Textos por fuera / Eleonora Requena

Texts on the Outside



[Eleonora Requena / Esteban Fonseca]


•


deciding
not to wait
increases the speed of the droplets
another farce


•


brief
each day
facing the screen
one word
another


•


without the keys to the door down the hall
from the one walled in by frets and brushwood


•


I shut up
from you
in the redoubt
as hygienic as
an ache (like a love)
exempt of any drama


•


“I love tautologies”
“you love what?”
“tautolgies”


•


there’s no poetry here, according to them
ideas and desires
run through the house


•


je sublime
tu sublimes
il sublime


•


you will never inhabit the place of certainties
you’re outside


•


as much as they’re aerial and elusive
they are the guide
of a minimal theater


•


go to the plaza to contemplate the guillotine
they’ve set up on a stage
for the pleasure of the condemned
this afternoon they’ll pass by us
followed by an abominable arrogant
court


•


wherever you thought you were safe
it hurts there too


•


neither clearings nor bellows
determined words
without consent


•


you should bring your ear closer
to the ear
to the ear


•


Warning:
sharpshooters will cut down all messengers


•


you’ll be safe from the dark swallows here


•


Conjectural tango:
it’s neither sky nor blue
it’s only writing




Ten Notes on the Margins of a Blank Page

1. Old schemes, new devices
2. It’s about a plot amid two absent people
3. I prefer the periphery to the edges
4. All space abounds here
5. Nothing escapes these four corners
6. Drought is an atmospheric phenomenon
7. ( )
8. Whiskey sips are the alliteration
of what’s unsaid, unwritten, silenced,
previous to a scream?
9. There is no text, nor pretext
10. Yes, none of this makes sense, I know




Eleonora Requena (1968) is a poet. She was recognized with the Premio de la V Bienal Latinoamericana de Poesía José Rafael Pocaterrra (2000). She resides in Argentina. The poems offered here belong to her recently-published book, Textos por fuera (El Taller Blanco Ediciones, Colombia, 2020).



__




•


decidir

no esperar

es aumentar la velocidad del goteo

otra farsa


•


breves

cada día

frente a la pantalla

una palabra

otra


•


sin las llaves de la puerta de al fondo

de aquella tapiada por trastes y brozas


•


callo

de ti

en el reducto

tan higiénico como

un dolor (como un amor)

exento de drama


•


– amo las tautologías

– ¿las qué?

– las tautologías


•


aquí no hay poesía, según han dicho

las ideas y los anhelos

corren por la casa


•


je sublime

tu sublimes

il sublime


•


nunca habitarás el lugar de los aciertos

estás fuera


•


en tanto aéreas y esquivas

son el corifeo

de un teatro mínimo


•


ve a la plaza a contemplar la guillotina

que a gusto de los condenados

han montado sobre una tarima


•


esta tarde pasarán a nuestro lado

seguidos de una corte infame

altivos


•


donde te creíste a salvo

también duele


•


ni escampos ni fuelles

palabras denodadas

sin consentimiento


•


debes acercar la oreja

a la oreja

a la oreja


•


Apercibimiento:

francotiradores darán muerte a todos los mensajeros


•


aquí estarás a salvo de las oscuras golondrinas


•


Tango conjetural:

ni es cielo ni es azul

sólo es escritura




Diez notas al margen de una página en blanco

1. Viejos ardides, nuevos artilugios
2. Se trata de una trama entre dos ausentes
3. Prefiero la periferia a los bordes
4. Aquí sobra todo el espacio
5. Nada se escapa de estas cuatro esquinas
6. La sequía es un fenómeno atmosférico
7. ( )
8. Los sorbos de whisky son la aliteración
de lo no dicho, no escrito, callado
¿previo a un grito?
9. No hay texto, ni pretexto
10. Sí, no se entiende nada, ya sé




Eleonora Requena (1968) es poeta. Fue reconocida con el Premio de la V Bienal Latinoamericana de Poesía José Rafael Pocaterrra (200). Reside en Argentina. Los poemas aquí ofrecidos pertenecen a su libro recién publicado Textos por fuera (El Taller Blanco Ediciones, Colombia, 2020).




{ Eleonora Requena, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 24 May 2020 }

Ovidio en Cabimbú / Ednodio Quintero

Ovid in Cabimbú

In a distant, ruined and today nearly forgotten country where people said there’d once been a paradise, the poet laureate, famous for his Elegy on the Death of the Last Horse, refused to prostrate himself at the feet of the tyrant, and as expected of the despicable charmer, the distinguished bard was exiled to a gloomy plateau in the western mountain ranges. At first, defeated, he thought he’d never endure such solitude and the intense cold that soaked into his bones. And yet, sooner than later he adapted to the difficulties and penuries of that type of life. Twenty years later, when the tyrant was assassinated in an uprising by one of his henchmen and dragged through the streets like a dog, a committee from the new regime presented itself at the poet’s premises with the purpose of offering him a return home, to the prerogatives of which he had been stripped and all the honors he deserved. The poet refused to receive them because there in that remote place among the rocky peaks, goats and fog he had found, at last, some peace and calm.

*

Ovidio en Cabimbú

En un lejano, destartalado y hoy casi olvidado país donde se decía que antaño había estado el paraíso, el poeta laureado, famoso por su Elegía a la muerte del último caballo, se negó a prosternarse a los pies del tirano, y como era de esperar del infame marrullero, el insigne vate fue desterrado a un páramo lóbrego en la cordillera occidental. Al principio, abatido, pensaba que no podría soportar semejante soledad y el intenso frío que calaba los huesos. Sin embargo, más temprano que tarde se adaptó a las incomodidades y penurias de aquella forma de vida. Veinte años después, cuando el tirano fue asesinado en una revuelta por uno de sus espalderos y arrastrado por las calles al igual que un perro, una comitiva del nuevo régimen se presentó en los predios del poeta con el propósito de ofrecerle la vuelta a casa, las prerrogativas de las que había sido despojado y todos los honores que se merecía. El poeta se negó a recibirlos pues en aquel apartado lugar entre farallones, cabras y nieblas había encontrado, al fin, sosiego y paz.




{ Ednodio Quintero, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 23 February 2020 }

A Victoria de Stefano / Ednodio Quintero

To Victoria de Stefano

                                   [Photo: Vasco Szinetar]

Reading Victoria de Stefano is a privilege, an aesthetic experience, a delight for the senses. Ever since I discovered her opera magna, Historias de la marcha a pie (1997), I haven’t stopped frequenting the pages of our writer like a swimmer who heads into deeper waters. And if I had to find a couple adjectives to define Victoria’s writing, density and intensity would work. Her prose, referring to just one aspect of the qualities of a unique, original work that flies high, possesses a frenetic rhythm and an astonishing conceptual wealth, possesses allure, fluidity, linguistic complexities and allows itself to be read with the joy we tend to feel when revisiting classics.

Victoria de Stefano is born in 1940 in Rimini, Italy, and her mother tongue is obviously Italian. Thrown into exile at the end of the war, she lands in Caracas at age six and according to her own testimony she “forgets” her first tongue and acquires the sweet and melodic speech of caraqueños. Ever since she was a girl she writes in Spanish, a “borrowed” language.

In Idea of Prose, Giorgio Agamben, citing Paul Celan when he affirms, “Truth can only be spoken in the mother tongue,” proposes a fascinating topic regarding the acquisition and use of language, particularly in cases of bilingualism. Following Celan, my hypothesis is that Victoria conserves in some place of her memory the sonority and enchantment of her mother tongue, and this in turn flowers joyously for our delight in her writing’s splendor.


*


A Victoria de Stefano

Leer a Victoria de Stefano es un privilegio, una experiencia estética, un goce de los sentidos. Desde que descubrí su opera magna, Historias de la marcha a pie (1997), no he dejado de frecuentar las páginas de nuestra escritora como un nadador que se adentra en aguas profundas. Pues si hubiera que buscar un adjetivo, o dos, para definir la escritura de Victoria, nos bastaría con densidad e intensidad. Su prosa, para referirnos apenas a un aspecto de las cualidades de una escritura única, original y de alto vuelo, posee un ritmo trepidante y una asombrosa riqueza conceptual, posee hechizo, fluidez, complejidades lingüísticas y se deja leer con la alegría con que solemos revisitar a los clásicos.

Victoria de Stefano nace en 1940 en Rímini, Italia, y su lengua materna es obviamente el italiano. Aventada al exilio luego del final de la guerra, a los seis años recala en Caracas y según su propio testimonio “olvida” su lengua originaria y adquiere el dulce y melodioso hablar de los caraqueños. Desde niña escribe en español, un idioma “prestado”.

En Idea de la prosa, Giorgio Agamben, citando a Paul Celan cuando afirma “Solo en la lengua materna puede decirse la verdad”, plantea un tema fascinante acerca de la adquisición y uso del lenguaje, en particular en los casos de bilingüismo. Siguiendo a Celan, mi hipótesis es que Victoria conserva en algún lugar de su memoria la sonoridad y el encanto de su lengua materna, y esta para nuestro deleite aflora gozosa en el esplendor de su escritura.

{ Ednodio Quintero, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 1 September 2019 }

Caracas ha muerto / Alonso Moleiro

Caracas Has Died

Caracas loses its hemodynamics. Its fury decomposes. Its vital signs are flattened. It’s losing its vitamins. Its defenses were extinguished. Its streets are emptying. Its animal and vegetal environment becomes more notorious. It was kidnapped by silence. It’s not as chaotic anymore. Caracas no longer speaks. It’s gone into a coma.

A bitter placidness, with a taste of paradox, dominates the spirit of the streets and avenues of Caracas at this moment. Many weekdays seem like Saturdays. Many businesses have closed their doors. Bands of happy parrots furrow its sky in the afternoons, like an ironic counterpoint. Like its only novelty. Six o’clock traffic has been liquified. You hardly ever hear music. People don’t enjoy themselves. The night is an enigma few want to decipher.

