Author: diazenciso

(Scroll down to read in English)

El otro día me sucedió una cosa de lo más extraña: iba cruzando el puente de Westminster. Como siempre que lo cruzo, vi de un lado las Casas del Parlamento y volteé hacia el lado opuesto para ver el paisaje familiar. Pero no estaba la cúpula de St Paul’s.           

Al principio no me alarmé demasiado. Creí que la vería si caminaba un poco más, que quizá la ocultaban los árboles. Y caminé, hasta terminar de cruzar el puente, pero St Paul’s no estaba por ningún lado. Me empezó a invadir la angustia. St Paul’s debía seguir en su lugar de siempre. Si no, ya me habría enterado. Si no estuviera ahí, querría decir que en Londres había sucedido algo terrible, y la gente no andaría tan campante.

Pero no estaba. Por más que me detuve y escudriñé el horizonte, por más que busqué y busqué cambiando de sitio para tener una nueva perspectiva, simplemente había desaparecido. ¿Han sentido alguna vez el horror de estar viviendo algo imposible? Pues así era. Como si me hubieran arrancado a un mundo paralelo, un Londres idéntico en todo al Londres en que había despertado esa mañana, sólo que sin la catedral de St Paul. Como un episodio del Dr. Who.

            Incluso llegué a preguntarme, dudando de mi memoria: “¿Será que nunca he visto St Paul’s desde aquí?” Lo que sería una curiosa memoria falsa, después de tantos años de llevar a mi cerebro esa imagen cada que cruzo ese puente.           

Me apresuré porque tenía una cita. Pensé: de regreso seguro que la encuentro.            

Mi cita era en el hospital de St Thomas, y en ese día glorioso de junio (antes de que llegara el diluvio universal), bajo el cielo tan azul, volví a pensar que era de lo más afortunada de que mi doctor trabajara en un hospital con vista directa a Westminster, pegadito al río.           

Iba algo nerviosa, aunque nada comparado con la angustia de haber perdido la catedral. Después de tres meses me enteraría de los resultados de mis muchos análisis y, con suerte, me quitarían el dolor que traigo desde principios de febrero.           

La cita fue algo anticlimática, después de tanta espera: por fortuna no tengo las cosas que más temía, pero para lo que sí tengo, este especialista me va a mandar con otro especialista… que sólo podrá darme cita dentro de varios meses. Ya me llegará una carta avisándome. Por mientras, me dio una pastilla.           

Así es el NHS, el sistema de salud pública de este país. La gente siente un miedo genuino de ser hospitalizada, porque los hospitales están llenos de microbios mortales. ¡Las furias que desata esta noble institución! (Aunque ahora, por fin, todas nuestras desventuras con el NHS cobran sentido: resulta que son todos terroristas, y ya con eso me quedo tranquila.)           

Pero debo admitir que el doctor me dio información importante. No la que yo quería, pero importante. Confirmó el diagnóstico de fibromialgia y le añadió el de Síndrome de Sjorgen, con lo que me quedó claro que padezco de cosas que no puedo ni pronunciar. Me ayudó a entender que, si bien es frustrante tener que esperar meses para ver al especialista adecuado, no puedo esperar de él o ella más que formas de lidiar con el asunto, porque el padecimiento es crónico (¡como si no me hubiera dado cuenta!), e incurable. Me aconsejó informarme lo mejor posible sobre estas complicadas afecciones, cosa que por supuesto estoy haciendo. Con mucho tacto me informó que no puedo esperar una cura milagrosa, ni llegar a sentirme como creo que se siente la gente que no está enferma todo el tiempo.           

Hace muchos años, en un viaje a México, visité a mi neumólogo, el Dr. Héctor Ponce de León, para saludarlo. Le comenté un poco sobre mis otros achaques y sugirió que podría tener fibromialgia. Yo al Dr. Ponce de León le tengo una fe ciega: después de todo me salvó la vida, y además es simpatiquísimo, cosa que no puede decirse de todos los médicos que he visto.           

De regreso a Londres, a los distintos médicos generales que he visto les he sugerido la posibilidad de la fibromialgia, y ninguno me hizo caso. Años después veo que mi neumólogo tenía razón.           

Algo que me encantaba del Dr. Ponce de León era la pasión con que ejerce la medicina. Recuerdo cómo viendo una de mis radiografías le llamó a un colega para que viniera a ver el interesante caso, y reconocí la excitación de encontrarse con algo fascinante. No que le entusiasmara que estuviera enferma; para nada. Es un médico de un trato humano extraordinario. Pero su profesión le apasiona, como debe ser.          

                                    

Yo sé que en la salud pública, aquí y en cualquier parte, los médicos tienen mucha presión, demasiados pacientes. Trabajar para el NHS debe ser un martirio (tiene lógica; de ahí a la jihad…). Pero qué triste es que, en lugar de estos personajes heroicos e inteligentísimos con que idealmente asociamos a los doctores, los médicos generales hayan terminado haciendo un trabajo mecánico que no exige más reto intelectual que el de sacar fotocopias.            

Si algo he aprendido de este tipo de enfermedades (el síndrome de Sjorgen es, aparentemente, una afección autoinmune), es que, además de ser una carga muy pesada para el paciente, son interesantísimas. Si yo fuera médico, me especializaría en algo así: misterioso, con mucho terreno aún por descubrir, lleno de sutilísimas complicaciones.   

La información es mucha y lleva tiempo entenderla y asimilarla. A ratos siento que aparte de todo, tengo que ponerme a estudiar el asunto como si estuviera otra vez en la universidad. Pero para explicar el padecimiento con una bonita y sencilla imagen, es como si le estuvieran haciendo a uno brujería. Nunca sabes en qué parte le van a encajar al monito las agujas, o qué parte del cuerpo le van a derretir. Ni a qué horas.           

Es decir, afecta a todo, todito el organismo, incluyendo las funciones de nuestro pobre cerebro y el estado de ánimo. Lo del cerebro es particularmente preocupante para un escritor. Nadie imagina las confusiones con que batallo todos los días, ni el horror de no recordar los nombres de los personajes de muchos de mis libros favoritos. (Lo bueno es que, literalmente, releer un libro es siempre como leerlo por primera vez.) La mejor forma de explicarlo es, quizá, decir que “no sé lo que sé”. Así que es un alivio enorme saber que la estupidez no es mía necesariamente, o al menos no toda, sino de la enfermedad.           

Y ahí está lo interesante: yo sé quién soy yo, en algún otro lugar que no es la confusión de mi cerebro. Ese pensamiento que siempre estoy tratando de alcanzar es el mío de verdad, existe. Sé que siempre, desde niña, he tenido pasión por el conocimiento; que me maravillan los alcances del intelecto humano y quisiera saberlo todo. Eso no me lo quita la bola de algodón que a veces siento que traigo en la cabeza en lugar de sesos, y la bola de algodón no me ha impedido llegar –por momentos– a ese lugar donde estoy “yo”, aunque desespere mucho con mis íntimos obstáculos. Y sin duda es un alivio enorme saber que hay una explicación para esa nube amorfa que me ensombrece el pensamiento, aunque dé un coraje inexpresable saber que no se va a ir a ningún lado.           

Algo similar sucede con el cuerpo, pero es más complicado. Sólo otras personas con esta enfermedad o padecimientos similares pueden entender el alivio que da cuando al fin es diagnosticada, aunque nos digan que es crónica y que no se nos va a quitar. Quizá contar esto en el blog es la manera más inmediata de gritarle al mundo entero (incluido tanto médico pasmado): “¿Lo ven? Es real. No lo inventé yo. No está en mi cabeza. No soy hipocondríaca. No me lo provoco yo con “malas vibras”. Existe. Existe. No estoy loca.”

 La mayoría de las veces el diagnóstico llega después de años, y aunque la enfermedad (o el conjunto de síntomas) está registrada desde al menos el siglo XIX, su comprensión en el mundo de la medicina es cosa muy reciente y todavía hay muchas opiniones encontradas al respecto. No hay forma de exagerar la pena que siento por todas las personas que padecieron de esto hace tiempo, durante toda su vida, sin que nadie entendiera por lo que estaban pasando, sin que nadie les creyera.

En mi experiencia, ha sido mi vida entera sin saber realmente lo que es sentirme sana, con algún tipo de afección u otro, con montón de condiciones crónicas, con el cuerpo entero comportándose como un loco, un día una parte de mi organismo poniéndose en huelga, otro día otra, dolores de todo tipo atacando cuando les da la gana… me llevaría páginas enteras contar por las que pasa uno. Y esa experiencia ha implicado muchos diagnósticos equivocados, o muchos doctores honestos que decían: pues sí, algo está mal pero te juro que no sé qué es, y muchos temores de algunos médicos de que tuviera cosas gravísimas. Infinito desconcierto.

Mis amigos me ven como a alguien frágil físicamente pero muy fuerte “por dentro”, pero por supuesto a veces desesperan porque, igual que yo y la mayoría de los doctores, no entienden nada de lo que me pasa y piensan que quizá es psicológico. (Sólo me entienden perfectamente los que también traen a cuestas un cuerpo rebelde.) Yo misma, por supuesto, he dudado de mí, todo el tiempo. Ante la innegable realidad de sentirme enferma de una cosa u otra casi todo el tiempo, sin saber por qué, mi mecanismo de supervivencia ha sido ignorarlo (a lo mejor así se sienten todos,  he llegado a pensar, nomás que no se quejan), trabajar lo más que pueda, orillarme hasta los límites de mi fuerza y energía (que no son muchas), hacer todo lo que tengo que hacer y mucho más: también todo lo que quiero hacer. Si me pongo a pensar –ahora que voy entendiendo lo que le pasa a mi organismo– en todas las cosas que he hecho en mi vida, pues debo ser una santa, un héroe. Me he orillado tanto hasta el límite de mi fuerza que he llegado mucho más lejos en mis esfuerzos que muchas personas sanas.

           

Y lo que me parece fascinante de este asunto es cómo la enfermedad y mi identidad se han ido fundiendo en todos estos años. No es como con el pensamiento, ese intelecto mío que sí está ahí, en algún lugar, y nada más tengo que hacer un esfuerzo mayor por alcanzarlo y ya llego. No; en la cuestión física, el vértigo, los mareos, la náusea, la sensación de que me voy a caer en cualquier escalera, sí son “yo”. Se han convertido en parte de mi personalidad. No sé muy bien cómo explicarlo, pero, ignorando toda mi vida que ese vértigo y sensación de inseguridad física tenían una causa orgánica, he crecido asumiendo que son parte de mi personalidad, sin pensar mucho en el asunto. Suelo contar cómo me identifiqué de niña cuando leí la historia del Licenciado Vidriera, de Cervantes. Eso, creo, lo explica todo.

            Otras cosas, aunque he sabido de entrada que son orgánicas, también han conformado lo que soy: la sensación de aislamiento que da el tinitus cuando es muy intenso; ese lugar extrañísimo y no del todo desagradable al que te lleva el “pre” y el “post” de la infame migraña. Incluso me pregunto, ¿no será que muchos de mis gustos literarios se han visto influenciados por la forma en que yo me siento?

                                                    Es decir: un organismo frágil es un lugar desde el cual se ve el mundo, como cualquier otro. Hay lugares mucho mejores y hay lugares mucho peores, pero es un lugar. Finalmente uno sí es su cuerpo. Y desde cualquier lugar que se vea el mundo, se puede descubrir algo de su realidad; de esa cosa inasible y sumamente vaga que llamamos “lo real”. Desde este lugar escribo, por ejemplo; eso es innegable: desde mi búsqueda intelectual de altos vuelos invadida por una neblina odiosa, y desde este cuerpo que se queja callado todo el tiempo.            

