Installation view, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 2007

A Dictionary of Foreign Time is a project originally conceived for the windows of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York (www.tenement.org). Aside to the installation, other components include an edition of glass slides with images and texts. The quotes in the façade, written in international phonetic alphabet, belong to LP Hartley (”the past is a foreign country”) and Paul Valèry (”the future is not what it used to be”). An edition of this work was produced in collaboration with the Center of Book Arts in New York.

Estoy tan lejos de ti
Y soy tan poco habil
Para salvar heroicos acantilados
Tanto de la vida como del amor,
Que no puedo alcanzarte.

Sólo sé que a veces
Te puedo tocar con palabras
Minúsculos hilos electronicos
Como las latas que servían de teléfono infantil
Y nos daban dificultosas, pero amenas, conversaciones
Con voces espaciales de metal,

Y me tengo que conformar
Con estos finos hilos de letras
Que por breves momentos te rozan
A horas extrañas de la noche
Horas extrañas como mis palabras,
Como mi presencia en tu vida,
A la mediatarde, o a la hora del yoga
Nunca sé cuando ni como,
Pero sé que te llegan
Y quizá los cuelgas en hilos como en un tendedero
Y a veces incluso te leo sonreir
Y a veces te siento quererme
Y yo sonrio y te amo y siento que hay algo,
Que algo de todo esto existe, después de todo,
Que es lo único que existe.

Solo nuestras líneas
Que no son sino fotones, juegos de luz, chispas silenciosas
Me llevan por las calles que caminas
Solo con ellas te sigo el rastro
En lo que te entreveras por el bosque de la ciudad.
Las migajas de pan electronico que me vas dejando
Como fiel sabueso miope que se guía por los olores
Sigo los charcos pequeños de tal o cual esquina
Que ocupan solo un Segundo de tu Mirada
Como el Rincon de aquel cuadro
O la ventana de tu cuarto y su jacaranda,
Que se vuelve violeta cuando pasa un colibrí,
Y todo aquello que es pequeño y olvidable,
Pero que lo constituye todo,
Y me lo haces ver, y en esos momentos
Todo me parece que ha sido hecho
Para vivirlo solo contigo.

Pero los hilos son frágiles,
Y se rompen a veces
Y uno queda Huerfano, atemorizado,
Suspendido en el aire sin paracaidas,
Aeronauta sentimental
Hombre de hojalata sin sentido.

Cómo quisiera que tuviéramos más que letras.
Cómo quisiera que tus palabras fueran formas, actos,
Que cada vocal fuera mas que ese aire
Que ni siquiera puedo respirar.
Quiero traerte hacia mí,
Pero no tengo nada más de momento que tus líneas,

Luego comprendo que en el mundo real no existen las líneas
Ni trigonometrías a base de electrodos,
Ni regla dorada que explique tu consciencia nocturna,
Las palabras solas no dan lineas rectas entre dos puntos,
Ni la ley de gravedad es responsible de mi gravedad,
Ni los teléfonos de lata existen ya.

Nada existe, en realidad, en este momento,
Sino tú, sin duda, en algún lugar,
Pero pensando seguramente en otra cosa,
Y yo, con mi gran angustia,
De algun dia ya no encontrarte
Del otro lado
De este fragil hilo
De letras.

Luis Ignacio Helguera (1962-2003)

Pablo Helguera

When I die, I shall finally have both garden and basement
(L.I.H.)

The Colonia Condesa is perhaps the most extemporaneous and melancholic neighborhood in Mexico City. Despite the recent commercial metamorphosis that has devalued its character, its buildings continue acting as tableaux vivants or postcards from an old Mexico: the subtle provincial air composed by the texture of the trees and the 1930s avuncular houses, the parque España and the parque México, the now extinct Bella Epoca cinema, the Rosa and Basurto buildings.

It made sense for Luis Ignacio to live there: not only due to his fascination for that era, but also because his state of mind always required a certain inoculation against the present. He hated driving, or any other speed-based activity outside of soccer: his favorite thing to do was to walk down Veracruz street, where he lived, go into the tio Luis restaurant or any given Cuban joint, visit the street fair and check out the man shooting ducks at the shooting stand, examine the meat and poultry shops, or simply sitting at the park bench and watch children go by with their balloons, and think about Aristotle and man’s final goal:

BALLOON

Happiness lies high for us
man’s ultimate goal, according to Aristotle
it lies high
rarely do we ever reach it
but sometimes
in a burlesque balloon fashion
it comes down our poor heads
and we feel its softness
electrify our hair
and we hold its string
and we caress its oval weightlessness
and we stroll through the park of the world
with our balloon
and we laugh like idiots
drunken with joy,
until we find it ordinary, boring, dull
to stroll through the world with a balloon like idiots
and the hand loses the string
and the balloon flies away in our anguish
as if into a precipice
towards the infinite.

As with everything else that surrounded him, he had a contradictory passion with the place where he lived, which simultaneously captivated and exasperated him (a feeling not that uncommon amongst those who live in Mexico City). One of this favorite quotes was by the Latin poet Catulus: “I love and hate. Do not ask me why, but I feel it so. And I suffer.”

