Madrid, 1987 – David Trueba
– Meeting someone you admire is the first step towards not admiring them anymore. You can only admire bodies and dead people. What’s inside is dirty, rotten, untidy.
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– You’re young and still think there’s something out there, floating… that resembles dreams. And there isn’t. There isn’t, ask your sister. This is it.
There you have it, the meaning of life, like two passing trains, they meet in an instant. You’re going… and I’m coming. This is like a mechanical problem in the tunnel. Unexpected. You and I… were just destined to cross paths. Each on a track, headed in opposite directions.
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– What would you be doing if you were out there? It’s Saturday. Young people still believe in the weekend.
– I don’t like going out on Saturdays. Too many people.
– It makes you feel special. Feeling special is important. What makes you think you’re special?
– Isn’t everybody?
– You’d be surprised by how many people aspire to be completely normal. We’re a race apart. You have to fight to the teeth for not end up being one of them. I think the French Revolution was wrong about “liberté, égalité, fraternité”. Fraternity with whom? The 20th century has shown us with a good beating that all men are not brothers. Or do you believe that crap? Only priests used to repeat it. Now it’s Coca-Cola, the Olympic Games…
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– I love “Portnoy’s Complaint.” And “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”.
– I think that’s when Joyce tells it: one day, after Catholic School, killing time, walking along the dock, he sees a beautiful girl walking in the water with her skirt pulled up; and it’s like a illumination: a illumination that leads him to choose life and art above everything else. Even if life is disorder and art is suffering.
What you read when you’re young is all you ever read. They say we always write the same book. We certainly do always read the same book.
[…]
Let’s not discuss tastes. How could we ever understand each other? It’s like a 17th century knight meeting a rock singer. Young people like impossible things. And older people, the simplest. It’s like flying: when you’re young, you think you can fly. That your car just flies away. Flies away, I don’t know… from this country, from this bathroom, from this world. The whole point of fucking you was to fly with your wings… fly a little while. To get a little taste of youth.
Do you read Proust?
– I tried.
– It’s the only theme. The passing of time. You’ll have to excuse me. I need to pee.
Sex matters a lot to people. But only one percent of human bodily fluids has anything to do with eroticism. Hundreds, even thousands of songs and poems have been written about love and passion. What about pissing? Or what our kidneys do, or the liver. There’s no literature about the crucial labors performed by the lungs. Literature eludes the truth because it wants to compete with God, in the unknown. With God and Disney. Don’t be afraid to talk about things organic. People who say that writing will elevate us are revolting sentimentalists. Don’t trust the abstract, trust your senses. About Stendhal. A critic once said he wrote like a concierge. That’s a virtue, not a defect. Write plainly, tell what you see.
[…]
What I have here is a pretty typical human conflict. To fuck… or not to fuck. If we do it, everything will become less tense, less interesting. Have you ever noticed that when two lovers desire each other and make love their bodies are weightless: it’s like they’re floating. But once satisfied, they get heavy again. They become real again, like the flesh on a woman in a Rubens. But not doing it makes you restless as well. Being near you is like sitting by a fountain and not being able to run my fingers through the water. How long will this last? I want to get out of here, damn it! Somebody get me out of here! I can’t take it anymore! I can’t take it anymore.
I’m choking. I’m choking, can’t you see? Why do you make me feel like I’m alone? I’m intolerable, I know. I know I’m intolerable. I can’t stand myself. I look in the mirror and see a fucking shadow of myself. I’m not fucking impressed. I’m not clever, I don’t admire myself. I disgust myself. Physically.
And you’re standing there like a muse, mute and naked, and instead of whispering verses in my ear you put a mirror in front of me. If you see me as I do, you must hate me. “Sleep with me”: what the hell were you thinking? Are you that much of a climber? What did you think you’d get from me? It was a no-lose situation for me. Look, my beard is growing. They say sexual desire makes your beard grow more quickly. And fear. Bullfighters’ beards grow like crazy the day of the bullfight.
[…]
I’m going bald. And nose hairs are truly uncomfortable. How absurd. This is too damn absurd. It’s really no big deal. The body is no big deal. Fucking is no big deal. Have you seen dogs in the street? They sniff each other and go right at it. Why have we gone so astray? Do we think we’re that important, with our museums, our cathedrals and our government advisors? With you here in front of me, all that just gets right in the way.
