Siri Hustvedt shares the memories of a life with Paul Auster in Madrid

Madrid. With a broken voice, the result of the emotion caused by remembering her husband and companion for 43 years, the writer Siri Hustvedt also shared some heartfelt words at the tribute to Paul Auster at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, at the who, in addition to making a brief gloss on an unclassifiable literary work, recalled curious passages from his life and revealed the courage with which he faced his final days, before, on April 30, he died at the age of 77 in his city. , New York, cancer victim.

Hundreds of people gathered in the Hall of Columns of the Madrid cultural center listened, between astonished and ecstatic, to his words, in which he recognized that in the last hour of the life of the author of New York Trilogy, When she could no longer speak, but was able to listen to what he was saying, she discovered that what she had enjoyed most about having shared her life with him was that they had become friends. a lot of fun together.

The tribute in Madrid was attended by their daughter, Sophie Auster, her grandson Miles and her son-in-law, and the photographer Spencer Ostrander. Friends and admirers of his work also participated, such as the Barcelona writer Enrique Vila-Matas, the filmmaker David Trueba or, by letter sent from London, the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar.

The expectation was maximum to hear Hustvedt, admired above all for her literary work, but on this occasion also for being the life companion of Auster, a much loved and read writer in the world, translated into more than 40 languages ​​and with a long list of international literary recognitions, among them one that was remembered during the tribute, the Carlos Fuentes medal from the Guadalajara International Book Fair.

Hence, the memories of those last days are still so close to the surface in Hustvedt, who related: “After Paul’s death, many people told me with good intentions that he is still alive in his work. It is true and it comforts me, without a doubt, but it does not alter the pain one bit. For those of us who loved Paul, his books are no substitute for the living, breathing man. Many years ago I told Paul that I didn’t want to be a literary widow; To me, that term evoked a shadowy female figure, slightly ridiculous and devoted to the great man’s legacy.

At the time, his death was an abstraction, an imaginative flight into a possible future. In early April, when we learned that he died, we also learned that I would be the executor of his literary estate and that I would defend his work.

Hence, he recalled that in his early days as a writer “up to 18 New York publishers rejected his novel.” city ​​of glass, which was later published by a small California publisher in 1985. As everyone knows, the New York Trilogy made Paul famous, not in the Taylor Swift way, but enough for a street to be named after him in Brooklyn, or a sandwich, in Los Angeles, or to be besieged by fans adoring, but frighteningly insistent in cities like Buenos Aires or Paris. Idolatry is one thing and writing is another, although in the Anglo-Saxon world Paul Auster became synonymous with postmodernism, a diffuse term that I have never liked; His work translated into more than 40 languages ​​is loved around the world because his stories are deeply felt and penetrate that mystery we call being alive, regardless of whether his reader lives in the United States, Mexico, Germany or Spain.

Hustvedt also stated: Paul’s work, depending on how you count it, is more than 30 books and cannot be filed under the heading of postmodernism or any other label. The writer with whom I maintained an intense and continuous dialogue for 43 years, a coming and going that influenced and changed us both, whose books I read carefully as he did mine, was a deeply ethical person, politically astute, enormously kind and genuinely funny. And as with most great writers, much of his work emerged from unconscious places..

Afterwards, he remembered the most tender and difficult moments of his last days: He refused palliative treatment. He chose the home library as the room in which he wanted to die. In the weeks and days before his death he received friends who came to say goodbye to him, he joked; He made sure that each person understood how much their friendship had meant to him. His calm, seriousness and bravery in the face of death amazed me then and amaze me now..

She recalled with raw emotion: “I can’t tell you how many journalists have asked me in all these years what it’s like to be married to Paul Auster. I never had an answer. The question was intended to find out if there were rivalries or a divorce on the horizon. In the last hour of Paul’s life, when he could no longer speak, but could hear me, I found the answer to that question. I looked at him and said, ‘Oh, we did have fun together.’ So that’s my answer. Being married to Paul was fun.”

In the end, Sophie Auster played Blue Team, from his most recent album and tribute to his father, since those two words were the way in which his family referred to the people with whom they had complicities.

The tribute ended with long and intense applause while photographs of Paul Auster were projected on an immense screen, the author who, as one of the attendees said, he wrote the organic fresco of the time in which he lived.