My wife believes that I have been bewitched. She says the main suspect is my sister, who is no stranger to the dark arts of witchcraft. With the complicity of one of my assistants, my sister is suspected of having stolen some underwear from my wardrobe to then subject them to shady spells with herbal potions and pins stuck in my photo, trying to cast numerous curses on me: thwarted loves, erotic impotence, literary failures, economic ruin, fragile health, among others.
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I have many enemies who wish me harm. I have earned them fair and square. I also wish them harm. I pray every night that they sink into misery, slowly agonize, and leave this world whining. Some of my worst enemies are powerful: politicians in power who believe they will always be in power, greedy businessmen who flatter politicians in power to make more money, owners of TV channels and managers of TV channels and TV stars who celebrate my decline as a TV figure, ex-lovers and ex-friends exposed in my novels, honorable relatives who see me as a felon. I have no friends left, not a single one. I have lost them all because of my fault and the worst is that I do not miss them. I have fumigated all my friends to the point that now they are glad not to see me anymore. Not even my editors are my friends; I would say that at best they are my allies.
It is also true that I have lost friends because I wanted to sleep with them and was rejected harshly and treacherously. I tried to slip into the bed of a lifelong friend, son of a prodigious writer, but my advances were not welcome and the friendship, made of intrigues and conspiracies, was broken forever. I wanted to have a romp with a newspaper friend, a savvy young man, with aristocratic airs, son of Spanish nobles who lived in a castle with Doberman dogs, but my lustful appetite was dismissed by said stiff gentleman who is now minister of justice and worship. I tried to seduce a writer who was a jury member of a literary prize, hoping he would grant me the award, but I did not realize that the lawyer did not like men and so he voted in favor of a female writer who took the trophy. Later, the jury member told me: I did not like the winner’s novel, but I liked her tits.
In other times my worst enemy was my father, who chose to be my enemy because I was a delicate, effeminate child, and then my worst enemy was my first mother-in-law, who tried to poison me several times by putting black hairy spiders in the beds where I slept when she invited me to spend weekends at her estate, a stately villa in the countryside. On three occasions those black spiders bit me, but they did not manage to kill me. I probably survived because my literary poisons served as an antidote to combat my mother-in-law’s poisons and her arachnids. Curiously, when they bit me, the spiders lost their lives, meaning that I poisoned and killed them. It may be that my saliva or my blood is potentially deadly. Had I kissed my mother-in-law on the lips, depositing the hemlock of my saliva on her poisonous tongue, I suspect I would have poisoned her. I have made a career in books and television thanks to my venomous tongue. I am a poisonous writer and, at the same time, poisoned. I wish harm to many people, especially politicians in power, owners and managers of TV channels who refuse to hire me, TV stars who earn more than I do, and writers who write better than I do and sell more books than I do. All of them are my enemies.
My wife insists that only persistent witchcraft, an evil spell, a wicked and bastard curse would explain why I am doing so badly this adverse, contrary year, in which every setback rises before me like a mountain, and the sum of so many mountains makes a black, rocky, impassable mountain range, a mountain range that prevents me from reaching the valley of happiness, the oasis that should be beyond, on the other side of the insurmountable mountains of misfortune. Too many bad things have happened to me and keep happening for me to attribute them merely to bad luck: my daughter got married and does not want to see me anymore, my mother no longer has words to speak to me, my sister wished me bad things because I did not want to lend her money, I slipped getting out of the shower and hurt my head, I was forced to fire one of my assistants for doing bad things to me, my salary was cut again, my wife’s truck broke down because the leather seats rotted and smelled, I offered myself to several TV channels and none wanted to hire me even though I promised not to charge them anything, I traveled to see the World Cup final and the Argentinians lost, my cat got lost and almost gave me a heart attack, I fired my daughter’s driver for losing my cat, I got injections to lose weight but had to stop them because they did not let me sleep and I did not want to be a skinny insomniac, sleepless, and my wife asked me not to take off my clothes when we make love because if she saw my prominent belly she would stop desiring me the little she desired me when she saw me with clothes on. It is clear then that someone, a black hand, a sinister will, a witch or sorceress, is conspiring in the shadows to make me unhappy.
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Worse still, I have been dropped from a book fair where I was confirmed. I had bought the plane tickets, booked the hotel, and announced my presentation in a few weeks, and now they inform me that there is no space for me at that fair. It is my political enemies who have guillotined me. First they told me that due to an earthquake I would not be welcome. Then they told me that I was not selected to participate in the fair: six hundred writers showed up, a kind spokesperson for the fair told me, and we only selected three hundred sixty-six. That is, three hundred sixty-six writers beat me. That is, the fair considered that those three hundred sixty-six writers were better than me and had more merits than me. I find no arguments to defend myself. I do not doubt that the fair organizers are right: the three hundred sixty-six selected writers are better than me and have beaten me fairly. I do not wish them harm. I hope they succeed. No one will notice my absence. The fair will not lose much by dispensing with me. However, I suspect that I was canceled not only because I am a deplorable writer, but also because I have criticized the government of that country.
Last night my wife passed the egg over my back, chest, head, and testicular sac, to see if that would cleanse me of the spells, curses, and hexes that have been cast on me. Then she placed the raw egg in a glass of water and gave a cry of astonishment upon seeing hairs and black dots. You have been bewitched, she declared. Taking advantage of the fact that I was naked, I suggested that, to cure me completely, we make love. She said: okay, but better get dressed, because like that I see you fat and it does not turn me on.
I wonder if I have at least one friend left, just one, in the whole world, a noble, loyal, selfless friend. I find none in my memory. A globetrotting friend abandoned me because he got back with the famous singer. A dandy friend stopped loving me when I got married to a woman. A friend and colleague did not look for me anymore because he knew I did not want to sleep with him. A friend gave up our friendship because I changed publishers. A friend fell in love with a retired footballer and dropped me. I have friends from school, from the newspaper, from university, but none want to see me for fear of appearing in my books and columns and technically they are then my ex-friends. At this point, I do not lie if I say that my wife is my best friend: when so many adversities and setbacks reduce me to tears, discomfort, and tremors, and I suddenly become a whining lady who feels like a victim of impious witchcraft, she is my friend and my husband, and she supports me with a virile strength that I do not have.
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