El escritor despierta a primera hora de la mañana y prepara café. Veinte minutos después, abre un documento en el ordenador y continúa con el esqueleto de la criatura. Dos meses más tarde, termina de armar la osamenta y empieza a llenarla de órganos. El proceso es lento y tedioso. Lo más complicado son las venas, cuyo descuidado manejo infectaría el torrente sanguíneo y el pequeño enfermaría hasta perecer.
Tras colocar cada órgano en su sitio y estructurar todos los sistemas, se limpia el sudor de la frente, como el obrero que trabaja sin descanso bajo el sol. Ahora solo falta el recubrimiento de piel. La duda aparece en su rostro. No sabe si la criatura será parecida a él. Teme que así sea.
Luego de cinco meses luchando todas las mañanas contra la pereza, releyendo y reescribiendo capítulos, perdido en soliloquios vespertinos, en busca de vacíos argumentales, soñando cada noche con los personajes, atrapado en el mundo de la novela, piensa que es momento de mostrar su trabajo. Contacta a su agente editorial, envía el manuscrito y una semana después recibe una llamada.
—Te has dejado la piel en esta obra —escucha a través de la línea telefónica. La frase le produce un escalofrío—. Solo hay que hacer algunas correcciones, pero vamos a publicarla.
El escritor sonríe, sin embargo, su alegría desaparece cuando piensa qué pretexto buscar ahora para volver a escribir. Si no lo hace, su vida se infectará de realidad y será él quien enferme hasta perecer.
Un mes después de la publicación del libro, recibe otra llamada.
Aquel había sido un buen día. Luego de varios intentos a lo largo del mes, logró dar con un personaje que lo dejó conocer su mundo y su historia. La semilla de una nueva novela.
Nunca se lo ha contado a nadie, pero a veces siente que es solo un instrumento a través del cual se filtra parte de la sustancia que conforma el mundo de las ideas. Aunque no sabe cómo explicarlo, ni está seguro de ello.
Contesta el teléfono. Es su madre, que lo felicita por el éxito de su nueva obra. Se ha traducido a tres idiomas y ha recibido buenas críticas. Aunque ahora siente que eso no le concierne, como si el autor del libro fuera otra persona. La conversación deriva pronto hacia asuntos familiares y su madre empieza a quejarse de que, a sus cuarenta y cinco años y con dos divorcios a sus espaldas, aún no le haya dado un nieto.
Antes de colgar, ella dice un tanto decepcionada:
—No sabes cuánto desearía que en vez de novelas trajeras un hijo al mundo.
La llamada termina y el escritor regresa a su soledad. Las palabras pronunciadas por su madre le parecen irreales, igual que las de su agente, como si fueran parte de una historia que alguien más está escribiendo.
¿O será él quien la escribe?
La noche ha caído. El escritor camina hacia la nevera, se prepara un whisky con soda, vuelve a la sala del apartamento y coge una novela de la estantería. Se lanza en el sofá y bebe un poco de whisky, con el libro en la otra mano. Piensa en la naturaleza de los clásicos, en la maestría de quienes los escribieron y en los mundos a los que el lector solo puede acceder a través de ellos.
—Ya quisiera tener un hijo así —dice, observando la obra de Collodi que ha escogido, antes de sumergirse en la lectura.
The writer wakes up early in the morning and makes coffee. Twenty minutes later, he opens a document on the computer and continues with the skeleton of the creature. Two months later, he finishes assembling the skeleton and begins to fill it with organs. The process is slow and tedious. The most complicated are the veins, whose careless handling would infect the bloodstream and the little one would fall ill and perish.
After placing each organ in its place and structuring all the systems, he wipes the sweat from his forehead, like a worker who works tirelessly under the sun. Now only the skin covering is missing. Doubt appears on his face. He does not know if the creature will look like him. He fears that it will.
After five months fighting laziness every morning, rereading and rewriting chapters, lost in evening soliloquies, searching for plot holes, dreaming every night about the characters, trapped in the world of the novel, he thinks it's time to show his work. He contacts his publishing agent, sends off the manuscript and a week later gets a call.
"You've worked your ass off on this play," he hears over the phone line. The phrase sends a shiver down his spine. "There are just a few corrections to make, but we're going to publish it.
The writer smiles, but his joy disappears when he thinks about what pretext to find now to write again. If he doesn't, his life will be infected with reality and he will be the one to fall ill until he perishes.
A month after the book's publication, he gets another call.
That had been a good day. After several attempts throughout the month, he managed to find a character who let him know his world and his story. The seed of a new novel.
He has never told anyone about it, but sometimes he feels that he is just an instrument through which part of the substance that makes up the world of ideas filters through. Although he doesn't know how to explain it, nor is he sure of it.
He answers the phone. It is his mother, who congratulates him on the success of his new work. It has been translated into three languages and has received good reviews. Although now he feels that this does not concern him, as if the author of the book were someone else. The conversation soon drifts to family matters and his mother begins to complain that, at forty-five years old and with two divorces behind her, she has not yet given him a grandchild.
Before hanging up, she says somewhat disappointed:
"You don't know how much I wish that instead of novels you would bring a son into the world.
The call ends and the writer returns to his solitude. The words spoken by his mother seem unreal to him, as do those of his agent, as if they were part of a story someone else is writing.
Or will he be the one writing it?
Night has fallen. The writer walks to the refrigerator, makes himself a scotch and soda, returns to the living room of the apartment and picks up a novel from the shelf. He throws himself on the couch and drinks some whiskey, holding the book in his other hand. He thinks about the nature of the classics, the mastery of those who wrote them, and the worlds the reader can only access through them.
"I wish I had a son like that," he says, looking at the Collodi work he has chosen, before immersing himself in reading.
