Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben), page 49
NAPLES
Naples! The Vesuvius is still a pyre worthy of the funeral ceremonies of Patroclus. Are we truly in the Christian era? One has to put a strong bridle on one’s imagination to think so. The morning burns, docilely, with an impeccable azure. I have climbed to the heights crowned by Castel Sant’Elmo, the classic point from which to look out over the city, so that I may see and conquer before I plunge into that noisy world that whirls and laughs at my feet. And I tell you, my friends, that we are under the empire of the Augusti—nothing here reminds one of the Nazarene’s cross, nothing his religion of suffering and anguish. This sun, which even in the fullness of autumn roasts the roses, which flower twice a year, is the same jovial sun that gilded Seneca’s venerable forehead.
The Bay of Naples, softly curving, palpitating, like a swath of azure silk upon an immense lap, still sings the cum placidum ventis staret mare,105 in its perpetual idyll with the islets of Sirenusa, choirs of fair Oceanides. The brilliant azure of the sky, the historic azure of that immortal sky, mocks the twenty centuries that have passed since in the pious sweetness of Mt. Pausilypus the sweet Mantuan who cooed eclogues106 lay down for his eternal rest. To its right, the Isle of Capri casts upon the waves glints of aventurine107 veined with living gold....
HAMBURG, OR THE LAND OF SWANS
Huysmans has been unfair with Hamburg, and his harsh humor has been expressed in bitter paragraphs. Clearly, Durtal did not visit the paradise of swans, and M. Folantin ate badly at two marks fifty. Hamburg is gay, with almost Latin gaiety, at least so far as is admissible in a Saxon center. Hamburg is a working, trading, independent city, with its strict Senate, its factories, its canals, its grand hotels, its large warehouses, and is also a city that amuses itself, prettifies itself, flirts with the foreign visitor: it has a St. Pauli that resembles Montmartre as beer resembles champagne, open-air cafés on the bank of the Alster, which in turn is vibrant with yachts and plied by little steamboats—and on Sunday, comely lasses flirting to the sound of music. It has a large wealthy neighborhood which some call “Judea,” because powerful Semites enjoy, in their villas and “cottages,” the happiness lent by money. Huysmans vents his spleen against men and women from Caracas whom he found in this commercial emporium. I have found no compatriots of Bolívar, although it is not unusual to hear Spanish spoken, because the city has many Latin American residents, and Hamburgians who have returned to settle here with their criollo families after making fortunes in warm distant lands. Various architectures arise among the green of gardens or beside the orderly tree-lined avenues.
Helkendorf, fresh and flowery, has delicious corners in which one may rest, court, and daydream, for it is not impossible to engage in that delicate enterprise of dreaming in a city whose inhabitants, however practical they may be, have a poetic place in a turn in the river where a large number of swans is maintained by the public treasury. These poets have no occupation but to consecrate themselves to beauty, to be white—there are some black ones—and to glide nobly along, with the dignity bequeathed them by Jupiter. They meet those obligations most exactingly, and besides the daily ration put out for them by their keepers, the public gratifies them with bits of bread. The pool is crystalline, the river bank carpeted with flowers; the golden afternoons rain a magical grace over that divine spectacle that would put even Doctor Tribulat Bonhomet into a meditative mood. And the lyrical inhabitants of that glassy pond that multiplies their Olympian figures enjoy the sweetest beatitude in the capital of counterfeiters and Teutonic merchants. Although if truth be told, I have felt a bit uneasy when, eating in the company of my friend the Semitic exporter, he has told me, with an air of gluttonous satisfaction, that the swan, like the goose, well-prepared, is—oh!!—so very tasty.
