It is twelve noon last Thursday, May 22. And I have been in the Euromed for a long time, traveling from Barcelona to Valencia to a cultural debate, to a dialogue with Marta Carnicero (Matriosk). Marta has been early in the early that she is already in Valencia.
I travel in the Zarrapastroso Euromed when I enter a Tote King email, where he tells me briefly: “How well writes Teju Cole.” Without a doubt, it refers to that wonder that is the last book of this and we talked about yesterday with Tote: Black paperpublished by cliff.
Just remembering that book I feel good when I begin to intuit that what I always thought could happen to me – especially if I insisted on continuing to travel so much for “the country of the last trains” – could be happening right now, at this precise moment.
It can’t be, I tell myself, for God’s, I can’t even believe it. But immediately I have to admit that the Zarrapastroso Euromed is not collapsing, but loses thrust and right now he has just stopped completely in the middle of nowhere, leaving me with a terrible doubt: not knowing when I will reach my destiny. To tell the truth, in the midst of nowhere I am not exactly, because outside, under the burning sun, a distant and pale sign indicates that we have stopped near L’Ametlla de Mar. and then I have a memory for all those who in recent days have been paralyzed between Olivares while asking if there would be some plan to evacuate them in this world.
What I am clear, because now the machinist is confirming it, is that there has been a general train blackout due to electricity. He will inform us again, he says, as soon as he manages to know something else. At the moment, they are going to reset Ferrovial energy, that is, we may still continue when the day brings the darkness. It is an uncertainty that, no matter how much you are close to the sea, I do not wish anyone. Because you have, but you have no future. And that God did the day and night and organized the distribution of the shadows.
To escape the narrow idea that I have been left with nothing to face the remains of the day, I have a single bottle of water and the memory of the book of Teju Cole, which I can remember until the tray of the train itself surrounds me: “We spend half of our day in the shadow of the earth. All the continents are continent black, half of the time. But the darkness is not empty …
And I think that, indeed, nothing is empty and less the dark, but I would like to be able to open a door and air, I don’t know, Olivarize meto arrive on time to Valencia for the cultural debate in which we have to talk about “the imposture as the very reason for literature.”
To reduce the tragic point of the moment, I call a friend, a native of the “country of the last trains” and, after describing my setback, he tells me: “Go, but if on Monday I go on the train of culture to Valencia, authors travel to Porrillo, according to the new Spanish customs!” And when he asks me where my train is standing, I can not help telling him that where our culture was shown one day.