The most important thing in a text is this: the beginning. This is known in any writing workshop or in any newspaper office. Popular wisdom says that the first paragraph is the last one written and the one that is most thought-provoked. The first sentence is the one that has to grab you by the lapels and plunge you into the text forever. It can be a ticket to eternity. “For a long time, I went to bed early…” “Somewhere in La Mancha…” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” But… what about endings?
The artist Camila Cañeque, born in Barcelona, spent a long time studying the endings of books and, in parallel, of other things in life, which is a continuous ending. And she wrote a book on this subject, entitled The last sentencepublished by La uÑa RoTa. Fate would have it that when he finished this book about endings, his life would also end: Cañeque died last February, at the age of 39, suddenly, while he was sleeping. The book was finished. “In a tragic coincidence, this book was the last thing he saw. He was working on it, left the computer, went to sleep and died,” says Carlos Rod, the editor.
The last sentences of the books are the material that Cañeque collected in her last years, almost like an obsession, and which forms the backbone of her posthumous work. “I don’t remember when my attraction to the last sentences began. In an exercise of unconscious fetishization, opening a book meant going straight to the end, looking for its closure,” she writes. At first she just looked at them. Then she started taking photos of them. She downloaded them to her computer and reread them. “The last sentences were charged with a strange magnetism, they were like textual bodies posing on the edge of a precipice,” the artist observed.
In his book, strung together in fragmentary reflections, he collects 452 final phrases. The first is “Amen,” from the Bible. The last phrase of the book The last sentence It’s “Okay”, from The Quijote. There are many in between. “Then the airplane turned around and we started to lose altitude,” Looking at the sunby Julian Barnes. “We didn’t invent anything, there it is, yes, yes, yes, yes”, by Libidinal economyby Jean-François Lyotard. “This I have engraved on the mountain, and my revenge is written in the dust of the rock,” by The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pymby Edgar Allan Poe.
“In literature there are memorable beginnings, they are the ones that establish the personality of the book and give meaning to everything that comes after, they are studied in any institute,” says the editor Rod, “but the last sentences seem without substance, they do not seem to have that force and consistency that help us remember them.” Although in Cañeque’s book, interwoven in his story, they seem to find new meanings and explore new literary dimensions. And there are endings that are famous. “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” ends the book. Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. “Do not leave me so sad!” he concludes. The little Princeby Saint-Exupéry. “What cannot be spoken about must be kept silent,” concludes the Treatise de Ludwig Wittgenstein.
He Ulises Joyce’s poem ends with the famous monologue of Molly Bloom, whose last bars are these: “…and her heart was beating like crazy and I did say I do I do Yes.” There are curious endings, some banal, some poetic. “Wait until I finish my cigarette,” in Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. “And the next day nobody died”, in the death intermitenceby José Saramago. “I have always loved your neck”, in Carpenter Gothic by William Gaddis. “And I couldn’t get hard” in Doneby Charles Bukowski.
Strange patterns
Cañeque finds patterns in the last sentences with the same ease as a conspiracy addict. He finds, for example, a lot of rain: “The rain falls silently, slowly,” in The prying eye by Georges Simenon. “At the end, under a saddened sky, it begins to rain”, by Reflections for ridersby Franz Kafka. “And I returned to the hotel in the rain”, in Farewell to armsby Ernest Hemingway. In addition to rain, other watery elements abound in the endings, such as seas, snow or crying. “And she cried, at last,” he concludes. The wayby Miguel Delibes.
In addition to classifying them, Cañeque makes the last sentences “dance,” mixing them in a surrealist way, and new meanings emerge. Sometimes they seem like small poems, other times small stories. “It comforted me to feel the weight of the gun in my pocket / The air was full of music / Ignoring the groans of my empty stomach, I put the rifle under my arm and crawled to the nearest window opening / I put it back in its place and continued singing / As if I weren’t thinking about anything / Where did you go?” This small text is made up of last sentences from different books, with no connection between them.
Cañeque reflects at length on the last sentences, creating small theories. He says, for example, that the last sentences are not the same as the ending, which is linked to the plot, but that their importance lies in what they imply, rather than in their content. That’s where it all ends. Not any more“It is not about its quality, but about its mere existence,” writes Cañeque. It is a “symbolic cherry on top” without which “the scaffolding does not hold, it falters and is lost.” It takes skill not only to start writing, but also to stop doing so. The author, as her editor recalls, had worked on themes such as “absence, inactivity, criticism, overproduction,” says Rod. “Now I was thinking about this need we have to put an end to things.”
The grand finale of everything is death. In those parts of the book where the autobiographical anecdote predominates, Cañeque narrates his interest in the end of life, when he lived near the Parisian cemetery of Père-Lachaise and, when passing by, he always stopped to look at the burials. When he lived in Brooklyn, his room was above a funeral home where the end of life was also orchestrated. Cañeque reflects on death, in those lines that now seem to install a strange prophecy where there was only damned chance.
“But this is over: the poison consumes me, my strength abandons me, and the pen falls from my hands; even the hatred with which I look at you I feel faint, and I die.” Thus ends the Persian letters by Montesquieu. And this is the last sentence of this article, which, like everything else, also comes to an end.