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 }

“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 }

Renato Rodríguez, topo de la narrativa venezolana / Luis Barrera Linares

Renato Rodríguez, Venezuelan Literature’s Mole

In my work as a writer and researcher of our literature, Renato Rodríguez has been a crucial author and character ever since I read his first book (Al sur del Equanil, 1963). I have always thought he might be the most blessed Venezuelan writer of all, in that he’s had the fortune of personifying the luminous life of an almost clandestine novelist who at the same time could be useful for contextualizing an excellent adventure novel. He hasn’t needed to invent persecutions, exiles or censorship in order to have something to tell. In this respect I compare him with two of our writers who endured a similar syndrome: Julio Garmendia and Rafael Bolívar Coronado.

Having admired him for a long time because of what that magisterial novel had meant for myself and for my aunt Eloína, I researched until I was able to meet him in person in 1985, in Mérida (through Alberto Jiménez Ure) and later on we exchanged a couple correspondences. At the time I realized that Renato truly seemed like the stamp of a character out of his own novels. I lost track of him personally, but not in terms of literature, once he decided to move to the state of Aragua, where the Premio Nacional de Literatura now finds him.

I could allude here to a couple different perceptions by which my attention was immediately caught by the novel Al sur del Equanil. One has to do with my work as a teacher of literature, the other with my conception of fiction and my freedom as a reader.

In order to explain the first perception, I could say this is one of the first contemporary Venezuelan novels to take seriously that phenomenon which after the eighties would begin to be pompously called “metafiction.” One of the variants of that modality is related to the game of fiction within fiction. And Renato practices it from the early sixties onwards.

The second perception, the freer one if you will, that of the free writer and reader, is a consequence of what I’ve just referred to. It relates to the links between the fiction writer that Renato is and fiction writing with which he’s managed to constitute himself. Between what he talks about in person and what appears written in his novels, we always seem to be on the exact border between the real and the fictional.

I profoundly admire those who’ve managed to assume narrative creation as a parody of existence, as a contrast to the formality and rigidity that has characterized a good part of our writers, as something that goes beyond cardboard cut outs in an effort to capture readers. And this is exactly what has impacted me about Renato Rodríguez’s fiction. Just as I have perceived this in two other Venezuelan novelists: Francisco Massiani and José Rafael Pocaterra.

This is why I’ve believed that Renato personifies one of the most authentic Venezuelan literary projects. Merely finding out that Al sur del Equanil could have been named Al sur del Ecuador (we should remember that Equanil is an antidepressant medication, which is what makes the title he arrived at by chance, according to what Salvador Garmendia once told us, so perfect). Nor could I imagine it could have been called Al sur del Meprobanato or Al norte de París. I believe in magic and I believe that literary texts, when they are destined to permanence, seek out their own titles until they find them, without any need for us authors to get in the way.

Just reading that back cover for the edition of his first book in which there were no judgments or praises, but rather presumptions and supposed rejections against the author and his work, sarcastically written by the author himself; just knowing that one time, in his work as an artisan for a parade, Renato built a dragon head that he later, with the help of friends, had to take out through a window three stories high because it wouldn’t fit through the door; just knowing that his father went to elementary school with the poet Andrés Eloy Blanco and that Renato himself spent time with Julio Cortázar, with Vargas Llosa and with so many other writers who’ve reached the most absolute notoriety while he he has almost remained (of his own will) in the shadows; well, may these few “justs” suffice to express my complete admiration for a Venezuelan writer who comes into light after having to self-publish at his own expense a good portion of his books.

