Many friends think I live a glamorous routine. That when I travel to literary festivals, I stay in suites at charming hotels, where I drop my luggage and head to the pool or go sightseeing alongside famous writers.
Sometimes it actually is like that. Very occasionally. As Milton Nascimento would say, "every artist must go where the people are." And the people are generally a flight and several kilometers of road away, in small, medium-sized, and interesting cities — not very lively ones — where I take the opportunity to do what I almost never get to do at home.
When I walk into hotel rooms, I drop my luggage and crash onto the bed, sleeping the sleep of someone who never gets a chance to nap at home. Or I pull my laptop from my backpack to write, thrilled to finally have a hotel room all to myself, where no one will knock on the door asking: what's there to snack on?
I'm not the only one. Writers — and especially women writers — report that they make good use of their "do not disturb" signs to make progress on their books. Just the other day I asked a friend whether she wasn't exhausted from attending so many literary festivals. On the contrary, she told me — what was exhausting was staying home with the kids. It's because of the festivals that she's been managing to write her new novel, a little bit at a time in each hotel room.
Others take advantage of the peace and quiet to read. Or to stroll around with fellow writers, whom we find already disheveled at breakfast, at tables that keep growing, filled with literary gossip and confessions like: "I lied to my editor and said I was nearly finished with my book, but I haven't gotten past page 20."
In the evenings, the gatherings tend to be more enjoyable, lubricated as they are with wine and music, which prevents the tiresome ones from recounting in detail the plot of the novel they're writing. It's after the second glass that we grow disappointed in some — those who can only talk about themselves — and charmed by others; the ones who sing or dance, who don't take themselves so seriously.
I'm not sure which group I belong to, but I try hard to be part of the second. On these trips, I like to let my body sink into floral bedspreads. To write while snacking on minibar peanuts. To drift through the surrounding streets. To drink with writers who live on the other side of the country or the planet and whom I would never meet any other way. To wake up hungover, open the window, and be surprised to find that I'm... where am I again?
The Spanish writer Rosa Montero often photographs the view from the rooms where she stays. There we see that not even a world-renowned writer escapes opening the window to find a blank wall staring back. Or a sad little corner where pots of wilting plants are crammed together.
The real view on these trips isn't accessed through the window, but through the knees stretched out behind the signing table, catching sight of the line of readers with their books in hand. These are people who have waited months to get a scrawled signature on the first page and a photograph. To say how much they loved this or that story. Sometimes they share intimate things. They bring gifts. They cry, moved by meeting us in person or swept up by the sense of closeness with an author that a book creates.
I might even say I come back lighter from these trips — if it weren't for the books I inevitably receive as gifts. And the kilos earned from those wretched airport coxinhas.