¿Y las depresiones? Eso es todavía más complicado. Hay mucho de circunstancial en mi formación y en mi vida que puede explicarlas, pero ahora que se sabe que la fibromialgia suele venir acompañada de depresión, es prácticamente imposible dar con la causa exacta de ese estado del alma (porque eso es, ¿o no?, por muy químicas que sean las cosas que están pasando en el cerebro).            

Tras el diagnóstico, voy entendiendo poco a poco estos lazos enredados de lo que me sucede y confieso que encuentro fascinante esta relación entre el estado de salud y la identidad. Para empezar, es innegable que somos una unidad: cuerpo, intelecto y alma. (Porque yo insisto en que existe el alma, aunque haya algunos que se escandalicen por ahí.)           

Lo difícil ahora es entender por qué mi mecanismo de supervivencia, aunque me ha sido útil y fructífero, también me ha puesto más enferma y tiene que cambiar. Yo iba al doctor con la esperanza de que me dieran esa medicina milagrosa que dice el doctor que no existe, para poder hacer más. Pero la solución es al revés. Ya no debo orillarme hasta el límite de mis fuerzas, porque eso me va a hacer sentir cada vez más enferma, que es de hecho lo que ha sucedido en los últimos años. Y no tengo la menor idea de cómo lograr ese equilibrio. No es sólo que hay una realidad concreta y objetiva: hay que salir de la precariedad económica, hay que trabajar mucho, y además escribir. Eso de por sí ya es una pregunta, hasta el momento, sin respuesta. Pero lo más difícil va a ser cambiar ese mecanismo en mi cabeza. Porque, hablando de identidad, no logro concebirme a mí misma más que como he sido toda mi vida, en ese arrojarme con todo el ímpetu de que soy capaz a lo que yo considero que es la vida, lo que quiero de la vida y mi responsabilidad en esta vida, que por supuesto suele culminar en un estado de agotamiento, físico y anímico.           

Quizá he estado equivocada. ¿No del todo, pero un poco? La pregunta es hondísima. Quiero sentirme mejor, ya no quiero tratar a mi organismo como un caballo de carreras que ya no puede más. Pero no logro entenderme sin esta, ¿cómo le diremos?, voluntad en pie de lucha.           

Vaya, vaya. Tengo mucho en qué pensar.           

Y saliendo del hospital, no pude encontrar la cúpula de St Paul’s. ¡Qué inquietud más grande!

La vi luego, por una calle lateral, para mi enorme alivio. Pero no desde el puente. No sé si sigue ahí. Es decir, sé que está donde siempre está, la veo desde las alturas de Highgate, pero no sé si volveré a verla nunca desde el puente. Lo que me recuerda mi fantasía de salir un día y no ver la cúpula de St Paul’s, sino la aguja de la catedral como era antes de que la arrasara el Gran Fuego de Londres. ¿No sería maravilloso?

                                          Something very strange happened to me the other day: I was crossing Westminster’s Bridge. As is always the case when I cross it, I saw on one side the Houses of Parliament and turned to the other side to see the familiar landscape. But St Paul’s dome wasn’t there.

At first I wasn’t too alarmed. I thought I’d see it if I walked a bit more;  maybe the trees were hiding it. So I walked, until I finished crossing the bridge, but St Paul’s was nowhere to be seen. I started to feel ridden with anxiety. St Paul’s surely was still in the same place; otherwise I would have known. If it wasn’t there, it would mean something terrible had happened in London, and people wouldn’t be hanging around so happily.

            But it wasn’t there. Though I stopped and searched the horizon, and looked for it moving from one place to the other in order to get a new perspective, it had simply gone. Have you ever felt the horror of being living something impossible? Well, it was like that. As if I had been snatched into a parallel world, a London identical to the London I had woken up in that morning, only that without St Paul’s Cathedral. Like a Dr. Who episode.           

I even wondered, doubting my memory, “Could it be I have never seen St Paul’s from here?” Which would be a very curious false memory, after so many years of calling that image to mi brain every time I cross that bridge.           

I hurried because I had an appointment. I thought: I’ll surely find it on my way back.           

My appointment was at St Thomas’s hospital, and in that glorious June day (before the universal flood started), beneath the spotless blue sky, I thought again how lucky I was because my doctor worked in a hospital with a direct view over Westminster, just by the river.            

I was a bit nervous, though nothing compared to the anguish of having lost the cathedral. After a three- month wait I’d find out about my many tests’ results and, luckily, I’d get rid of the pain that is plaguing me since February.           

The appointment was a bit of an anticlimax, after such a long wait: I luckily don’t have the things I feared the most, but for what I do have, this specialist will refer me to another specialist… who will only be able to see me in a few months time. They’ll send me a letter saying when one of these days. Meanwhile, he gave me a pill.           

So, this is the NHS after all. We know, for instance, that people feel a genuine fear of being hospitalized because hospitals are full of mortal bugs. (Though now, finally, all of our misfortunes with the NHS make sense: they are all terrorists, and now that I know it I can put my mind at rest.)            

But I must admit that the doctor did give me some important information. Not the one I wanted, but important nevertheless. He confirmed the fibromyalgia diagnosis and added to it that of Sjorgen Syndrome, with which it became clear to me that I suffer from things that I cannot even pronounce. He helped me understand that, even though it is frustrating indeed to wait for months to get to the right specialist, I cannot expect from him or her anything more than ways of coping with this stuff, because the condition is chronic (as if I hadn’t noticed!) and has no cure. He advised me to get as much information as possible about these complicated conditions –which I of course am doing. He tactfully informed me that I cannot expect a miracle cure, nor to get to feel as I  imagine people who are not ill all the time do feel.           

Some years ago, during a trip to México, I visited my pneumologist, Dr. Héctor Ponce de León, to say hello. I told him a bit about the way I was feeling and he suggested I might be suffering from fibromyalgia. I have blind faith in him: after all he saved my life, and he’s extremely nice and fun to talk to –something I cannot say of all the doctors I have seen.           

Back in London, I’ve suggested this possibility to all the GP’s I’ve seen, and none of them listened to me. Years later, I realize my pneumologist was right.           

Something I loved about Dr. Ponce de León was the passion with which  he practices medicine. I remember how, on seeing one of my X-Rays, he called a colleague to come and see the interesting case, and I recognized the excitement of bumping into something fascinating. Not that he was happy I was ill; not at all. His humane way of treating patients is extraordinary. But he’s passionate about his profession, just as it should be.           

I know that in the public health sector, here and everywhere, doctors have lots of pressure, too many patients. To work for the NHS must be martyrdom (it makes sense; from that to jihad…). But it’s quite sad that, instead of being these heroic and very intelligent characters we ideally associate with doctors, GP’s have ended up doing a mechanical work that doesn’t imply more of an intellectual challenge than doing some photocopies.           

If there is something I have learnt about this kind of diseases (apparently the Sjorgen syndrome is an autoimmune condition), is that, apart from being a pain in the ass (or everywhere else, for that matter) for the patient, they are utterly interesting. If I were a doctor, I would specialize in something like that: something mysterious, with lots of yet uncharted territory, full of rather subtle complications.           

There is lot’s of information and it takes time to understand and assimilate it. At moments I feel that, on top of everything else, I will have to study this as if I were in college again. But to explain the condition with a pretty and simple image, it’s as if they were attacking you with witchcraft. You never know in which part of the dummy’s body they will thrust the  needles, or which part of its body will they melt. Nor when.           

So, it affects the whole organism, including our poor brain’s functions and our mood. The brain part is particularly worrying for a writer. No one can imagine the confusions I battle with everyday, nor the horror of not remembering the names of the characters in many of my favorite books. (The good thing is that reading a book again is always, literally, like reading it for the first time.) The best way to explain it may be that “I don’t know what I know”. So it is an enormous relief to know that the stupidity isn’t necessarily mine, or at least not all of it, but the condition’s fault.            And that’s the interesting part: I know who I am, in some other place that is not my brain’s confusion. That thought that I am always trying to reach is truly mine, it exists. I know that I have always had a passion for knowledge, since I was a child; that I’m marveled by the reaches of human intellect and that I’d wish I could know it all. And the pack of cotton-wool that I sometimes feel to have inside my head instead of brains cannot take that away from me, nor has it stopped me to get –momentarily—to that place where “I” am, even if I despair at my intimate obstacles. And it’s no doubt quite a relief to know that there is an explanation for that shapeless cloud that darkens my mind, even if it makes you inexpressible furious to know it is not going anywhere.           

Something similar happens with the body, but it’s more complicated. Only other persons with this condition or similar ones can understand the relief you feel when it is finally diagnosed, even if they tell us that it is chronic and that it won’t go away. Perhaps to write this in this blog is the most immediate way to tell the whole world (including so many befuddled doctors): “Do you see? It’s real. I didn’t invent it. It’s not in my head. I’m not an hypochondriac. I don’t cause this to myself with “bad vibes”. It exists. It exists. I’m  not mad.”                  

Most of the times you are diagnosed after years, and though the disease (or group of symptoms) has been tracked since at least the 19^th Century, its comprehension in the world of medicine is fairly recent and there are still many opposite opinions about it. There is no way to exaggerate how sorry I feel for all the people who suffered from this a while ago, for their whole lives, with no one understanding what they were going through, with no one believing them.           

In my experience, it has been my entire life without really knowing what it’s like to feel healthy, with some sort of complaint or other, with lots of chronic conditions, my whole body behaving like a mad thing, one day one part of my organism going on strike, next day another part, all sorts of pain attacking whenever they see it fit (well, fit!)… it would take me many pages to tell what you go through. And that experience has implied many wrong diagnosis, or many honest doctors who said, well something is wrong indeed, but I swear to God I don’t know what it is, and many fears from some doctors of me having terribly fatal conditions. Infinite confusion.           

My friends regard me as someone physically frail but very strong “on the inside”, but of course they sometimes despair because, just like myself and most of doctors, they don’t understand what is happening to me at all and think it might be psychological. (Only those who also carry on their backs a rebel body understand me perfectly well.) Of course I have doubted myself too, all the time. Facing the undeniable reality of feeling ill of one thing or the other most of the time, without knowing why, my survival mechanism has been to ignore it (I’ve got to think that maybe everybody feels that way and they just don’t complain), to work as hard as I can, to push myself to the limits of my strength and energy (which are not much), do everything I have to do and much more: all I want to do as well. If I think about it –now that I understand what is happening to my organism–, if I think of all the things I’ve done in my life, I guess I’m a saint, a hero. I have pushed myself to the limits so much that I have gone farther in my efforts than many healthy people.

And what I find fascinating in all this is how the disease and my identity have merged in all these years. It is not the same case as with thought, that intellect of mine that is there, somewhere, and I just have to make a bigger effort to reach it, then I’m there. No; in what concerns the physical aspect of it, the vertigo, dizziness, the nausea, the sensation that I’m going to fall down in any stairwell, do are “me”. They have become part of my personality. I don’t know very well how to explain that, but, ignoring all through my life that such vertigo and sense of physical insecurity had an organic cause, I have grown up assuming that they are part of my personality, without thinking too much about it. I use to say how I identified myself, as a child, when I read Cervantes’s story of the “Licenciado Vidriera”. I think that explains everything.

