The penultimate survivor of the most prolific period of Spanish literary culture in the 20th century, Jorge Edwards died in Madrid at the age of 91. shortly after he told his last visitors he would take a nap. It was Friday afternoon, because after the noise of Madrid and the city where he had spent his last years and so many years had passed, he would begin his moment of silence on Núñez de Balboa street, close to where his friends were. bookstores and friends and bars.
The writer, Peruvian Jorge Eduardo Benavides, who was with her recently, remembers her half-asleep, half-hopefully, as if she thought she would continue to serve those who asked her out despite her age. to eat or drink, as until recently. But died. Jorge Edwards died and An era is closing that could or would not exist in another era without the capacity of memory..
A infinite memory capacityActually, it goes with it. Naturally, his books remained, many of which were dedicated to the memory of others, for example, relatives, and another very important – the memory of Pablo Neruda, whom he met as a child, who had recently died, and was already its author. general song he was more than a poet, he was a world icon of poetry and contemporary devotion.
In the world of memory, he dared to face first-person the Cuban revolution, one of the most promising and saddest events of modern life in Latin America. Where he went as business manager of the Salvador Allende Government, his desire to find himself there with a truly new world was cut short.
revolution is a dissimilar set of bureaucracies and orders it wasn’t really revolutionary, and it’s disappointing universe Persona non grata. This is how he defined himself, while ingratitude for himself and for the future of these hopes was to confirm that the revolution should already be remembered in small letters (because it soon became a memory).
This disappointment in Edwards marked that book, but unfortunately, as it was then, and continues to be so now, it also marked the literary world’s relationship of attachment to the author of these grievances, which combined anger and melancholy. HE Persona non grata It was the vital testimony of a man who, though not a victim of melancholy, was indeed the culprit of an unexpected passion: the passion of having to reinvent himself as a writer, an intellectual, amid warnings of betrayal that had finally gone unnoticed. through it. He never lost his humor and, of course, his memory.Perhaps this was what kept him alive until the final hours, when his friends, this time Jorge Eduardo Benavides, went to see him so that he could continue to recount the unpublished details of his long life and friendships.
Well, Edwards was a friend of the whole world like Kim from India, apart from the minor reservations of the early hours of post-Cuban history. Invited to homes and literary trips, he spent his life near Carlos Barral or Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Marsé or Carmen Balcells, this episode in no case has followed him beyond contemporary minorities. About his memory (the outstanding biography/novel about his uncle Joaquín Edwards is endless, family useless) the world was built in such a way that others don’t know how to countJorge Edwards has never been egocentric.
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Rather: Edwards, as a writer, the testimony of the past leads him to successive melancholics of resentment.. He was a quiet talker; He knew more than he was telling, and he spoke as if he were writing. In the final months of his closest relationship with destiny, now fatally realized, he speaks of himself and his family (i.e. anyone who touches the borders and lands of the world). boom) referred to others as if he had recently touched or encountered them.
I remember in the last interview I had with him about the possible poisoning of Pablo Neruda, he described everything around him in so much detail, with suspicions, proper names, barbarism, and also stupefaction, that it seemed to have a direct effect. beyond the visible memories or in line with the far here remnants of the present.
Benavides accompanied me on that conversation, and coincidentally coincided with the still-existing debate about the poet’s poisoning. He spoke to us fluently, It seemed that not only his memory, but also the spirit that lived in him had been reborn.And finally, as long as we kept talking or listening to the talk, he invited us to have lunch anywhere, because he liked conversation more than anything, but the other thing, precisely literature, was the real reason for his prestige. .
Another time I spoke to him, along with his friend, Asturian professor Eduardo San José, he was threading an unprecedented kite: paying attention to the afterlife, being a part of it and not. a farewell man was 92 and took us dressed to take us to lunch, to continue talking with Eduardo about all the stories that, once sealed and done, could be published as a novelty and a tribute to the great storyteller he continues to be.
Before the penultimate interview, when I went to see him for no reason, Jorge Edwards asked me: “And won’t you be interviewing me?” The joy of a date who wants to have at least a million friends around was hidden in this feature alone. He understood them despite Cuba and other bad time analogies. he was also a good personand this is something that, after all that has happened in the downpours of life, is much more than praise: the most remarkable part of validation.
In front of the world and others, a good man who laughed at himself like his ancestor died. Family unnecessary, He was perhaps the cleverest and most vain of his contemporaries.
Jorge Eduardo Benavides told me about him yesterday: “He was an intellectual. Immense transcendence and perfect tenderness. He gave us beautiful and above all bold pages. He is an honest, clear and lively man. About ten years ago, in Geneva, when he had just finished his job as Chilean ambassador in Paris, he confessed to me that he wanted to move to Madrid. “I want to live there without getting old.” He was eighty years old. I think this paints all over his body the tremendous vitality he retained until the very last moment. We’re going to have an aperitif tomorrow. That’s what he told me hours before he died.” And his friend, Peruvian Fernando Iwasaki, a writer like him, told me: “He was a Chilean Montaigne: a memoirist, a literary portrait artist, and an exceptional historian of the cities he loved.”.
He always asked us, “When are we going to have lunch?” he would say. He lived to relate to others. And he never sold his joy of living: he did.