Jonathan Franzen, or a man who looks like Jonathan Franzen, swims laps in a rooftop pool with the bay of Cartagena de Indias in the background. Sailboats on the horizon, twenty-story buildings and a wind that makes the sea raging. Colombia’s Hay Festival takes place in a convention center with a carpeted floor and full air conditioning, but the most extraordinary images of the authors are sometimes found in its surroundings. Daniel Mordinzki, the portraitist of the greats, makes them jump off the boardwalk or masks them just to turn them into people, his etymology.
The literary event has regained presence two years later. It has returned to normal, although to a hidden normality. The use of the mask is recurrent in all events. In Casa Hay, an open room with sofas, a meeting place for everyone, the epicenter of gossip, there are those who always have a coffee in hand to have an excuse. There they do not let Piedad Bonnett breathe while she tries to give an interview. A writer who lives overwhelmed by the thousands of books in her library in Bogotá, each time larger, more invasive, like the vegetation of the jungle. She gets chills when she listens to the traveling book buyer who runs through the capital with a megaphone.
Laughter from one room can be heard from the hallway. Inside, Martín Caparrós shocks the audience. Corruption is a type of ideology, explains the author of Ñamerica. Moreover, it is born from Catholicism. There you go, Monserrate. What greater form of corruption than atoning for sins with a priest, he continues. Pay to be free, to redeem yourself. The laughter turns to murmur. Later he will spend more than an hour signing books that he left speechless.
The Latin American intelligentsia walks the streets of this walled city. Especially the rola, the Bogotana. It is easy to identify them, they wear a gauze shirt and explorer pants, as if taken from Memories of Africa. This is how Raúl Zurita is dressed, confusing everyone, with a light suit and Roman sandals. Sitting on a sofa, alone, between commitments, next to a table where Franzen talks about divorce, he sometimes realizes that he is perhaps the greatest living poet.
But do not be overconfident, success also exhausts. The year and a half of Pilar Quintana, with two triumphant books, is dizzying. She reaches 50 exhausted. She fills the room, book signings and hours of interviews. She seems exhausted after all the tute. Only someone else coming these days from abroad has that rhythm: Irene Vallejo. They all want to talk to her. A radio announcer, who could not locate her, mobilized the entire newsroom to have her on the air these days. It was a matter of survival.
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Neither Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo leaves indifferent. He talks about the Trojan donkey of democracy, a concept widely seen in Spain, but here it was new. The moderator was Carlos Granés. Politics wins over the public, but alas, in front of him is Sandra Borda. Two policies that call themselves liberal come together but have nothing to do with each other and, of course, the occasional spark jumps that fails to ignite. There is no fear. It would have gone out with the aura of Manuel Vilas, who has come to talk about love in maturity and the beauty of everyday life.
There are those who cannot stop being editors for a moment. A follower approaches Felipe Restrepo Pombo to declare her admiration for her. She tells him that he always carries with him, in his adventure to start writing, a phrase: “there is no better critic than oneself”. Restrepo listens to her carefully, attentively, but in the end he can’t hold his tongue: “He’s a bigger critic than oneself, actually.”
The night ends at Quiebracanto, a three-story salsa venue, with wide-open windows, a narrow terrace where bodies mingle. Literary agents receive manuscripts from young writers, Vanessa Londoño is about to have a dance, Villoro finishes a drink and Jon Lee Anderson appears far away. Hay is back.
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