“Well, before coming to this party, I saw my father asleep at his desk, face down on some papers. I entered into this sacred enclosure for the first time ever, with intense emotion I picked up one of his books, and then. look at this!” And the young man produced the spine of a book out of the backpack he wore. “All volumes were false: a collection of spines, nothing more, hiding cabinets filled with bottles of whiskey!” Then he started screaming, “Who are we? Where are we?” and let himself fall, arms outstretched, amidst his audience.
Another time, an older man got a seductive young lady to get up on the chair with him. He said, with tears in his eyes, “I waited all my life. Finally I found her. I would cover her with caresses, but. ” With his left hand he removed his right hand, which was artificial, and shook it: “I lost it as a child. I got so used to my false hand that I grew up without thinking about how it was missing. Until the day that Margarita offered her body to me. And I, only half-caressing her, wished that I had two, three, four, eight, infinite hands to slide over her skin for eternity.”
Twenty men raised their hands and, standing in a compact group behind the man with the missing hand, became one with him. The woman let the two hundred and five fingers run over her body.
Another man, of a neat appearance, with a deep voice and measured gestures, giving an unexpected shout, climbed onto the shoulders of a young man and asked for everyone’s attention. When he had it, he tore off his tie and cried out, “I’ve been married twenty years; I have a wife and my two children! I’m tired of lying! I’m gay! And the young man carrying me on his back is my lover!”
Without knowing it, by considering the creation of parties as the supreme expression of art, in 1948 I was discovering the principles of the “ephemeral panic,” which artists would later call “happenings.”
On one occasion a young man of my age, nineteen years, with an intelligent face, a tall and thin body, an African baritone voice, and the hands of an aristocrat, climbed onto the confessional chair and swaying like a metronome put an oval mirror in front of his face like a mask and began to recite a long poem. This was Enrique Lihn. Even at that young age the genius of poetry dwelt within him. His talent awakened great admiration in me. I obtained his address through some mutual friends and went to look for him at the house in the Providencia neighborhood where he lived with his parents, which in those days was considered a very long distance from the city center. The streets were lined with lush trees, and the houses were small, single story, with porches where fruit trees grew. Nervous, I moved the copper ring that served as a door knocker. The poet opened the door. Frowning, he growled, “Ah, the party planner! What do you want?”
“I want to be your friend.”
“Are you a homosexual?”
“No.”
“Then why do you want to be my friend?”
“Because I admire your poetry.”
“I understand, it’s not me, my verses are what interests you. Come in.”
His room was small, his bed narrow, his closet tiny. But it had been converted into a palace: Lihn had covered the walls and ceiling with poems written in small, angular letters; he had also covered the shutters and windowpanes, furniture, door, floorboards, and parchment lamp. In addition to this there were mountains of handwritten pages, verses covering the white spaces in the books, train tickets, movie tickets, paper napkins, all barely containing his poems. I felt immersed in a compact sea of letters. Wherever I rested my gaze, I saw the words of a tortured but beautiful song.
With Enrique Lihn in our puppet theater, 1949. Photo: Ferrer.
“What a shame, Enrique, all this wonderful work will be lost!”
“It doesn’t matter: dreams are also lost, and we ourselves dissolve, little by little. Poetry is the shadow of an eagle flying toward the sun; it cannot leave traces on the ground. The prayer most pleasing to the gods is sacrifice. A poem reaches its perfection when it burns, like a phoenix. ”
On the verge of vertigo, I began to see the letters walking through the walls like an army of ants. I suggested to Lihn that we take a walk.
The poet took two of his father’s Maurice Chevalier — style hats and a couple of sticks, just in case robbers assaulted us, and thus armed and hatted, marching briskly, we descended on the Avenida Providencia. I cannot help thinking that the names chance offers contain a profound message. We came across a robust tree that grew in the middle of the sidewalk. Without discussing the idea, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, we climbed up the trunk and sat side by side on a thick branch. There we sat, chatting and discussing things until dawn. We began by finding out that we both agreed that the language we had been taught carried crazy ideas. Instead of thinking correctly, we thought distortedly. Concepts had to be given their true meaning. We spend a lot of time doing this. I remember a few examples:
Instead of “never”: very few times. Instead of “always”: often. “Infinite”: of unknown extent. “Eternity”: with an unthinkable end. “To fail”: to change activities. “I was deceived”: I imagined wrongly. “I know”: I believe. “Beautiful, ugly”: I like, I do not like. “You are like this”: I perceive you to be like this. “Mine”: What I currently possess. “Dying”: changing form.
Next, we reviewed definitions and concluded that it was absurd to define things with a positive assertion. Instead, the correct thing was to define by negating. “Happiness”: to be less distressed each day. “Generosity”: to be less selfish. “Courage”: to be less cowardly. “Strength”: to be less weak. And so on. We concluded that, because of this twisted language, all of society lived in a world plagued by grotesque situations. The word grotesque, beside its definition in the dictionary as meaning ludicrous, prodigious, or outlandish, was also taken to mean unconscious noncommunication. For example, the Pope believed himself to be in direct communication with a god who was actually blind, deaf, and dumb. A citizen, while being beaten by the police, believed that the state was protecting him. Two people remained married for twenty years without realizing that they were speaking to each other in different languages. The worst grotesque situations: believing one knows oneself, believing one knows everything about some topic, believing one has judged with absolute impartiality, believing one will love and be loved forever. In conversation, people think one thing and, in trying to communicate it, say something else. The interlocutor hears one thing, but understands something different. When answering, one does not respond to what the other person initially thought, nor to what the other person said, but to what one has understood. The final result: a conversation between deaf people who do not even know how to listen to themselves.