Be it houses, hotels, villages or neighborhoods, plazas or alleys or mask stores, places in general provoked in Luis Ignacio long, repeated and intense experiences. These would result in memories, which, in turn, after many meditations during naptime and insomniac exercises with the pen and the paper at night, turned into literature. His works usually were born at the table of our family dining room set, the one thing that was with him his entire life and which he himself commemorated in a poem:

Pain and pride of my movings
the ony imperial thing I’ve got
this dining room set of my grandfather
in which I portrayed him when I was four
while he was talking business
with my dad

This dining room
in which the family
passed around salty and sweet phrases
flying rug
changes with me of time and home

I fly with the dining set,
I touch its wood to land
while my daughter hides under the table
as if behind a tree
as I did as a kid
returning the legs to the woods
of diffused genealogies
We hit our heads with the table
we scratched it
we poured hot coffees onto it
and my grandmother, and my mother, and my wife
rubbed red oil on its wounds
When after all
I think
that’s all it ends up remaining
our pains,
our scars
on the table of the dining room.

Luis Ignacio was particularly sensitive to the personal anecdote and the place where it had transpired. My brother and I shared together, for more than a decade, a room in the old family house in Arizona 106, along with my parents and my two sisters. (Also with us there was a ghostly, 90-year old great aunt, Lolina, who I remember as an entirely white and almost ethereal being who would walk silently around the house. When she died, we continued suspecting her quiet steps around the stairs). Our room had very large windows, with beautiful dark wood French blinds, and it overlooked a garden with high walls covered with ivy.  It was in this room where Luis Ignacio one day was working at his desk and suddenly a bat appeared, hitting against the window, disappearing almost instantly. This incident resulted in a prose poem that gave the title of one of his books and which he dedicated to me (according to him, as a right for the co-ownership of the room):

Bat at Midday

To Pablo Helguera

A group of mockingbirds breaks loose into flight from the high ivy of the house in the garden. Fearful premonition of birds. Only one moment later, indeed, a brownish bat —slow, indifferent intrusion— arrives pushing itself in the air against midday, and passes through the abandoned home, clumsily hitting his wings against the windows, the ivy, the instants. Brief accidents of things, glitches of the itinerary. Lethargy, disorientation, untimeliness, flight in the desert of light. The inside surface of the dry leaves, the dark tree trunks, the hidden shadows. Soul in disarray. Sad comet of ash. Hairy and stupid flapping that crumbles in cave dust on the illuminated wall.
And the night still so absent in the plants.

–
Games

In the room where he was visited by the bat, Luis Ignacio discovered Chekhov, Ravel, Stravinsky, Tartini and Khachaturian, Capablanca, Zeno, Heraclitus and Heidegger, and Julio Torri —all of them fascinations that would become the basis of his aesthetic vocabulary. Each one of these discoveries took place at different times, but his loyalty toward them —which sometimes appeared to be simple partiality— always was eternal and unconditional, maybe because each one of these discoveries had marked a moment of profound personal identification. He treated his influences like his friends, as holding an unbreakable contract. His list of loyalties started with being a fan of the Mexican soccer team León, and particularly for his heroic goalkeeper Salomone, who once held him in his arms. Even though the León eventually went onto the minor leagues, and long after its heyday, Luis Ignacio continued watching its games till the end, from his frail black and white TV.

He always felt the urgency to communicate his fascination for things. It was vital to him to have some sort of interlocutor in order to share the way in which he felt about a poem, a philosophical phrase, a photograph, or a musical work. As a child, and being nine years younger than him, he made me his first fan and audience member, job that I took enthusiastically.  I would usually sit there, a bit perplexed, as I would hear his first drafts of poems or stories (many of which would go straight to the trash can later). Oftentimes, in order to entertain both of us, he would transform his interests in games: in the height of his passion for chess, we would organize fictional tournaments that would last days (“round robin” style) where we would place “real” players of international and historical fame (Spassky, Karpov, Korshnoii, Reti, Lasker, Capablanca), alongside Mexican ones (Kenneth Frey, Marcel Sisniega, Willy de Winter) and entirely fictitious ones (Tontocho Chávez). Notably, Nacho would adjust his playing style throughout the tournament according to the apertures and strategies of every player. Despite such educational displays, I didn’t become such a great apprentice, although I did win under his training a few children tournaments, while he was teaching chess at a cultural center near our house and at the Casa del lago in Chapultepec. Sometimes I would accompany him to his own class the Black Bishop at the Colonia Roma, a chess club where his teacher was Enrique Palos Báez, a timid and smiling man who mysteriously lived at the club in a tiny room and had the looks of a friar (was he the black bishop, perhaps?)

Then there was a turn of experiences that gave him a strong aesthetic focus. In 1981, my aunts Elsa and Elena took Luis Ignacio to Europe, for his first and only time. It was an experience that impacted him deeply. Upon his return, he brought back ashtrays from Milan and Rome, small bottles of Grand Marnier, a gray checkered hat from London that he kept for decades, a handful of cotton balls he picked up from a garden in Bruges. He also brought back a firm passion for French music and art in general, adding many names to his pantheon. I helped him put together a huge poster-like collage with postcards and magazine cutouts that reminded him of this trip. The impact of symbolism, impressionism, and the modernist movements of the beginning of the century became around that time, and from then on, the main basis of influence in his work.

Luis Ignacio’s passion for music, which had been greatly nourished by our parents, manifested itself first for the works of Ravel and Debussy, Milhaud and Ibert, and for the Russians like Mussorgsky, Borodin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. In childhood games we would put records on the dinosaur-like Philco player, and we would act out choreographies or invent stories around Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, Pavanne for a Dead Maiden, Milhaud’s Beuf sur le Toit, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Petrouschka and The Firebird, Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances, or Respighi’s Pines of Rome. As he himself tells in his work “Atril del Melómano”, he tried to study music at the national conservatory, “in the bucolic gardens of the ruinous and for me attractive building of Pani”, another mysterious place which, with its huge windows and its burgundy concrete floors, would make him decide toward not making music, but writing about it.

