THE COLOMBIAN GIRL FROM "LA NARVARTE” by Catalina Ruiz-Navarro (my translation)

Last weekend there was a brutal multi-murder in Mexico City. It happened in a district known as “La Narvarte,” a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. There were five victims: a man (who was found dressed) and four women, all naked, tortured and rapped. 

All of them got a mercy killing shot in the head. The five people from La Narvarte were, people say, 1) the photojournalist Rubén Espinosa, who came to Mexico City self-exiled because he was threatened to be killed in the state of Veracruz, where he resided since 2009. The governor of Veracruz (Javier Duarte) has created a very hostile and dangerous environment against journalism: so far, since he came into power (in 2010), it has been “officially” recorded that 37 journalist have been murdered and 37 have gone into exile. 2) Nadia Vera, an anthropologist, a cultural promoter and humans rights activist from Chiapas but graduated from the Universidad Veracruzana. Nadia was also threatened, to such point that she said in an interview that if something happened to her, she wanted to blame the despicable governor of Veracruz in advance. 3) Yesenia Quiroz, a young make-up artist, whose family (originally from Michoacán) lives in Mexicali; she had recently arrived to Mexico City straight from Mexicali. 4) “Alejandra,” a forty-year-old and “divorced” woman, who apparently worked as a housemaid, and whose last name has not been released to the press yet. And 5) “Simone” or “Nicole” (the Attorney General's Office has not been very clear about her, arguing that no one knew her last name in the building where her body was found), a 29 year-old Colombian girl, a “model and personal assistant,” at first assumed as the owner of the Mustang in which apparently the killers escaped (although the registration doesn’t have her name, also according to the Attorney General's Office). The Mexican press is suspiciously pointing at the statement released by the Attorney General’s Office: “despite not having a job, she was the owner of the Mustang, contributed to the expenses and owned a few jewelry and gold,” which, in other words, means that she was a whore (“like all the Colombian girls”).

This case is paradigmatic and disturbing for many reasons. Because Mexico City is no longer the safe refuge where threatened journalist once used to find peace. Also because, at first, the crime was reported as the murder of Rubén Espinosa and four other victims, whose names have been released slowly during the last days. Why at the beginning only Espinosa was mentioned? For two reasons: because authorities (and the press) tend to make FEMINICIDES invisible by not mentioning the names of the victims. And because the journalist, Rubén Espinosa, had solidarity and social networks in Mexico City that became aware of his absence. But why these women did not have this sort of networks? The answer is quite sad: because besides being women, they belonged to the most vulnerable social groups. The multiple homicide of La Narvarte perfectly exemplifies (and also makes us aware of) the great vulnerability suffered by women, journalists, activists, immigrants, domestic workers and sexual workers. This is a very clear message to those social groups: There’s no place where they can feel safe. I should also mention that all the stereotypes divulged by the press and media about these groups make easier that these crimes are eventually forgotten with impunity. Neither being a prostitute, nor consuming drugs, nor doing activism, nor criticizing the Government, nor “not spending our time picking up coffee beans” are justifications for rapping, torturing and murdering. 

Based on the public information, all “the evidence” points at the fact that the Colombian girl will be the scapegoat of this atrocious crime. Soon, people will say that it was “due to drugs”. However, if the authorities point at Rubén Espinosa and Nadia Vera as the main victims, this will become a clear attack against freedom of expression, and will eventually have a very high political cost, mostly because people won’t be able to say that the Colombian girl was murdered for “being a prostitute and a drug dealer.” In fact, the words “Colombian girl” are being often used as an euphemism for prostitute. Do you remember when Colombia felt terribly offended “as a country” when a Chilean comedian called Colombian women “whores”? Well, this crime is not a comedy sketch: a “Colombian girl” has been brutally murdered, stigmatized for being Colombian and discarded only for being an immigrant. No one will feel terribly offended for this crime? This is the time to feel indignation, to reject impunity, to demand our rights and, of course, to shout for the respect of the Colombian prostitutes.

