‘Passion is a part of
the trip, compassion its
destiny’:
A Conversation with Margarita R. Merino
Nibir K.
Ghosh
Dr. Margarita
Merino de LIndsay has worked in education, graphic design, the media and
has had expositions of her poems and drawings.
She has published
books such Viaje al interior, Baladas del abismo, Halcón
herido, Demonio contra arcángel, La dama della gallerna, Viaje
al exterior, Pregón de un Sábado de Piñata and many essays,
articles, columns and short stories. Critics highlight her talent as “total poetry” through
the vitality of her voice. In Mudrovic’s Mirror, Mirror on the Page: Identity and
Subjectivity on Spanish Women´s Poetry (1975-2000) she was identified as
perhaps the one “who avails herself of the poem as a mirror with the most
variety and imagination.” She has
lectured, given recitals and sung in prairies, prisons, theaters, classrooms,
night-clubs, cloisters and castles. Born in
Spain, she lives in USA.
NKG: What attracted you initially to art
and poetry? When did you publish your first poem?
MM: Love of arts runs in my blood. I have
been communicating with myself—writing, drawing, and singing inside too—since
my very early childhood, many times while hiding in closets. Some external sources
were helpful such as the good library we had at home–books have been always
there and I have been a voracious self-taught reader-. The strict environment
where spontaneity or free thinking was repressed with fear at school, the
punishment for “disobeying” or being different, the constriction to express
ideas, imagination, around the whole society—especially for girls (women were
second or third class citizens always under the control of fathers, brothers,
husbands, sons…, in the Franquism)—triggered for me the wish to survive those
boundaries in a quiet, secret form. I ‘published’
some of my early poems and handmade images in school magazines that have been
lost with time or otherwise vanished. I
had boxes of drawings, poems, illustrated things, but in the frustrated ways of
overwhelmed women mostly doing home chores, my mother or a maid stored those
early creations in an outdoor balcony, under the rain and the snow…. So the
elements destroyed them.
NKG: Who were the people you would like to
single out as your source(s) of inspiration?
MM: My father (Bonifacio Merino) was a
very inspiring human being, a great person always helping and listening to others.
He was sensitive for culture too—he loved literature, art, music, poetry. Poets
such as Bécquer, Rosalía de Castro, Antonio Machado, Lorca; musicians such as
Beethoven, Falla, Albéniz; many artists from western culture and cultures
around the world were present in the very early years of my childhood but the
biggest influence was the care my father had for his family and friends, his
dream of universal understanding among people.
NKG: You received a Coca-Cola Composition
National Award when you were just thirteen. What was your composition about?
What are your impressions of visiting Italy as part of receiving the award?
MM: The subject to write about was given
to us: “La rueda”: “The Wheel.” I wanted
to finish it fast to attend a birthday party, so I was a bit lazy. I wrote about
the history of a wheel that was first used to carry a fancy carriage in a
beautiful city—it was probably the 19th Century—to pass later on to
be engaged in rural work; to be used after that in serving the adventurous life
of some gypsies, and finally abandoned in a forest where—because its first transformation
for humans its destiny was to be an useful utensil for them—it misses the joy
to serve and remembers the voices of young kids … with tears … in an early use
of ‘personification.’
Being a daughter of Gothic Cathedrals,
sober abbeys; a neighbor of the ancient culture of Rome in many ways,—an
‘apprentice’ of that old style lawyer my father was—we celebrated every day the
antique Roman laws, Roman civil architecture such as aqueducts, roads ‘calzadas’,
obelisks…. To be somehow ‘citizens of the Roman Empire’ and its civilized lands
was our pride. It is fair to remember the roots of first ancestors but we
should also be conscious of their side of barbarity too … ‘Astures’ who rode
Asturcones horses almost naked and whose women gave birth by themselves
standing up in the fields, but whose enemies were precipitated to the abysms
from the top of mountains—as the Spartans did against the customs of Athenians.
I loved deeply my trip to Italy! Italy,
its magnificent creations, enchanted me in full—its culture, impressive art, fashion, music, taste
and design, delicious food, welcoming people everywhere. I should have stayed hidden there and never
returned back to Spain.
NKG: Would you like to talk about the
flooding of your Spanish library? How did it happen?
