Vanesa
Writing about Vanesa frightens me. Genuine dread. I have weighed at length the option of keeping the unanswerable sentence that opens this text and leaving the rest of the page blank. Because — and this is a warning — anyone who has not known Vanesa the way I have will never understand the extraordinary difficulty of finding words that could even remotely describe the greatness of this woman and of the universe she moves in. And even knowing that everything I can clumsily say will only diminish the true scale of Vanesa… I will say it. Because there is no point in what I’m doing here — talking about her, dedicating my time to her — without giving it the meaning it truly deserves: the throne of all women. Whoever has seen her, whoever knows her as I know her, understands that this woman plays in a different league.
Even at the risk of falling short, I will say that the vertigo that overwhelms me when trying to make sense of Vanesa is more than justified. Vanesa is realistic, almost naturalistic, yet she is far from being contemplative. Vanesa is life itself… I’ve already said it: she delights me, she distracts me, she intrigues me, she infuriates me, she amuses me, she unsettles me, she hooks me, and above all, she wounds me. There is something broken in her… as in each of us.
Forgive the audacity, but after knowing Vanesa there is something that changes in you forever. Many things, in fact. She is the woman who will make you look — let’s admit it — at almost every woman who comes after her from over your shoulder.
When I say that Vanesa is the most millimetrically perfect woman ever created, I am not treading the slippery terrain of personal taste. What she has goes beyond that. If there is one thing Vanesa makes clear, it is that she has no intention of making concessions of any kind. No softening, no simplification. Her life is raw reality… in mouthfuls: to hell with anyone who doesn’t like it. And so it is. There is no conventional fiction here, no concessions to the crowd: what she does is pure, hard realism. But narrated with extraordinary clarity. And the skeptics can shake their heads all they want — not one of those praises is undeserved.
And the proof — to cite just one — that Vanesa has no wish to reshape reality to fit into everyone’s “screen,” is her language: an absolutely impenetrable language, yet one you can understand. “That is part of her essence.”
In this way, seduction becomes inevitable.
Para Vanesa, “la más mejor”, de su paciente y amigo.
Carlos