Behold Things Beautiful

by Cora Siré

  Calzada de silencio

  With so much vested in her work, you obsess about the poet, forming hypotheses and theories, wondering what would have become of her had she survived as well. After three collections published in her lifetime, how many more poems were inside her? She might have extended to fiction or essays. She might have achieved eminence, been invited to lecture in North America or Europe. How would she have continued her artistic revolution, the expression of a woman’s heart? Gabriela Mistral and Alfonsina Storni were inspired by her. Juana de Ibarbourou considered Delmira her older sister. Had she lived, who else might she have inspired?

  She would have participated in the emancipation of Uruguay from provincial outpost to cultural centre, beginning with the Perón years, when intellectuals fled Buenos Aires for Montevideo. Delmira Agustini would have witnessed the prosperity as Uruguay became known as the Switzerland of South America and the rich flocked to the beaches in Punta del Este, before it became today’s celebrity haven with its Conrad Hilton casino, its yachts and beachfront estates belonging to Hollywood and Russian expats.

  Her politics would have taken shape. She died too young to have her convictions truly tested, but the open spirit of her poetry makes it impossible to imagine she’d have lived the years of military dictatorships in silence. When the Tupamaros were formed in 1963 by middle-class students agitating for change, Delmira would have understood their frustrations. After they were killed in peaceful demonstrations, she would have spoken out. And when they resorted to kidnappings and guerrilla tactics, she might have tried to intervene, convince them that their violence against the urban conservatism of Montevideo was a deadly mistake. In the junta of 1973, Delmira would have been three years shy of ninety. Would she have denounced the generals and alerted her people to beware the tactics inspired by Pinochet? The rounding up, the torture and disappearances executed by a military trained in the U.S. and abetted by Washington at a distance.

  We can only imagine how far her courage would have gone. How far does anyone’s courage go when a branding iron is held to their flesh?

  Your theories are hypothetical. Despite the submerging in poetry, music and painting, the reaching towards things beautiful, she dies in a rented room shot in the head by two bullets. All the masks she invented for herself couldn’t save her. Final silencing of the exile who never left.

  La senda más negra

  Another century, another continent, and you stand facing rows of desks. You ask the class to turn off iPods, phones and laptops, wait as they rummage in knapsacks, whisper and pass notes, settle down from their treks through the snow. The students, seventeen to twenty years old, are the sons and daughters of people who have journeyed from El Salvador and Mexico, Honduras and Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru and Argentina. When they speak, you hear the variegated castellano of the Andes, pampas, coasts and islands. You are doing the modernistas with them and by now you can predict their responses to the poets. They like Rubén Darío for his anti-Americanism, César Vallejo for his heroic populism and the love sonnets of Pablo Neruda.

  Today you’re teaching Agustini. Most will not have read the textbook in advance and you provide the context. They half listen until you mention murder, suicide, sangre. The rummaging and yawning cease. They like their details gory. You ask them to open their texts to a verse. Then you call on the loner in the class to read it out loud because the poet was a loner too.

  At first he recites without absorbing the words. Surreal images of caranchos, intruders and demons, angels and statues, stars and serpents. Then vampires, lips that kiss and curse, poison, daggers and swords. The young man’s face reddens, the others are silent. They recognize the singular violence of a southern spirit, the passion of a voice their age.

  The words and cadences come back at you from the concrete walls. The mute winter light outside the windows makes you hurt for the bluest of skies you left behind. You look beyond your reflection, momentarily visualizing her blue silk slip, hair curling over her shoulders, her frank gaze on the back of the student bent over her poem.

  And then you tell them of her legacy. Her body rots in the tierra of Uruguay. Her real remains are her poems. Delmira Agustini believed the poet is a seer who brings light to suffering. She considered the labour of creating poetry divine, and her works stand for liberty of the highest order, liberty of spirit. Her poems lead like a trail of polished pebbles, words that made her contemporaries so uncomfortable. The track gleams in the moonlight, transforms in time into an open highway: follow me to freedom. In the Americas, you say, her anthem still resonates.

