I flew into Mexico for the Letras del Mundo literary festival in Tampico just after the Day of the Dead, preoccupied with the question of being real. At Houston, where I changed planes, the immigration officer was having trouble getting my fingerprints.
"It's as if you don't have any."
"What happens then?"
"If you don't have any fingerprints, you don't exist!"
I have in any case been feeling inauthentic recently, after a company bought my domain name and cobbled together a fake website. The idea seems to be that this will annoy me so much that I will pay them £750 to have the name back. That would be like paying someone in order to be allowed to be the real, rather than fake, me.
Even so, our virtual identities may turn out to be more secure than our real ones. Reading Tim Adams on Second Life, I wondered if the place had a Third Life yet. Is there paintballing, karaoke, reality (or indeed any other kind of) TV? Perhaps not, and if so Second Life may be offering us a coherent version of reality which already seems nostalgic.
There is a growing anxiety about authenticity. As it gets harder to tell what is and is not real (I am avoiding putting that word in quotes because once it gets inside them, it might never come out), we are more and more impressed by whatever can convince us that it is. Fact has become fetishised as the best and only way to tell the truth, and non-fiction is increasingly attending to our fictional needs. Writing is laden down with the theatrics of making, and keeping, it real. In poetry and fiction alike, virtuoso description has become an end in itself. When I was asked to go to this festival, I thought about the smallness of the English poem and its timid recreation of the actual, as compared to the force and verve of the Latin American surreal.
I didn't make it out of Houston that night as our destination, Tampico, was declared "below minimum". It didn't exist sufficiently for us to get there. The seal on my journey was broken and I was all of a sudden ejected into the Texan night with little more than a bar of chocolate and a pair of spectacles. I felt so below minimum that even though it was three in the morning in England, I sent a text home - like someone shouting their name across a valley in hope of an echo. Four hours later I got a reply wishing me well in my new Texan existence.
As the passengers regrouped at dawn, we recognised but did not acknowledge each other. We were on hold. When I reached Tampico, I felt as if I were at last back down on earth - until I was handed a letter, which began "Dear Lavinia, I have sent these men to collect you. Their names are Jesus and Angel ... "
The next day I had to fill in a work visa form. After name, age, height and sex, it asked was I thin, medium or robusto? Were my eyebrows sparse, bushy or depilado? Was my chin round, oval or square? I had no idea. Then it was off to the police station to be fingerprinted the old-fashioned way: rolling your thumb on a pad of ink. This time it worked.
