Later we visited the bookstore. It was indeed huge, but there were few books of any worth. Everything on each of the floors was a waste. A crass vulgarity if compared to the former Buchholz of Bogotá! I believe the Colombians left Boulder that afternoon and that I remained two more days. The atmosphere transformed in a few short hours. All the rooms and hallways of the university filled with horrendous characters without the slightest look of teachers or students; the very opposite. In order to enter to give my lecture I had to show one of them my passport. As I said goodbye to Professor Williams I asked him what was going on, why there was such a leaden tension at the conference, who were the thugs with the faces and manners of assassins. He told me that Gabriel García Márquez might possibly come to Boulder to attend the closing ceremony and that there was a rumor that some Cubans from Miami had prepared a colossal provocation that would ruin the conference in which the entire university had participated roundly.
When I arrived at the airport in Mexico I bought newspapers. In them there was news that Salman Rushdie, the English writer of Pakistani origin whom the Ayatollah Khomeini, the religious and political leader of Iran, had condemned to death, had left his refuge in England for the first time and appeared at a university in the United States after several years in secret reclusion under police protection. The scene had been the closing ceremony of a conference at the University of Colorado.
From my visit in Boulder I hold as my fondest memory my first conversation with Darío and his dialogue with the ex-president of the Republic of Colombia. Since then I began to read and reread his masterful poetic and narrative work book after book.
Since then we have run into each other in numerous places.
Once in Xalapa, the city where I live. He was there at a book fair presenting the Era edition of his book Cartas cruzadas [Crossed Letters], which established him as a novelist in Mexico. Elena Poniatowska accompanied him and read a magnificent and impassioned introduction.
Another time, in Madrid, he arrived at the café at the Hotel Suecia with María Luisa Blanco. Our table was situated beside a window that faced almost exactly the Dédalo bookstore, whose proprietor is a Colombian of impressive taste and culture. After the café I suggested we visit that bookstore, where bibliophiles with interests in Latin American literature and history feel as if they were in their kingdom. A few days before, the shop owner had acquired the library of Mariano Brull, the most radical Cuban poet of the avant-garde in the Spanish language. The bookstore was, for that reason, overflowing with an infinite number of first editions, many of which with dedications and signatures from the authors. I had in my hands first editions of López Velarde, Tablada, Arévalo, Martínez, Vargas Vila, as well as the first and unfindable books of poems by Cardoza y Aragón, and the Vision of Anáhuac by Alfonso Reyes in the collection Índice de Juan Ramón Jiménez. Darío was ecstatic, and reserved many titles, including some on the history of Colombia that—he commented—he would have had great difficulty finding in his country, all of it for the Biblioteca Arango, one of the agencies that make up the cultural network that the poet directs from his vice presidency of the Banco de la República in Bogotá.
The next meeting was in Bogotá, upon returning from lectures that R.H. Moreno and I gave in Medellín. Darío learned of my stay in the city of his childhood and adolescence and invited me to do a reading in Bogotá. The day after the reading he invited me to eat with a group of his most intimate friends with whom he publishes Ediciones Brevedad for sheer and absolute pleasure, truly beautiful small books among which there is one with the poems of Eugenio Montejo and another by César Aira.
Then it was Buenos Aires, also by chance as in Madrid, a few days before Argentina’s thunderous collapse. We happened upon each other in a bookstore where a Mexican writer was presenting his latest book. Darío arrived with César Aira, who took us to have dinner somewhere nearby at the end of the presentation. I believe that Darío had just arrived that day, and the following day he had to go to a writers’ gathering in Rosario or Tucumán. He had walked all day, visited bookstores, and one could see how delighted he was by the dynamic vision of Buenos Aires’ streets; the presence of Aira, of whom we are both ardent admirers, intensified the happiness of the encounter.
The last, just a few months ago, was in San José de Costa Rica, each of us invited by Álvaro Mata Guillé to participate in his annual Symposium on Freedom and Poetry. They had installed us in a hotel from the 30s or 40s of the last century built by the Swiss, nestled in the middle of an immense pine wood, covered in a thick fog as evening fell. The panorama and the very structures of the buildings at that hour were transformed into scenes from the gloomy gothic novels of the eighteenth century or from their contemporaries, the German romantics. Yes, we were in the world of M.G. Lewis or of Hoffmann and Kleist. The hotel was an hour and a half from San José. The remoteness of that “magic mountain” turned out to be the most propitious place for chatting. The Venezuelan novelist Ednodio Quintero was also staying in the hotel; the colloquium’s other invitees preferred to stay in hotels in the capital. We were three men of letters who drank coffee while talking about writing, our readings, difficulties, and projects. Later that night, in my room, I read Cantar por cantar [Singing Just to Sing], the latest book of poems by Darío, impressed by the change of tone from those first poems blessed with a playfulness and filtered through the exalted amazement of early youth. Cantar por cantar is a book replete with maturity, in the vein of the Stoics, of ascetic rigor in the best meaning of the word. In it, the poet doesn’t dialogue with his surroundings as in his other books, rather with himself, or with abstract instances: society, memory—that is, another form of talking to oneself. It is noteworthy that, although laden with intense melancholy, those new poems never fail to be obliquely celebratory. Let’s take a look:
SONG
Here with me, one October first, a liquid evening of
blood and water and saliva,
here with me, in the hotel night and in the breath of
brandy and coffee,
here with me, tame and carefree, made of wreckage,
here with me my solitude, inert matter, now without
complaint and without tremor:with her I don’t hide
cards in my sleeve, I don’t have cards or sleeves, I’m
naked
with my music, here with me, far from hurry and from
bullets,
ignorant of the relentless pursuit of commitments and
the telephone, unharmed after the
[descent into hell.