Caracas is past. It reminds us of moments. In its neighborhoods and residential areas, in its bakeries, plazas, clubs, parks and boulevards you can hear, above all, the echo of those who are no longer with us. Of those who left the country and those who left this world. This city became a postcard.

Caracas has died. At night, its inhabitants keep holding a vigil for it.

*

Caracas ha muerto

Caracas pierde su hemodinamia. Se desconfigura su furia. Se achatan sus signos vitales. Se le van las vitaminas. Se extinguieron sus defensas. Sus calles se vacían. Se hace más notorio su entorno animal y vegetal. La secuestró el silencio. Ya no es tan caótica. Caracas ya no habla. Ha entrado en coma.

Una amarga placidez, con sabor a paradoja, domina en estos momentos, el ánimo de las calles y avenidas de Caracas. Muchos días laborales parecen sábados. Muchos negocios han cerrado sus puertas. Bandadas de loros felices surcan su cielo en tardes, como irónico contrapunto. Como única novedad. El tráfico de las seis de la tarde ha quedado licuado. Es infrecuente escuchar música. Los domingos nacen muertos. La gente no se divierte. La noche es un enigma que pocos quieren descifrar.

Caracas es pasado. Nos recuerda momentos. En sus urbanizaciones, en sus zonas residenciales, en sus panaderías, plazas, clubes, parques y bulevares se escucha, sobre todo, el eco de los que ya no están con nosotros. De los que se fueron del país y de los que se fueron de este mundo. Esta ciudad se volvió una postal.

Caracas ha muerto. De noche, sus habitantes la siguen velando.




{ Alonso Moleiro, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 16 June 2019 }

En la oscurana / Ednodio Quintero

In the Gloom

By candlelight, as if we were devotees of Saint Gaston Bachelard, my beloved Rosbelis and I sit down to share our cold frugal dinner: chopped potatoes, onions and tomatoes, canned sardines and picante sauce from Trujillo (we have no electricity or gas, and we still resist the idea of making a bonfire out of the library panels on the balcony terrace). While we savor our exquisite meal, out there in the immediate shadows that settle over the city, you can hear something like the roar of tin pan drums followed by shouts of cheering and rage that bring to mind so-and-so’s mother. Later on, at the edge of midnight, we read aloud to each other under the covers. I read a few pages from Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob, and Rosbelis reads “The Storyteller” from the book Illuminations by Walter Benjamin. We end up falling asleep knowing the sun will rise tomorrow, and nothing and no one will ever take the light that comes from high up in the sky away from us.

*

En la oscurana

A la llama de una vela, como si fuéramos devotos de san Gaston Bachelard, mi amada Rosbelis y yo nos sentamos a compartir nuestra frugal cena fría: papas, cebollas y tomates picados, sardina en lata y picante trujillano (carecemos de electricidad y gas, y todavía nos resistimos a la idea de hacer una fogata con las tablas de la biblioteca en la terraza del balcón). Mientras saboreamos nuestro exquisito manjar, allá afuera, en la tiniebla inmediata que se cierne sobre la ciudad, se escucha el resonar como de tambores de hojalata seguido de gritos de júbilo y rabia que le recuerdan la mamá a un fulano de tal. Más tarde, al filo de la medianoche, metidos entre las cobijas intercambiamos lecturas en voz alta. Yo leo unas páginas de Biografías imaginarias de Marcel Schowb, y Rosbelis lee “El narrador” del libro Iluminaciones de Walter Benjamin. Al fin nos quedamos dormidos sabiendo que mañana saldrá el sol, y esa luz que viene del alto cielo nada ni nadie nos la arrebatará.




{ Ednodio Quintero, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 9 June 2019 }

Venezuela: A Truly Dangerous Moment

A considerable and diverse group of writers, professors, intellectuals and artists have written a document about the current Venezuelan situation, offering a reflection on the already evident dangers of Maduro’s totalitarian tendencies, while also invoking the paths of understanding and plurality, with a particular accent on the value of the humanities and education for the country to come.


At a moment of economic, social and political crisis, it occurs to the President of the Republic —after delaying regional elections and torpedoing the convocation of a recall referendum— to invent a so-called National Constituent Assembly (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente) of a clearly fraudulent, mendacious and spurious nature. Given the circumstances, after more than one hundred days of continuous protests on the streets of Venezuela, it is a civilian concern to insist over and over again on the inconvenience and irresponsibility of that convocation, especially by a unilateral government, incapable of producing consensus, or sense, and much less confidence, among Venezuelans. Added to these concerns is the brutal, indolent and systematic repression executed by the Bolivarian National Guard (Guardia Nacional Bolivariana), among other shock troops, whose violent nature is more than clear. We are facing a massacre, especially of young people, executed with shocking and cold precision by the State. In many cases, the victims themselves, through social media, have documented these abuses.

As expected, because of the government’s dictatorial nature, it manipulates the constitution and uses public powers for its own convenience, as well as creating a “commission” —made up of their own, their most radical— to advance the constituent simulacrum it’s trying to sell. There is a considerable variety of arguments from the legal world that reveal overwhelming clarities about the unconstitutional nature of that imposition. One substantial symptom, within this chaotic process, is found in the continuous breaks and criticisms that have emerged within Chavismo itself, all of which announce clear signs of a fracture; and why not, maybe even of a crisis of consciousness within those groups that assume a loyalty to the constitution of 1999, with whom we must join forces, given that now is not the time for partisan battles, nor minor differences, but instead the time to defend and give an impulse to a country where all the different and even antagonistic postures can coexist democratically. The list of these ruptures within Chavismo would be too long to enumerate, but the most evident one is led by the current Attorney General of the Republic, Luisa Ortega Díaz, and her recent declarations. In the National Electoral Council, actually, opinions are also divided, judging by the interventions of the elections official Luis Emilio Rondón.

The president and his men only want to entrench themselves in power, gain more time, avoid legal elections and take back by force the seats in the National Assembly they weren’t able to obtain with votes so they can permanently install themselves in power. They propose to make a suit for themselves to help install a project that will keep the entire country under submission. Now the so-called best constitution in the world, the one that would last one hundred years, according to certain pompous pronouncements during these terrible years, from one day to the next is no longer convenient for them. This reveals a type of government that [mistakenly] calls itself “progressive” and is only sustained by brute force, wanting to lead Venezuela once again to the times of our worst military regimes.

Because of all this, our goal is to generate spaces for democratic encounters, carrying out articles 333 and 350 of the current Constitution, demanding from the opposition leadership —including new leaders, in the process of conformation— that they provide the first signals for achieving a peaceful and democratic transition, urgent general elections, the renewal of public powers, the freeing of all political prisoners, the disarming of violent groups and the consequent call for the conformation of a project for a plural country, based on the possibilities found in the current Constitution, just as they also take urgent economic measures that won’t affect the people, help stop the repression, allowing the identification by the Attorney General’s office of those responsible for these crimes, supporting the guarantee of the right to protest and move about at will, and the right to a quality education.

Let this also be an opportunity to note that culture will have to play a fundamental role in the country to come. We’re not talking about another round of circumstantial appointments and ministerial powers, but rather reflections and proposals for attaining spaces for understanding the nature of our situation and destiny as Venezuelans. Education, from its first moments until the university, should be prominent in the formation of citizens critical of any abuse of power, conscious of how important it is to defend democratic values, as well as considering the historic, continental and global climates they form part of as citizens, with the freedom to decide and to develop in a country that doesn’t flood the younger generations in blood and death, as the current government now does.

In sum: the country to come should think, among other urgent elements, about the importance of culture in the educational process of Venezuelans. That’s why we think the word should be action and reflection, a path for expressing what has been assaulted within us, what could provide an outlet for both pain and thought, to the rational and the irrational. We sustain that the word is not an emptiness, it is the royal and common way to justice, understanding, solidarity and responsibility.

There’s no more time to lose: the street should be the way to recover our citizenship. A street whose only end should be the return of democracy and freedom for Venezuelans. Let the doors of transition open up definitively.


Alfredo Chacón
Ana Teresa Torres
Elías Pino Iturrieta
José Balza
Elisa Lerner
Victoria de Stefano
Rafael Cadenas
Igor Barreto
Yolanda Pantin
Vasco Szinetar
Joaquín Marta Sosa
Rafael Arráiz Lucca
Miguel Ángel Campos

Alejandro Oliveros
Milagros Socorro
Nelson Rivera
Fernando Rodríguez
Armando Rojas Guardia
Antonio López Ortega
Rafael Castillo Zapata
Santos López
Luis Miguel Isava
Nelson Garrido
María Teresa Boulton

Gabriela Kizer
María del Pilar Puig
Sandra Caula
Edda Armas
Carmen Verde
Luz Marina Rivas
Diómedes Cordero
Harry Almela
Alberto Márquez
Miguel Gomes
Maribel Espinoza

Violeta Rojo
Jacqueline Goldberg
Carmen Alicia Di Pascuale
Álvaro Sotillo
Luis Gerardo Mármol Bosch
Alfredo Herrera
Alberto Hernández
Gisela Kozak
Miguel Von Dangel

Alexis Romero
Diana López
Angelina Jaffe
Nela Ochoa
Xiomara Jiménez
Teresa Casique
Silda Cordoliani
Sonia González
Faitha Nahmens Larrazábal

Jaime Bello-León
Katyna Henríquez
María Elena Maggi
Francisco Javier Pérez
Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez
Carlos Germán Rojas
Juan Cristóbal Castro
Carlos Sandoval
Isabel Cisneros
Juan Carlos Chirinos
Natalia Mingotti
Gabriela Fontanillas
Hernán Zamora
Julieta Salas Carbonell
Ana María Hurtado
Corina Michelena Poggioli
Krina Ber
Ana María Del Re
Karl Krispin
Elisa Maggi
Néstor Mendoza

Rosa María Tovar
Luis Alfredo Álvarez
José Luis Pérez Quintero
Gala Garrido Lozada
Blanca Rivero
Eleonora Requena
Geraldine Gutiérrez-Wienken
Diosce Martínez
Carlos Alfredo Marín
Héctor Torres

Vince De Benedittis
María Elena Huizi Castillo
Cristina Guzmán
Diana Arismendi
Geraudí González
Pedro Plaza Salvati
Kira Kariakin
Diego Arroyo Gil
Luis Moreno Villamediana
Florencio Quintero

Luis Perozo Cervantes
José Delpino
Francisco Catalano
Jairo Rojas
José Humberto Antequera Ortiz
Rafael Sánchez
Ricardo Ramírez Requena
Paula Vásquez
Alejandro Sebastiani Verlezza
Luis Yslas
Rodrigo Blanco Calderón
Alberto Bueno Rangel
Luis Barboza Bruzual
Brandol Manuel Alejos
Vicente Ulive-Schnell




{ Papel Literario, El Nacional, 16 July 2017 }

Una forma de ser / Ramón Palomares (1935-2016)

A Way of Being

Here comes The Night
the one with stars in his fingernails,
a furious stride and dogs between his legs
lifting his arms like lightning
splitting cedars open
throwing branches all over himself,
very far away.