I don’t mean to say by all this that one should necessarily write about what one has lived. But it does seem to me that one of the most important achievements of literature is that the writer end up looking like one of the characters he creates and not vice versa (that is, and not that the characters have something of us in them). The second option is much easier. And for the first to happen, in other words, in order for the author to end up looking like his characters, I think one has to make a greater creative effort. I’m very attracted by the idea that readers end up wondering about the possibility of the existence of the characters the author brings to life. That’s why I enjoy when readers ask me if my aunt Eloína exists or not, a matter which by now even I haven’t resolved. And as I reader of Al sur del Equanil I have always had the same experience. I’ve never been sure if David (the protagonist) or one of his heteronyms emerged from the novel to become Renato Rodríguez or if Renato grew tired of the exterior world and decided to go live inside that or any one of his other novels.

I now introduce him for this who don’t know him: René Augusto Rodríguez Morales, writer born in Porlamar, island of Margarita, Venezuela, South America, in 1927, creator of the character-writer Renato Alberto Rodríguez (RAR), forced editor of some of his books under the editorial imprint of Libros RARos, has been a type of mole in our literature who at last, now, emerges into the light. But, careful, not of his own volition, nor because he’s sought out his journalist friends to act as seeming paparazzis and catapult him before his time. He emerges because of the impact of his stories that are almost novels, which is why he calls them Quanos (Quasi Novels, 1997), and because of the narrative marvels of his more extensive texts such as El bonche (1976), ¡Viva la pasta! (1984), La noche escuece (1985), Insulas (1996). Thus, he has arrived because of his own weight and worth to where he had to reach: Venezuela’s Premio Nacional de Literatura. So now I celebrate that the character has emerged from his novels to receive it.




Translator’s note: The original Spanish version of this article can be read at Luis Barrera Linares’s blog.




{ Luis Barrera Linares, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 2 December 2006 }

Figuras emblemáticas de la cultura / Oswaldo Barreto

Emblematic Cultural Figures

On the occasion of the recent awarding of the national prizes to artists, writers and cultural promoters, we’ve talked here about Renato Rodríguez and Rafaela Baroni as emblematic figures of Venezuela’s cultural life during the previous democratic regimes. Both artists incarnate this representative nature in diverse manners, which we can barely mention in such a brief article. Seen as a completed whole already, Renato Rodríguez’s fiction presents itself to us as an original and vigorous testimony in two different aspects.

On the one hand we encounter, in the plane of his formation as an author and in the elaboration of his work, a person who decides – having spent his youth working in fields completely removed from any formal ties to literature – to consecrate himself to transforming his own experiences and those of his closest fellow beings in material for his fiction. His three novels, Al sur del Equanil, El bonche and La noche escuece, along with that short piece of gastronomical fiction – a pioneer in this genre among us – ¡Viva la pasta!, all seem to be an exposition of not just his experiences, but also of the author’s arduous task of mastering methods, techniques and abilities of the task he practices. And his opening up to the world is complete, in time as well as in space. At the beginning of the sixties – which is when the new democratic regimes began as well – the man who has lived immersed in the changes that have taken Venezuela from being a rural country isolated from the world to another one, each day more urban and more closely linked to the world, also opens himself to the study of other literatures, other tongues and cultures. First South America and then the United States and Europe become for Renato laboratories where he researches the present and past of those literatures, allowing them to penetrate almost imperceptibly his own creations. The vicissitudes of his characters, presented with a humor that is all his own and a very personal type of analysis, can start in a tiny corner of Los Chorros and continue through France’s Normandy, through Hamburg, or resuscitate in New York. Renato’s fiction has no frontiers other than those of his own art, he enacts his creation in complete freedom.

And this brings us to the second emblematic aspect. This creative freedom was a normal matter in those Venezuelan cultural atmospheres, where you didn’t write in pursuit of a determined formula or in an attempt to artistically incarnate a political tendency. The reception of Renato’s work and his publication by state funded editorial houses were motivated by a single quality: its extraordinary quality.




