The years of his ostracism are shrouded in legend. Perhaps he was jailed again, perhaps not.
But in 1975, after many failed attempts, he managed to get out of Cuba and settle in New York, where he devoted his time and energy—working more than ten hours a day—to writing and polemics. He died five years later. Surprisingly, his name figures in the Dictionary of Cuban Authors (Havana, 1978), which omits Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
POÈTES MAUDITS
PEDRO GONZÁLEZ CARRERA
Concepción, 1920–Valdivia, 1961
A few hagiographies of Pedro González Carrera have come down to us; all concur in affirming, and perhaps with good reason, that his work was as brilliant as his life was dull. He came from a humble background, worked as a grammar school teacher, got married at twenty and fathered seven children; his life was a series of moves from post to post—always in small towns or mountain villages—and economic hardships, seasoned with family tragedies and personal affronts.
His first poems were adolescent imitations of Campoamor, Espronceda and the Spanish Romantics. At the age of twenty-one, he was published for the first time in Southern Flowers, a magazine devoted to “agriculture, stockbreeding, education and fishing,” edited at the time by a group of grammar school teachers from Concepción and Talcahuano, whose leading light was Florencio Capó, a friend of the poet since childhood. At twenty-four, according to his biographers, González tried to get a second poem published, this time in the Journal of the Pedagogical Institute of Santiago. Capó, who by then had moved to the capital and was among the journal’s contributors, submitted the poem, as he would later say, sight unseen, and it was published along with twenty other texts by as many poets, who were teachers in Santiago or, for the most part, in the provinces, and who made up the core of the magazine’s readership. The scandal was immediate and momentous, albeit limited to Chile’s teaching community.
The poem was a far, far cry from the blandishments of Campoamor; in thirty precise and limpid verses, it vindicated Il Duce’s vilified armies and the derided courage of the Italians (who, at the time, in both pro-Allied and pro-German circles, were assumed to be a race of cowards; for instance, in relation to a possible border conflict with the Italianized Argentineans, a Santiago politician had famously remarked that with a company of good Chilean border guards the government could halt and rout a division of invading wops), while also, and here lay its originality, denying Italy’s flagrant defeat, and promising an ultimate victory, to be achieved “by novel, unexpected, marvelous means.”
As a result of the furor—of which González, teaching at the time in a remote village somewhere near Santa Bárbara, was informed by three letters, in one of which Capó disapproved of González’s position, reaffirmed his friendship and washed his hands of the whole matter—the magazine Iron Heart attempted to contact the poet, and the Ministry of Education added his name to a long and futile list of possible Fascist fifth columnists.
His next venture into print dates from 1947. It consists of three poems which blend lyric and narrative impulses, as well as modernist and surrealist metaphors, employing images that are, at times, disconcerting: González sees men in armor, “Merovingians from another planet,” walking down endless wooden corridors; he sees blond women sleeping in the open beside putrid streams; he sees machines whose functions he dimly intuits as they move through dark nights, their headlights shining “like diadems of canine teeth.” He sees, but does not describe, acts that frighten him, but to which he feels irresistibly drawn. The action unfolds not in this world but in a parallel universe where “Will and Fear are one and the same.”
The following year, he published another three poems in Iron Heart, which by then had moved its editorial operations to Punta Arenas. These poems revisit the same scenes and recreate the same atmospheres as the previous three, with slight variations. In a letter to his friend Capó, dated March 8, 1947, along with the usual complaints about his job and tales of familial woe, González reveals that his poetic illumination took place in the summer of 1943, during which he was visited for the first time by the extraterrestrial Merovingians. But did they visit him in a dream or in reality? On that point González remains unclear. In the letter to Capó, he reflects at length on glossolalia, epiphanies and the miraculous images that appear at the ends of tunnels. He explains how, having worked until nightfall in his little country school, feeling very sleepy and hungry, he tried to get up and go home. Unsuccessfully, at least in part, as far as one can tell from his account. An hour later he woke up in a nearby field, lying on the ground, face up, under an exceptionally starry night sky, with all of the poems, from the first word to the last, in his head. Having read the copy of Iron Heart sent by González along with his letter, Capó advised his friend to make an urgent request for a transfer, or else the solitude would end up driving him crazy.
