Last Wednesday I participated in an activity organized by the FILBA Foundation, the organizer of the Buenos Aires International Literature Festival. The topic on which she was to present had a pompous title: “The books that saved my life.” It seemed a bit exaggerated to me, because are there books that save your life? But when I thought about it a little more, I realized that books always save you from falling into the abyss of whatever, many take you to a place, to paraphrase Baudelaire, of “luxury, calm and voluptuousness” and others simply They are with you when you need them. For inveterate readers, books accompany us in difficult moments, to a doctor’s visit, to a break-up appointment, to a trip alone, to make any type of wait more bearable. As a reader, this is what has happened to me on more than one occasion. As an author, this is what I would like to happen with what I write: to accompany someone at a time when they need it.
There are books that may not save you, but that are part of your life. With that premise I began to fill a backpack with books to show them to those present. Because in those cases the books are not only the content, but also the copies, the editions in which we read those stories, ideas, poems. They are also our brands, the comments written in the margins. We could reconstruct our lives with what we emphasize at a certain moment.
I took the opportunity (a captive audience enjoying a glass of wine) to read excerpts from those books. Reading aloud is something that I have liked since I was a child, when at the age of eight or nine, on the summer afternoons in Lanús, we would sit in the shade with my friends so that I could read to them. Isidoro’s Follies either Beanpole’s Misadventures.
I said that a book that saved my life was Artificial respiration, by Ricardo Piglia. When I read it for the first time, when I was sixteen, I told myself that I wanted to one day write with the words that Piglia used. It was the first time I became aware of the Argentine language, the one I had to use if I wanted to be a writer. A novel that teaches you your own language, that makes you understand the literary tradition, but above all that speaks to you about a time (the dictatorship) with words that are eternal and that can always be read in the present. Just read the brief text that appears on the back cover of the Editorial Pomaire edition, perhaps the shortest back cover in history: “Dark times when men seem to need artificial air in order to survive.” Just that: white letters on an immense black background.
And what is literature, what are books if not a form of artificial respiration in dark times? Piglia says at another point in the novel: “You have to know how to look at what is coming as if it had already happened.” Good advice for this time, but there is more: “Argentine history is the hallucinated, endless monologue of Sergeant Cabral at the moment of his death, transcribed by Roberto Arlt.”
While I was selecting the books I would bring to the meeting I discovered that the majority were poetry. In fact, I took only a part of the many volumes that I would have liked to share.
There are poets who gave me titles and epigraphs for my books, such as the Italian Salvatore Quasimodo, author of the poem “Now the lean flower flies,” which says: “I will never know anything about my life,/ dark monotonous blood./ I will not know to whom.” I loved, who I love,/ now that tight, reduced to my limbs,/ in the damaged wind of March/ I enumerate the evils of the days deciphered.”
Of the Argentine poets, the so-called Generation of 50 was the one that marked the path for me – like Piglia – along which our language passed, in addition to the fact that these authors expressed their political and social concerns. They were not the first, but they did do it with a high level of lyricism. Seven of those poets, friends among them, made an anthology with their texts and included them without clarifying who had written each poem, except in the final index. The book is called Internal Anthology and brings together beautiful verses by Edgar Bayley, Miguel Brascó, César Fernández Moreno, Noé Jitrik, Ramiro de Casasbellas, Francisco Urondo and Alberto Vanasco. An unfindable book that I bought more than twenty years ago in a used bookstore. I think about the different life paths of these seven men, all so different. Hollywood would have made more than one movie with the lives of these writers.
Sometimes the books that saved our lives give us surprises. For example, in one of them I found a poem cut from a cultural supplement. The poem is called “A César Vallejo”, by Alberto Vanasco, exceptional poet and novelist. I cut it out in 1989 and it was inside a book, but before that I read it in public when I had to do it at the First Young Art Biennial. Context: March 1989, the final death throes of radicalism, hyperinflation, the arrogance of a government that did not realize that it was about to fall. Before reading my poems (which were very bad), I read Vanasco’s poem that says: “Language is not enough for us, comrade,/ to say the unspeakable./(…) Language is not useful for us, comrade,/ if We do not previously break down the words/ if we do not chew them a priori with violence/ and grind them stubbornly for a while./ (…) And yet we sing/ we sing in a time of crime and dispossession/ but we do not sing this time but the other / the time when everyone who wants will be able to sing.”
Vanasco was a friend of another poet, Mario Trejo, one of the most prominent of his generation. Trejo’s poetry is almost all gathered in a single book: The use of the word. His poems always come with me, like someone who has a photo of his loved ones in his wallet. There is a very funny poem (the adjective is correct) called “Notes for a critique of poetic reason.” In three of his provocative verses he writes: “the new man must guard against two dangers: / from the right when it is right-handed / from the left when it is sinister.”
He has some incredible love poems (“Free Lips”, “São Paulorevisited”), but the one that stays with me the most these days is one he wrote dedicated to a friend of his who had been imprisoned by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The poem ends by saying: “My pain and my joy have been of no use/ My mistakes have been of no use/ The night can last and will still last/ The dawn is the job of survivors.”
There they are, in your own or public library, in a bookstore or on a free exchange website. In paper or digitally. There are the books that await us to continue saving our lives. What a novel, what a volume of stories or essays, what poetry will accompany us in these dark times. I hope they help us see the dawn we deserve.