And while we are speaking of lyrical swans, let me tell you that Hamburg has a Montmartre called St. Pauli. . . . Or so I had been told, at least. A Montmartre? . . . For sailors. With one or two cafés of note, where one can eat to the soft music of an orchestra. But otherwise, the theaters are squalid, with chanteuses much past their prime, heavy moo-ers of romantic ballads, or skinny Parcae who shriek songs in English or in German. There is not a single cabaret, a single long-haired poet (or a short-haired one, for that matter) who might evoke a memory of Privas, Rictus, or Montoya. In a great working-class auditorium, a military band gives concerts. On the town square, a guignol attracts a large crowd; the electric sign promises marvels, but inside, the entertainment is third-rate and tiresome. But then there are the restaurants, with their sweet soups, their sausages, their braten, and their excellent beers. M. de Folantin in one way was right. But—oh, Des Esseintes!—what about the swans?
THE SECESSION
In 1900, when I visited the Grand Palais to see the section devoted to the Viennese Secession, what I found were quite a number of sincere worshipers of freedom in art, seekers after the new, the strange, if that suited their temperament, or personal interpreters of ancient artistic traditions, all without worldly blague,108 without Montmartrean aestheticisms, without the absurd monstrosities which, among a very few works of talent, were being exhibited at the time by so many wretched painters in the Parisians’ Salon des Indépendants. Was the air different in Vienna? Was the struggle for la vie et la gloire different there? The fact is that in all the efforts of the artists of the Secession, I sensed a sincerity and a noble independence and a consecration to the ideal and realization of beauty very unlike the extravagant and arriviste épateurs that abound in Paris.
In their own building, built and decorated according to the aesthetic tastes and ideas of the organizers of the museum, the work of the Secession is exhibited in the Austrian capital as an undeniable testimony to the tenacity, the energy, and the talent of its pure artists. The museum is an “exceptional” museum, as Vittorio Pica would say. Nothing in it is vulgar or common, and in everything one sees a gift of high grace and a desire for loveliness and a strength of thought that marvelously honor and elevate the Austrian mentality of struggle. Here one sees that there is no attempt to épater les bourgeois,109 but rather offer them a new revelation of beauty. Here, noble priests show dreams, a life of mystery, and the brush and chisel speak the profundity of the unknown, the arcane depths of our human existences, and the enigma that throbs in all things. Whether synthetic or complicated, they express their meditations and the inner visions, or in a strange symbolic apparatus draw forth an aspect of a possible truth, or make the light of the soul bloom, or crystallize the indecisive and the recondite. And there is frank, open expression, and a disdain for all routine. This is the only museum in the world where not only has the academic fig leaf been destroyed, but men have had the courage to reveal the most private things, the courage not to hide the most hidden—to the point that one recalls certain memorable quartets by Théophile Gautier. The legend has its cultivators. I see a hundred canvases that do not attract me; I will not mention the names of their creators, for they are not on the paintings and I have no time to produce an entire catalog. I will, however, recall potent Franz Metzner, the Austrian Rodin, the creator of that superb marble poem called The Earth, and of admirable decorative studies and busts and statues of an imposing and comprehensive originality. Metzner’s The Earth is exhibited in a special little gallery, decorated only with expressive telamons110 and its unique, impressive, elegant simplicity. And the figure in which earthly life and rhythm and natural strength is expressed, reposes on its base like the majesty and mystery of a sacred simulacrum. What the Secession has sent to the St. Louis Exposition testifies to the value of its painters, decorators, sculptors, ceramicists, and furniture makers. Ferdinand Andri sends his valiant figures, which in some ways renew archaic Assyrian art; Metzner, his superb creations, his synthetic expressions of the human person; Klimt, his symbolic paintings of such extraordinary workmanship and profound meaning, such as The Golden Apple, Life Is Combat, Jurisprudence, and Philosophy, which caused such controversy when it was exhibited in Paris at the last Universal Exposition.
I leave the Secession delighted to have found a true temple of art in times when temples of art are in the hands of the merchants, the insincere, the second-rate, the histrionic. And I salute that generous effort, with the hope that in our lands of nascent art the individual energies of the pure, the uncontaminated may come together to make something similar, far from the shoddiness of the schools of limitation and atrophy and the vain fashions that have nothing to do with the eternity of beauty.
