In the happy 90s (compared to all this time, those years are now dangerous, beautiful and unforgettable) Juan Cueto founded in Asturias, the homeland of his ancestor Leopoldo Alas (a) Clarín, the magazine Cuadernos del Norte, the most cosmopolitan, the best of those that were born at that time and one of the best, without a doubt, of the twentieth century in Spanish.
For that magazine, which was frequented, for example, by Susan Sontag or Umberto Eco, Cueto asked me to narrate the encounter that my family and I had with Jorge Luis Borges one weekend that now seems real, spectral or a lie.
In fact, as I have told you before, Maria Kodama, the widow, advised me to declare it a lie. But it was true, I lived it, my very young daughter lived it, and that meeting was witnessed by my friend the writer Fernando Delgado and my wife, Pilar, both journalists, so they wouldn't let me lie. My daughter, by the way, whose name is Eva and is a writer, also wrote for Cueto's magazine, as did Ana, his daughter.
But it was not a family publication but rabidly cosmopolitan, cosmopolitan to the point of folly, in which travels, reflections on the future and erasures of the present were combined.
It was one of the most daring cultural adventures ever in Spain. Cueto summoned many of us, in addition to the consecrated ones, because he was creating a world and not just a literary ghetto.
He was very generous, as well as an extraordinary character of the television, journalistic and literary culture of the European universe of the time, close to Jorge Semprún, founder of the best Canal + of all time, friend of the aforementioned Umberto Eco, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mario Vargas Llosa and tutti quanti, especially tutti quanti from Italy. It was there that he worked for the corresponding version of that pioneering network of modern television. But, above all, he was the creator of this magazine that I have been presenting to you and in which he published that, let's say, interview with Jorge Luis Borges.
For years that conversation, which I also sent as a love letter to Borges, rested in my house in the south of Tenerife, tucked away in number 6 of Cuadernos del Norte, until this winter morning I began to travel because of that feeling of the past that the shelves have. And I realized that this particular number had perhaps been diluted in the house of an overseer who did not remember to return it.
It is well known that there is no greater greed than that which sets out to reclaim what has been lost, so I asked many people, a publisher who has them all (Eduardo Riestra, recent author of a book in which he pretends to be Vargas Llosa's negro), Juan's daughter, Ana Cueto, until I found the published testimony of that so-called interview that a young man of that time was doing with the most admirable of the characters (of the people) that I have known in the world through which I pass, the literary life.
Now that I have the photocopy of the interview in front of me, I look at the title (Jorge Luis Borges, with his soul without flags), the first question and the answer that follows. Cueto had asked me to ask him about the flags and this is how the creator of El Aleph replied: "Why don't you ask me about something more concrete?" At the same time, he indicated me, pointing to the tortoiseshell or bamboo cane that he was caressing. I didn't know, how was I going to know, where it came from, and he was very interested in riddles. "Guess it, then."
Rejoicing at the clumsiness of the interlocutor, playing at being a neighborhood kid, he placed the origin of the mystery in China, and we move on to some closer facts. While the menu was being brought to us (he ordered, by the way, vichisoisse, a French martyrdom for blind diners) he declared that the suit that the girl was wearing had been bought by Kodama, and "especially" he showed his love for the tie, "so well tuned...".
He spent the night surprising with songs and sayings, with riddles. He told us: "Dante says nell mezzo del camí della nostra vita; I think there is a triple age, one ends at 35 years old. At the age of 35 I wanted to make it to forty. Maybe he was old then. But, hey, it doesn't matter how old he is. My father died in 1938, when Lugones committed suicide."
We lived those days with our mouths open, and that's especially how I lived when he asked me to leave him some openings so that, in the suitcase that I was preparing myself, the shirts could breathe. He asked me to take him to the part of the Palace Hotel, where he lived, to look from the huge hall at the yellow color (the only one he could distinguish) of the sky that we had as a witness...
I took so many notes. He told me, for example, that at some point he was called Beethoven, he explained that his grandmother, "when she was young, attended the reading of a chapter of Dickens, by Dickens... He changed his intonation and his face." Or, he also said, "when I was born, the houses were earthen, they had roofs, cisterns."
He was one of the great people I met in my life. Years later, Kodama took me to the same place and I pointed to the couch from which Borges had looked up at the ceiling. At that time (1983, I think) she had gone to see some friends of hers in Cordoba, Andalusia... Kodama stopped me there: "I never left Borges alone."
Since then, time or other accidents have led to the loss of this chronicle, which I have now summarized for the readers of Clarín... and Borges, a traveler of that night that he made ghostly, real and unforgettable.
We love the Nano so much
I am writing in Tenerife, in the south of the island, on the same day, 27 December, that Joan Manuel Serrat turns eighty years old. He made his music a real, intense, Latin American fantasy; I met him here when the Franco regime had begun to cross him out of the music almanacs and he was going to South America, to find there the inspiration that was making him from everywhere, and from everyone.
His songs, inspired by the sea or by its great poets, Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández, have remained forever part of the legacy of a man who, being a poet himself, has given the history of poetry the joy of being able to recite to his ancestors as if they were speaking themselves through his trembling and subtle voice. So beautiful, so poised, so risky.
He left the stage exactly a year ago, but people stop him as if he were still getting off the lecterns where he followed the verses of his songs.
They entertain him and call him to participate in remembrances that are due to those who suffered war or exile, and he has never ceased to be the citizen that the Latins claim as theirs just as we claim him as ours the Canaries, the Basques, the Andalusians of Jaén, for example, so many others and, of course, also. the Catalans.
Listening to him sing has always been, for as long as he has been known, a way of improving the poetry that he has inside his own life.