Slowly dissolved

An illustration by Jorge F. Hernández.EL PAÍS

It was slowly dissolving, Gran Vía upwards.

I was following him from Cibeles, believing that it was a hologram of myself, although he cheated on his collarless shirt (the kind used with added starches to tie the bow tie) and for a while he leaned on a cane with a pure silver handle.

As it vanished, not only the staff but also the hand and part of the right arm were lost, and on the plain that stretches like a sidewalk between the San Luis network and the Plaza de Callao, it seemed to me that the pages of the books fluttered in the window of a bookstore and the skirts of two unemployed hostesses rose with the passage of the unverifiable breeze of the dissolved man.

I followed him down through nameless alleys that gradually got lost in a haze of cuttlefish and the scents of boiling oil.

I thought that I would end up approaching him behind the scenes between the curtains of the Royal Theater, but the mirage preferred to sit on a bench facing the palace and without approaching I could hear his solid soliloquy rise as his entire figure of terror slowly dissolved into the air: he spoke of an unclassifiable woman and some poems in Romanian that he himself translated without end or profit;

he evoked the hostile conversation with two French publishers who censored his first book and seemed to sing a melancholic melody if it were not that all this was confused with the ungraspable coquetry of a pair of enamored birds fighting over a crust of unleavened bread.

Dissolved slowly, the man without a biography was reflected like a puddle of salt water on a limestone bench and I was forced to try to relate it on paper.

I took out the notebook and started by drawing it, I ordered a coffee at the place on the corner and let the drug seep like hot water from my palate to the pit of my stomach, reading it while narrating it as if it reproduced the exact steps that we both took. from Cibeles crossing Madrid and in a change of page, between bland paragraphs, the waiter was encouraged to indicate to me that the lady at the back table was inviting me a green drink on her marble table.

I approached, justifying myself abstemious and substituting the potion for an equally green tea, and it was then that the lady began by explaining to me what my own prose could not: “I made it up at dawn and I was thinking of giving him the resolution of a horrible crime.

He is my favorite character and –although I have him well described in seven novels– there are days when he slowly dissolves and I can't make a decent page for him.

If you like, I invite you to my studio right here in Bailén number 15 and I give you the first editions of your adventures, with a well-tied plot and endearing characters, with sepia settings and exciting dialogues not without intrigue ”.

It was fulfilled in the most longed-for of my dreams and I felt as an obligation to ask the waiter to charge me ... and there, the Lady let out the laugh that makes me dizzy until this moment when I don't know how to write –or if it will be legible or credible- that was communicated For the first time in decades that I am nothing more than the occasional character in an endless tale that does not reach a novel and that is lost from time to time in Madrid in search of a story that manages to curdle in destination.

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