                                                                       

            Other things, though I have known from the beginning that they are organic, have also shaped what I am: the isolation given by tinnitus when it is very intense; that extremely odd place and not altogether unpleasant where pre and post detestable migraine take you to. I even wonder, is it possible that my literary tastes have been influenced by the way I feel?

                           That is to say: a frail organism is a place from which to see the world, as any other. There are much better places and much worse places, but it’s a place. In the end one is one’s own body. And in any place from which you see the world, you can discover something of its reality, of that ungraspable and utterly vague thing we call “what is real”. For instance, from this place I write; that cannot be denied: from my high-flying intellectual quest invaded by a detestable fog, and from this body that silently complains all the time.

What about depressions? That’s even more complicated. There is lots of circumstantial issues in my formation and my life that may explain them, but now that we know that fibromyalgia usually comes accompanied by depression, it is practically impossible to get to the exact cause of that state of the soul (because that’s what it is, isn’t it?, no matter how chemical the things that are taking place in the brain are.)   

                               

After the diagnosis, I start to understand little by little these entangled knots of what is happening to me, and I confess that I find fascinating this relationship between the state of your health and identity. To start with, we can’t deny we are a unity: body, intellect and soul. (Because I insist on the existence of the soul, though there are some around there who find it shocking.)            

The difficult thing now is to understand why my survival mechanism, though it has been useful and fruitful, has also made me more ill and has to change. I went to the doctor in the hope that I’d be given that miracle cure he says does not exist, in order to be able to do more. But the solution is exactly the opposite. I must not push myself to my strength’s limits anymore, because that will make me feel every time more ill, which is in fact what has happened during these past years. And I have no idea of how to find that balance. It is not only the concrete and objective reality: one has to fight financial hardship, one has to work a lot, and write as well. That is already a question for which so far there’s no answer. But the most difficult thing will be to change that mechanism in my head. Because, now that we’re talking about identity, I simply cannot conceive myself but the way I have been all my life, in this throwing myself with all the impetus I can gather into what I consider to be life, what I want from life and my responsibility in this life, which of course usually ends up in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion.          

Perhaps I’ve been wrong. Not completely, but a bit? The question is extraordinarily deep. I want to feel better, I don’t want to treat my organism any more as if it were a race horse that can’t take it anymore. But I can’t manage to understand myself without this, how can we call it?, will power on a war footing.           

Oh dear, oh dear. I have lots to think about.           

And when I left the hospital, I still could not find St Paul’s dome. What unbearable anguish!          

I saw it later, through a back street, to my enormous relief. But not from the bridge. I don’t know if it’s still there. I mean, I know it is where it always is, I see it from Highgate, but I don’t know if I will ever see it again from the bridge. Which reminds me of my fantasy of going out one day and not seeing St Paul’s dome, but the spire of the cathedral the way it was before it was consumed by the Great Fire of London. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?                                                    

(Scroll down to read in English)
(Nota: No entiendo por qué a veces no puedo ponerle color ni subir imágenes al blog. Es un misterio. Ayer sí pude, hoy no. Disculpas.
Note: I’ve no idea why sometimes I can’t set colour to my blog nor upload images. Yesterday I could, not today. Sorry.)

Todavía no he ido a comprar el periódico, pero como quizá ya sepan, no era un coche bomba sino dos en Londres, y ayer trataron de explotar la terminal principal del aeropuerto de Glasgow. Primer día de vacaciones, muchas familias, muchos niños. Por la manera en que parece estar orquestado este asunto, temo que tengan preparado algo para hoy domingo. Parece que les gustó el fin de semana.
Por fortuna, los que planearon estos atentados son medio pendejos, y hasta ahorita no les ha salido el numerito. Y perdonen lo franco de mi lenguaje, pero a las cosas hay que llamarles por su nombre.
Pero tengo miedo. Sí. Todavía no me entra el miedo tan fuerte como otras veces, pero sí estoy asustada. Igualito que cuando las bombas del 2005, escribo sobre el asunto para calmarme, y leo todos los periódicos para calmarme también, tratando de entender. Tengo la fantasía de que, si entiendo un poco lo que está pasando, puedo controlar mejor mi miedo. Digo fantasía porque yo creo que a estas alturas ya nadie entiende nada.
En general la gente aquí sigue tranquila. Yo no me acuerdo porque no estaba aquí, pero ellos sí se acuerdan de los ataques de ERI. Los coches bomba no son nada nuevo para los londinenses. Su tranquilidad me ayuda a estar tranquila a mí también, porque qué vergüenza sería estar toda temblorosa cuando toda la gente a mi alrededor sigue con su vida normal, dándole la cara a la situación.
Anoche pensaba que a veces se nos olvida que a esta ciudad le tocó de todo en el siglo XX. Montones de bombas, por todas partes, lloviendo del cielo y luego estallando desde la calle algunas décadas después. La ciudad está más curtida que yo, pero si me pongo a ver el periódico y veo lo que pasa en otras partes, incluyendo en algunas partes de México, está claro que hay que ser valientes porque esto, de alguna forma, es normal en la historia de los pueblos. A veces hay violencia. Así ha sido siempre y por desgracia supongo que así será. Si no se fortalece uno, se pierde también la parte bonita de la vida.
De cualquier forma, la tragedia detrás de estos brotes de violencia, de esta especie de locura, las historias personales que arrastran consigo, son de lo más reales, y supongo que una genuina compasión por esas tragedias, una forma de comunión en lo que a todos nos toca, porque humanos somos todos, es algo que sí está a nuestro alcance.
Para ilustrar una de esas tragedias, les voy a contar una historia.
El sábado pasado Mark y yo fuimos a una fiesta en casa de un amigo en Kingsbury. Nos agarró la lluvia entre la parada del camión y la casa, una tormenta casi tropical, con rayos y todo. Estábamos empapados (se nos olvidó el paraguas). Mark me confesó que también se le había olvidado otra cosa: el número de la casa. Insistía en que nos protegiéramos bajo un árbol mientras trataba de reconocer la fachada, entre las muchas fachadas casi idénticas, y borrosas por el aguacero. Yo estaba ya de muy mal humor, y le dije que al menos las examinara desde un lugar más conveniente que debajo de un árbol. ¿No le habían dicho desde chiquito que ahí es donde caen los rayos? Total, empapados ya estábamos.
Así que llegamos al final de la calle, en una cerrada, y estábamos ahí en medio de las casas como debajo de la regadera. (Somos quizá los últimos representantes de una raza sin teléfono celular, así que no había forma de llamarle a nuestro amigo y preguntar dónde vivía.)
Entonces se abrió la puerta de la casa que cerraba la calle, y un señor ya mayor, de origen indio, nos preguntó qué hacíamos ahí mojándonos, y nos invitó a pasar a su casa. Le preguntamos si conocía a nuestro amigo, pero el señor estaba bastante sordo, así que llamó a su esposa. Ahí, en el vestíbulo de su casa, la señora nos dijo dónde vivía nuestro amigo. La amabilidad de la pareja me conmovió; había sido una gentileza luminosa en medio de la tormenta. Se quedaron en la puerta hasta que se aseguraron de que llegábamos al lugar indicado.
Pues bien: le contamos la historia a nuestro amigo, y nos informó que esta pareja eran los padres de un terrorista inspirado por al-Qaida (no estoy segura de si tiene lazos con al-Qaida o nomás “la inspiración”). Nos contó que una noche llegaron montones de policías a la casa de la pareja india. El hijo no vivía ahí, según entiendo, lo arrestaron en otra parte. Había estado involucrado en la planeación de un ataque muy similar al de los coches bomba que desactivaron el viernes. Le dieron 40 años de cárcel y luego le redujeron la sentencia a 30.
Después de las inevitables bromas mensas (“por cierto” –le dijimos a nuestro amigo–, “los señores nos pidieron que te entregáramos este paquetito”), me quedé pensando en la tragedia de estos señores tan gentiles, en su muy probable sensación de aislamiento después de que todos los vecinos vieron llegar a su casa a un ejército de policías.
Y ayer, leyendo el periódico, veo una fotografía de un rostro muy familiar, de un terrorista de esos que ya son famosos acá, Dhiren Barot: un joven con cara de listo pero no de malo, y leo que es de Kingsbury, que había planeado un ataque similar al del viernes, que le redujeron la sentencia a 30 años. ¡Este era el hijo de los señores tan amables que nos dieron refugio en la lluvia!
No puedo dejar de pensar en ellos. Ojalá tengan más hijos además de este idiota, alguien en quién apoyarse en su vejez. Que conserven su gentileza bajo el escrutinio de la ley y de un país asustado, pese a su seguro dolor (no han de pensar en otra cosa buena parte del día), me parece una de esas formas anónimas de heroísmo que nos recuerdan que los humanos somos más que una bola de dementes haciéndonos pedazos unos a otros.

I haven’t bought the papers yet, but as you probably know by now, it wasn’t one car bomb in London: it was two, and yesterday someone tried to blow up the main terminal at Glasgow airport. First day of holidays, many families, many children. The way this seems to be orchestrated, I fear they have prepared something for this Sunday. It seems they are keen on this weekend.
Luckily those who planned these attacks are sort of stupid, and so far their show has not gone the way they wanted.
But I’m scared. Scared indeed. It isn’t still as big a fear as in other occasions, but I am scared. Just as it happened with the bombs in 2005, I write about it to calm myself down, and I devour the papers for the same reason, trying to stay calm, trying to understand. I entertain the fantasy that, if I understand a bit of what is going on, I can better control my fear. I say fantasy because I think that by now no one understands anything anymore.
Here people in general are calm. I don’t remember because I was not here, but they do remember the IRA’s attacks. Car bombs are nothing new for Londoners. Their calmness helps me be OK myself, because it would be so embarrassing to be all shaky when everybody around me goes on with their normal life, taking it on the chin.
Last night I was thinking that we sometimes forget that this city had a bit of everything in the 20th Century. Lots of bombs from everywhere, raining from the sky or bursting in the streets a few decades later. The city has a rougher skin than I do, but if I read the newspaper and see what happens in other places, including some parts of my country, Mexico, it is clear that we have to be brave because this is, some way or another, normal in the history of nations. Sometimes there is violence. It has always been this way and, unfortunately, I guess it will be. If one doesn’t become strong, you also miss the nice parts of life.
Anyway, the tragedy behind these bursts of violence, behind this sort of madness, and the personal stories they drag along, are utterly real, and I guess that a genuine compassion for those tragedies, a sort of communion in what touches all of us, because we are all human, is something that still is within our reach.
To illustrate one of these tragedies, I’m going to tell you a story.
Last Saturday Mark and I went to a party at a friend’s house in Kingsbury. We were caught in the rain between the bus stop and his house. It was an almost tropical rain, with lightning and all. We were soaked through (we forgot the umbrella). Mark confessed to me that he had forgotten something else: the house number. He insisted on us protecting ourselves beneath a tree while he tried to recognize the façade, among the many almost identical façades, blurred by the downpour. I was in a very bad mood by then, and told him that he could at least examine them from a more convenient place than beneath a tree. Hadn’t they told him when he was little that is where lightning strikes? Anyway, we were already completely soaked.
So we reached the end of the street, a dead end, and there we were in the middle of the houses, as if in the shower. (We’re probably the last specimens of a race without mobile phones, so there was no way to call our friend and ask where he lived.)
And then, the door of the house that closed the street opened, and an elderly Indian man asked us what were we doing there, getting wet, and invited us to go into his house. We asked him if he knew our friend, but he was quite deaf, so he called his wife. There in the hall of his house, his wife told us where our friend lived. The couple’s kindness moved me; it had been a kind of luminous helpfulness in the middle of the storm. They stayed at their door until they made sure we had reached the right place.
So, we told our friend the story, and he informed us that that couple were the parents of an al-Qaida inspired terrorist (I’m not sure whether if he has links with al-Qaida or just the “inspiration”). He told us that one night a crowd of policemen arrived at the Indian couple’s house. I understand the son didn’t live there and they arrested him somewhere else. He had been involved in planning an attack very similar to that of the car bombs defused last Friday. He got 40 years, and the sentence was later reduced to 30.
After the inevitable silly jokes (“by the way, the couple asked us to deliver this package to you”), I was still thinking of the tragedy of that gentle couple, of their most likely feeling of isolation after all the neighbours saw an army of policemen at their doorstep.
And yesterday, while reading the papers, I saw a photograph of a very familiar face, one of those terrorists that are already famous, Dhiren Barot: a young guy with a clever though not evil face, and I read he’s from Kingsbury, that he had planned an attack similar to that last Friday, that his sentence was reduced to 30 years. This was the son of that so gentle couple who sheltered us in the storm!
I can’t stop thinking of them. I wish to God they have more children apart from this idiot, someone to comfort them in their old age. That they keep their sense of gentleness under the scrutiny of the law and of a scared country, in spite of their certain grief (they must not think of anything else most part of the day) seems to me one of those anonymous forms of heroism that remind us that we humans are more than a bunch of lunatics tearing each other apart.