I put on my mask, take off my mask, look for another
mask,
I go about unmasking myself.
I lost my face and now I pick it up,
in this hotel night, when my solitude becomes warm,
transparent,
and serene, I review the agonies:
What am I now, after so many masks?
Only fear allows me to pursue time,
if one can attribute it all to a spell:
Pins on a picture of me? A prayer? Trickery of witchcraft
and flattery?
Lies. I am the owner of my happiness and my fear
and of white breasts that fill five years of my life.
And now, here with me now, in this midnight,
she’s silent like a cat, my solitude full of passageways
like an abandoned anthill.
POEMS AND NOVELS. During my decade-long friendship with Darío Jaramillo Agudelo, I have read all his published work, which has allowed me to identify some of his literary devices and his thematic constants, and through intermittent conversations I have come to know bits of his life and his creative development.
I know, for example, that from the age of five his father read him sonnets by Lope de Vega, Adolfo Bécquer’s rhymes, poems by José Asunción Silva, and that, upon hearing these groups of rhymed words, the little boy would fall into a trance. They were songs without music, or another music that
wasn’t obvious, which caused the words to be even more astonishing.
During adolescence, the moment came when he knew that poetry was the most important thing in his life, and that it was going to be so forever. He read all the poetry he could find, especially that by León de Greiff, and shortly after he discovered Aurelio Arturo, who holds even now a prominent role in his poetry.
From eighteen onward he began to write poems and at twenty-six his first book, Historias [Histories] (1974), appeared. As the title suggests it is an attempt to come to poetry through apparently narrative techniques. But since beginning to write it he noticed that the narration was a mere pretext, that the important thing were the words, their sound, their rhythm, their position in each line, each stanza, in the whole of the poem.
His second book of poems, Tratado de retórica [Rhetorical Treatise] (1978), was a step further in his attempt to shake off the past, to break firmly with the harshness and solemnity of the sad legacy of a Colombian movement from which only a handful of poets managed to escape. His reading of Nicanor Parra’s antipoems provided the opening that the young Jaramillo was searching for. Thereafter, the rigor of language was for him one of the most efficient weapons for constructing and refining his chosen path.
But perhaps the most difficult challenge he set for himself was in 1986 on the publication of his next book, Poemas de amor [Love Poems]. The word “love,” tout court, had lost much of its prestige decades ago, unless it is accompanied by a descriptor that imprints on it a particular tone. That simple title seemed to be a game, a parody, or an ingenious rescue of those clots of affectation that filter through certain folds of our being. But Jaramillo’s love poems have nothing of that. They are great poems, exceptionally rigorous, with which their author made an enviable leap toward freedom, to a higher standard of freedom.
Cantar por cantar, his most recent book, has gained in depth. These poems are intense and naked. The book blends all the attributes the poet has displayed in the more than thirty years of summoning poetry, of placing himself in its shadow, of entering its breast. It is one of the great books of our language. Everything that he wrote before is present in those poems but elevated to a greater strength. Cantar por cantar can be read as the history of a life, a clear and at the same time secret autobiography
FLAYINGS
…the seafaring man with one leg…
R.L. Stevenson
My footless body continues loving you the same
and my soul goes out into the place that I no longer
occupy,
outside of me:
no, there are no symbols here,
the body becomes accustomed to passion
and passion to the body that loses its fragments
and continues whole, intact with mysteries.
Against death I have my gaze and my laughter,
I am the owner of my friend’s embrace
and of the deaf beating of an anxious heart.
Against death I have a pain in the foot that I don’t have,
a pain as real as death itself
and an immense longing for caresses, for kisses,
to know the very name of a tree
that obsesses me,
to inhale a lost perfume that I pursue,
to hear certain songs that I recall in fragments,
to pet my dog, for the phone to ring at six in the
morning,
to continue this game.
It is not usual that a poet is also a novelist. There is a host of poets who have managed to write magnificent essays and even theatrical works, but not novels. Darío Jaramillo applies his lyrical experience to the novel. For him, every noteworthy experience is poetry, and all serious writing is a poetic derivation. He uses correspondence, since he has always considered that form of writing one of the most perfect forms of poetry. La muerte de Alec [The Death of Alec] (1983) is a novella, a genre that has produced perhaps the greatest number of narrative masterpieces. Darío Jaramillo’s novella, from the first to last paragraph, is nourished by literature; the books discussed in it have almost as much importance as the protagonists. The text is a letter of one hundred pages, in which the author is both character and witness to the mysterious drowning death of a young man he recently met. In an instant, the novel’s plot becomes entangled with one of the most exceptional tales that exists in our language: The Flooded House by Felisberto Hernández. The force of La muerte de Alec can only be felt, like classic texts, or Hernández’s tale, or great poems, in one or several re-readings.
