“When I started reading, life (what people say life is) started seeming to me a series of interruptions,” Zaid writes. But sometimes, he admits in this text that is something like a self-portrait, interruption also takes the shape of joy.
Two lady friends meet in the street. The little boy, whose hand one holds as they speak, amuses himself by spelling out the streetsigns, until the other notices:
“Wait, can he read?”
“Apparently so,” says my mother.
There was an older lady whose house was full of novels and who lent them out most systematically: surveying the reader, chatting a little bit about them, considering what they had already read. I went there with my mother more than once. I do not know whether because of me or because she preferred such novels, but during a bout of whooping cough she read me El infierno verde by Gonzalo de Reparaz. The piranhas, and that wonderful time off, remained etched on my mind. I had to be kept away from other children, quarantined, given ass’s milk. All of which was easier when we went to a hobby farm where my mother, to amuse herself and to amuse me, read aloud, with some silences in unsuitable passages. It was paradise: having stolen my mother away for myself, and the two of us exploring the Amazon jungle together.
My father lost his sight, and almost everything, as his cataracts matured. Perhaps this is why he, who never shouted at me, shouted at me. There was a blackout. There was moonlight. I went outside to read, with the book very near my eyes. “You’re going to go blind, like me!” he said by way of warning. But I heard it as a curse. I sometimes feel that I am seeing when I ought not see, that I am committing some awful crime against the heavens, that I am going to lose my sight.
I am reading and my mother needs something or other:
“Son, since you’re not doing anything…”
I do not know how I discovered the public library in our city hall. It did not have many books, nor many users, but no one interrupted me and, from my first visit on, I took in the smell of printer’s ink and long-preserved paper that I still recall. That faint, retiring smell accentuated the silence, which was not silence, for the doors opened onto a downtown street and the main square; but I felt it was silence because I was there, among books, immersed in that journey, that incense. I read, spellbound, the Tesoro de la juventud and other books picked up at random, like Rodolfo Usigli’s Itinerario del autor dramático. In elementary school, I had written a skit for the stage, which was put on in class. In high school, I would later write a one-act farce in verse that would make it to the Teatro Rex.
I am reading a textbook: geometry. It gives me tingles, something—I know not what—in the heart: the elegance, the suspense, the episodes of reasoning, the music of consequence, the wondrous drumbeat of the Quod erat demonstrandum. I feel touched, thankful.
I would get dizzy in the aisles, between the book-laden shelves of the library of the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, to which I had access thanks to a very special permit that allowed me to explore it for hours and hours, and to get dizzy. Thus I discovered a little book that I came to know from memory, and that I even tried to translate into mathematical equations: La Fábula de Equis y Zeda. Why did I get dizzy? According to the ophthalmologist, my nearsightedness was so slight that I could use glasses or not. Years later, I thought it was the dizziness of an ambition: to read all the books.
When I started reading, life (what people say life is) started seeming to me a series of interruptions. It was quite hard for me to accept them, and I sometimes think I am still dealing with them today. That instead of quitting this vice, I take it with me everywhere. That if, finally, I came out into reality (what people say reality is), it was also because I started reading it.
Putting the world together: rereading it, rewriting it, putting a stop to the ugliness, the stupidity, the injustice that render it illegible. Making music of the noise, dialogue of the interruption.
When he was writing the Summa, Saint Thomas set it aside due to an interruption, one that consumed him completely. He had seen paradise. Everything became legible to him, with no need for anything more. I understood this when I fell hopelessly in love with an interruption, dizzied by the desire to read, within it, all the books.
Lord, punish me not for having read. I have done my penance through interruptions and jobs with which to earn my keep and serve others. Grant me the paradise of reading without being interrupted. The interruption that is joyful reading. The eternal recreation of reading and being read in the eyes of my wife, in the clouds and in the trees of a new sky and a new earth, in everyone’s conversation with everyone else, resurrected in your book.
EPITAPH
He died reconciled with the mystery of having been born.
Pepe Álvarez, who is making an album of one hundred Mexicans, asked me for my curriculum and the epitaph I would leave on my grave.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
Gabriel Zaid, “Curriculum Vitae,” in Letras Libres (Mexico), November 2022, No. 25, Year 22, 12-13, in the dossier “Gabriel Zaid, el clásico discreto.”
Published with the author permission.
