A book that changed my life? My post for the @bananafish question.

Dear friends, I leave my entry to A book that changed your life . I strongly recommend that you participate. It is a particularly beautiful initiative.
I will not abuse your time, the post is a little long, so, without further ado, I am grateful.

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There's no book. There isn't even a book. There is, yes, a long voyage full of stories.

Sometimes those stories were spoken, whispered in the nights of fear.

Sometimes they were contained in a book.

Sometimes they just led to that book.

It is a journey through blood, through a silver thread that unites my present and that of a girl, who was once, a long time ago, a woman, who was an old woman: my grandmother. There is "a path of stories like a snake that bites its tail," as Guillermo Meneses said in "La mano junto al muro".

She, my grandmother, was my Scheherazade. She told me the stories of the Vizier's daughter for King Shahriar in Las mil y una noches.

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And so, interspersed with the stories of her life, she led me through the stories of the books.

And so, on the nights of my childhood, I became a reader without knowing it.

And following the thread of their stories I found my stories. I also found the path of other people's stories that have made my life. I fell in love with stories and with stories I raised my daughter.

A silver thread that is woven into the secret of blood, as Gustavo Díaz Solís says in "Arco secreto". Like a snake that bites its tail.

My grandmother used to tell stories about a Spanish treasure she found, when she was very young, on a hill. She told me that her mother said, "God, help us," because she knew that the ghost of the old Spanish pirate would come for her and her daughter, my grandmother. Her mother was taken away by the Spanish flu plague in Cumaná, in this Land of Grace, in 1922. When she died, she had seen an earthquake devastate her village. A comet that threatened to burn the earth. She gave birth to six children. My grandmother survived her mother a long, tired night. At dawn, she knew she was holding the hand of a dead woman. There was no nocturnal bird screaming "Never more" in the horrendous darkness. Edgar Alan Poe's The Raven gave me a taste of his childhood horror.

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My grandmother used to tell me the story of a huge woman who constantly gobbled up what she found in people's homes. That the woman presented herself in the form of a very skinny old woman who asked for a loaf of bread, and, if you invited her into your house, ate the loaf of bread and what was in the pots of the kitchen and the owners of the house and the dog and the apothecary and the priest... And the whole town was eaten as in an impossible story, which could well have happened in Macondo, of Cien años de soledad. Every year I reread this book to make sure that reality continues to have cracks where astonishers fit. And again I feel like a child at the feet of my grandmother's rocking chair. My grandmother smelled of citronella leaves.

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My grandmother used to tell me stories of crazy owners and gentlemen, such as the "felice barahunda" of Quijote characters. Stories like that of the old man they found in a cave on a hill in Puerto Escondido (the town that her grandfather founded and governed his law, and where he loved and murdered himself). The old man could not recognize himself in the mirror, because he remembered that he was twenty-eight years old when his boat was stranded in those lands, which were then uninhabited. When they found him, he was asleep and murmured in sweet dreams compliments to the buttocks of one Crucita. He took shelter in the cave to spend the night and woke up wrinkled like a little patch and fiery like a lion in love. He dedicated himself to running around girls without much concern for his name, his family beyond that sea, nor his future. And when Don Quijote came into my hands and stayed definitively in my heart to make me see the world as a dream I will not waste, an adventure, a fiction where all possibilities fit.

Every year I read again the translation of Cide Hamete Benengeli...

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My life goes by between stories that mark their course (my course?).

A book terrifies me and in itself is a book of great beauty. The fascination it exerts over me is a trap that traps me for days, while I wander its streets, for days or months. Spoon River traps me in its stories, in its poems, and an Edgar Lee Masters smiles (because a writer knows, and sometimes only the writer knows how a reader will put a book in his soul). I read the Spoon River Anthology and hear the dead speak: their dead are my dead and they change my pace and the small calamities of my days are like echoes within their pages.

Once a year I am also Lyra and I travel through the four worlds that traverse La materia oscura. Philip Pullman tells me his stories: a compass, a spyglass, a dagger. I see the world through the unusual gaze of the mulefas (who have symbiosis with the trees of their world and have a sense of community and collective intelligence) and I despair that we are no longer like them and that we do not understand that a pet is our daimonion.

I am a city mulefa who cultivates a vegetable garden.

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My laughter and sadness are witnessed by the Olvidado Rey Gudú that one day Ana María Matute wrote. And the Trasgo del Sur showed me the wound of the excessive love, the maternal one, that gives itself without return. It also taught me to understand its inevitability.

And how much tearing, how much terrible astonishment in the impiety on the candor of Kuy-Kuyen. That story repeated in the innocent dead (no matter the cause declared in newspapers or reports, all are engendered in evil) that the Venezuelans of these last two decades will drag forever like bundles tied by the inventors of misery. With The Saga of the Confines Liliana Bodoc put my astonishment on the death that she decided to give birth and I threw myself to her abysses to understand the evil.

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"Trafalgar" came from the hand of Angelica Gorodischer and with her also the cosmic astonishment of indescribable beauty of "La onomatopeya de ojo silencioso". And Paco Igancio Taibo II was the terrible and eschatological laughter that showed me the miseries of my own soul, the miseries of all souls.

And there are many, many more... Right now I remember Ricardo Piglia in La ciudad ausente ("Can the real be told?"); I see Jorge Luis Borges looking at an impossible Aleph in a Buenos Aires basement; Brausen irremediably lost, and Dr. Díaz Grey in La vida breve, de Juan Carlos Onetti; Guillermo Cabrera Infante's endless habanera night...

Every book has changed my life because fiction changed my life. That renewed passion for finding the great book where all the stories come together made my life.

In a deep and punctual radical place of its center the books have shown me the face of a secret that I still cannot understand. The secret that my grandmother knew.

And that is my story.

Gracias por la compañía. Bienvenidos siempre.

¡Libertad para mi país!

Soy miembro de @EquipoCardumen

Soy miembro de @TalentClub

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://adncabrera.vornix.blog/2019/03/14/a-book-that-changed-my-life-my-post-for-the-bananafish-question/

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