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Me cuesta mucho despertar por las mañanas. Mark se levanta antes y prende la radio, y con frecuencia lo que dicen los locutores se mezcla con mis sueños matutinos, creando escenas de lo más extrañas.

Esta mañana estaba soñando que habían encontrado un coche bomba estacionado en Haymarket, pero en mi sueño era tranquilizador saber que alguien había encontrado un guión de hacía mucho tiempo con exactamente las mismas palabras que pronunciaban ahora los locutores, así que de seguro era todo una broma.

Cuando por fin desperté, me dije: “Qué bueno que era nomás un sueño”, y entonces oí las noticias: en efecto, había un coche bomba en Haymarket, cerquitita de Piccadilly. Ay.

El coche bomba es como el paso dos después de los ataques en el transporte público para ponerte los pelos de punta. Implica que no hay virtualmente ningún lugar en la ciudad donde puedes estar seguro. Si esta noticia la hubieran dado hace más de dos años, ahorita estaría sufriendo un ataque de pánico. Pero es curioso cómo la mente humana se adapta a muchas cosas; después de los ataques del 2005, ahora siento al menos alivio de que no detonara la bomba, y una extraña sensación de cotidianeidad. No sé si es culpa de occidental o simplemente lógica, pero no puedo evitar pensar que esto sucede en otras partes todos, todos los días. Nada más que allá sí explotan todas las bombas.

Pero pese a mi relativa tranquilidad, no es bonito. Como descubrí tras los ataques del siete de julio hace dos años, no nada más da miedo, aunque sí da. Da mucho, mucho coraje. Como todos aquí, supongo, pienso en “mi” ciudad, “mi” Haymarket y “mi” Piccadilly, y me enfurece que alguien quiera matar gente inocente y volver a poner la ciudad de luto.

Recién estrenado el nuevo Primer Ministro, esto va a ser una descomunal prueba de fuego para su nuevo gabinete. Es esperanzador que haya ministros tan jóvenes –aunque también es cierto que tienen menos experiencia–, y que hayan cambiado los que, en mi opinión, tenían cargos fundamentales: política exterior, el servicio de salud pública y el Home Office. Pero “esperanzador” es una palabra muy grande. Con la política, es mejor ya no esperar nada de nadie.

Imagino que este ataque (fallido, gracias a Dios y a Alá) estaba preparado para coincidir con el estreno de Gordon Brown. ¿O sería la reunión de las Spice Girls? No olvidemos, por favor, a ese extraordinario personaje, Omar Bakri Muhammad, quien dijo que en una Gran Bretaña bajo su ideal de una ley islámica ya no habría más “Spicy Girls”. (Sí son un horror, pero no es para tanto.)

En fin, las cosas no están nada bien. Más soldados muertos en Irak (dos de apenas 20 años), las inundaciones, el coche bomba. Ah, y la prohibición de fumar en los pubs que empieza este domingo…

¿Qué puede cambiar realmente con un nuevo Primer Ministro? Habrá que esperar y ver. Sigo pensando que Blair es un personaje político de lo más interesante. En ocasiones pensé que era de verdad brillante, y me aterrorizaba su elocuencia porque te hacía creer, al menos, en su sinceridad, aún si estaba de lo más equivocado.

Pero para mí cualquiera de las cosas buenas que también hizo, y la indudable fuerza de su personalidad que le acompañó hasta su último discurso, están eclipsadas por toda la sangre derramada de la que no puede fingir no ser responsable. Y no nada más la sangre derramada; también su arrogancia, no admitir jamás que se había equivocado, no pedir perdón jamás, no escuchar a la gente a la que gobernaba, cuya mayoría no quería la guerra. Tomó decisiones que eran la frontera entre la vida y la muerte de muchas personas, de gente inocente. Aún si creía tener la razón, tomó esas decisiones. Me dan escalofríos nada más de pensar lo que se debe sentir tener semejante peso en la conciencia. No ha de haber sido fácil salir de Downing Street despedido por el grupo de familiares de los soldados muertos en Irak gritándole “Asesino”.

Sí, es un personaje interesante y sin duda seguirá siendo estudiado en círculos de historiadores y politólogos. Lo trágico es que estos intereses, que no son finalmente más que ejercicios intelectuales, no se acercan nunca a la historia real de la gente de carne y hueso, anónima, que muere en las garras de la historia.

Yo me pregunto cómo es posible que alguien pueda querer de veras ser Primer Ministro o Presidente. Hay que estar loco para querer un trabajo de esos. El poder, pienso, el poder. Pero esa es sólo la respuesta más inmediata, la más obvia. ¿Qué hay realmente en la psicología de estas personas? Creo que nunca lo voy a entender.

En fin; a ver qué vendrá mañana, con Brown y su gabinete. A ver qué vendrá, con los coches bomba o sin ellos, las amenazas de muerte a Rushdie, la masacre cotidiana en Irak. Es este momento, y es la condición humana también, que con tanta frecuencia da espectáculos más bien desoladores.

Hoy iba a subir otra cosa al blog, pero me entró la tristeza con lo del coche bomba y me puse a escribir esto.

Gracias a todos los que han dejado sus mensajes. Debo confesar que, como ya se habrán dado cuenta, a veces tardo mucho tiempo sin actualizar mi página, y por lo tanto sin ver los mensajes que me dejan. A veces los leo muy tarde. No siempre les puedo responder personalmente, pero les agradezco mucho lo que dicen sobre mis libros, o mis letras para Santa Sabina, o sus comentarios para darme ánimo cuando me andaban echando del país.

Y por cierto, para no crear confusiones con los seguidores de Santa Sabina, porque veo que algunos se hicieron bolas: en la foto del texto pasado, junto a la estatua de Giordano Bruno, la que está conmigo y con mi ahijado no es Rita, es otra amiga que nos acompañó ese día.

 Veo lo que acabo de escribir y me doy cuenta de lo parecido que suenan “Gordon Brown” y “Giordano Bruno”, de quien tanto hablé en mi blog pasado. Por favor no se vayan a confundir.

 

I have lots of trouble waking up in the mornings. Mark gets up earlier and turns on the radio; often, what the presenters are saying gets mixed up with my morning dreams, creating the most bizarre scenes.

This morning I was dreaming that they had found a car bomb parked on Haymarket, but in my dream it was a relief to know that someone had found a script from a long time ago with exactly the same words the presenters were pronouncing now, so surely it was all a joke.

When I finally woke up I told myself, “How nice it was just a dream”, and then I heard the news. There was a car bomb on Haymarket indeed, quite close from Piccadilly. Oh dear.  

The car bomb is something like step number two, after the attacks on public transport, in hair-raising possibilities. It implies there is virtually no safe place in the city. If this news had come more than two years ago, I would be having a panic attack right now. But it is strange how human mind adapts itself to many things; after the 2005 attacks, now I feel at least relieved because the bomb was defused, and a weird sensation of daily routine. I don’t know whether if it’s Western guilt or simply logic, but I can’t stop thinking that this happens every single day in other places. Only that over there, it seems, all the bombs do go off.

 But in spite of my relative calmness, it ain’t pretty. As I discovered after the 7 July attacks two years ago, you don’t feel only fear, although you do. You feel a lot of anger. As everybody here, I guess, I think about “my” city, “my” Haymarket and “my” Piccadilly, and it infuriates me that anyone may want to murder innocent people and leave the city mourning again.

With a brand new Prime Minister, this is going to be an overwhelming baptism of fire for his new cabinet. It is a hopeful sign, I suppose, that there are such young ministers –though it’s also true they have less experience–, and that those who, in my opinion, held fundamental posts have been changed: foreign policy, the NHS and the Home Office. But “a hopeful sign” is too big an expression. With politics, you’re better off not expecting anything from anybody.

I imagine that this attack (failed, thank God and Allah) was prepared to coincide with Gordon Brown’s arrival. Or was it the Spice Girls reunion? Let us not forget that extraordinary character, Omar Bakri Muhammad, who said that in a UK under his ideal of an Islamic law, there would be no more “Spicy Girls”. (They are awful indeed, but that was taking things a bit too far.)

Anyway, things are not good at all. More dead soldiers in Iraq (two of them were only twenty), the floods, the car bomb. Ah, and the smoking ban that starts this Sunday…

What can really change with a new Prime Minister? We’ll have to wait and see. I still think Blair is a quite interesting political character. In some occasions I thought he was truly brilliant, and his eloquence terrified me because he made you believe in, at least, his sincerity, even if he was utterly wrong.

But to me, those good things that he also did, and his obvious charisma, that was displayed up to his last speech, are eclipsed by all the bloodshed, of which he cannot pretend not to be responsible. And not only that blood; also his arrogance, his never admitting he had been wrong, never apologizing, his refusal to listen to all the people in the country he was ruling who did not want the war. He made decisions that were the frontier between the life and death of many people, innocent people. Even if he thought he was right, he did make such decisions. I get shivers just to think of what it must feel like to have such weight on your conscience. It must not have been easy to leave Downing Street with the relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq calling him “Murderer” as a farewell.

Yes, an interesting character, and no doubt he will go on being studied among historians and political scientists. The tragic thing is, these kind of interesting stuff, which after all is no more than an intellectual exercise, never approaches the real stories of those people, flesh and blood, anonymous people who die in the claws of history.

I wonder how is it possible that anyone may really want to be a Prime Minister, or a President. You have to be mad to desire such a job. Power, I think; power. But that is only the most immediate and obvious answer. What is really the psychology of these people? I think I’ll never understand.

So, let’s see what tomorrow brings, with Brown and his cabinet. What tomorrow will bring, with car bombs or without them, the death threats to Rushdie, the daily carnage in Iraq. It is this moment, and it is human condition as well, which offers so often these rather desolate spectacles.