  When you tell them of her last hour, there are questions and discussions. Who was he, Miss? Did she plan to die in that room? Even the loner expresses an opinion. Her anguish was real, he says, it must have been a suicide pact. Another student argues, no, she wanted to live. Her husband was crazy!

  Two hours pass and when they scramble to leave, you remind the students that the next class falls on Valentine’s Day. For this gringo invention, they are to bring one dish of food from their country, algo muy típico, and one page of their writing, poetry or prose. It will be a fiesta, you promise, you’ll bring humitas, typical of the Andean region where Ernesto Guevara was assassinated in 1967. And in that moment you think of your loved ones back home with a longing you’ve tried to shed. It clings like a second skin.

  Mi alma

  Exile. It’s an exhausting masquerade. You recreate yourself, fake happiness and a sense of belonging and hope that by trying hard enough, the pretense will become real. You’re drawn to other travellers and sometimes, you’ll find connection with a national excited by the exotic. Together, as friends or lovers, you attempt to cross cultures. The most direct path to assimilation is to fall in love, integrate through sex. You try to dismantle your roadblock to intimacy, the vault in your mind where you store your horrors, shed the second skin. You might succeed at metamorphosis. You’re isolated at times, but you endure.

  One day you find the courage to return, walk the streets memorized in your internal map. In a state of hyper-awareness, you encounter the smells and tastes you’d missed so much. Nostalgia fades. You are no longer who you were. You’ve become someone else and you discover you’re an exile in your own country now. You try to recreate your sense of belonging in the arms of another damaged soul.

  Someone asks you to speak out. Tell what happened, how you became an exile. You find yourself entrapped, your deepest self too exposed. The fight resumes, you’re a mayfly caught in a mesh of arguments. Break the silence. Speak out so that your country can move forward, so that this never happens again. And yet you know it keeps recurring. Here and there on the globe, the powerful decide a certain person, a certain segment is inconvenient, has written subversive words, must be eradicated.

  Para entrar la Ilusión

  You owe her this. Not a eulogy but a final snapshot of the effect she had on strangers. A photographer perhaps, whose camera, much like a poem, compacts reality into an image of hidden truths and ambiguities.

  The scene unfolds on Calle Sarandí, a fashionable street in Montevideo. A carriage pulls up to a studio and Señora Agustini steps out first, followed by the poet. “Hurry, Nena. The photographer’s waiting.”

  Let’s say he’s Corsican, French-speaking and, like many of the immigrants here, well adapted to his new country. He’s setting up the Graflex and lights in the studio although he much prefers shooting outside to capture the subtropical flowers and vines, the plátano trees in the city’s resplendent light. He’s obliged to take portraits to earn his livelihood. At least this one will be credited in a book of poems. Laying out the unexposed plates, he hopes the session will be short. The name Agustini means nothing to him and he foresees a pale, gaunt youth with eyeglasses.

  Imagine the photographer’s surprise when a woman of notable girth enters the studio followed by a girl who looks to be no more than eighteen. Only later, he learns she�
�s actually twenty-three. The photographer, Domingo let’s say, greets the mother and before he can address the poet, Señora Agustini establishes the ground rules. The portrait must be taken in profile, emphasizing the best features, the little earring, the flower in the hair, the pearls around her neck. It must convey the poet as chaste, for that is what she is!

  Domingo’s only thought is how to get rid of the mother. This requires tricky manoeuvring. Women are restricted in Montevideo, they can’t go out alone, walk the streets, be seen unaccompanied by a man. They’re obliged to swim on segregated beaches, covering themselves from neck to ankle. Domingo affably plays the artistic card, asks the mother to leave the studio for just an hour. He must concentrate, he cannot speak. The lights heat the studio. The mother’s upper lip is coated with sweat and because he’s the best photographer in Montevideo, she capitulates and leaves.

