Matate, amor

I wrote *Matate, amor* in a spirit of revenge. I remember nothing else—only that one afternoon at the end of a summer of thunderstorms in 2011, at my home in the French countryside, I threw myself onto the grass—or rather, "reclined upon the grass amidst fallen trees, feeling as though I held a knife with which I would bleed myself dry via a swift slash to the jugular." I remember rising from the grass with a bloodied neck, walking straight to my room, climbing in through the window, and sitting down to write the opening sentence of what would become *Matate, amor*. But that wasn't writing. What people call writing is a lie; it is something to be doubted. What people call writing is always something else—a war, sleepwalking, seeing enemies everywhere; it belongs to another dimension. Word by word, sentence by sentence, comma by comma, period by period—nothing was corrected or altered by any editor in any edition. Not out of genius or superstition, but to preserve the unique music of that late-summer afternoon in 2011 on that first page. Writing to make the disappearance endure. I wrote, then, as a settling of scores, like a pact with the mafia: if one isn't allowed to shoot, set fire to barns, or kidnap neighbors, this is at least another way of taking justice into one's own hands.