There is no writer who does not dream of that. Oscar Wilde, at the end of the tenth chapter of his Dorian Gray portrait The ghost of a certain book to whose corrosive power must surrender a world and a life. “It was a novel,” he writes – “without argument and with a single character … The book was written in an ornamental, graphic and dark style at the same time … There were metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and with the same subtlety of color … It was sometimes difficult to know if the description of the ecstasy of a medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner was reading. It was a poisonous book. The dense smell of incense seemed to part with its pages and disturb the brain. The very cadence of the phrases, the subtle monotony of its music, as full as it was of complex choruses and movements elaborately repeated, produced in Dorian Gray’s mind, when passing from chapter in chapter, something similar to a reverie, a sleep disease that made him not realize that the day was falling and the shadows grow … »
He Dorian Gray portrait It was Wilde’s first writing that fell into my hands. I think – I’m not sure – that I should walk between the thirteen and fourteen. More than the canvas that gives name to the novel, I was seduced by the semiocultic image of the book to which its protagonist granted such a lethal beauty. Ignorance, according to my age at that time, made me assume that it was another invention of the prodigious imagination of the Dublin dandy. It took a long time, as a half decade, to give in an old -fashioned library in the Latin Quarter with a certain unknown volume – very much for me then – that I oak with the attachment that the materially beautiful objects impose immediately. I looked for it, the next day, in the Library of Sainte-Geneviève, that amazing jail of light and vacuum that would machining in 1851 Henri Labroute on the side of the pantheon.
Bibliophilia is a refined aesthetic, nothing more than that. More than that swimmers can come amazing gifts to which he is patient enough to not expect transcendence. I opened the book without special interest in its reading: it was enough for me, I believed, with his view and his touch. And I couldn’t close it anymore. The wiring purification of its French contrasted with the name, of flamenco or Dutch resonance, of the author. I did not find a satisfactory translation for the title; I still don’t find her. In its avoidance of any purpose or narrative content, it resonated that “perfect emptiness” whose devastating power proclaims the deepest of the Taoist treaties. But, to the very few pages, in the voice of its protagonist, Des Esseintes, the family echo of what was read a long time and was very forgotten. It soon realized that I had in my hands what, in the Wilde of my indolent ignorance of the thirteen or fourteen, I took as literary fantasy: that of a book whose fascination was infinite for not talking about anything, that of a writing that was only writing. Without object. From that parenthesis in Sainte-Geneviève, Karl-Joris Huysmans and “à Rebours” have been spells with which to raffle the heaviness of living in an increasingly rude world, increasingly ignorant, definitely now Ágrafo. Bárbaro, then.
The specimen of Huysmans that appears in my library does not, of course, the beauty of the one whose ranking leather spoiled with reverence in an antiquarian in the Latin Quarter, back in the summer of 1969. But the frivolous pleasure bibliophile of then has given up, over the years, to something else. It may be more frivolous, I don’t care. The wonder of reading words without object, without destiny, without moral or humanitarian alibi. Words alone. Well harmonized. That build an autistic algebra. More dim than music. And more indestructible. Of very few books I have read, I can say that.
I reread, in the early Madrid, Karl-Joris Huysmans. I let myself be taken by the same poison that before its pages was drugged to a damn Dublin. And, suddenly, the world ceases to be septic tank. Stop being. There is no writer who does not dream of achieving that. There is hardly any that succeeds.
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