It's not as easy as saying I don't write in my tongue to hide myself. I run away from my language because I cannot face it. Nor can I face myself, my family, my landscape. There are bits of December sunlight in Madrid that I miss. There are streets in the gay neighbourhood. Sounds. Cafés and bars and certain menus handwritten in chalk. Because I run away from the town I cannot return to the town. Because I run away I miss it.
And then the faces, which are not the faces of my friends. I miss my friends but I do not think about the faces of my friends. I think about the faces of actors. The face of Tristán Ulloa, whom I've been in love with since Mensaka. The face of Roberto Enríquez. The face of Alberto Jiménez. The face and the voice of Marta Belaustegui. Also Leonor Watling whom I've last seen in Lope and who was incandescent in it. Lope is a very mediocre film but it made me long for my mothertongue. We all have secret saints we construct secret private altars to and mine is Lope De Vega. For him I do not dismiss my mothertongue completely.
That is to say, I miss the films of my country because I miss people's faces.
The problem of how to write in your own language when one has felt so divorced from it. The other side of the story, I have help there: if I feel anguish about writing in a language that is not mine - an imprecise language, words that don't come naturally to me - then I turn to Nabokov and his own anguish. But, how to come back to the other side?
I am losing my language word by word. And each word is illuminated, at the same time. I am falling in love and I have no language to speak my love. In love with the loss of my capacities. To seek out the cure I read: that which I love, I read Pablo Rivero, Javier Calvo, Luna Miguel.
To return I read Lope De Vega.