It would be hard to find many people who enjoyed music with the intensity in which he did: he would spend hours next to the record player, looking toward the window or the ceiling, whistling, leaned over backwards, with the pen in the hand, closing his eyes, intensely savoring every note played by Heifetz, Gidon Kremer, Victoria de los Angeles or Tom Waits.

His literary interests, which would end up becoming his true profession, started with his attendance to literary workshops, chess games seasoned with literary conversations with Juan José Arreola, and with the guidance of Eduardo Lizalde, who was no doubt the greater inspiration of his youth.

However, when he was eighteen his passion suddenly veered toward philosophy, particularly existentialism. His studies at the faculty of philosophy and letters of the National University brought him eventually to phenomenology. He made his thesis on the notion of understanding in “Being and Time” by Heidegger, likely the most influential philosopher in his work. Heidegger’s and Husserl’s methodology and hermeneutics gave him a fundamental structure onto which exercise his critical and essayistic work, both musical and literary, whereas his interest in existential themes would constantly be expressed in his poetry and fiction. As editorial assistant of Octavio Paz’s magazine Vuelta at the end of the eighties, Luis Ignacio returned fully to literature and entered in touch with many leading Mexican writers, thus creating his most enduring artistic and personal friendships: Antonio Deltoro, Verónica Volkow, Aurelio Asiaín, Fabio Morábito, Gerardo Deniz, and many others.

His work on both music and literature never obeyed any sort of following of “current tendencies.” Instead, he almost automatically would lean toward any marginal or semi-obscure expressions that had captured little interest of other critics. This made him write about composers such as Conlon Nancarrow, Cri-Cri, or Candelario Huízar. In a similar way, his way of covering “current issues” was based mainly in commemorating death or birth centennials, or similar occasions, which were presented in the pages of Pauta, the magazine of which he was the editor for fifteen years under the approving oversight of Mario Lavista. Few music critics in Mexico have produced comparative music essays as useful and rigorous as the ones he made on the work of Silvestre Revueltas, Carlos Chávez, Rodolfo Halffter, and many others. He knew the work of Ravel and Stravinsky like no one else. One of the works that he never got to write could have well been a critical biography of either composer.

The “marginal” writers that occupied his interest, on the other hand, included
Pedro F. Miret – whose nightmarish and extravagant stories he loved—Uwe Frisch, Virgilio Piñera, Julio Torri and Dino Buzzatti. Toward the end, his interests darkened, ending with Charles Bukowski.  On the other hand, his emphasis on “impure” genres culminated perhaps on his work on prose poetry, a form that combined his inclination for elegance and brevity. This resulted eventually in his making the definitive anthology of prose poetry in Mexico.

Green Patios

Like every other family, our memories were marked by the places where we lived or visited. However, the circumstances around our leaving of these places —including the eventual departure of the core of the family to the U.S., which left Luis Ignacio as their sole interlocutor— made them acquire a more ghostlike quality. In his works, these places became part of a vocabulary of nostalgic mythology.

The first one of these places was our childhood home, located in the street of Orizaba 21 in the Colonia Roma, near the Insurgentes subway. When we left that house, an enormous mansion that housed the family for three generations, it was never inhabited again up till today, for reasons that to this date we ignore. Its continuous, empty presence, and the fact that it inexplicably appeared to resist being populated by new memories or people, gave it a certain air of enigmatic freezer of history, a sort of monument or memorial of a time that remains unburied. Luis Ignacio used to go visit it when he was in the area.  “I went by Orizaba the other day,” he would say, which would be just as saying “ I was thinking about those days.”

Another house that Luis Ignacio was prone to visit is located in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, and it has belonged to the family since the eighteenth century.  This one also occupies a symbolic place as it retains the residues and personal objects of more than six generations. Full of paintings, objects and photographs (“of diffused genealogies”), it has a great open patio with a well and a doorway through which we would see people like Kika freely enter in an out. Kika was a feeble, deaf, hunched old lady and neighbor of the family for more than half a century. Luis Ignacio developed a certain fondness toward her, in the same way in which he would grow an affection for all things and people who were in appearance marginal, forgotten, or invisible.

It was in this house (as well as in brief stays in Patzcuaro) where Luis Ignacio wrote great part of the material of his first book, Traspatios. Traspatios contains a series of daguerreotype-like vignettes of the provincial family life with which he exerts a phenomenology of memory and of the past. The personal experience and the family space would inevitably transform in a new place, populated by the familiar but also by the philosophical reflection:

In middle voice, through the antique hallway, lonely, an insinuation in chiaroscuro, preterital song of a woman who washes clothes by ear, rake that returns every afternoon for the leaves of the album to the tree of memory, friend of the house with her own key of the doorway, silent deaf old woman, subtle murmur of light debating between shadows, silent melody that lulls years, centuries, in the well of the oranges and hours (…)

Another place of the mnemonic nomenclature of the family, where we spent most of our childhood vacations, was the Jacarandas hotel in Cuernavaca, which has a number of gardens in a large area, filled with bungalows, golf courses, and cozy pool sections in the American style of the fifties. Over the course of the years, the gardens have been preserved, and the hotel still exists although a bit decayed, rather as a memory of a better time. But for us who remembered it in its times of glory, walking through its gardens was a process of reliving a series of anecdotes and incidents of before. Also stuck in its own time, this hotel also was an obsession to Luis Ignacio, who used to go back to stay at the bungalows to write perhaps to recover certain moments that could only be retrieved right there and then:

Jacaranda

Here thirty years later. The gardens grow experiences; memories take part of the vegetation. Just like those who grow in these corners: spot of soul, elbow, knee, shadow plant, ivy in waiting of being gardened by memory (…) in the leaf of the jacaranda is the living ground of the voices, the detention, the immense instant. We are a speck, a speck of a speck of our remembrances; and through specks like that, eternity shows.

