Cover photo: Almudena Jiménez
Continues unfaltering, Andrés Trapiello pursues his zeal in the song and recounting of the days, in the minutiae of the hours, in time (time also paints, as Goya said) in his twenty-fifth installment, De todo tiene, which is now, as much in craft as in joy.
Faithful to the Machado quotation “where will the road lead”, he continues guiding us without rush, for pure pleasure, along Extremaduran paths, through Madrid’s Rastro — more the Mira el Sol street than Ribera de Curtidores — or along the already languid and forgetful Cuesta de Moyano. What a good memory he pays to there for Alfonso Riudavets and Conchita, also a bookseller on the same curb, to that being and not being together, how he recounts that constant affectionate complaint they shared. Trapiello bears witness to Riudavets’ character — indeed he possessed it — with bales of books tied with string, bound, dusty, his quick judgment when buying or rejecting bundles of books that came to him, the prices for passersby fixed instantly and at random (by the way, that man owes to him the chance discovery of the dossier “Delitos contra la Seguridad del Estado” about the authors of the murder of two Falangists in 1945 on Madrid’s calle Ávila, which was the seed of his La noche de los Cuatro Caminos).
Does Trapiello account for all Machados that have ever existed in the world? Be welcome. They are nine pages where one finally discerns who is who in the family and some twists that come to clarify for a puzzled reader, both as metaphor and reality, what happened ninety years ago. With the pretext of the arrival in Seville from Chile of two daughters of José, Antonio’s younger brother, Trapiello pulls at the thread until he unmakes the skein of so many, pausing in Manuel and his vicissitudes in Burgos on the day of the Uprising, where he went for the birthday of his wife’s sister who was a nun, what a coincidence.
Let us look back to the first paragraph of the first installment of this Salón de pasos perdidos, which was titled in 1990 El gato encerrado. As if yesterday: “This morning the Rastro had the grandeur of the winter days. Dawn had barely broken and the first stalls were already unfurling. All the things laid out along the sidewalk seemed rusted, junk, old brass; even books carried a hint of debris.” The same style, or perhaps no style at all, which is the best style. Without any pretensions, which is how one travels the farthest, or finds the most pleasure. How well one writes when one does not want to write well, said Umbral and is supported by Landero. In that same prologue and on the following page, Trapiello slips: “I care little for diaries that resemble the Gotha.” He has fulfilled that. And also that he rises every Sunday — one must falter at least once in a while, few exceptions — at seven thirty, observing this maxim: “To seek books one must do so on an empty stomach, like executioners.”
He does not mince words nor hide his artistic tastes. If at one moment he maintains “In art, what matters most is what it seems, more than what it is,” he had previously stabbed Rafael Moneo for the Kursaal in San Sebastián (not so much for other buildings by the architect); neither do Chillida’s sculptures nor Weiwei’s work enlarge him, “a bully of art.” Picasso also does not escape. He does pause at Les rêveurs, a huge painting by the Impressionist Henri Martin in which several bearded men, clad in coats and hats, walk slowly on a soft festive afternoon by the Garonne as it passes through Toulouse: “A provincial painter painting the province.”
In this volume there is room for everything: detail and humor, meticulous description, the art of bargaining in Madrid’s Rastro about a supposed Sancha, and the line that arrives shod ( “the air of Madrid kills a man and does not extinguish the lamp” ) or the deftness with which men on a cold, foggy morning light a small fire at the foot of an olive tree, not forgetting the slips of the printed text, some fortunate (“hidden / chosen / shrunken pages”). There is also room for suggestion: “It smelled of damp earth (and it’s a pity that the word for that wonderful smell, ‘petricor,’ bears the name of pills for heart patients; one would need a contest to find a proper, old or new, one).” This could well have been written in El gato encerrado, for the themes, though not identical, are; a little like the Variations Goldberg or like those dervishes who seem to dance to the same tune, with a steady rhythm, similar, but if you look closely, not really.
Everything suits him, he milks it all, from an ex-libris bearing the words “I can wait” (magnificent) to the circumstance of a known person (Tomás Segovia and, by the way, anecdotes of Ramón Gaya or Álvaro Pombo at a reduced rally in the Madrid plaza of Ópera) or any ordinary person, faithful to the phrase of his esteemed Galdós in Fortunata y Jacinta that appears in all the titles of the Salon: “wherever a man goes he carries with him his novel.” Thus, one keeps noting readings that contagiously inspire, like revisiting Los cuadernos de Malte Laurids Brigge by Rilke, delving into the diaries of Moreno Villa, the memories of Hernández Girbal, or the Libro de las horas by Vicente Risco. A discovery without seeking, in the manner of Picasso. Or a way of being in the world: “With our friend present in body, we would not have done it [talking about intimate matters], not near her husband or her daughters, our friends as well. For respect. Although it was a way of staying beside her, talking about what life brings with it.”
The grace, so to speak, lies in not knowing what will appear from page to page, not even the topic nor its length, for an idea may fit in a single line or require several.
By chance I recently read in a 1994 ABC the last entries of Virginia Woolf’s diary. On March 8 [she drowned on the 28th of that month] in 1941 she noted: “No: I will not do any introspection. I repeat Henry James’s phrase: Observe tirelessly.” This Trapiello endorses. Observe, look, contemplate; and if it comes to it, write it down.
And all for what or why. “Literature,” Trapiello notes in this latest installment, “I don’t know if it saves, but it helps me pass the time.” So be it.