MM: I was living with my young daughter in a cute sunny apartment—kind
of a tiny, modest penthouse with a big terrace—in León, Spain. I had a small
but pretty diverse library whose books—collected with care—were put in boxes
and left in a subterranean garage with a ramp down under the house of some
friends when—it was the year 1992—we moved to the States. I rented my apartment
with everything but our personal belongings, books, long plays. It was one of the worst floods that ever took
place—when heavy rains happened in the north the same year, it flooded that
garage and destroyed all my books, drawings, pictures, photos (mine and those
of my daughter), wonderful letters from people who are gone. Still I dream of
those books and go to the shelves in my dreams to open their pages. I have
written poems about that … I go with closed eyes to pages of unique collections
of children books bought for me by my parents, pages of my favorite poems, pages
with quotations, pages of antique books, pages where special friends and
writers wrote dedications many years ago.
NKG: As a student of Political Science and
Sociology, what are your impressions about life and polity in Spain?
MM: I knew already that Spain was detained
in its right to develop as other neighboring European countries
evolved. It happened because of our undeniable peculiar history the Franquism
and the long dictatorship damned deeper. But even before it was already a country
full of dysfunctional manners—a disability for the ones in charge to reach for
the benefit of all the members of society—although the splendid figures,
artists, compassionate thinkers that Spain had (we were the first ones to
defend human beings against slavery through our notion of “Leyenda negra”—“Black
Legend”—invented by our rivals in the times when Spain was in power over seas
and lands...). It is often forgotten that
almost all of our neighbors had Inquisitions as well during the dark centuries,
that we are also our most acute critics in advertising our shortcomings. Spain,
despite its rare, precious ‘vidriera’`— ‘stained glass window’—has had three
cultures (Christian, Muslim, Jewish) living together; it has a twisted history
since the Middle Ages. It is a complex, manipulated interpretation when the
historical truth has been carefully disguised in the benefit of the Castilian
“ID”—but, please do not understand I am supporting any new nationalism when these
are the causes of racism and bloody rampages. Among its marvels, Spain has a disturbing
history of wars, destruction, intolerance, extreme poverty of the peasants. The
communal lands of the towns (we have had too very advanced democratic communal
laws before the British had them)—were sold by absurd legislation across
centuries. A lack of understanding of the biggest Spanish burdens and problems (injustice,
poverty, illiteracy, fanatism) added to a lack of insight from governments—private
or public counselors, religious figures attached to the royals—‘validos’, inefficient
politicians, greedy or lazy aristocrats, dismantled the puzzle to ashes. Our
Golden Century in Literature and Arts has behind it a scenery that was not so
bright. Added to it was a wide possibility of corruption in each corner where escaping
every law was available to powerful people or to the ones in charge;
authoritarism, selfishness from our uneducated disconnected rich classes—lacking
in compassion or the minimal sense of social justice; a Catholic church
becoming more conservative and their docile servant when it became impoverished
itself by the loss of its own properties and ways to stay independent, able to
help the ones in need, when the terrifying big lost— “desamortizaciones”
happened. What country has destroyed the irrecoverable wonders of all its amazing
monasteries as Spain did with its own? The
poor raising explosive resentment and rage built for the long forgetfulness
which made them to die of starvation, kept them totally illiterate and without
any possibility to work for sustaining themselves, the glorification of a horrifying
‘picaresque’: that celebrated wish to be successfully dishonest! An historical
absence of respect for others, a renewed rejection to open, practical ideas
happening in our vicinity, and the lack of understanding of the big picture for
the country by some outstanding ethical individuals—who were highly spirited
and wanted to help Spain—but who did not evaluate properly the real dynamics. Low
classes always were manipulated by the feudal landlords—minifundio or
latifundio, the ‘caciques’ had a crucial role in Spanish misery—, and the lack
of interest or the ability of our political groups to work together. We had learned nothing from Don Quixote.
NKG: Did the Spanish Civil War bring any
changes to the situation you describe?
MM: The Civil War of 1936, after the
Alzamiento—uprising—of July 18th of the fascists and the conservative forces
against the II República, destroyed the biggest efforts in our history to
extend public education everywhere, its redefined teachers—‘los maestros de la
República’—forged in the ethical foundation of “La Institución Libre de
Enseñanza” which goals had their roots in the Krausism. Unfortunately, the
Republic was stained by bloody forces wherein actions came from violent groups
from both sides involved in horrible crimes: that repulsive execution was claimed
out loud by some leaders. I recommend the classic The Spanish Labyrinth by Gerald Brenan, aka “don Geraldo” an
Englishman who lived many years close to Granada who truly loved Spain.