Although for Luis Ignacio these places were constant references, the resulting works were in general a distilled product, composed by a variety of situations that he wasn’t seeking to represent but rather to reflect upon, leading to metaphysical and metahistorical problems that consumed his mind. On the other hand, as he himself admitted, by force of repetition and revision of anecdotes in after-meal table conversations, these memories would be transformed in new fictions (“human memory ([is]…) full of whims and prone to falsify, free and creative”), to the point that in many cases he himself wasn’t sure about what was real and what had been a fabrication (in some cases he would even adopt our own personal anecdotes and place himself in them, although conveniently taking the most heroic role). On the other hand, his way of experiencing things was almost preceded by the very act of commemorating the transformation of the act of living into the act of remembering (“moments which since one lives them appear to be old memories”; “this perfume, which today only smells to itself, tomorrow will smell to these moments”). His work is thus an enactment of automatic historicity, commemorative and meditative, sometimes sad and nostalgic (“rain belongs to yesterday”) and sometimes ironic, critic, skeptical, and humoristic.

Masks

Luis Ignacio’s extraordinary attachment to things, to ideas, to places, people, music, and definitely to confrontations of every kind, was in general fairly selective, although implemented with formidable vigor. Sometimes he was extreme (“neither yes, neither no, neither neither”). Every person or thing that would capture his interest he would take over with absolute dedication and sense of ownership, as if he was afraid of loosing everything he would find along, and if it went away from him he would do enormous efforts to claim it back. His literary works, in a similar way, at times appear to reveal that enterprise of recovering things and commemorate them in a symbolical process that was at the same time an acknowledgement nothing truly can be retained.

His greater obsession lied in trying to understand things, for which he had an ongoing anguish; the greatest of them all, I think, was the very impossibility of understanding himself. His introspective writing could be excessively self-critical, and sometimes even ruthless: highly suspicious of his identity, which in fact is manifested already in his earliest published text (written in 1981):

Scrap of Film

…all seen from the eyes of a dog. Discolored images, rather in black and white, in slow motion. It looks like dawn in these fields, although it could well be a gray dusk. The immense field seen through the eyes of a dog, which could well be a cow. The wheat sprigs bow against the passing of the wind, but with the same sleepy rhythm. The images wag from the dog because he walks, because all this moves… And again they relatively fix as they stop in front of a milkmaid who carries two pails of water. She looks toward our canine visual field: she looks at us with surprise and horror. She slowly leaves the pails on the ground and with the perplexed expression she moves back, without looking at me. She touches her apron with her white hands and mumbles something that is not heard (nothing can be heard, actually).  She continues to walk back and I think that I am also walking, toward her, as she walks back. We arrive to a humble looking house, nearby the abandoned mill. She pulls the door, a bit faster, and now without looking at me, she gestures with despair as she locks the door behind her. I am left alone, immobile. I touch my face. I must be a monster.

This kind of writing, that sometimes adopts the tone of Kafka or Mary Shelley -although not without a touch of irony- appears repeatedly in various poems that revolve around the notion of self-recognition, such as in his text “mask store” (“almost without realizing, I bring my hand to my face and touch it”), Minotauro (“people, prey of fear, move out of his way”), in his short story “costume party”, where an unknown character crashes a party, and his well known text “The child face” (“and a radiant blow of light in the plain visage of the insect revealed to the executioner an unknown shot, in which he himself appeared as a child making a painful and whining gesture”).

As a great humorist, either by inventing bestiaries for his daughter Marina or ridiculing the music milieu in Mexico from the pages of his magazine Pauta, he practiced his humor toward himself over anyone else.  Toward the end of his life, as he himself wrote, his life turned into literature (“without realizing, he became all literature”), in a process that was known to his friends as the “Nachoaventuras”.

Our aesthetic arguments usually revolved around contemporary art, the area toward which I gravitated as a visual artist. We never were fully in agreement in terms of form, neither in regards to conceptualism and the social dimensions of art. Luis Ignacio could never get enthusiastic about the problems that he found too alien or that didn’t concern him at a very intimate level. This very condition made him become a writer distant from every kind of current fashion or tendency, as well as any kind of careerist style, which he reasonably despised. In my view, it also made him one of the most original literary voices of his generation.

***

In a most ironical fashion that he himself  would have approved, we gave burial to Luis Ignacio on a Tuesday the Thirteenth, finally enacting a series of scenes that he had obsessively envisioned throughout the years: the wake ( “the wake is a party without host”), the funerary arrangements ( “there is some kind of sweet innocence in dying and in taking care of the dead one”), the ritual of the burial (which he addressed in his short story “Milpa Alta”), and in the large family gatherings that precisely take place only in wakes and weddings, with which he claimed to dream regularly  and which had caused in him a mix of anguish and fascination.

Always prone to observing funerary coincidences, he would have been the first one to point out that, at his forty years of age, he punctually followed the steps of his most admired Mexican composer, Silvestre Revueltas, whose music, sensibility, and biography captivated him. In an article of his (“Revueltas between the music and the wall”) he quoted a phrase of Revueltas that he liked very much: “wherever I want to go, I always run into a wall”.