Article in Spanish:

http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/colombiana-de-narvarte

Related articles:

-“Sex Tourism Drives Underage Prostitution Boom in Cartagena, Colombia” by Meredith Hoffman

https://news.vice.com/article/sex-tourism-drives-underage-prostitution-boom-in-cartagena-colombia 

-“Prostitution in Colombia” 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Colombia

WHAT IS BEHIND A BRAIN THAT DOES NOT READ? by Juan Tallón

I’ve been wondering for years about the brain of someone who doesn’t read. What encourages such a brain to think through time and carry on 24 hours a day, for a whole existence? How are the walls inside this brain? How does it feed itself? Once I heard Fernando Savater saying that the brain of a person that doesn’t read, or barely reads, must probably look like an “empty attic,” in which slowly and silently a thick and dying dust takes over like a complete darkness.

            There is a letter from Kafka to Max Brod in which The Metamorphosis’ author punches the subject harder and better, he says <<If the book that we are reading doesn’t shake our heads with a shove, why do we bother to read it? We need books that affect our lives as a catastrophe would do, books hurting deep and hard, like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, books that make us feel exiled in a forest far from everyone, like suicide. A book should be the axe to face the frozen sea throbbing inside ourselves.>> Kafka, like Savater many years later, thinks about a brain that doesn’t read as a cold place, inhospitable, illuminated by a dull light.

            But, what if it isn’t that way? Often times we are tempted to think that the real damaged and absented brain is precisely the one that reads. After all, I don’t know people whose brains remain very tranquil, in peace, after reading a good book. There’s something so-called “curiosity” in these brains causing continuous tribulations; these kind of people are unable to sleep well without a book at hand. People that live establishing quotidian contact with literature accumulate anxieties, vital holes, broken nights, unknown questions… Sooner or later these people are unsure about everything, holding on to doubts and constantly facing a personal ostracism that forces them to move on to another book, and this  takes place day by day. This movement becomes perpetual, and the reader remains for life defeated in front of himself, because books are, in a sense, very powerful enemies.

            In April of 2000, during his last trip to Chile, Roberto Bolaño confessed to a journalist from The Latest News that <<writers are good for nothing. Literature is useless. Literature is only useful to literature itself.>> And Bolaño concluded by saying that <<for me that is enough.>> In his theory, a person decides to become a writer <<in an instant of total insanity,>> and one good day what that person wrote ends in front of someone reading also in a gesture of total insanity. Literature, said the author of 2666 in a different interview, grows over collisions and disasters. And only in that place Literature is happy, surrounded by its own sickness, which happens to provide to some kind of people a lot of company. Nothing is more uncomfortable for people that read than the “apparent” comfort that the person that never reads conveys.

           The place of readers is one lacking comfort, the gale, the feeling of inner disorder. The popular Spanish writer Iñaki Uriarte tells in his diaries that he has a friend that reads, of the kind that read to feel sick and pessimistic, and that always arrive late to the appointments. Uriarte recalls that once he waited for his friend one hour and a half, and when he finally showed up, he justify his tardiness arguing that <<Kafka always arrived late to his appointments.>> Uriarte reproached him that he had just invented that citation, that it wasn’t true, but then his friend replied that <<Faulkner was also a great liar.>> Perhaps reading is useful to establish this kind of dialogues. Dialogues that are ephemeral but dazzling.     

Here you can find the original text in Spanish: 
 http://descartemoselrevolver.com/2015/05/09/que-hay-en-una-cabeza-que-no-lee/
translated from the original in Spanish by Francisco Laguna-Correa

ORPHANAGE by Inés Arredondo (Mexico)

I believed that everything was this dream: on a hard bed, covered with a gleaming white sheet, I was a small girl with arms amputated at the elbows and legs cut above the knees, dressed in a tiny bathrobe that left the four stumps uncovered.

      I was in a room that looked a lot like a poor doctor’s office, with antiquated glass cabinets. I knew that we were by the side of a road in the United States where all the world, sooner or later, had to pass by. And I say "we were” because next to the bed, showing me his profile, there was a young doctor, joyful, perfectly shaved, and clean. He was waiting.

     The relatives of my mother entered the doctor’s office: tall, beautiful, and the room was suddenly crowded with sunlight and noise. The doctor explained to them:

     -Yes, it’s her. Her parents had an accident near this road and both died, but I was able to save her. That’s why I posted the sign, so that you might stop and see her.

     A very white woman (that immediately reminded me of my mother) touched my cheeks.

