lodijomarise - english version

Wigfredo was rejected at the age of five from nursery school for his repeated rejection of negative whole numbers: he refused to owe his teacher an apple, which led to an expulsion file being opened on him. That file was the first thing ever archived under his name.

He began writing in his teens, on a second-hand computer. By the time he first sat in front of a screen, he had already heard about chats, and the first thing he did was chat. He discovered that if he typed "hi, how are you?", he sometimes got a reply. It didn't matter that the conversation lasted only three minutes; those three minutes were the only ones in which someone spoke to him without asking him to "tidy something up" or "sweep the floor," and while he waited he didn't have to do his homework. He left school. Nobody noticed.

A friend from the chat, who turned out to be a used-car salesman, offered him his first job at his dealership. Wigfredo lasted three months. He couldn't do financing calculations. But he discovered that if he put on the boss's jacket when the boss wasn't there, he could flirt with the female customers, though he never got any further than that. He tried the jacket on in front of the mirror while imagining dinners with women who never accepted his invitation.

After collecting unemployment for the first time, those were the best moments of his life; he worked at a supermarket restocking cans of tuna. At night, in his room, he kept chatting with internet users —mostly women— in the vain hope of getting something from them, a goal he never achieved. He told them he was a poet. He sent them fragments of songs badly translated from English. Some asked for photos; he sent one of a catalogue model. When they found out, they blocked him.

He got a job at a second-hand bookshop, where, with a hundred-grit sandpaper, he sanded the edges of books to remove the accumulated dirt and yellowing, and pass old books off as nearly new. During that time he had his first serious contact with literature, reading tables of contents and the biographies on the inside covers. He learned authors' names the way others learn football line-ups. When a customer asked him "what do you recommend?", Wigfredo pointed to the most expensive one and said "this one is important." Sometimes he was right. The owner deducted from his wages every minute he spent reading inside covers, but he kept doing it because, in his head, it brought him closer to being a "writer."

At night he learned to get around his blocks by opening new accounts over and over again in the chats. From that period, scattered episodes narrated by other authors survive.

The most notable one was when he showed up at a supermarket in his old restocker's uniform and approached a cashier, puffed out his chest and said: "Tonight I get off at ten. Do you want to grab a drink? Then I'll explain the tuna can restocking for next week." The cashier called security. Wigfredo was arrested for harassment and intimidation. That night, in the holding cell —a cell with peeling walls that smelled of urine and stale tobacco, lit by a fluorescent tube that flickered every few seconds— Wigfredo resolved to straighten out the course of his life. When he got out, he sat in a café and chatted with a woman from a Nordic country. He wrote to her: "I'm a writer persecuted by the system." She, who had confused his profile with that of an Australian, didn't understand a word, and Wigfredo got no reply.

After wandering through several forums, he bought a degree. One September morning he received a diploma with gold trim and blue lettering certifying him as a "Bachelor of Advanced Literary Studies." He framed it and hung it in his living room, next to a drawing of a single line on a white canvas, with his signature.

That same night he opened a new account. He called himself Garcilaso. In the description he wrote: "Poet. Bachelor of Advanced Literary Studies. Author of Lodijomarise. Writer persecuted by the system."

And then he opened another account. And another. And from each one he wrote to the first.

Malisima_4471: hi, how are you?
Garcilaso: writing. i'm a poet.
Malisima_4471: do you publish anything?
Garcilaso: yes. i have a bachelor's in advanced literary studies. i have the diploma framed.
Malisima_4471: from which university?
Garcilaso: an international university.
Malisima_4471: which one?
Garcilaso: i don't like to boast.
Malisima_4471: it's not boasting, it's a normal question.
Garcilaso: do you like literature?
Malisima_4471: yes. have you published a book?
Garcilaso: yes. it's called Lodijomarise.
Malisima_4471: i don't know it. what's it about?
Garcilaso: it's an odyssey. about a woman. and her mother.
Malisima_4471: where can i buy it?
Garcilaso: it's not in bookstores. it's post-print writing. to read on the internet.
Malisima_4471: post-print?
Garcilaso: yes. not on paper. on screen.
Malisima_4471: okay. can you send me a fragment?
Garcilaso: sure.
Garcilaso: Lodijomarise (fragment)

Garcilaso:
Night falls on the cans of tuna.
She restocks, restocks, restocks,
and nobody says anything to her.