He comes in as if on horseback
and passes through the entrance
shaking the storm off his clothes.

And he climbs down and starts to inquire
and memorizes and extends his eyes.

He looks at the towns spread about
some on the slopes and others leaning on cliffs
and he walks into the houses
seeing how the women are
and investigates church sacristies and bell towers
frightened when he steps onto their stairwells.

And he sits on the stones
finding out forever.




***




Una forma de ser

Aquí llega el noche
el que tiene las estrellas en las uñas,
con caminar furioso y perros entre las piernas
alzando los brazos como relámpago
abriendo los cedros
echando las ramas sobre sí,
muy lejos.

Entra como si fuera un hombre a caballo
y pasa por el zaguán
sacudiéndose la tormenta.

Y se desmonta y comienza a averiguar
y hace memoria y extiende los ojos.

Mira los pueblos que están
unos en laderas y otros agachados en los barrancos
y entra en las casas
viendo como están las mujeres
y repasa las iglesias por las sacristías y los campanarios
espantando cuando pisa en las escaleras.

Y se sienta sobre las piedras
averiguando sin paz.




{ Ramón Palomares, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 8 March 2016 }

La crítica sin odio (I) / Alejandro Sebastiani Verlezza

Criticism Without Hate (I)

                     [Photo: Vasco Szinetar]


I’d like to think these notes are part of a bad dream


                                                                                    to Rafael Cadenas

*

Silences, small contritions?

*

They say it’s always outside

but some days it shoots closer each time

exile —now— is here

*

In order to understand the functioning of Evil and its resorts.

“A system that can only function in a state of emergency must maintain that emergency at any cost.” (Giorgio Agamben)

*

Petition.

The country to come: plural, lay, austere.

*

What’s the animal of transitions?

The monkey and its sunset clouds through the branches.

*

Homeland

exile isn’t a promised land

only this voice speaking of peace with a war tongue

the razor with the owner’s name

while the jugulars are threatened


Country

there is nothing more

save this instant

the desire to be alive

even when there’s no place

*

The induced misery of these years: the broken streets, the food lines, the fanaticism, the cult of power and its irrational penetration, the murky operations, the aversions, the corruption, the misery, the waste, the insults, the slander, everything bitter, the elusions, the erosions, the accusations, so many mouths dedicated to confusion.

*

The government won’t try to resolve the crisis, nor the food lines, nor the shortages, nor any of the evils it might be attributed with. On the contrary: it will systematize and refine its procedures. It will be not only State policy but a method of social control and just another form of the burden trying to attenuate the already galloping and unstoppable discomfort.

*

There are no saviors, ideologies are a cage.

*

Avoid becoming what you critique.

*

Thinking in transit: from the hero to the despot, from the despot to the martyr, from the martyr crowned to his image duplicated by official printers, a long and tedious echo.

*

The terrible merit of turning democracy into a rhetorical figure.

*

Evil maneuvers to twist the past.


*

Simone Weil, Essential Ideas for a New Constitution.

“It doesn’t matter how the government leader is chosen but rather how his power is limited, how his exercise of power is controlled, how he is punished, if that were to be the case.”

*

Sycophants in their labyrinth.

*

Compassion —and moderation— in exile.

*

Dialectics.

“Victory is ours

comrades

victory is ours

while the Empire

invents

the theories

that will justify

our ruins!”

*

Does compassion have an ideology?

*

Chronology of the Abyss (1999-?).

The revolution is yet to come

the revolution is yet to com

the r volution is yet to co

the r olution is yet to c

the r lution is yet to

the r lution is yet t

the r ion t

the r n

the r n

the r

the

th

*

Where did I hear it?

“Maybe we need the basement”

“The sun makes us too happy”

*

Months ago.

At the Bicentenario supermarket in Plaza Venezuela I saw a huge line of people (it reached the Zona Rental metro stop and extended even further, almost to the hotel district). In order to enter the supermarket you had to pass through a very narrow fence, almost a corral. Meanwhile, soldiers were checking IDs. A legacy of humiliation.

*

A true “current” for change can’t be founded on hate.

*

Fragments of country that stab the body.

Splinters, pulverized glass.

Long, painful uncertainty.

What’s coming?

*

To think of these years through the fable of Midas in reverse.

*

The tribe without a chief, nor a fable, its stubborn prayers to the void.

*

For so many years, he said: I, I, I, I am you, I am all of you, I am us, you and I, the great one and its shut down echo, stubborn ashes that don’t say goodbye.

*

Cadenas, Anotaciones:

“A people without awareness of language end up repeating the swindlers’ slogans; in other words, they die as a people.”

*

Francisco Andrade, quickly:

“It’s not class struggle. It’s society vs. the State.”

*

Freedom, Sancho!

“The democrat, after all, is he who admits that his adversary might be right, who, therefore, lets him express himself and who is prepared to reflect upon his arguments. When parties or men are persuaded enough by their own reasons to shut their opponents’ mouths with violence, democracy ceases to exist.” (Camus, Combat, February 1947)

*

Abyss project: a state of tutelage and lowered heads, frightened and meek, repeating and uniformed. Here, thus, the universities —and freedom itself— play a role that’s anything but minor and by all means inconvenient.

*

Fine! I won’t say “dictatorship”! No, it’s not! Venezuela suffers, actually, a pathological presidentialism, the deferred repetition —infinite— of Chávez’s Aló, Presidente TV show: marimbas, whistles, threats, insults, scoldings, promises, bad jokes, classes of invented history, geography, baseball, math, cosmology, Marxism, linguistics, sociology, the mise en scène of that Ego.




{ Alejandro Sebastiani Verlezza, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 29 November 2015 }

Rubi Guerra: “Aunque suene mal, soy un convencido de las virtudes formales de la imitación consciente” / María Celina Núñez

Rubi Guerra: “Although it sounds bad, I’m convinced of the formal virtues of conscious imitation”

                    [Photo: Alfredo Padron]


1. Can you enumerate the most emblematic moments of initiation in your life? Tell us about one of them, please.

The majority of my “moments of initiation” are too personal for a list, but I can talk about one of them.

Before I started elementary school, my older sister taught me how to read. First I learned how to trace the letters of my name, and then all the rest. It must have been a process of several weeks that I remember as a single day. I can see her (a tall, skinny girl of sixteen) and myself in the living room of our house in San Tomé; I can see that the door is open and beyond that lies the savannah of the Guanipa Plateau and it’s late afternoon. Two years later this moment finds continuity in the books my sister brings me from Caracas each time she comes home for vacations. By that time we’re living in Cumaná. I suppose everything can be found there.


2. How old were you when you knew you wanted to be a writer? How much time passed between that moment and the elaboration of your first book (published or not)? Who did you tell for the first time?

I started to write regularly at age fourteen, and at twenty-five I felt like I wanted to dedicate myself to writing literature as a fundamental activity in my life. I had just read Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, and I suppose I felt a little like Stingo, the novel’s young narrator. I don’t remember telling anyone about that decision, although it’s possible I did. My first book was published when I was twenty-seven. Nine short stories I gathered because the directors of the Casa Ramos Sucre, Ramón Ordaz and José Malavé, asked me for a book to start their publishing project. Up until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could publish.


3. Favorite authors? Have they changed over the years?

My favorite authors have remained incredibly stable for the last thirty years. Some have incorporated themselves into my list but I can’t tell yet if my interest in them will be permanent, and a few of them have disappeared. Among those who are always there I’d mention Juan Carlos Onetti, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Gustavo Díaz Solís, José Balza, Enrique Bernardo Núñez (for his novel Cubagua), Julio Cortázar (for his short stories), Günter Grass. I don’t consider Raymond Chandler, Ross McDonald, Ursula Le Guin, Philip K. Dick as favorites, and yet I keep going back to them at certain points. Now I’m reading J.M. Coetzee, Ricardo Piglia, Pierre Michon, Roberto Bolaño and Cormac McCarthy with great interest. I’m surely forgetting many.

I mention the poets separately because I’m a very inconstant reader of poetry and I have a barely fragmentary knowledge of the poetic tradition. I read the same ones over and over: T.S. Eliot, José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Rafael Cadenas, Eugenio Montejo, Juan Sánchez Peláez, Borges again.


4. Have you ever found yourself unconsciously imitating an author? How has it felt? How do you stop that imitation?

Although it sounds bad, I’m convinced of the formal virtues of conscious imitation. You can learn techniques, procedures, you’re able to try out ways of seeing. Unconscious imitation presents more problems: when we fall into it our writing becomes servile. And yes, it’s happened to me. It turns out to be a bit humiliating, though I don’t give it too much importance. If I detect that imitation in an unpublished text, it’s no big deal, I either rewrite it or throw it out. And If it’s published, there’s nothing I can do about it. Basically, it seems to me it has to do with the idea of originality, which is a notion that should be relativized a great deal. After all, in relation to narrative technique there hasn’t been anything too original in the last seventy years, more or less. Another thing is the vision of the world each writer has, which if it’s personal and honest, will be original (more or less). So that would be one way of stopping unconscious imitation: listening to yourself in order to find out what you have to say.


