The other thing is that I want to congratulate you because I learnt that you'll be 40, I thought that the person who was interviewing me was a youngster of 23 and I have received at home the invitation to the party celebrating you 40^th birthday and that, truly calmed me down a little. And then I want to tell the news to the whole Spanish people from the sublime pages of Indio Gris that you are likely to receive the award to the 2002 Working Woman, you must be feeling proud of yourself, or not?

Carmen Salamanca: Of course.

MOM: Or was it something that you expected?

CS: No, I didn't expect it.

MOM: Was it something that the organisers had previously arranged with you or did it surprise you?

CS: It surprised me and, furthermore, I resisted a little before accepting it, because when someone grants you an award, they label you and then the exigency from that moment  to my death will be in relation to this award.

MOM: And what would you rather prefer, to be an Scandinavian whore instead of a working woman?

CS: What I would prefer, at this time of my life, 40, has not much to do with this. Let's say that my life is already on the right road, I have to make myself owner of what is supposed I own now. The truth is that I don't know if they have spoilt my life or they have saved it, considering that from now on I have to fill in that tittle.

The small detail of the Sunday recitals is coherent with this issue.

MOM: You say that you people think: "He who works, works and he who doesn't work is fucked, you do think this way, don't you?

CS: What happens is that he who works is fucked, this question of being fucked is inherent to human life, but the effects are very different if one works or if one doesn't work. I mean that in everything there is a work that must be done, no matter if you work or you don't. Who was it that said: "You must see the amount of money that being poor costs". The quantity of work that costs not to work is another type of work, less productive, less rewarded…

MOM: I don't know, but I fake to be an artist, I fake to be an artist, alright, I'm not lucky, the person who comes to interview me is you, a worker who works for coins, for cents. How much do they pay you for being the director (well the director is Menassa but you are the soul), for being the editing secretary of Las 2001 Noches magazine, how much do they pay you?

CS: That isn't stipulated as an item.

MOM: And whom benefits from that?

CS: I benefit myself. The magazine benefits a lot of people, half the humanity.

MOM: Eh! Half of humanity seems to me a lot of people.

CS: What do you mean by that "eh"? What happens is that you only count the people who have seen it up to now, but you aren't counting the people who will see it from now until the magazines stops existing.

MOM: Do you think that this interview is gong to benefit the Indio Gris magazine?

CS: I don't know, because it is an inverted interview, it was the other way around.

MOM: How was it? How was it?

CS: I was supposed to ask you and it is you who is asking me the whole time.

MOM: Ask me.

CS: No, if I'm being very well interviewed.

MOM: What I want to say is: tell us something about what you felt when they told you that you were going to be named the 2002 Working Woman.

CS: Some of the truth?

MOM: Some, some small little drop of truth, my love. Several men died this century asking women for truth, that's why I ask you for truth knowing that it is a very difficult thing, but as I feel you are engaged with the word, with poetry…

CS: Well, I don't know if it was what I expected to hear, but I felt a tremendous desire of running away.

MOM: Where to?

CS: To the depths of the earth.

MOM: There is nothing more motherly than the centre of the earth.

CS: I didn't want to say it because it is a serious interview, but Menassa says: "fuck it"… Yes, to hide.

MOM: To hide, from what?

CS: From being a women that speaks because I will have to deliver a small speech.

MOM: Well, you may call it a small speech, but what you say that day you will have to bear with you throughout the next decade.

CS: You are fixing it up.

MOM: What? am I ruining the painting?

CS: The painting is looking wonderful. In the end, one has to be responsible, you cannot run away from the words that were pronounced,  you cannot run away from what you silence either, but you can think that you are running away from what you silence, running away is effective, but it is impossible to run away from what one says… It is a responsibility as well, because…

MOM: Why?

CS: Because there are a lot of women who have to speak, who can work, who are waiting for a signal although they may not know it, there are a lot of women who are waiting for someone to tell them: girls, go ahead! And, I don't know if I should, but this year's awarded woman has to say that in her speech, afterwards, it is more difficult to step back.

For example, I have seen here in Las 2001 Noches, (because the other day you told me that I should read your work and I am already reading your work), when I opened Las 2001 Noches  I found this phrase: "Because it is not thinking that my man was made, everything I touched of what is human and truthful I got it writing".

MOM: In reality for people to be able to touch humanity, sometimes, they even commit suicide, kill their companion, sever their lovers in four uneven parts…everything to find the truth, which is simple, you can find it in a kiss, someday making love in a heterodox manner. That the deep ice attacking permanently all human relations, turning them cold, doesn't come from any exterior place, from any other planet, it comes from the way the citizens speak. So, if you want to teach something to women, teach them to speak differently to how they usually do and we will make you goddess of the sea.

CS: "Everything humane and truthful that I touched", is that the truth to which you were making reference when you asked me?

MOM: We were saying that man is able of doing anything, thinking that he is going to touch humanity, when humanity are the books which were prior to us, the only possible truth for me is in a book prior to me. Man can't invent life, life is invented by writing and afterwards man tries timidly to live it.

"And in its lively ringing, rain speaks of you, remorse of knowing that I will never, never see you again because of my fault". The guy knew it, it was because of his fault, and nothing.

CS: It may seem that in your work, writing and love go together, there is a paragraph here which looks like a love letter.

"Sometimes you were a little inattentive, counting the stars, listening to my verses. How you liked my verses. I liked that they were my verses and not I, the ones which were conquering you, if you would fall in love with my poetry, I would be a great poet, only for you to stay by my side, contemplating your masterpiece, this writer made all of time, all of tears".

MOM: What do you want me to tell you? I tell you that when you read that to me I feel you are the one who is telling it to me, and I say "With this woman I will elope".

