The magical bed of deep rivers

On the occasion of the recent Congress of the Language, dedicated to miscegenation, which should have been held in Arequipa and had to be moved to Cádiz, the Association of Language Academies presented the commemorative edition of Los ríos profundos, by José María Arguedas, the

novel mestiza where Quechua meets Spanish.

Los ríos profundos

was published in Peru in 1958, the same year that

Carlos Fuentes'

of the sixties, before and after.

These two novels come to be a covetable lure to establish the alleged division.

is seen as the first great novel of the city, while

represents the agonizing voice of outdated indigenismo, already surpassed by Juan Rulfo with

three years ago, in 1955.

Rulfo would be the unique grandfather of magical realism, which settled accounts with the vernacular, regionalist and indigenous narrative.

also

represents a verbal and magical vindication of that rural world of solitude and heartbreak that its hybrid language makes its own.

In an interview in 1977 for the

program on Spanish Television, Joaquín Soler Serrano asks Rulfo about "telluric" writers and if he is devoted to any of them.

And without hesitation, he answers yes, because of José María Arguedas, with whom he "has many similarities, even in his way of thinking."

And in an article from 1960,

, Arguedas points out that “many of the stories in

and a large part of

are written in the first person and it is always a peasant who speaks.

This feat by Rulfo is perhaps the greatest”.

Both Rulfo and Arguedas share the fundamental idea that the central issue of literature is its ability to invent a parallel reality capable of transforming and sublimating the elements of the other reality through invention, no matter if it is a peasant language. or urban.

Indigenismo arose in the first half of the 20th century, when the issue of exploitation and segregation became crucial.

And the plastic arts and literature played an organic role, that of militant denunciation, in the programs of the nascent left-wing political parties, communists and social democrats, and within populist movements.

Contemplative costumbrista realism, where the Indian, an innocent and picturesque figure so many times, is part of the landscape, is being replaced by militant indigenismo, where the Indian is iniquitously exploited;

and by creating a political discourse of indigenismo, an indigenist art is created that has the role of denouncing.

Very few of the indigenous or social novels reached the literary dimension sufficient to survive, precisely because of their character as instruments of political propaganda.

It ends up seeing them as failed literature, for not being enough literature, and everything that falls under that name tends to be cancelled.

Arguedas produced a novel of the indigenous world beyond indigenismo, and turned it into an effective literary instrument from Quechua, his first language, which he transmutes into the other, mestizo Spanish, his second language.

He is not an Indian, but he writes a novel that vindicates the Indian from literary majesty, and those anonymous beings, obscured by the history that has kept them on the sidelines, objects rather than subjects, take on the quality of characters, the only thing that can make them transcendent. .

And it is his own life that is involved in the bet.

Because the master key to

lies in its autobiographical character, and even more than that, in that it is told by the voice of a child, Ernesto, a transcendental safeguard so that it never loses its character as a confession, and is illuminated by the magic.

A white child who thinks and feels like an Indian child, and who lives under the spell of the telluric call of the Andean mountains whose ins and outs he knows by heart, forgotten towns that he has traveled with his father, rivers, ridges and ravines etched in his mind. .

Between innocence and perversity, violence and fear, submission and rebellion, complicity and quarrels, the children make up the main cast of the novel, each one placed in their place on the social scale, representing their role. in a closed world that is nothing but a reflection and copy of the outside world.

More than making us think of any of the novels of the old indigenista canon,

reminds us better

of Vargas Llosa's

Los ríos profundos

evokes a reality that Arguedas knew better than anyone —and knowing better than anyone, in literature, has always meant knowing as a child—: the Indians, the mestizos, not as propaganda stamps, or as political caricatures, but as endearing individual entities.

Like characters.

A novel that leaves a patina of nostalgia in the memory.

Sergio Ramírez

is a writer and winner of the Cervantes Prize

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