2024-07-18 03:01:00
Some verse jumps from the springboard of memory. The walls of the Tortoni Coffeethe oldest in the city, exude stories. Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca They met in October 1933 in Buenos Aires. The Spanish playwright and poet came to the country to see the staging of his work Blood Weddingperformed by the Lola Membrives company at the Teatro Avenida. The bond with the then Chilean consul in Argentina was a friendship at first sight. They soon chose each other as interlocutors and shared endless evenings, some at the Tortoni, where literature, political commitment and life came together.
On the 120th anniversary of Neruda’s birth and the centenary of the publication of 20 love poems and a desperate song, the spanish actor Imanol Arias and the actress Luisa Kuliok They participated in a warm tribute to celebrate the legacy of a poet whose figure is not exempt from the intense controversy that a fragment of his memoirs aroused, I confess that I have livedwhere he himself He recounts a rape he committed in the late 1920s.when he was consul of Chile in the territory of present-day Sri Lanka.
The tribute at Café Tortoni, organized by the Embassy of Chile in Argentina and the MATTA Cultural Centerwas chaired by the Chilean ambassador Jose Antonio Viera-Gallo and the Cultural attaché of that country, the actor and playwright Alejandro Goic. “His death is still being investigated. We don’t know if it was a natural death or a political assassination,” the Argentine diplomat admitted. Neruda died on September 23, 1973. His nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, claimed that the bacteria found in his uncle’s body was injected by agents of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, 12 days after the coup d’état.
Goic decided to share what Julio Cortázar said about the work of Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, the name with which the poet who was born in Parral on July 12, 1904 was recorded. “Neruda brought us back to our own. He took us away from the vague theory of European lovers and muses to throw us into the arms of an immediate and tangible woman, teaching us that the love of a Latin American poet could be given and written here and now, with the simple words of the day, with the smells of our streets, with the simplicity of someone who discovers beauty without the approval of the great heliotropes and the divine proportion.”
In ostracism
Before reciting the speech “Al alimón sobre Rubén Darío” with Imanol Arias, Goic explained that the expression “al alimón” in bullfighting jargon refers to a very special bullfighting technique. “Two bullfighters can fight the same bull at the same time and with a single cape. This is one of the most dangerous tests in the art of bullfighting. That is why it is seen very rarely. No more than two or three times in a century and only two bullfighters who are brothers or who, at least, have common blood can do it. This is what is called bullfighting al alimón,” Lorca told Neruda.
For the Chilean cultural attaché, Neruda and García Lorca are the “fathers of the country.” “Without Lorca’s poetry, a gigantic piece of the sea would be missing. Without Darío’s poetry, a huge piece of Latin America would be missing. Without Pablo Neruda’s poetry, Chile’s spiritual territory would be dramatically reduced,” Goic said.Neruda says: “If you ask me what my poetry is, I must say, I don’t know. But if you ask my poetry, it will tell you who I am.”
The Chilean cultural attaché recalled an anecdote to illustrate Neruda’s personality, whom he defined as a “tremendous sybarite.” The story was told to him by the Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas (1916-2011). Neruda went to Paris, but the news was not made public for security reasons. For everyone the poet continued to live in Chile, clandestinely. Gonzalo Rojas was walking down a street in Paris and suddenly noticed the author of Residence on earth sitting at a table, with a gigantic basin of oysters.
–Pablo, what are you doing here? Gonzalo Rojas asked him.
–Here I am, in ostracism, Neruda replied.
An Argentine in disguise
Although he has not yet been granted Argentine nationality, Imanol Arias is like an Argentine camouflaged in a Basque accent. He never tires of repeating that he loves the country. Forty years ago, the Spanish actor won the hearts of millions of Argentines when he played the priest Ladislao Gutiérrez in the unforgettable Camilathe movie of Maria Luisa Bemberg who starred alongside Susú PecoraroThe veteran performer continues with the performances of the play Better not say itnext to Mercedes Moranin it Walk the Square Until July 28.
“The festival, the liturgy of the bullfighting world, has a strong connection with the rhythm of flamenco in the times when the muleta is moved. Today the world of bullfighting is under strict study and many young generations, faced with animalism and the defense of certain rights, do not understand it well – said the actor -. Independently of this discussion in which I am not going to enter, everything that the poet says can be illustrated by a right hand or a left hand extended with a red cloth that passes to the rhythm of each word and releases the fury of the story that is the bull.”
Arias added that for him, “a Basque Spaniard, father of children of Andalusian origin,” mixing accents is not a problem, but “a necessity and a privilege.” He then announced that he would try to recite imitating the Andalusian accent of the author of Gypsy romanceWith his right hand he banged on the table, as if he were marking the rhythm, and with his left he held the microphone and said: “He gave the murmur of the jungle with an adjective, and like Fray Luis de Granada, head of languages, he made star signs with the lemon, and the deer’s foot, and the mollusks full of terror and infinity: he put us at sea with frigates and shadows in the apples of our eyes and built an enormous gin promenade on the greyest afternoon the sky has ever had, and he greeted the dark south wind face to face, all chest, like a romantic poet, and he placed his hand on the Corinthian capital with an ironic and sad doubt for all times.”
The whole world in a single loop
Luisa Kuliok stressed that it is “very moving” to celebrate the poet and the man “so deeply committed” to his time. “I had to choose some of these poems 20 love poems… and it wasn’t easy because there’s the deep, masculine voice of our Pablo Neruda and I found one that I think is ideal for this moment, called ‘So that you hear me’, where that voice that I say is masculine is only by accident, because today we know that our internal nuances, our folds as people, as human beings, have so many colors, so many searches, so many questions, so many unanswers; it’s an extraordinary path that we’re discovering in each one of us. And I think that this poem has something that goes beyond the human like a backbone, in addition to the love of a couple or a desired or had love,” argued the actress.
Nicolás Prado, manager of Café Tortoni, received a commemorative plaque along with a photograph of Neruda, in a tribute which is part of the Neruda Year Celebrations Programprepared by an Executive Committee led by the University of Chile, the Neruda Foundation and the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage of Chile, in collaboration with the Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs of Chile. Prado mentioned Roberto Fanego, the former manager of Café Tortoni who was in charge of creating the “story” of Tortoni. “At that time there was no internet and with the telephone directory I looked for name by name, calling one by one to ask who had a photographic record to be able to put together what is today the history of our beloved café.”
After reading the poem, Kuliok spoke of the importance of dialogue. Listening attentively to her in the audience were the writer and president of the El Libro Foundation, Alejandro Vaccaro, and the director of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Andrés Drupat. “Dialogue is so that each one of us can hear the other person; so that we have the words that begin to avoid anguish, emptiness, abysses and transform us into an indissoluble knot to fight for the happiness that we deserve in every corner, regardless of our nationality, Chilean, Spanish, Argentine, Nicaraguan; the whole world in a single bond.”