2023-11-02 07:06:32
Joseluís González
Professor and writer
Our Time Magazine
In the middle of Florida, in the January summer of Buenos Aires, in 1980, Úrsula Rodríguez Hesles took several photos of her husband, the Leonese writer Antonio Pereira, and a now octogenarian Borges. It was a relentlessly hot day.
The Argentine had just been notified that he had won the Cervantes Prize ex aequo with Gerardo Diego. Months ago, from Madrid, Pereira had asked him by letter to visit him. The author of El Aleph responded by inviting them to his apartment on Maipú Street, near the hotel where the Spanish couple was staying. Fanny, the maid and housekeeper, opened the door, “cautiously followed” by Beppo, Borges’s cat with the same name as the poet Byron.
Among the undulations and softness of the conversation there was no shortage of secrets. Despite letting Antonio and Úrsula know that he had finally finished a story that had been in the making for almost twenty years, “The Memory of Shakespeare,” and apparently it was going to be his last, Borges kept the content of the story to himself. He did slip that it had occurred to him among the skein of a very previous dream, from when he had taught in the United States.
Nor did Pereira reveal to that brilliant blind man that someone, perhaps not much of a reader, had littered the portal with useless insults against that older and respectable man, always shy and gentlemanly. The three of them then went to a candy store. And he kept turning the gears of life. From that reel, in addition to the portraits, some press articles, some pages in the memoirs of the Bercian writer (published posthumously) and some stories were revealed on paper.
One was “If you read me I read you,” a recreation of that encounter, with a closing as intricate and cunning, as rebellious, art and artifice, as those of the narrator and poet who did not receive the Nobel. He also recomposed stories with anecdotes of a trip to the USSR or the kidnapping of Pereira and his wife in American lands. They became stories tempered by joviality and humor. And because of the differences that imaginative ability brings. Life, having lived, feeds and dresses literature. Thomas Mann, in the prelude to The Magic Mountain, reinforces that clear and therefore sometimes elusive certainty: “To tell a story it must have happened.”
Precisely one of his books compiles observations and memories.
Pereira, as a young man, traveled through the northwest of the peninsula to expand his father’s business, a hardware store that was growing; he knew how to combine the commercial with the literary, with the types, the landscapes, the adventures and curiosities. He managed to merge, with variants of the forge of the imaginary, life and writing. He himself confessed that certainty of being an observer, of stopping to listen: “I mean paying attention to things and writing them down.”
Precisely one of his books compiles observations and memories: Office of looking. Adventures of a storyteller. Edited by Pre-Textos after Pereira’s death, it selects a few dozen biographical fragments that occurred from January 1, 1970 to New Year’s Eve 2001. In his own handwriting he speaks about himself. And from others, with respect and with the same brave self-confidence as for their own. For example, Cela’s voice, “belle and dogmatic”, a certain snub from a famous friar and historian, the pious attitude seen in Gerardo Diego at a wake in a home, Pereira’s animosity towards some arrogant poet… They are notes, not a scrupulous diary. Comments on literary creation shine. “I distrust the pages that are written on top of what one is experiencing. “Poetry is a remembered emotion.”
June 13 marked the centenary of the birth of Antonio Pereira. The greatest compliment to a good writer: bringing together in two volumes released by the Siruela publishing house All the Poems and All the Stories. Almost thirteen hundred pages of happy, smiling, lyrical, jovial, sometimes spicy reading. Added is the reprint of a well-measured anthology of stories, with a study by José Carlos González Boixo, Recuento de invenciones (Cátedra).
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