La aventura de “Mandrágora” / Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda

The “Mandrágora” Adventure

[Jorge Cáceres, “La idea.” Image borrowed from Mandrágora]


In 1942 Braulio Arenas edits in Santiago, Chile, the first issue of the magazine Leit-motiv which includes collaborations from Breton, Péret, Césaire, Gómez Correa, Arenas himself, Teófilo Cid, Jorge Cáceres, and Juan Sánchez Peláez. (1) Thus the young Venezuelan poet, only 20 years old at the time, is linked to one of the most radical surrealist groups of the Spanish language, that since its appearance, in 1938, with a series of public actions and the first issue of the magazine Mandrágora maintained, according to Octavio Paz’s words, “an exemplary stance”: “Not only did they have to face the conservative groups and the black militias of the Catholic Church but also the Stalinists and Neruda,” (2) the preferred victim of their sarcasm.

Arenas himself would evoke, 30 years later, “the presence at the time of that young, skinny and, of course, amorous Venezuelan, who was slightly adrift (as we all thought we were) and who shared with great stoicism, here in Chile, the bread and a piece of the “Mandrágora.” ” (3)

What a splendind initiation, then, for an apprentice poet, that fervorous outburst that was “Mandrágora”: that participation, as tangential as it may have been, in that combat in favor of the unleashing power of the word. A combat that recurred, as it should be, not only to a healthy black humor, qualifying for example Neruda, Huidobro and Pablo de Rokha as “the three stooges of Chilean poetry,” (4) but also submerging itself, already, in those public years of “Mandrágora,” from 1938 to 1952, in deeper layers. As Gómez Correa has recently recalled:


“We propitiated the outer limits of the instincts with the subsequent acknowledgment of irrational values in order to attain as a goal an equilibrium between instinct and reason.”


Sánchez Peláez would discover amid the “mad geography” of Chile the thrilling inheritance of surrealism, taken up again by a group that maintained solidarity with its fundamental principles, and which in its vital stance as well as in its vertiginous writing has tried to take poetry to its final consequences, where dream and daily life stop opposing each other.

It seems to me that this is, at the level of his poetry, the most fruitful lesson Sánchez Peláez received from the Chilean group: not just to live in poetry, but rather to open himself up to a better reception of his own world; learning how to listen to himself so that later on, as is the case with some of his best poems – “Profundidad del amor,” “Retrato de la bella desconocida,” “Animal de costumbre” – automatic dictation concedes to him those texts that are at once fervent and doubtful; that rhythm that is simultaneously magical and colloquial.*


“The love letters I wrote in my childhood were memories of a future lost paradise. The uncertain trail of my hope was signed in the musical hills of my native country. What I pursued was the fragile roe deer, the ephemeral hunting dog, the beauty of the stone that becomes an angel.

(...)

My love letters were not love letters but rather visceral solitude.

My love letters were kidnapped by the ultramarine falcons
that move across the mirrors of childhood.

My love letters are offerings from a paradise
of courtesans.

What will happen later, not to mention tomorrow? murmurs the decrepit old man. Maybe death will whistle, before his enchanted eyes, the most beautiful love ballad.”
(“Profundidad del amor”)


Nor was the reflexive ardor of phrases such as these alien to the poetics that Rosamel del Valle would formulate in his diverse books of poems – “the mysterious timbales / That can push me away from loving aged young girls / Not because of time but by reason of looking at themselves day by day / In the sea that passes through the mirrors” – rigurously anthologized by Sánchez Peláez, and which, likewise, owe thanks to the 1959 essay Rosamel dedicates to the poetry of Humberto Díaz-Casanueva, which under the title of “La violencia creadora” constitutes a lucid explanation of the poetic task. Rosamel speaks there of the difficult alloy between communication and enigma; how nothing will be feasible without original nostalgia; that is: without the presence of myth; of the need for a permanent insubordination – “the fire of disobedience” –, and the imperious need for canceling any type of nostalgia, since it is not necessary to say goodbye to that which remains within, reinventing, incessantly, amidst the archetype of repetitions, a new Paradise.