González took his advice about the transfer but stubbornly continued to exploit his peculiar poetic vein. The next three poems he published (not in Iron Heart, which had folded, but in the cultural supplement of a Santiago newspaper) are free of surrealist images, symbolist baggage and modernist vagaries (González, it must be said, knew almost nothing of the three schools in question). His verse has become concise, his images simple; the figures that recurred in the six previous poems have also undergone a transformation: the Merovingian warriors have become robots, the women are now dying beside putrid streams of consciousness, and the mysterious tractors plowing the fields without rhyme or reason are either secret vessels sent from Antarctica, or Miracles (with a capital letter). And now these figures are counterbalanced by a sketchy presence, that of the author himself, adrift in the vast spaces of the fatherland, observing the apparitions like a registrar of marvels, but unenlightened finally as to their causes, phenomenology or ultimate purpose.
In 1955, at the cost of great personal sacrifice and tremendous effort, González financed the publication of a chapbook containing twelve poems, printed by a press in Cauquenes, capital of the province of Maul, where he had been transferred. The little book was entitled Twelve, and the cover, which was the author’s own work, is noteworthy in its own right, as it was the first of many drawings he produced to accompany his poems (the others came to light only after his death). The letters of the word Twelve on the cover, equipped with eagle talons, grip a swastika in flames, beneath which there seems to be a sea with waves, drawn in a childlike style. And under the sea, between the waves, a child can in fact be glimpsed, crying, “Mom, I’m scared!” The speech bubble is blurred. Under the child and the sea are lines and blotches, which might be volcanoes or printing defects.
The twelve new poems add new figures and landscapes to the repertoire developed in the previous nine. The robots, the streams of consciousness and the ships are supplemented with Destiny and Will, personified by two stowaways in the holds of a ship, as well as The Disease Machine, The Language Machine, The Memory Machine (which has been damaged since the beginning of time), The Potentiality Machine and The Precision Machine. The only human figure in the earlier poems (that of González himself) is joined by the Advocate of Cruelty, a strange character who sometimes speaks like a regular Chilean guy (or rather, like a grammar school teacher’s idea of a regular guy) and sometimes like a sibyl or a Greek soothsayer. The setting is the same as for the earlier poems: an open field in the middle of the night, or a theater of colossal dimensions situated in the heart of Chile.
González sent the chapbook to various newspapers in Santiago and the provinces, but in spite of his best efforts, it made almost no impression. A gossip columnist in Valparaiso wrote a humorous review entitled “Our Rural Jules Verne.” A left-wing paper cited González, along with many others, as an example of the growing Fascist influence on the nation’s cultural life. But in fact no one, on the Right or the Left, was reading his poems, much less supporting him, except perhaps Florencio Capó, who lived far away, and whose friendship had been sorely tried by the cover of Twelve. In Cauquenes, two s
tationery stores displayed the book for a month. Then they returned the copies to the author.
Stubbornly, González went on writing and drawing. In 1959 he sent the manuscript of a novel to two publishers in Santiago. Both rejected it. In a letter to Capó he refers to the novel as his scientific work, a compendium of his scientific knowledge, which he will bequeath to posterity, although it was no secret that he knew next to nothing about physics, astrophysics, chemistry, biology or astronomy. When he was transferred to a village near Valdivia, his health, which had been delicate at the best of times, deteriorated sharply. In June 1961, he died in the Valdivia Provincial Hospital at the age of forty. He was buried in a common grave.