  Delmira sits on the banquette facing the lights. He looks through the lens at her. She’s turned her face for a profile shot. Such an obedient daughter. The mother’s paying, so he’ll comply, then take the shots he thinks best capture the poet. She says nothing as he steps from the tripod and approaches her. He moves her hair, tilts her chin. She doesn’t flinch. Domingo shoots. Then he comes to take her by the shoulders. She faces the camera. He tells her to look over his left shoulder. He shoots again. Back and forth he walks between his subject and the camera. She doesn’t recoil when he touches her, but she doesn’t respond.

  Domingo can’t know how monumental it is to be touched by a man in a manner she’s explored in her poems, experienced in her fantasies and rarely in reality. When the mother returns, the poet says, Vous êtes un artiste et je vous admire. He replies, Au revoir. She shakes her head. Désolée.

  When he reads of her murder in El Día, the photographer recalls the small gloved hand taking his before she left the studio, the honesty in her blue eyes as she rebuffed him. Ten years later her last collection is published. In a bookstore on Calle Sarandí he discovers how it is that she’s haunted him all this time.

  In your chamber covered with reverie, make waste

  Of flowers and of spiritual lights; my soul,

  Shod in silence and dressed in calm,

  Will go after you down the darkest path of this night.

  Turn out the lights and behold things beautiful;

  Close all doors and enter illusion;

  Uproot from mystery a handful of stars

  And cover with flowers, like a triumphal vase, your heart…

  —Delmira Agustini

  from “The Encounter”

  Los Astros del abismo (1924)

  A Concise History of Luscano

  by Dr. Federico Molino

  Translated from the Spanish by Hannelore Stern Álvarez

  In the beginning a peaceful community of villages lies nestled along the coast and riverbanks. Until the clear summer day, some say in December, others January, when a flotilla appears on the horizon. Two children are playing on the sandy beaches of what’s now known as the Bay of Luscano. Nearby their parents are hauling in fishing nets when they hear the cries. “Look! Look!” The children point to the horizon. Word travels and eventually most of the villagers gather to watch the approaching ships. When they drop anchor only the wisest of Guaraní sense danger. In a month, following sign language offers to trade and help orient the newcomers, the community will be wiped out.

  Battlefields transform the land. Spanish ships are followed by Portuguese and later British fleets. Survivors learn the significance of waving white flags. The bloodshed seeps upriver into the forests and low mountainsides. Indigenous communities are massacred and those that survive retreat further inland only to encounter the Spanish conquerors bushwhacking down the Andes in search of precious metals and jewels. Missionaries arrive, sent by the King of Spain, to build churches and convert those who have not fled. On the site of today’s cathedral, a chapel named San Luscano after a minor saint is constructed for the forced weddings of Guaraní women to Spanish men. Thus begins so-called integration. Generations of mixed blood or mestizo offspring establish plantations to grow food, markets to sell their wares and inns offering rooms and meals to travellers. The port flourishes with trade, shipbuilding and fisheries. Franciscans open schools and teach their Catholic doctrine. Resistance merits hanging and torture. In the plaza, one of the remaining Guaraní leaders is bound by ropes, his arms tied to one horse, his legs to another. The horses are whipped to gallop in opposite directions. The man is torn apart.

  Caudillos emerge as new leaders in the nineteenth century. One, Hector Molino, owns a prosperous plantation of corn, sugar and livestock. Inspired by Bolívar’s exploits in Venezuela and Bolivia as well as San Martín’s victories in Argentina, Chile and Peru, he plots to expel the Spaniards from one of their last strongholds. He and his vigilante friends and neighbours, sworn to secrecy, meet for months planning their battle. Trading sugar and tobacco for arms, they amass a ragtag army equipped with rifles, slingshots and deadly poison-darts while waiting for the opportune moment. It comes in March 1895, when a fleet of Spanish ships is destined to stop over from Cuba. Lookouts are posted on the cliffs, and a messaging system, delivered by horseback and mule, is devised to alert the cavalry. Molino prepares a shadow government of councillors to seize power once the attack is underway. On the night of March 15, the ships drop anchor and as Spanish naval forces come to shore, they are attacked by a band of caudillos waiting on the wharves. Most of the Spaniards retreat to the ships. Those who try to enter the port are scalded to death by cauldrons of boiling water or oil dropped by boys from the second floor windows of the buildings along the winding alleys. The Spanish oligarchy, occupying the mansions on the shores of Barrio Norte, is given two days to leave then summarily executed. On April 1, 1895, a provisional government declares the newly formed country of Luscano an independent republic.

