Augustinian estrangements

Mexican author and writer José Agustín poses during a portrait session held on May 30, 1996 in Saint Malo, France.Ulf Andersen (Getty Images)

How short the New Year's promises last in this

newsletter

.

I say this because what I wrote two weeks ago—that this time we would climb the continent little by little—has been truncated since this installment;

On the other hand, as happens so often, the fault lies not with the writer but with death, so quarrelsome and unappealable.

And a few days ago, on January 16, José Agustín, author of amazing books like

The Tomb

and

It's Getting Late (Ending in Lagoon),

extraordinary books like

Deserted Cities

and

The King Approaches His Temple

and unique books like

De profile

and

Inventing what I dream.

If the reader of this

newsletter

has not read it - how envious it is to enter for the first time into these books or into his essayistic or autobiographical texts, such as

Prison Rock,

Mexican Tragicomedy

or

Flight Over the Depths

- do so now.

Unique strangeness

When I received the news of José Agustín's death, I experienced something similar to what I experienced the first time I read it: “It can't be,” I remember thinking and feeling when I closed the copy of

In profile

that I had taken from the bookshelf at home. my parents, after reading that beginning that shook me without being clear why and without imagining that the rest of that work would continue to shake me: “Behind the big stone and the grass, is the world that I inhabit.

“I always come to this part of the garden for something that I cannot explain clearly, although I understand it.”

After hanging up the phone - I was speaking with José Agustín's eldest son, Andrés, poet and editor, my editor, but, above all, a friend of those that life gives in dribs and drabs -, the strangeness not only did not let go of me but, turned into an impulse, he made me drive to Cuautla, where the family and some friends would watch over José Agustín, that renovator of form and style - so much so that, today, the writers who ride his trepidatory waves are legion, while those who ride the oscillatory ones are capable of continuing to add from the seed that the man from Guerrero sowed so long ago: that is how big his breakup was.

On the road I understood that, if I was driving like this, out of control, it was not only to say goodbye to the writer who sharpened a language, the one we share in this

newsletter

, well, our language would be much flatter, but also to accompany his family.

A family that, for me, thanks to Andrés, is much more than José Agustín and Andrés.

When I arrived in Cuautla—where José Agustín created a world that his detractors could not reach, who, like all the mediocre people in the literary world, could not bear the shadow of the giant—after hugging those I wanted to hug, I fell prey to strangeness again. —a strangeness in the antipodes of which years ago the story Luto, from Inventing what I dream, gave me: “Go to hell!” muttered Baby, pale, curled up at the head of the bed, sleepless, hearing the noises of the attendees at the wake.

The next day, she simply left the room.

Her aunts and cousins ​​watched her, gossiping.

Either way, it didn't matter, Baby explains, straightening the sheets: they could say whatever they wanted.

Idiots, she told herself, they are nothing more than idiots.

She put on a black bikini, a red blouse and went through the window, so they could see her.

There she understood that she didn't know what to do.

"I better go to the beach", because what I found was an ecosystem of love, care and temperance, a transparent, clean and peaceful sadness - when a voice asked me, with the naturalness of an Augustinian character: "What... are you going through?" to see the old man?”

Before I could process it, before I understood that question and before I thought of an answer, I found myself alone with José Agustín, in his room, beautifully decorated by his daughter-in-law and his life partner, Margarita, as beautifully as he had been laid out on his bed.

How good to die like this, I thought, again, surprised: in the center of a unique space, with this energy that turns the moment around, making it unexpectedly beautiful.

Then I sat in the only chair in the room and remained there for the next fifteen minutes, alone with the man who wrote, in

The Tomb:

“What an idiotic fear of death, it is the only thing worth studying in this life.”

It was a moment of brutal intimacy, a tribute.

Then I thought that this is how all farewells should be, that one should always spend a moment like this, in which the silences here mix with those that are being formed there — “What you don't understand is what is not apparent, what It is behind things,” wrote José Agustín in

Deserted Cities.

Of course, during those fifteen minutes I thought about a million things while the enormous author and the man José Agustín merged within me, the day I met him and the afternoon I opened his latest book, the time he took me by the arm. to pass through the crowd that was waiting for him to present his Cuban newspaper and that other fateful time, in which another crowd, added to the recklessness and negligence of the civil protection authorities of Puebla, pushed him aside, seeking his signature, doing so fall into a pit from which he would never fully emerge.

In the end, I understood that it was not possible for all wakes to be like this, because what was happening there was something unique: a man, José Agustín, was ceasing to be mortal and becoming immortal.

And his family, better than anyone, knew it.

A room and a garden

When the door finally opened, I understood that I had to leave that chair to the person who had appeared in the doorway, who turned out to be a friend of the old man and the family, in addition to being the one who had organized José Agustín's library.

She also stayed there for about fifteen minutes.

I, meanwhile, after changing my strangeness, tried to do what had brought me to where I was: accompany my brother and his family, serve as an unlikely support or, at least, a mild hindrance.

So, after talking about the only thing possible, we talked about anything.

We talked and changed seats in the living room, several times, with the other people, with the pack of dogs that live in José Agustín's house, Margarita and Tino, with Lucio, the little grandson, who at eight years old seemed to understand like no one else. what was happening: “He's my grandfather, although he doesn't look as much like he used to,” he explained to me before convincing me to help him fill his water gun.

In the garden—the night was slowly eating into the afternoon—, after playing with that water pistol, Andrés told me about his childhood in that space, about how he and his brothers Jesús and Tino climbed the enormous araucaria tree and of his painter uncle.

So we went to see some of that guy's works and then went into the writer's studio.

Before I left, Andrés put in my hands the notebook in which José Agustín began to write

In profile.

So the strangeness was not at that start, but at his handwriting and, above all, at the last page: “I'm going with this novel to another notebook.”

I left shortly after, with that last strangeness and the certainty of having shared a very brief moment of a long and wide love and affection.

Coordinates

The complete work of José Agustín is in the DeBolsillo edition.

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