Diaries are a storehouse of so much: love, guilt, revenge, vanity, projects. I would say that diaries are pages of mourning, even if nothing has been lost, mourning for life, because it is leaving. In Carla’s diaries there is much more life than grief.
What would you be if you weren’t what you are today?
Carla Mourino
06/14/2024
If there is a day that defines these diaries, it is Friday, today, Friday. Because it is a day to go on a trip, to get out of the habit, to start writing a book. In Ridiculously normal days there is another story. In addition to the adventures of the author, is the story of Julia, a 30-year-old girl who rediscovers the world. Julia’s life is the novel that Carla wants to write, and that is outlined in her diaries.
See photos: the most beautiful bookstores in the world
06/15/2024
Today is the presentation of the book, at Casa Brava: a bar, restaurant, dance hall in Malasaña that is the nerve center of Argentina, an Argentine island in the heart of Madrid. The River Plate flows here.
Before Carla and her editor, Lucila Sarquis, (between the two of them they have created The smallest publishing house in the world) come on stage, an audio plays over the bar’s speakers: it’s Carla and she says, among other things, that we can now open the envelope they gave us when we entered. Inside there is a paper where we have to write what we would be if we were not what we are today, we have to write our imaginary lives. Next to it, a postcard of a blue sky, of a blue sea, that says “Hopefully you have all the energy to surf the waves that come. “I will be on the shore, in case you need me.”.
This diary about the diary began with Cioran, the pessimistic Romanian, the desolate writer. And it ends, after going through Carla’s event, with the lyrics renewed. Carla is not Gabo, nor Leila, as she herself said in the email where she sent me her manuscript. But she could be Attila, because she leaves no grass in her path. It is a storm of ideas and will. When the day comes, and you write your memoirs, your autobiography, you could call them Live intensely to tell it, winking at the Colombian and reminding us that the fight to live is daily, that as they said in that film: “we have fought against the day, and we have won.” And that’s enough. As for the lives imagined, dreamed: If I weren’t a guy who writes, I would have liked to be an orchestra singer. It’s never too late.
