By Eduardo Garcia Aguilar * The Legend of Juan Rulfo among writers of today and tomorrow will be fixed as of those who rebelled with all her strength to the bondage of self-image and vanity. Maybe next to Samuel Beckett and Julien Gracq and a few others, the Mexican author refused to board the coach of the 'literary career', mean vehicle in these times of commercial pragmatism devours writers around the globe.
That this man, with a huge celebrity won against all odds and perhaps despite themselves, have resisted the temptation to make money by offering books by the piece, shows that the voices of his delirium came from a site very peculiar material which reveals only the wisest, the most authentic writers.
Newcomer to Mexico, I was able to find several times in the cafeteria and library Agora, alone or talking to the waiters, and I also had the wonderful idea to tell him not to approach it as his gesture marked and marks to the writers of my home country , beginning with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alvaro Mutis who gave as an example read the legendary book perdre Páramo.
Rulfo modest dress in dark suits, white hair slicked back showed her white forehead and is sometimes seen with huge horn-rimmed sunglasses. Sometime in the morning we were both over several hours the only customers in the cafeteria located in the high library Insurgentes Avenue and my communion with his presence that was another one of those epiphanic moments in life when one knows the power of truth and authenticity is there next.
was not in my case this idolatry that now prevails in the world to the best-selling writers and win prizes, more crawling to the power and the rich, but who was the veneration of a sort San Francisco Latin American literature.
I can say I'm crazy when comparing Rulfo with St. Francis of Assisi, but I find another figure with whom comparison. If the name of San Francisco approach shown here to Rulfo's because the real writer is always someone close to holiness and exercise comparable to religion.
The Rulfo I saw this long time without a book or a newspaper in his hand and only exchanged hot words with the waiter, had just returned from a trip to China and was staring in a strange ironic peacefulness saint. While his contemporaries intrigued here and there, or throwing stones or looks of hatred, or strutted seeking power, he was not afraid to go down to the reality of that table and that coffee shop, unaware of what they call "glory."
Rulfo also appeared to me in dreams and I see it clear in one of those dream trips. I was on a hot Brazilian population, perhaps Paraty, with colonial houses and cobblestone streets and suddenly I was in a cemetery. Rulfo suddenly appeared, he sat beside me and I would talk about something absurd like ocher color of autumn leaves. His eyes were watery, distant, whom he knows dreams, fantasies, unreal, mythical concrete, fantastic image, body of air or poetry. This meeting is for me as real as if it were true, as the true years ago in the cafeteria The Agora, a morning without date.
Rulfo left us in a few pages the deeds of these men on earth they are and have always been the same, marked by prayer, fear of death, pray for rain, curators of wounds, groaning in darkness. Now I'm back to Talpa, El llano en llamas, Tell them not to kill me, Luvina, inheritance Matilde Arcángel Pedro Páramo, I felt the thrill of knowing that I was ever close to a writer who knew the voices of others that it emerged in the desolate afternoon of the 50's. Crying, land, mountain, mountains, tomb, inheritance, father, shooting, sore, frogs, pilgrimage, prayer, prayer leader train, disease, Silence, words that gives rise to the literature.
When he died I had another chance to be close to him. Colombian television asked me about the world images of the recently deceased and then toured the sites where he walked in the Mexican capital, bookstores preferred neighborhood street where her apartment and the offices of the National Indigenous Institute, on Avenida Revolucion, where he worked for years. I entered his office he still fresh, I saw his mug of coffee and heard the low cry of his secretaries, who saw him come and go from there, oblivious to the glory that was chasing him and for decades.
The fury of the autocratic power of a president who thought he had fallen on Rulfo Quetzaltcoatl years earlier, he had the audacity to comment on the military.
Today nobody remembers the incumbent president and Rulfo's work is increasingly present because it recounts the sufferings of a people that is and will continue suffering, far from any redemption on earth. Rulfo's is a voice that is always there as a pyramid, a mountain, the voice through a twentieth century man wanted to express that of the spirits that inhabited this land for millennia and will continue populating when there is nothing .
* Published in Excelsior, Mexico. Sunday April 3, 2011.
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