And now you have just arrived in Buenos Aires, a stranger eager to observe the big city, bearing a message of freshness you still don’t know how to express, except through stammered exclamations:
In the red corymb of morning your
bumblebees buzz, Wonder.4
What strange wind (providence or chance) has gathered the phalanx of men to which you now belong, that sheaf of musical men come, like you, from different climates and diverse bloods? Some of them return from across the sea and bring enthusiastic missives from another world.5 Others have left their provinces, ambassadors of a particular land and its light. Still others arrive from the city itself, nervous and lively and nocturnal. And no sooner have all those voices gathered together than the battle is joined; they fight among themselves, brothers in their fervour, but already enemies in direction and in language. The very name of the phalanx, Santos Vega, has a symbolic value yet to be defined.6 Is it a matter of recovering a stolen music, a noble canticle being held captive? Yes. But music and canticle alike must emerge the richer for their imprisonment, if Juan Sin Ropa, the conqueror, has indeed triumphed under the sign of the universal. Do you remember the nights in the Royal Keller,7 the passionate arguments at the riverside, after which you would go home at dawn, your mind overexcited and eyes sleepless? You listen to the voices of friends in combat, but you do not speak yet, for silence and reserve are the stigmata one acquires on the prairie, where the human voice feels intimidated before the vastness of the earth and the gravitation of the sky. And when at last you manage to speak, you do so in an idiom that people find barbarous, in a throng of images they find confused. Your supporters shower praise: “A virgin poetics, without number or measure, like the great rivers of our country, like her plains and mountains.” And already, right from the start, there is clearly disagreement between your partisans and your soul. They don’t realize that when you build your poem as an incoherent string of images, you do so to overcome Time, its sad successiveness, so that all things may live a joyful present in your song. People are not aware that when you put two vastly different forms together in a single image, you want to defeat Space and distance, so that what is distant may be rejoined in the joyful unity of your poem. They don’t know this, and you dare not tell them, because silence and reserve are the stigmata one acquires on the prairie. You don’t dare tell them, because they may not have heard as children the admonishment of Time gnawing at the house and withering the sweet faces of family members; nor will they have wept at night in anguish, their gaze lost in the tremendous distance of the constellations above the pampas.
At last you realize how crazy your ambition is! Unhinged from its metaphysical yearning, your poetics is basically just a musical chaos; and that chaos is painful to you. Yes, a call to order, which no doubt comes from your blood.8 You will need to look for the code that can construct order. Contrary to what your supporters affirm, the creative cipher will not come from the earth, which itself has no code. You know well that the earth, far from giving, receives its measure from the human, because humankind is the true form of the earth. And it is in your blood that you will seek that measure, the one your grandparents brought from the other side of the ocean. You need to rediscover that measure, and to do so, you must see it incarnate in the works of your lineage, beyond the great waters. And so the elation of travel comes over your being.
You had crossed the sea, and your eyes, freshened by bitter waters and naval winds, had witnessed the mutation of the sky. A deep sense of absent constellations that no longer vault over the southern horizon, and the advent of new forms in the firmament, there in the frozen north, at nightfall. You were in a Galician port, and your solitude was already opening to embrace the forms and colours of another world. The winter day was barely dawning against an iron-grey horizon. Opposite, the three islands were like iron, too; and molten iron were the waves that crashed against the breakwater and set the ships dancing around their anchors. Above the boats, the seagulls wheeled, skimming the water’s surface or pecking at the surf, squalling like a single hunger broken into a thousand pieces. At your back, the city had not yet shaken off sleep, but along the seawall a few motionless figures stood waiting. Only their eyes showed any sign of life as they stared out over the still-dark sea. Then, walking along the seawall, you came upon a fishermen’s cove. Great, taciturn females were mending nets spread over a beach slick and shiny with fish scales. At the women’s side, drowsy children were baiting hooks with tuna liver. There, wind and sea sustained a turbulent dialogue; through its occasional pauses could be heard the terrestrial bugle of an early-rising rooster. Suddenly, the rigid figures, numb bodies, and stone faces came alive and started shouting in the direction of the sea; gruff voices from the water called back in the gloom. They were the harvesters of the sea, returning to the quay. Against the murky background of dawn, you could make out sharp prows, spare masts, and men who clung to the rigging and shouted a greeting or a lament. And, almost as if those men had caught the day on their lines and were towing it behind them, the light increased all around, and the earth lit up like a lamp. Then, before your eyes, rustic hands displayed the sea’s wealth, its splendid fruits: a universe of writhing tentacles, multi-coloured shells, mother-of-pearl and scales, inky pulp still bleeding and beating like the eviscerated entrails of the sea. And as in its prairie past, your soul at that moment could only voice praise: praise for so many pure forms, paean to the heroic life, encomium to the Maker who gives fruits. If those fruits are difficult to pluck, on an out-of-reach branch, it is by His design: the human hand that reaps them will also have harvested the beautiful and sorrowful flower of penitence.
Now you are in Cantabria, the land of your ancestors: it is the mountain where the Globe, celestial animal, recalls its own magnitude; the mountain that rises bare-headed, wraps its flanks in a cloak of earth, draws from the valley a tough elbow of granite and then sanctifies the stone in a cathedral.9 And it is the plot of soil, worked and polished like a jewel. And the wonder of water leaping out to the light and falling at the feet of golden oaks in winter. That landscape, whose nostalgic description you’d heard so many times from your grandparents on the prairie of Maipú, sketches before your eyes a familiar gesture as though of recognition and welcome: familiar are the faces forming a circle around the table, the big hands cutting bread for you and filling your tankard with new cider, the sonorous idiom and songs that, also in exile, rocked your childhood cradle in another world. And that’s it precisely: those voices and faces bring back a taste of infancy, a lost flavour that floods back in all its delight, something like the pleasure you still get from the deeply familiar odour of a plant, an old stick of furniture, a faded piece of cloth.
But the fervour in your blood will brook no delay, and you now cross the fields of Castille, its arable reds and pleasant greens. It is the same earth that saw a double prodigy in the march of its heroes and the levitation of its saints. In the shadow cast by that shepherd leaning on his crook, Salicio and Nemeroso might yet be intertwining their fluid voices as in Garcilaso’s poem.10 And among those green meadows, it would be no surprise to hear Don Quixote repeating his praise for the Golden Age.11 Wherever you open your eyes, you find the truth, the eternal number, and the just measure written in faithful stone, hard metal, or exalted wood. And, to be sure, when you learn the wisdom of the dead, your spirit does not quail in final elegies. Ah, how you long to perpetuate those voices, gather up those numbers, and give them another springtime, far from here, in your jubilant fields, beside your native river!