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Articles and Chronicles

WITH MANUEL GONZÁLEZ PRADA

Lima, March 1918

The reading room of the library, as always, jam-packed.

Its peace, abstractive. One hand after another that impatiently thumbs through pages. The delayed footsteps of some conservative, scouring the stacks. Oil paintings of illustrious Peruvians on the walls get damaged by the light of the large old windows.

We walk in. To the board room. With a fine welcoming attitude, seated softly on the couch, as if he were auscultating the spiritual moment, the maestro drops words I never dreamed I’d hear.

His vigorous sentimental dynamism, captivating and absorbing; the fresh expression of his venerable continent’s spring, has something of soft winged marble in which the pagan Hellas used to incarnate divine gestures, the superhuman energy of its gods. I don’t know why, before this man, an extraordinary reverberation, a breath of centuries, an idea of synthesis, one like an emotion of unity comes together between my fibers. One could say his shoulders fly that legendary flight of an entire race, and on his snowy apostolic crown, the maximum spiritual prowess of one hemisphere bursts in beams of inextinguishable white light.

Moved, I look upon him; my heart beating faster than ever; my greatest mental energies shooting out and flying toward every horizon in a thousand shimmering sparks, as if some diligent flogging were suddenly given with a million invisible arms for some miraculous job, beyond the cell … Because González Prada, by hypnotic virtue that in a normal state is only peculiar to genius, imposes himself, sequesters us, takes possession of our spirit, and ends up altering our course.

During this visit, as in the prior ones, Prada speaks of art. He doesn’t lavish us with his words. Rather, they are lapped with emotion and optimism, but not solemnity.

What a way to detox in front of this immense mountain of thought! “But the professors say no,” I reply. “They say symbolist literature is nonsense.”

“The professors … always the professors!” He smiles mercifully.

Not even in his sentences does he expend pontifical solemnity. The line of his noble silhouette forever vibrates in a thirsty fervor for truth. He doesn’t have that pause of senescence; he feels life right in the meridian, yearning, restless, renewing. No mild wing passes though him to swoop away horizontally, but instead it’s the wing in accelerated rhythm of a flight that eternally rises. That’s why he’s not solemn, why he doesn’t look old. He’s a rare, perennial, equatorial flower of prolific rebellion.

I ask him about Peruvian poetry.

“There’s the influence of contemporary French decadents,” he says, and, savoring a proclamation feigning complacence, he adds, “and Maeterlinck.”

A broad pause of conviction ensues at the end of his every phrase that, after being uttered, seems to consolidate their substantial value into blood, powerfully stuffing our veins with their ideal melody.

So I fervently beg the great Renán commentator, “As Valdelomar remarked to me the other day, Peru will never know how to express the immense gratitude it owes to Maeterlinck.”

The hue of his face enlivens in a smile that flutters, through the silence of forgotten summits far from here.

“And the youth of today,” he says, as if enthusiastically hammering out a warm applause with his lips, “is the offspring of his sublime liberating work. Yes, indeed,” he continues, “one must go against the shackles, against academics.” A founding diamond twinkles in his visionary eyes. And I remember that steel bible called Páginas libres. And I feel enveloped in the incense of a modern altarpiece without effigies.

“In literature,” he goes on, “the shortcomings of technique, the incongruities of manner, are unimportant.”

“And the grammatical errors?” I ask. “And the boldness of expression?”

He smiles at my naivety. “Those errors go unnoticed,” he replies with an expression of patriarchal tolerance. “And the boldness, in particular, is to my liking.”

I lower my head.

In the grave distinction of his demeanor, the splenetic opaque clarity of the room blows out and withers. At his feet a tongue of humble sunshine crawls, which forms a delicate flame of opal woolens that had arrived from afar out of breath on the run.

As I hear these last words from the philosopher, I think about so many hostile hands already in the distance, and I look forward to the morning when there will be a dawn.

With a slight smile that curves in subtle interrogation, sounding and studying, González Prada talks, thus lengthening the moments of his intellectual acceptance, and he introduces me with an unexpected enthusiastic eulogy.

He invites me to visit him again. This master of the continent, this orator who’s pulverized so much of the deformed organ of our republican life, whose work is not of dried-out leaves, of simply speaking well, but of incorruptible immortal bronze, like that of Plato and Nietzsche; this egregious captain of generations, always brilliant, whom the youth arms and of whom it thinks and will keep on thinking; this gentle man, enemy of all formalism, and likewise of all farce, shakes my hand in the doorway of the Biblioteca Nacional in a most personal expression of intelligence and courtesy.

I leave trembling. In view of what I’ve been told by the author of Horas de lucha, Minúsculas, and Exóticas, I feel my nerves ineffably stiffen like spears recently sharpened for combat.

Amid the gravelly noises of people who come and go, a beggar’s flute is weeping, played by the weak panting of his fast; and turning onto San Pedro, I discern that his sobbing is directed in supplication at the doors of the church. Could that blind man not know that those doors lead to the church and, since no one lives inside, no one will open them for him on this Friday afternoon of the poor?

[Taken from Antenor Orrego’s personal files, without date or place of its first publication]

[JM]

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WITH JOSÉ MARÍA EGUREN

With certain bitterness, the great symbolist of El Dios de la centella says to me, “Oh, there’s so much to fight, so much that’s combated me! When I was starting out, friends with some authority in these matters would always discourage me. And I, as you understand, ended up believing that I was making a mistake. Only a good while later did González Prada celebrate my verse.”

While his agile, cordial, and deeply sinuous voice dissolves, his stunningly dark eyes seem to search for memories and wander slowly through the room. Eguren the poet is of a medium build. On his face, of a noble, somewhat toasted white tone, his thirty-six years already babble some lines of autumn. His spontaneous manners, cut up in distinction and fluidity, inspire devotion and sympathy at the outset. The explanations he gives for some of his symbols suggest the rarest of illusions. He resembles an oriental prince who travels in pursuit of impossible sacred berry bushes.

“Has your approach always been the same as it is now?” I ask him.

“Yes,” he replies, lively and joyful, “with a short romantic parenthesis. Many of Rubén Darío’s skills,” he adds, “I had too, before they became known over here. It’s just that, until very recently, no newspaper wanted to publish my poems. Of course, I never exposed myself to rejection, but as you already know, no one would accept them.”

Then, he recalls for me his long years of literary isolation, which proved to be fertile for American letters.

“Symbolism has now prevailed in America,” he says with a polished accent. Symbolism of the phrase, that is, French symbolism, has already been consolidated on the continent; as for the symbolism of thought, this has been too, but with rather diverse nuances. For example, my tendency is different from any other, according to González Prada. It’s in this way that, as you see, it’s impossible to specify the compendious physiognomy of contemporary American poetry.”

Eguren is enthused and visibly takes pleasure in his discussions about art. He offers me an aromatic English cigarette and, between one and the next puff of smoke, through our lips pass the names of Goncourt, Flaubert, and Lecont de Lisle, along with some American and Peruvian writers, mixed into some divine eternal verse.

“You and I have to fight so much,” he says, with a gesture of mild resignation.

“But you have already enjoyed success all over America,” I argue. “What news do you have from abroad?”

“In Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and Colombia, they know of me and publish my poems enthusiastically. And I have numerous relationships with the intellectuals from those countries. Beyond that, we shall see, we shall see, not just yet …” (The pain and genius of Verlaine, Poe, and Baudelaire, unrecognized by their century, passes through my mind.) “And in Trujillo?” Eguren asks me with lively interest.

I’m caught off guard by this question and, without a way out, I shuffle and reposition myself on the divan, until finally, as if suddenly pushed forward by a memory, I reply, “In Trujillo—” Eguren interrupts and talks about those writers, friends of mine, to whom he dedicates phrases of enthusiastic praise.

“What’s more,” he rounds off his words with fine gallantry, “Trujillo is a comely city in my opinion, and I believe it possesses quite a bit of culture. I’m fond of it.”

When I said good-bye, the day had flown by.

On the way home, I look at Barranco, with its straight streets, lined with poplars, arborescent ferns, and pines. The chalets, in the most varied of styles, flaunt gardens of beautiful elegance, and vestibules open to the evening breeze—luxurious residences of bourgeois comfort.

The hour virgilian, turquoise, energetic green. And the sea rich in silver.

[La Semana (Trujillo), no. 2, March 30, 1918]

[JM]

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ABRAHAM VALDELOMAR HAS DIED

“Abraham Valdelomar has died,” it says on the chalkboard of La Prensa.

At four in the afternoon I read these incomprehensible syllables, and even right now they refuse to stay in my heart. Gastón Roger has said it too and can’t resign to accepting such news. Weeping, however, I cross the street where I walked so many times with Abraham, and overwhelmed by anguish and desperation, I reach my house and quickly sit down to write these lines like a madman.

Abraham Valdelomar has died. By this time the news is flying. But can it be? Oh, this is terrible!

“Brother in pain and beauty, brother in God,” Abraham, you cannot have left forever; it’s impossible, only “like when you were traveling, brother, you’re missing.”²⁶ Yes, that’s all, you’ve been missing since the rainy morning when you left on a train that will bring you back. Yes, you’re traveling, brother, that’s all. And you’ll come back, Abraham, very soon. Your mother awaits you; we your brothers await you too. You’ll come back to realize all your dreams of love, beauty, bounty in life, and because you have so much pain that you’ve gathered on your latest sojourns from the land which you’ll immortalize by dint of and thanks to your immense heart of a brilliant creator and artist. That’s why you’ll come back, my dear friend. Thus I feel and desire in this spring twilight with the sad pink ink that I use to write this now. And I shall see you again and wrap my arms around you, like always, with all my soul, with all my heart. Isn’t that right? At supper tonight, at the family table, when your mother, who might wish to say a word, sees the empty seat and bursts into tears … at supper tonight, we’ll tell her that you’ll come back soon, very soon, to the arms of your mother, that they’ll sing the tender and melancholic a-rro-rrO of your early poems.

But what’s come over me? Am I weeping? Why is my chest so tight? Oh, detestable chalkboard of La Prensa.

Abraham Valdelomar has died.

[La Prensa (Lima), November 4, 1919]

[JM]