In a conversation of days gone by with Elena Poniatowska, mediated by Antonio Ramos Revilla, director of the Casa del Libro at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, we talked about the infinite universe of readings, starting with those of childhood that are always remembered with the taste of nostalgia.
For Elena, her first book, read in French, was Heidi, the novel about the little orphan of the Alpine mountains, by the Swiss writer Johanna Spyri, famous in many languages since its publication in 1880, and which continues to be so to the point that it has become an anime comic in Japan.
I remembered that I had found the sense of adventure in comic book characters with hidden identity, such as Ghost, created by Lee Falk in 1936, “the walking goblin”, sitting on the Skull’s throne in a cave deep in the jungle, from where he would come out to deal with sordid miscreants.
And he also said that the best way to induce someone to become a reading vicious is to place them in front of a display case of forbidden books, locked up, since without a doubt they will get a pick to remove them and read them in hiding.
When I finished elementary school, I had access to a notebook typed with manila paper pastes and stitched with thread like the judicial folios, which threatened to get rid of so much manipulation. Its owner was a distant cousin on my mother’s side, named Marcos Guerrero, with curly hair and beard and feverish eyes, like a character from DH Lawrence. He lived alone in a dilapidated house, his fighting cocks for only company.
He kept it carefully in a pine drawer, the kind for packing laundry soap, along with books as diverse as Mud flower, by Vargas Vila, and he only lent them under an oath of secrecy. So my reading of that notebook, which had no title or author, was my initiation not only into the rite of reading, but also into that of sensuality.
It was about the Countess Gamiani, refined in sexual games not only with men and women, but also with animals, mainly hunting dogs. Only many years later, in my trips through so many bookstores, I came across this book again, which was called, in truth, Gamiani: two nights of excess, and I discovered that it had not been written by an anonymous hand, but by Alfred de Musset.
That sensuality has been transferred to the very body of the books. I always enter them smelling their perfume first, and I keep remembering those paperback volumes of closed booklets that it was necessary to break with a letter opener, a way to penetrate the secrets of hidden reading in each sealed sheet. That is why I am so suspicious of those horrible predictions of a future in which those caresses must be transferred to cold quartz screens.
But we also recall the books that were tools for learning to write. I return to Chekhov as to a house that can be entered without knocking because we know that the door does not have a lock, and I always imagine him holding his provincial doctor’s glasses to examine the legions of little beings that move through the pages of his books. stories, so sad, so comical, and so helpless.
Like O. Henry too, whose stories remain, for me, perfect theorems that are solved without stumbling; and I imagine him bored in his exile from the port of Trujillo on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, where he had fled after defrauding a bank, and where he wrote his novel Of cabbages and kings, in which he invented the term banana republic.
Infinite and infinite reads await more reads. I have more books than I will manage to read in my life, and yet every time I enter a bookstore I am overcome by the greed of someone who does not own just one. Every vice has its ungrateful withdrawal syndrome.
Sergio Ramirez
www.sergioramirez.com
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