BUDAPEST
Budapest . . . the king . . . Maria Teresa . . . the blue Danube . . . paprika . . . Tokay wine . . . and an old operetta that delighted the years of my childhood, The Magyars, in which a chorus sang:
Come, gentlemen,
to the fair in Buda,
for today is the day
to buy and sell . . .
And the colorful apparel with its bright loop-and-button fastenings, its galloons and braid, and the little lay-brother in the convent:
Ego sum, ego sum
the little lay-brother of the convent,
Ego sum, furthermore,
the bell-puller and the sacristan.
And I was enthralled with the dashing city (or rather the twins, the two cities joined by magnificent bridges), its climate, its flowers, its walks, its elegant, modern neighborhood in which almost all the new buildings are art nouveau, or Secession, whimsical mansions belonging to the grand aristocracy and the proprietors of huge tracts of the lucrative puszta.111 It is delightful to stroll through the kiralyi var,112 and to admire the city’s palaces and greenery beside the blue waters of the burbling river. There are splendid edifices, such as the magnificent Parliament building, which is reflected in the Danube. The city’s broad squares, streets, and avenues, and, above all, the most beautiful women in the world make this place seem an earthly paradise. Oh! every country has lovely places and beautiful women, but the city of love and loveliness, believe me, is Budapest. There is one spot, in a suburb of the city of Pest, which is called Ó Buda Vára113—garden, walks, an evening fair filled with attractions, little theaters, kiosks selling all manner of things, glowing castles, flowers, perfumes, national songs, picturesque apparel—and there, I have seen a collection of beauties that would have set King Solomon himself (a man known for his exquisite taste) to meditating.
There has been one particular moment of national mourning—or more than mourning, glorification, apotheosis: the death of Jokai. Filled with the enchantments of this fascinating city, I attended the funeral ceremonies for its poet, its novelist, its national philosopher. The funeral cars laden with wreaths of flowers passed down Andrassy, on which the poet had, in life, resided; the cortége was solemn and magnificent. Representatives of the government attended the ceremony at which the memory of the old revolutionary was honored; colorful, picturesque uniforms of all types—military, university, heraldic—filed by in strict and rigorous procession. And on the balconies above, adorned with black crepe, there stood a multitude, with divine faces out of which gleamed marvelous Hungarian eyes. And at that splendor, that wonder of feminine beauty, when the coach with the freshest wreaths passed by—sent by the city’s students—I bought a bunch of roses from a flower seller and, unknown poet from a distant land, with beating heart, in a shiver of emotion, I, too, tossed my offering to old Jokai.
APPENDIX SELECTED LETTERS
(1885) To Dr. Gerónimo Ramírez
My dear friend:
I dedicate this little poem to you, a person who takes such pleasure in things of the mysterious Orient, a friend of all things luxurious and imaginative, someone who is so fond of that style in Zorrilla’s legends that is half pearls and half honey and flowers, to you, my dear Dr., since you are so benevolent with all that comes from my poor pen. You may remember when you suggested that I write something along the lines of the piece I have enclosed. Here it is. I am sorry that it did not turn out as I had hoped, but, unfortunately, I have been unable to find any of Theophile Gautier’s hashish anywhere. What are we to do!
Yours always,
RUBÉN DARÍO
(Managua), May 12, 1886
Rosario:
This is the last letter I will write you. Soon I’ll be taking the steamer to a very distant country and I don’t know if I’ll return. Before we’re separated, perhaps forever, I take my leave of you with this letter.
