Lezama’s Fiestas (1)
Yale University
The most significant
Cuban
literature and art to emerge after the Avant-Garde
were associated with the poet and cultural promoter José Lezama
Lima, the
central figure in a movement organized around Orígenes,
the influential magazine that he co-directed with
José Rodríguez Feo between 1944 and 1954. Lezama’s
work and that of many of
his associates began in the late 1930s, as
In addition to the
returning Cuban
artists and intellectuals, there arrived in
If an overarching principle had to be named as defining Lezama’s group, it would be “transcendental nationalism;” the search for the essence of Cuban culture not in race or history but in and through poetry and art. Lezama did not partake of Afrocubanism, nor did he indulge in the exaltation of the white guajiros (peasants) as the source of nationality, though he occasionally used their traditional stanza, the décima, in his poetry. He sought a higher synthesis in which all those cultural components already would have been absorbed, with the result that, unlike Afrocubanism, his work and that of his associates, including the great mulatto poet Gastón Baquero, is devoid of exoticism. This does not mean that Lezama and his group were “pure” poets, or that their art eschewed Cuban social reality or history, but rather that these were interpreted by a hermeneutics seeking to discover their poetic essence.
Lezama, and
many of his
friends were Catholics and although certainly not pious or orthodox
their
approach had a Christian foundation, as did their attitude toward life,
which
was, on the whole, optimistic. While they were evidently heirs to the Avant Garde, they
did not share
that movement’s nihilism and negativity, and they were decidedly
opposed
to Existentialism, the philosophic trend that emerged after World War I
and
that had, through the works of Ortega y Gasset, a disciple of
Heidegger, and
later through Jean Paul Sartre, great influence in the Spanish-speaking
world.
The Ortega y Gasset Lezama and others favored was an earlier one, whose
main
influence was Oswald Spengler.(2)
They also
rejected Freud, a pillar of the Avant-Garde
who did
not have widespread influence in
Though a poet, Lezama’s
greatest and best-known work is his novel Paradiso,
published in 1966 but in the making since the forties; one of its
chapters
appeared in a 1949 issue of Orígenes. It is one of the most audacious and original
texts published anywhere in the twentieth century. As opposed to Carpentier’s, Lezama’s artistic development
cannot be charted against the backdrop of the evolving avant-garde
movements,
like Surrealism. He seemed to work
oblivious to literary fashions, and he wrote in a style that shocked
the likes
of Julio Cortázar, the Argentine writer, who said that upon
reading Paradiso he exclaimed “one cannot
write like that;” such was Lezama’s apparent untutored naivety.(3) Cortázar
was right. Lezama wrote in a style that
was
“prelapsarian,” devoid of guilt and before the law, ignoring
grammar, the rules of style, and good taste. It
is a mixture of kitsch and the
sublime. This stance is one with his poetics and philosophy of life,
which was
profoundly Christian in its inclusiveness, and with his view of
Fiestas are not only frequent in Lezama’s fiction, but his entire poetic system is predicated on a concept of the festive. In fact, one of Lezama’s best known lines of poetry, which graces his tomb in Havana’s Colón Cemetery, is “La mar violeta añora el nacimiento de los dioses,/ya que nacer aquí es una fiesta innombrable,” or “the purple sea longs for the birth of the gods/because to be born here [i.e. Cuba] is an unnamable fiesta.”(4) The festive, for Lezama, shares with poetry a quality that he considers essential to both, and that he called “lo hipertélico,” the “hypertelic,” from the Greek hyper, superior or excessive, and telos, end or goal. The hypertelic is that which goes beyond the end, beyond the “telos,” absorbing it, destroying it–I would say illuminating it-- as it emerges from it. It is in the hypertelic that the “image,” which is the basis of poetry according to Lezama, reveals itself. Elements that constitute the fiesta or are like it –poetry, music, dance, sports, gluttonous eating and drinking-- are not predetermined by anything and partake of the hypertelic. These activities obey no specific need, are not guided by a definite intention, and do not try to reach a specific goal. Like beauty, which all of them contain in some measure, the hypertelic is self-sufficient yet fundamental to the structure that they surpass, defining it backwards, as it were. The hypertelic is at the foundation of Lezama´s Baroque aesthetics, which is an aesthetic of excess.
