Palabras de presentación en la lectura de cuentistas latinoamericanos: Enza García y Mario Morenza (USB) / Dayana Fraile

Introductory Remarks at the Reading by Latin American Short Story Writers: Enza García and Mario Morenza (USB)



Good Afternoon.

Thanks to the invitation extended to me by Mariana Libertad Suárez and Editorial Equinoccio, I now find myself introducing two old friends of mine: Enza García and Mario Morenza.

I met both of them in the hallway that connects the Escuela de Filosofía and the Escuela de Letras at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, that hallway belonging to Mario’s other memories. I accompanied them, anonymously, in their first steps as writers during my academic internship at Monte Ávila Editores and I had the opportunity to participate in the editing process of their first publications: Cállate poco a poco by Enza and Pasillos de mi memoria ajena by Mario. I must confess I was very impressed by both manuscripts and that the best of dispositions marked my work and my readings at that time. I have always been inspired by the fiction being produced by young writers in Venezuela.

Enza García and Mario Morenza are a part of that avalanche of young fiction writers today who are transforming the landscape of the national literary tradition. Both of them, in a short span of time, have become central and paradigmatic voices of this emerging generation.

So it was a pleasant surprise to encounter El bosque de los abedules and La senda de los diálogos perdidos, books that received awards during the Concurso Nacional Universitario.

At the risk of seeming too informal, I will say that Enza’s short stories possess the virtue of shaking the floors and also the walls for us. They leave us picking up ceramic and plaster fragments, after a trembling of 7 on the Richter scale, as though it were possible to put everything back in its place with Crazy Glue or Elmer’s. Through her writing, Enza deconstructs traditional imaginaries and manages to assert agency in substantially original spaces of the creation and reading of those very imaginaries. Cállate poco a poco and El bosque de los abedules materialize battlefields between primordial pulsations and ancestral prohibitions. Freud said that all behaviors present themselves provoked by desire and, precisely, in El bosque de los abedules we can observe how a machinery of desire constitutes itself in the territories of logos.

In “El bonsái de Macarena” we notice a particularly interesting use of the keys to the construction of the female subject in these postmodern times. The narrator transcends the trite recourse to feminine victimization, recovering it in an ironic tone, right at the moment when she has taken on the role of murderer.

Simone de Beauvoir proposed that all sexual phenomena contain an existential meaning. “El bonsái de Macarena” seems to project this hypothesis, desire is the true trigger for the characters’ actions.

In this short story the theme of transcendence is important. I can’t help recalling that Simone de Beauvoir also said that the phallus carnally represents transcendence. The allusion the protagonist makes to her lover’s “very little” penis could be a metaphor, then, for the impossibility of attaining transcendence that these characters suffer. This impossibility definitely ends up pushing them toward the territories of anguish, desperation and antisocial behavior.

In another vein, Mario Morenza’s La senda de los diálogos perdidos evidences an excellent use of humor and a sense of the absurd. His characters are inserted in their respective individual tragedies, barely separated by thin walls. Notwithstanding, Mario makes use of the recourse of parody to define infinite possibilities for pleasure. Tragedies end up becoming tragicomedies, without losing in this process their original and constitutive meaning. Maybe this is why all of us who’ve read La senda de los diálogos perdidos remember it with a complicit smile. Mario’s writing, at times profound, at others poetic, also has the great virtue of making us laugh.

Reading Mario is like going to the beach for a weekend: it’s a renovating and fresh experience.

In “Dos tazas de café antes del trigésimo paso” we find some clues regarding the poetics that sustains the book. The narrator comments: “I like to lean on the balcony and watch people go by, see their faces. See how they contort their features. The situation animates me. This activity, in some way, reminds me of the horse races. All the residents of Block 4 return and depart to their own races. Between those two categorical points that establish moments, there exist phenomena of conclusive character. A story. And in their bags or suitcases and purses they carry their fragmented destiny. Minute pieces with which they’ll build their dreams or end up destroying them. One can say I witness the openings and closings of work days.”