I met you, perhaps, to my great misfortune. I loved you and I still love you a great deal. Our personalities are opposites and despite how much I have loved you, it is necessary that our love come to an end. And since it would not be possible for me to stop loving you if I saw you all the time and knew how you suffer and how you have suffered, I have made the resolution to leave. It will be very difficult for me to forget you. If you were me, you would understand how I suffer, too. But my trip is arranged and soon I will say farewell to Nicaragua. I always wanted to fulfill our dreams. My conscience is clear, because, as an honest man, I never imagined that I could stain the purity of the woman whom I dreamed of making my wife. God grant that if you come to love another man you will have the same feelings.
I don’t know whether I’ll be back. I may never return. Who knows? I might die in that foreign land! I go, loving you the same as always. I forgive you for your childishness, that little girl in you, your groundless jealousy. I forgive you for the fact that you have come to doubt how much I have always loved you. If you were to remain as you are now, by moderating your character and your frivolousness, if you could continue in the same way as we did while we were first in love, I would return. I would return to fulfill our desires. You loved me a great deal, but I don’t know whether you still love me. Girls and butterflies are so fickle! . . .
If you love another, you will remember me. You’ll see. I have no desire but that you be happy.
If, while I am so far away, I were to receive news that you are living peacefully, happily, married to an honest man who loved you, I would be filled with joy and I would remember you sweetly. But if, in Santiago, Chile, I were to hear something to the contrary, some news that, even if I were to imagine it, would make my blood boil, if some friend were to write and say that you couldn’t bear to look into my eyes as we once did. . . . I would be ashamed of having placed my love in a woman unworthy of it. But this will not happen, I’m sure.
As God is my witness, I swear to you that the first person I kissed in love was you. . . .
I hope that we can see each other again with the same tenderness as always, remembering how much I loved you and still love you. Good-bye, then, Rosario.
RUBÉN DARÍO
Buenos Aires, February, 1896
Román Mayorga Rivas San Salvador
... And, to be honest, do I have anything to return to? No. Family? Have I by chance ever had a family among all those people with my surname that is mine alone today?
... I have a son and a sacred memory: that is my family. “Friends?” you might ask. Well, yes, my childhood friends are the only ones, but they’re gone, too. Some have died, others have distanced themselves. Some, when I see them, look at me as if I were a foreigner: they have treated me without the intimacy of our early years. I have discovered a new generation that was still in its infancy when I left.
So, each time I have returned to the land where I was born, I have suffered. Oh, Román, you know about the emotional sadness of my childhood, the sorrows of my youth: you also know, my dear friend, about the painful things that affect me as a man today . . . !
What else can I tell you about myself? That my life is my work. That I have given the press, especially La Nación, enough material over the last three years for three or four books. That I continue and will continue in the struggle . . .
RUBÉN DARÍO
Buenos Aires, (early 1896)
To Luis Berisso
Conchera de las Flores,
Gualeguay, Entre Ríos [Argentina]
My dear friend:
It was only a question of time before misfortune struck. The rosy part of life had repeated itself too much. Then came the gray or black part, the continuous parties that caused countless physical ailments and emotional sorrow. From the last time we saw each other until today, my brain has been on the verge of exploding, my blood nearly paralyzed; pain, fainting spells, a disaster. Then the immense disgust that considers death itself a refuge.
And then, bad news, and betrayal, and again my life grew dark at a time when it was beginning to brighten a little. Today, I was unable to eat with Doctor Iraizos because I was too sick. I have been alone, completely alone, at a time when this was least advisable. And letters that arrive, bringing terrible news, and things that I regret, and rumors and bad things!
Tomorrow, Sunday, some conversation with you would do me good. I have thought about priests, I have thought about dying—it would be for the best!—and I have gone through some horrible hours.
I need to go to some spot in nature, and not breathe this atmosphere. Come early if you can. The letters are the least of my worries; but they are a symptom. I have deceived myself, and when I least expect it, my enemies descend upon me, worse than what happened to Lugones, and I don’t even have Lugones’ enthusiasm or years of experience.
And then, some lines by Bartrina:
