The Lecture, Part II
Esta es la continuación. A veces pienso que debo echarle mano a algunas partes, acortar otras, caracterizar un poco más a otros, pero qué va. Así quedó escrito, y así quedará publicado, así sea como primera versión. Enjoy the silence.
III
Professor Junguito raised her hand to let everyone know that the class had already begun. Some late students arrived after the clock had struck a quarter past seven. Soledad closed the front window, interrupting the inflow of Bogotá’s cold and chilly blows. After slightly lowering the water level in the bottle, she proceeded.
“That’s a very interesting question, Peralta, and it clearly explains why you greet us with your visit today. There are indeed many forgotten characters in Colombian literature. One of the purposes of any investigation, such as yours, is to give a new light to all those creations that once were so admired by the academy, and later overlooked by pedestrian readers who consume bestsellers. As you may know, and many others here, Colombian literature has not produced large amounts of recognized literature in the past century. If any of you look for Colombian literature in Google or Yahoo, yes, you will find thousands of entries. But, think about this, it happens that you read a certain novel, and after finishing it, have the idea of discovering a lost manuscript. You start searching for secondary bibliography, expecting to find nothing, thus confirming the idea of finding something new, and you find that thousands of critics have already written about it. The question poses itself: How is it that, if they are so famous, they are not lectured about within the confines of universities?”
“Amidst forgotten amounts of literature, there stand three gigantic novelists that have stolen time from any Colombian literature academic: Isaacs, Rivera and García Márquez. Jorge Isaacs, native from Cali, published in 1867 La María. Immediately every Latin American romantic, reader, dreamer or critic, pointed his eyes towards it. This novel has everything a romantic novel produced in our hands should have. Yes, when we talk of romanticism names come to our minds, such as Holderlein, Lamartine, Byron, and many others. In the novel genre, Goethe, that German monster that had acquaintances with the Devil himself. Here, in Bogotá, we had a wake regarding that solitaire, disdained and sad lover that Werther was. In our own way, we had thousands of disdained lovers who threw themselves from the Tequendama Fall, probably after writing in white chalk on a stone the names of their spurious loves. Every morning, at the bottom of the Fall, they appeared with their chests broken, and a false love was their only alibi. The most common mistake when anyone reads La María is that there lacks an obvious and rather necessary pact between the novel or the narrator and the reader. Once you begin reading it, you need to be prepared to see tears, tears and more tears. Every time María appears— and think that the novel has her same name—, she cries. Efraín, her immortal lover, talks to her, and she weeps. Efraín leaves for Bogotá, and she weeps. Efraín returns, and she weeps. I understand those that say that it is corny, but I understand them in the middle of their own etymological ignorance, since one cannot call something corny before the term started to be used.”
Yes, José Fernández y Andrade remembered it. Even though he had dispelled that kind of literature, he felt the urge, as foam rising, to state out loud that many of the people who actually read the novel years after it was negotiated in the streets of a gray Bogotá had such a candid pact that they themselves did nothing more than cry, cry, and cry. Fernández never considered himself as a weeping person; in fact, he had no memory of the last time he allowed one single tear to roll down his cheeks, to feel the salty flavor of his tongue.
“I could not agree more, Morantes. When Isaacs was publishing one of his many novels, different things were happening in Europe. Don’t ask for more: remember Bolivar’s words when some French businessmen were trying to sell him old machinery from their own industrial revolution: “Let us live our Middle Ages alone.” You will always find contrasts between Latin American and European productions. The one I like the most is the following: in 1821, Thomas de Quincey was publishing in London his Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Two years later, Andrés Bello, one of our foundational poets, was publishing Alocución a la Poesía, poem in which he invited Poetry to sing about American lands, since she should be tired of singing only about European landscapes. The message is clear: Latin Americans had to start writing about their own lands, if they finally had decided to free themselves from Spanish rule. This was the foundation of what later was called by the critics the Latin American Foundational Novel, a literary corpus that had the definitive purpose of creating a Latin American identity through art. Remember Virgil’s purpose when composing The Aeneid: to poetically legitimate Rome’s foundation by Aened, who was saved by a goddess in the War of Troy. It was the daybreak of a century that had promised independence. But how is it possible that, meanwhile in Europe someone was confessing his own addictions, in Latin America we were worried about our national identity? It was not in vain that our ancient politicians knew by memory Renan’s texts regarding politics.”