NKG: In the words of Eric Hobsbawm, “The Spanish Civil War united a generation
of young writers, poets and artists in political fervor. The wrong side may
have won, but in creating the world's memory of the conflict, the pen, the
brush and the camera have had the more lasting triumph.” How would you react to
the statement as a Spanish national?
MM: Yes, it is right. To feel
the “Spanish Passion”—its lust and belief—meant to endure its rigors
for many young artists and journalists (see the books by ‘hispanistas’ as Paul Preston
and Hugh Thomas) who died—war photographers many of them—because of it, or who
wrote of it and whose lives were changed for ever by the brutal events they
witnessed there, —some were imprisoned as Koestler; some friendships were
broken too (as the Hemingway-Dos Passos issue caused by the tragic death of
José Robles Pazos), —it was logical and almost
contagious. Some came in their own planes as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In part,
the “romanticized” aspect of the war spread with an impressive imaginary,
moving propaganda; the exotism exuded from an attractive, a still undeveloped country
in a conflict referred with a blooming media coverage, the compulsion to be
there … and the parallel hours of celebration and companionship with other
colleagues for a few as Hemingway. For some of the foreign young writers and
journalists, it was easy to get involved. While some of the ‘privileged’ participants
or observers did not experience in their hotels the lack of food or basic
comfort that most of the inhabitants in Spain were suffering all the time, some
were soon disappointed about the situation and left Spain (as Orwell) or stayed
since the leitmotif in Madrid for most in the resistance was “No pasarán.” For
too many readers that Spanish subject passed too soon in its cultural fashion,
so the Spanish Civil War remained forgotten by most liberal or democratic
politicians who could have had made the Franquism not so at ease. The same
liberals who finished trading with the rebels and the dictator because of the
help to the rebels from the Nazi German military trying its weapons, the Fascist
Italian support, or the intimidating Moor fighters and the cruel legionarios that
Franco brought, the war for the Republic with its no professional soldiers,
frail volunteers, poorly trained and fed, was already lost. The Spanish
president of government Azaña was naïve when he could have been in control and
punished the commanding military men in conspiracy. The Franquism stayed 40
years for the Spaniards until Spain was unable to be recognized anymore. The International Brigades brought people who
suffered fighting with the Spaniards in the front defending the República
Española. Reading memories of those who lived the ominous events makes me very
sad, also grateful for their huge sacrifice in leaving their lives behind to defend
ideals, to die unknown.
NKG: Writers
and poets like Federico García Lorca, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Andre Malraux,
W.H. Auden, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Emma Goldman, Pablo Neruda and
many others glorified the spirit of the Republican cause not only through their
creative works but also in actually participating in the war. Any favorites among these?
MM: I read almost all of them and their work many years ago. My underlined
books disappeared in the 1992 flooding of my library. I never tried to replace
them, and in fact I have been afraid to return to some of those readings. These
years I read more about the war history, memories or biographies. I often still
find myself crying through many nights of insomnia because of those events.
Among my favorite writers always are the poet Antonio Machado whose great
poetry paralleled his ethics as a human being and who shared with the losers
their painful destiny, being consistent with his ideals until the very end of
his path; Federico García Lorca, who suffered vicious jealousy against his
success, was assassinated in his Granada by the orders of the general Queipo de
Llano (Ian Gibson has written a lot about Lorca); the very fine, who suffered
real starvation, Peruvian poet César Vallejo whose poetry book “España, aparta
de mí este cáliz” is one of the most emotional works written about the Spanish
tragedy. Pablo Neruda, despite his great poems and fame—or maybe for this—was
not always the best as a human being, he was—as many poets are—overly egotistic;
though having all the commodities, recognition and possibilities to help
Vallejo, he was afraid of the deep poetry written by the Peruvian poet and
never helped him. I must remember the peasant poet Miguel Hernández who died as
prisoner of the Franquists, as in some way the old and repented don Miguel de
Unamuno did. Hemmingway is special for me for his Spanish passion. His many contradictions
make him very interesting and human: when my husband and I visited his home at
Key West in Florida I still felt his presence. An informative book more unknown
than the mediocre—with some very beautiful pages—La arboleda perdida by Rafael Alberti is the one written by his
wife María Teresa León Memoria de la
melancolía. It is hard to read their praising of the Stalin (whose brutal methods added more blood to the war) figure they meet visiting Russia or their political
preferences—ideology many times makes blind the ones who take partisan sides.