This concept has much in common, precisely, with George Bataille´s notion of excess, and even with Jacques Derrida´s “supplement,” being that which, going beyond the system, paradoxically characterizes it from its borders or actually beyond them. Lezama’s excess, however, though homologous to Bataille’s notion of expenditure, which to him is the violent residue of Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectic, is its correlative opposite. Bataille’s orgiastic potlatch is a destructive feast driven by his obsession with shit –an eschatological scatology. In the end, Bataille’s system is a metaphysic of shit, if such a thing is conceivable. Lezama’s excess, on the contrary, is a festive incorporation of the material, a communion with an abundance whose existence is to be celebrated. Derrida’s supplement is more abstract. It was applied at first to writing, seen in the West, he claims, as a suspect (parasitic) supplement to the oral, which is presumed to be the carrier of truth (being allied to the pneuma, the breathing spirit). But writing, from that exiled and vulnerable position, revealed through its inner workings (différance) the impostures of the oral and the impossibility of achieving knowledge or the revelation of being through language. Lezama’s excess joyfully brims over the limitations of language by means of a doctrinal act of the will (a faith) whose validity is untouched by corroboration, preferring to remain in the realm of the poetic.(5) These hypertelic activities are related to another decisive concept in Lezama, which he draws from his Christian foundation: resurrection. Lezama often insisted that “man is not for death,” as Heidegger had proclaimed, but for resurrection, which for him meant a rebirth through poetry.(6) The fiesta, an amalgamation of all the basic customs and practices of Cuban culture, is a joyous celebration of this triumph over death. In this sense, all of Lezama’s works are a fiesta, including his massive Paradiso, which constitutes a victorious creation sparked by a tragic misfortune, the death of the father in the fiction, which is, of course also the death of Lezama’s own father in real life.
Paradiso is an autobiographical bildungsroman that narrates the sentimental and artistic education of José Cemí and the history of the Cemí family in the wake the death of Colonel José Eugenio, an officer in the army of the Republic who died of an unspecified illness in Pensacola, Florida, while on training exercises with the U.S. army.(7) Cemí, a boy when the beloved Colonel dies, grows up in the care of his mother, grandmother, and uncles. We follow him through his education, his acquisition of a coterie of friends, some of whom are intellectuals and aspiring poets, his sexual awakening, and eventually his entrance into the university. The novel ends as Oppiano Licario, an enigmatic poet who witnessed the death of the Colonel, conveys to Cemí a poem that ignites his own poetic imagination and makes him fit to “begin again,” the last words of the novel. There are obvious echoes of Goethe, Proust and Joyce in this story, particularly of the latter’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because of the Catholic context of Cemí’s education and his poetic inclinations and those of his friends; at the same time there is also a good deal of Ulysses in the minute descriptions of Havana and the protracted discussions about literature and philosophy among Cemi’s friends.
This is merely the
narrative frame
of the novel, which describes Cuban everyday life in ever accumulating
details
and luxuriantly chronicles the development of the family, as its center
shifts
from the deceased father to Rialta, his widow and Cemí’s mother.
The
historical context of the novel, though not precise, is a suitable
backdrop to
what is, apart from its style, fairly conventional; it is the early
decades of twentieth
century
Through the microcosm
of the
Cemí family, which through the marriage of the Colonel to Rialta
includes the Olayas, Lezama endeavors to
create a
summa of Cuban culture. In fact,
because the Cemís are involved in sugar and the Olayas
in tobacco, their union is a kind of allegory of Ortiz’s thesis about
Cuban culture being a “counterpoint of tobacco and sugar,” the
title of his famous 1940 book.(9)
Moreover,
Cemí, is not a Spanish surname (much less Basque, as the
characters allege,
and which Lezama is), but the Taíno word for their stone idols. Cemís were the three-cornered figures
that the
Taínos, the original inhabitants of
As an origin,
Cemí is more
poetry than historical reality, but that is precisely why Lezama uses
the
name. Like Vico, who had a profound
influence in
Fiestas, as mentioned,
are a key
component of Lezama’s poetic universe; they serve as keys to his
understanding of Cuban culture and of culture and poetry in general.
