The exercise consists of placing a medium distance between you and the advertisements for nougat or sausages, just as you do with the lottery: we know that it will be difficult for us to win, but we buy a few tenths because “what if…”. You know, the conditional is the spice of life. When perfumes are advertised on TV promising irresistible appeal, don’t be completely suspicious, because at Christmas the word inspiration is written with glitter. We complain about the waste of kitsch and we think that they treat us like children lacking affection, but let’s admit that being one hundred percent adults 24/7 is real torture. Stealing a little naivety from children, nephews or grandchildren is essential in order to digest the sugary menu.
While the Ibex companies wish us happiness as if they cared more than a damn about us, we think about how much it has cost us to mature. We have crossed through stations and caught connecting flights with a certain taste for provisionality. This going from here to there, physically and mentally, is invested with a magnetic force thanks to the conditional mode. What if there was something better waiting for us? What if our wishes were tattooed in a corner of destiny? Then, among the boxes of marzipan and guirlache, the anti-Mozart spirit will emerge, telling us that no, there is nothing true, only crooked lines of cynicism.
Mozart, despite being the son of the most beautiful couple in Salzburg, came out emaciated, but they describe him as kind and attentive, a genius who transformed himself at the piano. I search for information about the anti-Mozart expression, which is repeated by the protagonist of the recommendable series Nada (Disney), and I find a wonderful author with an eventful life: Alberto Laiseca, author of Los Sorias, a monumental 1,300-page novel. Ricardo Piglia considered it the best novel that has been written in Argentina since The Seven Fools, by Roberto Arlt. Orphaned by his mother, Laiseca confessed that his father’s abuse pushed him to books. The Phantom of the Opera made him hungry and he began to write “delirious realism.” Borges refused to read one of his stories, Killing dwarfs with clubs, because of the bad taste of choosing the gerund.
Laiseca carried his manuscript – which he rewrote four times – in a supermarket bag for thirteen years. On one occasion, a thief tried to steal it from him, but he struggled in time and saved it. Professor of literary workshops, one of his pearls states: “Only what is exaggerated is alive.” He was a cult writer who ceased to be so when he appeared in a television series of horror stories. On the set he couldn’t give up his cigarette under a ceiling fan. Laiseca claimed to fight the anti-Mozart, following the idea that Mozart is absolute good, “but the enemy of good is not evil, but anti-good.”
I inquire around me about the anti-Mozarts, and my friend Ignacio reminds me of an anecdote revealed by Simon Leys in which he questions the search for ugliness, or the terror of beauty. He said that in a cafeteria, suddenly, the Salzburg composer’s piano sounded and everyone seemed uncomfortable, paralyzed. People stopped talking and a trace of disgust hovered over the bar and tables until someone changed the dial. Immediately the noise returned. Those present returned to their old selves, relaxed and resumed their conversations. In their act they showed that Mozart acted as a kind of distorting agent. Because beauty challenges us and at the same time isolates us, but the fatal thing is to miss it. Merry christmas.
