not find a thing. Not that I was looking for anything very important, I only wanted to know what kind of clothes I should take to the conference, casual? smart? a couple of designer suits? it was a minor detail but these things can get complicated. I have always felt envious of colleagues like Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the great Mexican writer, who goes to talk to the Pen Club in London in a T-shirt and shabby jeans, and even says he will not attend if they forbid him to smoke, but that is all a question of personality, or extreme shyness in my case, so I try to deal with it as best I can, I hate hearing people clearing their throat and muttering, I like to pass unnoticed, wearing the same clothes as everyone else. I ended up packing a couple of linen jackets, six shirts with their ties, and some casual wear. Most of my clothes were large on me, as I had lost quite a bit of weight during my illness.
The other nightmare is always: which books to take? The first question was if I should take some of mineâthose I had written, I meanâand here various hypotheses occurred to me. It might be appropriate to take a few for my hosts and some for any friends I might make there, and as people would be coming from all over the world it would be the ideal opportunity to get rid of a few copies in other languages, which I keep in boxes anyway. But then I thought about how much they would weigh, and it struck me that the best thing to do would be not to take any at all, since arriving with books that nobody has asked for is, when you come down to it, an act of vanity, and a touch unseemly, so I put them back on the shelves.
As for reading matter, now that is another story. To tell the truth, that caused a lot of last-minute problems when I was already ready to go out, with the taxi at the front door and the elevator waiting at my floor. As if, instead of a conference, I was going to a desert island for the rest of my life. Novels by Wiener and Walser, to start with. Three masterpieces of the novellaâTruman Capoteâs
Breakfast at Tiffanyâs
,
Twenty-Four Hours in a Womanâs Life
by Stefan Zweig, and
Hotel Savoy
by Joseph Rothâand a good book of short stories to read on the plane,
The Street of Crocodiles
, by Bruno Schulz, a book with Jewish themes, which I have been reading very slowly for years in a 1972 edition by Barral Editores, and the wonderful
Closely Observed Trains
by Hrabal, and something by Philip K. Dick, perhaps
The Man in the High Castle
, and another SF book, a rare pearl,
We
, by Yevgeny Zamiatin, and
The Elephanta Suite
, the latest by Paul Theroux, the best storyteller of his kind in the United States, and the latest by Thomas Pynchon, the best storyteller of
his
kind in the United States, there are many âbest storytellers,â and of course,
A Tale of Love and Darkness
, the memoirs of Amos Oz, the best contemporary Israeli storyteller, and the work of St John of the Cross, the father of all poets, and
Lost Illusions
by Balzac, the father of all novelists, and something light, my God, a travel book, yes, that little book by Pierre Loti on the Middle East, where is it? and again the entry phone rang, and the Fascist caretaker cried, signore, if you donât come down now the taxi will leave, hurry up, do you want me to come up for the bags? and I said, no! wait a minute, just a minute, I would never have agreed to that horrendous caretaker coming into my apartment, I know he would like nothing better than to spy on me, to sit down and ask me where I am going and for how long and then tell everybody, exercising his panoptic control over the lives of his tenants, so I took a last glance at my library and still found room in my baggage for a book of interviews with famous writers first published in
The Paris Review
, and at last I left, double-locking the door, and ran down to the street, regretting that I had not taken anything by Stifter, which would have been ideal for a journey,