The Blatt & Ríos publishing house has just published Alcancía – Ida, the first part of Rosa Chacel’s diaries. Ana Mazzoni, the always kind and efficient person in charge of the B&R press, offered to send me the book, but I proudly replied that I had the ida and vuelta together in a single volume, volume 9 of her Complete Works, published in Valladolid in 2004. We had it because at one time Flavia had become a fan of Mario Levrero, who in La novela luminosa speaks fervently of Chacel and cites her as an inspiration. So Flavia became curious about Chacel and found the famous diaries. When I saw them, I was surprised that this thousand-page volume was the ninth in a collection. But Chacel, born in Valladolid in 1898 and died in Madrid at the age of 96 after living in Paris, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and New York, was a prolific author of novels, essays and poetry. Although, as in the case of Gombrowicz, the diaries seem to be the most enduring part of his work.
I never fully understood Levrero’s merits, much praised by people who know, and I hadn’t read Chacel either, so I thought the time had come to do so with both. So I put aside the thick hardcover volume to pick it up again on the next occasion. Before that, I read the prologue in which a friend of his, Javier Marías, highlights the tone of permanent complaint that runs through the writing, which makes it akin in its literary neurosis to Levrero, whose character I had found unbearable at the time. But literature is made of crazy people, so that didn’t discourage me. However, I had one problem: when I decided to get down to the task, the book had disappeared from the places I usually frequented.
Our library is a ferocious mess, mainly because the books have long since outgrown the shelves and are piled up in different parts of the house. Still, I am usually able to find a book based on the memory of the last time I had it in my hands. The problem with Chacel was that I couldn’t walk very far from the reading places (the bed, the table, the armchair). And yet it wasn’t there. I looked and looked, but to no avail, although it is a very conspicuous piece, not a little book that can be misplaced mixed in with others. I thought I might have moved it by mistake to a section of books I’ve already read, and that wasn’t it either. Then it occurred to me that I might have forgotten it in a café where I also read. No luck there either.
Authoritarians don’t like this.
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a fundamental pillar of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe they are the owners of the truth.
For a week I realized that a worrying sign of aging was not being able to find a book in the library. The only way I could think of to counteract those bad thoughts was to write them down, and that’s where this note came from. Only yesterday, when I had already decided to do it, Rosa Chacel winked at me from a library whose books had nothing to do with her. It seems that, a serious mistake, I had put it there to protect it from an unwanted mess. I didn’t have time to read it in these hours, but as I turned the pages I saw that the author spoke of the cultural world of Buenos Aires in the 50s, of Borges, of the people of Sur and of many other characters, from a haughty periphery from which she allowed herself to rant against Simone de Beauvoir, and I thought that this was a point in favor of devoting more time to it.
