Episode Details

One day in June, during the three-year period of covid, a girlfriend whom I lost track of at the turn of the century so that her phone fell out of the agenda–like so many others before–despite the fact that I tried in vain to keep in touch at the time, suddenly appeared on Telegram, that app that is supposed to be better encrypted than WhatsApp.

From what I found out, when such apparitions happen it is because they are looking for you. And she would probably write a message and then delete it. Since I promised her back in the day that I would always respond, I did. But I received no reply. And even more, she disappeared from Telegram.

Six months later, intrigued, I launched a Google search and it turned out that she had recently gone on a trip. Just a week before! From her Twitter account, where several opinions of cancer gurus appeared, I imagine that she would be one of many people with cancer treatment for whom long-haul covid brought forward the trip. Or not. Who knows!

The only certainty I have is that she tried to say goodbye. But perhaps she would be so bald that her curly red hair would be a postcard from the past. And since the unfathomable feminine vanity is what it is, then whatever happened happened.

If it hadn't been for that surprise on Telegram, she would have remained in the deep catch-all of memory that we storytellers use to make golems–as my mother made croquettes–until in the end they become solid and plausible characters where the good reader projects himself with such generosity.

However, now I listen to her as if she were a Celtic ghost with unfinished business. Luckily I don't believe in ghosts and I know it's the writer's imagination, who, unlike the imagination of ordinary mortals, makes infinite sketches in the form of pristine prose tirelessly until the happy time of hitting the keyboard arrives. Like right now.

And hacking as usual, I found a literary biopic, where at least I entertain myself during my convalescence learning the art of some literary lightning rod.

And here comes my recommendation for those who like the genre. Wildcat by Ethan Hawke.

What is its relationship with the above?

Well, Elisabeth, that was her name, the first time we dated, invited me to the cinema where a very young Ethan Hawke played a sweet charlatan in the extremely famous Before Sunrise, a modern exercise in medieval courtly love from Occitania in Eurorail Vienna where there is not a hint of sex out of respect for female empowerment. Which is why the damn ghost was a pain in the ass while I was watching the movie.

It is about the short life and grotesque characters of the American writer Flannery O'Connor–look up in the Southern Gothic section–who also went on a trip too early, at only 39 years old due to lupus, she called it the French Wolf, which made her lead a life of a recluse during her last fourteen years, where she channeled everything that tortured her intimately,  the loneliness imposed by the disease, which made her a cripple, her Catholic faith, which represented a constant battle, and the racial question, since she had to live through the last years of the brutal Jim Crow laws in her native Georgia.

I have read other Southern Gothic stories like Eudora Welty’s The Petrified Man, and William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily. Each story possessed a morbid or violent ending that stuck in my mind. Sordid endings that employ mystery and terror are a defining feature of Southern Gothic fiction, which is characterized by grotesque, macabre, or fantastic incidents. In such authors, especially Faulkner in the iconic novel Light in August, the racial question was also the proper of their era.

For this last matter, the demented revisionists of literary history have tried to pillory her repeatedly, to decontextualize her words to bring them to the present prudish in which we live–laugh at the Spanish Inquisiti