As Peralta’s watch beeped indicating the turn of the hour, he awoke from what appeared to be a slumber. In a way, he had never given these type of thoughts to his own literary traditions. What was a country, if it not because of its artists? In his investigation, he clearly intended to prove how Fernández was hunted by the nature of his own blood; a dandy in foreign lands, he knew that he could never get rid of his American blood. Given his time, he was everything a landlord wished to be: poet, womanizer, and millionaire. During any library break, all the times he stepped out of the stacks to catch a breeze of the true reality that lived outside its walls, colleagues asked him about his investigation. The flavor of his own words was turning sour, especially when he named his famous character, now long forgotten by literature students. He remembered one line written by Fernández in the novel: “If you were alive today, Hugo, you would hear the chant of your poetry surrounded by derisive laughter.” Not that different from today, he thought.
While analyzing everyone in the room, Peralta realized how much it had still to be done. Soledad was carefully paying attention, as she always did, taking notes in both blue and red ink, depending on the importance of the idea. She glimpsed at Peralta only once, after feeling the weight of his eyes on her back, and then effectively connecting again with Professor Junguito. Morantes was already looking at his watch, for he knew he was already late for something. Many other were looking through the front window, paying attention to the same old lady that was crossing the Music Department. They paid more attention to the outside reality than to the one that Professor Junguito was evidently referring to: the death of our national symbols.
What did all these literature students expect from life? How many, in the unfortunate odyssey of publishing both academic texts or creative materials, would fall into the sea, after the sun had melted the wax of their feathers, to be forlorned forever? As in any forgotten battle, Peralta understood that things were happening in that precise moment, and it would have been impossible to acknowledge them later. In a way, all of the dim-looking students seemed to be the same. This was a rather ill-fated remark that he had heard in the back of his memory, but every time insisted in neglecting. Perhaps it was his own romantic upheaval: the pessimistic image of seeing his own books standing at the side of chocolate bars and strawberry flavored bubble gum behind a supermarket cashier.
What providentially freed him form his unenthusiastic thoughts was the image of a stranger in the classroom. As a last year student, he had the ability (and the habit) of locating everyone in a specific place, knowing in which year they were, sometimes their names, and never forgot a face encountered during a lecture. But this was something else: the stranger appeared to be taken out of time. His clothing, evidently expensive, shone from the last corner of the room. In his eyes, while he was attentively capturing Professor Junguito’s words, evocated a forgotten time, and an oblivious temperament. His silence had allowed him to stand besides the class dynamic, as forgotten by the academy, and even Professor Junguito seemed to not have seen him. At the side of the desk he had an ebony stick, that promptly lay on top of a long and gray coat, and in his hands he firmly held a purple mantle. There was something in his appearance that reminded Peralta of something he did not truly see. The sound of his own name obliged him to turn around.
“Peralta, what was that sentence that had such a terrible impact upon you once read?”, asked Professor Junguito.
Looking forward, Peralta answered: “A Colombian critic wrote that the time in between two of the most important novels published in Colombia, La María in 1867 and One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, were precisely one hundred years of solitude in Colombian literature.”
Fernández felt a cold blast that started in his lower abdominals and quickly spread towards his arms and legs. No one perceived or seemed to care about the shrieking sound of his chair.
“For many critics, this may be true. Regarding novels and novelists and literary characters, there are many who are stuck with that masterpiece called One Hundred Years of Solitude. There have been lost and forgotten manuscripts, not because of shipwrecks, but because of laziness. We have to face it: our own literature shelves seem like cemeteries. Remember Mrs. Von der Walde’s class about science fiction, remember that awfully seductive genre of the dystopias. In our ancestors’ time, thinkers were pursued because of literature. Many of our literary gods died while holding their literary banner. García Lorca, for instance, one of the fatal disappearances of Franco’s appearance. And Valle-Inclán: if cancer wouldn’t have killed him, Franco would’ve done it in a couple of minutes. How many writers died in glory, and we, in this time and place, seem to ignore their glorious existence. And I’m not only talking in political matters, but in artistic terms. There is one literary character, a true jewel and treasure of our Modernist literature, that has been slowly expiring, and many of us are guilty of it. His name: José Fernández y Andrade. And it’s a paradox: if a literary character would have a clear conscience of being one, then he would live happily ever after, knowing that his own book was written, and once the ink was printed, his eternity would’ve begun. The only way of actually killing a literary character is by burning all of the editions of the novel, and whipping out of existence every reader that dared to meet him. But look at ourselves: we do not have a Thought Police, or a Doublethink, or even a Big Brother that is watching us, but we decide to kill them ourselves, as if we were the ones. We are all assassins, and no one gets rid of their accusers. We are Fernández’s killers, gentlemen, there is no point arguing that.
