Shadows of Friends
I’ve been noticing with some alarm that many of the friends I made and spent time with in Barcelona in the sixties are no longer with us. Hardly a trace is left, either, of the city I knew then. In those days Barcelona was down-at-the-heels, cosmopolitan, and international; now it is extremely rich, provincial, and nationalist. Before, it surged culturally toward the rest of the world; today it seems fascinated by its own navel. This self-absorption is fashionable in Europe, and it is the natural response of the conservative and traditionalist strain of long-established cultures to the growing internationalization of life and to the headlong rush of the modern world toward the dissolution of boundaries and confusion of cultures. But in Catalonia, the return to the “tribal instinct,” whatever its deep political roots, contradicts another venerable tradition: universalism, so characteristic of the region’s great creators, from Foix to Pla and from Tàpies to Dalí.
My friends were all citizens of the world. Gabriel Ferrater wrote his poems in Catalan because, he said, he could “kick better goals” in his native tongue than in Spanish (we were both soccer fans), but he wasn’t a nationalist, or anything that required any kind of faith. All convictions and passions, except possibly literature, inspired in him a barbed and biting sarcasm, spiked with ferociously cynical metaphors. Just as others squander time or money, Gabriel squandered his genius writing book reviews and encyclopedia entries, talking to friends, and consuming lethal quantities of gin.
“Genius” is a big word, but I don’t know how else to describe the monstrous ability Gabriel had to learn everything about whatever he was interested in and become an instant expert on a subject. Then he’d lose interest, and move on. To call him a dilettante suggests he was superficial, and there was nothing superficial about the way he’d eviscerate Picasso in a discussion about art, wave his arms like a windmill as he argued the linguistic theories of the Prague Circle, or quote from memory in an effort to prove that Kafka’s German derived from police reports. I’m sure it’s true that he learned Polish in hardly any time at all just so he could read and translate Gombrowicz. He could, after all, read all the languages of the world, and he spoke all of them with a heavy Catalan accent.
Maybe “excessive” is the term, along with “genius,” that best describes him. Everything about him was over-the-top, from his voracious reading and learning to his long, restless hands, which, after a first drink, would make the ladies around him jump. Because I voted for João Guimarães Rosa over Witold Gombrowicz when we were on a jury together, he punished me by depriving me of a year of his friendship. On the three hundred and sixty-fifth day, I received a book by Carles Riba inscribed with the following lines: “Now that the year of punishment is over, we can pick up where we left off, etcetera. Gabriel.”
They say that he always claimed it was immoral to reach the age of fifty and that this coy declaration explains why he killed himself. It might be true: it accords very well with the strange mix of anarchism, insolence, discipline, sweetness, and narcissism that constituted his character. The last time I saw him it was ten in the morning, and he was at the Bar del Colón. He had been drinking for almost twenty-four hours and he looked flushed and exultant. With Juanito García Hortelano patiently listening, he was shouting hoarsely, reciting Rilke in German.
Unlike Gabriel, García Hortelano was reserved, even-tempered, obliging, and, above all, modest in the display of his intelligence, which he disguised behind a hearty, good-natured facade and a veil of humor. He wasn’t from Barcelona, but it was in Barcelona that I met him and saw him many times, more often than in Madrid. The day we met, we went out together to buy a Catalan grammar book, and we confessed to each other our fondness for Catalonia. In my memory I can’t dissociate him from Barcelona or the sixties, the decade in which his first novels were published—an era that, with everything that has happened since, has come to seem prehistoric.
When I was a child, I played with friends in Lima trying to guess which writers would go to heaven (if it existed), and it seemed to us that of the classic authors few would be chosen, and of contemporary writers none at all. I’m very much afraid that if that hypothetical Judgment Day comes, we’ll be deprived of Juan, because he’ll be whisked up instantly. Of all the men of letters I’ve known, he’s the only one who qualifies. I’m joking, but at the same time I’m deadly serious. I’ve never met anyone among my colleagues who seemed so honest and upright, so naturally decent, so free from vanity and deceitfulness, so generous as Juan. Goodness is a mysterious and grating virtue, and one that, in my experience—dispiriting, I admit—has much to do with lack of imagination and simplicity of mind, and with a naïveté that comes across as candor. That’s why it’s not popular, and why, in rarefied cultural circles, it is regarded with distrust and disdain, as a proof of idiocy. And it is also why the good man who possesses a subtle mind and a refined sensibility is a disconcerting rarity.
It’s true that bad people tend to be more fun than good people and that goodness is usually boring. But García Hortelano broke the mold here, too, because he was one of the funniest people in the world, a constant source of stories, inventions, intellectual games, nicknames, and plays on words that could keep the night patrons of the narrow Bar Cristal entertained for hours. With the same seriousness with which he assured us that Walter Benjamin was a pseudonym of Jesús Aguirre, I heard him swear once that he went to the red-light district of Las Ramblas at dawn only to buy the newspaper La Vanguardia.
