A motorcycle drives past two semi-destroyed buildings in Havana, Cuba.Giles Clarke (Getty)
I spend most of my time in an engraving workshop where it seems that the Atlantic Ocean is an easy stream to cross, because often the Panamanian accent is mixed with Cuban, Dominican, Uruguayan, Argentine and Chilean. Last week, as Isabel went into the kitchen to prepare dinner to continue with an aquatint and Rosa checked the coffee supply, Minú asked me if I had ever visited Cuba. He had been with us for a few days and had dedicated himself to devouring the library of the workshop (La analfabeta by Agota Kristof, La extranjera by Claudia Durastanti, Casas vacías by Brenda Navarro, El vuelo corto by Ofelia Rey Castelao), at that time she was talking to us about her childhood in Havana. Then spoke Rosa, a Dominican who researches cultural consumption in the Caribbean and arrived at the workshop in mid-April. Isabel, who came from the School of Art of Toledo, listened to our stories about the magic that one faces in Chiloé, and we saw that it was not far from what could happen in Castile. Milena arrived and took us to a Haiti of almost forty years ago and, as the sounds of the drums went down the hills, she brought us the darkness of the Duvaliers and the light of their most precious youth as a journalist.
We spent several hours standing in the tiny kitchen with a very young Milena who, in the midst of the Haitian revolt and running here and there with a tape recorder, dreamed of the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship in her native Chile. I thought of Maggie O'Farrell and her metaphor of Russian dolls, because it was evident that it was a twenty-year-old girl who was in that kitchen coming out of the eyes and mouth of the Millennium we knew.
I don't know if it was the Twenty Mile or the Sixty Milena, but she also told us about a certain Emma Reyes, and the next day we were already reading Memoria por correspondencia (Libros del Asteroide, 2015), the story of a girl who spent her childhood locked in dark and stinking rooms in the city of Bogotá, surviving in the purest misery isolated in a convent. looking at the world in disbelief through the lucid eyes of a painter. The book, which collects the twenty-three letters that Emma Reyes wrote to her friend, the intellectual Germán Arciniegas, was published in Colombia in 2012 and garnered great success. The interesting thing is not only his high literary quality or the portrait he makes of Colombia in the early twentieth century and the abuse of power of the Church. It is, above all, the first-person narration of an injustice approached without rancor. It seems that whoever writes is, incredible as it may seem, an illiterate girl. Again the metaphor of the Russian dolls: the fifty-year-old Emma Reyes who wrote the letters on behalf of her friend seems a simple vehicle for a girl who has survived the cruelest misery to speak and narrate herself.
One finishes the reading breathlessly, and wonders how that girl could continue living, but above all she wants to know how the adult Emma Reyes painted. "Sometimes I get the impression that my life is more important than my work," said the author, and I nod again as when I read the story of her childhood without being able to let go of the book, because it is what usually happens to us (to give an example: the great artistic value of the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, Renowned Baroque painter, she is often buried under the story of a rape).
The Colombian journalist Diego Garzón tells it in What happened to Emma Reyes?, the text that closes the book, but I read it a few days later, because at the end of the last letter I felt that I could only do one thing: take refuge in the silence of the night. To stay very still and fall asleep soundly like the girl who has run many miles without looking back and hopes that, when she wakes up, the world will finally be a fairer place.
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