The serious business of life is literature. A conversation with Adolfo Bioy Casares (Oviedo, May 1991)

Abstract

Individuals know very little or almost nothing about each other. This or that person knows us under certain or certain layers, but never manages to notice all the layers that compose us.

Vocation of happiness to whom the presence of old age and the idea of death made him uncomfortable. Women, he said without being true, now see him as if he were transparent. It was difficult to see a man as attractive as he was as if he were transparent, regardless of his age.

Lunches at La Biela at one o'clock in the afternoon.

The letter he wrote to me that I read and reread sometimes to make sure that it was true and happened to me. And I am by no means a mythologist, but I remember the day when, already living in New York, I found out by chance that Bioy Casares was in the city, that he had given a talk at the Instituto Cervantes where I appeared weekly as if it were my second home, and that he was about to leave. So shocked was Maribel when she told me that, going beyond the limits of that series of unwritten protocols, she gave me his phone number at the Ritz hotel where he was staying. I spoke to him, he told me he loved me very much and I hung up. Two years later, on March 8, 1999, Bioy Casares died, and once again I found out that he had died.