Many years later, thanks to the efforts of Ezequiel Arancibia and Juan Herring Lazo, who had read González’s contribution to Iron Heart, scholarly research into the poet’s work began in earnest. Luckily, most of his papers had been kept, first by his widow, then by one of his daughters. And in 1976, Florencio Capó entrusted the scholars with the letters he had received from his old friend.
The first volume of the Complete Poems (350 pages), edited and annotated by Arancibia, appeared in 1975.
The second and final volume (480 pages) followed in 1977. It included González’s overall plan for his works, sketched out in note form back in 1945, and a great many drawings, which were highly original in a number of respects, and whose function was to help the author himself to understand, as he put it, the “avalanche of novel revelations troubling my soul.”
In 1980, The Advocate of Cruelty was published, with the strange dedication: “To my Italian friend, the unknown soldier, the laughing victim.” The novel is 150 pages long, and elicits a certain wariness on the part of the reader. It makes no concessions to fashion (although exiled as he was in Maule, González can hardly have been aware of the literary fashions of his day), or to the reader, or to the author himself. Cold, but spellbound and spellbinding, as Arancibia writes in his preface.
In 1982, a slim, ninety-page volume containing his entire correspondence concluded the series of posthumous publications. It contains the letters he wrote to his fiancée, to his friend Capó (which account for the greater part of the book), to magazine editors, colleagues, and officials in the Ministry of Education. The letters reveal little about his work, but a great deal about the suffering he had to endure.
Today, thanks to the enterprising promoters and editors of the Southern Hemisphere Review, two streets bear the name of Pedro González Carrera, one in a far-flung suburb of Cauquenes, the other near a treeless square in the northern part of Valvidia. Few people know whom they commemorate.
ANDRÉS CEPEDA CEPEDA
known as The Page
Arequipa, 1940–Arequipa, 1986
The first literary ventures of Andrés Cepeda Cepeda were marked by the beneficent influence of Marcos Ricardo Alarcón Chamiso, a local poet and musician with whom he used to spend afternoons jointly composing poems in a restaurant called La Góndola Andina, in his hometown of Arequipa. In 1960 he published a slim volume entitled The Destiny of Pizarro Street, whose subtitle, The Infinite Doors, suggests a series of Pizarro Streets, scattered throughout the continent, which, once discovered (although as a rule they remain hidden) have the power to provide a new framework for American perception, in which will and dream shall blend in a new vision of reality—an American awakening. The thirteen poems of The Destiny of Pizarro Street, composed in rather uncertain hendecasyllabics, failed to attract critical attention: only Alarcón Chamiso reviewed the book, in the Arequipa Herald, praising its musicality above all, the “syllabic mystery that lurks behind the fiery style” of the author.
In 1962, Cepeda began to contribute to the bimonthly magazine Panorama, edited in Lima by the controversial lawyer Antonio Sánchez Luján. The two men met when Sánchez Luján came to Arequipa to be the guest of honor at a Rotary Club dinner. As a result, The Page was born; henceforth Cepeda used that pseudonym to sign articles ranging from political diatribes to movie and book reviews. In 1965 he combined his work for Panorama with a daily column in the Peruvian Evening News, which belonged to Pedro Argote, the flour and seafood magnate, an old friend of Sánchez Luján. There Andrés Cepeda enjoyed his few moments of glory: his articles, ranging widely, like those of Dr. Johnson, provoked hostility and lasting resentment. He gave his opinion on any topic, and believed he had a solution for everything. He made errors of judgment, was sued along with the paper, and, one by one, lost every case. In 1968, while leading a whirlwind life in Lima, he republished The Destiny of Pizarro Street, supplementing the original thirteen poems with five new ones, the elaboration of which, he confessed in his column (“A Poet’s Work”), had cost him eight years of intense effort. This time, because of The Page’s notoriety, the critics did not ignore the book but fell upon it, each trying to outdo the savagery of his peers. Among the expressions employed were the following: prehistoric Nazi, moron, champion of the bourgeoisie, puppet of capitalism, CIA agent, poetaster intent on debasing public taste, plagiarist (he was accused of copying Eguren, Salazar Bondy, and Saint-John Perse, in the last case by a very young poet from San Marcos, whose accusation sparked another polemic opposing academic followers and detractors of Saint-John Perse), gutter thug, cut-rate prophet, rapist of the Spanish language, satanically inspired versifier, product of a provincial education, upstart, delirious half-blood, etc., etc.