I said to her: "hi, how are you?",
and she didn't answer me.
I saw her restocking the world
with her yellow hands.

The system pursues her
through the supermarket aisles,
but she doesn't hide.
She restocks, restocks, restocks,
and nobody says anything to her.

Hi, how are you?
Hi, how are you?
Hi, how are you?

And nobody remembers her
when the lights go out in the supermarket.
Night falls on the cans of tuna.

Malisima_4471: you're a lonely man who invents a life for himself.
Malisima_4471: and wait.
Malisima_4471: Garcilaso.
Malisima_4471: that name rings a bell.
Garcilaso: it's mine.
Malisima_4471: Garcilaso de la Vega died in 1536.
Garcilaso: that was someone else. i'm Garcilaso. just Garcilaso.
Malisima_4471: nobody is called Garcilaso.
Garcilaso: i am.
Malisima_4471: you're a liar.
Malisima_4471: you know, all this is very unfair. i'm alone and with no company and i come into the chat to meet someone and this happens to me.
System: Malisima_4471 has logged out.
Garcilaso: ...
Garcilaso: hi, how are you?
System: No one is connected.
Garcilaso: ...
Garcilaso: hi, how are you?

That went on for years. He'd open an account, write to someone, lie, get blocked, open another. Hi, how are you? Hi, how are you? Hi, how are you?

When he turned forty, someone around him —perhaps a court-appointed lawyer— said to him: "If you don't leave the chat and do something serious, you're going to end up alone and no one is going to change your diapers when you're old." That night, Wigfredo looked online for some book to change his life. He found a forum where a user recommended reading a book titled If You Want to Impress a Woman, Say You Know About Numbers. The chapter of the book devoted to negative whole numbers reminded him of the episode of his expulsion in childhood, and he burned the book. "It doesn't matter," he said. "I'm strong. Life goes on the same."

That was when his mother, already elderly, fell ill. Wigfredo didn't know how to comfort her. He brought her a drawing made with a single continuous line that covered the entire wall of the hospital room. The nurse said it was "disturbing." His mother died the following month. Wigfredo wept in front of the computer keyboard. The women in the chat told him "i'm sorry."

For a while he wrote nothing. Not poems, not messages, not "hi, how are you?" He sat in front of the lit screen without opening any account. Then he came back. He came back because he didn't know how to do anything else. And he discovered that no one answered him anymore. The forums had changed, the accounts had been closed, and his name —Garcilaso, or whatever it was— no longer meant anything to anyone.

In summary, there is general agreement that Wigfredo was incapable of writing a single line correctly. Some critics dismissed him as a bookshop clerk who, after a life of hardship, believed himself a writer by becoming familiar with the names of the authors whose works he shelved. Others describe him as a metalworker who writes with hammer blows on wood pulp, with no creativity whatsoever. However, these versions contradict the studies of his early drawings, which reveal a handling of pencil and marker as delicate as it is immeasurable, capable of covering an entire page with a single, continuous line.

For the poetry and literature forums, Wigfredo's work neither entertains nor offers any pleasure. His texts, riddled with anachronisms, move in a temporality so contradictory and diffuse that it prevents all chronological coherence. Among the most noted inconsistencies of his principal work, Lodijomarise, is the impossibility that Marise ever had a mother, and even the existence of a father is doubted. For his detractors, Marise is nothing but a fictional character, a mere artifice within an odyssey of trivialities that Wigfredo, with visible effort, writes for us pretending that something written post-print, made to be read on the internet, should be read like a book.

mvf