Israel Centeno

Inside a copy of The Balandra “Isabel” Arrived This Afternoon, undated and unsigned, I found a yellowed envelope containing a single sheet, folded four times. The paper, as fragile as memory itself, bore a typewritten scene that some attribute to Guillermo Meneses. What would have once seemed an exaggerated claim now feels almost trivial. What Latin American writer hasn’t, at some point, left behind a phantom text to nourish their own legend?

The fragment begins with a phrase that could belong to a notary or a prophet: “Everyone fell silent, looking at each other, not daring to say a word.” The style is intentionally neutral, almost bureaucratic, but what unfolds is a baroque theatricality: marble columns, halted fans, a man in a white jacket —Don Emilio, they say— closing his notebook with the calm of a theater curtain falling. At first glance, the scene seems minor. But read through the lens of Pierre Menard, we understand: the silence that follows is not absence — it is excess.

This text appears to resist the contemporary narrative vertigo that confuses speed with depth, and chaos with style. In these lines, there is a subtle refusal —a whispered resistance— to that encyclopedic desperation of a certain dirty realism that tries to contain everything: names, lists, horrors, corpses. As if literature were an autopsy.

Meneses (if it is him) offers us the opposite: the world does not explode — it freezes. There is no climax, only suspension. Señora Ledesma clutches her chest, but does not fall. The diplomats stare, but do not argue. The waiter senses something, but does not understand. And this not-knowing may, in fact, be the core of the entire piece.

There is no crime, but there is suspicion. No revolution, but something breaks. No literature — and yet, nothing but literature.

The final gesture —“‘Everyone fell silent…,’ someone scribbled on a napkin”— contains the most Borgesian of devices: a text that quotes itself before being written. A napkin as a prophecy, a folded mirror of fiction.

This fragment stands as the perfect negative of a now-canonized way of writing — the aesthetics of ruin. There are no lost poets, no teenaged heretics, no dictatorships narrated in a fury of punctuation. Only the echo of an interrupted phrase, and the quiet suggestion that forgetting —as Macedonio once suggested— may be the most radical form of memory.

But perhaps the most unsettling part is not the text, but the note that came with it. Written in blue ink, in the narrow calligraphy of the 1950s, someone —Meneses himself?— left behind what reads like a warning, or a trap:

“This notebook can only be read by someone who has written before me, against me, and without knowing it. Someone who will try to discover me posthumously, pretending to have read me before I ever wrote. From his future essays, disguised as stories, he will believe he’s found a key that was never hidden.”

The sentence is brutally prescient. Could it be that Meneses knew that, in the future, someone would attempt to plagiarize him under the guise of literary criticism? That someone —not yet born, not even as a person, let alone as a writer— would one day play at reconstructing the apocryphal notebook of Narciso Espejo, assigning it a depth that Meneses himself feigned to abandon?

This is not literary paranoia; it’s metaphysical suspicion: anticipated plagiarism, retroactive reading, the writer born by writing the one who had already written him.

And if that is true —if Meneses truly knew— then he didn’t write for us. He wrote against us. Against our vain illusion of discovery. Against our clumsy hope of being the first to read him.

And thus, everyone fell silent