2023-12-30 19:26:34
It was on December 30, 2005, at 12:45 a.m., when the poet Jesús Orta Ruiz, the Indian Naborí, left this world; A little more than two years before, the sculptor José Delarra had done it. Thus, both friends, those who visited each other frequently and converged on ideas and deeds, began the path towards posterity.
Naborí and Delarra admired each other. In 1996, the sculptor made a head for the poet and the poet made a poem for the sculptor. He titled it “Horse and Spurs,” referring to one of the pictorial collections that the artist was vividly developing in those years. The Indian wrote:
José Delarra goes with his painting
rider on his fantastic horse
which at the moment turns into a rooster
and Horse is his horse.
Horse sings when the dawn is pure
makes way for the day with its soft ray
and neighs in January as in May
if a flirtatious pony tries it.
With the blood of all your watercolor
fight or run with a different spur.
Very good for the painter with a frank hand.
Only here is one thing that doesn’t fit:
the rooster is not enough for the filly
and the Caba is too much for the chicken.
Delarra, in about three hours, modeled the head that he made for Naborí (and that his family keeps). In his studio in Old Havana, the sculptor pulled the figure of his friend out of the clay, while they held a dialogue peppered with anecdotes and evocations of the work of the sitter.
About a hundred photographic images—taken by Jorge Valiente, from Bohemia magazine—preserve that moment, almost as they are revealed in the 24 snapshots per second that make up a cinematographic tape.
Photo: Jorge Valiente.
In these prints Naborí appears sitting on an aluminum and fabric chair, very popular at that time, which Delarra placed on wheels to rotate his models according to the angle he needed to capture. The sculptor is also seen working standing or from a chair with the same added bonus, often with a cigar in his mouth or in his left hand. Eloína Pérez, the poet’s wife, accompanies them.
In several frames, Naborí’s expression shows the delight of the recitation. In Delarra, the joy of making his friend a sculptural portrait. They both smile, gesture, talk.
“They had known each other since the ’60s. The two shared a love of the Revolution and their artistic passions. They traveled together around the country when Indio assumed a position that, in some way, linked him to art schools.
“Once, as a teenager already interested in literature, I was with them on the Bacunayagua bridge — along with Onelio Jorge Cardoso and Imeldo Álvarez. I also remember Delarra visiting our house at different times,” says Fidel Antonio Orta, the poet’s son.
When eighteen years have passed since his physical departure – Orta publishes this December 29 in La Jiribilla – it is nothing new to say here what is repeated every day anywhere on the island: the Indio Naborí is a very main ingredient of the national imagination; the Naborí Indian is synonymous with identity; The Naborí Indian is history, legend or fascination of obligatory reference.
These statements, he adds, are related to the popular impact of his extensive poetic work: he renewed the sung and written décima; he invigorated the elegy; He gave an unusual range of perpetuity to social poetry; he energized free verse; He pontificated the sonnet and revived the romance, fusing and elevating to an aesthetic category, the cultured and the popular, the classic and the modern.
Almost certainly this is the Naborí that José Delarra wanted to sculpt in the lump of clay from which 27 years ago he made the three-dimensional portrait of the poet’s head emerge. That attempt will last as long as the sculptural work of his friend succeeds. Meanwhile, in the archives of the “sculptor who paints” (as Delarra defined himself), of the workshop of large, medium and small monuments, lives the manuscript of “Horse and Spurs.” (Taken from Cuba in Summary).
#Naborí #horses #spurs