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Charter II. Spring diatribe.
in exile. On 2 April. My very expensive
Don Alvaro:
This is one of those long afternoons of tedium weak-willed they do not feel like doing anything except write, but to good weather and the garden is in bloom.
Nothing extraordinary has happened and in your life or mine since the last time. Easter I have spent at home. On Easter Day, I passed a church and went into it. No prayed, if ever I stopped to look at the stained glass and polychrome.
Your response to my last letter made me laugh. Preserved the grace and freshness as ever. But mostly you're still that wonderful gourmet met, but sometimes I guess in you a great sadness.
Your text made me remember what I wrote Pio Baroja: "When the rich lexicon is enforced, learned, is worth little, gives an impression of artifice, and now, when natural, spontaneous is another thing. " I like this simple and delicious fluidity with which you write, I like your words concatenated, orderly and correct.
I, as you said it, a passion for English, they speak my parents and grandparents and they spoke many of my ancestors whose generations are lost in time. As stated in Vallejo, I think in English, dream in English, speak English, English blasphemous and I will die in English, in the final impenitence conceived in English words. Borges said it well: "language is our common homeland."
a kid, I liked to sit and listen to old stories to tell. Many of them were simple peasants, almost illiterate, and almost all are now dead. But I still rattle in his ears the music of their accents and that sweet time with the words coming out more uniquely, many of them now due to disuse. It was then natural to call Jacinta, Concepción, Toribio or Froilan and the stupid habit of baptizing with foreign names, the most bizarre of the time, had not been popular. I wonder if this will be but a facet of cultural decay we are experiencing or other cultural bovarysme expression of Latin American this will always be what we are not, denying the poor relations. Are we done anything about suicide, ie, destroying ourselves and what's more we like Flaubert Bovary? Or is it rather an unconscious protest of thousands of people condemned to misery by an unjust society and little or no equity?
When all exalt nationalism prefer showing the undeniable benefits of our land and our people, I prefer to cultivate a healthy self-criticism. Perhaps it is that if we want to improve, as I said David Sanchez Juliao, we must be ruthless with ourselves, recognize that we have ended up being mediocre and we are very far away and far below of the great examples of nobility, sacrifice and courage of many who have preceded us. I hate complacency
sweet and masturbatory and narcissistic patriotism. I laugh at the literary obscenity, enjoy it, and yet I believe in respect, compassion and solidarity. I'm kind of Marx and Nietzsche together. In a mystic Eckhart, in aesthetically pleasing Céline, in tastes, an unorthodox relapse. As humble as Moses, as egotistical as De Gaulle. So shit and so none of the above and all of them.
April 8.
I left unfinished letter last week. I received a call and I got distracted. I would like to share you
some things that have happened to me in recent days in which to earn some money in this strange land, I have dedicated myself to the work of copy-editor and reader of English.
I was blessed with an excellent teacher of Castilian in the early years of high school and almost born with a natural taste for reading. Also, I think the correction never shied away when it is fair and justified. At least that might show up as an example. My mind is restless, wanting to know.
-and allow me to begin the lengthy quotation from Vallejo again, I put no reference at all because I feel mine, 'I want to know the ancient Chinese, the Ming dynasty, which overthrew the Manchus. I want to know the Icelandic language in which anonymous poets wrote the "Edda." The land routes of prehistoric hunter Sea route of Odysseus. The cycle of glucose, the orbitals of the atom, the operation of the magnetron. Don Juan's lovers and lovers of Verlaine. And not only the past haunts me: I'm obsessed with the future, I'm obsessed with the conditional.
"... I know the thousand feats Camoens sang, and the bland lies invented by chroniclers. Uroaltaicas languages I speak and read in the Japanese original of Shikibu Monogatari Ghenji without the slightest nuances escape me. I want to penetrate the profound meaning of 'Lost Guide "of Maimonides, which case I find myself to get lost once in the labyrinths of the Talmud. I am interested in old English grammar Nebrija, and the current Catalan Pompey Fabra. The legends of the Abencerrages explorations of Livingstone, the wars of Catalonia ... I want to keep in mind the equation of Kepler, the Tolkappiyam, the rude song of the dawn of minnesinger and sweet love song of the troubadours .... But this To begin with, is what I'll never know. "
So much bother me the people who, to paraphrase Thomas Merton, "only knows cars and film (I would add: and soccer) of what's in the fridge, what the newspapers say (sometimes not even that) and what neighbors are going to divorce.
Stupid, unthinking bourgeois life! Damn stubborn and hobby of mine wanting to know everything, everything!
Returning to Merton (I quote from memory), "the great temptation of modern man is not solitude, but immersion in the mass of men, in that ocean report irresponsible. The man then, and know you are alone or living in community. What is loaded is diffuse and anonymous anxiety, fear unspeakable appetites petty and intolerable and all hostilities that fill the ubiquitous society. "
These harsh words are valid for all, for you and me.
Sartre said that the great paradox is the duty to be critical of the bourgeoisie and the time to live in and live as bourgeois. Because today, they are bourgeois, even many of those who inhabit the slums of our great American suburbs. One can live in a suburb and act upon the lifestyle of the rich and according to its system of exploitation of another.
What criticize and hate, is often the germ within us ... Pardon
last phrase, this time directed against yourself, Ripol: I feel so often that talk is put chess pieces on deaf ears. "Margaritas before Porcos', as the Gospel.
Half of this reflection I stop to think what will write? Believe me, I wonder more by fear than by distrust or condescending. Do not serve this to sink deeper into mental tangles that often get lost? To increase the hysteria and delusions that often attack me? Should I shut up, go out?
saying this is not likely to go to produce in you a furious confusion, a strong reaction or feeling of being railed, maligned, underappreciated, misunderstood me, proud and arrogant?
I'm afraid to show her this letter to Silvia. I know this phrase and will not, but perhaps she who is between your stuff and read it. The last time did not accept my criticisms, which, you know, were completely fair. I want her to know that I insist on seeing beyond. See maybe the girl who still lives in his heart, very poor, very hidden, using the language of García Lorca, and is afraid of being hurt, being taken away, to grow.
How to call this feeling of solidarity that binds me to her? It is perhaps a kind of magnetic attraction, to qualify in some way. Stealing back the words of one, a mixture of mutual fascination and seduction aesthetics, but which, in essence, is like a love story, unfortunate for the impossibility of accomplished and, simultaneously, sweeping by the same cause.
But not only foreign to Silvia, sometimes I grab the homesickness of the soil. Europe certainly has its magic, but, you know well the deep ties that bind me to the South. Like the great Fatherland (Matria!) Mine, America. Just a matter of walking around the streets of their cities to realize the diversity of faces, races and backgrounds.
do I like, for example, the old Santa Fe de Bogota, the smog cold, the mountain wind. The sordid tenth race, their ancestry, their hands of English girl, their faces, people going fast, the high trees of its mountains, its prostitutes, their fags. Sometimes I miss the old Candelaria where a story is always the English elegance and Chapinero Teusaquillo noisy night owl. I think in the far Fontibón with their puddles, in the Suba of narrow streets, inner-city and ruddy cheeks Infantino. Review the affluent north, south forgotten, their faces sad, almost hopeless. City
all, no man's land, crying her loneliness, her splendid sunny mornings, their afternoons in the rain blurs the old windows, the tingling of his ironmonger ... Only
dead Monserrate, who watches me with his eyes and arms stiff extinct, you know what it costs me to be away.
Send me a photo of Silvia. I see her in her pregnancy. I hope to see you soon, more to see her than to see you.
With my most cordial greetings,
El Peregrino.
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