To Homero Aridjis
[Mexico City, November 1982]
Dear friend,
I’m putting into a few lines what I have already told you of my impressions on reading your book El último Adán. You can take out anything you don’t find useful:
Mankind will bring about the apocalypse, not God, that is in my view an absolute truth. This is the vast difference between the apocalyptic delirium of El último Adán and the mediocre description of the Apocalypse by Saint John. There is no doubt that human creativity has been enriched by the passing of the centuries.
The last Adam, his Eve already lost, wanders the ruined cities and barren fields in dense smoke under a dark sky, coming across groups of terrified humans with singed hair and eyebrows, blankly staring eyes and loosely hanging bellies. His progress is hampered by volcanoes erupting and clashing earth tremors, smoke, ash, skeletons, scattered human limbs and, above all, the fetid smell of putrefying flesh that I call ‘the sweet smell of eternity’.
Greek Homer’s ‘endlessly smiling sea’ has been extinguished, leaving only darkness and chaos.
To my mind, the constant and obsessive reiteration offers a powerful contribution to Aridjis’s narrative of delirious apocalypse, an alternative title for which might be:
Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla.*
[Day of wrath and doom impending / Heaven and earth in ashes ending]
Luis Buñuel
*I crossed out the bit about teste David cum sibylla [David's word with Sibyl's blending] because I think it’s stupid.
Jo Evans & Breixo Viejo, Luis Buñuel: A Life in Letters
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Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence by Homero Aridjis, translated by George McWhirter
THE JAGUAR
Tepeyollotli, heart of the mountain
1
That one who was the image of rain
no longer leaves trails through the jungle,
the gold discs of his eyes
no longer blink brightly.
He isn't to be seen
in the morning sun floating on a log
down the Sacred Monkey River.
His solar pelt is a rug.
The heart of the mountain no longer wears
black-and-white markings on its chest
nor does the volute, cloud of speech that names things
scroll from his molten jaws.
His mute cry
booms out
my extinction.
2
Sad jaguar of the mythologies
who on devouring the sun devoured himself,
who on turning into the devouring Earth
devoured his own shadow in the night sky.
Orphan god of the Underworld who,
on following in the tracks of man,
was tricked by his masks
and fell into his snares.
Poor jaguar of the resplendent,
in his skin he carried death.
3
Before words
when, in the bowels of the night,
there was neither fowl
nor tree
nor fish
nor river
nor sun
in the night sky,
the jaguar
meowed.
4
The jaguar that went away
is on its way,
the jaguar that came back
still hasn't come
the jaguar of we two
within you
watches me from outside
5
Our bodies
two solar jaguars
faced off in the night
will end clawed up
in the total dawn
***
THE WHITE CAT OF EARLY MORNING
For Chloe, Eva, and a cat called Benita
Alone in the solitude of the living room
the white cat of the first light
sought me out among the pieces of furniture
slip-covered in green cloth.
Her eyes, used to sizing up the immensurable
shapes of the night, explored
the corners in the house as if no one,
nothing, were there.
“Where has that one, who knew my name, gone?
Where has that one, who slept beside me, got to?
Who will open the closed door of the early-mornings for me,
to let me sleep our cold every-morning sleep in bed?”
she appeared to say to herself standing at the top of the stair,
reminding me, always, with her face that would fit into a hand,
that God created a cat so man might have
the pleasure of stroking the tiger.
No longer does anyone give her the water of shadows to drink.
No hand lifts her in the long nothing-to-do day.
Left abandoned, one nightfall, in a shoebox
on our doorstep, a little girl took her in.
Since then, looking at us with unfathomable,
disobedient, disdainful, almost ungrateful eyes,
held close, she held herself distant;
believing her ours, we never did know her.
***
GARDEN OF GHOSTS
For Mama Josefina
1
The pear tree with its pears isn’t aware it’s a ghost.
Geraniums, roses, bougainvillea,
trailing over the ground in a lapsed splendor
of purple petals, are unaware of their own absence.
All are gone. The women visiting,
the rains, the goldfinches, dogs,
the creaking of doors, the voices, gone,
and you alone, my invisible mothers, are here.
2
Birds drawn on the blue notebook of the mountain,
childhood angels drowned in a basin
among the dried-up flowers of memory,
age-old mythologies scaling the walls
down which redknee spiders crawl,
transparent bodies in the passageways that come upon us
like a wind to lead the way to buried treasures,
namelss creatures that spy on us through cracks
in rickety doors that only the air moves,
pale figures, attempting to take shape on the mountain
when the sun has gone in are aspects of me,
quivering with unreality on the hill of gold.