Effectively, the intertwined stories of the characters, often nameless, of Block 4, establish a fragmentary narrative sequence charged with emotiveness. From one of imagination’s balconies, Mario reconstructs the lives of characters that balance themselves between the crushing weight of the quotidian and the restorative hope of each setting sun.

In “Adán y Oto, siameses” Mario takes up once again the literary recourse of the double, tearing it from the kingdom of the fantastic and depositing it in the territories of the grotesque. The myth of the double has always reminded us of the fragility of our identities. This myth resignifies the dualism that dominates human thought: body and soul, good and evil, life and death.

Mario, in an interview he gave to a well-known website, affirmed that the situation of the country might have permeated the writing of this short story. Regardless, he declares that his intention was to create an homage to Jorge Luis Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy and Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas. Without intending to establish reductionist readings, it occurs to us that this story, beyond the effective splitting of the country of the Siamese, could have an interpretation of a political bent, one that’s not too evident and which is perhaps deeper: the avatar of those siblings that must remain together, against their will, because they share vital organs.

Undoubtedly, El bosque de los abedules and La senda de los diálogos perdidos enrich and revitalize Editorial Equinoccio’s catalog. With a paper hug, I celebrate the authors and their editors.




Translator’s Note: Enza García Arreaza’s El bosque de los abedules (2010) and Mario Morenza’s La senda de los diálogos perdidos (2008) are published by Editorial Equinoccio at the Universidad Simón Bolívar.




{ Dayana Fraile, presented at Cuentistas contemporáneos latinoamericanos, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, 23 October 2010 }

El jardín de los pasillos que se bifurcan / Gabriel Payares

The Garden of Forking Hallways

I have become a conjurer of seasons.
I hold in my hands that fraction of a second.
I ignore what came before and after.
Mario Morenza
Pasillos de mi memoria ajena

There are those who think that nothing is written without being about the author himself. No matter the genre chosen, the topics favored or the unquestionable marks of style, all acts of writing contain an individual battle for deciphering one’s own labyrinths, for making out of the ink on paper a very personal Ariadne’s thread, at once escape and minotaur. This labyrinthine image, a somewhat cliché borrowing from Greek mythology, accompanies the present reading of Pasillos de mi memoria ajena (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2007), the first publication by the young writer Mario Morenza, and it serves as a point of departure for certain reflections that are evident in the work.

One would have to begin by stating the obvious: Morenza seems to be conscious of the labyrinth he offers us, of his proposal for a complex and rigorous writing, which he sometimes catalogs as a diary, other times as a novel, but which he structures like a compendium of tales, or perhaps even like a personal collage: a sort of written Frankenstein built out of the textual snippets he was able to find dispersed in notebooks and journals. As with every labyrinth, Morenza’s tends toward dispersion, undoubtedly imitating the capricious prancing of memory, which leaps from one remembrance to another without any apparent fixed and coherent path; and at the same time he submits the very language that constructs it to a chain of mutations, of alterations in register and of apparent entrances and exits from the terrain of fiction, as though the text were trying to destabilize itself and become something new, something whose forms demand, as a first step, the demolition of all linear trajectories. Morenza’s hallways, present in the title of the work itself, are the routes of entry and escape from that personal chaos we tend to call memory, they are a possible direction amidst deviation: family, friends, one’s own personality, the Escuela de Letras at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, the very writing of the book that is being read; Morenza uses himself openly as prime material, in what could be considered a narcissistic gesture by the author, whose work erects for him a golden seat of honor in his own world, or also as a sacrificial outburst: the author presents his own life as a holocaust for fiction.

