very nice person

The pleasant person of Jorge Edwards with the elegant discretion of dying in a dream, during a mid-afternoon nap, which is almost always like dying at dawn to rise again in late-night conversation or browsing early-morning readings.

The pleasant person of Edwards has gone like an echo or a murmur of the musical way with which he spoke, caressing syllables and intoning consonances where the Chilean seems to clone such intimate landscapes of monuments and historical passages as glorious as his pain.

I saw him among the shelves of an old bookstore, taking copies from here and there like someone walking through the forest of his own memory.

He spoke with his eyes and suggested evocations of each of the immortal authors that passed through his hands, the exemplary novels, the timeless stories, and all this while it seemed like an academic master's degree in an improvised university.

The elegant figure who left the bookstore like someone leaving the square, with his cane tracing the thread of time on impalpable sand, must remain as the image of this afternoon: the diplomatic writer who moves away from so much noise to deliver his credentials before eternity.

Jorge Edwards does not deserve to be marked by his book

, although those premonitory pages record the disenchantment that became contagious in the face of the abuses and contradictions of the Cuban Revolution, prone since then to the nonsense of canceling wills, imprisoning ideas and ideals, censoring consciences... today that it is leaving, the foolish survival is ironically illustrative of shoddy totalitarianism already on the island or in narrow Nicaragua;

Worse still, today that Jorge Edwards is leaving —declared unpleasant due to the ingratitude of his closure— the puerile and shameless fallacious indoctrination persists.

And Edwards does not deserve that his memory is only exemplary for that book where he narrates his diplomatic misadventure on the olive green island because his literary work is even broader and greater: author of at least two endearing books where he captured his close relationship with the Poet Pablo Neruda,

not without denying nodal differences with the obsessed militancy of the Stalinist from Isla Negra and also has stories with which he opened a gap from the beginning of his inks and other not a few novels where he distilled the high office of extolling language with weighted prose, punctuation and pause of a knight-errant.

Edwards had an old fountain pen and high flights, heir to the charm that explains that not a few Chileans are like Englishmen from the Southern Cone and at the same time, although far from the rural landscape or typical plots, he internalized himself in the soul of his characters in silent dialogues. , nodal situations of pain or universal enjoyment.

I see him walk away with all the alternating books that he has concocted among all the shelves of his memory to reread and reread forever.

A slight shine remains that illuminated his gaze and that very discreet smile of sarcasm and wisdom that the most pleasant archangels usually project from the dome.

A Cervantes Prize winner rides at night to meet his peers and the man with the sad figure that gives his name to that highest award of our common language, a sharp and long trail of words with which he contributed to broaden the imagination and preserve the memory of all of us who speak and read with the letter Eñe... and in front of its most gracious shadow there is nothing left but to write sincere gratitude.

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