I would sit at the bar and always order the same thing, a glass of gin which I would sip slowly, distancing myself from one glass to the next. It was the 90s and you could still hear good music in the clubs of that era. I stopped at Ragtime, in Malasaña, on Ruiz Street, if I remember correctly. As I drank the gin, my memory worked its way through the smoke and music, completing stories to the rhythm of the songs that came from the speakers. Jazz has taken on a new dimension here.
Billie Holiday sang I’m a fool for wanting you with all his perversity, dragging his throat in the dust before ending his days in a dingy room. Charlie Parker blew the metal until it reached the heat of hell itself and I wanted to be like Jack Kerouac, taking that nervous, syncopated rhythm for a searing role. How deceived I was at that moment, by imitating the beatniks in everything except the most important: his writing, his way of linking ideas and actions; I was very young, damn it, and I hadn’t yet lived enough for what I had experienced to ferment into literature. I don’t know if I can explain myself, but I anticipated a future full of bullets, dead ends and broken glass. Cities of drugs and scrap metal, of sharp-tipped syringes and sawed-off cannons. Something was germinating, but it still needed time.
Over the years, I have understood that novels are made with memories that have already passed, but they are also made with those that have not yet passed, with memories that are still to come, thus anticipating a future that is now present. Because only those who dare to imagine a fiction expose themselves to anticipating the futures they will one day inhabit.
Without going any further, my latest novel, mermaid meatI wrote it from Cadiz and set it in Galicia, in the same place where I live now, the Costa da Morte. I wrote it without suspecting in the least that a series of coincidences would lead me to the same scenarios as its protagonist, Andres Bouza, whose marked destiny makes him cross the threshold of the door of an old tavern that I thought I had invented, but it was already invented, because what I did was anticipate my own journey. This is the same tavern from which I now write these things.
Memory and desire are the ingredients with which stories are built, but, for these stories to come to life, music is also necessary, and enveloped in the smoke of memory, I return to Ragtime while Duke Ellington plays on the speakers with his orchestra. Far East Suitea slow song that I savor with small sips of gin, closing my eyes and thinking that, many years later, I will wander in a port at the end of the world, looking for a place where I can believe that I’m Jack Kerouac, and having a drink while listening to Billie Holyday singing slowly I’m a fool for wanting youdragging his voice along a path of dust where sex and death merge.