     -She is so pretty!

     -Look at her eyes!

     -And she has curly, blonde hair!

   My heart throbbed with joy. They were talking about our facial similarities, and in all the excitement and praise, no one mentioned anything about my mutilations. They were now debating my future: I was indeed one of them.

   But for some mysterious reason, laughing and rambling, they joyfully left the doctor’s office and did not look back at all.

The relatives of my father came later. I closed my eyes. The doctor repeated the same speech that he gave to my mother’s relatives.

     -Why did you save that?

     -This is frankly inhuman.

     -No, a freak always possesses something surprising and, in certain ways, also something funny.

    Someone strong, short in height, held me by the armpits and shook me like a rattle.

      -You’ll see that we can do something else with her.

      And put me on a sort of rail suspended between two brackets.

      -One, two, one, two.

     He was positioning, one at a time, my leg trunks on the rail as if I were a tightrope walker, holding me by the neck of the bathrobe like a grotesque doll. I shut my eyes until my head hurt. 

      Everyone laughed.

      -Of course we can do something else with her!

      -This is fun!

     And vulgarly laughing they left the room while my eyes were still shut.

When I opened my eyes, I woke up.

     A dreadful silence crowded the dark and cold room. There was neither a doctor nor a room, nor a road. I was here. Why did I dream about the United States? I am in the interior hall of a building. No one walked by nor would ever walk by this place. Perhaps no one had ever walked by before. 

     The four stumps and I, lying on a bed dirty with my excrement.

    My horrible face, totally different from that of my dream: facial features have no definite forms. I know it. I cannot have a face because no one never recognized me nor will they ever.

This story was first published in the short story collection Subterranean River (1979) by |nés Arredondo (México 1928-1989).

-Translated from the Spanish by Francisco Laguna-Correa

(reseña crítica de) EL INFINITO SE ACABA PRONTO de Joseph Avski

EL INFINITO SE ACABA PRONTO
Joseph Avski
Bogotá: Editorial Planeta Colombiana, 2015.
p. 137

El infinito se acaba pronto de Joseph Avski es una novela inquietante. Puede leerse de un solo jalón, como una película que te atrapa y no te suelta hasta el final, o capítulo a capítulo, como un libro de sentencias y aforismos que aluden a la memoria, el infinito, la amistad y la locura. La novela trama capítulo a capítulo las vidas del matemático ruso Georg Cantor y el aspirante a matemático colombiano (una especie de detective salvaje) Marcos Lyons Pupo. Llama la atención que todos los capítulos están encabezados por la letra aleph; de hecho, la novela comienza sin epígrafes y lo primero que encontramos es el aleph, ¿un signo?, que el narrador explica en el último tercio de la novela haciendo referencia al trabajo de Cantor: "También son el infinito más pequeño, al que llamó א, usando la letra aleph que para sus antepasados judíos representaba la unidad de Dios" (p.95). Por supuesto que viene a la mente el famoso cuento de Jorge Luis Borges; sin embargo, aventuro que para el lector que no tiene en la memoria la referencia al alfabeto hebreo o al cuento borgesiano, la letra aleph podría parecer un signo en forma de tache o cruz aviesa que sugiere que el paso está prohibido. Y quizás la idea de que para el desprevenido la letra aleph es un tache que impide el paso, adquiere legitimidad en la medida que al asomarnos a las vidas de Cantor y Marcos sentiremos la misma soledad delirante que acompañó a los personajes de esta novela. Avski practica con intensidad una forma particular de hacer memoria, donde la objetividad es una forma de indiferencia afectiva, puesto que el narrador, cuyo nombre es "Avski" a secas, nos lleva por los meandros pedregosos de las vidas de Georg Cantor y Marcos Lyons Pupo sin hablar mucho de sí mismo ni llegar a sentir pena por el deterioro emocional y psicológico de Marcos, del que es testigo directo.