Today I was going to put something else in this blog, but I got sad with the car bomb issue and started writing this.

Thanks to all of you who have left your messages. I must confess that–as you’ve probably noticed–, sometimes it takes me ages to update my page, and thus to see your messages. Sometimes I read them quite late. I cannot always answer to each of them, but I am very grateful for what you say about my books, or my lyrics for Santa Sabina, or your comments to cheer me up when they were evicting me from the UK.

 By the way, to Santa Sabina’s followers: I see that some were confused, so please notice that in the picture in my last entry, by Giordano Bruno’s statue, the girl with me and my godson is not Rita, but another friend who was with us that day.      

I read what I’ve just written and I realise that Gordon Brown and Giordano Bruno have a similar sound. Please do not mix them up! 

(Imagen tomada de/image taken from www.hberlioz.com, © 2002-2006 Michel Austin and Monir Tayeb)                       

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Finalmente fui a México y regresé. Como todo en esta vida, esa pequeña pesadilla ya es parte del pasado. Cierto: el Home Office hizo cuanto pudo por hacerla eterna, y hasta el día anterior a mi regreso a Londres, desde el consulado británico en México, me tenían con el alma en un hilo. El chistecito nos salió en aproximadamente 1,500 libras. Pero supongo que es barato, considerando las 70,000 libras que Tracey Emin presume haberse gastado durante la Bienal de Venecia. Esto simplemente ilustra que hay muchas formas de vivir la vida para una mujer de 43 años en el siglo XXI.           

Pero fuera de los gastos descomunales y el estrés, fue bonito ir a México, aunque fuera por tan poco tiempo. Ver a esa familia muy poblada de mis amigos que es siempre tan leal y que da tanto gusto ver. Hubo muchas emociones encontradas en esos doce días. Acompañé a amigos muy queridos en el duelo por el fallecimiento repentino del esposo de una de ellas. Al mismo tiempo, estuve gozando inmensamente jugar con mi ahijado Claudio que al fin ya no es virtual; ya nos conocimos en persona y me dejó completamente enamorada.           

Extrañé a Mark; era muy raro volver a mi país y pensar que a las calles del D.F. les hacía falta este maravilloso señor inglés (de corazón mexicano, como él dice) que es mi esposo.            

Y vi México otra vez. El país, en sí, es una fuente muy fecunda de sentimientos encontrados. Realmente México parece estar peor que nunca, aunque eso también es relativo: desde que tengo memoria, siempre está peor que nunca. Seguimos en ese limbo de horrores cotidianos que no llegan a ser tan horribles como para acaparar la atención de la prensa internacional, pero que siguen implicando la muerte diaria a manos de la violencia y la brutalidad, y la miseria de millones de personas.            

Y como siempre, también, vi a la gente contagiada por esa efervescencia incomprensible que hace que los mexicanos sobrevivamos a todos los “peor que nunca” de nuestra historia. Hablar con la gente allá me llenó de energía, de vitalidad. Es una paradoja que no termino de entender.           

En el avión de ida y de regreso vi muchas películas mediocres, pero una me gustó de verdad: la vida de Edith Piaff. Veo que en Londres la están anunciando con el título de La Vie en Rose. Me acompañó también Frances Yates, con su libro Giordano Bruno and The Hermetic Tradition.            

Yates fue una historiadora brillante y apasionada. Varios de sus títulos están traducidos al español, y quien quiera comprender verdaderamente el Renacimiento, no puede prescindir de su lectura. Estoy por terminar apenas Giordano Bruno…, volviendo las páginas con avidez y, por momentos, con el corazón acelerado y profundamente conmovida. Leo a la vez con la tristeza con que nos acercamos al final de nuestros libros favoritos.            

El núcleo de este libro extraordinario es la constatación de que una parte fundamental de la construcción intelectual y del imaginario renacentista, y por lo tanto de la cultura occidental, fue originada por un error histórico de proporciones gigantescas: la creencia equivocada en la inmensa antigüedad de los textos atribuidos a un no existente Hermes Trismegistus.           

 La honestidad y rigor intelectuales de Yates son en sí mismos muestra de las alturas que puede alcanzar el intelecto humano a las que los personajes históricos que pueblan sus libros les atribuían tanta importancia. La búsqueda de una u otra forma del poder detrás de los empeños de tantos “magos” renacentistas, con sus inevitables tropiezos con la realidad de la falibilidad y debilidad humanas, es transparente para ella, y en ningún momento encontraremos en sus páginas justificaciones para ninguna New Age ni fascinación ocultista idiota.           

Sin embargo, también puede ver, en la férrea racionalidad que rechaza de un manotazo toda búsqueda de lo sagrado, simplemente la manifestación de una estructura de pensamiento que obedece a su momento y circunstancias históricos, pero que no tiene tampoco la última palabra.           

En mi lectura de Yates, que tantas construcciones fabulosas del pensamiento y de la imaginación hayan tenido como origen un error de interpretación histórica no anula el valor de dichas construcciones. Todo lo contrario: nos hace admirar aún más el vuelo prodigioso del intelecto humano. Y, ¿por qué no?, del alma.           

Yates nos recuerda que Bruno no era exactamente el rebelde de ideas liberales que ahora reivindicamos. Es decir, sí lo era, y era un defensor convencido de la tolerancia, pero su pensamiento era estrictamente religioso, aunque estuviera fuera de toda ortodoxia.           

He estado pensando, en estos tiempos en que la palabra “religión” se ha convertido en una especie de palabra obscena para la población bienpensante del mundo, cómo es posible que tanta persona inteligente que anda por ahí sea capaz de ignorar que el pensamiento humano ha alcanzado muchas de sus más altas cimas en busca de la experiencia religiosa.           

 A Bruno me lo encontré en el D.F. de otra manera: en el parquecito más bien triste de la colonia Juárez a donde llevamos un día a jugar a Claudio. Quizá al parque no le quede más remedio que ser triste y tener ese aire desolado: fue construido en el mismo terreno donde se derrumbó un edificio en 1985, ahí donde murió Rockdrigo. Una persona cercana a mí es de los muy pocos sobrevivientes del edificio. Y ahí, por motivos incomprensibles, está una estatua de Giordano Bruno, copia de la que está en el Campo de Fiori, en Roma, justo en el lugar donde fue quemado vivo en 1600.            

Esto, pues, fue el viaje a México. Regreso con mi flamante visa, y continúo trabajando en un libro que me tiene de lo más entusiasmada: la compilación y traducción de una antología de cuentos británicos contemporáneos de fantasmas para la Secretaría de Cultura de San Luis Potosí. Pero de eso les iré contando más adelante.           

Me despido con una cita de Yates, haciendo referencia al pensamiento de Bruno:            “El arte es el conocimiento de la forma en que nos unimos al alma del mundo.” I’ve finally been to Mexico and back. As is the case with everything in this life, that little nightmare is already in the past. True, the Home Office did all it could to make it everlasting, and up to the day before my return to London, from the British Consulate in Mexico, they had me worried sick. The adventure cost us about £1,500, though I guess that’s cheap, considering the £70,000 Tracey Emin boasts having spent during the Biennale in Venice. This only goes to show that there are many ways of living life for a 43 year old woman in the 21^st century.           

 But gigantic expenses and stress aside, it was beautiful to be in Mexico, even if it was for so short a time. It was good to see that very extended family of my friends, always loyal, always a joy to see. There were many mixed emotions during those 12 days. I accompanied very dear friends during the grief because of the sudden death of the husband of one of them. At the same time, I was enjoying immensely playing with my godson Claudio who, at last, is not virtual anymore: we now have met in person, and he left me completely in love.           

I missed Mark; it was very odd to go back to my country and think that Mexico City’s streets truly needed this wonderful English man (with a Mexican heart, as he says) who is my husband.           

And I saw Mexico again. The country in itself is a very rich source of mixed feelings. Mexico truly seems to be worse than ever, though that is relative as well: since as long as I can remember, it is always worse than ever. We’re still in that limbo of daily horrors that don’t get to be horrible enough to catch the attention of international press, yet still imply daily deaths on the hands of violence and brutality, and the misery of millions of people.            And as always, too, I saw people swept away by that incomprehensible effervescence that makes us Mexicans survive all the “worse than ever” moments in our history. Talking to people over there filled me with energy and vitality. It’s a paradox I can’t still understand.           

In the airplane to Mexico and back I saw many mediocre films, but one I really did like: Edith Piaff’s life. In London it is being announced with the title La Vie en Rose. I was also accompanied by Frances Yates, with her book Giordano Bruno and The Hermetic Tradition.            

Yates was a brilliant and passionate historian. Whoever wants to really understand the Renaissance cannot miss reading her. I am about to finish Giordano Bruno…, eagerly turning the pages and, at some moments, with my heart beating fast and very deeply moved. At the same I read with the sadness with which we approach the end of our favourite books.The core of this extraordinary book is the corroboration of the fact that a fundamental part of the Renaissance–and thus of Western culture–intellectual and imaginary constructions, had its origin in a historical mistake of gigantic dimensions: the mistaken belief in the immense antiquity of the texts attributed to a non existent Hermes Trismegistus.           

Yates’ intellectual honesty and rigour are themselves proof of the heights human intellect can reach which were so cherished by the historical characters that people her books. The quest for one or other form of power behind the efforts of so many Renaissance magus, with their inevitable stumbling against the reality of human fallibility and weakness, is transparent for her, and at no point do we find in her pages any justification for any sort of idiotic New Age nor occultist fascination.           

Yet, she can also see in the fierce rationality which rejects in one blow all quest for the sacred simply the manifestation of a thought structure, which obeys to its historical moment and circumstances but doesn’t have either the last word.In my reading of Yates, the fact that so many fabulous constructions of thought and imagination had as its origin a mistake in historical interpretation does not invalidate the value of those constructions. On the contrary, it makes us admire even more the prodigious flight of human intellect and, why not?, soul.           

Yates reminds us that Bruno wasn’t exactly the rebel guy with liberal ideas we now claim him to be. I mean, he was, and he was indeed a convinced champion of tolerance, but his thought was strictly religious, even if it was alien to all form of orthodoxy.           

I have been thinking, in these times when the word “religion” has become a sort of obscenity among the well-meaning population of the world, how is it possible that so many intelligent people around there are able to ignore that human thought has reached some of its highest peaks in its quest for the religious experience.           

I also found Bruno in another way in Mexico City: in the little and rather sad park in the Colonia Juárez where we took Claudio to play one day. Perhaps the park can’t help being sad and having that desolate atmosphere: it was built in the very same grounds where a building collapsed in 1985, the same one where Mexican rock singer Rockdrigo died. Someone close to me is one of the few survivors of the building. And, incomprehensibly, there is a statue of Giordano Bruno, a copy of the one in the Campo de Fiori in Rome, just in the place where he was burnt alive in 1600.     

This, then, was the trip to Mexico. I’m back with my brand new visa, and continue working on a book that I am very excited about: the compilation and translation of an anthology of British contemporary weird fiction stories for the Secretaría de Cultura de San Luis Potosí. But more about that later.           

I say goodbye with a quote from Yates, referring to Bruno’s ideas:           

“Art is the knowledge of how to become joined to the soul of the world.”                          

