Limpus Road

[ Pray (2008), una de mis ilustraciones favoritas de Koren Shadmi. Como anillo al dedo a uno de mis capítulos favoritos de Cakes and Ale (1930)]

Aún recuerdo que leí esta novela de W.S. Maugham de manera bastante parecida a como estoy ahora mismo, tumbada en la cama, con un edredón por encima, pasando bastante frío en mi pequeña habitación Erasmus. Era esta misma edición de 1993, Penguin. Este mismo ejemplar. Me recuerdo tan joven... tanto que me pregunto hasta que punto entendí este libro y muchos otros que pude leer aquel año. Y no por leídos y reverenciados dejan de parecerme geniales algunos de los párrafos que estoy redescubriendo. Maugham puede no ser el mejor escritor en lengua inglesa (y eso que a mí su prosa me atrapa igual que la conversación de un viejo amigo de vuelta de todo, un cínico que no ha perdido el último poso de romanticismo), pero es uno de esos escritores que se han atrevido insinuar en sus libros las intrahistorias que obviamos en la vida diaria. No todo hay que contarlo. Pero los escritores deberían estar obligados por una especie de juramento hipocrático a vestir de palabras aquello que ninguno nos confesamos, ni a nosotros mismos siquiera. ¿Qué nos cuenta Maughan en este libro, que incluso se permite un párrafo sobre el uso de la primera persona en literatura?

(134) I stared at her and I stared at the picture. I had such a funny little feeling in my heart. It was as though someone softly plunged a sharp knife into it, but it was not an unpleasant sensation at all, painful but strangely agreeable; and then suddenly I felt quite weak at the knees. But now I do not know if I remember Rosie in the flesh or in the picture. For when I think of her it is not in the shirt and boater that I first saw her, nor in any of the other dresses I saw her in then or later, but in that white silk [...](140) Then one night when we had walked home from the Canterbury, and I was leaving her at her door, when I held out my hand she laughed a little, a low chuckle it was, and leaned forward. 'You old silly,' she said. She kissed me on the mouth. It was not a hurried peck, nor was it a kiss of passion. Her lips, those very full red lips of hers, rested on mine long enough for me to be conscious of their shape and their warmth and their softness. Then she withdrew them, but without hurry, in silence pushed open the door, skipped inside and left me. I was so startled that I had not been able to say anything.
143) I wish now that I had not started to write this book in the first person singular. It is all very well when you can show yourself in an amiable or touching light, and nothing can be more effective than a modest heroic or pathetic humorous which in this mode is much cultivated; [...] A little while ago I read in The Evening Standard an article by Mr Evelyn Waugh in the course of which he remarked that to write novels in the first person was a contemptible practice [...] All the same I can find one reason why certain novelists, such as Defoe, Sterne, Thackeray, Dickens, Emily Brontë, and Proust, well known in their day but now doubtless forgotten, have used the method that Mr Evelyn Waugh reprehends. As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings; this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middleaged or elderly writer whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people. For if the proper study of mankind is man it is evidently more sensible to ocuppy yourself with the coherent, substantial, and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life. Sometimes the novelist feels himself like God and is prepared to tell you everything about his characters; sometimes, however, he does not; and then he tells you not everything that is to be known about them but the little he knows himself; and since as we grow older we feel ourselves less and less like God I should not be surprised to learn that with advancing years the novelist is less and less inclined to describe more than his own experience has given him. The first person singular is a very useful device for this limited purpose.
(145)'Blow out the candle,' she whispered. It was she who awoke me when the dawn peering through the curtains revealed the shape of the bed and of the wardrobe against the darkness of the lingering night. She woke me by kissing me on the mouth and her hair falling over my face tickled me. 'I must get up,' she said. 'I don't want your landlady to see me.' 'There's plenty of time.'

Her breasts when she leaned over me were heavy on my chest. In a little while she got out of bed. I lit a candle. She turned to the glass and tied up her hair and then she looked for a moment at her naked body. Her waist was naturally small; though so well developed she was very slender; her breasts were straight and firm and they stood out from the chest as though carved in marble, It was a body made for the act of love. In the light of the candle, struggling now with the increasing day, it was all silvery gold: and the only colour was the rosy pink of the hard nipples. We dressed in silence [...]. We tiptoed along the passage and when we opened the door and we stepped out into the street the dawn run to meet us like a cat leaping up the steps. The square was empty; already the sun was shining on the eastern windows. I felt as young as the day. We walked arm in arm till we came to the corner of Limpus Road. 'Leave me here, ' said Rosie. 'One never knows.'