(Quisiera hacer una breve digresión con respecto al nombre del narrador de la novela, que se asume es el mismo autor de carne y hueso, inmortalizado ad infinitum en su El infinito se acaba pronto. Esto lo traigo a colación por cuestiones de género. En Estados Unidos hay una distinción tajante entre lo que llaman "literary fiction" y "literary non-fiction" o auto-novela. Se arguye que las técnicas escriturales y los métodos para enfocar el objeto diegético son distintos para cada género. En Latinoamérica y Europa, creo, esta distinción no es funcional e incluso puede parecer espuria. Me vienen a la mente varias novelas publicadas desde la segunda mitad del siglo XX donde la experiencia "real" de sus autores es pábulo diegético e incluso diégesis pura. Me refiero, entre muchísimas que ahora olvido o ignoro que existen, Mars de Fritz Zorn (seudónimo), Vidas minúsculas de Pierre Michon, El libro de mi madre de Albert Cohen,  Austerlitz de WG Sebald, Canción de tumba de Julián Herbert, varias de Roberto Bolaño, American Visa de Marcelo Rioseco, etcétera. Todas estas novelas las leí, pese a su contenido histórico de realidad, como ficción, puesto que lo novelado es un guiño hacia la realidad, pero no la realidad en sí. En El infinito se acaba pronto, este guiño se reproduce en mise-en-abyme: Joseph Avski es el pen name o seudónimo del colombiano de Montería "José Palacios", quien en la novela de su vida decidió suplantarse a sí mismo con el "Joseph Avski" autor y personaje de ficción. Y, como sabemos, algo o mucho de Quijotesco hay detrás de esta suplantación nominal). 

El infinito se acaba pronto es también un diálogo con reflejos intertextuales. Tras la letra aleph con que comienza la novela, el primer capítulo comprende un solo párrafo con varias citas del Génesis que hacen referencia a la quimera de la Torre de Babel. Esta referencia bíblica no la recupera el autor a lo largo de la novela de forma explícita. No creo que esto haya sido un descuido, me parece que es una treta literaria en la que el primer capítulo se inscribe también como el epígrafe inaugural de la novela. Comenzar con la letra א es imprescindible para Avski, me parece, con el fin de inscribir las historias de Cantor y Marcos como parte de un entramado infinito de historias, que como se dirá más adelante: "No importa qué tan inmenso sea un infinito siempre hay otro más ridículo, se suceden sin límite, uno más grande que el anterior, todos inconmensurables, neciamente incomprensibles para la limitación humana" (p.79). Quizás la memoria tiene una relación analógica con el infinito. Memoria, en un sentido histórico, sugiere una o varias historias que no figuran en los archivos historiográficos, de ahí que Enzo Traverso y Susan Sontag, entre otros, hayan ofuscado la idea de la recuperación de la memoria como una forma de hacer crítica historiográfica. Nuestra memoria vital e histórica puede fungir como un archivo de donde extraer evidencias para contrapuntear los discursos históricos que pretenden instaurarse como verdades absolutas. Esta novela de Joseph Avski echa mano de los archivos de la memoria para delinear los temblores vitales de Georg Cantor a través del desplome emocional de Marcos Lyons Pupo.

Parafraseando el prólogo que Octavio Paz escribió a la obra de teatro de Luis Cernuda, La familia interrumpida, El infinito se acaba pronto establece una tensión constante entre "la memoria y el olvido". Después del primer capítulo epigráfico que hace referencia a la Torre de Babel, la novela, me parece, arranca en el segundo capítulo, justamente con un recuerdo en el que se menciona al novelista colombiano más universal: "Al entrar al corredor recordé un cuento de García Márquez en el que una mujer ingresa a un manicomio..." (p.9). Este me parece un recurso de viveza en el que Avski hace un guiño a la tradiciones literarias colombiana y latinoamericana. Si recordamos la famosa frase inaugural de Cien años de soledad, "Estaba el coronel Aureliano Buendía frente al pelotón de fusilamiento cuando recordó...", podemos notar que en una frase Avski inserta las historias que nos va a contar dentro del infinito literario narrativo y al mismo tiempo fortalece la voz autorial en primera persona, cuyo sustento es la experiencia y el conocimiento directo de lo que nos contará. 