“De Sobremesa was written by Silva around 1896, but, after his suicide, the manuscript was never known to the public. Around thirty years later, when Modernist readers had vanquished from existence, and new vanguards were on the move, Fernández’s birth was at the same time his own oblivion. His baptism was greeted with harsh voices that accused an incestuous long buried Silva. Le richissime Americain don Joseph Fernández et Andrade had to wait in solitary shelves and dusty pages for another twenty years, until a critic re-discovered him and gave him the glory he was convinced of having. But then, it was loneliness again.”
Professor Junguito’s voice plucked in his soul as the jewel dagger that once in a Suisse hotel room was dragged out of one of his lovers’ chest. The one thing he never thought about was having a premature death. As any literary character having conscience of being so, he was confident in the fact of someday watching the dawn of humankind. But this was different. If his name were forgotten in literature lectures, if he indeed were an unrecognizable stranger in a literature room, then his life was slowly fading towards oblivion. Fernández, reader of his own critics, grabbed his ebony stick and prepared to depart, as Peralta’s voice stopped him from doing so.
IV
Peralta stood up, swallowed a worn-out bubble gum he had been chewing, and began walking towards the pulpit. Everything seemed wider now that he was walking amidst the students.
“First of all I want to thank Professor Junguito for her lovely invitation. I am here, in a way, to render justice to perhaps the most poetical hero of a seemingly forgotten time: José Fernández y Andrade.”
Thus sang the bard, and Fernández drew his purple mantle over his head and covered his face, for he was ashamed to let the students see that he was about to weep.
—Few or none characters have decidedly shown us how to live a romantic life as Fernández did. Let’s start with his existential conflict: son of a Spaniard mother whose family had died unpolluted from flesh encounters, and a Colombian father who chopped Spaniard’s heads in the conquer of Los Llanos, in western Colombia. Son of a reconstructive time, he did not know pretty well how to live his life: as a European dandy or as a Colombian adventurer. More than once in his diary he accepts that the two failed assassinations of two of his lovers, one because he had caught her in a lesbian scene with a theatre actress, and the other simply because of the post-coitum smokes, were because of his indomitable Colombian blood. How to live, if both sides pull the same amount of energy?
The sound of coughing made Peralta briefly stop his speech— not a very nice beginning, he thought. Soledad was looking at him attentively, and he felt glad once he noticed she was writing with a red pen. Professor Junguito was taking notes in a yellow pad, and Peralta felt that the room was bigger than ever: there was something in the pulpit that translated itself into a wanted prominence.
“This dichotomy was translated into two characters, without, dear fellows, falling in schizophrenia: his sensual I and his intellectual I. The sensual was in charge of hunting for endless sensations, savagely conquering European mademoiselles, of making them drink his kisses and kneel before his indomitable love. And the intellectual was in charge of collecting pieces of art, of never-ending readings of Dante’s La Vita Nuova, and of searching for what he considered the beauty ideal of his time, Helena de Scilly Dancourt, whom he found underneath a tomb in Paris’ Pêre-Lachaise. His diary is the testimony of failure, of never actually grabbing what he intended the most, a small girl that happened to be of the same artistic bent of Elizabeth Siddal, prematurely dead wife of Rossetti. But there is much more to it. This is what you will find in any encyclopedia, but I am here to give you more.”
“Fernández’ real hero was Dorian Gray, my people. This is the true fact that critics have been scarcely paying attention to in the last century. They have been all stuck with the same idea: Fernández is the alter ego of Silva himself, a horrible interpretation that rescinds Fernández from himself. Silva, in a personal yet mysterious episode, decided to take away his life. That doesn’t mean that Fernández would actually do the same thing. Characters are not their fathers, let’s not mix business in this matter. Therefore, I invite you to recognize that he is still alive, and lives among us, in one way or another, because he reminds us of the truly Latin American conflict: should we forge our own way of living, or should we borrow foreign customs and live according to what other people and other fashions demonstrate?
