2023-10-11 13:00:00
In 2016, the novelist and essayist Pablo Montoya won the José Donoso Ibero-American Literature Prize for his entire work. / Archive
The tearing of our ties with the city of Medellín, with our country, our land, our history, becomes corporeal through the stories of Pablo Montoya gathered in his book Death is Loose.
“Be careful, death is loose in the city,” a taxi driver warns us at the beginning of this literary tour of the places where that monstrous ferocious animal prowls, that “apocalyptic beast,” which one would say has escaped from its natural cage.
In the vast majority of these 31 stories, fruits of 15 years of writing (1991-2007), the will, the need to narrate, emerges to convince us that life is also loose, unbridled, open, unbridled, loving. We believe in life “despite the fact that death continually visits the streets.” And he tells us how solidarity, friendship, filial feelings, compassion, the enjoyment of music, the practice of art, of theater survive. And especially about writing. Art becomes a means of salvation, a way of dreaming the absolute.
“Why write? Because we cannot do anything else: Testimony, resistance, humanity, navigation between reality and our fictions, writing to exist,” advises doctor and writer Javier Burgos Cantor.
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Medellín, Pablo Montoya diagnoses, is “a gigantic illuminated amoeba.” But he refutes the absolute pessimism that he pointed out when reading The Virgin of the Sicarios by Fernando Vallejo, for whom “there is only one important and unobjectionable thing: the grim reaper is loose in the city, in the country, and his representative, Alexis, the Exterminating Angel , is there”.
One of the stories in his book is precisely titled “The Black Angel”, an Afro-Colombian man who emerges from the depths of despair to save the protagonist of the story. “Two vigorous hands lifted him up. Come on, the black man told him. And in the waters of the Magdalena a flash of sun finally touched Arturo’s eyes.”
Perhaps the greatest audacity and most achieved in this book is the author’s thaumaturgic power in reviving the dead, in unearthing them and bringing us closer to them, in taking us to see their traces, their diffuse presences. Perhaps that is why a character named Lazarus appears in this isotopia of the resurrection. “Remnants of that Christian faith” that we later throw “into the trash heap of family memories”? We are here in a certain way on the side of myths. For this purpose, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer teaches us that “all mythical thought can be interpreted as a constant and obstinate denial of the phenomenon of death.”
Another flirtation with the myth: “I told him an old story from the neighborhood where men flew over the summit of the mountain on designated days, doing pirouettes. That was a ritual way of loving women. “Yes,” she said, the mother is like a mountain, at least for those of us who live in Niquía.”
In the story “Night of the Full Moon” the narrator invokes Chibcha, Embera, and Aztec gods to enter the cemetery. As in the Homeric nekya, the vision that Ulysses has of the kingdom of the dead, Hades, told in the lambda song (XI) of the Odyssey, this great writer who is Montoya bravely wanders through dark streets, without Sun, through wakes and cemeteries, by the emergencies of hospitals and police stations, by the closed mansions of the gangsters and the disappeared, by the sleeves where unburied bodies still warm after the last massacre lie. The stories of Niquía, his first book, take place in the shadow of the Quitasol mountain.
“Our investigations have no end; our end is in the other world,” says his beloved Michel de Montaigne in the essay about the experience. Pablo, in his search for knowledge, is not happy with the doxa, with the “red chronicle,” with “the events” that the newspapers publish every day. To live is to experiment, reminds us another philosopher, Freddy Téllez from Bogotá. This book then offers us the experience of an artist, a dreamer, a romantic musician, in the sense of Albert Beguin’s book, The Romantic Soul and Dreams, who sought to analyze “the stupor that inspires the human condition”, contemplate it “in all its strangeness, with its risks, its entire anxiety, its beauty and its disappointing limits.” Hence he cites Nerval, Novalis, Schubert.
That is why Pablo Montoya’s investigations continue in the afterlife, behind that dream curtain that separates us from those who are now only memories, myths, stories. Dreams are part of his plot. And also the music, he stopped reading it for a few moments to listen to Erik Satie’s aquatic piano in the Gymnopedias that he recommended to us and I thank him very much.
Some of us were fortunate enough to live in Medellín half a century ago, before gold manure was discovered and that bone dust transmitted fear to us, not only when blown, but when negotiating with it. Fear and the law of retaliation. Víctor Gaviria shows this very well in his film “Sumas y subtasas”.
“We lost, brother!” is the name of the first of Niquía’s stories, the book with which Pablo Montoya arrived in Paris to begin his doctorate in literature that would make him, years later, a tremendous professor at the University of Antioquia.
It is impossible not to mention here two other writers from Medellín, Juan José Hoyos with El cielo que perdimos and Gilmer Meza with La quadra. Writers from the neighborhood and the university who have not deprived themselves of living, but nor of studying.
In several stories the image of the author appears, called by respect for fiction, Pedro José Cadavid, busy resisting, getting rid of a “pressing sadness”, reading and writing in the midst of collective dementia, “seven bombs exploded last night in my beloved Medellín,” Joe Arroyo also sang in that era decayed by excessiveness, hubris, the dangerous emptiness of consumer and pleasure societies, the saying that we were not born for seeds, etc.
In the story “Requiem for a Ghost,” Cadavid is writing “the novel of exile,” dedicated to Ovid. Montoya, we know, published Lejos de Roma, dedicated to the author of The Art of Loving and The Metamorphoses.
Between The Tales of Niquia and The Kiss of the Night it is observed that the language became more formal and less colloquial and that it lost something of the youthful humor that emerged despite everything: “Rain of alcoholics who look like academy actors, walking zigzagly (… )”
Pablo Montoya gives us the feeling of being a writer fully committed to his craft, with the need to be effective when telling us his stories, denouncing everything that is wrong, not only in Medellín but in intermediate towns or cities like Tarazá.
“Sometimes I suspect, and this is an idea that appears in several of my books, that writing, composing or painting fulfill a merely consoling function in the midst of the continuous restlessness of the world and of men. But even if this represents nonsense, I continue writing and the characters I have created make art in the midst of the crisis. They and I have no other alternative,” says Pablo Montoya in an interview with El Espectador.
In the story “Antígona” we reread the dramatic work of Sophocles: Sara, a theater actress, begins a journey through Medellín to look for her brother Manuel, who has lost almost everything due to “vice.” “I will bury him, sister, and it will be beautiful to do so.”
His stories offer the reader a wide range of ways to approach topics. Sometimes they are also memoirs or chronicles, like the story of Thomas. Brave fables, exercises to acquire resistance: the imagined machine to go back in time and be able to witness the father’s suicide, to understand what happened; the terrible secret of incest, alcoholism, the death of the mother, the hermaphrodite awakening.
In the hard and beautiful fable titled “The Double Wound” I read a tribute to the Envigado philosopher, Fernando González, and his beautiful book The Sleeping Hermaphrodite.
Another story, “The Women of Aspasius” reminded me of Herodotus, who also tells of the forbidden loves between embalmers and beautiful dead women in ancient Egypt.
Now at 60 years old, after having written works such as Far from Rome, Triptych of Infamy and The Shadow of Orion, Pablo Montoya has become an example and a reference for writers older and younger than him.
“A book is like an island, like a bubble, like a piece of imagination made of signs that tries to reflect reality. And doing so is a reckless undertaking in which we writers give our all. But reality is much more complex, more exciting, more alive, and therefore more worthy of celebrating, than a book,” he says in the aforementioned interview.
* Collaborator for El Espectador, he was a correspondent in Paris and is the author of the books Vestido de bestia, Los Domingos de Charito, Trapos al sol and Dionea. His most recent novel is Pechiche naturae (Collage Editores).
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