Y así ocurre. Avski halla de manera accidental, o casual, a Marcos en un manicomio de Montería, ciudad natal de ambos, cuando buscaba algo relacionado con el poeta Raúl Gómez Jattin, quien, imagino, con toda la ignorancia que poseo en torno a Gómez Jattin, una vez estuvo recluido en ese manicomio. De esta forma, la investigación extraliteraria o la curiosidad personal se convierte, en el caso de Avski, en la chispa que enciende la mecha de su propia memoria. Es así como llegamos a conocer a Marcos Lyons Pupo, a quien Avski el personaje maltrata a lo largo de la novela como si fuera un perdedor de la vida, un sin nada, un pendejo total, un loquito mitómano, megalómano, niño prodigio de pueblo, incoherente, fallido remedo de matemático, que una vez estudió matemáticas en la Universidad de Antioquia sin llegar a licenciarse. Del encuentro fortuito entre Avski y Marcos renace al final del primer capítulo, a través de otro recuerdo, la memoria del matemático Georg Cantor: "Recordé que Borges argumenta que todos los hombres somos en realidad uno, que nuestro destino es singular; y pensé que por lo menos en ese universo el loquito de la mugrosa bata blanca sentado frente a mí, era también Georg Cantor, el gran matemático del infinito". Esta alusión a Borges me parece crucial para comprender la indiferencia y el maltrato que Avski el personaje prodiga a Marcos el loquito. Después de este capítulo, habrá una alternancia casi perfecta (salvo al final de la novela cuando dos capítulos consecutivos hablan sobre Marcos) de capítulos que destejen las obsesiones intelectuales y espirituales de Georg Cantor y Marcos Lyons Pupo.

Este entramado de alternancias nos presenta, por una parte, a un Georg Cantor que escucha una Voz, quizás celestial o quizás diabólica, que lo empuja a buscar el infinito en los números hasta su muerte en 1918. Por otra parte, nos presenta los incontables fracasos de toda índole del indeseable Marcos, a quien el narrador le desea al final de la novela "suicidio". En esta alternancia, el narrador esboza a Cantor como un portento intelectual de perseverancia, mientras que a Marcos como un fracasado que falsifica su título universitario (de la Universidad de Gottingen) para dar clases en una escuela primaria, de donde es despedido cuando se enteran que no habla ni gota de alemán. Sin embargo, recordemos una vez más a Borges a través del narrador: "Todos los hombres son un solo hombre". La locura genial de Cantor es también la locura opaca y lastimera de Marcos. Cantor fracasó en su proyecto inmenso y vital de probar la Hipótesis del Continuo; Marcos, por su cuenta, fracasó en su proyecto vital de licenciarse en matemáticas con una tesis sobre Cantor. Pero no olvidemos que "No importa qué tan inmenso sea un infinito siempre hay otro más ridículo". Acaso, a lo largo de la novela, me parece que Avski, al denostarla y ridiculizarla, enmarca la vida de Marcos en una inmensidad más humana y compleja: la inmensidad del fracaso del idealista latinoamericano, porque el fracaso de Marcos, como lo narra Avski, es contundente y feroz.

El infinito se acaba pronto es una novela que en su brevedad contiene el maleficio de la trascendencia. Es una novela que debe leerse. Donde habla una generación colombiana, y me atrevo a decir que también latinoamericana, cuyo fracaso político y económico fue tan fuerte y profundo como sus ideales rotos sin un sentido preciso del futuro y la duración de la juventud. El lector hallará en esta novela una voz sabia, que como Marcos Lyons Pupo y Georg Cantor, aspira a su lugar en la inmensidad delirante del infinito.

THE BLACK CRITTER by Mario Levrero (Uruguay)

I OPENED THE DOOR OF THE APARTMENT to head out, and a black and hairy critter snuck rapidly inside; too big for a spider, I thought. It had to be a small dog, a little puppy. I closed the door and started to search for it; it had already hidden. For a while I couldn't find it. Finally, when I moved a couch, it ran like a bullet and hid again. I armed myself with patience and kept looking around, but I got tired of searching. So I left the apartment because I had to go out. When I came back, two hours later, the critter was still hiding. I put a bowl in the floor of the kitchen and poured a little milk in it. I sat on one of the living room couches and stayed still, waiting. From there I was able to see the door of the kitchen and the plate on the floor. It is sure to show up at some point, I was thinking.