And above all a very marked emphasis on that “burning order”: to remain within poetry, exiling oneself in the world of mayor nonconformity, as is the world of great experiences. One does not always speak to be understood, says Rosamel, and he adds:


“The problem is to restore the spirit, to train it to strengthen itself in myth and imagination and not remain in the stubborn chore of sinking man into the pits of his poor reality.” (5)


At the death of Rosamel del Valle, whom Sánchez Peláez would only get to meet personally in New York in 1962, he dedicates a moving eulogy to him. To create is above all to create oneself, he says there, adding: the primary outburst of being pulverizes the apparent order that exists in the world. “To remake life because true life is absent, to invent the world because we are not in the world.” (6) This, the decalogue of surrealism, had already become for Sánchez Peláez an essential part of his creative effort. Confirmed, later on, through his various translations of surrealist poets: Péret, Magloire Saint-Aude, Sénelier.

Various notes of his, moreover, dedicated, for example, to Breton or Leonora Carrington, emphasize his interest. In the first of these, he says that poetry is a method of knowledge and a way of making known [hacer conocer] (7), following an idea by Breton. All of which becomes even more explicit in the various homages that several of his poems propose, where names such as Tristan Tzara or Rose Selavy shine unequivocally.

But the influence of surrealism is even subtler and impregnates his work in a perhaps more decisive manner. As Julio Ortega has pointed out:


“The happiness of the bright form, that immediate and necessary splendor that is the word objectified and without emphasis of writing impelled by a “rhythm,” by a knowledge that abandons itself without waste, is also a fervor gained by the modern tradition, in good measure, from the surrealist verbal experience.” (8)


Here we find something that can also be applied to Sánchez Peláez, who makes of his texts not a discursive sequence but rather a reiterated enigma; there where the prosaic lives alongside the cryptic, and language in a state of exhaltation doesn’t hide the transparency of its sense. Where the secret is clear, and stripped. Between solitude and participation Juan Sánchez Peláez’s poetry has led us to read those with whom he shares affinities. It’s time now to return to his own texts, and to focus our attention, in detail, on his contribution, which is as singular as that of those he considers, with good reason, his teachers.

_____________________________________

1. Stefan Baciu, Antología de la poesía surrealista latinoamericana. México, Editorial Joaquín Mortíz, 1974, p. 90.
2. In/mediaciones. Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1979, p. 158.
3. “Los rasgos comunes de Juan Sánchez Peláez.” In El Nacional, Caracas, 11 November 1976.
4. Stefan Baciu, Surrealismo latinoamericano, preguntas y respuestas. Chile, Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, 1979, pp. 22-38. See also, by Braulio Arenas, Actas Surrealistas, Chile, Editorial Nascimiento, 1974.
5. Santiago de Chile, Editorial Universitaria, 1959, pp. 69-70.
6. “Rosamel del Valle,” “Separata,” Valencia, Universidad de Carabobo, October 1970, pp. 20-21.
7. “André Breton, 1896-1966.” In Imagen. Caracas, No. 10, 1-15, October 1967, pp. 6-7; “Leonora Carrington, hada surrealista.” In Imagen. Caracas, No. 12, 1-15, November 1967. p. 5.
8. “La escritura plurar (Notas sobre tradición y surrealismo).” In Revista Iberoamericana, Pittsburgh, Nos. 76-77, July-December 1971, pp. 603-604. See also, from the same author, “La escritura de la vanguardia.” In Ibid, Nos. 106-107, January-June, pp. 187-198.

* This is why upon returning to Venezuela Sánchez Peláez would seek the creation of a “genuine poetic atmosphere” in his country, as stated in the editorial for the only issue, appearing in November of 1949, of the magazine El Perfil y la Noche which he would edit with his friend Vicente Gerbasi. Poems by Rosamel del Valle and Eluard, a note about Aimé Césaire and a translation of an article by A. Maugée which vindicates obscurity in poetry, these reveal the lasting influence of “Mandrágora.”




Translator’s note: This is an excerpt from a longer essay entitled “La poesía de Juan Sánchez Peláez,” which first appeared in the Papel Literario supplement of the newspaper El Nacional on August 17 and 24, 1980.




{ Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, Juan Sánchez Peláez: Ante la crítica, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }

Acerca de por qué Alfredo Silva Estrada era un Mago de Oriente con poder y ciencia rara / Luis Enrique Belmonte

Regarding Why Alfredo Silva Estrada Was A Magician of the Orient with Rare Power and Science

1

Speaking about magicians isn’t easy, since they are prodigious by nature and what is prodigious tends to be fleeting. Magic is one of man’s deepest influences. When we encounter a magician the first thing that impresses us is his incantatory power. The spell of magicians seduces because it creates a temporal suspension of the senses, as happens when we look at a Persian carpet or at a gang of bluebirds fluttering at the window (I’m watching them right now). This is the source of the hypnotic nature of magical operations. F. Vergesen tells us that in Alfredo Silva Estrada’s poetry “the poem heads along a route where the near totality of data of sensibility, thought and the imaginary cross paths.” A poem like “En delirio de piedra,” for example, is nothing more than a prodigious verbal artifact capable of enchanting and disordering our senses. Alfredo was a delightful person; that’s why children, dogs and exalted creatures loved him and greeted him.

2
Magicians defy the possibilities of matter and subvert the order of things. They produce explosions where we least expect it. An explosion is a sudden and vivacious manifestation of something that wasn’t there and that by the force of the art of magic appears. This is the source of the sparks and illuminations in life and in Alfredo’s poetry. His poetry is like dynamite for language. It contains marvelous hidden mines that when stepped upon provoke unexpected conflagrations of the sign. They are like ritual fires: fascinating, celebratory, cathartic. Alfredo was a subversive, a rebel of forms (of “the form that in its own self liberates itself.”)

3
All acts of magic have to do with transmutation, that is, with the transformation of one thing into another. For Alfredo this was a daily practice. To transmute experience into word and the word into experience was the substrata of his alchemy. This is what he refers to when he speaks to us of “existing in the duration of the poem,” or when he wagers for “the poetic word rooted in existence itself.” This implies an ethics of language and a way of life. And his life was a transgression of the limits of expression: his poetic word sought the experimental encounter with other material worlds. That explains the approaches to the plastic arts (with Gego), to music (with Del Mónaco), to graphic design (with Leufert), or to Hertzian waves (with Ofrendas, on Radio Nacional de Venezuela, one of the longest running programs in the history of national radio). In El libro de las puertas one of his preferred poetic operations is manifested, which by the way is very closely related to transmutation: it is the transfer, the passing through what is unknown, the exploration of the edges of being to found, in the open, new spaces that might expand the possibilities of matter. We’re talking about the transmuted word. Zoroaster (or Dr. Faustus) did the same thing.

4

Simon Magus was persecuted by Saint Peter. Simon possessed the secret to levitation and Peter couldn’t stand this. They say that once Simon was trapped and taken to Rome to be tried, Peter asked him to fly and once the magician was in the air they began to throw stones at him and this is how they got rid of him. The thing is that Peter bought stones to establish churches, while Simon flew through the air establishing other kingdoms, less apprehensible, more suggestive. The poetry of our magician is light and ludic. But it turns out that when interacting with his fellow beings Alfredo was also like that. Alfredo took a lucid stance against intellectual and literary shyness. His humor erased with a spark the impostures of the serious and the pretentious. When facing the cardboard nature and prejudice of those who insist on making certain spaces hostile, Alfredo preferred to open up the vents of light and sound so as to avoid the blockade. He belonged to no court, nor did he set up obstacles for anyone. Alfredo would fly in his famous chair and sing “Alma libre” with fervor, a song that begins like this: “Like a magician of the Orient / With rare power and science / I will break the chains / That bound me without pity...”

5

Obliquity is another superpower that belongs to magicians. They tell you one thing goes here and it ends up showing up over there. They make you climb into a suitcase, for example, so as to then have you emerge from a mirror. That’s what Alfredo’s poetry is like. The phenomena of refraction appear in his work and in his life. And those reflections cast spells on us. They produce strange resonances, echoes, explosions, syncopations, cracks. You never know where a verse is taking you until you find a reflection of it somewhere else and it surprises you because you weren’t expecting it. His poetry is endless because it has that reverberational quality that’s found in acts belonging to magic. As though it were a reticularea of light.

6

Magicians generate spaces for connivance. A moment comes when those who witness an act of magic find an element of communion in wonder. Magical phenomena have an enveloping nature and they tend to set bridges of unity between beings, circuits under the auspices of shared delight and the celebration of life. Alfredo made his house a home of tolerance and brotherhood around the poetic word. He was a server of friendship. He didn’t cultivate any type of hatred and he respected human beings profoundly. Magicians radiate warmth and they tend to wink an eye at you when you are surprised by amazement.

