Describe un encuentro fortuito con un desconocido que te haya marcado positivamente.
a chance meeting
Reality, fantasy and horses in the Rose of the World
21 April 2023,
aridio fernandez rosario
Novels and poems, films and television series speak to us, when they try to approach the history of the French city of Avignon, of a hidden, cabalistic knowledge, disseminated in buildings and monuments, secluded squares, churches and monasteries that, using hermetic signs , transmits to us an esoteric knowledge encrypted throughout the centuries.
No famous writer has published a guide that hits the mark on this treasure trove of unforeseen finds. Only Lawrence Durrell, in some of his books, but above all in his magnum opus The Avignon Quintet, displays, not without caution, certain secrets that veil this compendium of signs and warnings that envelop, with an enigmatic halo, the old city that was once the seat of the city. papal of former pontifical reigns.
Between us, a late poet, Ángel Crespo, of refined culture, exquisite sensitivity and proven experience of the world —a brilliant translator, moreover, of Dante Alighieri, Giacomo Casanova and Fernando Pessoa— could have given us a book on Avignon similar to the one he wrote over the city where, impetuous and feverish, the Tagus river flows: Lisbon. Thorough guide to the Portuguese capital, of course. But also, and simultaneously, a joyful journey through a labyrinth of concepts and places where the unknown and magical dwells, the mysterious. Mas Ángel no longer belongs to the kingdom of this world. If we were here and now, I would say that what we inhabit is a fallen world, without grace or ease, and devoid of joy.
There is no joy or desire to celebrate. At least that’s what I see when I walk slowly through the streets of Paris, Barcelona or Avignon at Christmas parties that, after repeated enough, no longer mean anything. However, the word of the poet would tell us that, despite the fate, it is worth being attentive and educating the gaze. Discern, among the pile of objects and junk that surround us without any interest or story, whatever is essential because it is materially useless: the moment. That moment, elusive and ephemeral, but endowed with the primordial particularity of snatching our attention to plunge us into the most hidden meanders of the river of the soul; that silent flow of images, thoughts, sensations and memories that accompanies our heartbeat with restlessness and discomfort or with peaceful hope.
As certain Ibero-American writers have already pointed out, but especially the Argentine Julio Cortázar, finding the extraordinary in the course of everyday life is the task, among others, of the contemporary narrator. Nowadays, any fiction maker knows from experience that no one has returned from paradise with a golden apple. It turns, when it turns, with an original loss and an air of loss. An open wound that seeks the difficult compensation of a dream that gives breath, meaning and reason to an existence that no one has chosen.
The result of chance and the dark laws that weave our destiny, human life barely lasts for a second, a blink in the continuous and lightning dialogue of the universes. Such an adventure is, perhaps, the result of chance and a necessity that covers the immense shadow of a void. Hence the lack, the lack of something consubstantial to Being and Time that creates it to project it in Space, ask and inquire until finding an answer —always partial — that calms the dissatisfaction that invades us.
The profession of writing constitutes, among others, a painful task: delving into the darkness until finding the light that gives us, among other things, the key to meaning. It’s not a bad job. It has, in addition to its many difficulties, its shred of glory and redemption. For an instant, if the text touches and moves what is real, it returns our being, to the origin, and at that moment we find ourselves without guilt or betrayal, without the need to justify ourselves to anyone or anything. We are what we are; and we are, moreover, with great ignorance of ourselves. And in the end everything is resolved, both in writing and in life, in «the air that we demand thirteen times a minute to be, and, while we are, give a glorifying yes» (Gabriel Celaya).
Yes, breathing and rhythm are the two cardinal movements of life. Hence, the walk, in addition to being useful for our health, is revealing of the moment that awaits us as an unexpected work of Fortune.
Indeed, I can only think that the goddess put in my way the achievement of a chance meeting in the old walled city of Avignon. Because it was in the Saint-Didier square of said city, and at the end of a solitary walk, where I met an old Colombian colleague: Juan Gavilán Malandro. A valuable though unpublished author, Gavilán Malandro was part of a small group of Spanish-American storytellers and poets who, during the long decade of the eighties, settled in Barcelona with the purpose of publishing their work in the prestigious Biblioteca del Fénice, inspired and directed at that time by that prince of letters who came to be called Carlos Barral.
The second surname of this great forgotten caused quite a stir in Barcelona in those years. Lacking economic resources —that is to say, poor—, and forsaken by the hand of God, Juan Gavilán lived on the edge thanks to certain literary collaborations and not a few blows that he gave to his own and strangers. Among the gatherings and literary circles, the word spread that this Malandro, honoring the name of his mother, was nothing more than a «delinquent», a crook or small-time rogue who used literature for the purposes of he; ends that, of course, were not at all noble.
Naturally, the authors of such hoaxes—true defamations—were well-established bourgeoisie, posh and timorous people, “progressives” from Barcelona with claims to carve out a respectable place under the sun of the big publishing houses.
I attest to this: if Carlos Barral did not publish his best book of stories, Aviesa luck, it was not for lack of desire. A close collaborator of this publisher entrusted me with her proofreading of the first set of galley proofs of this title, still unpublished, which could not be published due to the serious financial problems that the publishing house, Argos Vergara, was going through.