  Peace is, and will remain, elusive. The caudillos do not have the luxury of celebrating freedom. Every border, south to Uruguay, west to Paraguay and north to Brazil, is subject to ongoing battles with the new republics and the last holdouts of Spanish and Portuguese mercenaries severely weakened by the independence wars fought throughout Latin America. The flag of Luscano, red and navy blue for blood and sacrifice, flies at the port and on government buildings. New laws, most favouring the landowners, are enacted, a Luscanan currency is introduced with one peso featuring the portrait of Hector Molino and trade routes are established. The council of Luscano is renamed a congress consisting of ten members designated from the thriving port city and countryside plus five senators appointed for life. Senator Molino dispatches an envoy of plantation owners to New York, a foreign policy initiative that paves the way for future ties with the Americans and significant borrowings from the US treasury backed by Luscanan commodities. The leader of the delegation, Patrón Ernesto Pindalo, returns with promissory notes in hand enabling him to establish Luscano’s first bank.

  Power structures inherited from the Spanish colonialists persist. Landowners alone may vote, then business owners and eventually, educators and clergy. The early caudillos build an army, drafting poor villagers as foot soldiers. With continued skirmishes to establish Luscano’s borders, most of the country’s income is designated for military purposes. Gradually, with the expansion of voting rights, democracy begins to take hold, resulting in increased access to education and medical care. But after the Great Depression and temporary decline in American trade, elections in the early thirties are largely rigged until a left-leaning coalition incites Luscanans to demand fair voting systems and increased citizen rights. Protests and blockades escalate. The port is essentially shut down for six months. But in 1940, just as Hitler is bombing Britain, General Augusto Fernandez engineers Luscano’s first post-independence military coup. Under his leadership, the junta endures for ten long years, aided and abetted by General Perón in Argentina, who aligns himself with the Germans until the end of World
War II when, smelling impending defeat, he declares himself on the side of the Allies. General Fernandez does not follow suit. The Americans retaliate, weakening Luscano’s military government. In 1950, the first democratic elections are held in a decade.

  Luscanans are often described as fiercely independent and somewhat insular, more intent on upholding the traditions of family and community than on what transpires outside their borders. The country accepts a certain quota of immigrants particularly from Italy and Eastern Europe, as well as neighbours fleeing hostile environments, all of whom assimilate relatively quickly. This tradition continues throughout the twentieth century. For a long period, the country’s democracy endures even while military regimes and dictatorships decimate the region. Exiles from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay arrive in Luscano throughout the seventies and eighties, most just passing through. They tell of abductions and torture, of state surveillance and terrorism targeting artists, activists, Jews, psychologists, journalists and intellectuals. Few listen to their stories; those that do naively cannot fathom how such tactics would ever work in Luscano. In the late 1980s, at an American-led conference in Bogotá, delegates from Luscano align themselves with one of the region’s last dictatorships, Chile’s Pinochet regime, and are dismissed by US Department of State officials as a “bunch of loose cannons.”

  The bloodless coup – as it’s first called – presages another terrible chapter in the country’s history. In 1990, a handful of senior armed forces’ officers led by General Adolfo Galtí storm Luscano’s Government House to seize power. For five years, the military inflicts state-sanctioned violence, abducting and imprisoning without cause hundreds of citizens in La Cuarenta and other prisons in the countryside. When the prisons overflow, the incarcerated are taken to fields, given shovels to dig graves and trenches, and executed. Many leave Luscano, seeking exile in neighbouring countries and abroad. Morally and financially bankrupt, the military concedes power to Congress on the condition that a full amnesty is declared for all members of the armed forces. In 1995, Ferdinand Stroppo is elected President, gaining a second term five years later. At the time of writing, Congress is considering amending Luscano’s constitution to allow Stroppo to run for a third term in 2005.