Javier Aranda Luna: Patricia Highsmith's Last Toast

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The day Patricia Highsmith met Agustín Lara on a sunny morning in the port of Veracruz. She watched the people from La Parroquia, a long, half-height, black-tiled café serving excellent espresso for one peso . White tables, some with cloth tablecloths, ice cream parlor chairs, and a sidewalk terrace. There, according to a hastily penned note from March 7, 1957, men talk about anything at the top of their lungs. Suddenly, on the opposite sidewalk, she saw a strange crowd gathered around a thin, gaunt man who looked like Jean Cocteau. Expensive clothes, a painful scar from the corner of his mouth to below his chin and neck. Everyone is fawning over him. There are press photographers surrounding him, telling people to move aside. He is with a pretty woman in her 40s who is also a bit of a celebrity. She enters a bar wearing a black mask (she's not in costume, by the way), which somehow brings the place down with applause . On the street, countless gay guys, among whom one particularly successful transvestite stands out, rosy-cheeked, wearing a 1920s hat, high heels, lanky in a black dress, ogles the crowd and lasciviously sticks out his tongue .

Patricia Highsmith knew that novels should be an emotional thing , something unusual that readers can remember, that shakes them, makes them laugh, something they can talk about and even recommend to their friends .

That's why he took notes of surprising things in his diaries. About the stormy relationships with some of his lovers, his depression and anxiety over lack of money, the silly questions from congressmen, like the one who uttered to Arthur Miller the only phrase for which he will be remembered: "Why do you write in such a morbid, sad way? Why don't you use that magnificent talent of yours to further the cause of anti-communism?"

It never ceases to amaze me that Highsmith's literature is still seen as mere entertainment, something to pass the time while waiting for a bus. Her emotionally charged stories have endured longer in readers' minds and memories than many novels whose authors take themselves too seriously.

In the 1960s, Highsmith wondered if the great books of the mid-20th century were those that told us what was wrong with our civilization. And while she acknowledged that they were the most interesting to most people, she didn't believe those books would ever become the greatest, because art isn't made by wielding or sharpening an axe . She was right: Canto General, Pablo Neruda's iconic collection of poems, and Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles survive from that decade. They, like Highsmith, thrived on life on the streets, hungry and thirsty. And despite the large and constant print runs of the stories and novels by the creator of Strangers on a Train, her work doesn't appear in canonical literature. Few characters are as complex as the sociopath Tom Ripley; few environments are constructed with swift and precise prose like those in Highsmith's work.

His interest in managing emotions is clear in this note from his diaries published by Anagrama:

Mortal terror, the terror of the mortal mind: I shall go through life without ever finding with certainty a third of the ingredients of that formula... Solitude, tranquility of mind, excitement of the senses, people, isolation, success, failure, advantage and disadvantage, gluttony and abstinence, memory and reverie, transfiguration and reality, requited and unrequited love, the faithful lover and the unfaithful, fidelity and experiment, curiosity and resignation—all these flow from my pen in far less time than it takes to write. But when, and with what level of each of these, shall I live? And what have I overlooked, what have I included that I don't need?

Her sparkling, magnetic prose hangs on emotions that crisscross and intertwine. She was certain that the greatest achievements of her time in writing would be achieved by scholars of chaos. The lines extend in all directions, and where they intersect, there is no point of sanity or safety.

Vibrant and contradictory like life itself, Patricia Highsmith's prose and poetry drew on it, on her life on the streets. Among the diaries and notebooks found after her death, her friends and editors discovered some verses that could well be her epitaph, and which they ended up reading at her funeral: Here's to optimism and courage! / Here's to daring! / And laurels to whoever takes the leap!

Let us toast, then, three decades after his death, because his laurels continue to be renewed by his thousands of readers.