Night Notes

unpublished, 2002

It is hard to write about something you do not remember. I had not read a book cover to cover in a long time. Reading has become a professional habit, I read all the time, but within a finite horizon. Then, two days ago, I finished a 499-page novel in one sitting. It is Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Someone whom I could well call a companero bought it in a secondhand shop. “Read this” he said, and handed it to me.

My eyes are bloodshot, I am almost dizzy from reading, I call my wife to break the news. She has already read it a long time ago, then she declares in a disparaging way “they made a movie, it was in Istanbul too…” This is a woman who really reads, and does not have any patience for the business I am in. “It lacks stories”, she says at times, or “I am just a cook” at others. She pretends not to comprehend. But, to get back to “Smilla”, I underline passages such as “I have lost the sense of how to tackle a believing European”; “It is not healthy for the tightrope walker to be misunderstood by the person who is holding the rope”; or “The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it”. There is nothing more gratifying for me than stumbling upon something that solidifies my wandering thoughts and embryonic speculations. This novel is full of them. I could shoot myself for not having gobbled it up back in 1993.

Today, I spent a long time in the bookshop, not in the art section but in the fiction. I’m looking for a catharsis as good as the one I had. I walk out of the shop with a new book. But why am I already dead sure that whatever I buy is going to make me abandon the pursuit of novels once more?

I get a final email from Roberto (Pinto), he is giving me yet another chance, this time I will comply. “To put a text together has always been harder”, writes Şener Özmen at the end of his tale in the exhibition. My wife would agree. Why then, every time Felix Gonzales-Torres is mentioned, does she look away and her eyes water? I have to admit, I have never been interested in art that did not have something to say, and did not say it with the finest dosage and substance. It was Sun Ra who said, “History is His story, it is not My story. So, what is Your story?”