CS: Does it mean that writing doesn't belong to anybody?

MOM: That it is written, that it is useful for everybody, that that is life. I did it for you to fall on my feet and you, instead of falling on my feet,  bring this phrase to me and read it aloud to me, with which you have conquered my heart, with a phrase which wasn't yours nor mine. Because if it were mine, how could you conquer my heart?

CS: Of course.

MOM: I hope this disgusting thing I'm doing isn't being filmed. What?

Audience: A woman's body, the hips are like a mouth.

MOM: Mummy, what a pussy you have! A shark that swallows everything, very well. With this interview people is going to think: "How they have been dancing! Now, they not only paint but they also dance early in the morning".

CS: The other day you were telling us that they had told you: freedom or dignity? That question about freedom has some turns, I imagine, because I bumped into another writing in Las 2001 Noches, that is like a psychoanalysis session: "He told it to me sincerely: I don't want to be mortal, I want to be free. And I, with an aftertaste of nostalgia because of my own youth, I advised him to psychoanalyse himself four times a week".

Which freedom is the one we have to choose and which is the freedom opposed to death?

MOM: You want a cooking recipe, as your blessed telly watchers, but there isn't. Let's see, tell us where we are and I will give you a lesson.

CS: I don't want to die, I want to be free.

MOM: The first question that any philosopher would ask you, even a Spanish one (they say they don't exist, but I'm going to vindicate them, because it is said that there are no Spanish philosophers in Europe)… But tell me, where am I, you leave me very lonely.

CS: I don't want to die, I want to be free.

MOM: Any philosopher would ask first of all: "free, from what?, freedom, for what?, freedom, with whom?"

CS: And at what cost?

MOM: Finally, is it going to be freedom for all or only for you? And besides if you want civic freedom to separate yourself from the bonds which keep it alive, it'll die. Let's define ourselves, let's rewind.

CS: That freedom has a limit, the limit of the humane. That it isn't the freedom of which you were talking about the other day.

MOM: There was once a skier (not this one who drugged himself, another one who didn't drug himself), who succeeds to outdo a record which seemed impossible to be outdone. I feel that all human beings, also me, have had the freedom of having a skier who undid the prior challenge showing that humanity keeps on going. That freedom. Today, in the afternoon, the best football player comes and scores one of those goals which seems impossible to score and he does it… there, the man is free to have performed that marvel, as when you write a good poem.

CS: That means that freedom must be social, there is no individual freedom.

MOM: What does individual freedom mean? Perhaps saying something that I don't understand.

CS: That freedom doesn't exist without others.

MOM: Now the question is better placed. Freedom of what?

CS: Religious freedom, expressing ideas freely…

MOM: There is a playwright or a novel, a short story, that we published in a magazine in 1974, where in a ship a person is about to die for others that tell him: "we are fighting for freedom" and the one who is about to be killed, who is also armed, asks them "what freedom?" and then, while the others are occupied answering him, he kills them all. You were recalling that novel, weren't you?

CS: Yes.

 MOM: A fundamental question, do you think that the Working Woman award you are about to receive, you owe it to your mother, your father, the Cero Group?

 CS: I think I owe it to Cero Group, it's more, I don't think, I owe it to Cero Group!

 MOM: If Cero Group won't charge you…

 CS: Well, but there exists something called "symbolic debt".

 MOM: Be careful that if the psychiatrists win, you will be taken to jail.

 CS: Of course, they have given me something which I cannot return in the same way, nor even to the same person, it's a gift, like writing, you can only return it to others.

 MOM: Taking advantage of that theorisation, let's say that you have no reason to make me a little favour. We could fall into those extremes. 

 CS: Why into those extremes? Why have I told you that we have to return to others?

 MOM: Yes.

 CS: But you, when you aren't the one who teaches, you are also another. One isn't, one is in a determined function.

 MOM: Now you are making me feel ashamed, as if I didn't know about that.

 CS: If I had nothing to return to you, you wouldn't be human, how come that I don't have to return to you? You are also others.

 MOM: In the painting, I'm drawing a procession of four religions together, that is what the woman dreams while with this hand she's masturbating, this arm reaches just here. She sees strange things, she sees, for example, a Jewish-Christian-Muslim manifestation here.

 Audience: A face of total pain…

 MOM: So now, a sort of blind sun, that is nothing but another fantasy. It is called "The girl sleeps tranquilly".

 CS: You ask me about the award as if they were giving it to me and I were alone, it is also something grupal, I am a grupal product.

 MOM: You, to run Cero Group editorial, of which you are the Managing Director, how many employees do you have?

 CS: Four or five.

 MOM: That is to say, that you are going to end up abandoning poetry for your work.

 CS: It isn't incompatible.

 MOM: But it has been a long time since you've published, two years ago.

 CS: Almost three, I'm going to publish a book now.

 MOM: Ah, you looked as if you were dead, because when a young poet stops publishing for three or four years, people think that he disappeared.

 CS: I was thinking, concentrating, doing my chore.

 MOM: Poor woman in the painting, she may be called "Anterior, external, birth".

 CS: No, she is the 2002 Working Woman before being granted the award.

 MOM: Resting.

 CS: Yes, before I suffered and now I rest, don't I?

 MOM: Don't you worry that while my contract with Cero Group lasts, the truth, I won't earn much money, so I won't flee to other lands, because I'm painting for you to live better and have time to study. G 

He dropped on the couch and said to me:

- I don't know how to caress my own wife.

 And I answered him directly:

 - A man who doesn't know how to caress his own wife, won't be able to learn it even if a doctor may teach him or he takes an intensive course with the Marquis of Sade. He won't learn, that's why we can continue the next time.

Indio Gris