{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 21 August 2006 }

El bonche

[Photo: Cambridge, MA, 1969]


Since reading Renato Rodríguez’s novel El bonche (Monte Ávila Editores, 2006) this summer, I’ve been asking friends how they might translate the title into English. The word “bonche” really has no direct translation, and everyone I asked agreed the word “party” wouldn’t be accurate. A “bonche,” as I understand its spoken context, is more than just a party, it’s an event, a spectacle, an excess and a release from the everyday. While a party might be fun, a “bonche” is memorable long after it ends.

This is Rodríguez’s second novel, first published by Monte Ávila Editores in 1976. The entire book takes place during one day in New York City, as the narrator travels by subway to a bonche being held by friends, hangs out in the kitchen and living room of their apartment while commenting on the various denizens of that evening, and concludes after he ingests from a potent batch of LSD (or, as he calls it in the book, “lisergistuff”), stumbles out into the dawn streets of Manhattan and is transported via hallucination back to Caracas.

Born on the island of Margarita in 1927, Rodríguez has spent much of his life living outside Venezuela, in places such as San Francisco, New York, Boston, Paris, Bogota, Santiago and sundry towns and highways in between, employed in all sorts of jobs including carpenter, electrician, hotel night clerk and chef, among others. He published his first novel, Al sur del Equanil, in Caracas in 1963, inaugurating an experimental fiction that still hasn’t been completely digested in Venezuela. He was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 2006, and Monte Ávila Editores has committed to reprinting all of his books, an endeavor that will hopefully assure his work gains the wide readership it deserves. In Venezuela, for instance, Rodríguez remains an underground figure, read and admired by a fervent minority. He now lives in the mountains outside Caracas, far removed from the literary circles of Caracas, and as far as I know he’s no longer writing.

I read El bonche within a week, not wanting to finish the book because it’s such a pleasure to inhabit its pages. I also identify with the situations and characters in their late 1960s and early 1970s setting of New York City and Boston, hippie or counterculture Venezuelans and Latin Americans adrift in an age where traditions, cultures and the world seemed to be disintegrating. I was born in 1970, so what I actually remember are fragments of my parents and their friends. The way, for instance, I was aware of how my parents and I seemed “weird” to other people when we arrived in the middle class milieu of Caracas in 1976, with our long hair, vegetarianism, simple clothes and whatever other hippie accoutrements we brought from Cambridge. Reading El bonche, I often felt like I was getting a chance to finally listen in on parties and conversations I missed as a child but which had somehow filtered into my consciousness. Above all, though, I identify with Rodríguez as a writer for whom the act of reading is an adventure in itself. His narrator often comments on his obsessive reading habits:


“The vice of reading dominates me. Every day I lie down with a book and read until I fall asleep.” (93) [All translations from the Spanish are my own.]


Rodríguez’s funny, irreverent voice certainly has some parallels in writers such as his contemporary (and I would say aesthetic cousin) Kerouac, or Henry Miller, or even moments in Bukowski. But reading El bonche one is continually reminded that Rodríguez is inventing his own type of novel, one that is never satisfied with being a novel but ventures into the realm of memoir and countercultural rebellion against aesthetic or political orthodoxy. Being the late 60s/early 70s, there is, for instance, the requisite presence of radical political stances. Yet El bonche’s narrator remains outside any attempt at purity, positing an anarchic irreverence toward both conservative and revolutionary alignments. In one scene, the narrator reacts to a friend’s revolutionary ideas with irony, and also composes a poem in English that hints at the untranslatability of the book’s title:


“That Ludwig is pushy, I can’t stand his attitude, he claims to be an intellectual and a Marxist, but I’m more of a Marxist than he is, after all I’ve seen every single Marx Brothers movie. He always wants to hang out with intellectuals and artists. What right does he have to keep calling me a poet? Does he think that flatters me? Not really, I know several poets and I don’t envy them at all, they’re mostly just pathetic, unhappy creatures. Now, if he wants me to pass for a poet, I’ll do it to make him happy. But, what the hell is this idea of his of refuting me in front of people? Bad manners and nothing else. I’ll even write him a little poem if he asks me, in English no less. You don’t think so? Well here it goes... What should its title be? Let’s call it El bonche, since we’re all in the midst of a bonche.