But they both played a positive role in the educational “Las misiones
pedagógicas”—as Federico did it in “La Barraca”—and still Alberti and León,
helped bravely to save the treasures of The Prado Museum traveling in risky
trips in trucks driven by the milicianos under the Fascist bombings. Something fun
and kind of hilarious is to think in the frail and short-sighted Simone Weil
trying to shoot in the anarchist column of Buenaventura Durruti.
NKG:
The Spanish Civil War is said to be
the dress rehearsal for the Second World War. How would you respond to this
statement? What memories of the Spanish Civil War did you receive from your
mother, María Estrella Sánchez Corbelle?
MM: It is true. That rehearsal was the main
reason the war was lost by the legitimate government of the Republic that never
received help from France or England. In addition to the treason made by many
of the Generals of the Spanish military to the República, Nazi Germany tried
their super-sophisticated weapons, their invincible combat planes in Spain. It
was a butchery. My mother, María Estrella Sánchez Corbelle, was very disturbed
in the depth of her soul, had ciclotimias, fear, melancholic moods triggered by
the horrible events she witnessed in her youth in La Coruña. I have published
few moths ago a little book—Pregón
de Sábado de Piñata (con explicación y gata) —where the poem “Estrangulada su juventud por la guerra
fratricida”–“Her Youth Suffocated by the Fratricide War—refers how she watched, as other civilians did, the corpses
of fathers and little young sons assassinated by the Falangistas: corpses showing
in their poor mortal remains the “tiro de gracia”—the signature last shot from
the fascist in their forehead. Those corpses were often dropped in the ditches
off the roads. She told me about it all
the time. I was very depressed.
If someone wants to know the
irrational, abominable ways of the repression suffered by average Spaniards one
may take a look at Muerte en Zamora
by Ramón Sender Barayón. A true history where abandonment, abuse from greedy
relatives or an acquaintance rejected by the victim such as a boyfriend, added torture,
and execution of an innocent woman: the mother of the author. Spain was scary
in those years, and the many of the ones who claimed to have God on their side committed
the biggest atrocities.
NKG: As a poet-painter, what are your
impressions of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’?
MM: I would like to deserve one day to
have the title of a painter but I am far from it due to my busy daily life. About
the ambiguous ‘Guernica’—an emblematic painting critically analyzed again and
again, acclaimed as a symbol against the brutality of war for many of its experts,
is it truly a representation of the bombing that happened in Guernica April 28th
of 1936 by the German ‘Legión Cóndor’? Is
it a masterpiece related with the unknown thoughts of Picasso or a spiral of
answers to the dramatic forces and art movements (as the Surrealism) that were taking
place in those years of world unrest? I
must simply refer to the words, translating them, spoken by Juan Larrea (who
seemed to have had an important part in the role the painting played): “throwing
down the historical truth, the basic mystery which makes art emotional just
happens.”
NKG: How would you describe your
experience of moving from a nation steeped in history and culture to the land
that Columbus discovered by default only a few centuries ago?
MM: I always have loved the Americas. The speaking Spanish America, the North
America which diversity makes together with Canada a vigorous continent. I had
a romantic idea through art, literature, music, cinema about America. When I
came—knowing no English at all (I used to speak French, now totally “slept” same
as other old languages as Latin and old Greek I could traslate in my childhood
I have totally forgotten)—I was in shock.
I had an anagnorisis
on the fortunate life I have had in Spain—notwithstanding the restrictions—simply
by being a member of an educated family. Many of the simple daily ways in Spain
seemed suddenly big luxuries here—the little things and details which enrich
our existence, as I am sure you have plenty of them in India—in comparison with
the rush, the workaholism and busy lives here, the isolation, the materialism,
the obsession for religion but with such an absence of spirituality in the USA.
At the same time, I have admired the many possibilities that are offered around
and the essential freedom to choose. I am
grateful too for the American friends I have.
NKG: Did you have to undergo assimilation
in the melting pot metaphor that characterizes the U.S.A.?
