This Saturday Amparo Dávila, one of the great Latin American writers, died in Mexico City at the age of 92. He was born in 1928, in Pinos, Zacatecas, Mexico. The death of her younger brother marked her when she was a child and at that time she leafed through, terrified and amazed at the same time, the engravings of the demons of Gustave Doré in a copy of The Divine Comedy that was in her father's library. His family went to live in San Luis Potosí, where he studied middle and high school. He published his first book of poems at age 22, Psalms under the Moon (1950). It was followed by Meditations at the edge of the dream (1954) and Profile of solitudes(1954). She moved to Mexico City in 1954, worked as an assistant to Alfonso Reyes in the Alfonsina chapel, whom she always respected and cared for. She was a contemporary of Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Elena Poniatowska, Margo Glantz and Julio Cortázar, with whom she had a long friendship. He read the classics and his contemporaries, and from those youth readings Quiroga, Borges and especially Franz Kafka marked him: “In him I find a great accommodation; that is, when I read Kafka I feel at home, surrounded by the things that I know, that I feel and suffer. ” He started writing stories. He was interested in the mystery, the unknown, the terror, the fantastic was his line. From that time of youth, Elena Poniatowska wrote: “I remember that once in the fifties Amparo Dávila told me that she no longer wanted to drive because she felt –as in horror stories– that her car took her where he wanted, never where she had it. have to go. Halfway there, she had to force him to go home. It seemed to me a story of dread very similar to that of his books and poetry. Death accompanies me, Elena. ” With a simple style, his stories cover a wide number of characters, whose themes are death, loneliness, mental disorders, dysfunctional families, marriages that are confinements. Atmospheres of fear framed in daily life. He published the story books Tiempo Destrozado (1959), Música concreta (1961), Petrified Trees (1977) and Con los ojos ojos (2008).
In the Latin American context of his time, predominantly masculine and hetero-patriarchal, the work of Amparo Dávila stood out as he stands out in the present by his gaze, stories in which the unknown occurs in known space, in which terror is born at home. In his stories, the best known is the unknown, and that space is also the body. Terror does not occur outside, nor is it collective (a la Godzilla), they are not stories in which men solve men's cases (as happens in the crime novel The Mongol Plot or with its predecessor Sherlock Holmes). In other words, it is not a hetero-patriarchal terror. In Dávila's work, the characters are also women, wives, mothers. Anecdotes are not epic, they are everyday. His search was very different from that of his time, like Octavio Paz seeking to explain the Mexican or Carlos Fuentes portraying the endless Mexico City. In The Guest , a short story and a masterpiece, the protagonist's husband brings home a strange entity "with yellowish, almost round eyes", when terror breaks out: "I was combing my children when I heard the cry of the little one mixed with strange screams. When I got to the room I found him cruelly hitting the boy. I still could not explain how I took the little one and how I launched myself at him with a bar that I found at hand, and attacked him with all the fury contained for so long. ” In his stories is the desire to escape from the everyday, because the everyday is horror itself. Furthermore, there is usually ambiguity between fiction and reality, so that horror is potentiated. His work has children and will continue to have, like the books Distance of rescue (2014), by Samanta Schweblin; La cresta de Ilión (2002, 2018), by Cristina Rivera Garza; The company (2019), by Verónica Gerber Bicecci and Our part of the night (2019), by Mariana Enríquez.
Towards the end of her life, she published some small poems, as she liked to call them, and in tribute to her 90 years she read an unpublished text titled Semblanza de mi muerte : “That a cloudy and cold winter day does not die and I leave shivering with cold and fear before the unknown: that world of faceless shadows that always walks by my side, or awaits me around the corner and that unfathomable mystery that we cannot reveal and that distresses and disturbs existence. I want to leave a sunny day of a green spring full of buds and shoots of birds and flowers to look for my Garden of Eden. ” Amparo Dávila left on a sunny day of greened spring, but the sunny day has brought the night and the heat has brought the rain, and his work remains as lightning in the midst of the dark sky, illuminating.
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