I would sit at the bar and always order the same thing, a glass of gin that I would sip slowly, taking distance between one drink and the next. It was the 90s and you could still listen to good music in the clubs of that time. I stopped at Ragtime, in Malasaña, on Ruiz Street, if I remember correctly. While I drank the gin, my memory made its way through the smoke and the music, completing stories to the beat of the songs that came out of the speakers. Jazz took on a new dimension in that place.
Billie Holiday sang I’m A Fool To Want You with all his perversity, dragging his throat through the dust before ending his days in a seedy room. Charlie Parker blew the metal until he reached the heat of hell itself and I wanted to be like Jack Kerouac, taking that nervous and syncopated rhythm to a burning role. How deluded I was at that time, imitating the beatniks in everything except the most important thing: his writing, his way of linking ideas and actions; I was very young, damn it, and I had not yet lived long enough for what I had experienced to ferment in the form of literature. I don’t know if I explain myself, but I anticipated a future full of bullets, dead ends and broken glass. Towns of drugs and scrap metal, sharp-tipped syringes and sawed-off cannons. Something was germinating, but it still needed time.
Over the years I understood that novels are made with memories that have already passed, but they are also made with those that have not yet passed, with memories that are yet to come, thus anticipating a future that is now present. Because only those who dare to imagine a fiction are exposed to anticipating futures that they will one day inhabit.
Without going any further, my latest novel, mermaid meatI wrote it from Cádiz and set it in Galicia, in the same place where I now live, the Costa da Morte. I wrote it without suspecting in the slightest that a series of chances would bring me to the same scenarios as its protagonist, Andres Bouza, whose marked destiny makes him cross the threshold of the door of an old tavern that I thought I invented, but which It was already invented, because what I did was anticipate my own journey. This is the same tavern from which I now write these things.
Memory and desire are the ingredients with which stories are built, but, for those stories to come to life, music is also needed, and wrapped in the smoke of memory I return to Ragtime while Duke Ellington plays over the speakers. with his orchestra playing Far East Suitea slow song that I savor with short sips of my gin, closing my eyes and thinking that, many years later, I will be walking in a port at the end of the world, looking for a place where I can believe that I am Jack Kerouac, and have a drink listening to Billie Holyday while singing slowly I’m A Fool To Want Youdragging his voice along a path of dust where sex and death are confused.
#Fool
