the conductor giving instructions: hey, boys! Allegro.... Ma non troppo, ehhh? I could also pretend to be illustrated by mentioning that the school boys in Italy read over and over again The Divine Comedy and that in IT terminology, the computer who first spreads a virus is called untori, word that Alessandro Manzoni used to refer to the people falling into the claws of the plague in I promessi sposi (1822). I could tell you a fantastic story related to Riccardo Cocciante's Margherita and I could sing to you the first two verses of Non e buona by Adriano Celentano. And I could save to my ears the details of intonation, sounds and interjections, which makes everything so alive and sparky. And so on. When I come back to Rome, I will go to Il Necci for lunch or, perhaps, for supper and drinks at dusk, and I would remember the connection of this place with Pasolini, and everything would taste better, more real.

And this is enough for me... . The most valuable knowledge in the world, and the most valuable experience. Italy is becoming a blossoming romance. And many other fragmented pieces of knowledge (the wonderful Roman Stories of Moravia, the History of Indro Montanelli, the poignant criticism of Fallaci, the scene of Anna Magnani bellowing from a stall of fruits, the Italian cinema, its forbidden beauties and impossible monsters, the songs of Tozzi, the festival di Sanremo and Luigi Tenco's Mi sono innamorato di te, the AC Milan of Van Basten, Gullit and Maldini, and the stories of D.M., the priest, riding a Vespa and "smuggling" bottles of wine into the Seminar in the 70s), become tastier, burning and magnificent when connected with the little pieces of human experience which brought them to my knowledge: memories in a heart.

Baldaccini, Donadoni e un sconosciuto (per me)

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Thursday, June 7, 2012

Oppressive Moscow

Let me try to remember... Apart from one or two Agatha Christie's books, The Maltese Falcon ages ago, and  one of the stories of Nero Wolfe two summers ago, my portfolio of detective novels ends with Martin Cruz Smith's Three Stations... Yes, I think so. I tried once something by Ray Bradbury (requiescat in pace), but desisted. It is not my cup of tea, I guess. However, this Smith's story of Arkady Renko has the power to amaze and gobble up the reader like a huge anaconda: it keeps and leaves him completely dumbfounded almost since the first page.

Renko is probably the only real hero in Moscow: that is, a totally damaged and wronged being, but standing, always standing. Vodka, hangovers, insomnia, loneliness; he is loveless and senseless, without any purpose. The atmosphere of Moscow breathed from the pages of this novel is oppressive and, in the dark of it, Renko is like a spot of diffusive and frail, but persistent light. He is the last link in the evolutionary chain, desperately clung to the dregs of what human beings used to be. Moscow is the palace of evil and inhumanity. It is one of those inhospitable places on the Earth's Inferno. Unbreathable. I can see the white and mythical snow: black and muddy. Trodden. Disposed of. That is Putin's Moscow: a deceitful mica Muscovite trodden and corrupted into a dark piece of biotite, black as jet stone. In such a hell, girls under 15 work as whores after school with the consent of their parents; people shoot people and get shot in return; indomitable dogs tear off somebody's neck skin; educated men pay for sex with kids; boy gangs piss-mark their territory in the Metro underworld; hustlers become mafia; people steal or disposed of three-week babies; mothers attempt to murder along with their sons. In this Moscow, ether fills your lungs.There is no escape. Guys like Renko are miracles, one-in-a-billion chance, even gifted with the power to restore life or fight to death against cold-blooded assassins and win.

At the end of the novel, Renko brings Maya her baby girl. In the eyes of the heartless bitch -fate which is tattooed on her- light leaps on. And one realizes that Renko, the miracle, has created the impossible: hope.