MM: Of course my Spanish ways created for
me a lot of misunder-standings. Generosity was suspicious! The revival of a kind
of intolerance for being different—here or there—made me to restrain myself as
a loner again, I assume life is not pleasant when seen as constant competition,
but it is a fact I feel well enough now, and some similarities—as my
Cuban-American friend Gustavo Pérez Firmat would say—with the ones living “in
the hyphen.” I am, and I write, in a territory that is not León, Florida or
Tennessee, a place that is neither Spain nor the States.
NKG: What is your perception of the ‘American
Dream’?
MM: My perception is related to that dream
by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or the ones that John F. Kennedy or his brother
Robert Kennedy would have tried to reach if they would have been not assassinated. But the American Dream now is lost in many
ways right now.
NKG: Who are the poets whom you consider
as influences on your growth as a poet?
MM: I have many debts sustaining the wish
to write or being encouraged to continue alive rather than to a particular
style. To feel in company and dialogue with some dead writers when more
functional illiteracy is spread around. The more my life passes, the more that I
read, the more unfair it seems to me to quote a few of the writers among the
many I have read, loved, liked and learned from. I do not like to simplify years
of reading and exploring universes in different vital moments and from diverse epochs,
ways, and languages. Spanish, Roman, Greek or French, Italian or Portuguese,
German or Russian, British, Irish or American writers. Or, if I tried to
remember I would think in poems, novels, short stories, chapters more than in
particular poets, novelists or writers. I suppose ancient mythology, Homer or
Virgil, had a big impact in my early days. Still I remember a children’s book, Platero y yo, when I love animals so
much, its sad ending. Many of my inspiring poets or writers were those who in
fact had not much recognition along their lives.
NKG: What aspects of American life,
literature and culture impresses you most?
MM: America is a very big, alive, diverse
place no matter how the ultraconservative forces try to confuse, pervert or
diminish its genuine spirit. America is
a great country. The variety of American spectrum, freedom, the self-criticism
many of its creators have about their own culture or surroundings. It is easy
to remember some of the names who have illuminated my Spanish nights: Edgar
Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Lovecraft, Ernest
Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Emily Dickinson, Isaac Asimov, John Steinbeck …
and, and, and … I was forgetting one of
my very favorite writers: Jack London! I
will not be able to quote so many of the American films that I love, so many
songs I like.
NKG: Would you agree to P.B. Shelley’s observation, “Most wretched men/ Are cradled into poetry by
wrong:/ They learn in suffering what they teach in song”?
MM: Yes. It was a bright way to explain what I
call ‘vital alchemy.’ As the dark late
Spanish baroque shows light and shadow rule together the human soul, the best
poetry in its depth does not come as easy. Pain, rejection, failures widen our insight,
make us become humble, able to better understand. P.B. Shelley is now beloved
but he was not so acclaimed by his contemporaries. I think passion is a part of the trip, but
compassion is its destiny.
NKG: You have been graciously eloquent in speaking about A World Assembly of Poets and the
inclusion of your poem “Ballad Beyond the Darkness.” How does it feel to find
your connection with India through this Re-Markings’
Special number?
MM: Magical. I was just
blessed by a mysterious Indian spell which put me in the stanzas of a colorful,
vivid piece of poetry as art—A World
Assembly of Poets—which
is going to last. You, Nibir, were the wizard. India was in my early years in
some the poems of Rabindranath Tagore translated by Juan Ramón Jiménez and
Zenobia Camprubí as it has been always in the admiration I feel for Mahatma Gandhi,
or showed up again in The God of Small
Things.
NKG: It is believed, good poetry is lost in translation. What is your view?
Do you feel more comfortable writing in Spanish and then translating it into
English or you prefer to write in Spanish and allow others to do the
translation?
MM: Because I did not have a
formal education in English and I learned it by osmosis, always I am at a
disadvantage. There is no comparison
with the use of my Spanish language. I write in Spanish mostly but sometimes I
do in English—how have I the bravery? I
can not avoid it. The process of the translation to English by others can be painful
and risky—although I am grateful some
poems have been translated—too many subtle things change there.
NKG: Your poem, “Ballad Beyond the Darkness” ends thus: “She loves you so/
darling old lost world/ coasts and plains and mountains of Spain/ Oh Sweet
Tennessee.” Can we call this “mixing memory and desire” in terms of your
nostalgia for the past and attraction to the present?
