THE LECTURE, Part I
A servant presently led in the famous bard Demodocus,
The lecture had started amidst heavy-eyed students, who by all means were trying to eschew the deep and shallow night light that was slowly inflowing through the front window. The AU Building stood in the corner of the 19th Avenue and 2nd street, behind one of the desolate and yet luxurious forests that still remain in Bogotá’s downtown. Benches where avid students sat in their coffee breaks rested now untaken, save for a couple of late lovers that seemed to catch up with time reading Baudelaire’s “Parfum Exotique.” The night street lights circled the forest, and in its south face one of the branches of a tall eucalyptus could barely touch the front window of the room in which professor Junguito, PhD in XIX Century Latin American Literature, had already entered, forging a change in the student’s physiognomy. Some, yet not all, looked at their watches, realizing how awful a business it was to decide to switch the course for a night schedule— only for two weeks, some said, to assuage others. Fernández enjoyed late classes: there was something romantic in the act of crossing the empty streets of a downtown that reminded him of his own— for some futile— time.
The room, small in appearance but large once someone stood in the pulpit, held about thirty students, including both MA’s in comparative literature and neophytes in literary studies who still believed that a BA with a major in literature would guarantee success in fiction writing and adjust to the thoughts that winning a School Short Story Contest had brought to their innocent and terribly corruptible hearts. Soledad, a twenty-one year old student, hid in her wide purse a yellow composition notebook containing what she guilelessly called her juvenile poetry, mostly produced by the shock of pursuing Peralta three years ago, a last year student who was writing his thesis investigation on the nineteenth century Colombian poet and novelist José Asunción Silva, avidly looking for foreign intertextualities that could sustain his own concept of the artist. He carried his investigation in a black-leathered portfolio, probably imitating Silva himself, who always wrote in Bogotá’s periphery, feeling lonely and desolate with the powerful and seducing morning dew. As a bookmark he used a thousand-times read letter that Nicole had sent him from Venice, thanking him for helping her in the decision of finishing her thesis in Italy—an historical analysis about Manzoni’s The Betrothed. What Soledad did not know, and never would, was that she was guilty of allowing them to mingle together under the biting sun that morning when they were still asking about their favorite books and classical authors, smoking cigarettes while trying to hide that yes; they often looked at each other when entering libraries, borrowed the same books once they returned them, and in class they paid more attention and took more notes when the other one talked. More than once they discovered eloquent eyes silently glancing into the other’s when reading in secluded benches, or lying down in the campus pastures— but it was later, after what they called The Autumn Deluge, soaked and encouraged by the cold rain, that they shyly confessed this premature attraction.
Professor Junguito, before crossing the threshold of the room, stepped on his cigarette as the last bluish circles of smoke started to evanescence. She was wearing a brown leather jacket, covering a blue navy sweater, and her red hair reminded many of a sunset in New England. The water bottle in her left hand rattled as she walked towards the pulpit, and the light of the last three bulbs took exactly fifteen seconds to block the night light that entered through the front window. José Fernández remembered that before the electrical street lights were prompted to light Bogotá’s nights, gas lamps were distributed along the stony streets of La Candelaria, the old name to Bogotá’s downtown, illuminating then those nineteenth century lovers who memorized the latest poem in order to recite it to an emaciated maiden. He remembered that which few did.
II
What Peralta enjoyed doing before entering any class was walking with no clear intentions through the Music Department, an old edification in the eastern section of the university. Au contraire of many departments, where everything of value was kept behind strong safe boxes and vigilant guardians, the Music Department had decided to install the piano practice rooms in front of the long main corridor, which amused many with nineteenth century portraits of musicians, and some reproductions of Courbet and Rossetti. Peralta always allowed time to pass slowly while gazing his favorite, Millais’ “Ophelia,” and induced his own self to be conquered by its tragic aura.
He explained those afternoon walks as a mere tease of destiny, since he had always considered himself a lost musician; the four chords of the bass had appeared after the six of the guitar were untreatable, knowing, deep down in what he called his essential megalomania, that he was supposed to be a pianist, but somewhere, in the middle of a late meeting or perhaps in the dark valleys of destiny, he was given something else instead. Choosing literature would finally prove itself not that different, he convinced himself, after remembering the time when he counted the black and white keys of a piano when he was still walking through the red-tulip gardens of innocence. His grandparents located the instrument right in the entrance of their apartment after his grandmother had decided that the arthritis had vanquished the musical impulses of her fingers; it was put there as waiting for someone to finally arrive, uncover the wooden veil, and eloquently master Beethoven. Yes, Peralta dreamt about it every time he stayed at his grandparents’ place, normally the day before the return journey to Bogotá; the same way he dreamt with the picture of a bloody bull in the middle of the bullfight, with three flags already plucked inside, nailed to a wall right in front of the bed that used to be his father’s, and now used to convey history in order that it repeats itself.
