Siri Hustvedt shared more than 30 years of her life with Paul Auster. It was she who announced, in March of last year, that her husband had lung cancer and who, over the course of a year, became a narrator of the fight against the disease that was not so slowly destroying him. And it was she who, this Monday, at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, starred in the posthumous tribute that their publishing house in Spain, Seix Barral, organized for the prolific novelist and film scriptwriter. “When we knew that he would die, we knew that I would become a representative of his work and that I would defend it,” said Hustvedt at the beginning of a speech in which she recalled her husband’s life, his last days and his last job, Baumgartner, written in the months when he was sick. “Paul, with that ending where it is not known if the hero has died or not, wrote my sorrow in advance.”
The act in memory of the author of The New York Trilogy It was held in a place that the author already knew: the columned room of the Círculo de Bellas Artes. There she met on June 16, 2003 – the anniversary, by the way, of her wedding to Hustvedt – with a group of readers to chat and inaugurate a series of conferences. In Spain, in addition to being one of the most beloved authors—proof of this is the long line that surrounded the building a couple of hours before the event—he also had good friends. Some of them were at the tribute.
Like the writer Enrique Vila-Matas and the filmmakers David Trueba and Pedro Almodóvar, the latter present through a letter that was read to the public, in which he recounted some of their mutual experiences. “From London I send you all my love,” he had written. Also in Spain he was awarded the then Prince of Asturias Award for Letters in 2006 and the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) named him a doctor. for the sake of honor in June 2022. Also participating in the event were the rector of the UAM, Amaya Mendikoetxea; the editorial director of Seix Barral, Elena Ramírez; the journalist Inés Martín and the president of the Círculo de Bellas Artes, Juan Miguel Hernández León, sharing their personal memories with the novelist.
The last guest to participate in the tribute was his daughter, Sophie Auster, singer and songwriter, who paid tribute to her father with a song she had written for him: “I think of you and mom, dancing to a Tom Waits song. Although tears are always close, you and I are clear,” he sang in the company of the soft sound of the piano, while images of the writer and his family were projected.
Another tribute from Siri Hustvedt to Auster will come with a book that he is already writing and that, as he confesses, he started as soon as the writer was buried. “He started writing a book in his last days. He never finished it, but I include it in the one I am preparing,” he said. It will be an essay about death, mourning and permanence. It’s already over 100 pages and will call you Ghost stories. “Books are also a tool of ghosts. The dead speak to the living. Although books do not replace the living person.” That will be her way of continuing to talk to her husband, with whom, she acknowledges, she had such a good time: “They always asked me what it was like to be Paul Auster’s wife. Until today I have not answered the question. But in the last minutes of his life I understood it. He couldn’t speak, but he listened to me and I said ‘Oh, God, we had fun, didn’t we?’ What was it like being Paul Auster’s wife? “It was a lot of fun.”