Invisible Garden – Process

Mexico City (apro) – This August 9th marks the fortieth anniversary of the death of José Lezama Lima, which can only show that he continues to travel the world as usual and no longer sits at the small table that he preserves in his home. In the old house at 162 Trocadero Street, there are hundreds of notebooks with folded covers, loose papers crossed too tightly with blunt pencils, and state-of-the-art computers in sterile cubicles. I do not refer to the kitsch present in his work, but to the fact that his words continue to behave as if they were the new stories, poems and essays pursued by their authors. For me, it is an inevitable day when I think about how to bring the poet into the field of journalism. His relationship with this craft was complex, since he wrote chronicles of pharaonic rituals and reported the first cries of Etruscan ceramics, but he necessarily presented his art of language in newspapers and magazines.The Cuban essayist Rafael Rojas was careful to emphasize that he was not a wise man isolated from society or lost in his glyphic scrolls – we are indeed lost – but “a public BroadCast Unitedlectual and a small cultural entrepreneur. As founder and director of four magazines – Verbum (1937), Espuela de Plata (1939-41), Nadie Float (1942-44) and Orígenes (1944-56) – he developed an BroadCast Unitedlectual policy that was always subordinate to the protection of the BroadCast Unitedlectual autonomy of the community of writers and artists. This community, generationally and culturally heterogeneous, was misunderstood as an “anti-avant-garde”, “nationalist” or “Catholic” cultural city, but in the 1940s and 1950s participated in a way that was part of Cuban cultural life and public opinion during these decades.” (“Lezama Policy”, Cuban Journal, December 20, 2010).Rojas adds: “All of Lezama’s magazines were independent of the state: the first was a university publication, the next three were private magazines. The most important and lasting, Origen, was financed by its co-editor, the essayist and critic José Rodríguez Fio. This independence allowed Lezama to maintain a permanent key position to the island’s social and political order, especially the governments of Ramón Grau y San Martín (1944-1948), Carlos Prio Socarras (1948-1952) and Fulgencio Batista (1952-1958). This does not mean that Lezama never negotiated with power: he did, especially during the Batista period, but he always considered negotiation a practice and ritual of self-government.” Judging from the current state of the written press, we can guess at the fate of those editorial ventures. We want to warn you that bankruptcy is inevitable from where we are now to where you are as a young dreamer. On the other hand – and let’s continue with the topic of Rojas – “Official histories often mention that in 1954, in an editorial in the 35th issue of the magazine Orígenes, in its tenth edition, Lezama rejected the offer of funding from the National Institute of Culture by the Batista government, then headed by Guillermo de Zandgui. It is in this note that Lezama seems to be referring to the cultural politicians of the Batista state, saying: “You are simply incapable of appreciation. You represent the nihil admirari, the most ancient shield of decadence. You have built your house out of flimsy materials, with the lead of apes and the stone of hell. ” It was this note that announced the departure of Rodríguez Feo from the magazine, with which its main source of income was depleted. ” He was not moved by sheer courage or by his literary naivety. Facsimile editions and anthologies of these publications show that their propaganda campaigns had an extraordinary effect on Latin American culture. Manuel Pereira, a Cuban interpreter whom I interviewed not long ago, told me that Lezama Lima had a bad opinion of journalism, although in the examples he gave me this seemed only because the profession absorbed his good friend Gastón Baqueró. He regretted that “a great poet had been lost to journalism.” When Pereira met Baqueró, whom he admired, in Madrid in 1991, he told him this, and the latter laughed out loud. “Lezama said that he was spoiled by journalism because Baqueró was the editor-in-chief of El Díaz, a reactionary Spanish newspaper that had existed in Cuba since the colony,” Pereira explained. Curiously, Lezama Lima was a columnist for the same newspaper. Baqueró left the editorial office and Cuba on September 19, 1959.
Impossible social page
Among the anecdotes that Manuel Pereira told me, I would like to recall one of them. This happened in 1970, when, he said, Havana retained “the charm of open doors”. That is, people kept their doors and windows open so as not to die from the heat inside their rooms. “In Cuba, people come into your house, drink your coffee, lie on your bed. It’s not like here, they have stricter rules of behavior,” he commented, and I think it’s the same here, only those who do it when you’re not there, and take everything they can sell. That year, Fidel decided that the island must produce 10 million tons of sugar, “and for this he mobilized the entire population, including surgeons and dancers … Everyone went to cut sugar cane. We were there. In the end, there was a kind of national depression, due to the humiliation of a population that was not ten but eight million. It’s not a big difference, but the magic number is 10.” To keep the popular spirit high, “Fidel or the government decided to hold one of the most spectacular carnivals in Cuban history. “This meant a lot of lights, floats, street lights, theater troupes. ” Pereira was then a reporter for the magazine Cuba International, part of the Latin Press Agency, and they sent him to cover those celebrations. As part of his heavy responsibility, the young writer-turned-reporter had to enter floats filled with exquisite decorations to interview a Carnival queen and her entourage of girls, whose skin shone brighter than timid sequins. They called themselves “Stars” and “Luceros”. During a break, Pereira went to the house of Lezama Lima, whom he often visited, and followed his Delphic reading curriculum: a series of books that opened the way to image-generating qualities for the poet’s disciples. But the doors and windows were open. The air that came in was warm, but it also brought new breaths. The snail in its shell breathed hard, paying close attention to them, catching the sounds of the waves, which suddenly found expression in music. But suddenly Pereira heard these fresh notes and through Lezama Lima’s funny eyes he noticed a glittering arrival: amid the whirling din, the Carnival floats arrived on Trocadero Street and stopped at the window. Accompanying her are motorcyclists with sirens and honking horns. The poet must have pretended that he had eaten the fruit of Circe, no, of Proserpina – this is not the name of the dancer, when he saw how Estrela and her Luceros descended without distinguishing one from the other by the rows. The sequins shone in the light of the public lights. To make matters worse, one of “those young and beautiful girls” recognized the journalist and came in to greet him, another did the same and asked to go to the toilet, another asked for coffee when she had already helped herself, and suddenly the whole troupe came. Turning the conversation into a literary orgy. Only then was it explained that one of the Luceros had a boyfriend in the same street. We could have sworn that Lezama Lima did not see any of the girls with lust. But the flood of images and the cry of Havana nights would have brought him harmony with his poem “Island Nights: Invisible Garden”:
The Violet Sea longs for the birth of the gods, for here birth is an unspeakable celebration, the drumbeat of courtship and domination over Triton.
carista@proceso.com.mx