Before the tulips of his gullible path had begun to droop, he shared room with his brother, three years older than he and already seeming more adult. In the nights that fear did not pursue him to ask for extra space in his brother’s bed, after an uncomfortable but yet reassuring groan, Peralta’s father used to tune a classical music radio station to invoke deep sleep under the influence of already worn-out violins. After heavy eyelids had fallen, notes crossed the heavy darkness of the room and posed themselves preparing to be inhaled after a nightly sigh. This was the rather poetical explanation Peralta gave to his current fascination towards Chopin, disregarding that the most plausible was that that afternoon in which his parents had given him a ten-cd collection titled “The Greatest Classical Collection,” which introduced him to the fancy of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Chopin, among others. Even though the collection still stood on his library shelf, long ago those same “Nocturnes” by Chopin had already been scratched by exaggerated use.
It was inevitable: the smell of lonely eucalyptus had always reminded Peralta the essence of innocent love. It did not take him many years to recognize that he was fond of solitary alps, as later he knew Byron’s Manfred also was, and obscure in libraries, as Neruda wrote. Even though he had never committed poetry, he discovered in that melancholy XIX century a part of his own that asked him to never stop reading. Novice love letters started to be given away to first loves, agreeing to rendezvous in the school playground, among the brownish eucalyptus that stood behind the soccer field, in that corner of their thirty-minute universe where no one stepped. Kisses promised later encounters; the sole touch of lips was enough for a true love that resisted suggestions of looking for forward caresses of a female body. Years later, sitting naked in an altered bed, he asked out loud why any poet had ever warned him that it was possible to become a father once the taste of his lost virginity would have been swallowed. For the first time he realized that perhaps literature had not given him enough pledges for the consecration of life.
After this, it had crossed his mind to undertake literature instead of women, in a futile yet reassuring project of life, because it was undeniable—he later acknowledged it— to understand the accurate metaphysical experience without caressing the shoulder of whom he intended to be his own mortal muse. Instead of falling in love he had fallen out of love, giving away interminable love letters, caring more for their poetical content than their actual messages. He started to be the jest of his companions, after bacchanalian gin-nurtured nights whose only results were impossible to remember. He woke up with piles of disorganized books on his desk, bookmarks trying to recall last-night thoughts, liquored fumes and female names written in black ink across his arms. Phone numbers that translated into alphabetical symbols were blank spaces of his memory, and afternoon calls of his friends wondering what had happened last night, why that corny romanticism, why those ineffectual promises to emaciated maidens, and why-questions regarding that thousand times heard poem called “Poeta, di paso”; the only poem he would truly recite from heart. As José Fernández y Andrade himself, the awakening of a sinful night obliged Peralta to retire along lonesome forests in Bogotá’s savannahs, inviting the cold wind to purify his soul, and clean him from memories he could not remember. He had the feeling that art was the only means to cleanse off his ideas of flesh, and air his suffocated conscience. In those scenarios he felt he was what he always intended to be: a nineteenth century literary character having nothing to lose but his own existential gloom.
But everything changed until he met Nicole. For the first time in his life he lowered his eyes in the face of a feminine glance. He felt that her eyes had reached the farthest regions of his diminished sinful soul, and that her company was his only salvation. But, as with many other girls, he lost the chance of grabbing her amidst the passage of eternal time.
All of this, he knew, was indeed one of his vast reasons of studying literature. He felt he was meant to study XIX century literature not because it was a trite in his own time, but because he was meant “to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race”, rendering an homage to the long-standing Daedalus. He read poor translations from the French Romantics, experienced in Baudelaire a new taste in wine, in Lamartine an everlasting reason for sadness, and in Nerval a misfortuned eternity. These were his interminable roundabouts until he met Silva, the Colombian who lost his entire oeuvre in a shipwreck, who lost his sister because of a sudden sickness; he greeted in this new acquisition his own blood, his own choices, and his own fatality. But it was not in his poetry that he looked for redemption; it was long since he had avenged his death while learning his most crucial poems. It was now, under the shadow of José Fernández y Andrade, le richissime américain, principal character of Silva’s only novel, that he was looking for his BA title with a major in literature.
Comentarios