The
festive, in all its sensuality and struggle against death, endows
matter, most
significantly the body, with a transcendental dimension expressed
through
poetic language. Lezama’s fiestas display
all
the main features of the event viewed from an anthropological
perspective: they
mark a transition, being a moment of union and dispersal, they occur at
special
places and times, involve a variety of activities the principals of
which are eating,
drinking, music, and dancing. There are two that I consider crucial to
Lezama’s
conception of the Cuban fiesta because they establish a counterpoint
between
the domestic and the public, between the home and the street as
privileged sites;
a counterpoint that illuminates his comprehensive conception of Cuban
culture,
both in its intimate and public manifestations. These fiestas are the
family
dinner that takes place in chapter seven of Paradiso
and the carnival scene that is the focus of the poem “El coche
musical.”
Both take place in
Chapter seven of Paradiso narrates José Cemí’s passage from boyhood to young adulthood. The novel has fourteen chapters, so seven marks the turning point to the end. The chapter centers on a family reunion and dinner and on the charismatic, iconoclastic and iconic figure of Uncle Alberto. A ne’er-do-well who squanders money on gambling and other vices, he serves to the protagonist as a counterpart to the dead father (uncles are supplemental fathers, often looking like them, but being devoid of their menacing authority). Uncle Alberto, who is killed in a car crash at the end of the chapter, is like a “joker” in all senses of the word; in dying he becomes the principal scapegoat of the feast celebrated in the chapter –the turkey that they eat is his double or emblem. Described in loving detail, the family dinner is, as mentioned, the principal scene of the chapter; it is one of the most memorable in Lezama’s oeuvre, which has even given rise among Cuban writers and intellectuals to the expression “cena lezamiana,” “Lezamian dinner,” to allude to any copious feast.
With a Balzacian
eye for economic detail that one would hardly expect of him, Lezama
describes a
house that, because of its location on Prado Boulevard, its elaborate
doors,
windows, inner patio and multiple rooms, bespeaks of past glories in
colonial
times, yet the fact that the upstairs is usually rented out reveals
that the
owners are no longer wealthy. There are, for instance, squabbles in the
family
because of the financial assistance that Leticia, a sister of Rialta
who lives
in the provinces in some comfort, provides the widow. Grandmother
Augusta
scolds Uncle Alberto severely because he shows up infrequently and then
only to
ask for money, which he proceeds to squander. She
stills gives it to him. Fine china
and an elaborately embroidered tablecloth are brought out for the
dinner, with
explicit indications by the narrator that they hark back to an era of
splendor
no longer known by the family. Rialta
anxiously
awaits the mailman who will deliver the check with the Colonel’s
pension.
It arrives, to her relief, as the chapter ends. This is the house
prepared for
the feast that will celebrate the coming together of faraway members of
the
family, like Leticia and her husband Santurce, a doctor, who live in
Las
Villas, the central province, and Demetrio, a dentist who now lives in
Havana
in modest circumstances, and whose wife is a mulatta whom he married on
the
Isle of Pines, where she ran a pool hall. All these representatives of
various social
classes gather in the
The time of this fiesta
is also
significant. The dinner takes place on a stormy November evening,
drizzly,
windy, and with large waves pounding the seawall of the Malecón,
the
seashore drive on the edge of the
Like all fiestas, this
celebration marks both reunion and
dispersal, people who come together for the occasion but part ways,
often
through death, afterwards. The narrator alerts the reader to this: “A
family dinner mingling gravity and simplicity had warned them that the
time for
dispersion had come...” (185).(12) This
ominous quality of the
dinner makes the time of the reunion especially worth seizing and
elevating; it
is a time that celebrates itself, as it were. The signs of impending
departures
are everywhere, such as the cancerous tumor of the beloved grandmother
Augusta,
Uncle Alberto’s dangerous adventures in a bar, in which he is entangled
with a Mexican charro who is a figure of the devil, and eventually his
death.
But the presence of death at the dinner is also evident in the animal
flesh and
vegetables being consumed and the conversations they elicit. To be
sure,
conversation is a significant component of the dinner both as a festive
activity in which the guests display their rhetorical skills and wit,
as well
as the ways by which their words invest the food with meaning.