And it did show up, much later, moving with caution; it came from the hallway that connects to the bedroom. It entered the kitchen but didn’t care for the plate of milk. It moved fast and with great lightness, almost as if it was floating, exploring the kitchen, which it evidently couldn’t have explored while I was gone because the door had stayed closed. Then it came out from the kitchen and, from its position near the door, glared at me. I say that it was glaring at me, but I don’t know how it did it, it was so hairy that its eyes were not visible. It looked to me as if it didn’t have eyes. Nor did I see its legs; it seemed as if it was just a ball of dough covered with black hairs. 

When I went to bed, I closed the door so that it didn’t sneak inside. I never close that door because I like to feel the air circulating in the bedroom, and with the door shut I feel something akin to asphyxiation, even though a random current of air always enters through the window joints. When I woke up the next day, the critter was on the bed, at the foot of the bed; it was rolled up on top of the blanket. I thought that I was going to catch it while it was sleeping, and I wondered what I was going to do with it when I caught it. But as soon as I moved, it moved too, and it slid rapidly under the door. It is a wooden door, not made of metal like the one in the kitchen, and there's almost a finger of light between the floor and the bottom of the door. So I understood that it wasn’t a dog. It was just hair. I proved that later to myself, looking at it against the light while it was moving on a windowsill; there wasn’t a proper body, or legs, or eyes. It didn’t eat or drink either. And I don’t know if it used to sleep, or if by night it simply got comfortable by the foot of the bed searching for company. It didn’t even look for warmth, because it used to stay far from my body.  

It never stung me, nor bit me, nor inflicted any harm upon me; but we didn’t become friends, either. Every time I tried to get close, it would move fast to get out of my reach. After a few attempts, I stopped trying. It will come to me itself, I thought, but it never came. 

During the couple of years that the critter stayed at my house, no one else saw it; not even the worker, who used to come twice a week, during one of her thorough cleaning sessions. I don’t know where it used to hide. The people that came over never felt its existence, and neither did the women that occasionally stayed for the night; those nights the critter didn’t show up in the bedroom. And the next day it didn’t show any signs of  resentment, nor had it changed in any way its quotidian behavior. 

One summer afternoon it was resting on the biggest windowsill of the living room, its favorite place. The other windows were also open, on account of the heat. There was a sudden gust of wind that fed a strong current of air into the apartment, and the critter was blown away; it navigated over the roofs, going away, and then it would slowly descend, and another gust of wind would push it up again, making it change its direction.

I followed it with my eyes until I stopped seeing it. 

Translated from the Spanish by Francisco Laguna-Correa

ESTELA DEL FUEGO QUE SE ALEJA de Luis Goytisolo

Afuera casi todos los objetos están cubiertos de nieve. Hebras de color blanco caen desde arriba sin parar. Se trata de una llovizna helada que no cesa. Salgo a la calle. No tengo ningún motivo específico para salir. Aterido en busca de refugio, entro a una librería donde no espero hallar ningún libro en español. De manera automática, comienzo a buscar en los anaqueles el libro de Ben Okri que hace una semana me recomendó una chava que escribe poesía. Quienes hayan entrado a esta librería saben que el orden de los anaqueles obedece a un sistema organizacional regido por el desmadre. Entre el desmadre de libros, bien ordenados en los anaqueles, vislumbro el lomo de una edición primigenia de Anagrama. Se trata de ESTELA DEL FUEGO QUE SE ALEJA de Luis Goytisolo. Dejé de comprar libros nuevos de Anagrama desde hace varios años. Y las novedades editoriales de la ahora canónica editorial catalana han dejado de suscitar el furor que me provocaban cuando tenía diecinueve años. Pero se trata de la primera edición del número 3 de la colección Narrativas Hispánicas, esa que comienza con EL HÉROE DE LAS MANSARDAS DE MANSARD de Álvaro Pombo y VALS DE MEFISTO de Sergio Pitol; en la solapa trasera de la novela de Goytisolo, se puede leer el plan de Jorge Herralde. Se trata de un plan maestro:

“En preparación: 

Alvaro Pombo, El hijo adoptivo

Eduardo Alonso, El insomnio de una noche de invierno (Premio Azorín)

Pere Calders, La ruleta rusa y otros cuentos (Prólogo de J.M. Castellet)

Paloma Díaz-Mas, El rapto del Santo Grial

Enrique Vila-Matas, Impostura

Ricardo Cid Cañaveral, M-30

Edgardo Cozarinsky, Vudú Urbano (Prólogo de Guillermo Cabrera Infante)

Valentí Puig, Mujeres que fuman”.

