After the small detour that this newsletter took last time, which made it jump to Guatemala, with Rodrigo Rey Rosa, we return to the continental climb in which we were involved, dear reader, to land in Colombia.
I write this and I remember those beautiful verses by William Carlos Williams (or is it that, rather than suddenly remembering them, they always accompany me?)—: “The descent calls us / as the ascent called us / memory is like / an achievement / a kind of renewal / almost / an initiation, new open spaces / inhabited by hordes / and therefore does not imply / new species— / because its movement / is directed towards new destinations / (even if they have been abandoned).”
But let’s go back to where we were going, I mean, to Colombia, although before landing there, let’s allow ourselves a new descent, with the aim of opening space for these other verses, from the extraordinary Argentine poet Olga Orozco: “They were legion. / Fierce legion was their name / and they multiplied as you unraveled yourself to the last stitch, / cornering you against the voracious cobwebs of nothingness. / He who closes his eyes becomes the home of the entire universe.” And it is there, in that last verse, that one of the threads that weave the soul of Garden in cold land, the novel by Colombian Fátima Vélez, who, by the way, is a poet in addition to being a narrator.
‘Garden in cold land’
Now, however, since I am at this point, that is, before finally entering Vélez’s novel, I want to leave here, in passing, some of her verses, since it has been a long time since I collided with a writer whose poetry and narrative held such a tense and transparent dialogue: “By moving the body away / from the detachment of its parts / we could not prevent the tide from going down / and there / a man lying / open / fragmented / like everything we were trying to save. / We looked closer / we cleaned it to confirm that it was not another of her stains / —man’s body we confirmed— / and then he opened his voice / he opened his voice and said: / ¢ that which others have called the abyss / is what I call inland ¢”. Or, perhaps even better, in the sense of tension and transparency: “the drive with which the chicken is skinned / and coriander seeds are sown / in the glass pot / of the orchid that was thought to be dead / until in despair / the expanded flower of whiteness emerges / just when we were evaluating what to do / with the pot / so pretty / so useless / so tailored to the living orchid / that my dad’s girlfriend sent as a gift / thirty-eight years old younger than him / two years younger than me.”
In Garden in Cold Landwhere there is an elderly father and several daughters, one of whom, the narrator, in addition to being in charge of the garden at the bottom of the archipelago of houses where her sisters also live, is convinced that there her father has buried his wives, that is, her mother and her sisters’ mothers, after finishing them off.
In addition to a father, a daughter, the space of one or more mothers and a lot of daily tasks, in Vélez’s novel, which tells 24 hours of the life of Primera V, its protagonist, to tell her entire life, as in In those last verses that I quoted, there is also something about to be born, another kind of expanded flower of whiteness, just when evaluating, not what to do with a pot, but with a life. And here it is worth remembering how Orozco’s poem continues: “He who closes his eyes becomes the abode of the entire universe. / He who opens them draws the borders and remains in the open. / He who steps on the line does not find his place. / Insomnia like tunnels to prove the inconsistency of all reality; / nights and nights pierced by a single bullet that embeds you in the dark, / and the same attempt to recognize yourself when you wake up in the memory of death: / that perverse temptation, / that adorable angel with a pig’s snout.
Velez’s novel
What else can I say about Garden in cold land? Likewise, something about another of the story’s foundations: the strangeness, the slowness, the rarefaction and the fear, both of it being true and of it not being true, with which Primera V relates to the possibility that her boyfriend and her best friend are in a loving relationship behind her back, who, on the other hand, in a certain way, also behind her back, desires and does not desire a relationship with the bookseller of the bookstore she usually goes to, is presented to the reader in such a successful and precise way that one feels, literally, that he is hiding there, behind Primera V’s back.
And also say something about the most interesting narrative strategy in the form of Garden in cold land, narrative strategy that also results from an enlightenment by the narrator: what happens when one makes a decision, with the person that one also is, the one who chose the other decision?, Primera V asks herself at one point.
From there, little by little, the novel also becomes a novel of doubles, because, in addition to following the protagonist, we follow, or almost, those she was or would be, rather, if she had taken the other path at the crossroads.
A dream that we have all experienced, but which here, fortunately, I insist, becomes a form.
Coordinates
Garden in cold land was published by Laguna Books. The work of Olga Orozco has been brought together by the FCEand the poetry of William Carlos Williams is found in editions of Lumen.
#detour