5. Gregarious or solitary? Have you belonged to any literary groups? Do you believe in literary generations?

I haven’t belonged to literary groups, but I have many writer friends. I don’t consider myself particularly solitary, but I spend a lot of time alone. Sometimes I go for days without leaving my house; it’s not something that weighs on me too much; and yet I don’t avoid people either. Maybe I’m a solitary man who enjoys being with his friends. Determining what a “literary generation” might be and who belongs to it or not is a matter for academics. About twenty years ago, maybe a little longer, people started to talk about the “generation of the nineties,” and they included me in that. I don’t think it was a very rigorous classification from a theoretical standpoint.


6. Do you want to be a very famous writer or a writer known by a select few?

I hadn’t ever thought about it in those terms. Does anyone want to be known by a select few? In other words, to be read and admired by very few people? I can’t imagine anyone would want that as a fate. What I would like is to be able to write what interests me with something I’ll call “aesthetic solvency” because I can’t think of anything better, that I’m able to find editors willing to publish what I write and that they don’t lose money in the process, and that the resulting book find the greatest number possible of attentive readers. Nothing more, and nothing less.


7. Do you publish everything you write? Do you keep personal diaries? Would you write your autobiography?

I wish everything I write deserved to be published, but that’s not the case. Most of it is worthless and it ends up in the trash or in the limbo of cyberspace.

During some periods of my life I’ve taken autobiographical notes with certain regularity, and they too have ended up in the trash. I’ve accepted that diaries, mine or those of others, bore me. Save for a very few exceptions. For that reason I’d never write my autobiography; I don’t think it would interest anyone; not even me. Of course in the fiction I write there are autobiographical elements: the landscapes, certain emotions, a portrait of a character; never the central actions. Relatedly, personal memory isn’t very trustworthy, at least mine isn’t. I prefer to use my scarce memories as nourishment for fiction.


8. What is your opinion of criticism? Is there an undercover critic inside each creative writer?

A critic is, or should be, someone who reads with attention, and writes with rigor and elegance about what they read. They should, moreover, pay attention to the resonances of a particular work within its cultural, historical, ideological contexts... Maybe that’s too much to ask. In any case, criticism is necessary so that the other writers (critics are also writers) can have interlocutors. Many writers have no interest in practicing criticism despite the fact that they are, to a certain degree, professional readers. It’s a matter of inclinations. On the other hand, many authors, poets and fiction writers, dedicate themselves on a regular basis, and in no way undercover, to criticism. For example, among the contemporaries, Coetzee, and a few decades ago, Eliot. Guillermo Sucre, José Balza, Luis Barrera Linares, among the Venezuelans. Really, it seems to me like something natural that emerges from the fact that authors live and work among books, they reflect on what they read, they love and distance themselves from certain books. Some limit themselves to oral criticism; others are more organized and put their reading experiences in writing.


9. How do you endure the weight of the world?

Badly, like nearly everyone on the planet.




{ María Celina Núñez, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 27 November 2015 }

Una nouvelle de Ricardo Azuaje / María Celina Núñez

A Novella by Ricardo Azuaje

Ricardo Azuaje (Altagracia de Orituco, Venezuela, 1959) is a writer of great talents, something the reader can confirm by looking at his interesting bibliography. Between 1986 and 2000 he kept a very high profile. Today he publishes interesting texts of fiction and opinion at his Facebook page.

I would like to speak about Juana la Roja y Octavio el Sabrio (Fundarte, 1992), a very well-written novella that addresses problematic realities basing itself fundamentally on the masterful creation of the protagonists.

When the book begins, Octavio is a young man who is starting his university studies and is in the process of developing a relationship with a girl his own age. Everything seems to be in perfect order until, after years of absence, he runs into his mother by chance. From that point onwards, the image of Juana makes itself present.

After the encounter at Octavio’s house, the main setting for this novel, the actions acquires an urgent pace. The mother and son living together will lead to a domestic clash but, above all, it will undo the connection that has kept a feeling at bay: Juana’s presence will awaken in her son a path of unexpected initiation.

The narrative fluctuates between the past and the present. The central plot revolves around the impossible love between both characters: Juana doesn’t accept being called a mother and Octavio considers her too erratic to see her as an authority figure. In this conflicted tie there is an affection that constantly nears desire but is never consummated. It is also a tragic love: once Octavio manages to become closer to his mother, he will lose her forever.

In order to shape the tale, Azuaje wisely chooses a second person narration. In this way he expresses the perennial desire for access to the other which is what gives an agonizing pulse to the main character and to the text in general.

However, this isn’t the only agony. Juana, in her own life, is committed to a struggle which she eventually questions, despite her passion. Her political commitment is framed by the guerrilla insurgencies of the 1980s, when utopias no longer enjoy the solidity of the past and hope has already been extensively undermined by historical events.

The author appeals to binary images to display the textual reality: Juana and Octavio represent inverted roles, both at the level of political ideology and lifestyle, as well as on a more intimate plane, due to the confusion regarding who might hold the authority in this curious relationship.

On the base of these permanent contrasts, Ricardo Azuaje achieves one of the greatest virtues of the novella form: a texture of constant suggestion, the emergence of a subtle possibility against a backdrop of what appears to be a plain reality. Thanks to these elements, sometimes evident, other times distant, the story acquires multiple connotations. The chosen aesthetic resource is the second person narration that occasionally “confuses” the object of the discourse: from the mother to the girlfriend and vice versa. To the point that the character of the girlfriend progressively loses textual space to the presence of Juana, each time more eroticized.

From the moment Juana enters the life and home of Octavio, he beings a series of recriminations that will continue to change his initial rejection of his mother. In fact, Octavio lives a very complex process of initiation because it happens almost in parallel to his relationships with his mother and his girlfriend. The sensuality acquires an Oedipal character almost from the first page: “she stands at the door with her arms open and says come here.” This image recurs in the text and synthesizes, symbolizes the relationship between them: embrace and goodbye, desire nearly consummated, definitive goodbye and a kiss on the lips on the highway before Juana disappears forever. The author created a very sober text that successfully avoids the pitfalls of melodrama.

Alongside this intimate story, we are presented a portrait of Caracas. To speak of Caracas in the 1980s is to portray a city wounded by the construction work for the Metro, crowded by a series of devices that congest it despite the fact they intend to do the opposite. It’s also about the drawing of a key era for my generation that is, I wouldd say, the same one Azuaje belongs to. In the 1980s the ideological struggles were receding (I thought they were finished) and it is in that frame that Juana’s struggle takes place. Her son is the first to point out this gap. This portrait of an era is completed with the articulation of the fiction with an episode of extra-textual reality: Juana will die in the massacre that took place in Cantaura in 1982.

The handling of private space, the house, by the protagonists provides the key of opposite personalities and the evolution of the relationship. The order and objects of Octavio will be linked to that other mode of order that is Juana’s and with another type of objects and cultural references: Octavio is wise and sober, “Sabrio,” and Juana is a hippie, “Loca.”

Private space is so important it could eliminate any other scene. Because of that the city, the marks of its possible routes, appear in the background as complementary resources that have an effect on the verisimilitude of what’s being told. On the other hand, the story that occurs in that public space isn’t disposable; on the contrary, it defines the end of the novella.

But definitely, if anything has a great deal of specific weight in this brief novel it is the presence of desire. Octavio, apparently a more or less cerebral, logical being, is prey to desire. In this manner, the always-closed door to his mother’s room is perceived as a prohibition.

There is a subtle lyricism throughout the book. With only a few metaphors that are barely removed from colloquial speech, and the use of a free indirect style, an impossible love story between mother and son is constructed; and also that of an era full of impossibles: What else do we call a time without utopias (and there are the victims to prove it)?; and, finally, of the human condition. This is how Juana “plagiarizes” the poem “Defeat” by Rafael Cadenas.

Octavio can’t recover Juana as his mother, he can’t let himself be taken by that other feeling that unites them, nor can he live ignoring that other world as he proposed for himself at the beginning of the book.

In the end, Juana and Octavio lose their nicknames of “Loca” and “Sabrio.” And the reader closes these pages with a sadness that captivates her, undoubtedly, and is yet more proof, certainly not the only one, of the talent and literary complexity of Ricardo Azuaje.

Today’s article is an invitation to read Ricardo Azuaje. Don’t miss out on that pleasure.




{ María Celina Núñez, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 26 June 2015 }

Carta abierta a María Auxiliadora Álvarez / Igor Barreto

Open Letter to María Auxiliadora Álvarez

The poet from Caracas was recently honored during the activities of the XII World Poetry Festival. Upon the occasion of this award, Igor Barreto sends this open letter to his fellow poet.

Dear María Auxiliadora Álvarez,

Many of us are surprised that you accepted the tribute from Chavismo in the recent edition of the World Poetry Festival in Caracas. It was just over a year ago that dozens of students died in the streets of Venezuela, executed with a coup de grâce for protesting against a new type of dictatorship. Of course it doesn’t look like Pinochet’s dictatorship but essentially the quadrature of its political behaviors are the same. During these past seventeen years, even while being aware of the continuous human rights violations confirmed by international organisms, some intellectuals who call themselves progressives or revolutionaries, in a true act of cynicism have supported this contemptible “process” (as Chavismo refers to itself). They defend a useless utopia, that, as Mandelstam said, was a failure for haven chosen not the path of humanity but of authority. Szymborska also spoke of the Marxist utopia as an island where any trace of doubt is condemned: “The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here / with branches disentangled since time immemorial.” These references seem to be mere abstractions, but we live that failure and it can be felt like the coldest metal.

The populism and Stalinist recipes of the old Stalinist manuals created the collapse of our productive economy, bringing shortages and hunger. Corruption has impoverished the country and death surrounds us at each step. Drug trafficking has turned the nation into one giant airplane runway, with the grotesque enrichment of many government officials, some of them with court cases pending abroad because of those crimes. Venezuela is living the hour of its decomposition. Its most intimate fabric has given in to the worms, like the dog lying by the side of the road after being run over.

