Цитаты из книг — Алехандро Самбра

What for a smoker is nonfiction, for a non-smoker is fiction. That majestic story by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, for example, about the smoker who desperately jumps out the window to rescue a pack of cigarettes, and who, years later, very ill, his wife keeping a vigilant watch over him, escapes to the beach every day to unearth,…

The table swallowed up in tongues of fire The scars that showed on my father’s body The quick confidence amid the rubble The phrases written on the childhood wall The sound of my restless drumming fingers Your clothes in some other house’s drawers The never-ending sound of passing cars The warm, steady hope of a return…

It’s better not to be in any book for the words not to try to protect us A life with no music and no lyrics and a sky without the clouds you see there now The clouds — you hardly know if they are coming closer or retreating when they alter their shapes so often and you’d hardly know we weren’t still living in the place we…

Today my friend Pablo called me so he could read me this phrase he found in a book by Tim O’Brien: “What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.” I kept thinking about that and stayed awake all night. It’s true. We remember the sounds of the images. And sometimes, when we…

Gazmuri: Then you don’t know what I’m talking about, you don’t know the drive. There’s a drive when you write on paper, a sound to the pencil. A strange equilibrium between elbow, hand, and pencil.

When I got home I thought about Eme’s words. I thought she was right. That we know very little. That we used to know more, because we were full of conviction, dogma, rules. That we loved those rules. That the only thing we had really loved was that absurd handful of rules. And now we understand everything. We understand,…

On the way back home I remember a scene in college, one afternoon when we were smoking weed and drinking a sticky wine with melon. I’d spent the afternoon with a group of classmates, and we were exchanging family stories in which death appeared with urgent insistence. Of all those present I was the only one who came from…

Now I don’t understand that freedom we enjoyed. We lived under a dictatorship; people talked about crimes and attacks, martial law and curfew, but even so, nothing kept me from spending all day wandering far from home. Weren’t the streets of Maipú dangerous then? At night they were, and during the day as well, but the…

Back then I was, as I always have been, and I always will be, for Colo-Colo. As for Pinochet, to me he was a television personality who hosted a show with no fixed schedule, and I hated him for that, for the stuffy national channels that interrupted their programming during the best parts. Later I hated him for being a…