(Scroll down to read in English)

Resolver problemas. Enfrentar la responsabilidad del día. De pronto el mundo parece constreñirme de una manera insoportable; todo esto que es útil, todo el deber (ser, hacer) es una agitación de superficies, una imagen eficiente de mí que ahoga lo que soy. Lo que yo soy. Tengo que repetirlo muchas veces para caer en mí: lo que yo soy.
Basta con mirar a la gente en la calle, en el autobús, para entender que esto es, en buena medida, la vida humana. Navegar en la circunstancia.
Ahora mi circunstancia es un problema de inmigración, un problema de salud, mucho trabajo. Otros se mueven en otras circunstancias, similares o completamente distintas, atroces o cargadas de bendiciones. ¿Por qué siento, cada vez con mayor frecuencia, que las circunstancias de los otros son arrojadas sobre mi cabeza, abrumándome con historias que no quiero conocer? No sé si estoy perdiendo la soledad. No me gusta.
Nuestros vecinos se pusieron paranoicos por la remota posibilidad de un robo en el edificio y pusieron una cámara de circuito cerrado en el diminuto vestíbulo que divide su studio flat del nuestro. Primero me reí mucho, porque no podía entender el mecanismo mental que les había llevado a hacer una cosa semejante. Pero cada día que pasa la maldita cámara me enoja más y más. Lo que me cuesta concebir ahora es tamaña estupidez. Me descubro ya actuando para la cámara: fingiendo que no está ahí, fingiendo que no sé que está ahí, comportándome de manera “natural” pero consciente de ello, en un esfuerzo supremo por ignorarlos, harta de ser espiada.
El equipaje de toda mi vida se mezcla con el peso de la imbecilidad que parece impregnar el planeta, ¿o es sólo esta ciudad? He sido espiada desde niña; estoy acostumbrada al ojo invisible que me observa, a vivir como si no existiera, confundiendo el ojo de Dios con el ojo familiar, el ojo del destino, siempre intentando desafiar esa mirada con mi absoluta ignorancia (fingida) de su existencia. Ahora esta cámara, aquí, en la puerta de mi casa, las cámaras esparcidas por toda la ciudad como un universo delirante en cuya realidad todavía me cuesta creer, me arrojan fuera del universo. Empeñada en negarlas, viajo hacia adentro. No existen. No existe el espectáculo de todo lo que somos. Si no puedo romperlas a patadas, las romperé con mis ojos cerrados. Hacerlas explotar, hacer explotar el ojo insomne.
¿En dónde empieza la libertad? ¿Hasta qué punto puede nadie escapar a sus circunstancias? Quiero quitarme de encima esto que me oprime esta tarde, esta capa pesadísima de una mañana perdida resolviendo problemas, esta prisa de hormiga, esta sensación de huida permanente interrumpiendo el único momento realmente significativo: el manzano florecido en un parquecito, en medio del desolado paisaje de Wood Green.

To sort out problems. To face the day’s responsibilities. Suddenly the world seems to constrain me in an unbearable way. All this that is useful, all the duties (what I have to be, to do) is a stirring of surfaces, an efficient image of me that suffocates what I am. What I am. I have to repeat it many times in order to fall back into myself: what I am.
Just to look at the people in the street, in the bus, is enough to understand that this is to a great extent human life. To sail in the waters of circumstance.
Now my circumstance is an immigration problem, a health problem, lots of work. Others move in other circumstances, similar or completely different, atrocious or blessing-laden. Why do I feel more and more that other people’s circumstances are thrown upon my head, overwhelming me with stories I don’t want to know? I don’t know if I’m losing my solitude. If it is so, I don’t like it.
Our neighbours went paranoid at the remote possibility of burglary in the building and installed a CCTV in the tiny hall that divides their studio flat from ours. First I laughed a lot, because I couldn’t understand the mental process that had led them to do such a thing. But every day the bloody camera angers me more and more. What I find now difficult to conceive is such stupidity. I discover myself already acting for the camera: pretending it’s not there, pretending I do not know it’s there, behaving “naturally” but aware of it, in a supreme effort to ignore them, fed up with being spied upon.
My entire life’s baggage merges with the weight of the imbecility that seems to pervade the planet. Or is it only this city? I have been spied since I was a child; I’m used to the invisible eye that watches me, used to living as if it didn’t exist, mistaking the eye of God with the family eye, the eye of destiny, always trying to defy that gaze with my (pretended) ignorance of its existence. Now this camera here, at my doorstep, the cameras spread all over the city as a delirious universe in the reality of which I still find it hard to believe, throw me out of the universe. Intent on denying them, I travel inwards. They don’t exist. The spectacle of all we are does not exist. If I can’t kick them to pieces, I will break them with my closed eyes. To make them explode, to make the sleepless eye explode.
Where does freedom start? To what extent can anyone escape his/her circumstances? I want to get rid of this thing that oppresses me this afternoon, this incredibly heavy cloak of a morning lost sorting out problems, this ant’s rush, this sensation of a permanent flight interrupting the only truly meaningful moment of the day: the apple tree in full blossom in a little park, in the middle of Wood Green’s desolate landscape.

The person Ms Featherstone, our MP, addressed at the Home Office got back to her. He said the problem was not so much those doomed three weeks of delay, but that my migratory status was as an artist, and the only condition for being granted that is that we don’t change our migratory status within the country, but from outside.         

First news I have of that! The scary letter from last week didn’t mention that either.         

My migratory status is that where they put all those people too odd to be classified normally: for instance, I share it with religious ministers. I’m so used to not fitting any normal classification of anything that I accept all sorts of oddities as a matter of fact, but that such oddities seem to deprive me of any rights of whatever kind starts to piss me off.          

Anyway, on Tuesday I went to see the lawyer with this new piece of information. Her advice: go. It seems it would be even more expensive to try to fix it from here. She said they would be inflexible and that anyway there was such confusion within the Home Office that I’d be better off leaving in a few days. She also said that my plea for mercy on health grounds was pointless: they expected you to be fatally ill in a hospital or about to give birth in order to consider such pleas. I thought it was quite odd: if I were dying on a hospital bed I wouldn’t be thinking of my visa, as I would be preparing for a much longer trip.     

On Wednesday morning a young message boy who had a parcel for my neighbour had the wrong bell and started ringing on mine desperately. I rushed down the stairs. Then he started banging on the door and my heart nearly stopped: it’s the Home Office, I thought, and they will deport me with my slippers on.         

That same day, one minute before starting to book my very expensive flight –being so close to Easter holidays–, I thought I should follow my appeal application, even if I had supposedly no right to appeal and even though the lawyer told me there was no point in trying. I called the tribunal and, to my absolute amazement and joy, they told me that there was no problem with my appeal application, that I would receive a letter shortly and we would have a hearing for the 4^th of May! That same day we received a letter from the Immigration and Nationality Directorate feeling “very sorry” that we had had reasons to complain, and saying they would look after our case.         

I didn’t know any more whether if I should laugh or cry, with my emotions, and my plans, going up and down like that during the whole week. I had already been picturing myself in Mexico giving lots of presents to my godson and eating quesadillas. I had already been through despair because I had so many things to sort out in very few days with lots of physical pain, and had been cursing the fortune this would cost us. Now, it seems we have a whole month to prepare ourselves for the hearing and things don’t look that bad.         

Which is all very good. Mark and I are quite relieved and happy and I even bought myself a pair of new beautiful shoes, much cheaper than the flight to Mexico and the new visa application.         

The thing is: do the Home Office staff know where do they have their heads? Why one person says I have one problem and then another one says the problem is something entirely different, something I was never informed would be a problem at all? Furthermore, why do they send such threatening letters without any reliable information and with no mention whatsoever of your rights? Even criminals are informed of their rights when arrested. I feel bullied but I don’t even know if there was any bad intent behind that or just gross inefficiency. That letter I received a week ago is full of horrid implications and has not one single line that provides any sort of help, advice or information about your rights.         

Anyway, I won’t bother you further. Let’s wait for the hearing in May. Then I will know how good or bad things are. Meanwhile, let’s dance in the sun.         

Muchas gracias a quienes me han escrito y me han dejado sus cometarios de apoyo. ¡Claro que sirven de algo! Me levantan el ánimo y eso es lo que importa. Perdonen que continúe con esta aventura en inglés; con toda esta pesadilla no me da tiempo de contarla también en español, y ya que la empecé en inglés, pues así sigo. No se preocupen: mis próximos blogs volverán a su estado bilingüe.         

Thank you very much to those who have written to me or left their support comments here. Of course they are useful! They cheer me up!         

The saga continues:          

Yesterday morning I left home at 6:20 am, on my way to the Immigration Advice Office (a charity, independent from the Government) that opens at 9:00 o’clock. I went to Borough tube station, the one with a terrifyingly loud alarm on the lifts that makes you think the ultimate terrorist attack is on its way. Not good for my nerves.         

I came out of the station thinking that at least I was in Little Dorrit’s territory, though if I think about it, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, given the circumstances.         

I needed to go to number 190 in Great Dover Street. The first number I saw was 4, so I assumed I had to walk to the opposite end of the street, and there I go. I passed endless estates with no numbers on them, and no sign whatsoever of the Immigration Advice Office. I started to go frantic. The thing is: I had forgotten how idiosyncratic the numbering of streets can be in London. It usually makes this funny U-turn, so actually 190 was exactly in front of number 4, where I had started.          

When I realised I had been unforgivably imbecile again, I rushed back in a panic, thinking that by now I would have the last place in the queue and wouldn’t be seen that day. But there was not a soul (it was by then 7:48), so it was just as well that I walked up and down the street like a lunatic; it kept me warm and busy in that ungodly hour.         

Oh well, things were not that bad then. I went to the café next to the station, the same one where I started one of my exhaustive Dickens walks for my London book a while ago. By then I was starving so I ordered a croissant and a coffee. The macchiato looked spectacular to me and beautifully served, a warm and friendly salute. The croissant, though, was one of those huge and elastic monstrosities that remind you that this is not exactly Paris.          

I did not even feel guilty to have a croissant; I had walked so much in the cold and shivering with anxiety, that I’m sure it won’t make me inordinately fat. I ate only half, anyway. Its dimensions scared me.         

I thought that I had been in despair a few minutes before, in the roundabout at the other end of the street, thinking: “This place doesn’t exist either!”, and that now I had found it, with no queues, and had even time for enjoying my favourite activity: taking notes and reading in a café, feeling almost cheerful.          

And I didn’t even have to go to Croydon! As I was saying last Saturday to our beloved Quentin (the other witness to our wedding, by the way), everybody knows Croydon is one of the deepest circles of hell. There are even some Doré engravings that show that place with the ominous name, Lunar House.         

Life being so unpredictable, would I be leaving the office in tears again, a couple of hours later? What do you think, dear reader?         

I dashed out shortly after anyway, just in case a mile length queue had suddenly appeared, but there was only another lady. We waited standing for nearly an hour, nothing good for hurting bones, but at least I was reading Osamu Dazai’s short stories (Quentin’s birthday present). I finished reading “On The Question of Apparel”, that had me laughing in the tube earlier that morning. His eye for absurdity was very handy just then. It was a bit hard to read because there were some road-works just opposite, but what the hell, it could be worse. It could be Croydon.         

A couple from Nigeria arrived with a very peculiar problem. They were not accepting their permit to marry because they insisted their case was one of a same sex couple cohabiting, even though they were so very obviously male and female. We had to laugh.         