I knew nothing after the adventures of this narrator. Some said that his footsteps were lost in some Central European country; others that if he returned to his birthplace, in Medellín; and less than if he had gotten a modest job as a night porter in some New York hotel, specifically in the Bronx district.
And yes, the reader who has followed my story up to here will be right: it was in a bar in Avignon, and after so many years, where I had the pleasure of meeting this unknown writer again.
Once presided over by three majestic pine trees that delighted its inhabitants, Saint-Didier Square is, today, a space where only cement dominates. With nocturnal treachery and treachery, the municipal services in charge of these tasks liquidated the three green giants that oxygenated the air. Lacking that good shade, Comptoir-Saint Didier, the bar-restaurant, is a place whose atmosphere has declined due to incompetent public management. Regrettable.
But the air of the place, before that apparition called Juan Gavilán Malandro, suddenly acquired a tone of festive memory. Suddenly, like a moviola, the images of the past took shape in my memory to parade with cinematographic clarity and precision. Cafés and bookstores, art galleries, painters’ studios and engraving workshops were evoked by the heat of the words that were sprouting in that corner of the square until they came up with the names of old friends, some of them already deceased.
After several hours of talk and before saying goodbye, Juan Gavilán, responding to the dictation of an uncontrolled impulse, finally stated the reason for his trip through these lands of France:
«…now I work for that Aztec newspaper. I left literature… or she left me. I dont know and I dont care. I am in Mexico City, where I was able to settle down and work, have a family, friends, money. Anyway, those things that make life easier and better… And no, you won’t see my name anywhere. To sign my columns and reports I use the pseudonym Carlos Pulido. I had to put up with a lot in Barcelona at the expense of my last name…
“Yes, I’m staying at that hotel… on the Cours Jean Jaurès. I will only be two days. The time necessary to write the chronicle of ‘Cheval Passion’, that horse fair that for thirty-four years has been held on the outskirts of Avignon, in the exhibition park…
Here, I give you two invitations; Come see me at the end of the day Sunday and we’ll keep talking…».
For a moment, after saying goodbye, I didn’t know what to do with the two tickets that Juan had given me. Two tickets that allowed access to Crinières d’Or, an equestrian gala that would take place that day, Saturday January 19, at 8:30 p.m. I was tempted to intentionally forget that invitation and dedicate myself to continue wandering the streets of the city, aimlessly. However, something told me that I should go to the place where that event would take place.
Emblem of vital force, but also of the passage of time, when not a funerary symbol, the horse has been a source of many and diverse meanings since ancient times: power, grace and beauty, nobility and freedom. This would be the positive signifying constellation of his image. The negative or dark, on the other hand, would be associated with war and the attributes of conquest, booty, domination and victory. But his figure is also central to his ability to represent our passage through life: fast at times, slow and calm at others, runaway in situations of rupture or catastrophic outbreak.
The horse is, therefore, one of the essential signs of human civilization. So much so that throughout this function convened by Cheval Passion I had the opportunity to see one of the most beautiful and complete shows that, around these and other equine characteristics, took place in the thirty-fourth edition of this international fair. Horses and studs from Spain, Morocco, France, Portugal and other countries starred, in perfect symbiosis with horsemen and riders, in a scene that is hard to forget: dexterity and harmony, ingenuity and movement, agreement and harmony blended into a cadence that, for For a moment, he had the virtue of transfiguring himself towards the end of this meeting – through the work and grace of the brothers Frédéric and Jean-François Pignon – in the spiral that the rose describes when it opens up in the warmth of the sun and of life to give us the spell of her beauty.
It was then that I realized that Avignon, considered the rose of the world among cabalists and necromancers, occultists and druids, revealed the alchemy of its essence in that circular movement of eternal return on itself. Exactly like the impulse of life, which unfolds, they say, in concentric circles, identical in composition and structure.
Euphoric, I wanted to comment the next day, Sunday January 20, on these and other details of my experience with that unknown writer, far from Barcelona for so many years, rigorously unpublished, and whom I met as if by chance on the occasion of that equestrian fair. But once again, Juan Gavilán Malandro had disappeared. Was his presence of him real or was it the result of an invention, a literary device of the already hackneyed «magical realism»?
At the hotel reception nobody knew how to inform me of his existence. I only found the trace of one Carlos Pulido, a journalist, who, in effect, had stayed until that very morning in that establishment, located opposite the magnificent Palace of the Popes.
Confused, I came to think of this curious joke of fate: literature, once again, had given way to informative, effective and highly productive journalism. Literary creation had been left behind as a frustrated vocation in the person of Juan Gavilán; a redoubt of memory that only serves to cover reality with the fable of a lie. However, it is that lie that reflects our deepest truth with greater precision and transparency, the one that can never be realized and that, like a watermark or filigree, crosses the web of time to give us news of what is permanent, essential and invisible.
Thus the city of Avignon, which only shows what it hides and that our eyes will never be able to see… not for lack of clarity, but for the terrible evidence that dazzles us.
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