This slender man, a Mexican from Guadalajara, the land of Juan Rulfo, has passions for literature (he writes it, publishes it), education (he teaches at the very important Princeton University, near New York), and travel, especially the whole Cuban trip, from which he comes and goes... Now he lives in Spain (Barcelona, Madrid) on a sabbatical, he spends that time in libraries, he meets friends, he asks questions... He was a journalist, he is friends with a very varied intellectual community, but he It's hard to boast about it, as if he were one of his students, or as if he were still a journalist who, for example, asked Octavio Paz questions as a young boy.
He is a peculiar man, one of those human beings who seem born to listen, until you ask him what he does, what he has done, and it turns out that he is like Kim from India, everyone's friend, so In his references, if you ask him, relations with Fernando Vallejo, Carlos Fuentes or Mario Vargas Llosa are common, in addition to the Mexican Nobel Prize that we just mentioned.
Due to his work as a professor of literature in Spanish at one of the most important universities in the world, many names of the great writers of this language pass for review or scrutiny, whose manuscripts, letters or confessions reside forever in the solemn shelves of this place where William Faulkner or Francis Scott Fitgzgerald studied in the midst of a silence that lasts to this day.
Through his hands, then, manuscripts by Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Donoso or Jorge Edwards come to life, the last of those who have died among a very long list of losses... Of all those pearls (of what their manuscripts say , from the authors themselves) has a memory, which he shares with passion and care.
He was born in Guadalajara (Mexico) in 1969 and it could be said, from his appearance, that he still has the body of the young man he was.
Among his books is Conversation at Princeton, the account of what his students at Princeton spoke with Mario Vargas Llosa, who was teaching there just when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Other books of his are of Cuban origin, such as Theory and Practice of Havana and Death in Havana, as well as (the most recent) Modern Havana.
Critical texts of Cuban architecture), which not only reflect his love for the island but the very varied range of his intellectual interests...
His passion for literature comes, he told me,
“from being born in a very boring and very Catholic city, which was Guadalajara, a provincial city that has nothing to do with the one that every year receives the crowds that go to the International Fair. of the Book that is celebrated there... Although it now has six million inhabitants, it is still very closed, there are no publishing houses, no important magazines, although there have been great writers, such as Juan Rulfo, Fernando del Paso or Juan José Arreola, who on the other hand “They tend to leave as soon as they can.”
He was born “
in that ultra-Catholic city where, after the Mexican Revolution, the Cristero War took place, when people came out raising flags and shouting Long Live Christ the King!
I was born into that world and as a child I was bored and bored, so literature became an escape.
It was in books where things happened… Mario Vargas Llosa says that people create literature because the world is bad, it is missing something, and literature is a way to reconstruct a perfect world
.”
So at the age of twelve he entered the Alliance Française, he dedicated himself to reading Jean Paul Sartre, he finished his studies “very young” and now the writers, their reading, their teaching, are his mission.
One day, very young, the literature of the generation of the '60s, that of the boom, mixed with his path and that Mario Vargas Llosa, Cabrera Infante, García Márquez or Juan Goytisolo were the essence of his nomenclature as a professor and of a writer.
”That opened windows to the world for me... Hispanic American literature has a charge of truth and life that I have not found in North American or English writings, which for me are more distant. In Latin American there is a closeness to the truth and to the world, and to reality... Checking what Gabo or Mario did with language changed the consideration that our literatures had before that time... Something that is due to them, and Rulfo, among others, is the demonstration that literature comes from the imagination of the towns, the countryside, of people who are not necessarily cultured or literate... That evidence marked me a lot
. "
And how were those discoveries made, who were the first to open your eyes to the continent's literature?
“Vargas Llosa was one of the first.
I read García Márquez enthralled in my house in Guadalajara... The encounter with those writers was random and chaotic, without any order.
Juan Goytisolo was also an important discovery, like Octavio Paz, when I worked as a journalist at the magazine Vuelta, which he founded... There I interviewed Goytisolo when he came from doing a theater show in Sarajevo with Susan Sontag based on Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett … Octavio Paz once said that in Mexico there is an almost religious relationship with poetry and literature, and I inherited something of that.
And to me Paz seemed, in effect, a priest of literature, like Goytisolo, who was part of that world
. "
While still a student, he met Augusto Monterroso, he was a friend of Juan Villoro... While already a professor at Princeton he met Vargas Llosa...
"Little by little a wish came true: to get closer to Literature with a capital L
", which is, on the other hand, the that is cared for at Princeton…
“The first Latin American who came to the University archives was José Donoso, who had also studied there… He left the classrooms owing a loan that he ended up paying, over time, with the letters from his archive , and thus the tradition of hosting the correspondence and other documents of great writers in the Princeton archives was born
.
The list of those who have bequeathed to Princeton what were not their books but what their books gave of themselves is innumerable.
Rubén Gallo names some, such as Francis Scott Fitzgerald, the Cubans Severo Sarduy (“of whom we did not have manuscripts, but we did have his paintings”), Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Reynaldo Arenas, Virgilio Piñera or Pepe Rodríguez Feo, the aforementioned Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa or Elena Garro... He is now custodian of an incredible world, shaken by the boom that was born when he himself was still a boy who today cultivates, with his own literature, and with his teaching, "
a language that is a work instrument not not only beautiful and wonderful but also an impressive capacity to pay tribute to the greatest heritage we have, the writing of Miguel de Cervantes.”
-Of everything you have seen or read, Rubén, what has impressed you the most?
-
It's difficult to say, but I think what impressed me most is what Octavio Paz managed to do with literature, in addition to writing very important, wonderful books.
He knew how to put literature at the center of Mexican life, even political life.
And I think that's very impressive.
He created it from nothing, and not just with his imagination.
Now Rubén Gallo is writing “a very complex book about Cabrera Infante's Cuba, that of the 1950s.”
The feeling that Rubén Gallo produces is that he knows so much, and is so silent, that perhaps if the journalist had not asked him anything, he himself would have maintained the courtesy of asking me with that gesture that seems to come from the way of being, for example, of Cabrera. Infant:
-Look, come here, what happened, tell me what happened.