Rafael Toriz Translated by Julia Ostmann

Chatting Over A Drink Conversation in the Convent

Being, appearing to be, and running a bookstore in Mexico is a high art, not suitable for the lazy and much less for the novice. In a country where drinking is a national sport and where disorganized realities demand constant interpretation, the invitation to buy and read books seems at first like a mistake, then a deviation. In the end, it seems like a warm welcome. For this reason, and so the endeavor bears fruit, a few daring people have put together—with distinct success—a fascinating hybrid that fulfills two essential needs: the bookstore bar, that is, the wineglass lubricated by books, a concept not far off from my idea of paradise. Among the various options for getting hammered among a few though learned books, the most conspicuous, elegant, ... Read More »]]>

Rafael Toriz
Translated by Julia Ostmann

Chatting Over A Drink
Conversation in the Convent

Being, appearing to be, and running a bookstore in Mexico is a high art, not suitable for the lazy and much less for the novice. In a country where drinking is a national sport and where disorganized realities demand constant interpretation, the invitation to buy and read books seems at first like a mistake, then a deviation. In the end, it seems like a warm welcome.
For this reason, and so the endeavor bears fruit, a few daring people have put together—with distinct success—a fascinating hybrid that fulfills two essential needs: the bookstore bar, that is, the wineglass lubricated by books, a concept not far off from my idea of paradise.
Among the various options for getting hammered among a few though learned books, the most conspicuous, elegant, and sumptuous in the nation is Profética in Puebla, an amazing place that contains, within walls dating back to the viceroyalty (the building belonged to the former Convent of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception), all kinds of intoxicating drinks, with a fountain of clear and timeless water at its center. To set foot in Profética, in all its nobility, is to set foot in the 17th century Mexico of Sor Juana, the baroque, and the cheeky, bare-bottomed cherubs of Tonantzintla: Profética, for many years now, has been the promise that the heart of another country, gorgeous and intoxicating, beats in the boundless Mexican night.
Whenever I am in Mexico, whatever it takes, I make time to visit this resplendent courtyard. Beneath Profética’s sky I have heard the years that whisper through the magnificent bookstore and in the still more surprising library. Whether I am being presented books or chatting over a drink under the stars, it is clear to me that Profética is not only an instant suspended in time, but also one of my favorite places on Earth. For this reason, each time I am given leave to cross its threshold, I let myself be led into the depths of mezcal on chariots of fire.

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3 sur 701. Centro
Puebla, México.
Tel (222) 2469101

YOU HAD GLITTER ON YOUR FINGERS

I can hug the old refrigerator before they take it away. I can write that you had glitter on your fingers and that burning glitter smells like a fairy tale. I can bite the cat’s tail. I can bite my husband’s beard, because it is mine, because it is mine and tastes like fruit. I can cry and say that I’m crying, and not feel embarrassed by my pink cheeks. I can be sappy. I can dance naked with the windows open. I can paint each nail a different color. I can clean the house only once a week. I can refuse to read the news. I can refuse to hear the planes. I can refuse to feed the mosquitoes with my thick, viscous blood. I can invent a lullaby for deaf children, the only thing missing is a voice, the only thing missing is a long ... Read More »]]>

YOU HAD GLITTER ON YOUR FINGERS

I can hug the old refrigerator before they take it away.
I can write that you had glitter on your fingers and that burning glitter smells like a fairy tale.
I can bite the cat’s tail.
I can bite my husband’s beard, because it is mine, because it is mine and tastes like fruit.
I can cry and say that I’m crying, and not feel embarrassed by my pink cheeks.
I can be sappy.
I can dance naked with the windows open.
I can paint each nail a different color.
I can clean the house only once a week.
I can refuse to read the news.
I can refuse to hear the planes.
I can refuse to feed the mosquitoes with my thick, viscous blood.
I can invent a lullaby for deaf children, the only thing missing is a voice, the only thing missing is a long neck where we can resound.
I can say that we are scared.
I can say that hunger is an invention of our teeth so they don’t feel so alone.
I can write the word cancer a thousand times, because cancer reproduces a thousand times. It is a relentless killer, and I am also a relentless killer, and I swear I will get my revenge.
I can dream I’m kissing a made-up poet.
I can dream I’m a drop of acid rain.
I can use up all my Candy Crush lives until I finally feel that I have died. That I have died in the magical world of the candies.
I can leave the gas on.
I can light all the candles.
I can invite domestic catastrophes, cut off my finger, or cut off my nipple, or cut off a single hair and afterward eat up all my remains.
I can wish for a baby.
I can want a baby.
I can love the stupid and sweet idea of longing for a baby with all my guts.
I can make love with myself.
I can knock myself up with self-love.
I can say me, me, me, me, me and me, and still be here alone.
I can breathe underwater.
I can entertain myself with any fly.
I can collect photographs of my mother and stick her pale face on the wings of a dove.
I can fly.
I can fly.
I can set fire to everything when it pleases me.
The air here smells like fairy dust.
There is no more glitter.
There are no more sparkles.
I hug the old fridge.
There is no more body.