… un plan maestro. ESTELA DEL FUEGO QUE SE ALEJA tiene una dedicatoria de puño y letra del autor: “Para Stephen Summerhill, en recuerdo de nuestro mutuo buen entendimiento. Luis Goytisolo, Mayo, 1984”. Ya en casa busco en Google quién podría ser Stephen Summerhill. Los resultados de la búsqueda los encabeza “Stephen Summerhill. Associate Professor Emeritus Iberian Studies. Emeritus Faculty. Areas of Expertise. Literary Theory; Literatures & Cultures of Spain …”. Se trata de un profesor emérito de la Ohio State University, en Columbus, sólo a un par de horas de Pittsburgh. ¿Cómo ha llegado este libro, que escribió un catalán en español y que luego dedicó a un profesor gringo de literatura española, a las manos de un mexicano del D.F. que vive en Pittsburgh igual que podría vivir en Chapel Hill o Portland o Madrid o Praga o San Cristobal de las Casas o Lisboa o Playa del Carmen? Sé que parece una mamada, pero cuando observo el libro grispardo de Goytisolo acurrucado en mi escritorio, pienso que en sus páginas hay mucho más que una novela. ¿Puedo apropiarme de esta novela o se trata de una novela ya con punto final? Afuera la llovizna helada ha sido reemplazada por robustos copos de nieve. Antes que anochezca, todos los objetos inmóviles allá afuera estarán totalmente cubiertos de blanco.

-Febrero 18, 2015, Pittsburgh, PA

RÉPLICA que complementa la réplica de Lázaro David Najarro Pujol a Luis Marcelino Gómez (El Peor)

http://www.archivocubano.org/najarro_71.html

Hace tiempo leí esta entrada del blog, poco nutrido, del señor Lázaro David Najarro Pujol, ciudadano de Holguín (el mismo sitio donde nació el peor de los escritores: Luis Marcelino Gómez). Envié una breve misiva a don Lázaro Najarro, que aquí hago pública. (Sostengo todo lo que digo en mi mensaje; sin embargo, pido que lean con humor donde mis palabras sugieren que soy un orate tiramierda…). 

Estimado señor Lázaro:

He leído con desconsuelo la elocuente manera en que ha puesto en su sitio al señor Luis Marcelino Gómez, a quien conozco y de quien fui amigo hasta que me inscribió, como a usted, en su lista negra. Me desconsuela la miopía histórico-social de Luis Marcelino. Su cobardía también. Estoy seguro de que ha perdido la cabeza. Luis se ha vuelto loco, de locura clínica. Me desconsuela, además, la manera en que intenta desprestigiar a la Revolución y a Fidel Castro en territorio yanqui. Luis Marcelino sólo quería ir a París... Pobre idiota, renegar de un valor inmenso como la Revolución por un paseo con correa en cuello por la pútrida Europa, cuna de las decadencias occidentales... La Revolución Cubana ha sido y es aún referencia de quienes aspiramos a la libertad. La vida en Estados Unidos, donde yo vivo igual que Luis Marcelino, no es revolucionaria en ningún sentido. Soy mexicano, pero me gustaría haber nacido cubano para vivir en Holguín. Hay que ser un iluso para creer que viajar a Francia o Israel es motivo suficiente para autodenominarse libre. Extraña libertad la de un loco que reniega de lo que es y de su Cuba. Extraña libertad la de un cubano, un latinoamericano, que renuncia a tener valor. Luis Marcelino es un loco medroso que anda por el mundo diciendo que es judío y que sus padres vinieron de Sion. ¡¡Loco!! 

Felicito su labor, estimado Lázaro. ¡Viva la Revolución!

Atentamente,
Francisco Laguna Correa

(autorizo el uso del contenido de mi mensaje para lo que usted desee). 

p.s. Pese a estar en la lista negra de Luis Marcelino, aún me considero su amigo y espero, con el corazón, que su locura y su miopía se disipen. ¡Saludos a "El Peor”!