MM: You explained it
perfectly! I am grateful to both worlds,
their creatures, their nature.
NKG: Going by the contents and expression in your poems entitled, “Mi casa,”
“Black Birds at the
Windows,” “Ballad Beyond the
Darkness,” “Tunnel Infinito” and “Flying in Tierrasola,” would you accept that the images in the poems
reveal your affinity to magic realism?
MM: Again, you
nailed it, Nibir. Magical realism has been present in my unconscious life since
its origins because it was a substantial part of the memory of my parents, part
of the way they spoke, related with stories happening in their families and
lives, as the legends of their geographical areas and traditions encouraged. Now you can read the poem “Black Birds at the
Windows” and decide if you prefer it to my long answers, or maybe to cut some
of them and publish both in your tested generosity. Many thanks for all the convergences you
bring through diversity and my congratulations too.
NKG: Thanks Margarita for making this a wonderful conversation. In deference
to your express wish, we are rounding off this exchange with what you consider
your most loved poem, “Black Birds at the Windows.”
Black Birds at the Windows
Margarita Merino
Translated from the Spanish by Brenda
Logan Cappuccio
To Edgar Allan Poe
In the ominous corridors of childhood
where we fearfully shivered and
shuddered sheltered in closets
behind the overcoats and with mothballs
on our breath,
in strict schools where we ate bloody
liver
choking back our disgust as the
monitors jotted down
the names of the disobedient on
punishment lists,
there where we hid novels and poems,
wondrous stories,
under the blue folds of our robes and
our uniforms,
the adults tried to disguise the
dizzying frenzy of time
degrading us with implacably ordered
doll houses.
The domestic rituals of the pale-faced dolls reduced
to a world upholstered in cretonne were
carried out correctly
under the scrutinizing eyes of the nosy
neighbors of those galleries
with no front walls where perhaps
mystery
had secretly nested in its chaotic
order.
Play was a formal exercise in the parameters
where pulchritude could not take the
place of emotion.
(Ah denial served up in steaming
tureens,
the harshness of calendars wrapped in
mufflers,
snow falling softly on your mouth
burning your lips.)
Far from the cabins in the mountains
that exuded
freedom in abundance, in the delirium
of the fevers
of childhood, we dreamed of the Great
North and a freezing wind
rocked us in its currents as far as the
wolfhounds
and the infinite meadows.
The citizens of Foundation and Empire fed on
the sugary celluloid sweetness of the
Disney factory
mixer of immortal stories in tasteless
batter
to refine the movements of children
born very old
to the taste of nuns, frigid mothers,
notary confessors
who never filtered the transparency of
the punishment
for difference. And we lived it humiliated
on our knees, faces to the wall, with
our arms
extended and books in our hands,
anointed with white chalk
in the corners next to wastebaskets and
blackboards,
filling up with rage, never ever saying
the word sorry.
Some of us grew up different despite everyone,
dark circles under our eyes and fear in
our fantasies, knowing we were
guilty, exiled forever from the gentle
normalcy that other kids enjoyed in
their homes,
and the staircase landings with their
scent of wax-comforting
to them-seemed to us threatening places
where you could feel the still fresh
throbbing trace
of horrendous crimes between the stairs
of each floor
and the vestibule. The fear of being defenseless in the face of
cruelty
would take us by surprise: suddenly
pressure in the stomach,
the death rattles of the repressed
archways in the dining rooms
of the school, the involuntary vomiting
that nobody consoled,
the growing omen of that unknown
sickness
where the stumps of your soul ache.
Precocious readers, runaway sleepwalkers
who dreamed up other spaces from the
alphabet,
we knew early the salty flavor of the
fiercest
romanticism in the substance of our
tears
but not even the fear of contrite
reprisals
could cure us of the stigma and halo of
the star:
the rebelliousness of escaping to
little prisons
galloped like a wild pony transcending
the boundaries
of a prefabricated universe made of
papier-mâché
and the tightness of the lie didn’t
trap the integrity
of our thoughts, agile like eagles,
when they finally assumed their
uniqueness.