7

Now we’ll have to talk about what is most precious for a magician: revelation. This is the true card a magician hides under his sleeve. And revelation only manifests itself to visionaries (those who can see through, the authentic revolutionaries). Alfredo is a visionary because he invites us to see what no one else has seen before. Bordering the limits he lifts himself to glance at the horizon in search of the place where the unspoken arises, because “in poetry the only thing worth saying is the unspeakable,” as Reverdy said, fifth member of the Reverdy quartet. Alfredo’s poetry is highly stimulating because it’s difficult and is full of occult codes that, thanks to patience and chance, manifest themselves to us suddenly. It’s what Alfredo called the superlife [supervivencia] of the poetic act, that is: “The surprising place of the poem with its own structure that resists, even in its vacilations and faults, all possible readings.” Because the mystery of the unspeakable is revealed to us and that mystery is as endless as the imagining consciousness.

8

To finish this indagation regarding why Alfredo Silva Estrada was a Magician of the Orient with rare power and science, all I have left to say is that magicians exist on borders and they spend their time feeling, scanning, gathering herbs from one place to plant them in another. Magicians are in contact with the hidden forces of the matter they manipulate. They are transgressors of limits (sometimes, with dynamite). They speak with the absent. They weave webs of astonishment. They proceed with joy of the bow [alegría de proa] towards the confines, well-planted in the going. We know they have always been among us. Bon Voyage! Cheers! (Greetings, Sonia.)




{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 24 October 2009 }

“Que me reconozcan me hace sentir vivo” / María Gabriela Méndez

“Being Recognized Makes Me Feel Alive”
Renato Rodríguez, Premio Nacional de Literatura

He was born on July 3rd, reason enough for him to get the idea into his head that the coincidence of sharing a birthday with Franz Kafka was the unequivocal sign that he was the reincarnation of the Czech writer: “I was often penetrated by his style, wanting to be like him,” says Rodríguez, who has received the Premio Nacional de Literatura. In Al sur del Equanil (1963), his first novel, one of the characters talks about the conflict with his father.

Although at the time of its publication his work – El bonche (1976) and La noche escuece (1985) – didn’t have the best reception among critics, today his prose is considered one of the most prodigious. He still remembers clearly the critiques of his first book, as he laughs: “A friend wrote an article that said: “If it was well written, the dirty words in it would shine like brutal images.” ”

He also recalls what Julio Miranda wrote: “Too little, Renato Rodríguez, and too late,” he repeats with a harsh tone that turns into a laugh.

But those comments about his novel didn’t bother him: “I had the sensation of having done what I needed to do. Criticism is sometimes fickle and it often measures itself by means of established parameters. Criticism evolves.”

But if a National Prize was far from his aspirations nowadays, it was even further away back then. “I think I’ve already accomplished my cycle. And now that they gave me that prize, it’s like a colophon. Not because one has to aspire to that in life. No, that’s banal. I mean that a group of people recognize one’s existence. That’s like coming into life, like feeling alive.”

He still doesn’t know who postulated him, but when an acquaintance announced the news to him, he laughed about his hunch coming true: “I had had a stupid fall and I thought: “Some compensation will come my way. I think they’re gonna give me the Premio Nacional de Literatura.” ”

It could seem strange that a nomad who traveled the world and lived half his life outside these borders would end up taking refuge in the mountains of Aragua state, in Tasajera. but he didn’t choose that place: “That simply happened. ”




{ María Gabriela Méndez, El Universal, 9 September 2006 }

Portrait of Juan Sánchez Peláez by Enrique Hernández-D’Jesús

This postcard was printed for the IX Semana Internacional de la Poesía in Caracas in November 2001, which was dedicated to Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003). The photograph was taken at Sánchez Peláez’s home in Los Palos Grandes in 1975 by his friend the poet and photographer Enrique Hernández-D’Jesús. It was used as the author photo for Sánchez Peláez’s last book of poems, Aire sobre el aire (1989), which Hernández-D’Jesús and Simón Alberto Consalvi published with their small imprint Tierra de Gracia Editores.

