Day Seventeen

Today, again, I wrote only five hundred words. I am choosing to blame this drop of productivity on my living in Madrid, where I have been tempted, time and time again, toward bad habits, particularly getting drunk with anybody who asks me to get drunk with them. Tomorrow I go to Pamplona, and there for five days I will try to live the life of a grandmother, more or less.

But today I went to the Museum of Reina Sofia. It was a stupidly massive place, and it wore me out almost instantly, but if anything I managed to see Picasso's Guernica, which I practically walked into without realizing and which stopped me dead in my tracks. I have much to say about that painting, but here it is bound to come out sounding idiotic. I will try something brief. My greatest fascination with it is the joining of the Modernist aesthetic with political activism, the only such masterpiece of this kind, as the main line of Modernists desired to abandon such "trivial" concerns, and in doing so, I think, damaged the capacity of art to matter (whatever that means), but Picasso, in Guernica, was able to bear the exhausting complexity of modernity while keeping a clear enough focus to, in a word, say something. So that was nice.

At night I went out with two Brazilian psychiatrists, a man and a woman who may or may not be seeing each other, who are here for some psychiatry conference. I wanted to try to seduce the girl, but I was afraid of what would happen if I attempted to do so, so in the end we all remained friends, the three of us. The male psychiatrist is scheduled to give a speech at the conference, and he must give it in English, but his English is very poor, to put it mildly, and so he is very nervous. I helped him pronounce some of the tougher words. Apparently the one that gives him the most trouble is "failure." He says it so poorly that it makes me laugh every time. I'm sure his speech will go fine.

Neither of them spoke much English, and I speak no Portuguese, and so our conversations were, by necessity, somewhat elemental, although we attempted a very long banter about modern trends in psychiatry, and on Sigmund Freud's addiction to cocaine. But in any case, I have come to like such limitations. They create a certain intensity in one's speech, as one tries to say the closest to the essence of what one thinks or feels without allowing misunderstanding to creep in. For example, there is an absolutely beautiful Turkish girl at the hostel who I have spoken to a number of times. Her English is virtually non-existent, so the main thrust of our communication has been to smile at each other and laugh at our mutual incomprehension. And what more could anybody want?