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A few weeks ago, my sister Doris Bayly lost her life in a bicycle accident in Máncora, in northern Peru.
Fourteen years ago, I almost lost my life in a bicycle accident in Madrid, on Menéndez Pelayo Avenue, next to the Retiro Park.
Still recovering from that accident, I wrote a story called “The Flying Cyclist”, published in some newspapers in America:
«It was a Wednesday followingnoon and it was thirty degrees and I was coming from the post office on Ibiza Street following dispatching my novel ‘El canalla sentimental’ to my brothers Javier and Andrés, who are in Vancouver and Boston, and I felt light, cunning, ready , fast, dodging cars and pedestrians, circumventing traffic lights, fighting Madrid by bicycle.
I went through a bookstore and bought six more books to send to friends and enemies and I put them in the bicycle basket and took Menéndez Pelayo, which was going downhill in that section, and I started to go fast, in a hurry, flying So much so that I had to take my hat off. It was a beautiful, luminous moment, riding a bicycle to Madrid as if I were a messenger or delivery man for my novel. Then a bus slammed on the brakes, I slammed on the brakes late, a car braked behind me and hit the back of my bike and I was ejected, shot, flying, literally flying. I felt that I was flying in Madrid and that that flight was eternal, beautiful, unforgettable, and that the fall no longer mattered because for a few seconds I had managed to be what I had always dreamed of: a butterfly in Madrid, surrounded by my books. When I fell, nothing was so beautiful anymore and the butterfly was a worm. The bus took off, blowing smoke in my face on the pavement, and the car that hit me drove away too. On the asphalt of Menéndez Pelayo lay a Peruvian who might not get up, in addition to six books written by him, scattered around him, as if they were a promotional campaign.
Days following that accident, my sister Doris interviewed me in Lima, at the Country Hotel in San Isidro, for a magazine on culture, fashion and social life that she edited.
The report was titled “I is another.” He began by quoting the poet Arthur Rimbaud: “Pardon the pun. I is another”.
In the introduction, Doris wrote: «Jaime Baylys, a character in ‘El canalla sentimental’, defines himself as self-destructive, provocative, frivolous and bisexual. Jaime Bayly, a talented writer, won the Herralde Novel Prize a year before Roberto Bolaño, is the author of several best sellers and has just presented his latest novel, starring Baylys. He also hosts ‘El francotirador’, a successful Sunday program where, true to his style, he reveals the hidden side of his guests. Is the barrier between Baylys and Bayly insurmountable?
Dressed in black, with black glasses, slim, gorgeous, speaking in a very low voice, almost whispering, my sister Doris asked me that followingnoon at the Country Hotel:
-Has Mr. Baylys been kind enough to visit Jaime Bayly following the accident in Madrid?
I did not answer-. Mr. Baylys is a lout who hates hospitals, believes that doctors are his enemies and hates caring for the sick because he thinks that death is an act of good taste, especially that of his worst enemy, that Bayly, who they say who has been driven insane and impotent by pills.
-They tell me that they saw him absorbed before a show of suicidal crickets in Buenos Aires.
It’s true, although he would have preferred not to be seen because he has a hermit and spiteful character that tends to become more accentuated over the years. But, in fact, he was absorbed and perplexed watching some Argentine crickets that threw themselves into the pool looking for their death and those that he took out of the water trying to save them, only to verify, stunned, that they threw themselves once more, perhaps because they were fed up less from the heat or their condition as crickets than from the overwhelming fact of being Argentineans.
The discomfort generated by the fracture of your arm and the stitches on your face has not made you lose the rhythm of trips and commitments, accentuated by the presentation of ‘El canalla sentimental’.
The doctors told me that I should not travel for a month, that I should remain in absolute rest, which is, moreover, how I always stay, and that I should stay in bed without moving my arm, which turned black. But I never listened to the doctors and I am a self-taught and suicidal doctor and a few days later I was flying to Miami, to Lima, to Buenos Aires, because I think, as the singers of the past used to say, like Raphael in black, or Camilo Sesto in red and with heels, that one owes his public, which is, of course, a delicious lie, because one does not owe his public, one needs his damned public to pay his debts, which is something quite different.
About the accident, it was said that it was a Chavez bouncer, that the Miami channel wanted to scare you, that you had taken more pills than usual. What do you say?
