The penultimate survivor of the most fertile period of 20th century Spanish-language literary culture, Jorge Edwards, died at the age of 91 in Madrid shortly after telling his last visitors that he was going to take a nap.
It was on Friday afternoon, because, once the noise of Madrid and the city where he spent his last years, and so many years, had passed, he would inaugurate his moment of silence on Núñez de Balboa street, near where his friends were. bookstores and their friends and their bars.
The writer who was with him shortly before, the Peruvian Jorge Eduardo Benavides, remembers him at that moment half asleep and half hopeful, as if he actually considered that, despite his age, he was going to continue serving those who asked him out. , to eat or drink, as had happened until recently.
But he died.
Jorge Edwards died and an era came to an end that would have been another, or would not have existed, without his memory capacity.
An infinite capacity for memory, in effect, leaves with him.
Naturally, his books remain, many of which were dedicated to the memory of others, of his relatives, for example, and of another very important one, Pablo Neruda, whom he met when the recently deceased was a boy and already the author of Canto general was more than a poet, he was a world icon of poetry and contemporary commitment.
He had the audacity, in the world of memory, to confront in first person one of the most promising and saddest events of modern life in Latin America, the Cuban revolution.
His aspiration to find himself there, where he had gone as business manager of the Government of Salvador Allende, with a truly new world was immediately cut short.
The Revolution was a dissimilar set of bureaucracies and orders that were not really revolutionary, and he described that disappointing universe in Persona non grata.
He described himself that way, when the ungrateful thing, for him, and for the future of those hopes, was to verify that the revolution already had to be remembered (because it was soon a memory) in lower case.
That disappointment in Edwards marked that book, but unfortunately it marked, as things were then, as they continue to be now, also the relationship of the world of literature of commitment to the author of those complaints that combined anger and melancholy.
That Persona non grata was the vital testimony of a man who, without having been a victim of melancholy, was indeed guilty of an unexpected passion: that of having to redo himself as a writer, as an intellectual, in the midst of the treason warnings that finally they slipped
He never lost his humor, and of course neither his memory, which was perhaps the factor that kept him alive until the last hours when his friends, this time Jorge Eduardo Benavides, went to see him so that he could continue recounting unpublished details of the long time of life and friendships.
Well, Edwards was for a long time, except for the petty reservations of the first hours of his post-Cuba history, the friend of the whole world, like Kim of India.
He was invited to houses and literary journeys, he made his life close to Carlos Barral or Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Marsé or Carmen Balcells, in no case did that episode pursue him beyond contemporary pettiness.
On his memory (the extraordinary biography / novel about his uncle Joaquín Edwards, The Useless Family is infinite) the world was built that others did not know how to tell, Jorge Edwards was never egocentric.
On the contrary: Edwards was made, as a writer, to bear witness to the past without the present leading him to the successive melancholies of rancor.
He was a quiet talker;
he knew more than what he was telling, and he spoke as if he were writing it.
In the last months of his closest relationship to destiny that has now fatally come true, speaking of him and his family (that is, of everyone who touched the borders and territories of the boom) he referred to others as if I had recently touched or encountered them.
I remember that in the last interview I did with him, about the probable poisoning of Pablo Neruda, he recounted everything with such a wealth of details, suspicions, proper names, barbarism around him and also stupor, that it seemed that he had a direct line with the beyond, or the side, of memories that seemed like relics of the present.
Benavides accompanied me to that conversation, and coincidentally coincided with that controversy, still present, about the poisoning of the poet.
He spoke with us fluently, not only his memory seemed to be reborn, but also the spirit that inhabited it, and in the end he invited us to have lunch anywhere as long as we kept talking, or listening to talk, because he was more of a talker than anything else, although the other thing, precisely literature, was the real reason for his prestige.
Another of those times when I spoke with him, together with his friend, the Asturian professor Eduardo San José, he was giving thread to an unprecedented kite: his ability to be attentive to the life that followed, being him part of it, and not a man saying goodbye
He was 92 years old and he received us dressed to go to lunch, to continue talking with Eduardo about the complete stories that, once sealed and finished, could be published as a novelty and a tribute to the great storyteller that he continued to be.
Before that penultimate interview, once I went to see him for no reason, Jorge Edwards asked me: "And you're not going to interview me?"
In that trait alone, along with many others, was hidden the joie de vivre of a flirt who only wanted at least a million friends to be around.
He got them, despite Cuba and other bad-time parables.
He was also a good person, and that is something that, after what he has gone through under the downpours that life has thrown at him, is much more than praise: it is the most remarkable part of a verification.
A good man died who, before the world or others, laughed at himself as if he were also, like that ancestor of his, the useless of the family, when he was perhaps the smartest, and least vacuous, of his contemporaries. .
Jorge Eduardo Benavides told me yesterday about him: “He was an intellectual of enormous importance and exquisite sensitivity.
He gave us beautiful and above all brave pages.
A man of integrity, lucid and vital.
About ten years ago, in Geneva, when he had just finished his work as Chilean ambassador in Paris, he confessed to me his desire to move to Madrid.
"I want to live there before I get old."
He was eighty years old.
I think that paints the whole body of his immense vitality, which he maintained until the last moment.
Tomorrow we were going to have an aperitif.
That was what he told me hours before he died."
And Fernando Iwasaki, a Peruvian friend of his, a writer like him, told me this: "He was a Chilean Montaigne: a writer of memory, a literary portrait artist and an exceptional chronicler of the cities he loved."
He would always tell us: “When are we going to have lunch?”
She lived to associate with others.
And she never sold her joy of living: she gave it away.
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Was Neruda killed?
I don't believe it or maybe it was like that
The 91 years of Jorge Edwards: "I have been faithful to literature, more than to women"
Chilean writer Jorge Edwards died