EL BONCHE= THE BUNCH

(The translation isn’t very catholic, but with a little effort and imagination it works.)

Everybody is sitting on his own stone age.
All things are brand new.
Languages haven’t yet been created
at the tower of Babel

Matters not the awful silence
when every fucking word is elsemeaning
I read the newspapers and ask myself
How much in God we trust?

Rain is all over and something is rotting
on the mount Ararat

While I wait for an answer
I will turn on my TV box.

Who’s gonna stop me? With the same right that a bunch of guys who call themselves poets and artists go around working as carpenters, I can, as an actual carpenter, write poems. There’s no school where you can study poetry. Poetry is the wisdom that’s never learned. Only in Venezuela are there poets with degrees, who’ve graduated from the School of Letters at UCV.” (74-75)


The beauty of this novel is that it defines itself as something other than a novel, just as it captures the ephemeral nature of a memorable bonche, a party where anything can happen, an event that is merely an allegory of that larger bonche that is life. While Rodríguez’s characters are involved with the counterculture impulses of a specific moment in the U.S., his narrator is never completely devoted to any single approach to living. Rather, like Kerouac’s lonesome travelers, he’s always aware of the distances he has traversed and how his self-imposed exile is at once literal and metaphysical:


“But a bonche is a bonche and when one shows up at the door I become a wild animal, I do my yoga asanas with extra concentration, practice my most spectacular dance steps. Most of the time I come back to my house frustrated, deep in thought and with my head hanging down. But, what the fuck? A bonche is a bonche and you can never discount the possibility that something might happen, something important. That’s how it’s been since I got to New York.” (78)


The book is dedicated to various friends, including “My cat Micifuz,” who shows up in several hilarious scenes, such as one where he writes a confessional memoir the narrator comes home to find in his typewriter one afternoon. “Micifuz’s Memoirs” is a mirror image of El bonche itself, a text within the text that mocks reader and writer, pointing out our arrogance as humans when we forget our pets are sentient beings too.

Rodríguez’s aesthetics are wide ranging, nurtured as much by his voracious reading as by his travels throughout the world. A particularly fascinating interlude occurs in Paris, where the narrator works as a night clerk at a cheap hotel. There he spends his night shifts reading at the solitary desk and befriends a man named Goldstein who is a member of the Letterist International, and who begins to recommend books for him to read. The narrator is always making wondrous discoveries as a reader, in the books, people and cities he encounters.

From the perspective of his wanderings, the narrator of El bonche often looks back at Venezuela as an absurd and contradictory place that is “... carefully disorganized so that punctuality becomes impossible.” (209) During a season spent traveling in Germany, the narrator spends hours on a park bench learning to play a guitar. In one beautiful moment, a German girl sits silently beside him one afternoon reading Die Vorsokratischer Philosophen and looking over at him occasionally, finally departing without a word. In El bonche, personal and amorous connections occur but they always seem to fade as unexpectedly as they appear. His focus on trying to learn how to play guitar symbolizes the novel’s self-reflexive analysis of the art of fiction and its relationship to visionary experiences:


“I put the guitar back in its case and remained there, sitting still, overwhelmed by a lack of inspiration, I regretted having bought the guitar. The ancestral sounds of the al-ud weren’t coming to me, it was like the most authentic emptiness, an absolute emptiness and I once again felt the fear of the absolute that pushed me to flee toward a north that never ended in any physical border, of the absolute nothingness, which is the most chilling of escapes, and of finding everything and nothing at every corner, at every café, at every barber shop, at every cigarette shop, in all the nooks of a country where holy water is called beer.” (212)


At one point late in the party, having ingested his dose of “lisergistuff,” the narrator wanders into the streets of downtown Manhattan and mocks poets once again, as he notices they never fully prepared him for the wonders of the night he’s now experiencing, a moment of visionary consciousness that Rodríguez leavens with his sarcastic wit:


