All time is an instant

Remember

.

We met in Monterrey and the first thing you taught me is the correct pronunciation of your name:

(with an accent on the second vowel) and

(accentuating the sound of the

, contrary to the grain of the Spaniards who call you

believing they are British or the Mexicans who underline the

, as a gringo synonym of avalanche or haste).

Salman Rushdie known by millions, read by not so many, including the fan who stabbed you just a week ago;

that is, an instant ago.

As the hours have passed since the attack, the enigmatic irony increases that the assailant – now in prison – bears his fate in his last name.

His name is Matar and to his greatest misfortune, not even that was achieved;

just as one more year has passed since the murder of the poet García Lorca in Granada and the executioners who have the skulls stuffed with lead, wanting to kill him, only managed to take his life to make him immortal.

Puns of irony, enigma of time and of the unknown heavenly scriptwriter who writes that the executioner's name be called Matar or that Osama died in Obama's time and other inexplicable synchronicities or rhymes.

Remember

that you evoked for me with healthy nostalgia a walk through the Alhambra in Granada arm in arm with Antonio Muñoz Molina and that both appear in a photograph that served as a Sunday issue of

where they are seen surrounded by 12 or 14 passers-by, tourists or anonymous troupes whose faces were diluted because they were incognito escorts.

Only unfocused faces around two faces of writers and the Moor's last breath became ink on paper, without you yourselves knowing who the armed archangels were who guarded you through the tiles of a dream palace, decorated with verses from the Koran... and the hidden water that cries from its fountains.

As a blink, decades passed to the point of making us think that Salman could already walk around the world without shields and in Monterrey, just like a week ago, there was hardly any surveillance when we went on stage.

Behind the scenes you also evoked a surreal train trip with Juan Villoro to a town called Tequila, like Comala, a blurry and dizzy mirage of a pure landscape of paragraphs and right there, in the Monterrey dressing room, after the stage I told you about my friend Philippe and the insomniac dawn that dragged on in rare moments, after you had inaugurated, together with Álvaro Mutis and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the Citlaltépetl Refuge House in a highly guarded Condesa neighborhood, in a cordoned-off part of the largest city in the world,

of the ancient prophet of Iran.

But you did not know that Moctezuma's

fell on the commando in the form of galloping and tripartite diarrhea thanks to the suadero taquitos that the mujahideen threw the night before their failed operation and

that I told you that my Philippe was woken up by the Judicial Police during the early morning when you were already sleeping on that invisible beach to inform him, inquire and insinuate about the incredible discovery of some boxes with dynamite that were found under the steps of the mansion now of Shelter for Writers and that it was all due to the strange chance that the property had belonged to a mining engineer, that all of this had nothing to do with the ribbon that you had cut the day before and that those same judicial officers were supposed to have reviewed each millimeter from the house, while cordoning off a considerable portion of Mexico City.

We laugh.

In Monterrey, we laughed at the beautiful life, the friends that unite us, the books that we share in two languages… and time, which is but an instant.

But we also laugh because to introduce you to the public of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León we opted for the path of humor that distills you and almost all your books.

Whoever reads you and knows you, Salmán, will be pleasantly surprised by the cheerful prose, the happy garden of memory, the lightness of intelligent sarcasm so far removed from cake and jokes... but for that you have to read you and more now that it is confirmed that those who hate and attack you have only read a page or two of just one of your books and yet they irrationally abrogate the Killing effort.

Killing is what ignorance and the foolish obstinacy of stupidity do;

killing is spilling blood against the grain of trying to understand, even of the incomprehensible and killing is daily bread since –without reading you– madness sentenced you to death and Killing is now the devil behind bars who had to be condemned to read you, to be read in each stretch of the schedule of his sentence that will last all the time and just an electric moment in which some policeman informed him that he had not managed to take your life.

Remember

that I confided in you about a young newlywed couple who tried to fly from Madrid to Mexico on the same day that the ayatollahs threatened to blow up Iberia's planes because the united publishers of Spain had just published

.

Another line, another plane with a different flag, substituted the flight of those newlyweds to Holland and there they arrested the groom for looking suspicious and because he was carrying a

like the one used by the terrorists of the PanAm plane over Lockerbie... and we laughed in Monterrey at the groom reviewed as delinquent because he read

which, fortunately, he was able to finish reading before landing in Mexico City, acquitted of Dutch suspicions and barely injured by trigeminal neuralgia that tempted him to jump headfirst from the KLM plane over the Atlantic, like an uncomfortable sidekick accompanying to the two characters in that novel about satanic verses that become archangels when they fall into the void from a plane dynamited by real terrorists, although they vanish in the generous fiction that perspires the ink of your pen.

We laughed in two voices one afternoon that turned into a night in which Paul Auster confused me into believing that I was a gringo, around the streets of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid and we both cried – without tears – the three decades in which loves evaporated and yes, a single shared and barely visible tear in front of the public in Monterrey because all that time had to pass, that one and the same moment, to finally embrace you with the gratitude of someone who, by reading you, became an ally and an accomplice.

We laughed remembering the voice of Octavio Paz and the camaraderie of Carlos Fuentes in a London that you used to sneak around, from hideout to hideout, from bookstores disguised and always as the loving father of your child.

that you are almost always a smiling face, either because of the humor of your immense intelligence and unleashed imagination or because the eyes on the middle edge of your eyelids seem to start the smile, even if you keep only one of your eyes to look at the world with words and curdle the moment in which the boyfriend of thirty years ago could hug you in Monterrey and cry together the eternity of chance, the girlfriend who vanishes like sea foam in memory, the same copy bought three decades ago that you signed in Monterrey and the same moment when yesterday Paul Auster and so many writer friends gathered on the staircase that leads to the columns of an elusive time to celebrate your life, voice and vocation… because

that we all have the invaluable treasure of speaking, giving opinions, thinking and capturing freely, that every voice that honestly rises above nonsense and all the paragraphs that are printed above authoritarian poison sail on clouds without knowing if they have to be read confident that someone assures the cycle with their eyes, back and forth where the reader finishes off the silence of the syllables that you could barely mutter when you came out of anesthesia... because that cannot be killed.

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