The inscription by Hernández-D’Jesús on the postcard reads: “Juan le dice a la noche que lo acompañe, que después se prolongue y que no cese nunca, porque la estrella debe seguir su curso y brillar para darnos luz en lo más alto. Juan.” [ “Juan tells the night to accompany him, that it then prolong itself and never end, because the star must follow its course and shine on so as to give us light from high above. Juan.”]

Voz apagada / Douglas Gómez Barrueta

Extinguished Voice

The poet, essayist and translator Alfredo Silva Estrada died on Wednesday night in Caracas

[Photo: Iván González, 2005]

“To write at the limits: shock, emotion, touchstone: That shock called poetry.” That is what was sought in Al través by Alfredo Silva Estrada, the poet who died on Wednesday night accompanied by the dancer and choreographer Sonia Sanoja, his inseparable wife since 1960, the first reader of all his verse, his essays and his translations.

Silva Estrada was born in Caracas on the 14th of May in 1933, and at the age twenty he published his first two collections, De la casa arraigada and Cercos. A year earlier he studied Art History in Italy. He received a degree in Philosophy in 1957 from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, where he taught for several years. He attended graduate school at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Between 1965 and 1982 he produced the show Homenajes on Radio Nacional de Venezuela. His work also includes the books Integraciones/De la unidad en fuga and Del traspaso, published in 1962 and Literales (1963). In 1964 Lo nunca proyectado, Trans-verbales I (1967) and Acercamientos (1969). In the seventies he published Trans-verbales I, Trans-verbales II y Trans-verbales III (1972), Los moradores (1975), Los quintetos del círculo (1978), Contra el espacio hostil (1979) and Variaciones sobre reticuláreas (1979). In 1986 Dedicación y ofrendas was published, De bichos exaltado in 1989, ten years later Por los respiraderos del día y En un momento dado, and in 2000 Al través.

In 1997, Silva Estrada received the Premio Nacional de Literatura. In 2001, he obtained the international prize in poetry at the Liege Biennial (Belgium), an award previously given to Giuseppe Ungaretti, Saint-John Perse, Octavio Paz and Roberto Juarroz, among others. In October 2005, Silva Estrada was honored at the XII Semana Internacional de la Poesía in Caracas.

He also translated into Spanish the poetry of Salah Stétié, Georges Schehadé, Vahé Godel, Francis Ponge, Fernand Verhesen, Pierre Reverdy, André du Bouchet and Andrée Chedid. The essay “La palabra trasmutada/la poesía como existencia” was published in 1989, and in it he wrote: “Poetry as experience and not merely as formal experimentation, because its material (language) is only manipulable to the degree that it will continue being newborn and incitingly elusive. A diction of what have been called “the great commonplaces of humanity:” love, pain, joy, the consciousness of death... universal feelings that have always been spoken, that always need to be expressed and that each poet, individualizing them, pronounces with the intensity of a first time.”

*

Alfredo Chacón
Poet, Anthropologist, Essayist
“With Alfredo Silva Estrada, I lose a very dear brother and one of the poets I most admire. Venezuelan readers of poetry can hold on to the inextinguishable part of his life: his books of poems and his writings of reflection on poetry. Poets and critics from here and elsewhere will continue to trust that Alfredo Silva Estrada’s work will attain in Latin America and in Spain the acknowledgment it has received in our country and among French-language poets. May it be so.”

Jesús Alberto León
Poet, Scientist, University Professor
“Alfredo stands out amidts Venezuelan poetry of the second half of the twentieth century as a revolutionary, even though I don’t like that word because of the implications it has today. And he stands out because all his contemporaries, which include those who belonged to El Techo de la Ballena or Sardio, centered their fuss in behavior, their ruptures were existential ones transferred to literature. But Alfredo leaves a trace in language which is the theater of all life. We Venezuelan poets owe Alfredo for liberating us from certain slaveries, for having dared to engage in games, in ruptures.”

Bárbara Gunz
Mathematician, Director of the Fundación Gego
“Alfredo and Sonia went every afternoon to Gego and Leufert’s house to have a few drinks and to talk. From that experience emerged Variaciones sobre reticuláreas. Besides, Sonia danced on many occasions among Gego’s works. I was an adolescent and that was an intellectually enriching salon.”

