BarcelonaThere are days when you come back from vacation and enter a huge bookstore in your city, where, as soon as you walk through the door, the first thing you find is a selection of books under a sign that says Booktokers, a selection of books with flashy covers and unknown names, all of them thicker than they really are, the paper size, multiplying the words and paragraphs to feed a gregarious and hungry crowd), and then there is another wall lock with the bestsellers, the new releases (including news that have been on the street for a year) and the recommended books, some of which are incredible to recommend, although it shouldn't surprise you because you already know that in this bookstore recommended It's synonymous not with the bookseller's enthusiastic reading but with the payment the publisher has made to have their book in a prominent place, so you pass through the entrance and reach the half-hidden corner at the very end, behind a column, where Catalan writers have been punished, and there you find a book with a cover that not only tastes like churros (which are no longer sold) but also like iPhones, and that will be read for this reason alone: to be the imitation of a cover, to be a repetition. And on days like these you think: "Fuck books."
There are days when you're still on vacation in a city on the other side of the world, a city that alone has almost five times the population of your own entire country and that seems to have come from the future like a promise or a prophecy or a curse, a city where you've seen thousands of commutators systematically zombified with their cell phones in crowded, silent carriages, and only a few of them actually browsing through a book (One in a thousand? Or is that an overly optimistic figure?). And on days like these you think: "Fuck books."
There are days when your partner publishes a book, and not just any book, no, a good book that speaks of the collective and personal confusion in the unspeakable world we live in, a book with sharp, lyrically pissed-off prose, with lucid ideas, irony, and tenderness, and you know it pisses him off so much that it pisses him off so much—no, no ...
There are days when a story you could write crosses your mind, a story about a world where everyone always has their hair combed and there are bald in-laws and small, incomprehensibly dirty chauffeurs, and you wonder what the first line will be and how it will continue and for a while, for a few weeks, you find yourself, but you dare. You have to perform and invoice (translations, articles, collaborations in the media) and you have to take care of the children (balance family logistics with piano lessons, and take care of the eldest who will suddenly live in Barcelona: you will have to invoice even more, so how will you do it?) and with all this in mind, how do you want to? dirty? What's more, even if you write it, you suspect that almost no one will read it either, because we've been drummed into our heads that we don't like stories, just as we've been drummed into our heads so many other falsehoods that we've believed and repeat as if they were our own truths. And you think: "Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it."
But there are also days when you start reading with skepticism –it doesn't seem at all like a book you would like– a novel about a female youth boxing match, a debut novel titled Lightning stroke written by a thirty-six-year-old Californian named Rita Bullwinkel, a novel with a sash that says it almost won the Booker, the Pulitzer, and a few other prizes, and you know that sashes are a joke and that often, too often, books don't live up to expectations and you start like this and you don't think at all for a single millisecond: "Fuck books."
Or days when you finally start The girls, of theEmma Cline, which you've had pending for too long, and you wish you were skillful enough to find more time to immerse yourself in that world that is so foreign to you and that at the same time you can understand so well because the author writes some sentences that inject themselves into your soul and make it swell and more tense and rather "Fuck books", but quite the opposite: "More books, please, more books".
Or days when you are seized by a wild, gluttonous, desperate desire to read Scenarios, the new one Toni Sala, and you tell yourself you should save it like someone reserving a good wine for a special occasion, because you want to enjoy the promise and the anticipation, since once you've read it, you won't be able to read it again for the first time. Like the women who once saved their virginity for someone who deserved it.
Days go by. Another course begins, and another battle between days. A battle that—unfortunately—no one will win.