Stubbornly, travelers toward the cupolas of the cosmos,
persistent in the imagination that
freed us
from the daily abyss where happiness
was routinely asphyxiated,
we would fly as the intrepid pilots of
so many illusions,
navigators of dreams conceived in
terrible gargoyles
in Gothic cathedrals that darkened
their stained glass windows
with the secret of underground
passages. We were
quiet adventurers into the intuition of
the parallel reign
and we crossed over into the country
from which there is no return
without staining ourselves with mud,
sweat or blood.
Suckled in a voracious melancholy
that was not reflected in mirrors we
were
more alone day by day surprised at dawn
in a monologue of strawberries,
chocolate and pages.
Those weren’t times to celebrate the
collective memory
in the perception of prohibited
identity with a song
of one’s self, and on winter’s horizons
the domes of a temple of mercy never
appeared:
we knew that our pilgrimage would never
lead us
to contemplate the late afternoon from
the tranquility of our patios,
and that we would never find the
marvelous imaginary city.
But it was impossible to resist this foolish inclination to
imagine
movements and magic forms in hallways
and corners,
balconies, laboratories and storage
rooms, the message of the sermon
crouched among the school desks,
prosaic logic of the poor human
eagerness arranged according to the
ashen measure of the [confessionals:
passions were rigid, deformed, like the
sad fetuses
in the vials of formaldehyde and the
withered remains of the [dissecttions
silhouetted on paper like the paper
doll cut-outs of the model
that the intolerant middle class of the
provinces propagated
and their hunger for a never-golden
prosperity.
Then we accepted with pride the smoke
signals
that our dreaming inspired where we
lived split
into other happier selves, the shining
brothers of unnameable [shadows,
knowing in our hearts that we were
artists amid incomprehension.
Shocked, we sensed the nearness of the presence,
the foreboding flapping of the
carnivorous birds
that tore away all certainty from the
thresholds,
and their call made us abandon the
warmth of the sheets
recognizing our status as chosen ones,
the curiosity
which reveals premonitions. And we learned
to listen to the lament of the dying
impaled
on walls, the mewing of ghostly cats,
the pain
of the betrayed, the callousness of
murderers
expectantly awaiting their chance too
in the tranquility of libraries and
family parlors
sowing a mute terror in throats
which have begun to forget children’s
songs.
Thus we kept losing our way on the
course of our youth,
the trip we would never undertake to
sweet paradises
ignored because of the conflict between
the concealed and the visible,
confirming in our gut that the
eradication of desire,
fear, was a form of cancer that was
devastatingly rotting
the delicate epithelia of primordial
illusion,
and we obeyed by locking life up in the
attic.
The funereal hours passed on a watch without hands
at the initiation to a mystery that
gave us another homeland.
Curled up in our favorite hiding
places, stretched out under
the chestnut trees and lilac bushes of
the Garden of the Assumption
or kneeling on the benches of the
school chapel adorned in its finery,
breathing the dense perfume of incense
and fresh flowers,
between the sing-song of the prayers
and the sacred chants
we were guests of the sinister rooms:
engrossed, we read the dark stories
nestled in the bosom
of the missals and their spotless, mother-of-pearl
covers
anxiously invoking their creators and
creatures,
immersed in the wide space of adventure
only
to evade the urgent beauty of the
psalms
and the sadness of
love-with-a-capital-letter fiercely denied.
A solitary man, in the bitterness of his wretched days,
had opened the cages of the
impossibility we knew so well.
Many ominous birds disseminated the
desolation of his talent,
the torment of nightmares where alcohol
oozed
grimaces and shrouds, yellowish liquid
masks
of the most profound pain, larvae of
ravenous grief
in the interstices of those left to
their own devices,
and one night a heavenly ambassador
from the forbidden spheres,
the raven, was awaiting me in my
father’s study
bringing signs of the future.
“I am,” he said, “your guardian angel. I have come
to save you from the hope you don’t
have.”
“It’s nothing more than the winter
gale, the wood contracting
because of the cold,” I assured myself,
refusing to glance at the [shadow
projecting from the bust of
Beethoven. The storm
abated.
The reflection of the snow on the nearby flat roof
gleamed with an unreal brilliance
freezing the instant
into a still life. I couldn’t make a sound, and there was no
threat
in the tone of that changeable voice
that had a mocking
inflection-was it my own interior voice
speaking aloud?-
but the crow laughed stridently with
harsh cackles
and I fell into a leather chair,
turning my back to the evidence,
my gaze floating out into the ghostly
sky.
