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The phrase ‘the good old days’ does not mean that bad things happened less frequently in the past, only – fortunately – that people simply forget they happened.
it is easy to be modest when you are famous. That is, appear to be modest.
Even when you think a person hasn’t the slightest trace of vanity, suddenly you discover it in its most subtle form: the vanity of modesty.
Vanity is found in the most unlikely places: in combination with kindness, and selflessness, and generosity.
There was one person who could have understood me. But she was the very person I killed.
I was filled with indescribable emotion. I had thought about her for so many months, imagined so many things, that when I saw her I did not know what to do.
Experience has taught me that what seems clear and evident to me is never so to my fellow human beings. I have been burned so many times that now before I justify or explain anything, I mull it over a very long time; almost inevitably, I end up withdrawing into myself and not opening my mouth at all.
I detest sects, brotherhoods, guilds, groups in general, any assemblage of morons congregating for reasons of profession, tastes, or similar manias.
I tried to find a quiet corner, but it was impossible. The room was crammed with identical people interminably parroting identical conversations.
painting is what I know best, and we all know that we have greater reason to detest the things we know well. But I have still another reason: THE CRITICS. They are a plague I have never understood. If I were a great surgeon, and some fellow who had never held a scalpel in his hand, who was not a doctor, and who had never so much as put a splint on a cat’s paw, tried to point out where I had gone wrong in my operation, what would people think? It is the same with painting.
There might be some excuse for listening to the opinions of a critic who once painted, even if only mediocre works. But that is just as absurd; because what could be reasonable about a mediocre painter giving advice to a good one?
It is not unusual during nights of insomnia to act more decisively than during the daylight hours.
There are times I feel that nothing has meaning. On a tiny planet that has been racing toward oblivion for millions of years, we are born amid sorrow; we grow, we struggle, we grow ill, we suffer, we make others suffer, we cry out, we die, others die, and new beings are born to begin the senseless comedy all over again.’
Was our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars?
‘The word commendable isn’t relevant here,’ she said, as if answering her own question. ‘What is relevant is the truth.’
‘But I don’t know what you will gain by seeing me. I hurt everyone who comes near me.’
She does things spontaneously, but without changing very much of anything. How can I explain it to you?’ He gazed abstractedly toward the floor, as if seeking a clearer explanation there. After a moment, he said: ‘As if someone stranded in a desert suddenly moved with great speed to a different location. You understand? The speed is really unimportant; the person is still in the same desert.’
what did you notice?’ Her voice was hard. ‘Something on your face. The trace of a smile.’ ‘What would I be smiling about?’ she asked in the same tone. ‘About my naïveté. About my asking whether you really loved me, or loved me like a child. How can I know…But you had been smiling. I’m sure of that.’
In spite of the fact that she gave herself to me without reservation, I would suddenly be overcome with the feeling it was all a sham.
For a while she would seem as innocent as a young girl, but suddenly I would be convinced she was a bitch, and then a long parade of doubts would file through my mind: where? how? how many? when?
she seemed to experience a true and almost unbelievable pleasure. That caused the episodes of my throwing on my clothes and rushing outside, or brutally twisting her arm, hoping to wring confessions from her about the authenticity of her emotions and sensations.
It seemed to me that any woman would be humiliated by being called that, even a prostitute. No woman should be able to shift moods so quickly, unless there was a certain truth to what I had said.
such moments of tenderness were growing more infrequent and short-lived, like intervals of sunshine in an increasingly dark and stormy sky. My doubts and questionings were engulfing everything, like jungle vines curling around trees in a park, choking the life from them.
I would suffer because I was not with her; I would be unable to work – and all to effect some hypothetical humiliation on María. I say ‘hypothetical’ because I have never known whether that kind of retaliation actually had any effect.
I have seen émigrés with the humility typical of concentration camp survivors come to this country and happily accept anything that afforded a livelihood, the most demeaning jobs. But is it not rather strange that a man cannot be content with having escaped torture and death? As soon as he begins to enjoy his new security, the pride and vanity and arrogance that seemed to have been permanently obliterated begin to creep back, like beasts driven into hiding – but showing themselves with greater insolence, as if in reaction to the shame of having fallen so low. It is not rare in such
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As soon as I left the post office I realized two things: I had not said in the letter how I had deduced that María was Hunter’s lover and, second, I had no idea what I had hoped to accomplish by insulting her so unmercifully.
she had given herself physically only when faced with the extreme of confessing her aversion or, in the best of cases, a motherly or sisterly affection – all of which, of course, prevented me from trusting her raptures of pleasure, her words and expressions of ecstasy;
What did I care who María was outside our relationship?
I was even convinced that during those moments her face changed, that her lips curled with scorn and she was perhaps laughing with some other man, and that the whole story of the passageways was my own ridiculous invention, and that after all there was only one tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my entire life.
in one of those transparent sections of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had naïvely believed that she was moving in a tunnel parallel to mine, when in fact she belonged to the wide world, the unbounded world of those who did not live in tunnels;
sometimes it happened that when I passed by one of my windows she was waiting for me, silent and anxious (why waiting for me? why silent and anxious?); but at other times she did not come in time, or she forgot that poor caged being, and then I, my face pressed against the wall of glass, watched her in the distance laughing or dancing without a care in the world or, which was worse, I did not see her at all, and imagined her in obscene places I could not reach. At those times I felt that my destiny was infinitely more lonely than I had ever imagined.
There was only one person who understood my paintings. In the meanwhile, these paintings must only be providing more evidence for their diagnoses. And so every day the walls of this hell will close more tightly around me.