The differences between the first and second editions of The Destiny of Pizarro Street are not especially striking. Some, nevertheless, are worthy of note. The most obvious difference is that the Arequipa edition is made up of thirteen poems and is dedicated to Cepeda’s mentor, Alarcón Chamiso, while the Lima edition contains eighteen poems but no dedication. Of the original thirteen poems, only the eighth, the twelfth and the thirteenth have been revised, and the changes are slight—simple word-substitutions (impasse instead of difficulty, judgment instead of talent, miscellaneous instead of various)—which do not greatly alter the original meaning. As to the five new poems, they seem to be cut from the same cloth: hendecasyllabics, a supposedly vigorous tone, an overall aim that remains rather vague, regular versification with occasional shoe-horning, and nothing in the least bit original. And yet the addition of these five poems changes the meaning or deepens and illuminates the interpretation of the first thirteen. What seemed a welter of mystery, murkiness and hackneyed allusions to mythical figures resolves into clarity and method, explicit commitments and proposals. And what does The Page propose? To what is he committed? A return to the Iron Age, which for him coincides roughly with the life and times of Pizarro. Inter-racial conflict in Peru (although when he says Peru, and this is perhaps more important than his theory of racial struggle, to which he devotes no more than a couplet, he is also including Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador). The ensuing conflict between Peru and Argentina (including Uruguay and Paraguay), which he dubs “the Combat of Castor and Pollux.” The uncertain victory. The possible defeat of both sides, which he prophesies for the thirty-third year of the third millennium. In the final three lines, he alludes laboriously to the birth of a blond child in the ruins of a sepulchral Lima.
Cepeda’s notoriety as a poet lasted no more than a month. The Page’s career continued for some time, although his glory days were over. Losing the libel cases was a rude awakening; then he was sacked by the Peruvian Evening News, which offered him up as a propitiatory victim to placate both a beer magnate of indigenous origins and the secretary of a certain ministry whom Cepeda had publicly taken to task for his ineptitude (which was widely acknowledged and admitted).
He did not publish any more books.
In his final years he relied on Panorama and stints of radio journalism. He also worked occasionally as a copy-editor. Initially he was surrounded by a small group of admirers, known as The Pages, but gradually time dispersed them. In 1982, he returned to Arequipa, where he set up a small fruit store. He died of a stroke in the spring of 1986.
WANDERING WOMEN
; OF LETTERS
IRMA CARRASCO
Puebla, Mexico, 1910–Mexico City, 1966
A Mexican poet inclined to mysticism and tormented phraseology. At the age of twenty she published her first collection of verse, The Voice You Withered, which bears witness to a stubborn and sometimes fanatical reading of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz.
Her grandparents and parents were supporters of Porfírio Díaz. Her elder brother was a priest who embraced the cause of the Cristeros and was executed by firing squad in 1928. In her 1933 collection, The Destiny of Women, she confessed that she was in love with God, Life and a New Mexican Dawn, to which she also referred indiscriminately as resurrection, awakening, dreaming, falling in love, forgiveness and marriage.
Being open-minded, she frequented the salons of Mexican high society as well as the haunts of the avant-garde, where her charm and frankness immediately won over the revolutionary painters and writers, who welcomed her warmly although they were well aware of her conservative ideas.
In 1934 she published The Paradox of the Cloud, fifteen sonnets in the style of Góngora, and A Tableau of Volcanoes, a series of highly personal poems, specimens of Catholic feminism avant la lettre. She was boundlessly prolific. Her optimism was contagious. Her personality was delightful. She radiated beauty and serenity.