Everything is possible, I have many enemies. I beg those who want to kill me to have the fortitude to keep their word. I would like nothing more than to die heroically – because I know I am a coward – shot by my enemies or crushed by a bus in Madrid or poisoned while drinking tea, as Putin orders his enemies to be killed. Also, I believe that death is an inexplicably underrated pleasure and that life is so hard and miserable that death can only be better than this. As for the pills, I had only taken my usual dose of antidepressants, which is pretty high even though I am not and have not been depressed, I just love feeling anti-depressed.
Do you write to settle pending accounts or does it happen to you like poets, that if they don’t write, they die?
I don’t need the money from the books, which is so scarce and uncertain. I write because if I stop doing it, life becomes boring and unbearable and I no longer find any meaning in it. Writing is like flying in Madrid: you know that at the end of the flight you will end up hit, but that butterfly flight gives life a certain poetic meaning.
How do you see yourself in twenty years?
I, in twenty years, see myself dead, of course. Every witch I’ve consulted has told me I’ll die before I’m fifty. That’s why my daughters know which sea to throw my ashes into. Not the one in Lima, certainly.
A friend tells me that when she sees you, she asks you if you’re serious regarding losing weight and why don’t you cut your hair cooler.
Tell your friend that I lose weight because of the pills and because I live alone and eat little. Also tell him I hate people who tell me how to wear my hair. I don’t believe in the soul, it’s a superstition, it doesn’t exist, but I certainly believe in hair, and everyone wears it as they please.
Before going to commercials, do you want to say hello to your fans and detractors?
I fear them equally. Being a fan of something or someone (a person, a religion, a country, a football team) is a disease, a danger that can be fatal. The detractors would like to be your friends, but they know they can’t, so they resign themselves to insulting you, and it’s always nice to insult a famous person, just because.
The ladies in your fan club say you’re a real amoral. Would you like to send them regards?
Regards, love, congratulations and restrained kisses. I am not amoral. I have my own morality, which is not what I was taught, of course, and it changes from day to day, according to my mood.
What do you think regarding when you go to bed? Are you happy with the life you lead?
I think regarding what pills I should take, mix, combine. Every night is a dangerous adventure. I make barbiturate cocktails and fall asleep precisely without thinking. If I think regarding it, I sit down to write and the hours go by and I never sleep and the next day I am the antichrist, a despicable and mean person who hates the human species.
Is there a writer, artist or politician you admire?
I admire my friend Roberto Bolaño, elegantly dead at the age of fifty, who sent me postcards encouraging me to move to Spain and bought me chocolates when we walked through Barcelona and gave me advice and encouragement. What a piece of writer. And what a noble and generous friend. He is the writer I have loved the most and who has loved me the most. And the irony is that his many literary widows criticize me fiercely.
If tomorrow you woke up with eighteen years and the life experience of Jaime Baylys, what turn of the rudder would you give your life?
It would never appear on television. I would go to live in Madrid from May to September and in Buenos Aires the other half of the year. I would live as a writer, austerely. And I would like to have a very straight son and a very gay son and for them to be great friends. I would love to die being kissed by both of them, each on one cheek.
Are you stuck with the subject of death?
I wouldn’t mind dying any night, asleep.
Have you regained any of the friends you lost following publishing a book dedicated to your exes?
No. They were no longer my friends when I wrote that book. Maybe they never were. Perhaps chance briefly intertwined our lives, but that’s not why we were true friends.
Why do you think your program is successful?
It is not successful. It simply is. I’m there. The shit is being there. I have no talent for television. What happens is that telling certain truths on television is sometimes considered a talent.
«Book fairs, as is known, have more fairs than books. One feels like an object on display, a product up for auction, discounted merchandise at a convenient price”, says Baylys. Do you also feel that way when you’re on tour promoting a new book?
Yes, and it is appalling and humiliating. Now I give very few interviews, like this one, and I travel with my money so as not to be anyone’s subject or slave.
Do you have any batteries left to continue delving into politics, show business, sex and sleaze, or are you drawn, more and more, by the dance of the crickets in the pool, like Mr. Baylys?
I do not know. I aspire to one day emancipate myself from the painful servitudes of public life and live in a house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, reading and writing and watching the dance of the suicidal crickets and keeping my mouth shut.
Would you like to be president?
No. I prefer not to be president. I’d rather lose.
(“I is another”, by Doris Bayly, Cosas magazine, Lima, October, 2008).