Twelve years after having published this short novel, in 1995, another of imposing volume appears, Cartas cruzadas, whose writing took five or six years. It’s the story of a handful of young men united by friendship, kinship, and love, and their transformation during a decade. Their lives transpire during a time when great economic development fraternizes with their country’s greatest corruption: the period of drug trafficking, in Medellín above all, the city where the young men have deep roots. Cartas cruzadas, as its title suggests, is an epistolary novel. The characters keep in touch through a fluid and permanent correspondence. Esteban, the character who has the most going for him, provides additional details in a personal diary. In the end, none of them can be considered a winner; those who were not crushed can at best be considered survivors. The setting in which they move is dictated by drug trafficking, even though some never come to suspect how close they are to that extremely risky game. Cartas cruzadas expanded the author’s presence outside Colombia. The complex combination of the quotidian, the academic, the sexual, the fraternal with an opposing and invisible front, recruited from the underworld to a certain strata of high finance, is one of the novelist’s achievements. Another, the absence of a facile morality that the topic usually carries, in exchange for genuinely moral writing.
In Memorias de un hombre feliz [Memoirs of a Happy Man] (2000), his latest novel to date, letters are replaced by a journal, a missive directed at the person writing it. It is the diary of a subjugated and dictatorially destroyed husband who after many years of marriage takes delight in slowly murdering his wife. Without the spectacularity of the last novel’s subject, the portrait, which presents a generic view of a stratum of Colombian society, is even more artfully critical than the former. The Memorias recall the self-confidence of the splendid first novels of Evelyn Waugh, where the reader is witness to, without the slightest regret, the moral chaos of a world that moves like a boat adrift. And not only does the reader not regret, he takes immense amusement in knowing that society deserves all that and even more. There stirs in this novel an excellent and precise play between the elegantly English comedy of manners, parody, esperpento, and a subliminal sense of divine justice. It is not Darío Jaramillo’s most important novel, but it is my personal favorite. His narrative malleability is noteworthy. Each of his novels obeys a different poetics, unlike his poetry. In his poems, gradations are set, and in each of them the word deepens and bares itself relentlessly. The past is rescued, but the poet also rummages and discovers new worlds housed deep inside. Of course, there are variations, ebbs and flows, extensions. In the end, everything converges in an outcome of a miraculous ontological whole.
It seems obvious to me that the author requires two channels to express himself. And that during the years he dedicates to narrative, he turns his attention to his surroundings, the commitments and distractions of the world. But from the construction of that concave and convex mirror that reflects his external vision, he preserves one agonizing space and another celebratory one that he keeps exclusively for himself. From those concentrated moments his last poems emerge.
CODA. I have read excellent interviews with Darío Jaramillo in Mexican, Spanish, and Colombian cultural supplements and magazines. I’m referring to conversations with learned critics, at times poets, and it always amazes me that in his responses he doesn’t attempt to provoke the reader with universal taunts. He says what he believes poetry to be and why, and doesn’t dictate what the
devices are through which writing inevitably becomes poetry, and when it is not. I have read in Eliot, Yeats, Huidobro, and various others, all prodigious writers, absolutely autocratic definitions of poetry and of poetic creation, with a more than imperious and less than respectful hubris toward poets that follow lineaments different than theirs. There are few who differ from this absolutist pattern. Scholars of poetry can be even worse, save an admirable minority.
In The Craft of Verse, the six lectures that Borges gave at Harvard University during the term 1967-1968 and not published in Spanish until 2000, one reads:
Whenever I have dipped into books of aesthetics, I have had an uncomfortable feeling that I was reading the works of astronomers who never looked at the stars. I mean that they were writing about poetry as if poetry were a task, and not what it really is: a passion and a joy.
And further down, in the same paragraph, he concludes:
We go on to poetry; we go on to life. And life is, I am sure, made of poetry. Poetry is not alien—poetry is, as we shall see, lurking round the corner. It may spring on us at any moment.25
And Darío Jaramillo in his Historia de una pasión describes the poet’s same relationship with that which lurks around the corner—poetry:
I know that there was a day when I knew that poetry was what mattered most to me, what would matter most to my life. Poetry in its fullest and most boundless sense, the timeless drunkenness of a mouth loved, the aroma of a eucalyptus, the internal labyrinth of your quartz watch, of your data processor, a sunset, a goal, a curuba sorbet, a familiar voice, Mozart, understanding something new, an oyster cream sauce, a horse’s gallop, in short, so many things that are poetry in its broadest sense. And later, too, much later, let’s say in 1962 or 1963, passion in its most restricted sense, that is, the ability to hallucinate with the written word.
The Magician of Vienna Page 11