In this manner, the work’s hallways lead once and again to the author: they are perhaps an attempt to provide himself with an order, to create a map of the labyrinth in which he lives, in hopes of guiding himself toward an exit. This is why the photographs, charts and drawings that illustrate various sections throughout the book turn out to be a series of elements of intimate accompaniment, that contribute for the purpose of drawing a portrait of Morenza himself, in the same way in which a child’s free drawings in a notepad might; but at the same time they constitute elements of collectible meaning, dispersed in the labyrinth as though a family album lay beneath the tale. Because underneath it all there is a curatorial gesture in this deployment of personal forces, and Morenza himself makes note of it in the text that serves as an introduction, “I Can Speak”: “I want to protect my memory from the world so that it won’t continue to be, in this sublime moment, the same or more remote than what it’s already been. No one will interrupt me while I speak to myself.” (6)

This overwhelming introspection involves a risk similar to that of an intimate diary or a confession: the author must choose from among multiple scenarios –hallways– of his life what to tell and what to hide, and in what specific sequence narrate what he chooses. He clearly runs the risk of granting the most superfluous anecdotes an false air of transcendence, or of betraying life –as if the latter were of any concern to the reader– and of attributing to himself an agreed upon, treacherous and convincing memory. But, isn’t this exactly what one does when writing? Isn’t the narrator’s voice always treachery, as it recalls events it never witnessed and never will?

In any case, Morenza assumes this risk and allows himself to be misplaced in this new memory of his, a memory that is both his own and someone else’s. This what probably stands out the most in this book, and offers a certain consolation to the reader who faces the 270 pages of a text that wanders among various genres and which can occasionally discourage its reading, with its close-ups that are too prolonged: the daring versatility of the whole, that often allows its fragments to be taken separately as a type of mosaic or meccano. “Vitrum” and “Demons in the Backyard,” in fact, two of the best tales in the work, are texts that can be appreciated on their own, and whose inclusion in Pasillos de mi memoria ajena provides, more than meaning or clues or alignments, a series of enigmas and questions whose answer we must seek out in the previous blocks, taken from the author’s own life. A game of unfoldings that will culminate in the dialogue between a Mario 8236 and a Mario 8237, versions perhaps of clone travels across the labyrinth of a memory that is now foreign.

One could, finally, say that Morenza wagers for making the life a tale, or for erasing as much as possible the border between the two; traces of bravery and of a certain writerly pride that is surely surprising when found in a young writer, even more so when this is his first book.


Gabriel Payares

Illustration: “Relativity,” Escher


{ Gabriel Payares, 500 ejemplares, 1 August 2010 }

Caracas sin Cabré / Mario Morenza

Caracas without Cabré

From the balcony Fabiana and I have witnessed how the city’s silhouette changes continuously. Buildings grow and an entire block of houses crumbles. A neighborhood is lifted and three others are born on top of what used to be a park or a parking lot. The city, with its Guaire river, with its Parque Central towers, becomes dangerous and gray at night and during the day, with its criminals who, just like streetlights, don’t feel time. The city ripens and grows fat like humans do, though not with grease and calories, but rather with cement and vehicles that install insufferable traffic. And yet, Caracas is still there, it endures and expands. Fabiana and I have been slow witnesses to the changes. The city grows downwards, subterraneously through the Metro lines. It grows toward its sides so as to join with suburbs and commuter cities in a single gray stain. The hills are populated and abandoned, so as to be savagely populated once again. Our mountains aren’t green, but rather brick and zinc. The ecosystem has reinvented itself in order to establish a new stratification. It has no trees, only light posts and stairways improvised by an architectural anarchy. The city moves and breathes and we are the ones responsible for this disturbing unreality. Coche, Catia, Chacao, Casalta, Caricuao, Cotiza, La Candelaria, after all, Caracas is full of citizens who are consumed by life and unreality, order and the notion of law wear a police uniform, from this city whose neighborhoods have lots of Cs, the most ruthless angels. Coche, Catia, Chacao, Casalta, Caricuao, Cotiza, La Candelaria, after all, Caracas is being recognized throughout the world because it devours lives amid its smoke, its cement and its river of manure that cuts through it like a dagger. Caracas is always there, sticking its tongue out at us and about to play a dirty trick on us. “Stop right there,” any criminal says to us on any day pretending to be a stoplight.




Translator’s note: Manuel Cabré (1890-1984) was an artist known for his landscape paintings of Caracas.