“But let’s go back to Dorian Gray. As you all remember, Lord Henry’s most emphatic criticism towards Dorian was the fact that he saw Sybil Vane as an actress, therefore he should not worry for the death of such a human girl. Dorian fell in love with the artistic creation, but not with the material girl. This is precisely what happens to Fernández: he mentally makes a construction of Helena using diverse literary and pictorial standards: she is a mixture of Dante’s Beatrice and of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s Elizabeth Siddal. He meets her only once: in the dining room of a hotel in Interlanken, in Switzerland. After this, nothing more but mental elucubrations of a supposedly fifteen year old girl he saw after a night on opium. As Don Quixote, he decided to allow art into his reality, to the point of living according to it. He states it in these words: “Everything in me turns into literature.” It is as clear as water.
Fernández blinked. He felt a headache advancing from the distance, as his legs and arms were as cold as morning marble. His blanked memory started to stab a somewhat similar existence to the one carried years ago, but, still, there was a feeling of nothingness in the pulpit of his heart, a feeling of an ephemeral fame long-forgotten.
“As many of you don’t remember because you irresponsibly have not read the novel, Fernández suffers from a mental disease during his permanence in Paris. He auto-prescribes himself, determining that the only thing that can save him from this is finding Helena, and forgetting sexual intercourse with any other women. He visits two doctors, Rivington in London before going to Paris, and Charvet once he gets there— who both seem as a reflection of that famous XIX century doctor Charcot—, and they both tell him that he should forget about those virginal dreams and get back to a licentious composure, without, of course, forgetting that his true love is Helena. Instead of allowing him to continue dreaming and mentally constructing Helena, they both advise him to find her and marry her, thus making him realize that she is human, real, and a female. But this is quite difficult for him, since she already shares a celestial podium with Beatrice.”
“But the disease is far beyond the reach of science. It is indeed about Helena, and it is indeed about that sickness so many poets shared called the mal-de-siècle. But for him, the term siècle acquires a new dimension. There is a constant sentence in the diary: Fernández feels the urge to hurry up, because he is going to be late. For where, he has no idea, but he feels the disease. So, he is walking a 31st of December in a Paris sidewalk. He gets nearer and nearer to a huge and black clock that sits behind a shop window. And then he realizes that the time has come: it is 12 o’clock, and the year is changing. My interpretation, people, is that the year that is changing is 1899, therefore the entire century is changing. This is what really kills him: to realize that his century already passed, that time exists, and there is nothing he can do about it. Here we see a clear relation with Baudelaire’s “Le Horloge,” a chant dedicated to that sinister God that rules time. Once again, because of art, Fernández realizes that his time has come.”
“His diary is the diary of frustration. It finishes in the cemetery I have already mentioned, and, at the same time that the diary ends, and all of his friends remain silent in that living room somewhere in a XIX century Latin American city, a place where he began to read the diary to his friends. As he finishes the reading, we encounter the real mourning of his time: the century had ended, and he never found his true love. Only the words in the cemetery thunder in the silence: ‘You dead, Helena?... No, you can’t die. Perhaps you never existed, perhaps you were simply a luminous dream of my spirit; but you are a dream far more real than that which many mortals call Reality.’”
“But what is that which we call reality? Is it the place where we forget about artistic creations, about literary characters, about that which he have acquired since long ago? Please someone tell me this is false, or else I would rather cease and remain in the blackness of a closed book. If reality is the place where one forgets about Fernández, my dear people, then allow me “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of our race”: we are literature students, God knows if we will ever be literary characters of lonesome writers, but we have the chance of living our life throughout artistic means, and Fate knows why we chose to study literature. If no one here is prepared to take the risk and challenge the living like this, then I invite you to retire and apply to economics or veterinary science, careers that will never make you forget about your reality.
V
Thus stopped the bard, and then Fernández again drew his mantle over his head and wept bitterly. No one noticed his anguish except Soledad, who was standing near him, and heard the heavy sighs that he was heaving. Professor Junguito effusively thanked Peralta, and dismissed the class. Every clock in Bogotá had struck 9 p.m.
As they crossed the campus silently, Soledad noticed the heavy burden that Peralta was carrying. She felt that awkward silence that threatens the vocal chords once a lapidary sentence has unearthed an atmosphere. The wind awoke the eucalyptus branches as a soft and melodious song erupted in the middle of the night.
As they stood on the covered bench, Soledad asked Peralta:
—By the way, did you notice that strange fellow weeping in the corner of the room, once you finished your speech?