The dinner is, needless to
say, lavish. It includes six
courses: a plantain soup, a beet salad, a seafood soufflé made
with
prawns and lobster, a roasted turkey, a frozen cream for desert, made
with
grated coconut and pineapple, and fruit. These dishes are lovingly
described,
with commentaries on their colors, shapes, and origins. Eating in Lezama is a poetic process by which matter is
metabolized
into flesh, making of the feast a collective communion whereby, in
eating the
same foods, all become one substance. Hence, eating these meats, sea
foods,
vegetables, and fruit, all products of Cuba’s nature, makes the dinner
guests, more than family, one with the motherland, and one in flesh and
spirit
(when speaking, Lezama always used “incorporar” instead of
“comer” to signify eating). Of course, to consume these fish and
fowl they first have to be killed; they have to die to be reborn in
those who
consume them, just as the legumes and fruits must be transformed in the
passage
from field or orchard to the dinner plate and the stomachs of the
diners. This sequence
from death to life is brought out in the conversation in three ways. First, when one of the children refers
to the turkey as a “zopilote” and is corrected by Cemí, who
explains that the proper Mexican word for the bird is “guajolote,”
if a Mexican word is to be used. Someone adds that “zopilote”
refers to a carrion bird whose Cuban name (aura, buzzard) he
declines to
even pronounce because of its ominous connotations. The turkey thus has
been
associated with death, and eating with the consumption of carrion. Grandmother Augusta brusquely changes the
topic of the conversation. The prawns are next addressed, and it is
mentioned
that Cuban fishermen believe that when these animals feel the nearness
of death
they let themselves be carried by the current to a place where they
join many
others whose bodies make up the coral foundations of the
The third is the most
complicated
and noteworthy. Uncle Demetrio awkwardly knocks a slice of beet onto
the fine
cream-colored tablecloth, making three very visible, embarrassing red
stains on
it:
It
was then that Demetrio blundered. As he cut his beet, he lost the whole
thing,
and while he was attempting to recover it, the untimely pricked red
ball began
to bleed. Demetrio trapped it for a third time, but it broke and slid
away;
half was stuck to the fork and half, with a new malign insistence, laid
its
wound once more upon the delicate cloth, which soaked up the red liquid
with
slow avidity. As the ancestral
cream color of the tablecloth mingled with the beet´s
monsignorate, three islands of bleeding
showed up
among the rosettes” (182).(13)
The suggestion of blood could not be clearer. Uncle
Alberto comes to the rescue,
jokingly trying to cover the stains with the shells of prawns already
consumed
by him and José Cemí.
But in spite of the mirthful turn he gives the accident, the
ominous
signs of the red spots on the tablecloth are evident: “In the way the
threads absorbed the vegetable blood, the three stains opened up in
somber
expectancy” (182).(14)
The announcement
of Alberto’s death lodged in this apparently trivial accident is
fulfilled at the end of the chapter.
After the taxi in which he is riding smashes into a train,
hurling
Alberto’s face against the windshield and snapping his neck, the
railroad
guard who approaches his prone body “took a handkerchief out of
Alberto’s pocket, on which from lack of use the [ironed] squares could
still be seen, and he covered Alberto’s face with it, but the blood was
still pouring out and followed the careful creases down to one corner,
where
his initials had been delicately embroidered by Doña Augusta”
(195).(15) Like the tablecloth’s fabric
absorbing the beet’s
juice, the handkerchief absorbs Uncle Alberto’s blood. This textile
image
binds together the text of the chapter and seals, as it were,
its festive theme. Alberto is the scapegoat of the fiesta; he, the
charming
chosen one, who embodies life and poetry, is the sacrificial victim. It
is the
price extracted by death for the revelry, its revenge for the affront
made by
the lavish dinner in flaunting the unity of the family. We might say
that Alberto’s
death is embedded in the fabric of the fiesta, revealing the tragic
element of
Cuban, of human culture.
For Cemí the death of this supplemental father signals the beginning of his adult life. Henceforth he will become increasingly involved with his friends; although still within the family home, he will make the city more and more his world. The mysterious figure who appeared in the bar room fracas between Alberto and the Mexican, the darkly attired Oppiano Licario, will become his new guide. The family dinner proved to be the ritual of dispersal conjured up by the unity that it celebrates. It is the bright and dark center of the novel, its chiaroscuro play of white and black.