“Poets are a bunch of motherfuckers, they’ve swindled me. How is it they’ve never been capable of telling me about the beauty of this night and all its splendor?” (229)


But of course Renato Rodríguez is a poet, one whose medium is prose, and the texture and visionary nature of this book confirm this. Throughout the novel one finds moments of insight on exile, travel, love, desire, ambition and the labyrinthine paths of writing. Rodríguez and his narrator (are they the same person?) mock and curse poets because they identify with them, in all their sublime moments as well as their frequent tediousness. After all, it’s the poet who seems to sustain these pages and their ability to transform us and our surroundings momentarily:


“But reaching Brooklyn Bridge probably would have cost him more than what he had left and, besides, Brooklyn Bridge no longer exists because Hart Crane died, the one who kept it upright with his song, just as the laments keep the Wailing Wall upright in Jerusalem; the day the lamentations end, the wall will collapse.” (119)

Renato Rodríguez viaja por su memoria: “La escritura nunca fue un pretexto, siempre fue mi vida” / Albinson Linares

Renato Rodríguez Travels Through His Memory: “Writing Was Never A Pretext, It Was Always My Life”


[Photo by William Dumont for El Nacional]

From his refuge in Tasajera, the winner of the National Prize in Literature [2006] talks about his obsession with Latin America, Europe and the United States, which led him to live in various countries and write titles such as Al sur del Equanil (1963), El bonche (1976) and La noche escuece (1985), novels in which his experiences as a wanderer are told with particular mastery.



It takes nearly two and a half hours from Caracas. The extreme changes in temperature pass from the warm steam of the capitol to mountainous cold, while one ascends on a narrow road that snakes its way to Tasajera. In the middle of the mountains of Aragua state, breathing the fresh air that imposes itself at 1,250 meters of altitude and in a building that was once a saw mill, lives Renato Rodríguez.

The aroma of a certain type of piled up wood reigns in the little house where, since a few years ago, the winner of this year’s National Prize in Literature lives. A small living room in which an old television and a bookshelf stuffed with books occupy almost the entire space, barely leaving room for the dark leather armchairs where the interview takes place. Renato is thinner, maybe the result of his convalescence from a fractured femur he sustained a few months ago, after a fall.

The humidity makes the air heavy and, at the end of the room, a rusted oil lamp presides the table in the improvised kitchen area. With some difficulty, the writer clings to his walker while he settles in front of his library, a peculiar display of literary remains from many travels, throughout half the world.

McLuhan and Count Villamediana, Balzac and Stendhal, next to books about Italian and Spanish cuisine. Hesse and Goethe take spots between Rafael Pocaterra and Eduardo Liendo, among the writers the author has been going through recently. The roar of the rain that assaults the fragile tin roof marks the moment when the author, pulling on his whitish beard, begins the twisted transit of his memory. Then, the journey begins.

Al sur del Equanil
– Do you remember your first contact with literature?
– I’ve always read everything, many European, Latin American and American authors. I remember the French, like Dumas with The Three Musketeers. But when I was a child my grandmother would sit me on her lap and read to me. She read The National Episodes by Pérez Galdós and some things from Don Quixote. Her name was Victoria and she was an impenitent reader, she was actually my godmother, but since my natural grandmothers died I speak of her as my grandmother; it’s funny because I was a reader before I learned how to read. I was read to. In fact, they eventually started to scold me because I read so much.

– There has always been talk of a tense relationship with your father. Were you named after him?
– No, my name is René Augusto, but ever since I was a child everyone called me Renato like my father. I’m the oldest, the only boy and I carry his name like an old custom. You could say our relationship was never very good. I remember that dad went to elementary school with Andrés Eloy Blanco, in fact, our families were close and the Blancos’ crib ended up in my house, and that’s where I slept when I was a child. Although I never spoke with him, I tended to see him in Caracas, and on several occasions I witnessed his drunkenness.

