99-year-old young woman: Ida Vitale.
The Uruguayan poet passed like a whirlwind through the Argentine capital these days, leaving behind her a trail of astonishment at her lucidity and sense of humor.
"I'm on vacation," she said, with a knowing smile, to tell that she no longer writes.
Instead, she reads a lot of what she can get her hands on and listens to even more music.
"When she was young, she spent everything she had to go to concerts, music is up there, even poetry," she replied during a public talk at the Buenos Aires Book Fair.
Awarded the Cervantes Prize and the Guadalajara FIL, Vitale (Montevideo, 1923) is the only survivor of the Uruguayan Generation of '45, which also included Mario Benedetti, Idea Vilariño, Carlos Maggi, María Inés Silva Vila and Ángel Rama. , among others.
“Ida is the last representative of that generation, of that scene that was so important in Uruguay.
There is a great longing for those cafes where they would get together to read and criticize each other and she somehow represents all of that”, describes the documentalist María Inés Arrillaga, granddaughter of Maggi and Silva Vila and part of Vitale's extended family given the great friendship between the two families.
Arrillaga has traveled to Buenos Aires this week to present her documentary
De ella Ida Vitale
, screened on Wednesday at the Malba with the presence of both.
“They are being precious these days in Argentina.
Ida has a way of poeticizing reality and of making appear what was not there before she named it that makes you see everything differently”, she adds.
In the first scenes of the film Vitale is seen humming a song.
She is also seen lying on a hotel bed passionately listening to Schubert's
Winter Journey
.
That song reminds her of another, that she searches with her cell phone.
“Reality consists of two moments, the moment in which one lives it and the infinite moment in which one remembers it”, she reflects on the camera while she observes photos taken in different countries.
As in
Lexicon of affinities
, Vitale's work structured around the alphabet, the documentary also uses it to describe the poet.
The flowers, the birds, the poems, the music and the trips appear on the screen to give clues about her intense life.
Vitale has also been an essayist, translator and journalist.
She divorced and remarried a man 18 years younger than her.
A few months after the coup in Uruguay in 1973, Vitale and her second husband, also a writer Enrique Fierro, went into exile in Mexico.
They lived there for eleven years.
After the restoration of democracy, they briefly returned to the South American country before moving to Austin, which was their residence for three decades, until Fierro's death in 2016. His final return to Uruguay coincided with a belated recognition through the granting of prizes and the reissue of his poetry books.
“One has the illusion that the country is a kind of house that protects us.
But sometimes there's a wind and the windows bang and you're left on the outside.
It's not bad either.
I was lucky to go to Mexico, ”Vitale said at Malba when talking about his years of exile, reflected in
Shakespeare Palace
.
"It was a book of gratitude rather than memory," he said about this autobiography that takes as its title the affectionate nickname that the Uruguayan couple gave to their first home in the host country.
The documentary captures the poet's great curiosity and attentive look at everything that surrounds her, especially nature.
She is fascinated by the threads woven by a spider in the garden, describes the strenuous flight of hummingbirds, says goodbye to the sea after a boat trip and delicately disassembles a bouquet of flowers received to give it a new shape.
“I think we are little in nature.
In general we find ourselves in cities where nature is a tree, a bird.
Suddenly one writes with the illusion not of finding nature, hopefully, but rather of supplying it, ”she said in Malba.
She is the author of titles such as
The light of this memory
(1949),
Word given
(1953),
Each one in his night
(1960),
Oidor andante
(1972),
Silica garden
(1980),
Pavo kingdom
(1984),
Procurement of The Impossible
(1998),
Plants and Animals
(2003) and
Byobu's ABC
(2004).
His passion for plants, embodied in his literature, stems from a botanist aunt.
She “she had a grandmother who had had many children and one of them was a botanist daughter.
She meant respect to me forever for everything that is natural: plants, animals… Well, animals that are not too invasive.
I have never had anything to do with rhinos, for example, ”she ironized before the Book Fair audience.
Vitale also made the listeners laugh when he recounted the time he met Jorge Luis Borges in front of a Montevideo shop window and tried to help him when he believed he was lost.
“Borges was that for which I always envy Argentina.
I learned from him what I could never be, ”she noted.
"Borges' poetry taught me to admire and look and to be discreet in not copying," he added about the great Argentine writer.
From the envy of Borges to the friendship with the poet and singer-songwriter María Elena Walsh, with whom she was united by a great friendship.
“She was charming, funny, good people and she touched you guys,” she stated.
"For me she was poetry, the most endearing."
Accompanied from one side to the other by her daughter Amparo Rama, Vitale had time at each act for hugs, selfies and book signings.
She then scuttled off with the nomadic words in tow on her.
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