—Which fellow?
The bus was arriving.
—Never mind, here comes our bus.
They stepped in and went away heading north through the Seventh Avenue.
III
Professor Junguito raised her hand to let everyone know that the class had already begun. Some late students arrived after the clock had struck a quarter past seven. Soledad closed the front window, interrupting the inflow of Bogotá’s cold and chilly blows. After slightly lowering the water level in the bottle, she proceeded.
“That’s a very interesting question, Peralta, and it clearly explains why you greet us with your visit today. There are indeed many forgotten characters in Colombian literature. One of the purposes of any investigation, such as yours, is to give a new light to all those creations that once were so admired by the academy, and later overlooked by pedestrian readers who consume bestsellers. As you may know, and many others here, Colombian literature has not produced large amounts of recognized literature in the past century. If any of you look for Colombian literature in Google or Yahoo, yes, you will find thousands of entries. But, think about this, it happens that you read a certain novel, and after finishing it, have the idea of discovering a lost manuscript. You start searching for secondary bibliography, expecting to find nothing, thus confirming the idea of finding something new, and you find that thousands of critics have already written about it. The question poses itself: How is it that, if they are so famous, they are not lectured about within the confines of universities?”
“Amidst forgotten amounts of literature, there stand three gigantic novelists that have stolen time from any Colombian literature academic: Isaacs, Rivera and García Márquez. Jorge Isaacs, native from Cali, published in 1867 La María. Immediately every Latin American romantic, reader, dreamer or critic, pointed his eyes towards it. This novel has everything a romantic novel produced in our hands should have. Yes, when we talk of romanticism names come to our minds, such as Holderlein, Lamartine, Byron, and many others. In the novel genre, Goethe, that German monster that had acquaintances with the Devil himself. Here, in Bogotá, we had a wake regarding that solitaire, disdained and sad lover that Werther was. In our own way, we had thousands of disdained lovers who threw themselves from the Tequendama Fall, probably after writing in white chalk on a stone the names of their spurious loves. Every morning, at the bottom of the Fall, they appeared with their chests broken, and a false love was their only alibi. The most common mistake when anyone reads La María is that there lacks an obvious and rather necessary pact between the novel or the narrator and the reader. Once you begin reading it, you need to be prepared to see tears, tears and more tears. Every time María appears— and think that the novel has her same name—, she cries. Efraín, her immortal lover, talks to her, and she weeps. Efraín leaves for Bogotá, and she weeps. Efraín returns, and she weeps. I understand those that say that it is corny, but I understand them in the middle of their own etymological ignorance, since one cannot call something corny before the term started to be used.”
Yes, José Fernández y Andrade remembered it. Even though he had dispelled that kind of literature, he felt the urge, as foam rising, to state out loud that many of the people who actually read the novel years after it was negotiated in the streets of a gray Bogotá had such a candid pact that they themselves did nothing more than cry, cry, and cry. Fernández never considered himself as a weeping person; in fact, he had no memory of the last time he allowed one single tear to roll down his cheeks, to feel the salty flavor of his tongue.
“I could not agree more, Morantes. When Isaacs was publishing one of his many novels, different things were happening in Europe. Don’t ask for more: remember Bolivar’s words when some French businessmen were trying to sell him old machinery from their own industrial revolution: “Let us live our Middle Ages alone.” You will always find contrasts between Latin American and European productions. The one I like the most is the following: in 1821, Thomas de Quincey was publishing in London his Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Two years later, Andrés Bello, one of our foundational poets, was publishing Alocución a la Poesía, poem in which he invited Poetry to sing about American lands, since she should be tired of singing only about European landscapes. The message is clear: Latin Americans had to start writing about their own lands, if they finally had decided to free themselves from Spanish rule. This was the foundation of what later was called by the critics the Latin American Foundational Novel, a literary corpus that had the definitive purpose of creating a Latin American identity through art. Remember Virgil’s purpose when composing The Aeneid: to poetically legitimate Rome’s foundation by Aened, who was saved by a goddess in the War of Troy. It was the daybreak of a century that had promised independence. But how is it possible that, meanwhile in Europe someone was confessing his own addictions, in Latin America we were worried about our national identity? It was not in vain that our ancient politicians knew by memory Renan’s texts regarding politics.”