– Your travels begin when you are a child. When do you have to move away to various places in order to study?
– Yes, actually everything began here in Venezuela because I studied in Porlamar, La Asunción, Carúpano, Los Teques and Caracas. It used to be very difficult, because in the interior of the country there were no secondary schools, only federal schools that only presented two years, which would always alternate. So you would study your first year at one, your second at another, and so on. That’s why you had to live in different places.

– At what moment did you feel the need to express yourself through writing?
– There were always signs. While I studied in Los Teques, I felt the calling of God and I thought I would dedicate myself to the priesthood. I immersed myself in what St. John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul,” and I began praying and taking communion on a daily basis. Finally, when I spoke to Father Ojeda, who was the superior, and told him about my problem, he laughed at me and said I was crazy, that I wasn’t made for such a calling. Since I felt so bad, so confused, I told him that nothing existed for me anymore. And he was the first person to tell me that I had to dedicate myself to writing, because that was my trade. I remember that very clearly.

– Do you remember those first attempts?
– I began to write on my own in Chile, because I had a friend who was driving me crazy telling me that I should be a writer. It turns out we were walking around the streets of Santiago one night and he told me: “Now you’re ready, go home and start writing.” Like an automaton I went to my little rented room and spent the rest of the night writing a story, which turned out to be very bad, about prostitutes and brothels, something very immature and common.

– When you left on that first trip, did you think you would visit so many countries in those years?
– I left Venezuela for the first time in 1947. I left for Bogotá and I ended up living in Ecuador, Perú and Chile. I had desire, youth, and now I believe that was my destiny. I was obsessed with my continent, which gave me strength to live and open a path for myself. Besides, in those times people were marvelous, very attentive and cordial.

– What anecdotes do you recall from that first voyage?
– Caramba! There’s so many of them. I remember I traveled from Cúcuta to Bogotá in the same plane as Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who at that time was on a tour for his electoral campaign. Out of sheer coincidence I emerged from the plane right after him and, at that instant, I realized that Libertad Lamarque was also on board. Imagine my surprise when I saw myself on the front pages of all the Colombian newspapers the next day. That was a marvelous city, in the Gran Colombia café on Seventh Avenue, I met many Colombian writers, such as Arango and León de Greiff. I was in Perú when Gaitán was assassinated, which was horrible. I used to frequent some of the circles of the APRA [Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana] and met Víctor Raúl Haya de La Torre, who I also coincided with in Paris. In Santiago, which is a city that enchanted me, I always went to a café named after a woman, I think it was the Flora, and there I engaged in delicious conversations with poets like Nicanor Parra, Violeta Parra, Pablo and Carlos de Rohka. I remember that’s where I met Albert Camus, who was a friendly guy who spoke Spanish very well. Then I returned to Venezuela, stopping before in Chiclayo, a city in Perú, where my father had to “rescue” me because I had a stomach virus.

Old Europe
– When did you depart for the old continent?
– I was in Caracas for nearly 10 years, until 1960. Because of a political deception I decided to leave the country and I fell into a desperate crisis, a very serious one. I remembered that as a child I always tended to see a freight ship on Margarita island called “El Colombie,” and actually, at a certain moment, my grandmother once took me on a guided visit to the ship when it was in port. So, the idea came to me to enter a travel agency where a friend of mine worked and when I asked him about the ship he casually answered that it was making its final trip and no longer came to Venezuela but to Guadalupe instead. I went to Guadalupe, got on board and shared a cabin with captain Joseph Ropars, a very pleasant man from Martinique; as soon as I entered with my luggage, I noticed a box of rum. I remember he said to me: “Look, my friend, we have to drink this box of rum because customs won’t let me enter with it.” Of course, we traveled very happily and the “twelve girls” lasted for the entire trip to England. Although I must recognize that on the leg between the Azores and Great Britain, the sea became very violent and the rum almost ran out. That really would have been a tragedy.

