I read Joseph Conrad under the sky announcing the first spring rains. Walk through his short narrative, published in its entirety by Sexto Piso in a beautiful edition translated by Carmen M. Cáceres and Andrés Barba. From time to time I stop reading to continue reading beyond the page.
I don’t know if I understand myself, but I lose my sight on the horizon line where the sea is a tear of shadows. Then the memory assails me and takes me on a trip to Madrid, to Paseo de la Castellana 167, 11th floor, elevator, where I met Mario Muchnik one of the last times, busy as he was translating Joseph Conrad’s letters.
Until that day, I hadn’t given Conrad the attention he deserved. He always threw me more Jack London or Rudyard Kipling or Herman Melville. But Mario convinced me of the importance of him. He taught me that Conrad had laid the foundations of twentieth-century American fiction. Without going any further, Hemingway is a bastard cross between Conrad and Mark Twain, in the same way that Scott Fitzgerald is a cross between Conrad and Henry James. And what about Faulkner? Another Conrad cross, but this time with Melville.
Conrad’s verbal resonances trap you in the spiral of a unique style. The meandering syntax of his prose is identified with the prolonged moments of Erik Satie’s pieces, but also with the harmony that underlies Debussy’s works. A complexity illuminated by the torches of sound impressionism with which the history of contemporary music began and the magic pass that had its most outstanding heritage in jazz. In his story entitled Typhoon, Joseph Conrad describes a storm on the high seas, when nature unleashes all its wrath on the steamer Nan-Shan, a merchant ship loaded with Chinese workers returning home. Conrad tells the storm from within.
He achieves it with a dense and ghostly style at the same time, a way of transmitting that has only been surpassed by Charlie Parker’s sax, the musician who has best known how to imitate nature when nature does not allow itself to be subdued. And then there is the other, the stillness, the face of Captain Mac Whirr, as ordinary and immutable as the notes thrown up by the folk traditions from which the Impressionists borrowed their local color. In addition, Ravel and Debussy also sailed through the narrow seas of China, loaded with realities and exotic symbols that were building their story, translating into the notes of a precise and ambiguous scale at the same time, as precise and ambiguous it is, at their time, Conrad’s prose.
I read and reread Joseph Conrad; This is how I fully immerse myself in the memory of my friend, the editor Mario Muchnik, who left a year ago on the other side of the river, where the heart is wrapped in darkness and everything else ceases to matter. Forever.