3
Along the cobbled street
ran the little girl, Josefina,
dressed in percale and shadow
a bandit had come into town
by way of the graveyard to steal women
and was reaching arms out
to lift her up-and-onto his black horse
through the street she ran, terrified,
the small shadow with big eyes
who would one day be my mother.
4
I was not aware that flowers may be the ghosts
of their own morning and spook a boy who searches
for his reflection in the misted-over mirror of his empty room.
I wasn't aware that the flicker cast ahead of his steps
is like the whip of shadows left behind by an unremembered
relative on the floor tiles.
And that my deaf aunt with the white braids, so like
La Llorona,* who bathed me under the setting sun,
went about rapping on doors in the air.
Come, digger of graves from my childhood,
come and play in my garden of ghosts,
the game of love and death.
*La Llorona is a wailing ghost roaming the earth in search of her children, whom she drowned.
***
BORGES IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR
The hotel in Morelia had a great mirror.
Acquired along with a wardrobe
in an antique shop,
the mirror was priceless.
A young woman opened the door to the room,
set his suitcase on the floor,
and went out.
Borges said nothing.
He remained seated, dozing
beside the open window.
The garden smelled of roses.
After a few minutes,
the blind author rose from the chair
and brought his face to the mirror
without seeing himself.
Then, he ran his hand
over the flat pane
and felt the cold looking glass.
Then, returned to the chair.
***
CODA
at the hour of his death
they say Turner began
to mix pure colors
with solar rays
he dreamed tender yellows
cobalt blues
and angels standing
at the edge of a cloud
with that amalgam
of animated shadows
and warm colors they say
he made what lies beyond close by
and the distant visible
***
WITH CORRUPTION
They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
- Ezra Pound, Canto XLV
They built houses for the poor with corruption,
painted fake heavens over the church altars,
wrote lies on elementary school blackboards,
marked their face with the sign of the beast avarice,
passed on the rapaciousness of their fathers to their children,
with corruption they plundered the lands of their ancestors,
fouled the waters for their descendants,
cut down the tree of life and through the roots of the mother ceiba,
disfigured the effigies of their primordial beings,
their millionaires made millions of the poor,
they sold their daughters into the sex markets,
and turned borders into venal territories,
converted the country into a hellfire of death,
with corruption they sold the Virgin's pearls,
sat harlots at the altar of their gods,
brought criminals along to banquet with their judges
and sent hucksters into the House of Song.
***
INSOMNIA
It all began with the images
I was afraid to lose on closing my eyes
that might not be there on opening them.
It all went on with the bolting night-
mares that ran through the streets
knocking down doors and walls.
It all kept up with the chimeras,
awakened under the black moons
flowing along the river of poetry.
It all took place in the night within me,
in prenatal time, in the workshops of the resurrection,
when I was prone to blackouts of conscience.
It all began before I was born,
in the world of the contingent beings,
when we are exposed to thirst and being orphaned.
It all began with the long insomnia
of the infinite inside of us,
which dogs us to the grave.
***
FOR BETTY, AN AUTUMNAL POEM OF LOVE (excerpt)
I don't love you for what you are,
but for what I am when I am with you.
***
THE CREATION OF THE WORLD BY THE ANIMALS
(according to the Popol Vuh)
Across an empty darkness,
across unmoving sky,
flashed scarlet macaw—
so day broke; and yellow orioles
with turquoise eyes
began dancing a solo of light
and within a mighty ceiba tree,
the “mother of birds,” appeared
a skinny spider monkey
his privates dangling—and howler monkey,
scriving prophesies on the mirror of dawn,
and a lunar owl, perched on death's arm.
Caiman lurked on a river bank,
his back marked with celestial stripes,
and sharp-fanged jaguar
pursued the fleeing deer; and eagle,
aloft on clear wings, spied the horizon—
and all was a feathered dream: yellow and green.
Then figured from water, clay, and wood,
came woman and man:
offspring of the sun,
children of forest and mountain,
with their eyes they could behold themselves,
their voices named the animals.
Heart of the Sky, Heart of the Sea
Heart of the Earth beat as one,
and all the winged creatures, creatures
of the waters and the land
could be, breathe, love, and cast shade.
And life is re-created every day.
***
SELF-PORTRAIT IN THE ZONE OF SILENCE (excerpt)
At the foot of life and death's double pyramid,
the god Quetzalcoatl offered flowers and butterflies
to his followers in place of human flesh.
And amid such splendor, only the sadness was mine.
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