3 World Writers' Congress

After I was married, I would come home late at night and Valentina would not settle for it, she would heat up my soup while cursing David. I would leave it at that, I had no way of explaining to her that when I was finished, I would stay alone in the agency on my own, in obsessive reading. In those hours, seeing my works signed by strangers gave me nervous pleasure, a kind of jealousy in reverse. Because for me, it was not the guy who took over my writing, it was as if I wrote in his notebook.

It would be night, and I would read the phrases I knew by heart, then repeat the subject's name aloud, and swing my legs and giggle on the couch, I would feel myself having an affair with another woman. And if someone praised the phrases, much greater was the vanity of being a discrete creator. It was not pride or presumption, feelings naturally silent, but of vanity itself, with a desire for boasting and exhibitionism, which greatly valued my discretion. And new articles were asked for, and published in magazines covers, and praised by readers the next day, and I stood it. With that vanity in me gathered up, made me strong and handsome, and led me to quarrel with the telephone operator and call the office-boy a donkey, and ruined my marriage, because I came home and was already shouting at Valentina, and she looked at me wide-eyed, she did not know why I was so vain. I had a bad temper when it came to arrive at the agency the invitation to the annual meeting of anonymous authors to be held in Vienna.

It was a correspondence posted in New York, with no other sender's cue, with Melo & Silva Agency in a black envelope that David opened and gave me amused.

I threw the letter in the drawer of unimportant things, even though it did not contain more information than the name of a hotel and a date that I by accident came to register in my mind, it was Valentina's birthday. Months later, arriving home at two o'clock in the morning, I found my wife sitting up in bed with a sleepy face as since she had become a newscaster, she had woken up early. When she asked me if I still wanted the soup, on impulse I told her that on television she looked like a parrot because she read the news without knowing what she was talking about. She put on her slippers, put on a crochet over her pyjamas, went slowly into the kitchen, turned on the microwave, and without raising her voice said that it was worse for me to write a portion of things for no one to read. I dismissed the soup, left the house with the clothes of the body and I settled in the agency, where I was rendezvousing my articles until falling asleep on the sofa.

After nights sleeping there, with some leftovers of anger and back pain, I thought of going back to Valentina for her birthday, and that was when I remembered the invitation in the drawer. David did not oppose my trip to Austria, he even made some comments about globalization and such.

I had enough money, more than thirty years and I had never left the country, I thought that in the worst case I would cool my head around the world in the plane. I came home to pack, Valentina was not there, I left her a note informing me that I would be leaving for the World Writers' Congress.

Ethics, press laws, criminal liability, copyright, the advent of the internet, was the subject of the meeting, behind closed doors, in a sullen hotel in Vienna. Speakers from different nationalities followed each other in lectures that I accompanied in Spanish through the simultaneous translation system. But already on the second day, as we entered the night, the questions of common interest gave rise to personal, embarrassing testimony. This was beginning to look like a convention of anonymous alcoholics who suffered not from alcoholism, but from anonymity. Veteran authors, sporting the full name on their badge, wrangled over the microphone for a festival of boasting. They cite a row of their works, and without necessity, they exposed the identity of the presumed authors, sometimes a great statesman, sometimes the notorious ghost-writer of a great statesman, sometimes a laureate novelist, a philosopher, a prominent intellectual, stirring up laughs from the audience.

On the third night, I was really determined to leave the conference when the microphone fell on my hand and the bystanders crossed their arms to watch me. I was the freshman, I was perhaps a strange element, I had heard compromising confessions, I had no way out, my silence would cause a fit of a pique. Apologizing for expressing myself in Portuguese, summarizing my curriculum, mentioning my doctoral thesis they started applauding, I recited some of my phrases slowly, so that the interpreters could translate them to contentment. Then I explained the context of one or another work, I alluded to personalities who owed me favours, I was soon releasing scattered fragments of all the articles that came to my mind. It was already a compulsion, I, boiled, would talk, talk, talk until dawn if they did not turn off the stereo. When I saw the empty room and the crowded elevator, I climbed seven floors of stairs. I was light, I was thin. Up there I got the feeling of having gone hollow. The nausea I felt upon entering my bedroom would be with me for a long time, the mould of the corridors impregnated my nostrils. For months, every time I retreated on the agency couch, thinking of savouring old articles, I would resent the smell of the hotel's orange carpet in Melbourne. My room was muffled, the window was a fixed glass, the landscape was two rows of light posts on a straight and endless avenue. I felt like calling someone in Brazil, but the phone was blocked. I spent the night looking at the ceiling, and when they knocked on the door with breakfast, I felt great gratitude, I made sure that the steward sat with me; he was Hungarian, spoke very little English, taught me some Hungarian words, and had very small hands, which I filled with coins. I was emotional, I went downstairs anxiously to see my colleagues, and from that morning the meetings were almost silent, the people prostrate in their seats. The few who were willing to take the stage spoke in a low tone, away from the microphone, remembering the hardships of a trade that so many deserted in search of fortune and popularity. There were tributes paid to absent companions, deceased in abandonment or hospitalized in asylums for schizophrenics, some were even persecuted and condemned in their countries for the crime of opinion, professionals who, as a matter of principle, do not have one.

In the closing session, there were speeches in defence of the rights of privacy and free expression, but the proposal to write an open letter was harshly rejected, after all, no newspaper would publish a petition of writers who never signed up. And we, who had come to the hotel a week before, knocking cab doors and unloading luggage, we set off slowly, dragging baggage-laden luggage to the chartered bus across the street. At the airport we exchanged addresses and hugs, there were those who cried, everyone promised to be present at the next meeting in Tokyo, then everyone went into a tunnel. I spent thirty hours thinking blank, and when I asked to sleep at home, Valentina did not ask me anything, she poured me soup and combed my hair. It was when, deprived of self-love, I impregnated Valentina.