{ Mario Morenza, La senda de los diálogos perdidos, Caracas: Editorial Equinoccio, 2008 }

De la literatura y de las carreteras: Entrevista con Carlos Ávila / Mario Morenza

Of Literature and Roads: An Interview with Carlos Ávila


A writer’s words tend to be solemn, but with Carlos Ávila they acquire the simplicity of phrases worth a thousand images.

On the day I arranged to interview Carlos Ávila I ran into him in one of the elevators of the North Tower of the Centro Simón Bolívar. We were heading to our respective offices like the other ten people in there. It was Monday. And it was 7:50 A.M. “Today’s the interview, right? When do we meet?” “When we get out,” I told him. “At 4:30 on the 12th floor. I’m tired. I’m just getting back from Mérida,” he mentioned. Suddenly, a power outtage. The elevator stopped. Everything stopped, except for the red glow with the word FULL trembling just above the elevator doors. They opened.


Writing without Rituals

– In what state do you get inspired to write.
– In the state of Mérida.* (See inset below.)

– If Caracas were the plot for a collection of short stories or a novel, what would you call it?
– I’d call it Caracas Is Not A Short Story [Caracas no es cuento].

– When do stories come to you?
– When I’m not paying attention, when I drift off and discover myself inside one.

– What Venezuelan author do you admire?
– I admire Armando Rojas Guardia, because it has been through his poetry that I’ve been able to be closer to the unnamable.

– What advice do you give young people who want to engage in literature?
– That they ask themselves if they really want to assume a life from a stance of total questioning and with the only certainty being that you’ll be wrong most of the time.

– Do you remember when you said to yourself for the first time: “I want to be a writer”?
– I think those things haven’t been premeditated; I’ve simply provoked it, I’ve taken a few steps, I’ve stopped taking others and circumstances have taken their own course. Now I’m linked to literature but I think all of this obeys an answer to life itself and not, at least in my case, something planned out in advance.

– Do you have a ritual?
– No.


Ávila Kaleidoscopes

– For Jorge Luis Borges the Aleph was in a basement; for Enrique Vila-Matas (Rómulo Gallegos Prize 2001), in Mérida. For Carlos Ávila, where does he find his own Aleph and what does it contain?
– My own Aleph would be in our voice, and it would be a name, it would be a word that contained all of them.

– What do the sounds of El Silencio [in downtown Caracas] mean for you?
– They mean the murmur of cities: the screams of the walls, the breathing of motors... The screeching of taxis, as Cayayo would say.


Carlos in Motion

– How do you see life, what’s it like from the 21st floor in the offices of El Perro y La Rana [publishers]?
– I see a place where everything is alive, a city where no zombies live, nor specters or any of those dark artifices among which some poets move. Though, to be honest, you can see it better from the 23rd, where there’s fire.

– How do you see life, what’s it like from a bus when you travel?
– I don’t know if it’s because one is always in motion, but crossing a path marked by the repetition of light posts and trees, one after another, always ends up being introspective. The road is reflexive, so that the glance turns inward, toward our memory or toward our imagination, toward things that hurt us and those that heal us, sometimes toward the names and gestures of the people one can’t forget, and almost always toward what we can’t resolve or respond to, all in an incessant and urgent gallery of images that repeat themselves while the landscape outside surges frenetically.

– How do you see life, what’s it like on the subway when you travel through the city?
– It’s active, it’s vertiginous and it’s rushed, it always moves faster; and I don’t know if that makes it all harder for some people, but for me in particular it ends up being defiant and because of that entertaining.


Inset

Fragment from the short story “Desde el monte” from the book Mujeres recién bañadas:

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.


Legend

A short story writer who moves with and on the road of his stories.

____________________________________

Carlos Ávila (Caracas, 1980) received his undergraduate degree in Literature from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. In 2004 he obtained the Premio Nacional Universitario de Literatura, in fiction; a year later he received an honorable mention in the V edition of the Concurso Nacional de Cuentos SACVEN. He has published two books of short stories, Desde el caleidoscopio de Dios (2007) and Mujeres recién bañadas (2009), which will soon be released.




{ Mario Morenza, El Apéndice de Pablo #6, May 2009 }