As Peralta’s watch beeped indicating the turn of the hour, he awoke from what appeared to be a slumber. In a way, he had never given these type of thoughts to his own literary traditions. What was a country, if it not because of its artists? In his investigation, he clearly intended to prove how Fernández was hunted by the nature of his own blood; a dandy in foreign lands, he knew that he could never get rid of his American blood. Given his time, he was everything a landlord wished to be: poet, womanizer, and millionaire. During any library break, all the times he stepped out of the stacks to catch a breeze of the true reality that lived outside its walls, colleagues asked him about his investigation. The flavor of his own words was turning sour, especially when he named his famous character, now long forgotten by literature students. He remembered one line written by Fernández in the novel: “If you were alive today, Hugo, you would hear the chant of your poetry surrounded by derisive laughter.” Not that different from today, he thought.
While analyzing everyone in the room, Peralta realized how much it had still to be done. Soledad was carefully paying attention, as she always did, taking notes in both blue and red ink, depending on the importance of the idea. She glimpsed at Peralta only once, after feeling the weight of his eyes on her back, and then effectively connecting again with Professor Junguito. Morantes was already looking at his watch, for he knew he was already late for something. Many other were looking through the front window, paying attention to the same old lady that was crossing the Music Department. They paid more attention to the outside reality than to the one that Professor Junguito was evidently referring to: the death of our national symbols.
What did all these literature students expect from life? How many, in the unfortunate odyssey of publishing both academic texts or creative materials, would fall into the sea, after the sun had melted the wax of their feathers, to be forlorned forever? As in any forgotten battle, Peralta understood that things were happening in that precise moment, and it would have been impossible to acknowledge them later. In a way, all of the dim-looking students seemed to be the same. This was a rather ill-fated remark that he had heard in the back of his memory, but every time insisted in neglecting. Perhaps it was his own romantic upheaval: the pessimistic image of seeing his own books standing at the side of chocolate bars and strawberry flavored bubble gum behind a supermarket cashier.
What providentially freed him form his unenthusiastic thoughts was the image of a stranger in the classroom. As a last year student, he had the ability (and the habit) of locating everyone in a specific place, knowing in which year they were, sometimes their names, and never forgot a face encountered during a lecture. But this was something else: the stranger appeared to be taken out of time. His clothing, evidently expensive, shone from the last corner of the room. In his eyes, while he was attentively capturing Professor Junguito’s words, evocated a forgotten time, and an oblivious temperament. His silence had allowed him to stand besides the class dynamic, as forgotten by the academy, and even Professor Junguito seemed to not have seen him. At the side of the desk he had an ebony stick, that promptly lay on top of a long and gray coat, and in his hands he firmly held a purple mantle. There was something in his appearance that reminded Peralta of something he did not truly see. The sound of his own name obliged him to turn around.
“Peralta, what was that sentence that had such a terrible impact upon you once read?”, asked Professor Junguito.
Looking forward, Peralta answered: “A Colombian critic wrote that the time in between two of the most important novels published in Colombia, La María in 1867 and One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, were precisely one hundred years of solitude in Colombian literature.”
Fernández felt a cold blast that started in his lower abdominals and quickly spread towards his arms and legs. No one perceived or seemed to care about the shrieking sound of his chair.
“For many critics, this may be true. Regarding novels and novelists and literary characters, there are many who are stuck with that masterpiece called One Hundred Years of Solitude. There have been lost and forgotten manuscripts, not because of shipwrecks, but because of laziness. We have to face it: our own literature shelves seem like cemeteries. Remember Mrs. Von der Walde’s class about science fiction, remember that awfully seductive genre of the dystopias. In our ancestors’ time, thinkers were pursued because of literature. Many of our literary gods died while holding their literary banner. García Lorca, for instance, one of the fatal disappearances of Franco’s appearance. And Valle-Inclán: if cancer wouldn’t have killed him, Franco would’ve done it in a couple of minutes. How many writers died in glory, and we, in this time and place, seem to ignore their glorious existence. And I’m not only talking in political matters, but in artistic terms. There is one literary character, a true jewel and treasure of our Modernist literature, that has been slowly expiring, and many of us are guilty of it. His name: José Fernández y Andrade. And it’s a paradox: if a literary character would have a clear conscience of being one, then he would live happily ever after, knowing that his own book was written, and once the ink was printed, his eternity would’ve begun. The only way of actually killing a literary character is by burning all of the editions of the novel, and whipping out of existence every reader that dared to meet him. But look at ourselves: we do not have a Thought Police, or a Doublethink, or even a Big Brother that is watching us, but we decide to kill them ourselves, as if we were the ones. We are all assassins, and no one gets rid of their accusers. We are Fernández’s killers, gentlemen, there is no point arguing that.