You probably saw the horde of the government’s political party, the PSUV, kicking the faces of the journalists from the newspaper Últimas Noticias right in downtown Caracas, or the photo of the other journalist who was (recently) thrown from a second story, simply for doing his job. You’ve heard people talk about the “Gate of Tears” which is nothing more than the immigration gate at the international airport in Maiquetía through which our young people pass to never return. Did you by chance know about the agony and death of Franklin Brito, who died in a hunger strike under the impassive glance of president Chávez? Franklin Brito could have written this verse by Celan that says: “We dig a ditch in the air...” The enumeration of torturous acts could continue almost into infinity, just like the fearful or complicit silence of the poets who accompanied you during those days in Caracas recently. They are mute at the foot of the dead letter. It would be interesting for everyone if you would explain your acceptance and complacency. What is the reason for your visit to Venezuela from the United States? What are you looking for? You were invited to participate in a monochord World Poetry Festival, in which the only chord that vibrates is the one officially approved. That Festival is an “International congress of fear,” as Drummond would write.

I was able to see you on a news program on Vive TV celebrating the virtues of this literary event without antecedents in Venezuelan culture. Indolence, vanity or indifference have been your three forms of turning your back to the country that today in its majority demands a more just course. Or maybe you turned your back and didn’t see some of your friends going to the supermarket the day that corresponds them according to their national I.D. card.




{ Igor Barreto, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 5 July 2015 }

Rafael Cadenas: la vía profunda / Alejandro Sebastiani Verlezza

Rafael Cadenas: The Deep Path

                                    [Photo: Jorge Humberto Cardenas]

One of his books, maybe one of the least known, is called Apuntes sobre San Juan de la Cruz y la mística (1998). I occasionally return to these pages and feel that in some way they extend into his poetic writing. I can’t glimpse anything else when I approach this luminous fistful of aphoristic thought shrouded in the humility that accepts the presence of something that overwhelms our comprehension and at the same time is there, quite close: “only the reality we are exists,” he notes, “the ideal is a mirage.”

We should return to his reminders: to quiet —and pacify— temptation in order to encompass a total comprehension of reality. To assume the former, and if I understood it correctly, this implies letting go of the compulsive desire to impose points of view —actually, it’s a matter of having eyes— and mastering reason. That’s why, in adhesion to clarity, Cadenas meditates with firm serenity: “Instead of bringing them together, religions divide human beings, just like ideologies of any sign, as well as nationalism. This trinity is guilty of countless crimes.”

Life and beliefs, the instant and the Projects, the flow of consciousness during the day and not the slowing of thought, the acceptance of what can only be perceived for a few moments. From this we can infer Cadenas’s relationship to the Tao, the early distancing from orthodox ideologies and his reticence towards the merely “literary”; maybe this is why he distances himself in his essays from the more inquisitorial —or exhaustive— tones of the treatise, the monograph, the thesis, because in the end he’s speaking of an inner path and not an affirmation through will, a knowledge closer to intuition than reason —but it’s not a matter of negating it, but rather experiencing it’s limits, that’s the question.

His teachings tend to come from various angles: the word isn’t a site of splendor and inner breaking can start at it, a reflection of other breaks; precisely the gift received for approaching his fellow beings —the tongue— ends up being used for the purpose of an idea. This is where an arc is drawn: power’s speech falsifies, manipulates, twists, impedes the perception of the instant and the ability to receive something like “the real.”

I should repeat it to myself: it’s a matter of being in love and a lack of concern for the laughter released by the person who knows he doesn’t know anything and accepts it without fear or arrogance. Because for St. John, the author of these “notes,” illumination is “union with God.” He cites the passage referring to man the spiritual Canticle, but “seen” with wizened eyes and maybe even suspicion: “He and nearly all the mystics point to a single path towards God. They leave no alternative for those who think there are many paths towards him, some even unexpected. Maybe there’s none, maybe when we let go of the idea of a path, of a distance to be traveled, and the present recovers its intensity, can we feel closer to the mystery.”

That’s the “illumination.” The pure and simple fact of being and agreement facing that escape of so many thoughts parading in front of the perplexity —my own, right now— of the instant. The end of questions. That’s why I’m nearly certain that, already in Realidad y literatura (1979), Cadenas, the man who claims to live in radical ignorance, stopped at what “Wordsworth offers the world”:

a heart
That watches and receives.




{ Alejandro Sebastiani Verlezza, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 15 March 2015 }

Fernando Paz Castillo: Nuestro poeta metafísico / Rafael Arráiz Lucca

Fernando Paz Castillo: Our Metaphysical Poet

Fernando Paz Castillo was a Caracas native and this, though it might seem trivial, is important for understanding his work. He sees the light of the world on April 11th, 1893 in the valley presided by Mount Ávila. From a young age he suspects that mountain will be a guardian angel of sorts throughout his very long life, regardless of how many periods of time he’ll spend far from the mountain, taken to other metropolises by the fate of the diplomat.

Thanks to his life in Caracas, he studies at a French school, where they combine a religious education with the language of Voltaire. There he develops a friendship with his future companions in a band of poets: Enrique Planchart and Luis Enrique Mármol, with whom the fire of friendship will keep growing under the flame of the poem’s candle.


The Poet and the Circle

But before the capital event of his formative period, Paz Castillo frequents, like all his generational companions the Circle of Bellas Artes. Already, the painters Manuel Cabré, the Monsanto brothers and the rebellious Armando Reverón were battling with the palette, the legendary Circle had broken with the academicism of Don Antonio Herrera Toro, the director of the Academy at that time, they’d taken their colors and had gone into the open air to paint landscapes. The young Paz Castillo formed part of that period of very close relationships between painters and poets, and there actually are some who suggest that the idea for the name of the Circle is the poet’s, rather than one the painters.

The Circle has contact with the members of the Alborada group: Rómulo Gallegos, Enrique Soublette, Julio Rosales and the enormous poet Salustio González Rincones, when he was in Venezuela. But the painters are also in contact with the members of the poetic Generation of 1918. Perhaps the most significant of poetic generations to have existed during the Venezuelan 20th century.

Paz Castillo is a protagonist of that generation, along with his previously mentioned elementary school friends and Jacinto Fombona Pachano, Andrés Eloy Blanco, Rodolfo Moleiro and the uncomfortable José Antonio Ramos Sucre. The year 1918, as we know, refers to the days when these young men offered public recitals and a poetry collection by Enrique Planchart was published. But Paz Castillo doesn’t lose sleep over the magic of publication. His first poetry collection, La voz de los cuatro vientos, was published in 1931, when the year 1918 was already a memory, and its members were scattered across the national and international geography. The poet was thirty-eight years old when he decided to reveal his poems to the public, although many of the texts in that collection had been read in periodical publications and newspapers.

The following year he travels to Spain, this being the first stop abroad in his journey, but the diplomat still doesn’t begin his functions. It was under the government of General López Contreras that Paz Castillo is sent as Consul to Barcelona, to then become secretary for the Delegation to Paris, and afterwards to Argentina and Brazil. Between 1936 and 1938, four countries receive his luggage, in the exhausting routine of the diplomatic functionary. Later on come London, Mexico, Belgium, Ecuador and Canada, until from 1959 onwards he retires and settles his destiny in the city that saw him born.


The Door That is “The Wall”

During his long and exhausting diplomatic itinerary he never stopped writing and publishing, but his best work doesn’t emerge during those years. Maybe the minutiae of his job are a distraction from the poems of longer breath that await him, maybe the careful attention toward his family distances him from the poem. Once he returns to Venezuela the poet occupies himself seriously with his work: he not only gathers and organizes his substantial production in newspapers but he also saves it from oblivion housing it in books. His valuable reflections on the plastic arts, regarding the making of poems, about the figures of our republican history are saved from the ocean of newspapers. Enthusiasm invades the man who seems to live as though he had regained his freedom, and it’s then the poet’s gift reaches its peak. What had been gestating since his second collection, Signo (1937), and had found its nearly definitive course in Enigma del Cuerpo y el Espíritu (1956), precipitates magnificently in “The Wall” (1964).

This text, which I judge to be one of the best in Venezuelan poetry, is the most finished, the most profound work by Paz Castillo. I don’t disdain the ones that came later, but they can’t be explained at all without the door the poet opened with “The Wall.” From his later period a startling poem shines in particular: “Misterio,” included in the collection Pautas (1973), and also resounding in their depth are the texts that make up Persistencias (1975), a collection in which the cleanness of the verses reaches its purest state. But “The Wall” is the sun of the poet’s planetary system. Curiously, it was written and published when the Caracas native was nearly seventy years old and already considered a poet with an exalted oeuvre.

Everything happened slowly with Paz Castillo: not just the beginning of his literary life, when he first published at the edge of being forty, but also the glory of his major poem arrives when he’s in his seventies. His life, seen from a distance, seems to have been structured by the premonition of its expansion.


Between Light and Penumbra

The poet’s ghosts gather in “The Wall.” Death arrives punctual and plants the flag of doubt. The anguish of uncertainty also plants its flag: what will happen to us once we cross the wall, the wall of death; what is there on the other side of life. A bird, this time a vulture (maybe Poe’s raven) passes from one side to the other with no difficulty. We, who aren’t made for flight, remain facing the dividing line, giving shape to the clay with our hands. But the wall, more than an arrow of certainty, is the figure that inquires, the one who asks a single question on this side. The poem cites that other column in Paz Castillo’s work: God, the sacred meaning of existence and, alongside that, the afternoon, the poet’s favorite time of day, the ambiguous zone between light and penumbra. As we see, in “The Wall” he not only manages to express his philosophy of life but also gathers all his ghosts, all the pieces in the labyrinth of his work.