If in Paradiso the fiesta is an
intimate, family ritual celebrated within the home, in “El coche
musical,” first published in 1960, Lezama focused on a street festival,
the once famous Havana Carnival, taking place not just outdoors but in
The Louvre Cafe was the
favorite
meeting place of poets and baseball players in the nineteenth century,
the acme
of
The timing, of course,
need not be
elaborated upon: it is Carnival, the season of revelry, relaxation or
inversion
of customs, rules, and mores, taking place just before Lent, when
prohibitions
will return with exceptional rigor and remain in place for over a month. During the early decades of the
Republic, the Havana Carnival achieved great splendor, with floats and comparsas (dancing quadrilles) parading
through the streets of the city. It was not quite
It is noteworthy that
Lezama should
have focused on Valenzuela, whom he portrays as a key figure in the
fulfillment
of an all-encompassing Cuban cultural synthesis. He was a dark mulatto,
probably from the colored petty bourgeoisie that had emerged on the
island
during the nineteenth century, and a musician, as were others of the
same
background. Lezama did not engage
in identity politics, much less racial ones, but his poetic insight
about
Valenzuela’s significance in combining elements from various levels of
culture in the creation of his popular art –i.e., an art for the
masses—makes
of “El coche musical” a poem whose
importance transcends its aesthetic merit. The first danzón
was composed and played by another mulatto musician, Miguel de
Faílde,
in
Before reading “El coche musical” in a recording of his poetry, Lezama recalls:
I
remember that when I was very young, towards the end of the year, when
Carnival
time came,
Aside from the fact that Lezama conflates the year’s
end holidays with those of the Carnival, which arrive three months
later, one
problem with this poignant reminiscence is that Valenzuela died in 1905
and Lezama
was not born until 1910. Could the Carnival scene be something that a
family
member related to him? Could the Raimundo Valenzuela he remembers be a
son of
the original Raimundo Valenzuela? I have not been able to answer this
question,
but it does not really matter; what is significant is how Lezama
transmutes
this childhood recollection into a poem about fiestas, and what he does
with the
figure of Valenzuela, whom he turns into Orpheus, thus offering a
stunning
dramatization of Cuban culture in the making.
“El coche
musical” follows Valenzuela, as he triumphantly rides around
Aquí el hombre antes de morir no
tenía que ejercitarse en la música,
ni las sombras aconsejar el ritmo al bajar al
infierno.
El germen ya traía las medidas de la
brisa,
y las sombras huían, el número era relatado por la luz.
In prose translation
this goes
something like this: “Here
[i.e. in
In this bubbling mixture hierarchies are abolished, everything has its own dignity and significance, as it is sucked into the creative vortex of Valenzuela’s entrancing music. He presides over a universe in flux, oblivious to fixed categories, such as distinctions between high and low art, between classical and popular music. In his danzones, as mentioned, Valenzuela often adapted tunes from opera and other forms of European music. It is clear to me that Valenzuela, a heroic figure, is a persona of Lezama himself and his poetics of Baroque accumulation. In developing the danzón, the mulatto composer and musician founded a Cuban musical blend that binds the population, regardless of class or race, in moments of ecstasy in which, by forgetting themselves, they remember a lost unity. This is the reason why Valenzuela can parade himself, sashaying in his fancy taffeta frock coat, commanding respect and admiration from all and obedience from his musicians, whom he conducts with verve and conviction. Larger than life, Valenzuela is a fabulous figure, a hero.
“El coche musical,” in fact, begins with a correction in that regard. Its first line reads: “No es el coche con el fuego cubierto, aquí el sonido” (“It is not the carriage covered with fire, here it is sound”), that is to say, this is not Phaeton’s chariot, shrouded in flames, but a carriage radiating music, a kind of roaming calliope. Valenzuela may be no Phaeton, but he too is a mythological figure, Orpheus, who, while not setting the world on fire, will by filling time with measured sound crack the mysteries of fate to prepare his fellow revelers to confront death. Orpheus is the god chosen because he crossed death’s limits and, lulling Hades’ gatekeepers Pluto and Persephone with his music, descended into it to rescue Eurydice. The poem’s impenetrability is like the music of the danzón; it is melodious, rhythmical sound without an ostensible verbal meaning translatable into rational discourse. Since to Lezama Valenzuela is Orpheus, his music is Orphic; prophetic, ritualistic, and mystical like “El coche musical.”
