Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [70]
A movie I had never seen.
Soon María José ascended the stage. The crowd quieted down as she walked to a standing microphone I had not seen. She thanked everyone for coming to tonight’s discussion. She then proceeded to introduce the panelists, noting, when she got to me, that a bilingual selection of my poems was shortly forthcoming, and she said we would begin the evening by asking each of the panelists to speak informally for one or two minutes about the topic, “literature now.” We would begin with Javier Torres, who was seated on the end of the table nearest María José, and work our way across; I was second from last.
Again the anger rose inside me; surely María José had told the other panelists to prepare a few minutes of remarks, but had somehow neglected to say as much to me. But as Javier Torres began to speak in his politician’s voice, a voice that fit his headshot perfectly, a voice that sounded like it came not from a body but a screen, my anger was nothing compared to my anxiety; I had no idea what to say. I reached into my pocket for my tranquilizers and realized, no doubt blanching, that I had failed to transfer them to my suit pants from my jeans. I felt a surge of terror so intense I was dizzy; it was like I was looking down into the space between the winding stairs of the Sagrada Familia, a view I’d never seen. Somehow Teresa, next after Javier, was already speaking; soon it would be my turn. The audience was invisible from the stage because of the lights but I could sense its presence, its attentiveness; Teresa made a joke and they laughed and the many-headed laughter was terrible to me. Elena López Portillo was talking now; I wiped the sweat from my brow. If I’d brought paper, I managed to think, I could have composed something coherent. Use your memorized lines, I told myself, but could not remember them. I was going to flee or vomit or faint.
But a line materialized. Elena López Portillo had ceased to speak and I could feel a change in pressure on my face, the effect of the audience focusing its eyes upon me. I heard myself say, my voice sounding to me as though it issued from the back of the auditorium, from deep within the audience itself, “Ortega y Gasset wrote ‘By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.’” I paused, and could feel the silence tighten, as the audience attempted to take the quotation in. I was encouraged enough by my own prefabricated fluency and by the fact that I did not sound nervous or crazy, to add: “My fear about this panel is that we are in a hurry to define a period, to speak of literature now; every period, like every concept, is in itself an exaggeration. I hope to hear from others what changed on March 11 that permits we to speak,” my grammar faltered, but I could see the sentence’s end, “of a new now, of a new period, without dislocation.” I stopped there, making my brevity seem the issue of my pithiness and courage, the courage to contest the concept of the panel, when in fact I didn’t want to use up any more of my quotations. A murmur of interest ran through the crowd; a current of adrenaline coursed through my body. I glanced at Teresa as Francesc Balda began to speak and I thought her smile communicated pride in me. Now I could attempt to listen to the other panelists; Francesc Balda began by stressing the importance of my point; he shared my healthy suspicion of neat distinctions between a pre-this and a post-that; indeed, perhaps literature’s role was to help us keep our perspective, to take the long view, to allow us to link our “now” to various past “nows” in order to form an illuminating constellation. He then went on to describe something about Catalan literature and its relation to political violence that I failed to follow.
After our brief remarks, María José thanked