I want to think, and nothing stops me from this conjecture, that the wall in the poem is Mount Ávila, the guardian mountain of the poet’s childhood and youth. For us Caracas natives who love the mountain and, especially, its silhouette drawn by the light of the afternoon, the mountain seems to us like a dividing line, like a wall that preserves us from the world, like a wall capable of building our urban region, like a hulk that separates us from the sea and, in doing so, makes the sea the horizon’s only scene. We don’t know if we’ve learned how to see the mountain in the manner Paz Castillo’s “The Wall” has taught us or if, instead, when we read the poem we think of the city’s mountain. It doesn’t matter what came first: what is significant is that between nature’s creation and the poet’s, the matrimony is reconciled indissolubly.

There are lives that offer extraordinary similitudes: Cabré, ninety years old, devoted to the mountain; Paz Castillo, eighty-eight, a demiurge of the mountain’s metaphysical possibilities. Both sons of the glorious moment of dialogue: the Circle of Bellas Artes and the Generation of 1918.


A Poet is a Reader

Borges alluded countless times to the pride he felt about the books he had read, more than the ones he’d written. As far as I know, Paz Castillo never affirmed something similar, but he could have, since he was a voracious reader. He didn’t just read the words that books offered him, he also understood the grammar of painters. Reading, though this might not seem true, hasn’t been an extensive habit among Venezuelan writers. This is still the case. Venezuela is a country so slack in some paths, that it’s perfectly possible to be an academic of language and to read a book every time a pope dies, or to be a professor of literature and, deep down, to hate writing and hold up The Poem of the Cid as a contemporary poem and yet be considered a writer, or also, a poet, a word for which slackness is absolute. It was rare then, and it continues to be, for a Venezuelan poet to love reading. The majority affirm, with naive brazenness, that they prefer writing to reading. Contrary to that, Paz Castillo’s oeuvre is the work of a reader.

From the confession where he manifests himself as a devotee of Don Quixote, read several times throughout his long life, until the poetry of Antonio Machado, the universe of readings in Spanish of the Caracas poet include Darío, Manrique, Unamuno and, most particularly, St. Thomas Aquinas. In Shakespeare’s tongue, he drank from the pages of Whitman, Wordsworth and Keats. He stopped in Verlaine, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Breton, Éluard, manifesting a particular interest in French poetry. He was no stranger to the work of Nietzsche and of the Prague native Rainer Maria Rilke. He was also an attentive reader of his generation. He was able to maintain a writer’s life, no matter how many hours the affairs of the office might steal from him. His reading was guided by pleasure, on the one hand, and by the trembling of a search, on the other. His poetry is marked by the anxiety of discovery: from perplexity, the poet elevates a prayer toward the heights seeking an answer. He was touched by the fervor of the awakened.




{ Rafael Arráiz Lucca, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 29 March 2015 }

El peso del mundo y de la noche: Rubi Guerra / Juan Carlos Chirinos

The Weight of the World and of the Night: Rubi Guerra

Without intending to —because a reader doesn’t have a plan or a map of the books in his life— I’ve been reading Rubi Guerra (San Tomé, Venezuela, 1958) for over twenty years, but I’m not sure when I first became aware that he’s one of the great fiction writers of my generation; maybe I’ve always felt this way, even when it was merely a hint. I’ve verbalized this idea several times, in different places and for different reasons; and every time I doubt my words I read, or reread, one of his short stories and convince myself that I’m correct to feel this way. “A singular atmosphere of expectation characterizes Guerra’s short stories,” say the anthologists of La vasta brevedad (2010), the voluminous collection of 20th century Venezuelan short fiction. So then I’m surprised to find myself grateful when I find in that phrase the perfect word to describe the sensation that invades me when I read Rubi’s prose: expectation. And that might be one of the author’s narrative tricks, because if there’s something a reader appreciates it’s when they incite him to keep reading. To be unable to stop: that’s the reader’s vice. The perfect reader would be the expectant reader. Or, at least, one of the most desirable readers for a book.

The novel I want to talk about, El discreto enemigo (2001), is a crime novel, of course, but it knows it can’t be a classic crime novel. In another commentary I’ve tried to explain that Venezuela has a particularity regarding crime or police novels; in a country whose violence has been especially bizarre for a long time now —the violence follows a continuous line that goes from 1810 to our days, and barely presents a few surprising interruptions—, a genre in which a scandal provoked by a specific crime serves as the axis for the narration, doesn’t have much of a future. One single crime scandalizes the society in which it happens; one among two hundred thousand doesn’t. So, Venezuelan novelists, aware of their Western logos, when they find themselves impelled to write crime literature, must figure out how they can stop verisimilitude from ruining their fiction’s party. Some, like Rubi Guerra, are able to achieve it and they offer us works that are worth rereading. Which is what I’ve done this week; I’ve let myself be dragged along by expectation, and because it had been a long time since I’d returned to the pages of this novel, I have (re)encountered several pleasant surprises. One of them is the text’s awareness of its own condition:

“Stop, don’t try so hard. You don’t have to explain everything to me, I’m not the commissary. I believe you” —the wrinkles on his face stretch, like an animated mask—. “You must feel like you’re in a crime novel. (...) Don’t be surprised. I’ve read some stuff. Somewhere in the house I have several boxes of books feeding the cockroaches. You’re the classic hero who’s been falsely accused. Although I don’t think there’s been a formal accusation yet.”
“If this were a police novel, we would have already seen two or three murders a long time ago.”
“You’re right. But this town can’t handle more than two deaths per year.”

It remains paradoxical that the fictitious town —La Laguna— to which the protagonist Medina arrives, in an apparently paradisiacal Araya peninsula, can sustain so few murders, because it’s a nest for all types of crimes and shady events. Like Hammett’s Poisonville, or Thompson’s Pottsville with its 1280 souls —or the Los Angeles of Chinatown—, La Laguna is an infected, rotten place full of secrets. Medina, who’s a journalist with a less than edifying past, arrives in town with the intention of writing an article for a tourism magazine, for which he hopes to learn about the customs and traditions of the area. Useless: in that town, instead of fishermen, the closest thing to tradition is a dive bar and the hotel owned by a German man, Wilhem, a former doctor and drug addict. And this is where we find an expectant atmosphere: perhaps following the tradition of fiction writers like Gustavo Díaz Solís, the author describes for us in the opening pages the ruined atmosphere without a future in which the protagonist finds himself. But he lets us glimpse how that story has more to it than we’d expect: “The girl appeared from behind a corner with a load of firewood on her head. She walked very poised: blue shorts, a yellow t-shirt, black face, thin, pleasant. Her firm, round breasts, with tiny nipples, were visible beneath the fabric soaked in sweat.” It’s not a “classic” crime novel, that’s true; but oh how it seems like one at times. This girl, María, will be the trigger for transformation of the mediocre journalist’s visit into a journey towards a territory that borders the abyss, that human temptation. María will be the recipient of Eros and Thanatos: her body’s sensuality, which he enjoys, will also be the place where the killer’s hands take pleasure.

At the same time, the narrator hasn’t forgotten to give the reader clues so he can add volume to what would otherwise be merely the story of a distorted and flat passion. The author reveals the pit, what helps every story make sense: “I started on the trail going back, or rising, because I knew I was in an underground fortress, in a condemned, sorrowful city, below the river line, supporting tons of stone, mud, dirty water filled with excrement, slime and the roots of trees along the shore, it all gravitated over the building and its inhabitants. The weight of the world. The weight of the night.” And that infinite weight is what forces the reader to continue until the end. He must follow the progress of Medina the journalist, who becomes Medina the detective, in order to find out who has murdered María, his very brief and young lover; for this task he must dig into the past of the town’s residents, especially Dimas Marcano, a chieftain, boss, owner and benefactor of the area. If he risks his life in the attempt it’s something neither he nor us will find out; the only certainty is that in La Laguna the law doesn’t function normally. Neither the police seem like police, nor are the suspects suspicious, and the murderers and victims don’t occupy their positions. It’s as though, while he was writing a police novel, Rubi Guerra dropped his papers on the floor and his characters became fragmented. But that’s not it: what happens is that in a remote place of the Paria peninsula, with the heat, humidity, the literary air and the sea that’s presented as barren, the images are distorted and tremble on the horizon, creating a series of mirages. The mirages that make possible a crime novel with only one crime in a country of twenty-five thousand homicides per year.

This brief novel by Rubi Guerra would be enough to place him among the leading Venezuelan novelists of today, but then, on top of this, he published La tarea del testigo —that second life of the poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre—, through which he’s reached new heights: he has turned expectation into an essential weight of the world and of the night.




{ Juan Carlos Chirinos, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 11 October 2014 }

El grito insomne / Carolina Lozada

The Insomniac Scream

On October 25th, 1929, José Antonio Ramos Sucre writes a letter to his brother Lorenzo, in which he confesses himself as an unfortunate being and a condemned spirit as a consequence of being raised in an inconsiderate and despotic manner:

“I was locked up in Carúpano. Father Ramos completely ignored the care one should give a child. He incurred in a stupid severity for trivial reasons. That’s why I feel no affection for him. I would spend days and days without going out to the street and I then was assaulted by bouts of desperation and I would spend hours crying and laughing at the same time. I hate the people who were charged with raising me.”

In the same letter he also speaks about his nervous condition: “My mental imbalance is a terror and only fear has stopped me at the threshold of suicide.” However, a few years later, the poet born in Cumaná will lose his fear of death and cross the threshold. In one of his final letters, written to Dolores Emilia Madriz and dated in Geneva on April 24th, 1930, he expounds: “I don’t how I’m doing. But I assure you that I’m not very scared of death;” later on, just a few days before his first suicide attempt, he announces to the same person:

“I will not resign myself to spending the rest of my life, who knows how many years!, in mental decadence. The entire machine has become disorganized. I’m very scared of losing my will to work. I still shave daily. I barely read. I’m discovering in myself a radical change of character. The day after tomorrow I turn forty and it’s been two years since I’ve written anything.”

On June 9th, 1930 he turns forty and tries to commit suicide a second time. On June 13th he dies.