Today I realize that he must have identified himself with that bat in midday that hit against our window: an anachronistic being, whose erratic presence, disoriented, seemed to enter in constant conflict with with the practical world into which he had arrived, a darkness in the middle of the light.  Luis Ignacio constantly questioned his place in the world, with full conscience of his finitude, as a true subject of a heideggerian “dasein” (or “being toward’s death”) with full lack of synch with time but in active search of his own parameters of duration ( from there his admiration to Bergson).  The work of Luis Ignacio is an exercise in extemporaneity, a dialogue with a world full of objects and circumstances  that refer to a certain present, but that as they are integrated into the territory of his literature evolve into signifiers of a lucid metahistorical reflection about our relationship with memory and time. This is because, despite his permanent restlesness with the place and time where he was, he was profoundly in touch with the experiences of life in a way that many of us will never be able to be.

I will miss him unspeakably. His life, which involved all of us near him in an extraordinary way, was unfairly consumed by his own personality, which absorbed both good and bad things without distinction— which is impossible to sustain in a regular life.

In his flight through life, Luis Ignacio always hit his head against the transparent window of reality. But as a redemption to his enormous anguish, every little blow generated a work that help us understand from the most abstract to the most banal.  As a bat that emerged from Plato’s cave, his work comes from a world of shadows that at first may seem unfamiliar, but if seen carefully, bestow the most prodigious clarities.

Zurich, May 2003

LIH in Mexico City, c. 1987

Luis Ignacio Helguera

Recuerdo y Olvido

Todo en mi despertar es polvoso
El ayer, el hoy el mañana
Y presiento que he olvidado lo más importante
Recuerdo que lo he olvidado
Y duele, deveras, el olvido,
Y recuerdo lo que quisiera olvidar
Y duele, deveras, el recuerdo.

Rembembrance and forgetfulness

Everything in my awaking is dusty
The Yesterday, the Today and the Tomorrow
And I sense that I have forgotten what’s  most important
I remember that I have forgotten it
And it hurts, truly, to forget,
And I remember that which I wanted to forget
And it hurts, truly,  to remember.

Panteón

¿Por qué será, de veras?
Cada vez que se muere alguien que quiero
Cae una tormenta.
Se inunda quizás el panteón de la memoria
Llueve el dolor por dentro de mis sueños.
Y sin embargo es tan cristalina el agua.

Graveyard

Why is it, really?
Everytime when someone that I love dies
A storm falls.
The graveyard of memory is perhaps flooded
The pain rains from inside of my dreams.
But despite all that,  the water is crystal clear.

–

Intermezzo núm. 2, en si bemol, op. 117, de Brahms

A mi padre, Luis Ignacio Helguera Soiné
Sólo ahora, a los cuarenta años
comprendo por qué me recostaba en el sofá de la sala cada noche
cuando estudiabas ese Intermezzo de Brahms
porque expresaba tu carácter y tu fuerza y tu nobleza, que aprendí mal
y la caída de las hojas verdes y luego rojas, en los jardines que tuvimos
el luto otoñal de todo
y recuerdo cómo oyendo la radio estacionaste el coche en una calle
entre automóviles furiosos
para ponerte a llorar sobre el volante
disculpándote conmigo con el pañuelo en la cara
porque era un Nocturno de Chopin que tocaba tu madre
y recuerdo cómo me cargabas semidormido hasta mi cama
al terminar el Intermezzo de Brahms, cada noche
y tu carácter y tu fuerza y tu nobleza, que aprendí mal.

–

Postal de Brahms

Para Carlos Helguera

Esta vecina de mis padres en Chicago
ensaya todas las tardes el Andante un poco adagio de la Primera sonata para viola de Brahms
mientras piso las hojas rojas y anaranjadas de la Campbell Avenue
¿Por qué le obsesiona ese movimiento como a mí?
(porque no lo estudia: le obsesiona)
¿por qué pasan estas cosas, tío?
No toca nada mal la viola, aunque se atora en un pasaje difícil, como yo en la vida
Quisiera tocar el timbre de su departamento
hablar con ella de Brahms, de esa serenidad sublime
y admirar la belleza de su viola y su cabellera
y la expresividad de sus brazos y sus ojos
mientras me otrece un café o una copa
y hablamos del poder evocativo y las meditaciones otoñales brahmsianas
y del estatismo armónico extraño y sublime
en que flota un clarinete de pronto solista sobre el piano en el tercer movimiento
del Segundo concierto para piano y orquesta
y la invito a cenar en Belmont
¿Pero qué tal si es una güereja desabrida o una anciana decrépita
o un maricón pelirrojo o un gordo devorador de hamburguesas?
Sólo quedaría sellar una brahmsiana amistad y largarme
¿Por qué pasan estas cosas en la vida, tío?
¿Por qué se pregunta uno por qué, si la vida toda es naturalmente azarosa e indescifrable?
Hace años que me obsesiona la dulzura de este Andante
Brahms deshojaba lentamente en el pentagrama los árboles más bellos
Me invade la melancolía, pero no tengo el valor de tocar el timbre
Tal vez esa mujer espera a un brahmsiano que toque su timbre
Tal vez esa mujer sea tan solitaria y triste como yo
Tal vez esa mujer y yo podríamos amarnos, apadrinados por las barbas de Brahms
Tal vez sea la mujer de mi vida y me separan de ella la cordura y la cobardía y un timbre
Después de todo, la melancolía de los acordes
ambienta bien mi soledad
Me quedo con la belleza pura de la música
silbo la melodía y piso las hojas rojas y anaranjadas de la Campbell Avenue
y regreso con mis padres
Qué triste y hermoso y brahmsiano es el otoño en Chicago