This is going to be a huge mess, you know. My enemies, the ones I’ve made with much success, with each millimeter I’ve taken of their territory, of what they consider theirs, will have a field day. Your father might have to kill me as his final service to the homeland. And my wife might leave me, more out of shame than anything else. I’ll have to give up all the great things about living with her. I still desire her, you know. And we’ve been together for ages. But there’s a thing called… Call it refuge, call it solace, I don’t really know. It’s a place far away from the limelight, where it’s very hard to find someone who knows everything about you, and doesn’t use it to destroy you, rather to put you back together when you’ve fallen apart.
And you… You’ll forget me in every body that awaits you. The worst part is everyone will imagine what we did in here all this time and we won’t be able to tell the truth because it’s too ridiculous. The best comedies are often based on the dirty old man chasing after fresh, young meat, which is always unattainable. This absurd situation is good for laughs; but it reveals that the distance between insanity and balance all comes down to a single hair on your head. Then laughter becomes terror. Fear that something similar can happen to you.
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– But your opinion counts…
– No, it doesn’t. If I write shit about a minister, it matters to the minister. People only care about being left alone.
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– You see the world like an outsider.
– You have to grab the scalpel and cut away.
– But the world being like this is your responsibility too.
– Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who think writing can change the world.
– Why not?
– The only thing a writer can do for the world is write well. It’s a double feature tragedy. They change the details, but the plot is the same.
Of course a flood or an earthquake always comes along to save the day. If you want to move people, but that doesn’t interest me. No, what matters to me is saying “the world is a joke. A masquerade ball. Come on, let’s dance.”
– It’s hard.
– What’s hard?
– Why should we care about the world if it’s so impossible to change things? If you want to do something different?
– You want to do something different?
– Maybe…
– Young people forget you’ll be like us. You overestimate yourselves. Youth is a gift, but watch out: it’s a gift that fades. You feel life emptying and you cover the holes as best you can. You’ll see.
– Why do you scold me when you speak to me? My siblings do it all the fucking time. Why do you all talk like nobody ever came before you? It’s non-stop, like a lesson in installments. We have to endure every topic: sex life, job, studies, what to do, what to think… Leave us alone, let us live!
– I only wanted to have sex with you. Sorry I turned this into summer school.
– What if I was the one after sex? Maybe I’m curious, or a pervert…
– A real pervert…
– Or to get ahead, like you said. What would you get me, a job? Tell your boss to hire me as an intern. Get you to reveal a secret. I’m not that naive. And if I am, it’s my problem. The same comparison, over and over again: «back in my day, nowadays…»
– Just a little prehistory for you.
– To teach us what, cynicism, bitterness, striking an intellectual pose?
– Finally somebody said something intelligent in here.
– I’d rather you actually taught me something you believe in. I think this is how it is, or this is how it should be. But they’re empty recipes: always talking about your age, like I’m not aware of how old you are and how old I am… Maybe I’m the one who picked you, to escape from what’s expected of me, and try something new. Maybe I don’t find guys my age interesting or different enough. If we weren’t locked in here, you’d have left by now, right? You’d have gotten out of bed with some excuse. «I’m expected at home» or «I have a meeting.» You’d have dressed in a hurry. «I got what I wanted»; so stop talking like you’re in a tower.
– An ivory tower?
– No, a tower of shit.
– I was just killing time. But anyway… talk, I’m listening.
– I have nothing to say.
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– Real politicians make me sick. They deceive people.
– You think people want to know the truth. They’d rather be deceived.
– You can’t be happy if you don’t lie to yourself?
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– People who commit suicide are almost always making a statement to those who survive them. That’s suicide’s nastiest side.
Strangely enough, being desperate can be wonderful, if you can bear it.
– You think so?
– Desperate people expect nothing. That’s usually when the best stuff appears. The unexpected.
– We all expect something…
– But we fabricate other things until it comes along.
– Fake.
– And necessary. The most trivial things, the pettiest, are the most basic.
– It’s pretty unpleasant.
– When they see what’s out there, some choose windows, and others seek more hospitable orifices, where the “gorilla”, or other beasts we carry inside, don’t bark, growl or scratch.
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[The whole made up story about the kid not getting up from the bed.]