Even then, there are
flickers of
meaning, the overall narrative structure can be grasped, and some of
the
obscure allusions can be ultimately deciphered. These are clues that
situate
the poem in a specific Cuban geographic and historical context, linking
the
contingencies of Cuban culture to the broad cosmological resonances
suggested
by Orpheus and his music. For instance, a place referred to as
“lágrimas compostelanas” [Compostelan tears] must be the Centro Gallego,
the imposing
building of the Galician mutual aid society already mentioned (Santiago
de
Compostela being the capital of
Lezama’s writings have contributed to our knowledge of Cuban history and culture. His highlighting of Raimundo Valenzuela’s significance, for instance, is an original contribution to our knowledge of the history of Cuban culture. Lezama underlines the sacred nature of certain common practices that we take for granted (fiestas, foods, and family relations). These are also insights of the highest value whose importance has extended beyond his group of followers and admirers. Lezama’s judgments about figures in the history of Cuban literature are also unique and have been influential among critics and scholars. But although Lezama’s poetic fiestas have had an impact on younger writers, particularly Severo Sarduy, they are an end in themselves, a culmination. They are not a probe into Cuban culture that yields any applications, being in a sense inimitable. To enjoy them, one must allow oneself to be carried away by their powerful allure, suspending not so much disbelief as the desire to know and understand rationally. Lezama is a writer of the stature of Proust, whose vision and language absorb reality, creating with it another world that, once one enters into it, feels coherent, total, and sufficient. It is not an alternative or parallel world, it becomes the only world. The greatest pitfall of Lezama criticism is to be sucked into that world and produce commentary that is either a pale reflection of Lezama, or, at worst, a parody of him; much of the criticism devoted to his work has fallen into this trap. It is easy to do so. To resist Lezama, however, may be tantamount to resigning oneself to not understand him, to be left out of the fiesta altogether. To take ironic distance feels like a profanation; besides, from what secure vantage point might one cast an ironic glance that is not as arbitrary or predicated on a faith, even a nihilistic one, as Lezama’s? What I have done here aspires to be the isolation and interpretation of a topic or recurrent scene in Lezama, but as happens with every detail of his work, to tease it out means to bring the whole along with it. In that sense I too have failed to hold off Lezama and I too have joined, with my unsure steps, the dance.
Notes
(1). This essay is part of a book in progress about
Cuban
fiestas in literature, art, and sports.
I use fiesta, which appears in my Webster’s, because –unlike
“feast”--it refers to an event, a celebration,
that involves more than eating.
(2). See my Alejo Carpentier: The
Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
(3).
“Para llegar a Lezama
Lima,” en su La vuelta al
día en ochenta mundos (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 1967),
135-55.
(4).
“Noche
insular: jardines
invisibles,” in Órbita de
Lezama Lima, ensayo preliminar selección y notas de Armando
Álvarez Bravo (Havana: UNEAC, 1966), 81. All
quotes are from this version.
(5). See Georges Bataille,
Visions of
Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, translated and edited by
Allan Stoeckl, with Carl R. Lovitt and
Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985), and Jacques Derrida, Of
Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivac (
(6). “Y cómo la
mayor posibilidad infinita es la resurrección, la poesía,
la
imagen, tenía que expresar su mayor abertura de compás,
que es la
propia resurrección. Fue
entonces que adquirí el punto de vista que enfrento a la
teoría
heideggeriana del hombre para la muerte, levantando el concepto de la
poesía que viene a establecer la causalidad prodigiosa del ser
para la
resurrección, el ser que vence a la muerte y a lo saturniano.”
In
Iván González Cruz, Diccionario: vida y obra de José
Lezama Lima (Generalitat Valenciana, 2000), 134.
[And
since the greatest infinite possibility is resurrection, poetry, the
image, I
had to articulate its widest compass opening, which is resurrection
itself. It was then that I attained
the point of view that I oppose to the Heideggerian
theory of man for death, raising the concept of poetry which
establishes a
prodigious causality of being for resurrection, the self who defeats
death and
the Saturnal.]
(7). Though the chronology of the novel is vague, this
must have
happened, if the fiction parallels Lezama’s
life, late in the second decade of the twentieth century.
