I can enjoy Bach and Vivaldi as much as she does, and I can tell the difference between Bach or Vivaldi and Enrique Rodríguez. But just then it seemed impossible to explain to her how that orchestra, for me, was like contemplating a ruin overgrown with vegetation. Not because the orchestra was around so long ago, though in a way that heightens the effect, but because, even at the time, Enrique Rodríguez’s original intention was always a ruin overgrown with vegetation. That’s what his music tells me, and it’s what, after breakfast today, was woven into my secret argument with Dylan Thomas and my memory of the sunset on the beach by the racecourse. And that’s how I recovered an essential part of myself, which I’d lost in the chaos of recent years.

*

People think, almost unanimously, that what interests me is writing. But what really interests me is remembering. In some languages, the word “remember” comes from the old word for awaken, and that’s how I like to think of it. I forget whether it relates to the word for heart as well, but I hope it does. After all, remembering things sometimes means knowing them by heart.

Often people even say: “There’s a plot for one of your novels,” as if I went around in search of plots for novels and not in search of myself. If I write it’s in order to remember, to awaken my sleeping soul, to stir up my mind and discover its secret pathways. Most of my stories are fragments of my soul’s memory, not inventions.

The soul has its own way of seeing things. It contains elements of our waking lives, but also elements that are particular and personal to it; the soul is part of a higher order of universal understanding that our consciousness can’t access directly. The soul’s conception of what happens in and around us, then, is much more complete than anything the narrow, limited self could ever perceive.

Today all those different kinds of ruins came back to me, and I knew it was my soul’s way of saying, “I am those ruins.” My semi-erotic contemplation of the ruins is really a narcissistic contemplation of myself. And although it comes at a price, and despite the sadness of what’s being contemplated, it feels good. When I look at myself in the mirror and see someone I don’t like, I think: at least it’s someone I can trust. The same thing happens with this inner contemplation. It doesn’t matter if I’m looking at an ugly picture as long as it’s authentic.