– How important was it for a young writer to live in the “City of Light”?
– Very important, a dream come true. I still remember when I arrived at Le Havre, I was still dizzy from the amount of rum I had drunk and as soon as I got off, a pretty prostitute asked me if I wanted to go out with her; it was really something unforgettable. I did everything: I was a night receptionist, a cook, a worker and I also organized travel packets to a French dependency. There were writers and painters from all over the world. In the Latin Quarter even the air you breathed was artistic. As soon as I arrived, I registered at the Sorbonne, in Literature and Human Sciences, so I could eat at the university cafeteria, where one could eat well for little money. I attended a few classes, but soon grew bored.

– What was your encounter with the Peruvian novelist Julio Ramón Ribeyro like?
– We shared a great friendship that marked me a great deal. Since we first met, we got along well. I remember him very well. He wasn’t too tall, about my height, thin and always very affable. He had been writing for a while and he had even been published. Since I was an unpublished author, he always cared about me a great deal and would always give me advice. I learned a lot from our conversations, and we’d always go to La Contraescarpe where we would spend hours talking about books, women, and drinking wine. On that same corner lived a Peruvian painter with the last name Orellana, whom we’d wake up late at night to continue the conversation in his miniscule studio. Those were other times when we were all exiles in Paris, but we were creating a lot, everyone wrote. I remember that’s where I also met Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa and Alfredo Bryce Echenique.

– At that time, were you writing Al sur del Equanil?
– Of course, while I’ve lived, I’ve always been writing. For me, writing was never a pretext, it was always my life and that novel condensed much of what had happened to me. I also loved living in New York, where they called me Rubber Legs because of my talent for dancing. I lived in Little Italy, specifically in the Saint Anthony neighborhood. I still vividly recall the mailbox located on Grant Street for contributions to the mafia. Everyone assumed I was just another Italian, they said I was Neapolitan, because I worked as a pizza cook in a restaurant, and my pies were always good. In the miniscule apartment where I lived I owned a gramophone. I used to peek through a hole in the gramophone and I always saw Caruso singing inside, standing up.

Political Deceptions
– What do you remember from your time as a political activist for the Copei political party?
– Many things. When I began I was still a student and it wasn’t a political party yet, but instead it was busy supporting candidates in elections. I liked it because I felt I was being useful, and this was a country that was being shaped in democracy.

– Why did you abandon its ranks before you went to Europe?
– When I returned to Venezuela from my journey through South America I rejoined Copei, which was already a political party, but there came a time when I became disillusioned; I always questioned the party because I had the impression that it had become an organism merely destined to support Rafael Caldera’s aspirations.

At that time, because of my travels and readings, I had learned a great deal about the structures of political parties and I knew that those institutions needed to have a defined ideology, a social and economic proposal, a vision for the country. Y grew disenchanted and I was a real pest for other activists, because I would question many of the politics and declarations of the leaders.

– Is it true that someone accused you of being a conspirator?
– Of course! Someone in the party accused me of being a conspirator. That was fashionable in those times, because democracy was just beginning with Rómulo Betancourt’s government, and the famous Punto Fijo Pact had just been signed. Anyone who didn’t support the pact totally and completely was considered a conspirator.

One time, a friend of mine who worked for El Nacional called me, because he was in Copei and among its higher circles. He told me: “Look René, be careful because someone in the party denounced you as a conspirator and they’ve already given the order twice for Digepol to arrest you.” When I asked him what the party was going to do about it, he answered that Horacio Moros had gone twice to talk about the topic with Oscar Zamora Conde and hadn’t been received; in other words, they didn’t care about me.

When that happened, I renounced my position as Secretary General of Sabana Grande, in the parish of El Recreo, and in the branch I had founded in Chapellín; that’s when I decided to retire completely.




{ Albinson Linares, El Nacional, 21 August 2006 }