This Immigration Advice charity turned out to be superb. To start with, it’s a clean and welcoming office, and not the refugee-camp Croydon-like scenario I was expecting. The staff is all extraordinarily kind and understanding. They struggled hard to find me an urgent appointment with a lawyer for today at 3:00 o’clock, because they say the case is very unusual and we should hurry, so I’m still in suspense till that time.         

Our bad luck had it that my payments and the loan money finally came through just now, because our bank accounts of this month show a rather unusual reality. Had we been there just one month ago the service would have been free, but now I had to pay 100 quid. I don’t know if you find the humour in it. I do. It’s a very gloomy and macabre kind of humour, but I find it. This is the kind of completely absurd situation that makes me wonder if someone has a spell on me, but I try hard to go back to rationality and stop recurring to magical thinking.   

I got back home by bus, and as I saw the City workers in their smart dark suits hurrying around the Bank of England building, I even thought I could be far worse-off and be one of them. Am I not amazing?         

I was in very bad pain when I finally got home. I immediately called the Law Enforcement thing and finally they know where my passport is, though they still can’t open the file to see if my Marriage Certificate is there. Yet they told me not to worry: it certainly is not lost. My question is: that certificate is not only mine; it’s Mark’s as well. What right do they have to retain it?         

This person informed me, to my qualified  relief, that I simply made a mistake in my application. That if I go out I wouldn’t have to have any trouble to come back, but he believes I do have to go out, and not to any other European country. I have to go to Mexico and pay for the whole visa all over again. He says it’s only a procedure matter. I don’t think it’s that simple; a lightning trip to Mexico is certainly not simply “procedure” to me.

Then I tried to drink some water and realised we had no water at all in the flat. You guessed: I started crying, to make do for the lack of liquids. It’s not that I don’t want to go to Mexico and see my friends and my godson. It’s just that I don’t want to go like this, spending all our so hardly-earned money this way, and furthermore I can’t see how can I organise a trip like that, and the finances included, in a few days, feeling so very ill.

So this is what a blog is, then? Letting the steam out? Is it an embarrassing thing to do, a sign of how insane and neurotic our society has become?          

It’s probably a very bad thing. At least we have running water again.         

I like to think of my life as of a wonderful novel, full of depth and adventure and drama, but if I’m honest, it’s rather like a soap-opera. When I read ages ago the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, I was furious. I don’t remember much about the novel apart from thinking that the heroine was an absolute idiot who had brought all her misfortunes upon herself so blatantly that she ended up deserving them.         

Well, many times I feel exactly like her. I must hurry and clarify, before you make assumptions: my misfortunes are not so saucy, not at all, for better or worse! But sometimes I can hardly believe so much tragedy and I get mad at myself and know I am just as stupid as Justine, who I really don’t like at all.          Thank God I have such wonderful friends who are kind and polite enough to call me a dreamer, an idealist. But even they sometimes, in my worst moments, have despaired and asked me: ‘Who the hell do you think you are, Joan of Arc, to put yourself always on the path of fire? And for what, can you explain?’ Mark also calls me Adri Calamity, but even him, used to see me knocking down everything every time I move, falling down unexpectedly or crying like a Magdalene over a new cosmic tragedy when he comes back from the office was very shocked when he saw last Wednesday the Home Office letter asking me, his wife of nearly three years, to leave the country as soon as possible.         

Oh yes! I have been living in this country for exactly (I think to the day) 8 years. I have lived with Mark for 4 years and we’ve been married for nearly 3. Yet, I overstayed my leave to remain for three bloody weeks, three bloody weeks I was late to renew my visa and apply for my married visa, a mistake the causes of which I explained to the Home Office when I sent my application, on grounds of financial problems and ill health, and it seems I am deported. What’s worse: with no right to appeal.         

And now the obvious question comes, the so embarrassing question that shows my stupidity in all its glory, so embarrassing that I didn’t dare to tell anyone, not even Mark, that I made my application three weeks late, hoping all would be well: why on earth was I late?         

To explain, justify or simply show how much my life is like a Mexican soap opera, I’ll tell the whole story, as briefly as possible:    I came to this country to recover from a moment of awful emotional tragedy on which I will not dwell here. I was recovering from a nearly fatal pneumonia, I had no money, and I came here. I know: only an idiot thinks she can recover from grief, bad lungs and dire straits coming to one of the most expensive cities in the world, where she didn’t know a soul, and famed for being very damp. But then, I had always dreamt of London, since I was little, and I thought its literary past and atmosphere would save me. Ah, how poetic!         

The worst of all is that to this day I claim it did save me. To this day I love this city in an ecstatic way and manage to find its mystical, Blakean nature in spite of London transport and Tesco stores. For years and years my friends back in Mexico despaired, thinking it was suicidal: furthermore, I’ve been poor as a rat. They begged me to go back, but no, no, I was living my dream.         

Most of these years I have lived as a correspondent for several Mexican magazines and newspapers, and as a translator for Mexico as well. Everyone knows that with what you earn like that in Mexico it’s very hard to live back there, but if you turn those pesos into pounds and pretend to live in London, well… that only can mean your brain is soft. During those years the Adritragedies –too embarrassingly frequent and weird to tell here– accumulated, including very bad health, and the debts accumulated as well. But I persevered, writing back to every journal in Mexico about how this is the most wonderful city in the world, revealing, or so I thought, its many mysteries.         

Then I met Mark and love shone through; we started living together. Most of the time we had to rely on his sole income, so he started accumulating debts himself. When I renewed my visa they gave me leave to remain for three years and now I’m allowed to be a freelance writer and translator, which means that even though I cannot be permanently employed, at least I can accept translations here or in Europe, which has been very good. Of course, I pay taxes for whatever income I receive like that. So things were getting better. Establishing myself as a freelance translator here has taken some time and it has been tough, as it is, but things were better. Still, we had quite too many debts. So that’s why we didn’t apply for my married visa immediately after our marriage. We married with no money whatsoever. Clara, one of our very dear witnesses, was my “wedding dress godmother” when we went to choose a dress in Camden Town (we could not afford it); our party was in The Gatehouse pub, where our guests had to buy their own drinks and even bought many of ours, and our honeymoon was in our dear friend Rosie’s house in Whitby, because we could afford no B&B.    

And it was a very beautiful wedding and a very beautiful honeymoon. Many friends say it’s one of the most beautiful and happiest weddings they have ever been to, and I agree. But the idea to pay for the visa right then was absolutely out of reach.         

At least, we thought, we still had nearly three years to pay it. Those nearly three years, though, have passed very quickly and the way time was passing before: struggling, struggling, with difficulties to keep up with the rent of our studio flat, this very loved and very crammed room where we live (where would we be without our wonderful, understanding and generous friend and landlady Ruth?), with debts and debts, me looking for freelance jobs here and in Mexico, taking on board more than is humanly possible whenever there is work to take, while Mark keeps on working in Samuel French every day, struggling, struggling. In 8 years I haven’t had a real holiday: wherever I go it has been carrying a laptop to keep on translating (and that includes –please don’t laugh—our honeymoon). These years have gone by trying to keep the boot of financial hardship off our neck. That’s the absolute, naked truth.         

We did go to Mexico in 2005, and of course we loved the trip. It had to be done anyway; I had to arrange things there regarding the official invoices demanded by the Mexican Inland Revenue, or else I would not be able to receive any more payments from jobs or royalties from my country, so the expense of that trip was unavoidable. And yes, by the way, poor as we are, I pay taxes in two countries. I might be able not to do that, but for that I’d have to hire an accountant, something we can’t afford.         

You must be now reading beside the Kleenex box, but wait: it gets worse. And don’t get angry: yes, we did try to save for the visa. I put the odd 20 or 40 quid in my savings account now and then, but it always had to be used later on for simply eating, paying bills.          

The final months of 2006 came with a reality: now we had to pay for the visa very very soon. And as is usually the case with freelancers, I wasn’t receiving any jobs in those pre-Christmas months. To make things slightly more complicated, Adri’s way, my health has been increasingly lousy and during those months I was holding a battle with the NHS begging them to send me to a specialist, and wondering every other day when was I finally going to collapse. None of the payments I was expecting came through –we had been dreaming that with those payments we would pay the visa and then would go to Mexico to the christening of my godson Claudio, but not only was there no Mexico and I became the first virtual godmother in history; there was no money, period. During January and the first weeks of February work started coming through, thank God. I took everything on board, everything, thinking all the time: the visa, the visa, apart from the rent and the innumerable bills coming through the mailbox. I worked on weekends, I worked mornings, afternoons, evenings, quite heroic because I’ve been feeling like shit. In the end we had to recur to a further loan. And then, finally, payments started coming through and we are living a rare period of financial beautiful relaxation and we have paid for the visa! But, a bit too late. Three weeks late, to be exact.         

And while we entered our documents, I let Mark go on thinking the expiry date was on April, even though I had by then known it was not, and I didn’t tell one single friend I was late, because I felt just too stupid, too cornered by circumstances. I felt too much like a cornered animal and that embarrassed me. I just thought that the Home Office would understand if I explained: that the months approaching the expiry date of the visa we had been under lots of financial stress, that none of the expected payments came through and we had been living on only one income (Mark’s), and I had been so ill and exhausted I could hardly think properly. I thought they would understand. I keep on telling my friends how authorities here are as not as arbitrary as in Mexico, so I feel doubly stupid now.         

While we were waiting for (we thought) our visa, I finally got an appointment with the specialist at St Thomas Hospital (very cool: you go out and can see the Houses of Parliament and the Big Ben; if it’s foggy and bitterly cold like that morning, it’s exactly as in the movies). Last week I was diagnosed (finally!) with fibromyalgia and the appropriate tests are being run, given the multiplicity of my symptoms, to check for other possible conditions, none of them very pretty, which may be lupus, confirmation of previous diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, MS, diabetes, thyroid problems and a long and unpleasant etcetera. They took so much blood it was like a Hammer horror film.         

And until last week I thought my biggest problem was that, though the doctor said he’d want to see me in a few weeks, at the reception they gave me an appointment until June. I thought my biggest problem was to keep on feeling so ill and scared about my health for three months, without knowing the results of my tests and with no treatment, and I felt angry that it had to be so in a country where I have struggled so hard and where I pay taxes. Little I knew what the post was bringing a week later!         

So this is it: another sad chapter in Adri’s soap opera. The day I received the letter telling me to leave immediately I couldn’t sort anything out because everywhere I called in the Home Office they couldn’t help because “their system was down”. I had to wait till the following day. They gave me a number to call for immigration advice… and that telephone number does not even exist. Yes, you read right: in the letter where they tell you to fuck off, they give you a telephone number that DOES NOT EXIST.         

I called the Law Enforcement whatever it’s name is where my passport is supposed to be, according to their letter, but they don’t have it, know nothing about it and tell me to call until Monday, which is of course very scary because I’m being asked to leave as soon as possible. And they did not return our marriage certificate. At Law Enforcement they don’t know if it will come with my passport or not.          No one tells me how many days exactly does “as soon as possible” mean. No one tells me why I have no right to appeal, even though I’m married to a British citizen. No one tells me if I have a right to appeal once outside the country; whether if I have to go to Mexico or I can arrange things from a consulate in Europe. No one tells me if it’s only my overstay that is the problem but that can be fixed, or they want to throw me out of the UK for good.          