–

Modhina de las Bachianas brasileiras
núm. 1 para ocho cellos de Villa-Lobos

Para Guillermo Helguera
Qué tristeza a veces da la tristeza ajena
la de la gente bienintencionada a la que el destino parece empeñarse en probarle que es mejor ser mala persona
la de la gente que trata honradamente de “superarse”
y compra y lee con esfuerzos uno de esos manuales de superación personal
y todo le sale mal
como todo bien a los autores abyectos de esos bestsellers
una tristeza que va y vuelve como las olas del mar
la de la gente buena que cree a diario en Dios por más que Dios sólo le dé a diario bolillo duro
qué tristeza la del hombre que logra por fin armar el rompecabezas de su vida
solamente para comprobar que fue todo un rotundo fracaso
la del cierre de un buen restaurante destinado, quién sabe por qué, a la bancarrota
del que fue uno el último cliente y ya ni siquiera le cobraron la cuenta
una tristeza que va y vuelve como las olas del mar
la de enterrar personas a las que no pudimos decirles ni probarles que las quisimos mucho
qué tristeza las discusiones agrias de parejas ancianas que no se tienen ya sino uno al otro
y no tuvieron hijos, como no tuvo Villa-Lobos
y en medio de las discusiones, cada vez más agrias, lo saben, y mejor van por el pan y la leche
la de las parejas que se destrozaron a cachos después de que cupo entre ellas todo el amor del mundo
qué triste recordar a fuerzas lo que más duele recordar
las mordidas del murciélago o la rata en el alma
una tristeza que va y vuelve como las olas del mar
qué triste cuando queda ya sólo el recuerdo, cada vez más recuerdo del recuerdo
qué triste cuando el billar de toda la vida, Villa-Lobos, es ya sólo rutina
cuando las carambolas o el sexo importan tanto como ir al baño o pagar la renta
qué tristeza incluso expresar toda esa tristeza en un canto desgarrado de ocho cellos
en belleza desesperada
como hizo Villa-Lobos

notas:
1) Octavio Paz, prólogo a “Los Privilegios de la Vista”, p. 23. De Obras Completas, tomo 6, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991.
2) Debo mi agradecimiento a los comentarios del artista uruguayo Luis Camnitzer, al curador colombiano Jose Ignacio Roca, y a la historiadora mexicana Irmgard Emmelhainz. Un largo ensayo que elabora sustancialmente en estas reflexiones y que hacen un recuento sustancial sobre el desarrollo del conceptualismo latinoamericano y su relación con la literatura, es “Contextualization and Resistance: Conceptualism and Latin American Art” de Luis Camnitzer (aún inédito, de próxima aparición).
3) Una de las obras más significativas para el estudio de la relación entre literatura y artes visuales al principio del modernismo latinoamericano es la antología de Jorge Schwartz, Las vanguardias latinoamericanas, Universidad de Sao Paulo, 1995
4) Para mayor referencia, cf. El ensayo de Jose Luis Gomez-Martinez, “La presencia de Ortega y Gasset en el pensamiento mexicano” , Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 35.1 (1987) pp. 197-221
5) Ortega y Gasset, “La deshumanización del arte”, Obras Completas, VII
6) Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas, VII, p. 514, citado por Rafael García Alonso en “En torno a Ortega y la Estética”, Actas de las II Jornadas de Hispanismo Filosófico, 1995.
7) Cf. Samuel Ramos, Filosofía de la vida artística, Col. Austral, Espasa-Calpe, Argentina, Buenos Aires, 1950. Pp. 98-108
Octavio Paz, “Los Privilegios de la Vista”, p. 13 Volumen 1, Obras Completas. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994.
9) Octavio Paz, op. Cit. P.21
10) Octavio Paz, Presencia y Presente: Baudelaire Critico de Arte, en Op. Cit. P. 45
11) Cf. Arthur Danto, Art After the End of Art, Princeton University Press, 1997 Cap. 5
12) Octavio Paz, Alegoría y Expresion, en Los Privilegios de la Vista, op. Cit. P. 291
13) Octavio Paz, op. Cit. P. 143
14) Octavio Paz, op. Cit. P. 148
15) Octavio Paz, op. Cit. P.147

<< Columna de Arena no. 49
©  Derecho de autor:
Texto: Pablo Helguera. Columna de Arena: José Roca
Presentación en Internet: Universes in Universe – Mundos del Arte, Gerhard Haupt & Pat Binder

Zumaya

Gaspar:
Iban los siete caminos verdes
al tormento de los labios rojos
setenta láminas que no se si serán suficientes
cada una de ellas con siete venas
cada vena con noventa horas
y cada hora con  cien historias
estoy en el balcón, cada noche después de cenar
mirando escalones triangulares
gentes que apagan sus luces
cuartos rosas de niñas que mañana irán a la escuela.
Mientras todas se bañan
suenan los aires de la papelería
vuelan tareas zurcando el cielo
el silencio de los parques
Mejor sería que me contaras historias de la India
cuando cruzabas el río con los faquires
y los niños jugaban a los dados con ramas.
Pero son sólo imágenes de nacimiento:
estamos tan lejos de todas las cosas,
que de nada me sirven estas láminas ni estas venas, Gaspar.
Pasa un camión con luces verdes por dentro.

