2014-03-18 To S.

2014-03-18

Hello Sergio,

Today, I remembered the girl who cheated, that you cheated, that we cheated last year in Barcelona. It is sad to think that I do not remember his name for sure. After meditating for a while, his surnames came to mind: B. B. I have the name of L. stuck in my mind, but I do not have the feeling that it is that. It is intuition, but it may be L… I am not sure … (In any case, I have learned, I am learning to live and move forward without answers. To try to grope, looking for a light that no one assures me that I will find, or even exists). I have remembered her because I have been talking to a Chilean man in his fifties, I estimate, about another girl: M.. Do you remember the proud and independent girl that I mentioned to you a couple of months ago? It’s her: M.. Now we are in a stagnant situation, or not? My last interaction with her was one afternoon, after trying to be nice, she reacted badly and became rude. I went to the library and wrote him a letter. I don’t remember very well, but I think in the letter I said that I was aware that it was all my fault, that I’m the one who has to learn … I’m not even sure she has read it. I don’t care too much. A few weeks ago, I made the decision of not interacting with her. I’m waiting for her to do something. I am cold, I am silent, I am immobile, I am waiting. She looks at me. I detect a certain sadness in her gaze. But it does anything.

Tonight, the Chilean, who knows more by old than by Chilean, has opened my eyes a little more. “Maria is afraid of falling in love with you.” I believe it. Just like L. B. had it before we cheated on her. Both are dependent, or were, or claim to be. Like L., M. also suffered abuse from her ex-partner. He didn’t hit her as much, but he humiliated her, isolated her and nullified her as a person. As I did with L.. But I have a certain morality. Lesson I learned the other day: If you play to be bad, you have to be bad, to the end. With L. E. (FUCK! I just remembered her name !!). E. With E. I couldn’t be bad until the end. I have morality, I believe in the human being and I am a good person. At the bottom and in the essence of my being goodness, compassion and humanity are beating. Now, that I have remembered her name I see much clearer. My mind has been unlocked; I can think again. I don’t want you to give me advice about M., or Ag. (the Italian girl you told me to forget), or Ma. (another girl I’m meeting). I want to share it with you because you are my friend, you are the person I usually talk to about girls. But now that I’ve unlocked it, I can open myself. Open to you. Give myself.

I’m going to leave this letter with the same structure, so you can appreciate my change, the change of my mind. The human mind is wonderful just like this. (In other circumstances I would rewrite it and omit certain parts and focus on others, but I don’t want to do it this time.) We will talk about the girls, but I prefer to leave it for later. For now, just know that I am finding myself. That I am being honest, that I stop deceiving myself and deceiving others. That I’m a little emptier. I will tell you more details in the future.

Let’s go to what interests us. Following a Facebook post you published some time ago, I noticed your intellectual capacity and as a writer has much more potential than you show. I think that that potential is being wasted. I know that you are pure Spanish fury: anger and rage. The post I’m talking about is the one in which you said that Franco has delayed Spain and left it at the bottom of Europe, if not the world. It’s not that you’re right, it’s that you irradiate rightness. But people need arguments. Although they have already been said, not all people have heard them. So some need you to remind them. “Battles are won with the tip of the … pen?” said Becquer, maybe. No, I don’t think so, it sounds more like Quevedo, opposite of Góngora. Anyway, I don’t care about the dates, the quotes, the references and the sources24. Because right now I’m writing by hand. I write directly from my mind. From the deficiencies of my intellect. For you. To mobilize your neurons, your brain. To awaken the Spanish beast that you carry inside. The beast that the technology of the 21st century is containing; the beasts that Franco in the 20th century imprisoned and/or murdered; the beast numbed by culture and tradition; the Spanish beast that is waking up from the siesta.

I am writing to awaken the fury of a country of writers, of creators, of thinkers. What France was in the Revolution of 1789; but we don’t need pitchforks. What Franco avoided by exiling Machado and Alberti, assassinating Lorca and locking up Miguel Hernández. We are the language of elegance and beauty. Of conquest, courtship, lust, and irony. We are blood transformed into ink. We are ideas that want to be heard. Do not think that you should not write because what I am telling you has already been said by other people in the past. You may not have heard it until now. Or, if you had already heard it, you had not seen it this way. You hadn’t heard me. From you to you. From hand to hand. From pen to pen. From friend to friend. Direct communication.

Communication with fury, courage and anger. We will resurrect our future. We are going to resurrect the future that humanity deserves. The future that the past has shot in the neck. We are going to populate the planet with free human beings, thinkers, writers, philosophers, scientists. We are going to get the population moving. Let’s sit them down and make them write ideas instead of WhatsApp messages.

We will travel to the past. I want to resurrect what Hitler murdered. I want to see Germany full of Gestalt psychologists and not economists. I want to bring Lewin from the United States. I want to return him to Poland. I want to take him to where he was born, to the land from which he had to flee, for thinking and for being a Jew. I want Spain to demonstrate that the Republic is something that the Spanish people chose, and that Franco snatched and avoided imposing on us a monarchy that we had decided we did not want. I love people writing like Juan Ramón Jiménez, like Cervantes. I love Severo Ochoa, I want Spanish and non-American Nobel Prize winners. I love Ortega y Gasset, I love Unamuno, even Pío Baroja. The 20th century has been one of South American writers who received a decade or two of dictatorship at most. Franco has killed several generations of writers, thinkers, scientists, philosophers. 35 years of darkness and death, plus the years in which we are dragging its shadow. Gray years still. Little by little clearing up.

We are a people of fury made word. Anger transformed into ideas, essays, poems, speeches, letters, novels. We have a splendid, fabulous, fantastic, delicious and enriching language, varied, alive, pure, unalterable and changing, malleable, transformed and transforming. Castilian Spanish gives us the perfect way to express our ideas with beauty, elegance and determination; with seriousness and irony; with power and with rage; with respect, tact and delicacy.25 It is our Weapon of Mass Destruction. Americanism. The Castilian unsheathes the pen and poses it with love and hate at one time, on the virgin paper; to disembowel his thought and transform them into divine grace, hypnotized by the swaying of his ideas when they dance next to the ink that stains the sheet, marked now, eternally. This is our weapon. Writing.

Now I want to see how you use it. I want a letter. I want the best of you. I don’t care if you talk about Franco, about altruistic reasons, about the reason why the Spanish people continue to take a nap, why we are a hopeless people, about the infinite alternatives we have. I want you to write to me, to hate me and love me, to give me your fruit, to give birth to thoughts, to shape the conglomerate of ideas in your mind. I know that your head boils and your heart smokes when you watch the news, when you hear the talk show experts of everything-logy who do not control anything, because they never stopped and wrote. Only speak. They have not built their own thinking.

I want rage. I have many more things to tell you, but I don’t want to overwhelm you with everything the first day.

I hope you are well. I would like to know from you.

A huge hug,

Carlos

Leuven, March 18, 2014

  1. Actually, I was referring to “The pen is mightier than the sword.” written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton↩

  2. I am aware of the irony of translating and publishing this letter in English instead of in Spanish. Time to time.↩