Among the many things that I once planned to write but never will is a magic meeting with him on a foggy morning by the sea at Calafell. As in his novels, much was happening and nothing at all. We had listened to the debut record of a singer called Raimón, which Luis Goytisolo had brought with him; guided by our host, Carlos Barral, we had visited bars and restaurants, traipsed around boats and fishermen, and made a fire on the beach. For a long time, Jaime Gil de Biedma held us rapt with electrifying stories of evil deeds. At midnight we swam, in a fog that made ghosts of us. We got out, dried ourselves off, talked a little, and all of a sudden someone asked where Juan could be; he was nowhere to be found. Surely, we thought, he had gone to bed. Much later, I went to plunge again into the water and fog. Wreathed in wisps of mist, the writer appeared, shivering. What was he doing there, chilled to the bone? Teeth chattering, he told me that he couldn’t find his way off the beach. Each time he tried, he seemed to be heading toward Sicily or Tunisia. And why hadn’t he cried for help or called out? Cry for help? Call out? Only a bad novelist would do that.
Unlike Juan, Jaime Gil de Biedma was utterly lacking in modesty, and cultivated intellectual arrogance the way others cultivate their gardens or breed dogs. He started arguments in order to demolish his opponents, and when admirers of his poetry approached him full of unctuous praise, his retorts would leave them reeling. He did everything he could to seem unpleasant, arrogant, unapproachable. But he wasn’t as bad as he would have liked to be, or as tough and cerebral as he made himself seem in his Diario del artista seriamente enfermo (Diary of a Seriously Ill Artist). Late at night, in conversation with a few close friends, he’d tire of posing and let the bad-boy mask fall, and the sensitive reader would appear, the man torn between his vocation and his work, the man of ambivalent sexuality, the vulnerable and tormented young writer of verse.
When he wasn’t sunk in self-contemplation, his intelligence could be dazzling. He had an infallible ability to detect the original thought or exquisite shading in a poem or a sentence, and to pick out falseness and ostentation; one could trust blindly in his literary judgment. But although his poetry and essays may be read with pleasure, there is something in Jaime’s work that struggles to show itself and seems repressed, something that never becomes more than a spark: the part of experience that is outside the intellectual orbit. Maybe because his aesthetic only had room for elegance and because his sentiments and passions are always a little precious, his poetry, like Borges’s stories, has more thinking than living in it.
It was through Carlos Barral that I met Gabriel, Juan, Jaime, and almost all of my Spanish friends in Barcelona in the sixties. Carlos published my first novel, fighting fiercely to get it past the censors. He helped me win prizes, got my books translated into many languages, invented me as a writer. Everything has already been said that needs to be said about the breath of fresh air that his work represented in the stifling cultural climate of Spain thirty years ago. But enough will never be said about the charms of the persona he cultivated and the spell he was capable of casting back then, before the terrible ordeals he had to endure.
What will he surprise me with this time? I used to ask whenever I went to see him. There was always something: his dog, Argos, would bark hysterically if the poems he read aloud were bad; he had taken to wearing eighteenth-century capes and carrying sword canes on the streets of Barcelona’s La Bonanova; or he would recite to me in Latin a list of two hundred timbers of a ship on which, according to him, Ulysses had sailed. With his grand gestures and phosphorescent adjectives, he was every inch a gentleman. His generosity was boundless, and though he sometimes posed as a cynic, since cynicism was in fashion then, he was good through and through. To seem wicked, he had invented a diabolical laugh—openmouthed, reverberant, gravelly, volcanic—that contorted his rail-thin, Quixote-like form from head to foot and left him exhausted. A formidable laugh, and one that still echoes in my memory.
He had literary fixations that one had to respect at the risk of losing his friendship: Mallarmé and the seventeenth-century Spanish poet and playwright Gabriel Bocángel were unmentionable, for example, and English literature was beyond the pale, except maybe for Shakespeare and Marlowe. But he could spend hours discussing the writers he liked, speaking brilliantly and quoting from memory with the passion of an adolescent. His love for form was such that in restaurants for a while he took to asking just for “oysters and cheese,” because he liked how it sounded. He dreamed of having an ocelot to take for walks around Calafell, and I brought him one from the depths of the Amazon, at the cost of unimaginable hardship. But in the Barcelona airport, a Civil Guard washed it down with a hose and gave it chorizo to eat, sending the poor animal to its death. I still keep the beautiful letter I received from Carlos upon the demise of Amadís as one of my literary treasures.
Beneath the posing and the theatrics there was something more lasting: a talented creator and an editor and literary promoter who left a deep mark on the entire Hispanic world. In today’s Spain, open to all the world’s currents, it is hard to conceive of his importance. But those who, like myself, arrived in Madrid in 1958 and discovered that the isolation and prudishness of cultural life in Spain were even worse than in Lima or Tegucigalpa know that Carlos Barral’s efforts to topple barriers and familiarize Spanish readers with what was being written and published abroad, while saving the young or oppressed writers of the Iberian Peninsula from anonymity and persecution, were a decisive factor in the intellectual modernization of Spain. Then, too, of course, he brought Latin America to the attention of Spaniards, and Latin Americans to the attention of each other. How many of the young poets and writers of the New World who immigrated to Barcelona in the seventies and eighties and turned the city, for a time, into the literary capital of Latin America knew that the person who paved the way for them was the gaunt gentleman, now shed of his publishing houses and plagued with ulcers, who could still be seen with his cape, staff, beard, chains, and long hair walking his dog like an apparition along the streets of Sarriá?
Shades of the past, and friends long gone. But their presence is still felt.