More solos without Jorge Edwards

I look at a black and white photograph.

It is 1960 or 1961 and Jorge Edwards is in front of the Chillón castle, on the shores of Lake Geneva.

He is in a suit and tie and bends over a little to hold the hand of a little boy who is barely walking.

That little boy is me.

Surely my father, his colleague in diplomacy, asked him to hold me while he took that photo.

Edwards does so with obvious reluctance.

I repay his mistrust by pouting and tugging to get out of his hand.

Our next meeting occurred some eighteen years later and was more promising.

In 1978 or 1979 we met on board an Argentine merchant ship anchored in the port of Valparaíso (Chile).

A Buenos Aires playwright, who was also a sailor, offered a barbecue on that ship.

Predictably, a crowd of known or novice writers, guests or cast members attended.

We ate huge chorizo ​​steaks, good wines and a huge bottle of Chivas Regal, which the navigating playwright brought from some truly free port.

As evening fell on the deck I found myself talking face to face with Edwards.

This time he welcomed me without hesitation.

I discovered that it was typical of him to create sudden trusts, oblivious to the difference in ages and other superficial data.

I felt like we were becoming friends.

More information

The Chilean writer Jorge Edwards dies at the age of 91, one of the last exponents of the great Latin American literature of the 20th century

I, who only wanted to leave Chile, asked him why the hell he had returned from his exile in Barcelona to the Pinochet dictatorship.

For me, that capital of the Latin American literary

was little less than Paradise.

He answered me something like this: "Everything is not so great there either."

Later I would get used to those relativizations of his, daughters of a natural skepticism, of a stoic equanimity.

If the most perfect place is the one we see from afar, that would explain why Edwards was always leaving.

In other texts I have reflected on Edwards's books, now I prefer to spin anecdotes, as Jorge used to do.

Remembering events is a way of continuing his memory, which he gave us so many hours of entertaining, written and oral stories.

A few years after that meeting on the Argentine ship, I heard him speak at a Book Fair that was held under the oriental plane trees of Parque Forestal, in Santiago de Chile.

A caustic writer of my generation whispered in my ear: “Vained, that

”.

I didn't know how to refute it at the time.

I suffer from the "spirit of the stairs" and only later did I reflect that, in the case of a storyteller, anecdotal thinking may be the most appropriate and the least pretentious.

The narrator sees individual cases, people matter more to him than groups or classes.

That particularist gaze distrusts theories and generalizations.

In the story, in the anecdote, contradictions and ambivalences coexist.

If Edwards lavished anecdotes in his speeches, it was not out of vanity, as my caustic friend affirmed, but on the contrary.

The good writer tells the case as he saw or imagined it, with its uneven details and irresolvable ambiguities.

The conclusions, the ideas, remain for the readers.

The author refers to the motto of Montaigne (Edwards' patron saint): "What do I know?"

I could unroll this ball of memories much more, but space is short.

I jump several decades.

In 2018 Edwards and I were invited to the Summer Courses in El Escorial (Community of Madrid).

He was 87 years old and his head was not the same, he was easily confused.

I gave my talk and then attended his.

He began improvising, as always, without following any prompts.

I feared the worst.

But it seems that getting on a podium was enough for him to orient himself immediately.

He spoke for an hour and a half: about Stendhal, about the pianist Claudio Arrau, about strange people from his family.

He spoke of a Santiago de Chile in which trams thundered and even brayed.

It was an unlikely mix.

But 70 years of "tables" allowed him to wander without getting lost.

Her memory came and went like a loom shuttle weaving a tapestry of free associations.

Despite its apparent disorder, that class at El Escorial offered privileged access to the workings of a storyteller's imagination.

From the fortuitous contact between incoherent data, the spark that illuminates an original idea can sprout.

Jorge Edwards was not a simple person, no true artist is.

He knew how to be very sociable and welcoming.

And he could be cold too.

He would open his house and his bar and the rich memory of him to almost anyone.

He was generous even with his forgetfulness: he easily buried the offenses received.

But he had a hard time expressing his affections.

In 2001 he stayed for a few days at my house in Berlin.

We walked and had a lot of fun.

When he was leaving I went with him to find a taxi.

In a corner I made a move to hug him.

But he reacted faster, turning his back on me and walking away waving his hand over his shoulder.

A hand that said: no exciting goodbyes!

That was George.

He had to die so he could get my revenge.

Two hours after his death, a group of friends arrived at his house in Madrid.

The corpse was on the bed, still warm, already waxy, skinny as a character from El Greco.

Taking advantage of a minute when I was alone, I put my hand on his forehead, gently patted his skull, caressed that "noble skull."

He couldn't refuse, nor could he make impatient gestures that meant “no exciting goodbyes”.

Then the friends made a toast.

If it hadn't been for the small inconvenience of death, I'm sure Jorge would have gotten up from his last bed to toast too.

And he would have begged us not to get sentimental.

But he couldn't do it.

And now I take advantage of that silence of yours to sadden me without complexes.

I am going to refute that rhyme by Bécquer: “How alone the dead are left”.

It's a lie, we are more alone.

Carlos Franz

is a Chilean writer.