The possibility of suicide as an exit from his tribulations also seduced Kafka, even though it never materialized. On February 15th, 1914 the Czechoslovakian author made a list of what he had done (and wished for) on the previous day; among other things, he writes: “Yesterday afternoon I got my hair cut, then I wrote a letter to Bl.; then I spent a few minutes with Max (...), then, a desire to kill myself.” With a less breezy tone he had noted on August 15th, 1913: “Torments in bed, at dawn. The only solution I could see was jumping out the window.” The constant idea of suicide isn’t the only presence that binds these two writers, there’s also insomnia, the spirit undermined by a nervous frailty. On several occasions, Kafka writes in his diary about how difficult it is for him to get the restorative sleep he needs. In the years leading up to his end he complains, just like Ramos Sucre, about a great physical and spiritual weakness: “I can’t continue writing. I’ve reached the definitive limit (...) This fate pursues me. Once again I feel cold and soulless; there’s nothing left but the senile love of complete repose.”

Conscious of the “mental proximities” between Ramos Sucre and Kafka, Rubi Guerra fictionalizes an encounter between the two in his novel La tarea del testigo (Caracas: El perro y la rana, 2007 / Lugar Común, 2012). The novelist from Cumaná sets both characters in a European sanatorium where they will establish a cordial camaraderie. At the same time he lets himself introduce characters and situations taken from expressionist cinema, such as the recreation of the persecution of the killer in “M,” the vampire from Düsseldorf, the film by Fritz Lang, and the apparition of the somnambulant Cesare, from “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Through this fictional game, Guerra is able to situate both writers within that spiritual and artistic moment that was created by expressionist angst.

Witnesses during times of war and global terror, Kafka and Ramos Sucre share at a distance the insomniac scream, the uncertainty when facing the tides of their nervous existence. Neither one of them is able to break their fears or insecurities, neither one will recover from his sick body: “the illness forced him to hate his body,” writes Rubi Guerra in La tarea del testigo. In Kafka the enthusiastic and volatile moments of fortitude will deflate: “From today onwards never abandon the diary! Write regularly! Don’t give up!” With his strength overwhelmed, at some point the author of The Process assumes himself as a being “so abandoned by me, by everything.” Pages later he will write: “Dying would be no more than handing over nothing to nothingness.”

“Residue” is the title of Ramos Sucre’s last poem and in that text he will begin the path to renunciation, passing through misty places: “I declined my forehead on the plateau of revelations and terror.” The Latin American poet would survive the European novelist only by a few years, and he never renounced the fatalist feeling that marked his life: “I carry in my spirit the desolation of the landscape.”




{ Carolina Lozada, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 24 May 2014 }

Sobre Armando Rojas Guardia / Rafael Cadenas

Regarding Armando Rojas Guardia
Words in Presentation of the Anthology Mapa del desalojo

                  
[Photo: Armando Rojas Guardia by Manuel Sardá]

What I’ll read tonight are notes. I’ve divided them without following a thread. This will be added by the listeners. My intention was to write a presentation worthy of Armando, who is a classic of our letters, and I now confess that I haven’t been able to, even though I’ve spent many hours in the company of this book. I have read and reread the poems it includes, savoring their rhythm, their expressive precision, their unexpected frankness. I would need more time to explore them and the existential background they speak, in a verbal music, because they are scores.

Armando’s voice comes from deep within. It has a sustenance of Catholic and Christian roots, psychic experiences that are sometimes extreme and a great deal of culture.

That’s where this poetry has emerged from. It’s made with the best words in the language that Christopher Columbus brought us, the one we still speak and which is degraded each day. Above all, the official language of government strips the meanings from the central words of this Republic, which is being dismantled. Nor do we know what language is spoken by those who knocked down the admiral’s statue.

A note on the side. I said “Catholic and Christian” because they’re not the same thing; what’s more, the greatest problem the Church faces is Christianity.

I’m not going to talk about his poetry now: it speaks for itself and I don’t want to interfere in the contact between his poetry and its readers.

I must only warn you that, while it’s true that none of his poems depart from excellence, some of them stand out notably, such as “Falta de mérito,” which summarizes the limitation of language condemned to be a second authority; or number twenty-five of Poemas de Quebrada de la Virgen, where the author fantasizes about probabilities that never took place; “Casi arte poética,” so ironic; “Miro jugar el mundo,” which is about the gratuity of what exists; “Patria,” that summarizes a tragedy, the one we continue to suffer; “La desnudez del loco,” an impassioned defense of difference; but I can’t abound. Now I see that I’ve been unfair to point out various poems, since each one of them communicates so strongly an uncommon experience.

Armando’s words seem to materialize through the strength of what governs them: the corporeal, the physical, the real, names that designate the unknown, since strictly speaking, what do we know? This insurmountable ignorance is covered by the word God, erected as the highest being, what is unthinkable: “An existing God would be frightening,” says Antonio Machado, “God save us from him.” This notion that seems like a joke situates us before an essential matter: the impossibility of that name having an image. This is why Christ is referred to, but no description of him exists either.

Oscura lucidez is a book by Jonatan Alzuru Aponte that I’ve also been reading. It shouldn’t go unnoticed. Besides leading us through Armando’s jungle, it presents the singularity of being multiform: diary, essay, notes, dialogue, criticism are interwoven there, poetically. It makes one want to write that way, without clinging to a form, guiding oneself by means of what one lives. Jonatan’s study, which took him years to complete, seems indispensable to me for anyone who wants to know about his friend’s work as well as his. Both of them are intertwined in Oscura lucidez [Dark Lucidity], an accepted oxymoron.

The prologue by Adalber Salas Hernández and the epilogue by the author contain other visions that complement those offered by the book.

I coincide with many of Armando’s ideas. I’ll choose one: the importance of attention, which by situating us in the present, is the only portion of eternity we are given, dissolving time. In one of his aphorisms José Antonio Ramos Sucre considers it thus: “Time is an invention of watchmakers.” I imagine very few readers have taken this affirmation seriously, which seems so relevant to our era. Schrödinger, a scientist, says in an unbeatable manner: Eternally only exists now. The absolute is here, where else would it be. Life is not somewhere else, it exists where we exist. According to Hinduism sarigara is Nirvana. Buddha would be what’s happening at this moment, beyond and within ourselves.

Finally, listen to the poems the author will read, enjoy his poetry spoken in his own voice, and afterwards do it alone with the book, slowly, reading and rereading.

When I wrote these lines my granddaughter’s cat approached me to ask for her food, it was what I was writing at that moment. This is another one.




NOTE: The poems in Armando Rojas Guardia, Mapa del desalojo: Poemas escogidos were selected by Adalber Salas and published by Fundación Común Presencia, Colombia, 2014. The presentation took place in the bookstore El Buscón in Caracas, on July 17th, 2014.




{ Rafael Cadenas, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 14 September 2014 }

Un poeta venezolano que sólo conocen algunos poetas / Vicente Gerbasi

A Venezuelan Poet Who is Only Known by a Few Poets

                  [Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003) and Vicente Gerbasi (1913-1992)]


Juan Sánchez Peláez, a young Venezuelan with one of the greatest gifts for poetic exercise, has been working for more or less ten years amidst a silence that is surprising in our circles, where everyone who writes a sonnet or a couplet or a newspaper essay wants to launch their literary career with the publication of a book.

Juan Sánchez Peláez, whom I think is one of the best poets in Venezuela at the moment, is barely known by a limited group of poets, writers and artists in Caracas, the city where he grew up and has spent some of the years of his taciturn existence. He is also known in Santiago de Chile, where he studied and attended the gatherings of the group “Mandrágora”, a circle of young Chilean poets and prose writers, among whom Eduardo Anguita, Braulio Arenas and others stand out.

In Chile, a land of turbulent struggles and good poets, Juan Sánchez Peláez became aware of the troubles of our time, perfectly understood modern poetry, knew how to conceive beauty according to the newest aesthetic currents, and unraveled a concrete and lucid language from his own soul, through which a marvelous subjective atmosphere anoints a real world of wealth.

In his poetry everything seems to be an invention of language, but the truth is that his work adheres to a profound reality of the senses, to a serious resonance of the soul, to a charmed vision of the world.

Sánchez Peláez works on his poetry every day, indefatigably. This young artist is possessed by a true creative passion. For years now he has been accumulating pages, notebooks, books. However, he hasn’t yet been able to publish anything, not even a chapbook. This is the great danger for our young poets. Besides the fact that they find themselves crushed by a cruel reality, often despised by a society only focused on the thirst for gold and a frenzied career of vanity and luxury, they don’t have the possibility of publishing their poems in books, unless it is by means of extraordinary sacrifices.

I continue to believe that we should establish an association of writers and artists that would focus on publishing on a monthly basis the best work being produced in the country. Decent, presentable editions could be made, with quality paper and tasteful typography, to be distributed to subscribers. In this way we could stimulate many of our young poets, writers and artists in a practical manner. That association could also publish music, give concerts and present exhibitions of our most outstanding artists.

Someone might ask: “Well, isn’t that what the Association of Venezuelan Writers is for?” Whoever asks this is correct, but the truth is that organization isn’t doing very well.

We should organize a group of writers and artists, a group motivated by creative enthusiasm, from which a homogenous movement might arise, capable of continuing and enriching our intellectual tradition.

The truth is, at this moment our literary and artistic landscape is quite mediocre. Young people in particular resent this mediocre landscape. Especially certain young people who are truly creators, like Juan Sánchez Peláez, whose temperament is crushed by encounters with falseness, selfishness and the masks of cretins.

In Venezuela we’re accustomed to hearing excessive adjectives when people talk about writers and artists.

Regarding Juan Sánchez Peláez, let us say that he is a good poet, a true good poet.




{ Vicente Gerbasi, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 25 June 1950 }

Renato Rodríguez: Del Equanil al infinito / Carlos Flores

Renato Rodríguez: From Equanil to Infinity

Renato Rodríguez by William Dumont

Fifty years ago, Al Sur del Equanil [South of Equanil] was published. Its author lived in a dozen countries looking for something he hadn’t lost.