María Antonieta Flores
Poet, Essayist
“Thanks to him I was able to see that it’s true that poetry saves. In desperation, I stumbled onto one of Gego’s panoramas with a blank book. Each word and each verse by Alfredo stopped me and I never left. The poem “Lo nunca proyectado.” Neither cold nor distant, his poetry is emotion and sensuality suspended in a tense web, and it emerges from the everyday... I’ve lost the last of my three poet friends, the poetic as humanity incarnate.”

Luis Enrique Belmonte
Poet, Novelist, Psychiatrist
“My teacher has died, the great poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, who has outlined one of the most fascinating and dangerous adventures of language in contemporary poetry. He was an explorer of the limits and of the“edges of being.” He wrote from the clearing against hostile space. He was a man who made his house a space where poetry and friendship were celebrated. His word always sought to expand the possibilities of being, opening breaches of light and sound in the gills of the day. He died in his chair, on a Wednesday, and those of us who knew and loved him know what Wednesdays meant: the day of encounter after his lit word. He never lost his sharp sense of humor. The last time I saw him he surprised me because he sang “Alma libre” impeccably, one of his favorite songs. He was a western mage with clear power and a science that possesed the mysterious gift of transmuting the word.

Now his soul flies freely.”

*

Before Departing

Before departing
Don’t stop to look
At those undone sheets
And that glass
Where you’ve drunk so many times

Seek out instead
The horizons you can sew like yarn
The birds that eat on the shoulders of the blind
And that trail that will lead you
Like a writing




{ Douglas Gómez Barrueta, Tal Cual, 16 October 2009 }

El poema que escucha mi amigo / Alfredo Silva Estrada (1933-2009)

The Poem My Friend Listens To

In the poem when my friend listens to it

the echo of the earth is prolonged


Silence returns to the throat

the pores of the page reabsorb it


A certain transparency reveals itself in the humus

if we say humus

feeling the connivance of the earth

its indolence necessary to our pain


When the friend receives my poem

a foreign song arrives with the air

that envelops us




{ Alfredo Silva Estrada, Al través, Caracas: Angria Ediciones, 2000 }

XXIV / Manón Kübler

XXIV

now i know i won’t die tonight. if i pass by and go over lost amid splendors and beings i find myself in the form of the mirror that separates my neck from others. if climbing up intricate stairs and sustained by railings i have lived while falling now i know i won’t die tonight and it’s because i rest on the empty side of the bed, repeated side that i name in lower case letters, and number, and complained it goes in texts and i understand the void will continue even with the solid shadow of a beautiful girl resting. now i know. the extended hand seeking itself in the aridity in the lack bursting with that voice that stains the souls of children when i name and where you find the reigned space your children cover and where the dream is dictated while i wrote. and i know i don’t take control of the trigger because it’s not my voice that says goodbye for good to the fetishes i use to decorate my ideas, tonight which won’t be the last even if i want it to be and i feel like a demon with its slight cough and with the arrhythmia of my arms i perch on the machine for the lifting of the complaint nearly dead because i know this night is not.




{ Manón Kübler, Olympia, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992 }

III / Manón Kübler

III

i am done with the drama, i suffer from a lack, from the brutal and mute howl at midnight, from insomnia, from debt, from the rigor coming through the windows or the age. i no longer have any crude stories that deserve to be told, i am unmoved by miserly forms and cold bodies. indifference called off its delicious game of killing me. i am evaporated of all passions. i went from agonized existence to the support of the bed, to the lifted feet of repose. i notice my transformations: women don’t scratch me their memories don’t dig into me when i get home, happy to have a house without dreaming of failure without aspiring to what is irrevocable to the abyss to the inert arms, forever inert on a mistreated body. i am not whipped by my philistine comments nor am i wounded by languages. my tongue’s magnifying glass doesn’t lose its composure over invented bodies it doesn’t seduce it doesn’t adore. i notice with horror, without bravery, that i am beginning to be happy.




