Unpublished books
At thirty, unemployed and newly settled in the city of Toledo, I spent a year doing nothing but eating a loaf of bread a day, walking for an hour each day, drinking Coca-Cola, and reading absolutely every book in the Alcázar library — which appears covered in snow in some of my photos posted on my Twitter account.
Shortly after, a friend encouraged me to write a book and offered to be my patron. I then wrote a 700-page philosophical essay. My friend loved it, we met to discuss it with a publisher over paella and a bottle of wine, but we couldn’t reach an agreement, and the book remained unpublished after I submitted two more copies to two major publishing houses, both of which rejected it.
Before that, I had dedicated myself to compiling my poems about rain and love with different women, revising and arranging them in such a fashion that the collection gave the impression of telling a story with the same woman, even though the verses were preceded by a dedication in the plural, Alas mejores: a play on words impossible to translate into English, which could be read literally as Better wings, or implicitly as To the best (‘A las mejores’), paraphrasing — yet in the feminine plural — Alexander the Great, who was said to have bequeathed his empire on his deathbed to the best or the strongest ones.
The sister of another friend, a PhD in Philology and Spanish professor at the university, liked it a lot. She was struck by the seemingly unusual fact that ‘it doesn’t talk nonsense’ (no dice tonterías). This time there was no paella, no wine, and no editors, but coffee at El Café de la Ópera in Madrid.
I submitted the book to several prestigious competitions and immediately began to have second thoughts. After that, I only showed the book to one person. I think I still have it as an email attachment. Don’t even know if I could find the other book if I looked for it, either in print or digital format. I made a firm resolution never to write again, and I stuck to it until I opened my Twitter account — just a few years later.
This evening, while collecting the rubbish bags in the last bit of time at work today, I was reflecting on whether the epigraph/dedication in the poetry book was a good epigraph.