“De Sobremesa was written by Silva around 1896, but, after his suicide, the manuscript was never known to the public. Around thirty years later, when Modernist readers had vanquished from existence, and new vanguards were on the move, Fernández’s birth was at the same time his own oblivion. His baptism was greeted with harsh voices that accused an incestuous long buried Silva. Le richissime Americain don Joseph Fernández et Andrade had to wait in solitary shelves and dusty pages for another twenty years, until a critic re-discovered him and gave him the glory he was convinced of having. But then, it was loneliness again.”
Professor Junguito’s voice plucked in his soul as the jewel dagger that once in a Suisse hotel room was dragged out of one of his lovers’ chest. The one thing he never thought about was having a premature death. As any literary character having conscience of being so, he was confident in the fact of someday watching the dawn of humankind. But this was different. If his name were forgotten in literature lectures, if he indeed were an unrecognizable stranger in a literature room, then his life was slowly fading towards oblivion. Fernández, reader of his own critics, grabbed his ebony stick and prepared to depart, as Peralta’s voice stopped him from doing so.
IV
Peralta stood up, swallowed a worn-out bubble gum he had been chewing, and began walking towards the pulpit. Everything seemed wider now that he was walking amidst the students.
“First of all I want to thank Professor Junguito for her lovely invitation. I am here, in a way, to render justice to perhaps the most poetical hero of a seemingly forgotten time: José Fernández y Andrade.”
Thus sang the bard, and Fernández drew his purple mantle over his head and covered his face, for he was ashamed to let the students see that he was about to weep.
—Few or none characters have decidedly shown us how to live a romantic life as Fernández did. Let’s start with his existential conflict: son of a Spaniard mother whose family had died unpolluted from flesh encounters, and a Colombian father who chopped Spaniard’s heads in the conquer of Los Llanos, in western Colombia. Son of a reconstructive time, he did not know pretty well how to live his life: as a European dandy or as a Colombian adventurer. More than once in his diary he accepts that the two failed assassinations of two of his lovers, one because he had caught her in a lesbian scene with a theatre actress, and the other simply because of the post-coitum smokes, were because of his indomitable Colombian blood. How to live, if both sides pull the same amount of energy?
The sound of coughing made Peralta briefly stop his speech— not a very nice beginning, he thought. Soledad was looking at him attentively, and he felt glad once he noticed she was writing with a red pen. Professor Junguito was taking notes in a yellow pad, and Peralta felt that the room was bigger than ever: there was something in the pulpit that translated itself into a wanted prominence.
“This dichotomy was translated into two characters, without, dear fellows, falling in schizophrenia: his sensual I and his intellectual I. The sensual was in charge of hunting for endless sensations, savagely conquering European mademoiselles, of making them drink his kisses and kneel before his indomitable love. And the intellectual was in charge of collecting pieces of art, of never-ending readings of Dante’s La Vita Nuova, and of searching for what he considered the beauty ideal of his time, Helena de Scilly Dancourt, whom he found underneath a tomb in Paris’ Pêre-Lachaise. His diary is the testimony of failure, of never actually grabbing what he intended the most, a small girl that happened to be of the same artistic bent of Elizabeth Siddal, prematurely dead wife of Rossetti. But there is much more to it. This is what you will find in any encyclopedia, but I am here to give you more.”
“Fernández’ real hero was Dorian Gray, my people. This is the true fact that critics have been scarcely paying attention to in the last century. They have been all stuck with the same idea: Fernández is the alter ego of Silva himself, a horrible interpretation that rescinds Fernández from himself. Silva, in a personal yet mysterious episode, decided to take away his life. That doesn’t mean that Fernández would actually do the same thing. Characters are not their fathers, let’s not mix business in this matter. Therefore, I invite you to recognize that he is still alive, and lives among us, in one way or another, because he reminds us of the truly Latin American conflict: should we forge our own way of living, or should we borrow foreign customs and live according to what other people and other fashions demonstrate?