The army corps of the Republic, which
had been trained by the U.S. Army, many of whose officers had studied
in the
United States, was violently deposed by Fulgencio
Batista’s “sergeants’ revolt” of 1933. By
dying before this happened, Lezama’s
father was spared the humiliation, and in
not a few cases extermination, to which the officers were subjected. His widow and family lived in relative
poverty on the father’s modest army pension.
(8). It is notorious, for
instance, that Lezama’s usual greeting
was,
“¿Qué tal
de resonancias?” ,
which we might render as --“Getting any vibes?” There are many anecdotes
about Lezama’s convoluted everyday speech.
(9).
See
my “Lo cubano en Paradiso,”
in Isla a su vuelo fugitiva: ensayos
sobre literatura hispanoamericana (Madrid: Porrúa Turanzas,
1983),
69-90.
(10).
“Prólogo,”
Antología de la poesía
cubana (Havana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1965), vol. I, 7.
(11).
“la
casa de los Olaya” (217).
Paradiso
I quote from the first edition (Havana: UNEAC-Contemporáneos,
1966) and Gregory Rabassa’s translation
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974).
(12).
“Una
comida familiar, que
había mezclado la gravedad y la sencillez, les avisaba que
había
llegado la dispersión” (249)
(13).
“Fue
entonces cuando Demetrio
cometió una torpeza, al trinchar la remolacha se
desprendió
entera la rodaja, quiso rectificar el error, pero volvió la masa
roja
irregularmente pinchada a sangrar, por tercera vez Demetrio la
recogió,
pero por el sitio donde había penetrado el trinchante se
rompió
la masa, deslizándose: una mitad quedó adherida al
tenedor, y la
otra, con nueva insistencia maligna, volvió a reposar su herida
en el
tejido sutil, absorbiendo el líquido rojo con lenta avidez. Al mezclarse el cremoso ancestral con el
monseñorato de la remolacha, quedaron señalados tres
islotes de
sangría sobre los rosetones” (244).
(14).
“en
los presagios, en la manera como los hilos fijaron la sangre vegetal,
las tres
manchas entreabieron como una sombría expectación” (244).
(15).
“extrajo
del bolsillo de Alberto, con los cuadrados aún marcados por no
haber
sido usado, su pañuelo, le tapó el rostro, pero la sangre
aún brotando se fue extendiendo siguiendo las cuidadosas
divisiones de
aquella pieza de hilo, luciendo en una de sus esquinas sus iniciales,
delicadamente bordadas por Doña Augusta” (262).
(16). The poem appeared
in Dador
(1960) and was also published that year in the literary supplement Lunes de Revolución,
no. 76,
(17). See my “A
Cuban Belle Epoque” in The Pride of
(18).
I
draw this meager information on Valenzuela from Helio Orovio’s Diccionario de la música cubana:
biográfico y técnico (Havana: Editorial Letras
Cubanas,
1992), 495-96. [Second edition, the first is from 1981]. On the history of Cuban popular music I
follow María Teresa Linares, La música
popular (Havana: Instituto Cubano
del Libro, 1970).
(19).
“Yo recuerdo que
cuando yo era muy joven, al llegar los carnavales, los
fines de año, el Parque Central cobraba una animación
fiestera
verdaderamente vertiginosa. Cuando
llegaban los carnavales, pues entonces el Parque se rodeaba de
orquesticas, y
cuando una se remansaba comenzaba la otra, de tal manera que aquel
cuadrado del
Parque Central estaba constantemente animado, reverberante de luz;
había
un verdadero ambiente verbenero. Y entonces Valenzuela, que era de muy
buena
presencia, con su levita de tafetán, pues iba de orquesta en
orquesta y
daba como el compás, y entonces inmediatamente la orquesta
empezaba sus
sones criollos. Y eso me causaba
mucha impresión porque veía incesantemente la
música como
si fuera candela, la música movilizada y surgiendo por cada una
de las
esquinas del Parque. Valenzuela me causaba la impresión de un
Orfeo que
iba dando los sones de la flauta, los números de la
armonía. Y eso, al paso del tiempo,
esa
impresión perduró en mí, hasta que un día
hice el
poema “El coche musical, en recuerdo de Raimundo Valenzuela y sus
orquestas de carnaval.” José Lezama Lima. Poemas. “Palabra de
esta América,”
No. 22 (Havana, Casa de las Américas), side B.