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