“I’m on the fourth floor of a building in a city
where nothing ever happens, it’s a
hallucination caused by the moon and tides,
weariness because of too little sleep,
the result of annoying
jokes by my older brothers, too much
reading science
fiction and horror stories by
flashlight . . .,” I told myself.
“Learn to listen to the language of
nightwalking birds
and noble savages, the signs of a world
made for you,”
recited the ugly bird in the manner of
a Sunday sermon.
And I, astonished, thought: “I’m just a
little girl in the middle
of a realistic and very strange dream;
I’ll wake up soon.”
A leaden silence perched on my temples,
and I sensed the soft spreading of
feathers, the voice now murmuring:
“Yes,”-the words are engraved in my
memory as if on tombstones-
“you will awaken to solitude, your
heart’s only sustenance,
and nothing more . . .”-There was an
agonizing pause.-
“Nothing more than the landscape, the
flow of nature
on nights like this one, knowledge,
books . . . Nothing more.”
Everything around me began to spin. The outlines of objects
disappeared in the dizziness of my fall
into the darkness
of a hazy dream. Melodies and hymnals, windows,
the height of the mountains,
thermometers, the sea and notebooks
merged.
The faces of my familiars grew old spookily
and my face was consumed in the stages
of aging to senility.
I witnessed the wound of time, the
destruction of all
that I had loved, still loved, and
would ever love.
Because my corpuscles were the
inheritors of a never-ending weeping,
and I was the carrier of that weeping, and
belonged forever
to generations of weeping, to the
family of animals who weep,
and I would dream pointlessly in the
country of weeping and of cold [bonfires.
All that remained were the tides, the cyclical lunar debit
of their flow,
the fratricidal balance of the waves
swinging the bodies of dolphins,
dirty boats in oceans corrupted by the
waste of war,
anonymous corpses with their faces
nibbled away by fish,
unanswered letter decayed by seaweed
and by petroleum,
and on the muddy shores of oblivion,
the hunger of the multitude.
Quieted after the mutilation of the
watch towers, the storms left behind
a lament over losses, a burning
infection from the past,
the agony of unfulfilled love and the
burning fresh breeze
in memories, a malignant list of frugal
length.
Eyes poisoned by mercury: insects
exploring
rotten grasslands, gray lizards in the
demolished rubble.
And finally, far from the perfection of
the cloisters, McDonald.
In the ruins of the empty
amphitheaters, black canvasses, caustic [soda.
Deciphering the message of time, its
signs and its petals: the remains
of syringes of serum, the vision of
guts invaded by absence,
pentothal in your bones, the scent of
bleach in bedpans,
snakes in the cracks of solitary
hospitals,
old age in the consumption of mercy.
But I learned to expect the arrival of the sinister birds
on nights of sleeplessness and
sacrifice.
Thankfully I opened the windows when I
heard in the eaves
the rhythmic beating of the impatient
blackness
of their wings.
I was their hostess. I served them honey and little soft rolls.
With them I inferred the certainty of
the interpretation of omens.
I let them perch on the head of my bed
in rooms
where they monitored the course of my
thoughts,
my engrossed reading of the books I
love.
With them I confronted my father’s
death, the losses,
the lullabies sung to my only daughter
to inform her
of the direction of the faraway
kingdom.
And I tiptoe across the territories of
twilight
until I recognize every inch of their
quaking bogs without crying
now that I am getting old.
And I smile serenely, when everyone has
gone, when everything is [turned off,
freed of the tremulous spells of
happiness,
while they recite in a semi-darkness
that for me will never exist “nevermore.”
Note: "Pájaros negros junto a los ventanales"
("Black Birds at The Windows")
was first published in America and the
Spanish-Speaking World, Part II.
Ed. Ed Stanton. ANQ 10.3 (Summer 1997): 2-11.
·
Dr.
Nibir K. Ghosh, former Head, Department of English Studies &
Research, Agra College, Agra is UGC Professor Emeritus. He has been a Senior
Fulbright Fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA during 2003-04.
An eminent scholar and critic of American,
British and Postcolonial literatures, he is Author/Editor
of 14 widely acclaimed books and has
published over 170 articles and scholarly essays on various political,
socio-cultural and feminist issues in prestigious national and international
journals.
Published in Re-Markings Vol. 18 No.1 March 2019. - www.re-markings.com
Copyright Nibir K. Ghosh 2019.
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