Lois Fernandez, a Spanish author, had five biographies written about
her life. She trained her first biographer when she was still in
college in Seville. After her first book of autobiographical poetry was
published and won prestigious prizes, she drowned in Catalonia, leaving
behind an intriguing suicide note.
One of her classmates, an unpublished poet, leapt at the chance of
writing her life, both because there hadn't been much of it and because
he had known her personally over four years of it. He had always wanted
to sleep with her because in addition to being talented, Lois was a
sultry Mediterranean beauty with hazel eyes and a figure that incited
the deepest ayes a Spaniard is capable of. In his biography, the
author, Carlos Maria Seguin, subtly repaired the grievous mistake of
having never succeeded in sleeping with Lois, by insinuating that he
had. The passage in question is an inspired example of the shoddiness
of the biographical craft. Carlos recalls a drunken evening after a
literary club meeting, an evening replete with names of people and
places, weather data, and precise descriptions of what everyone was
wearing. The merry gang of young writers roams through several bars
before ending in the rooms of a wealthy student whose apartment is
being looked after in his absence by Carlos Maria. The revelers drop
away one by one, either by stumbling drunkenly out, or passing out on
the hand-woven Moroccan rugs. At long last, the two poets are left with
one another, leaning drunkenly against each others' backs in front of
the dying embers in the Cordoba-style fireplace, and the famous
sentence occurs: "Still reciting remembered snatches of each others'
verse, they recognized simultaneously, the presence of Desire, standing
mute in a corner of the room, between two ogival windows." The scene
ends there, but one can easily imagine (in fact, one is compelled to)
the helplessness of the young bodies under the unflinching gaze of that
mute witness.
Carlos Maria Seguin received a fair share of attention for his
quasi-intimate portrait of Lois Fernandez, and his book sold many more
copies than Lois' prize-winning but slim volume of verse. The trouble
was that Lois came back to life, resurfacing in Cadaques, as if born
from the foam of the sea, and mocked the young biographer, claiming,
among other things, that all the paper trails she had left purposefully
behind, were fabricated for the express purpose of snaring a
biographer. Even her poetry had been written with that goal in mind.
Furthermore, Lois was really Luis, a 28-year-old man, not a sultry
female beauty.
Carlos Maria Seguin should have drowned himself in the sea, but instead
he took a humble job teaching in the provinces, and was never heard
from again. Luis Fernandez, now in charge of his own life, went on to
write a volume of stories that didn't win any prizes. The critical
establishment did not find the game amusing, consisting mostly of
biographers or biographers in the making, or writers who wrote with a
view toward eventual biographies.
Fernandez committed "suicide" one more time, and snared yet another
biographer. When he resurfaced again, this time as an Arab woman named
Fatima Lois, she declared famously that snaring a biographer was like
shooting fish in a barrel, the Arabic equivalent of which is, "catching
sand flies with a camel."
During the course of 80 productive years of writing increasingly
obscure literary works, Fernandez (he or she always kept that name),
committed "suicide" six more times, leaving behind longer and longer
suicide notes that became, in the end, his or her best-remembered work.
At least this is now the critical consensus reported in the last of his
or her biographies by a scholar who had the body exhumed and subjected
to DNA analysis, just like a criminal cold case. This last biography
sold more than all of Fernandez's books, is in its eighth printing in
Spain, has been translated into several languages and has garnered
important prizes. The author, Pistil (one name, like a rock star) is a
familiar voice and face on Spanish radio and TV. In 2005, Pistil
received the prestigious Helix Prize, and is the first biographer to be
nominated for a Nobel in literature.
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