Postal / Dayana Fraile

Postcard


I can’t remember how many times this scene has repeated itself. Ana is wrapped from head to toe in her plaid blanket. Aside from her head, I can only see a bit of her hand between the fabric, an incandescent sparkle where the cigarette should be, the quivering ash, always about to fall anywhere except the ashtray. Beth Gibbons shredding her vocal chords in the background, “Nobody Loves Me” playing live, “Over” or “Glory Box” in Sao Paulo.

I’m always sitting on the mattress spread out on the floor, beside the bed, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left. Sometimes the room is smaller or bigger, the window changes position, with more or less things, because the things are essential there, the mountains of CDs, the quartz stones, the teddy bears, the music magazines, the books, always the dwarf bamboo resting in a glass container full of something that looks like colored gelatin, the hair clips, the blister packs of pills scattered on the floor and Ana raising or lowering the music’s volume, arbitrarily, as though she were disconcerted by having a free hand and nothing to do with it.

I light up and extinguish a cigarette, the same cigarette, several times, I think I want to smoke and I light it, I think I don’t want to smoke anymore so I put it out – “You know? I’m tired of being alone” –, Ana always seems to want to add something else, but never does, she entertains herself with the CDs, she wants to make a long enough pause so that the words she has just pronounced, a few seconds ago, will distance themselves enough from those that will soon come. She tries to make some time. She puts on a CD and takes it off, she puts another one on and takes it off, and now she plays a song by Fiona Apple, almost always the one where she says, “Sometimes I feel like a criminal.”


I don’t say anything to Ana when she tells me this, I just listen to her and sometimes I feel like a criminal, laralarala... I light another cigarette, skim through another magazine, and finally end up inventing some story about a sudden and unexpected encounter with some ex-boyfriend, because I know those types of stories fascinate her, she looks at me from the bed, and asks for details about each one of the guy’s actions, about mine, “Seriously?... And what did you do?”, she asks if I pause during the story, as she checks the time on the clock at the bedside table, stretches out her arm and pops another Lexotanil in her mouth.

It’s always the same scene, the same songs, the same eiderdown, the same bamboo buried in gelatin. I think certain people stay within us like a fragmented image, a postcard photograph, a scratched record where the same needle rolls indefinitely. For me, Ana is one of those people. That’s why when I go out for walks in the afternoon without any fixed destination in mind, I sometimes end up at Ana’s door, at any one of her addresses that are subject to constant change. When I go into her room, I feel like a shipwrecked person who has swum across the Caribbean and finally reaches shore.

Even though six months may have gone by since my last visit, when I go into her room I feel I’ve never left, everything is identical to how I remember it, including the sleepy expression on Ana’s face, framed in the empty space of the door as it opens.

It feels good to visit her, it feels good to sit on the mattress she pulls out from under the bed when I arrive, to cook up something quickly, serve a plate of salted chicken strips with slices of pear on the side, creating a strange salad only Ana and myself understand. I invent stories for her, I bring her news from a reality I don’t inhabit either. I think our friendship, at its core, is a lot like that.





{ Dayana Fraile, El Apéndice de Pablo #6, May 2009 }

De la literatura y de las carreteras: Entrevista con Carlos Ávila / Mario Morenza

Of Literature and Roads: An Interview with Carlos Ávila


A writer’s words tend to be solemn, but with Carlos Ávila they acquire the simplicity of phrases worth a thousand images.

On the day I arranged to interview Carlos Ávila I ran into him in one of the elevators of the North Tower of the Centro Simón Bolívar. We were heading to our respective offices like the other ten people in there. It was Monday. And it was 7:50 A.M. “Today’s the interview, right? When do we meet?” “When we get out,” I told him. “At 4:30 on the 12th floor. I’m tired. I’m just getting back from Mérida,” he mentioned. Suddenly, a power outtage. The elevator stopped. Everything stopped, except for the red glow with the word FULL trembling just above the elevator doors. They opened.


Writing without Rituals

– In what state do you get inspired to write.
– In the state of Mérida.* (See inset below.)

– If Caracas were the plot for a collection of short stories or a novel, what would you call it?
– I’d call it Caracas Is Not A Short Story [Caracas no es cuento].

– When do stories come to you?
– When I’m not paying attention, when I drift off and discover myself inside one.

– What Venezuelan author do you admire?
– I admire Armando Rojas Guardia, because it has been through his poetry that I’ve been able to be closer to the unnamable.

– What advice do you give young people who want to engage in literature?
– That they ask themselves if they really want to assume a life from a stance of total questioning and with the only certainty being that you’ll be wrong most of the time.

– Do you remember when you said to yourself for the first time: “I want to be a writer”?
– I think those things haven’t been premeditated; I’ve simply provoked it, I’ve taken a few steps, I’ve stopped taking others and circumstances have taken their own course. Now I’m linked to literature but I think all of this obeys an answer to life itself and not, at least in my case, something planned out in advance.

– Do you have a ritual?
– No.


Ávila Kaleidoscopes

– For Jorge Luis Borges the Aleph was in a basement; for Enrique Vila-Matas (Rómulo Gallegos Prize 2001), in Mérida. For Carlos Ávila, where does he find his own Aleph and what does it contain?
– My own Aleph would be in our voice, and it would be a name, it would be a word that contained all of them.

– What do the sounds of El Silencio [in downtown Caracas] mean for you?
– They mean the murmur of cities: the screams of the walls, the breathing of motors... The screeching of taxis, as Cayayo would say.


Carlos in Motion

– How do you see life, what’s it like from the 21st floor in the offices of El Perro y La Rana [publishers]?
– I see a place where everything is alive, a city where no zombies live, nor specters or any of those dark artifices among which some poets move. Though, to be honest, you can see it better from the 23rd, where there’s fire.

– How do you see life, what’s it like from a bus when you travel?
– I don’t know if it’s because one is always in motion, but crossing a path marked by the repetition of light posts and trees, one after another, always ends up being introspective. The road is reflexive, so that the glance turns inward, toward our memory or toward our imagination, toward things that hurt us and those that heal us, sometimes toward the names and gestures of the people one can’t forget, and almost always toward what we can’t resolve or respond to, all in an incessant and urgent gallery of images that repeat themselves while the landscape outside surges frenetically.

– How do you see life, what’s it like on the subway when you travel through the city?
– It’s active, it’s vertiginous and it’s rushed, it always moves faster; and I don’t know if that makes it all harder for some people, but for me in particular it ends up being defiant and because of that entertaining.


Inset

Fragment from the short story “Desde el monte” from the book Mujeres recién bañadas:

Mérida just beyond the roads. Surrounded by green, by brown and mountain. Way up, where the red-cheeked Chinese live: the sons of muleskinners and frailejón flowers, the grandsons of the Comala fire. Up there on the peak where parsimony and restraint grow. Far from the city noise. In that place, on the very crest of the world’s cathedral, rests Mérida: humid and still, fresh, like recently rained on trees, like a woman just stepping out of the shower, with her hair and crotch wet: smelling of God; of plants.


Legend

A short story writer who moves with and on the road of his stories.

____________________________________

Carlos Ávila (Caracas, 1980) received his undergraduate degree in Literature from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. In 2004 he obtained the Premio Nacional Universitario de Literatura, in fiction; a year later he received an honorable mention in the V edition of the Concurso Nacional de Cuentos SACVEN. He has published two books of short stories, Desde el caleidoscopio de Dios (2007) and Mujeres recién bañadas (2009), which will soon be released.




{ Mario Morenza, El Apéndice de Pablo #6, May 2009 }