TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Rodrigo Fresán

And no: nobody read him.

The laptopcomputer likeamediumbetween hisdead-living ideas and a living-dead book and the more than probable possibility that he’d already written the best thing he would ever write without being fully aware of it, but suspecting it all the same. And he wondered if he shouldn’t also blame his machine, programed with something whose name was as absurd as it is intimidatingand, intheend, deceitful (WordPerfect), and include it along with mobile phones and “smart” watches and tablets in his luddite diatribes. That ghost-time invention in whose memory past and dead books reappeared in new circumstances. But it was also clear to him that without the help of the search and the cut and paste he would never have been able to write the books he wrote. Especially the last one, with all its echoes and all those reflections between some pages and others. If he had to use a normal typewriter, like from back when he was starting out, when his stories were so much easier to read aloud (and, he had to acknowledge it, his sentences sounded so much more marmoreal and immovable and finished ), he would’ve never dared to use the liquid structures of his last book, of—if he could keep from getting worn out and think with greater optimism— his last book so far. The question, of course, was whether or not a book like that would’vehappenedwithout such technical assistance; theenigma was whether the book’s formwas more a product of the tool than of his head. Should he try to find out? Should he look for and find that book in the library of his bed and spend his insomniac night like that? No, sir! Reading yourself is difficult, hard, and 210