“Hast Thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling . . .”
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Writers form the strangest friendships. More than with any other social bond, the essence of these relationships are predicated on logos; the logos of St. John, where words float between the hemispheres of sign and symbol, love and sorrow. I count my writer friends as my intimates, yet I have personally met them a few times if at all. Through the exchange of letters, books, and newspaper clipping, writers delve into each others' subconcious landscape, becoming more than friends though a little less than kin.I count poet Saul Bennett, whom I met but once in New York City, as one of those special friends. His generosity of spirit was such that his sudden death in 2006 has left an emptiness among his friends best described by the Spanish word aucencia, an absence juxtaposed with longing.
**
My friendship with Saul began with death. In late 1997, my father had passed away from pancreatic cancer. I was working with Archer Books editor John Taylor on revising my second novel, Chronicles of Air and Dreams. I was having difficulty concentrating, becoming progressively more depressed as though my father’s passing had revealed to me the physical borderlands of death. John’s business partner at Archer Books, Rosemary Tribulato sent me a copy of Saul’s book of poetry, New Fields and Other Stones, which dealt with the death of his 24-year old daughter Sarah.
Thus, began a bond based on what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called the tragedy of man’s death. I began reading Saul’s book at the same time I was helping my mother with the unpleasant legal transactions to remove the existence of my father’s memory, just as Saul had done with Sarah. Only for Saul Bennett the tragedy of man’s death was compounded by the realization that he had outlived his child.
Months later, Rosemary mentioned that Saul was applying for membership in PEN America. As a member of PEN USA, the West Coast division of the organization, I offered to write Saul a letter of recommendation. When Rosemary shared with Saul what I thought of his work, he was immensely surprised and humbled that I had compared him to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Intrigued, he wanted to know what I had written. When Chronicles of Air and Dreams was published, Rosemary gave him a copy. Shortly thereafter, Saul sent me an email. “When I reached the final words of the novel," he wrote, "I said, ‘It can’t end. There has to be more. I don’t want Maria Elena [the protagonist] to leave.’”
Later, Saul sent me a complete set of Lawrence Durell’s Alexandrine Quartet. “It’s the same story four times,” he told me. I knew what he was saying: Write your story again and again and again. There has to be more, and it can only be completed by the fourth time. Bring her back, that woman Maria Elena. The poet discerned that Maria Elena was no mere actor. She was the mythic woman escaped not only from the imaginations of men but the silent aspirations of women; the mutilingual magician driven to madness by the many truths of her many languages.
So it was Saul’s desire for the continuation of the story of Chronicles that inspired me to finish The Stillness of Love and Exile, a novel I had begun from the seed of an unpublished short story. Yes, Maria Elena was there. But more importantly, there was Lilia, who is merely another interpretation of the mythic woman: the prototypical human being who discovers the difference between fate and destiny.
I wrote three different versions of the novel before I finally settled on the narrative: a combination of my own family’s Sephardic heritage, the colonial history of Mexico’s Northeast, and more importantly, the journey of Lilia Cantú, a young woman whose escapes the humiliation of her rape through love, and whose desires recreate the destiny of Miguel Treviño, a man shaped by the forces of modernity but who possesses a thread of primal memory and the nascent longing for a woman’s love .
On the cover of The Stillness of Love and Exile is a version of a painting of an apparition of Lilia she as if is being dreamed, but by whom? The ambiguity of the painting intrigued Saul. One of the versions of the book cover was of the whole painting. “Use that one,” said Saul. “It’s more romantic.” Maybe it was he who dreamt it.
Dream of Lilia, by Michael Parillo, Jr.
**
I chose the name Miguel for Lilia’s love interest because I had just finished reading Miguel de Unamuno’s Paisajes del alma, his beautiful mediations on Spain and its hidden landscapes of the soul. I wanted to send Saul a copy of Paisajes del alma, but there are no English translations of the book, as if the work is untranslatable and can only exist in Spanish. The character of Miguel was meant to be Unamuno in the New World. Like Unamuno, my Miguel would contemplate the pathos of the centuries and contradictions of the landscapes with its islands of unmoved time. I had entire passages, deleted from the final version of The Stillness of Love and Exile, which echoed Unamuno. I wrote those especially for Saul, as though they were transcriptions of Paisajes del alma:
For the Spanish poet and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno winter, not spring, was the signifier of innocence and rebirth, and the snowfall the guardian of silence. Once, as he watched the moonlit ravines and steppes of Tudance, he wondered whether there were geographies that existed outside of history in a realm of perpetual prehistory or perhaps “intra history.”
The philosopher divided the landscapes of his native Spain into what he called “the mother of men" and “the daughter of men.” “The mother of men” he imagined as a land whose many fruits nurtures men, feeds and protects them generation after generation and shields them from the advances of time. In this land Unamuno saw a world unlike that of the centuries before, where ghosts are unable to discern their passing in a landscape unchanged, where prehistory resides like a shy beast on the verge of extinction. The “daughter of men,” however, was what he called the harsh lands that demanded the sweat and devotion of men and exacted its penalties in measures of time.
Unamuno in the New World would have regarded the majestic, Mediterranean-like California as the “mother of men”: a land of oak groves sprouting on rolling hills that resemble entombed dinosaurs; the vast grassy fields--cousins of infinity--where the breezes manifest themselves like invisible seas; and the moody shores where windswept waves crash against the prehistoric crags like suicidal lovers.
Unamuno would have called the desertic lands of Texas-Coahuila the “daughter of men,” for its essence can be best captured by the Spanish word extramadura: The land of extreme brutal summers and equally paralyzing lunar winters where hidden streams interrupt the landscape as it dreams itself a desert. But Unamuno would be wrong, for in the New World, it is this land with its nights of stillness which is the refuge for exiled memories and dreams deferred.
**
Two years later: My Advanced Composition class at Cosumnes River College had just completed the Carlos Fuentes novella Aura, a haunting story about desire and identity, which had greatly influenced my early development as a writer. As part of the students’ final assignment, they were to write their own ending to the novella.
“Look,” I reassured them, showing them a copy of The Stillness of Love and Exile, “I wrote this book in part to address some of Carlos Fuentes’s themes in Aura. So if I can write a whole book, you can write me a couple of pages.”
Their endings were so brilliant and original that I decided to share mine with them: I gave each a copy of the book.
“Who are Saul and Elisa?” asked one student when she read the dedication page. “Are they Miguel and Lilia in your novel?”
I was completely caught off guard. “No,” I said for the lack of a better answer. “They’re two friends of mine who wanted me to write them a book.”
But I’m not so sure anymore. Saul Bennett---who discovered the eternities of August on the streets of 1940’s New York, who heard the stray echoes of Spanish words of his ancestors in Argentina, who recovered the silences of exiled memory in crumbled photographs---in a different existence would have been the character Miguel Treviño: Miguel de Unamuno in the New World.
_____________________
Rosa Martha Villarreal is a Contributing Editor to Tertulia Magazine. Her novel The Stillness of Love and Exile won an 2008 Independent Publishers Book Award Silver Medal for Best Fiction in the Pacific-West Region.
Michael Parillo, Jr. is an artist living in Jackson Hole, WY.
Copyright © 2008 by Tertulia Magazine. All rights reserved. The articles, documents, and information on this web site are copyrighted materials of Tertulia Magazine and its writers and artists.
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