“Of course I met Merv Griffin!, who was later taken off the channel and substituted by David Frost, with whom I also worked,” he pauses. He scratches his chin, then rubs his neck, exhaling: “And by the way, that Englishman never saw me with good eyes. Once, they called me to his office because the air conditioning wasn’t working. I went and realized it wasn’t plugged in. I plugged it in and it worked. Frost asked me, with his impressive British accent, What was the problem with the air conditioning? And I answered that there wasn’t a problem, just that he had it unplugged. Two guys who were with him in his office died laughing and Frost, who had been made to look ridiculous, grew ferocious and said to me, his teeth gritted: What a brilliant man you are! But he said it with irony, of course.”

After narrating an anecdote like that with the calmness of someone who’s telling of an everyday occurrence, Renato Rodríguez lit a cigarette and let out a mouthful of smoke.

His voice diminished and he accommodated his slight anatomy in an old and creaking wooden chair. That was eight years ago. An encounter that I now feel occurred centuries ago. Actually, I’ve sometimes asked myself, did I really sit down to talk with the author of Al sur del Equanil, up there, in the cold mist of a mountain in El Consejo, in the state of Aragua, or was it all some type of post-beat-post-hippie-post literature hallucination; a fantasy typical to someone who wants to become a writer and hopes that, at some rare moment in his life, he might bump into a giant of letters (at the same time nearly anonymous), like Renato Rodríguez? But at this moment, on a nearly erotic Saturday night, while the stars are hidden in the dark stellar cupola, I remember many details, nearly all of them, from when I heard the legends, epic stories and barbarities, pronounced with a thick and aged voice, by Renato Rodríguez. A man who lived, raised hell, wrote about it... and then, just as many other warriors, he retired to a chosen rest in his personal Valhala, where immortality is a poem whose verses persist like a supreme consciousness.


Seeking, Always Seeking
Al Sur del Equanil (1963), El bonche (1976), La noche escuece (1985), Viva la pasta: las enseñanzas de Don Giuseppe (1985), Ínsulas (1996) and Quanos (1997). The work of a dispersed life is expressed in a handful of volumes. Of long and variable journeys; characters that seek, with no fixed destination, the future and, perhaps, some explanation of their past. I remember finishing the final paragraph of the treasure that is Al sur del Equanil. I was barely 21 years old and I hated the book as much as I envied it.

If Hunter S. Thompson was my American giant, I had found another literary titan, and this time a Venezuelan. There is a formidable vitality in that text, in little big phrases such as: “And although you don’t like to type you have to admit that the clatter of the Olympia is so nice.”

I was frustrated to live in the future and to write in front of an illuminated, cream-colored box and not hitting the keys of an old typewriter and to see, right there, how the paper begins to fill with that mystical essence that is literature, as the protagonist of Al Sur del Equanil, David, searches for his identity as a writer and as a human being. He searches, searches... and keeps searching.


All Trips... The Trip
“I’ve lived here since 1997, because it’s quiet,” Renato sighed, who was 78 years old at the time. True, that place was as calm as it was distant, 12 kilometers of mountainous ascent. Always heading upwards, seeking the clouds. You could feel the climate change; the temperature drop, another world extending its fresh and soft arms. “You’ve got a ways to go before you reach old man Renato’s place,” that’s what I heard the few people I found on that desolate road say. The residents knew his name was Renato Rodríguez and that he was in charge of a small coffee plantation (despite the fact that his real name was René, but that’s another story).

However, few of them had any idea at all about the “character.” They didn’t know he was a writer, near-rival of Salvador Garmendia; the Venezuelan Kerouac. A fox expertly trained in hunting paragraphs saturated with experiences he would later establish on the page.

On a table built with a thick and dented plank, a large quantity of books were piled up, most of them classics. Yellowed pages. Worn covers. Renato could barely see anymore. He was about to lose an eye to glaucoma. But his novelist’s soul remained intact.

“I was born the same day as Kafka, a 3rd of July, in Margarita. 40 days after I was born my father, who was a quick foot, took us to live in Cumaná. He liked to move a lot.” And they moved so much that in 1929 the family installed itself in La Guaira.

“My father worked in a customs house. We lived in the hotel La Mejor, which belonged to a woman from Martinique, Mrs. Cecilia Sant-Laurent. Everything was very confusing there because a German couple, of advanced age, wanted to adopt me, for my mom to give me to them. “Ma’m,” they said to her, “you and your husband are young, you can have more children. We’re unable to conceive.” Renato’s mother was so frightened she packed the luggage and went up the mountain to Caracas with her boy. There, in a humble guest house, would occur another encounter that also marked the future writer: on a quiet evening, with a fresh breeze and a clear sky, the silence inside the room where Renato lived with his mother was broken. A jarring sound awoke mother and child. Something was happening. In the middle of the room, and emerging from the shadows, a masculine figure appeared whose silhouette emerged, step by step, as it was lit by a street light that was shining through the window. “Miss, don’t worry, I won’t do anything to you or your child,” said an elegant voice that came from a very presentable body, dressed with a vest and tie.

“I’m a thief. And so I don’t waste any time, allow me to rob this medal here.” That apparition, delinquent but at the same time distinguished and polite, made an impact on young Renato. “Wow! I said to myself. I have to a thief if I want to be as elegant as that man.” But he never dared to rob; he could never fill, with the required pension, the shoes of a criminal.

He would soon trade sin for sanctity. While he was in high school as a boarding student at San José de Los Teques, he felt a spiritual calling. “One day I went to speak with the school principal, who was a priest named Isaías Ojeda, and I said to him: Look, father Ojeda, I need to ask a favor.

I want to enter the seminary because I feel the calling of God. But the priest wasn’t too enthusiastic about the petition and he was cutting: You’re not made out to be a priest, your thing is writing, start writing. You’ll see you’ll be able to develop it.”

And from that afternoon onwards that’s was what Renato Rodríguez did: he wrote, he wrote sitting down, in bed, hungry, while eating, sinning and even praying, but nothing transcendent, memorable seemed to emerge from his texts. Just words that fell on each other, like flimsy houses made from cards.

After finishing high school in Venezuela, he travels to Colombia and enrolls in a military academy, in order to obtain a higher baccalaureate. When he finished, he met a young singer and became his manager. Together they travelled around half the continent. “That was because I found out and was fascinated by the fact that someone from Margarita was Carlos Gardel’s agent. But my singer was rowdy and wanted to interpret even opera, so we split up in Quito,” he recalls smiling. From Quito he moves to Lima, where he continued his training as a writer. “Faulkner had given a piece of advice to a kid who wanted to be a writer: get a job in a whore house, he told him.” Immediately, Renato placed his luggage on a cot in the famous brothel of Doña Elvira. That was his home until he left Peru to go to Chile, where he was finally able to write.

“I used to write anything, day and night. That was in 1949 and after 1950 I returned to Venezuela because my father dragged me back by one of my ears.” And in his country, between Caracas and Cumaná, he was a milk producer, a farmer and office worker, at the same time that he was finishing the redaction of his disorganized first novel, which eventually became a classic.


Just South of Ecuador
The story is already a popular legend: “One day we were in a very good bar, on Caroní avenue in the Bello Monte district of Caracas. I was there with some people and among them was Gonzalo Castellanos, who was an architect and asked me what I did. I told him I was a writer and had a novel ready. When I was going to say it was called Al Sur del Ecuador [Just South of Ecuador], which was its original title, I made a mistake and told him: Al Sur del Equanil, which was a popular painkiller at the time. Salvador Garmendia, who was present and quite drunk, said: Ah, that’s so great.” People imagined he had read my novel and had found it to be very good but the truth is that Garmendia was referring to the pill called Equanil, which was very good. So it turns out that word spread about me having a novel that was so good that even Salvador Garmendia had approved of it.”

Months later Al sur del Equanil was published. “When I published it they said all sorts of things to me. An incident occurred because people were arguing about which was better, Salvador Garmendia’s Los pequeños seres or Al Sur del Equanil. But I wasn’t competing with Garmendia because our styles are quite different. I was being accused of plagiarizing Kerouac, Henry Miller, the French noveau roman.” He escaped from his minor literary polemic and left the country, once again, to install himself in vibrant New York.

There he worked in a restaurant on 33rd street and he was among the first people to live in a loft in what today is known as Soho. When he got tired of that, he boarded a bus and crossed the country, all the way to Los Angeles, where he would pick up the dirty plates of guests at the Biltmore Hotel and, after a brief stay, moved to San Francisco. “Such a beautiful city!” he remembers with his eyes shining. “And what about the Golden Gate bridge, the bay and then Chinatown!” he sighs, “San Francisco in the mid-sixties was a very special place.” Later he would return to New York, to work in the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, on the Merv Griffin show. “But I would spend my time dancing, they called me rubber legs,” and it’s precisely from those dances that the idea emerged for El bonche (Monte Ávila Editores, 1976).

Renato Rodríguez’s exaggerated life isn’t limited to the American continent. He travelled by cargo ship to France. He disembarked and took the train to Paris, where he ran into an old Chilean friend and got a job at the School Cooperation Office for the French government. “If you’re patient and have a sense of humor things will go well for you wherever you are. I was in Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and spent a long time in Germany, in Dusseldorf, working at a car parts factory.” As the years progressed the tank emptied. The trips became less frequent and one fresh and sunny morning, there I was in front of Renato, the great Venezuelan writer and recipient of the National Prize for Literature, in a small coffee farm in the state of Aragua, listening to the great story of his life that, at the same time, is his best work. Renato Rodríguez died on June 22nd, 2011, a Wednesday. He was 86 years old.

During that memorable encounter, Renato told me that he felt his gunpowder was damp and he no longer wanted to write. “Why should I write? No one here reads,” he murmured sadly.

Maestro: I hope you’re on a celestial bus, accompanied by Kerouac and the rest of the troop, and that you’re going full speed, the great spree of all sprees, the cold, strong breeze coming in through the windows, just beyond the Golden Gate... just beyond the Equanil.




{ Carlos Flores, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 3 November 2013 }