COBRANZAS

Que los lirios rotos acepten su sudor,
que las teclas del piano se diviertan sin mí,
yo solo quisiera zancos sencillos
para librar los charcos esporádicos.
Hay momentos como éste,
en los que la cerbatana es una pluma bic
con la que me lanzan bolitas con saliva.
Pero sin embargo, nadie responde mi papelito
mandado con cautela de pupitre a pupitre
perfumado e ilustrado con esmero.
Son montañas sin fe, ruletas sin números,
hipódromos sin meta los míos.
Pero en dos patadas voy a kodak y hago ampliaciones
laboriosas de mi camisa manchada de lipstick,
incluso si fue por casualidad,
para que todos lo vean colgados en mi cuarto,
contando la historia que yo quiero ver.
Por suerte se han inventado los charades
para mantenernos felices.

Visitación

Y he aquí la providencia: se me presentó en mi cuarto,

que aún a la brisa de la tarde se entregaba,

con la noble belleza de Juno, o de Minerva, o de otra vestida de blanco,

y así me trajo el hondo río de su océano.

Después de que una, y muchas veces la observé,

ví que era un instrumento extraño,

pues no sólo producía los extraños acordes del laúd

sino que abrigaba flores de ecos sentimentales y acaso ridículos

—como un Pinkerton que no sabía lo que haría si Butterfly no lo esperara.

mientras la música cedía  a la condición informe del   agua

y mi expresión de incredulidad no cambió a lo largo de la obra,

me clavó las uñas, me destrozó las garras, me sangró mis encías.

La historia, hay que decirlo,  se mueve como el reino vegetal,

aunque difiere en su esquema estructural de mayor anchura.

Pero quizá porque un cuadrado grande es cuatro veces un pequeño

o porque el sol de la tarde brillaba en los campos de Itaca,

o porque uno alimenta con cariño a sus remordimientos,

o porque quería concluir la composición con el acorde previsto

cuando mi muerte era dada por un hecho

—  y a sabiendas que el tema no puede ser agotado— me dijo:

“siempre ha de haber algún tonto que nos escribe versos”.

Rodolfo Limonini es mi heterónimo más temprano. Nació hacia 1985 y sus poemas han aparecido de forma esporádica a lo largo de los años, con un incremento de producción entre los años 1994 y 2001.

A continuación va su biografía y algunas obras.

RODOLFO LIMONINI
(1962- ?)

Rodolfo Limonini, nacido en Uruguay en 1962, creció en Lagos de Moreno,
Jalisco, hasta los quince años, edad en la que se convirtió en el líder
absoluto del Movimiento Ant-Cristero y Anti-Todo, el cual duró tres días y
medio. Limonini se trasladó a Ciudad Victoria, donde inauguró la revista
Algodones, así como un teatro de ópera y tres salones de fiestas
infantiles. Estudió ingeniería hidroeléctrica en la universidad de las
Américas, sociología medieval en la universidad de  Albuquerque y técnicas
militares en la universidad de Tanzania. Se ha casado trece veces. Ha
publicado catorce libros, entre ellos: “el turbán de Allen Ginsberg” y
“llamas que llaman”. Es ahora gerente general de una fábrica de biberones en
Dayton, Ohio. Escribe para los periódicos Il Corriere de la Sera y el
Washington Post.  Este nuevo libro de poesía (Malvaviscos Rostizados) reúne
sus poemas de su etapa borracha.

El Coco ( I )

Anduve en ascuas,
coloreando exquisitos corn flakes con Miguel Angel,
sin saber que la regla dorada no había sido
sino una triste mentira de mi tío abuelo cuando fue a Beliorrusia.
Desde el día en que el perro periodista me lo dijo
al ver mis engalanadas décimas visuales,
supe que las escaleras del futuro estaban todas embadurnadas
de un aceite viscoso invisible, indecible, burlón.
Cual malvavisco de azúcar que tocas y se hace duro,
(oh nubes bestiales
de armas atómicas y deseos felices)
mis ganas de nadar se fueron al pozo
y mi canción de mayo entró al repertorio del organillero.
Y ahora, eso sí, uso gorros de colores
porque esos sí se venden en las tiendas,
y aunque uno tenga que masticar tabaco en los puertos franceses
no cabe duda que tragar uvas a fin de año sirve,
o al menos nos ayuda a creer que estamos en pos de algo.

Tropicalia (I )

Era el final de la temporada de los colorines
y por eso ya no nos los podíamos retacar en la nariz.
Me encantaban todas las casas veraniegas del pueblo
pero no podía ni comprar un twinky, le dije con horror a la avestruz.
Ella no entendió para nada lo que le dije;
en realidad nunca había entendido nada, a pesar de que yo creía
que la coca-cola sabe igual en todos los países.
Pero no: ni yo había leído cuidadosamente a Schopenhauer
ni ella podía lavar en una semana inglesa
los tinacos eternos
de una telenovela azteca que aún definía mi vida.
Ni modo, vayamos a bailar, quizá a jugar canicas,
podemos comer algunas croquetas también,
pero olvida para siempre la idea de que compremos un zipper
para reparar los hoyos de la cama.
Cada que pasa un trailer de mudanzas o de plantas tropicales
presiento que tenía razón,
pero en el fondo se me hace que estaba equivocado:
¿qué tal si en vez de tinaco
hubiese conseguido un sifón sencillo?

Sello de agua

Según la posteridad
-que siempre se equivoca-
lloré quinientos setenta y cuatro días,
con trece horas y veintiún gatos,
sólo porque ese era el récord
para los enfermos crónicos de malaria
a quienes se les quemó el bisquet en la mañana
de sus vidas absurdas.
Pero no lo hice por vanidad, como repetí inutilmente
ante las cámaras universales y locales:
uno llora por que hay que llorar,
porque los bolsillos duelen, por que las ventanas
nos entristecen con sus pésimos paisajes,
o porque se nos murió nuestro camaleón mascota.
Eso sí me duele.
¿De qué me sirve lamentarme por un cuarteto de cuerdas
que no llega a la estación adecuada en sus vidas,
o porque una camiseta regalada
de repente tenga manchas de chile chipotle?
Lo peor es lo que realmente
nunca pude ver.