“But let’s go back to Dorian Gray. As you all remember, Lord Henry’s most emphatic criticism towards Dorian was the fact that he saw Sybil Vane as an actress, therefore he should not worry for the death of such a human girl. Dorian fell in love with the artistic creation, but not with the material girl. This is precisely what happens to Fernández: he mentally makes a construction of Helena using diverse literary and pictorial standards: she is a mixture of Dante’s Beatrice and of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s Elizabeth Siddal. He meets her only once: in the dining room of a hotel in Interlanken, in Switzerland. After this, nothing more but mental elucubrations of a supposedly fifteen year old girl he saw after a night on opium. As Don Quixote, he decided to allow art into his reality, to the point of living according to it. He states it in these words: “Everything in me turns into literature.” It is as clear as water.
Fernández blinked. He felt a headache advancing from the distance, as his legs and arms were as cold as morning marble. His blanked memory started to stab a somewhat similar existence to the one carried years ago, but, still, there was a feeling of nothingness in the pulpit of his heart, a feeling of an ephemeral fame long-forgotten.
“As many of you don’t remember because you irresponsibly have not read the novel, Fernández suffers from a mental disease during his permanence in Paris. He auto-prescribes himself, determining that the only thing that can save him from this is finding Helena, and forgetting sexual intercourse with any other women. He visits two doctors, Rivington in London before going to Paris, and Charvet once he gets there— who both seem as a reflection of that famous XIX century doctor Charcot—, and they both tell him that he should forget about those virginal dreams and get back to a licentious composure, without, of course, forgetting that his true love is Helena. Instead of allowing him to continue dreaming and mentally constructing Helena, they both advise him to find her and marry her, thus making him realize that she is human, real, and a female. But this is quite difficult for him, since she already shares a celestial podium with Beatrice.”
“But the disease is far beyond the reach of science. It is indeed about Helena, and it is indeed about that sickness so many poets shared called the mal-de-siècle. But for him, the term siècle acquires a new dimension. There is a constant sentence in the diary: Fernández feels the urge to hurry up, because he is going to be late. For where, he has no idea, but he feels the disease. So, he is walking a 31st of December in a Paris sidewalk. He gets nearer and nearer to a huge and black clock that sits behind a shop window. And then he realizes that the time has come: it is 12 o’clock, and the year is changing. My interpretation, people, is that the year that is changing is 1899, therefore the entire century is changing. This is what really kills him: to realize that his century already passed, that time exists, and there is nothing he can do about it. Here we see a clear relation with Baudelaire’s “Le Horloge,” a chant dedicated to that sinister God that rules time. Once again, because of art, Fernández realizes that his time has come.”
“His diary is the diary of frustration. It finishes in the cemetery I have already mentioned, and, at the same time that the diary ends, and all of his friends remain silent in that living room somewhere in a XIX century Latin American city, a place where he began to read the diary to his friends. As he finishes the reading, we encounter the real mourning of his time: the century had ended, and he never found his true love. Only the words in the cemetery thunder in the silence: ‘You dead, Helena?... No, you can’t die. Perhaps you never existed, perhaps you were simply a luminous dream of my spirit; but you are a dream far more real than that which many mortals call Reality.’”
“But what is that which we call reality? Is it the place where we forget about artistic creations, about literary characters, about that which he have acquired since long ago? Please someone tell me this is false, or else I would rather cease and remain in the blackness of a closed book. If reality is the place where one forgets about Fernández, my dear people, then allow me “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of our race”: we are literature students, God knows if we will ever be literary characters of lonesome writers, but we have the chance of living our life throughout artistic means, and Fate knows why we chose to study literature. If no one here is prepared to take the risk and challenge the living like this, then I invite you to retire and apply to economics or veterinary science, careers that will never make you forget about your reality.
V
Thus stopped the bard, and then Fernández again drew his mantle over his head and wept bitterly. No one noticed his anguish except Soledad, who was standing near him, and heard the heavy sighs that he was heaving. Professor Junguito effusively thanked Peralta, and dismissed the class. Every clock in Bogotá had struck 9 p.m.
As they crossed the campus silently, Soledad noticed the heavy burden that Peralta was carrying. She felt that awkward silence that threatens the vocal chords once a lapidary sentence has unearthed an atmosphere. The wind awoke the eucalyptus branches as a soft and melodious song erupted in the middle of the night.
As they stood on the covered bench, Soledad asked Peralta:
—By the way, did you notice that strange fellow weeping in the corner of the room, once you finished your speech?
—Which fellow?
The bus was arriving.
—Never mind, here comes our bus.
They stepped in and went away heading north through the Seventh Avenue.
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