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Image: Luna Miguel

Álvaro Bisama translated by Julia Ostmann

My favorite bookstore is a ghost bookstore. It was called the Orellana and was located in the center of Valparaíso. It closed a couple of years ago. It just couldn’t hold out anymore. Its owners were an old couple that had been there since the mid-’50s or ’60s. He was tall and thin; she was tiny and wore thick glasses.

I never knew their names.

My grandmother had kept an account at the bookstore ever since it opened. My grandmother read a lot: in the house where I grew up, my parents’ books were mixed with hers. That library formed or deformed me. Many of those volumes came from the Orellana, easy to recognize thanks to a stamp on the first page. When my parents got paid at the end of the month, they would give ... Read More »]]>

Álvaro Bisama
translated by Julia Ostmann

My favorite bookstore is a ghost bookstore. It was called the Orellana and was located in the center of Valparaíso. It closed a couple of years ago. It just couldn’t hold out anymore. Its owners were an old couple that had been there since the mid-’50s or ’60s. He was tall and thin; she was tiny and wore thick glasses.

I never knew their names.

My grandmother had kept an account at the bookstore ever since it opened. My grandmother read a lot: in the house where I grew up, my parents’ books were mixed with hers. That library formed or deformed me. Many of those volumes came from the Orellana, easy to recognize thanks to a stamp on the first page. When my parents got paid at the end of the month, they would give me Astérix comics which came with that stamp, for me a sort of sacred mark. That stamp was in almost all of the Boom novels I read in my teens and in the literary theory manuals that had been on the shelves since the 1970s. I still leaf through those volumes, now scattered here and there, in my parents’ house and in mine, in the curves of my memory: Greek classics edited by Porrúa, books by Kayser, Wellek and Warren’s New Criticism publications translated by Gredos, editions of Droguett or Vargas Llosa from the 1960s.

The Orellana was not a museum, but it looked like one. Nothing ever seemed to move on the display tables; the bookcases revealed the geological layers of our literary styles. And that made the place reliable: They never got rid of anything. You could buy out-of-print things there, you could find on the shelves the same books that had been carried for decades. I remember that the bookstore’s science fiction section was terrific and that for years you could find Alianza’s old tomes by Kafka, Canetti, or Lovecraft.

Sometimes, I believe those stamps are time machines.

The bookstore survived more or less a half-century, in a city where all the others went bankrupt time and time again. In fact, since I can remember, hardly a single bookstore lasted very long in Valparaíso. The Orellana was there before them all, and it seemed that nothing was going to happen to it. Or that’s what I believed. I should have read the setting more carefully: Everything surrounding the bookstore had changed. During the past decade, the area (getting more and more touristy) had been overtaken by large department stores appropriating that corner-store aesthetic, the old soda fountains had become pubs, the clothing stores had mutated into Chinese importers; the noise of the buses turned everything intolerable. Perhaps that is the problem or the illusion that literature poses: the confidence that, in the moment when everything comes crashing to the ground, books can elegantly navigate any entropy.

I trusted in the Orellana’s survival almost instinctively. It was an illusion: At the beginning of 2011, when I returned to the area to write a feature about the Viña del Mar Festival, my mother and brother told me that the bookstore had closed. The reasons were what they always are—it wasn’t self-sustaining as a business, and it was better to sell the land, which was located in the city center, yards from the Cinzano, inches from the Plaza Aníbal Pinto, in the heart of every tourist route. When a fire started in the office next door, nothing happened to the bookstore. Nor did anything happen when the owners of the soda fountain on the other side turned it into an abominable restaurant-bar. I believe that events like these ended up confirming the mythic aura that enveloped the bookstore. It was a fragile myth, created to find the way back to a lost time.

Ghosts are mirages; they revoke the progression of time. The Orellana is one of my favorite ghosts. I like to think about ghosts: they are the echoes that we leave in the places we once inhabited, they are the memory of the books that we once saw on a display table and dreamed of reading and, although we never did, that we pretend occupy a space in our memories. The Orellana is a ghost, a landscape that is no more, a library that exists only in dreams.

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Librería Orellana – Avenida Esmeralda 1148 – Valparaíso, Chile

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Image: Álvaro Bisama