{ Manón Kübler, Olympia, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992 }

Mèlancolie / Dayana Fraile

Mèlancolie


This sadness gets tangled in branches
                                                      hangs from plastic vines
silently penetrates me while I scream

Like all sacred beasts it adorns itself with cayennes
burns like a horizon in your palms
dabs itself with cucumber and honey masques

untamed                         rough
disorients the neighbors            carries stones in its mouth

savage
villainous

celebrates the road of the abyss
leaves no room for sleep
drinks water straight from jugs
listens to Chopin records well into the night




{ Dayana Fraile, Lianas de plástico, cuchillos de cartón y otras maneras de pasar el tiempo, 2009 }

Mujeres recién bañadas

[Photo: Mucuchíes, Mérida by Enrique Vila-Matas]


Mujeres recién bañadas (Caracas: Mondadori, 2009), the second book of short stories by Carlos Ávila (Caracas, 1980), begins and concludes with people who leave Caracas (temporarily) and travel to Mérida, finding themselves transformed in some way by the mountainous landscape, its stories and legends, and by semi-mysterious (drugged? dreamed?) occurrences in the Andes.

Some of the characters in these ten short stories are readers, and the protagonist of the stories is a young man, sometimes identified as Carlos. So, there is a sense of autobiography here but in a stylized manner. And this self-referential aspect doesn’t intrude because Ávila enthralls us with how his characters pass through such vivid landscapes and distorted situations, sometimes as though they were invisible, or merely reading.

In the final story of the book, “Desde el monte” [From the Hills], two college students board a bus in Caracas that takes them to the city of Mérida, in the Venezuelan Andes, during a vacation from classes. The narrator delineates an offhand allegiance that reflects on the book we’re about to finish. There is the attention to realist accuracy (the reference to Enrique Vila-Matas visiting Caracas in 2001 to receive the Premio Rómulo Gallegos), an awareness of literature as an inheritance as well as detective work, and Ávila’s skilled architecture of signs and textures (for instance, the layering of stories being told about others telling stories, as if ad infinitum, the edges between telling stories, reading and traveling dissolve) that resonate throughout the book.


“A little more than two years ago I heard Enrique Vila-Matas say that one of his favorite writers was Kafka, and that likewise Kafka’s favorite writers are also his own favorite writers. A foreign reflection, that one, which makes me think the same thing could be happening to me with Vila-Matas himself: if I hear about the name of some writer I don’t know, or that I know very little about, and that Vila-Matas admires him, I immediately become his follower as well.” (114-115)


A few days later, having abandoned his annoying acquaintance from school, the narrator runs into some friends in Mérida who take him up into the rural Páramo region of valleys above the city. They take a bus and then hike to a small cabin with no running water, where they eat some of the region’s powerful mushrooms and where the narrator is able to finally lose some of the edge of sadness and tension he’s brought with him from Caracas.

But these stories never seem to fully resolve themselves, the protagonist of “Desde el monte” is only changed slightly, or his change is subdued. We notice this, for instance, when he hears about a man who may or may not have once lived in the cabin where they stay for the night, in a story a man who now rents the cabin from his friend tells him. He continues to read the world around him as a series of tales that feed into each other:


“Malaquías discovers the mushrooms from the time he’s a boy. When he spends days without coming down the mountain it’s because he has swallowed and he remains dazzled in the back of the house. He can spend hours there breathing with the trees: feeling how his chest opens up into four parts each time he takes in air, and how it closes into four more each time he lets it out. He enjoys watching the sky. He tells me the moon enters him through his forehead and, like a glass hit by light, he manages to see a whole bunch of colors that come out of his head. According to him, he can sometimes distinguish the color of what’s on his mind.” (125)


The title of the book [Freshly Showered Women] is evoked as a series of beautiful images at unexpected and undramatic moments in several stories, during encounters with lovers that we never end up knowing too well. In “Desde el monte,” Ávila identifies this beautiful vision of a moment that ends too soon with an energy glimpsed in the mountains:


“Mérida just beyond the roads. Surrounded by green, by brown and mountain. Way up, where the red-cheeked Chinese live: the sons of muleskinners and frailejón flowers, the grandsons of the Comala fire. Up there on the peak where parsimony and restraint grow. Far from the city noise. In that place, on the very crest of the world’s cathedral, rests Mérida: humid and still, fresh, like recently rained on trees, like a woman just stepping out of the shower, with her hair and crotch wet: smelling of God; of plants.” (129-130)


One of the stories from Mujeres recién bañadas can be read (in Spanish) at ReLectura: “Vaquero dice:.” Ávila’s first book is the short story collection Desde el caleidoscopio de Dios (Caracas: Editorial Equinoccio, 2007). Both books are wonderfully written, sharp and funny, in memory of reading.