I’ve spent the past few days on the phone, looking up things in internet, sending faxes. I have received prompt help from our MP, Lynne Featherstone. I am going early on Monday morning to an independent immigration advice office. I’m terrified, I don’t know if in 3 days I should be in Mexico visiting my godson Claudio quite sooner than expected, or visiting my dear Mercedes in Barcelona, but in either case with my heart in my throat sitting at the UK consulate, not knowing when will I see Mark again. Terrified to think that the recent loan’s money and our very well deserved income after so much struggle will all vanish in the air paying for more applications or lawyers. Of course, any idea of looking after my health is ridiculous now: my symptoms have quite intensified, I spent the first 2 nights without sleeping at all, and I swallow far too many Kalms a day, supposing that at least you cannot overdose on herbal remedies. (That would be the top Adritragedy of all! She died of a Kalms overdose! How uncool, how unlike Jim Morrison or Virginia Woolf…)         

Ah, what I would give for a good old Tafil just now!         

Hopefully all will be well by Monday; hopefully I will have been told what to do next, that things are not that bad, that I can fly over to Barcelona and have it fixed in a couple of weeks.          

If not, my friends, I’m afraid I will have to ask of your kindness to support my case, though I still don’t know how do you do that exactly. Maybe just to be willing, if necessary, to bear witness to the fact that I’m simply a writer, and not a terrorist or a threat to the nation, and that I have not taken anything whatsoever from this country. I’ve never claimed benefits, I pay taxes, I keep on saying London is the best place on earth and writing about all British literary heroes, and, well… I’m just a writer with a tendency to tragedy.

          I know I have pestered some of you before asking for signatures and support for all sorts of causes, for the Mexican oppressed people of Oaxaca, etc. I know I can be a downright pain in the ass. What can I say! If all goes well, I promise to throw a wonderful party in Hampstead Heath, where we will stay eating, dancing, drinking and reciting poems to the sun and the moon from noon till they kick us out, which is the Mexican way.

           

           

           

           

           

           

           

(Scroll down to read in English) 

Tras el día luminoso la lluvia, el día sin un solo atisbo de luz. La lluvia, la mortaja gris de las nubes apagadas, densas, lejanas como un cielo visto tras un vidrio, un vidrio sucio, un cielo enmarcado en una escena que no nos muestra, que contiene nuestro pensamiento nada más, un pensamiento torpe, el alma atrapada.

        ¿Cómo pudieron ser ayer los cielos claros, ayer ese azul extenso y limpio atravesado de nubes inmaculadas, la glorificación del universo entero?

        No sé para quién escribo. Ni ahora, en este espacio, ni siempre. No sé qué buscamos cuando buscamos las palabras. Las figuras borrosas, los rostros de rasgos difusos inclinados bajo el paraguas.       

       Me sigue persiguiendo este sentido de urgencia; algo tienen que romper las palabras. No es ni un velo ni un cristal ni un muro. Es un material imaginado, algo que hemos ido construyendo entre todos con un silencio estéril, con nuestra hipócrita conformidad con lo de abajo, la opacidad, la muerte de todo éxtasis y todo dios.       

       ¿Romper como un estallido, o como plumas acariciando el rostro? Como estar en el sueño con los ojos abiertos. La palabra como el sonido del destello. 

After the luminous day –the rain, the day without a single glimpse of light. The rain, the grey shroud of dull, dense clouds, distant like a sky seen behind a glass, a dirty glass, a sky framed in a scene that doesn’t show us, containing only our thoughts –clumsy thoughts, the soul entrapped.       

      How could it be yesterday –the clear skies, yesterday that sweeping and clean sky crossed by immaculate clouds, glorification of the whole universe?       

     I don’t know whom I write for. Not now, in this space, nor ever. I don’t know what we seek when we seek words. The blurred figures, faces with fading features leaning beneath the umbrella.       

     I’m still haunted by this sense of urgency; words must break something. It’s not a veil or a crystal nor a wall. It’s an imagined material, something we have all been building with a sterile silence, with our hypocritical conformity with what is below, opacity, the death of all ecstasy and all gods.         

     To break as an explosion, or as feathers stroking a face? Like being in the dream with eyes wide open. The words as the sound of brightness.

(Scroll down to read in English)
Yo no debería estar haciendo esto. Debería estar trabajando en una traducción y en un artículo. Pero he estado recibiendo comentarios sobre este blog que no actualizo desde diciembre, y llevo varias semanas intentando agradecerles que sigan paseando por este espacio tan lento, tan poco cibernético.
Gracias, entonces, y muy sinceras. No crean que no me doy cuenta de que, al empezar un blog y empezar a tener lectores, he establecido una forma de comunicación con la que tengo cierta responsabilidad. He pensado en un montón de cosas que quiero hacer con esta página: actualizar mi sección de puentes con las direcciones de muchos otros links que me entusiasman, ponerle sonido (música como la que estoy escuchando ahora –Ali Akbar Moradi, que me deja sin palabras–, lectura de poemas), subir más textos inéditos.
Pero no ha habido tiempo. A veces siento que voy subiendo por una colina cuya cima se vuelve más alta a medida que avanzo, hasta que se convierte en una montaña gigantesca. En estos momentos el nombre de la colina sigue siendo la cuesta de enero. Trabajo y trabajo, trabajo y trabajo. Y algo de mí se cansa. Veo a mi alrededor, todos al parecer atrapados en las garras del monstruo financiero, el correo cargado de cuentas y más cuentas por pagar, la angustia, la angustia…
¿Es esto, simplemente, la vida adulta? ¿O caímos todos en una trampa mortal sin darnos cuenta? ¿O las dos cosas son en realidad una y la misma?
Por fortuna, no todos los días el correo viene cargado nada más de cuentas pendientes. Hace algunas semanas, por ejemplo, me llegó la novela de mi muy querido amigo Martín Solares, Los minutos negros. Martín ha sido mi amigo desde hace muchos años, desde que ambos vivíamos en México (ahora él vive en París). Su amor por la literatura es genuino y obsesivo. Ha trabajado como editor, impartiendo talleres de literatura, e impulsando a muchos autores en cuyo trabajo cree. Al mismo tiempo, en silencio y sin cesar, ha estado escribiendo. Soy testigo de los años y años que batalló dándole forma a esta novela, sin hacer alarde de su talento; al contrario, manteniéndose siempre un poco en una muy fértil oscuridad, y ahora, de pronto, nos deslumbra con su primera novela, publicada por Random House Mondadori. Una novela macabra, cargada de un humor irresistible pese a los horrores que describen sus páginas, un retrato escalofriante de los bajos fondos (con sus visibles fachadas de poder) del norte de México, una fantasía desbordada… en suma, un novelón. Recibir sorpresas así en el correo son de las cosas que alegran la vida.
Por no hablar de la nieve que cayó justo hace dos semanas. Aquí se quejan mucho porque este inverosímil país se paraliza, como si nunca jamás hubieran visto la nieve en estas latitudes, pero para mí, después de casi ocho años por acá, el espectáculo de la nieve sigue siendo una de las fuentes más profundas de pura felicidad y puro asombro. Que el mundo pueda ser tan bello, todavía… Me fui a un parque a ver monos de nieve y medio hacer uno con una amiga, mexicana también.
Entre las carreras del trabajo, las batallas financieras, los monos de nieve, por supuesto, y los días que se escurren como ratones con una velocidad desquiciante, pienso y pienso en la maleabilidad del tiempo. En lo largo que es el tiempo en la infancia. En los 43 años que cumpliré este próximo lunes, sin saber cómo llegué aquí, cómo los últimos 15 años de mi vida han sido esta especie de relámpago lento, pero relámpago al fin.
Mientras tanto, México sigue siendo esa herida abierta, pero hoy, como ya había dicho en diciembre, no hablaré de política. México es también esa tierra que añoro. Sueño constantemente con que hago maletas y tomo aviones de un lugar a otro, sueños cargados de ansiedad y la misma pregunta, “¿aquí o allá? ¿aquí o allá?”. La pregunta nunca resuelta. Mejor decir que estoy aquí, en este tiempo mío, más que en ningún lugar, un tiempo hecho de Londres y de México, de los afectos aquí y allá, un tiempo hecho de libros y de música, de la dulzura del amor y el refugio a veces suspendido sobre el océano mismo que es este cuarto nuestro, nuestro hogar. El tiempo de la vida que me avanza, con todo su peso y sin embargo –a Dios gracias— el asombro, cada vez más grande.

I shouldn’t be doing this. I should be working right now on a translation and an article. But I have been receiving comments to this blog that has not been updated since December, and for several weeks now I have been trying to thank you for still roaming around this slow, utterly un-cybernetic space.
So thanks, quite sincerely. Don’t think that I do not realize that, on starting a blog and starting to have readers, I have established a way of communication towards which I have some responsibility. I have thought of a lot of things I want to do with this page: updating my bridges section with a lot of links I find exciting, setting sound to it (music like what I’m hearing now—Ali Akbar Moradi, which leaves me quite speechless—poetry readings), uploading more unpublished texts.
But there’s been no time. Sometimes I feel I’m going up a hill the top of which becomes ever higher as I go forward, until it becomes a rather gigantic mountain. Right now the name of the hill is still what we call in Mexico “January’s slope”. I work and work and work, and something in me gets tired. I see around me, all of us seemingly trapped by the claws of the financial monster, the post loaded with bills and more bills, and the anguish, the anguish…
Is this, simply, adult life? Or have we all fallen into a mortal trap without our noticing? Or are both things really one and the same?
Luckily, the post is not always carrying only bills. For instance, a few weeks ago I received my very dear friend Martín Solares’ novel, Los minutos negros (The Black Minutes). Martín has been my friend since we both lived in Mexico ( Now he lives in Paris). His love for literature is genuine and quite obsessive. He has worked as an editor, leading literary workshops and promoting several authors in whose work he believes. At the same time, silently and ceaselessly, he has been writing. I can bear witness of the years and years he struggled giving shape to this novel, without any showing-off of his talents; all the opposite, rather, always remaining somehow in a rather fertile darkness, and now suddenly he dazzles us with his first novel, published by Random House Mondadori. The novel is macabre, full of an irresistible humour in spite of all the horrors described in its pages; it’s a chilling portrait of Northern Mexico’s underworld and its visible façades of power, and also a display of unfettered fantasy… a great novel indeed. To receive such surprises in the post is one of the things that make life happy.
Not to talk about the snowfall we had just a couple of weeks ago. Here they complain a lot because the whole country comes to a standstill, as if they had never seen the snow in this very peculiar country, but to me, even after nearly 8 years here, the spectacle of snow is still one of the deepest sources of pure joy and wonderment. That the world can still be so beautiful..! So that day I went to the park with a friend (Mexican as well) to watch (and half-attempt to make) snowmen.
In between the work rush, the financial battles, the snowmen of course, and days slipping away like mice, with unnerving velocity, I think of time’s malleability. On how long time is during childhood. On the 43 years old I will be next Monday, without knowing how did I get here, how the last 15 years of my life have been this kind of slow lightning, but a lightning nevertheless.
Meanwhile, Mexico is still that open wound. But today, as I had already said in December, I will not talk about politics. Mexico is also the land I long for. I dream constantly of packing-up, of taking planes that go from here to there and back again, dreams full of anxiety carrying the same question, “here or there? here or there?”. The never answered question. Better to say that I am here, in this time of mine, rather than in any particular place; a time made of London and Mexico, of the loved ones here and there, a time made of books and music, of the sweetness of love and the shelter—sometimes suspended above the ocean—of this room of ours, our home. The time of life walking on me with all its weight and yet—thank God!—with all its wonderment, every time bigger.