ARTSY PARTSY

a G.P.

Odio y amo. No me pregunteís por qué, pero así es. Y sufro.
—Catulo

Que gélida es la manivela
cuando la leche se rescalda en estas fiestas.
Y luego cuando todos se exaltan
surgen ilusiones imprevistas.
A lo dicho, pecho.
Checar qué importa,
si al bollo no se le hace torta.
Aspartame, señorita, no es la solución:
ni adelgaza una como palote con un piropo
ni con quesón ni requesón.
Qué fachoso y cómo vino, oye,
secretean las chicas millonarias.
Se rumora que los sonetos que escribo
tienen fachada de quesadilla
Y que vivo de biberones
al borde del acantilado.
Lento gravito hacia el rincón de la fiesta
a ver las estrellas con las que tanto me asocian,
y no siento nada, sino más bien
un vago deseo de apretar
varios senos semi-revelados que pasan.
Pero mi pobre letanía de gran señor
Y mis rimas e himnos de amor
no riman con mis lonjas:
son sueños quiméricos de algodones hiperbólicos
y mis castillos se caen al aire
al ver mis jeans con manchas de mostaza.
Mejor sería, en estos momentos,
trabajar como talador de miel
o como ladrón de joyas
o gigolo de ojos bellos
y ladrar como los otros ladran.
Vienen ahora como ideas usadas
a leguas de mí y de mi constancia.
Y sin embargo, como dice el romano,
inexplicablemente,
Odio y amo los flamingos que me ignoran.
Y aunque por momentos les gusten
los arrieros con sucios arneses,
coloniales  al fin somos, con leyes reveladas,
y la bulla, si bien a ratos divertida,
no acaba concordando conmigo,
porque al fin, el vino se les pasa
y con él, la dolce speranza.

NADIR

Hubo, en su tiempo, un café
al que llegamos cuarenta y siete cocineros
para preparar huevos acorralados en fa.
Sólo tú y yo sabíamos
que nunca se cocina nomás por nomás,
y sabíamos
como buenos acróbatas empedernidos
que la cuenta llegaría, tarde o temprano,
con o sin sonrisa.
Pero el tournedós nos sabía demasiado a fuentes romanas
como para dejar nuestras carreras
soñadas desde edades barrocas.
Sucedió lo siguiente:
llegó un chino vendedor de albercas,
vinieron los de la telefónica con sus latas e hilos,
como los que se amarran a los carros
en historias que bien acaban, tú lo sabías,
y realmente no había manera alguna
de que yo dejara la cuerda floja
y aún menos con la charola de merengues en mi mano.
Tampoco se podía, como querías,
hacer de trenzas corazón
y lanzar juegos pirotécnicos
con la cara de Morelos y Pavón.
Malabareábamos lágrimas ,
tomamos taxis infinitos de un extremo a otro,
agotamos las gomas de borrar del pueblo
tratando de borrar nuestros errores
y ponerlo todo en claro, pero fue inútil:
las arañas se nos trepaban por las gargantas,
la crema facial, antes ebúrnea rosa,
en grasa zapatesca se volvió.
Por infantilismo metí tu ropa negra a la secadora
y ante mis dolorido ojos desapareció, burlona.
Aunque ya había expirado el yogurt
y no había más espuma en la alcantarilla
necio traje el equipo de buceo,
y hasta la máquina de recitación.
Pero ni las velas, ni las tarjetas navideñas
podían regresarnos
al chino con las albercas,
ni los edificios coloridos de los art decó treintas,
ni las camas hechas con teléfonos públicos,
ni los rusos blancos en la penumbra,
ni al vendedor de croquetas eternas
ni al danzante de rap
ni las conversaciones en la catedral
ni los pimientos rellenos en el hospital
ni a nosotros mismos en la cuerda floja.
Era parte del menú de comida corrida,
y que su precio jamás concuerda con la realidad.
Hastiado, y a la vez, hambriento,
no quiero seguir comiendo ni quiero dejar de comer,
no quiero seguir cocinando ni quiero dejar la cocina,
ni pienso decirte ya nunca, como planeaba,
que nunca he tenido sentido del gusto
y que en mi caso,
comer un filete o un trapo es lo mismo.
pero eso sí: no me digas nunca
que abriste tu propio restorán chino
con una alberca.

Cleptomanía

Soy cleptómano de sueños de embarazo,
de eternos pirulís italianos sin brazos robustos,
supe que podía tragar rieles sin romperme la aorta,
sin temer los marcapasos subí nubes y bajé rosas.
Hice llorar a muchas mariposas, algunas
incluso prefirieron dejar de ser mis experimentos de Roscharch
y se cerraron para siempre. Sus madres me culpan, diciendo
que yo, el fundador del club de los robadores de lámparas rojas
merezco la guillotina. Quizá, pero solo en un mundo bueno,
no en este charco de tripas con alcohol,
de promesas que se regalan en los clubes sociales.
Y además qué le voy a hacer: estoy enfermo,
de aquello que no es enfermedad, sino manía,
aquello que no es excusable por ser obra de Dios,
sino por obra de todos. Aún así, yo no inventé los malvaviscos
ni la lavadora de ratas.
Existo: ése es mi problema.