On August 22, 1939, Gombrowicz set foot on Argentine soil for the first time, unaware that World War II was about to break out and he would be stranded in Buenos Aires for a quarter of a century. It wasn't until another 22nd – April, 1963 – when, disembarking for a few hours in Barcelona on his way to France, he finally set foot on old Europe again. The next day he was already in Cannes and "was rushing towards Paris on the Mistral train." That April I had just turned 15 and kept a diary, actually a bland and cold annotation in telegraphic style – devoid of any literary temptation – of the names and events that crossed my life. On the morning of that April 22 when Gombrowicz passed through the gray Barcelona of the time for the first and last time, I noted (as if everything there was a party): "I went to a music festival. Los Pájaros Locos and Los Salvajes."
On October 22, 2001, before meeting the widow, Rita Gombrowicz, at the Avenida Palace hotel in Barcelona, I discovered that the Pole had narrated in his masterpiece, Diary (1953-1969), his brief passage through the city: "Today, the 22nd, I am in Barcelona. For a long time I have known that the double two is my number. Also for the first time I touched Argentine soil on a 22nd (of August). Welcome magic! (...) I arrived at the square where the Columbus monument is and cast a glance at the city, where perhaps I will settle permanently after my stay in Berlin...". During the colloquium in which we presented Ferdydurke in Barcelona, I asked Rita to expand on the information about her husband's steps through the lower part of the Rambla. "Well, actually, it's most likely that he didn't even get off the boat," she said. Recently, Kronos, Gombrowicz's other diary, has been discovered and published in Paris: the B-side or, rather, the "underbelly" of his masterpiece.
In terms of diaries, Gombrowicz also seems to have opted for the double two: the best known has a profound literary accent, and in it a powerful subjectivity reaffirms itself on every page through an invented personality that never disfigures the author's intimacy; in the other, in the recently found Kronos, he dedicates himself to a bland annotation in telegraphic style -devoid of any literary temptation- of names and events. When in that second harsh diary, devoid of flourishes, we reach April 22, 1963, the author comes up with a cold -but I think as lucid as it is eloquent- single annotation: "Barcelona. Nothing!" Do either of his two diaries tell the truth? And if so, who would be more inclined to expose it? The literary one, or the cold, emotionless diary? Bets are open for the double two.