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THE STRESS OF STORMS THE CANOE |
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THE STRESS OF STORMS THE CANOE |
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HORACIO QUIROGA
(1878-1937)
Uruguayan essay writer, poet and story teller. He was born in
Salto in 1878, and died by his own hand (cyanide
poisoning) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1937, after discovering he had cancer.
Quiroga’s life was tainted by tragedy. When he was only three months old, his father accidentally killed himself with a shotgun. In 1891, his stepfather committed suicide. In 1902, Quiroga accidentally shot his best friend. In 1915, his first wife committed suicide, and that same year his literary master Leopoldo Lugones died the same way. However, things did not stop there: after Quiroga’s suicide on February 19th, 1937, his daughter Egle also committed suicide and years later his son Dario did so as well.
It is true that the tragic and fatal aspects of his life have touched and seduced us, but not as much as his literary creations. Many of his stories take place in the Misiones jungle where Quiroga took refuge.
To mention just some of his works we have: Cuentos para una noche de insomnio y fantasia nerviosa (Stories for a Sleepless and Fantastically Nervous Night), “Anaconda”, “El crimen del otro” (The Other’s Crime), “Los perseguidos” (The Hunted), “Recuerdos de un sapo” (A Toad’s Memories), “Sunstroke”, “The Decapitated Chicken”, “Drifting”, “The Lazy Bee”, “El Yaciyateré” (The Yaciyatere), “Los Mensu” (The Mensu), “Los cementerios belgas” (The Belgian Cemeteries), Stories about Love, Madness and Death, “El vampiro” (The Vampire), “Su ausencia” (His Absence), “El techo de incienso” (The Incense Ceiling), “Sin razón pero cansado” (Tired but Without a Reason), “The Dead Man”, “Más allá” (Beyond) and many, many more.
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THE CANOE
The man had been feeling something inside his stomach that grew like an anaconda.
Forced by it he abandoned the jungle territories that for so long had been his willing exile and his literary and emotional refuge.
He returned to the city, a land of greenhouses, where tragedy strikes hard too many times. He returned with a legacy of violent stories and the innocence of death raped.
That morning, a hospital radiology room revealed with its monochromatic xrays, the cancerous hypthalmic spot on his entrails. The man knew he was already dead and his hand, heir and witness to many suicides, preferred to anticipate the inevitable in order not to suffer the agony of an illness.
He then marched to his forest-like city home and there he chose the best tree for the task. Lifting the garage door he headed to the wall where the tools hung. His trembling hand wielded an axe which he sharpened until nightfall.
Tired but without a reason, he tried to sleep and to ignore the incense ceiling.
He could not, but his thoughts were enough to help him get through that sleepless and fantastically nervous night.
Morning arrived when he was next to the tree that had already fallen by a swing of the axe. The Yaciyatere, a bird of omen, cackled its curses from above since it no longer had a nest.
The man, surrounded by mallets, chisels and other tools, guided by his own design, started right there his last great work.
“Horacio! Boy, Horacio! Where have you been?” cried his friend Julio Roldan who had decided to venture to the writer’s house after several days of calling him on the phone.
“Julio! Julio! Over here!” answered the man between the trees.
“Holy Christ, Horacio! You look awful, my friend.”
“It’s a cold, my friend, the one I always catch at the beginning of summer,” said
the man who was wearing a leather jacket that noon. After shaking the wood shavings off his beard, he asked impatiently, “Julio, do you know anything about canoes?”
“About canoes? Well… yes… I know about them as much as a journalist might know about literary critique,” said Julio smiling and trying to soften the expression on his face.
“No, no… This is different. This is about logic and common sense.” Grabbing Julio’s sleeve he dragged him six feet to where his finished canoe was.
“Horacio Quiroga! But this… this is a masterpiece!” cried Julio after observing the canoe that was as graceful as a nymph.
The man stroked the polished surface of the boat and, like an initiated in the craft, he started revealing to his friend the secrets of the shipyards’ hidden art.
“Look at the precision of its lines! All of them are like words in a poem. They have a reason to be, because in nautics that which is not absolutely necessary is too much. The more we simplify its body the stronger and more beautiful it will be.
Observe how the curving of its shape starts at the bow and ends harmoniously and definitively at the stern… And this, my friend, is not easy to achieve… in spite of the fact that I followed a formula,” he said pointing with contempt at the scribbled drawing.
“That is impressive, Horacio. It’s perfect! But….”
“My friend, you only have to start,” interrupted the man, grabbing Julio again by the sleeve to make him sit inside the canoe. “What do you think?”
“Well… it’s small like a coffin… but effective… yes, yes, very effective,” Julio answered nervously, trying to change the subject.
“Of course it’s small! Small as a story! A canoe doesn’t intend to be a transatlantic. A canoe knows that time is too short in this wretched life to lose it in an even more wretched way at sea,” said the man.
“There’s no doubt about it,” Julio agreed since he had no intentions of contradicting his friend.
“A canoe drifts on a stream without ever losing sight of land. It sets sail knowing precisely where it is going. It’s not public transportation and it never carries useless loads. In a canoe there is no time or space for a long novelistic parody. To overload it is to sink it and its most important thing is….”
All right! All right, Horacio…,” Julio interrupted when he noticed the man was going to run out of breath. “But why a canoe in this city without rivers?”
Grabbing his friend’s sleeve even tighter, Quiroga walked him out to the door with slow but stern steps, without saying anything.
“Let go of me, Horacio! It was only a question,” Julio begged.
When he came back, the man lied himself down effortlessly inside the canoe to drift away… Like a snake’s bite, the cyanide he drank killed him little by little so in death he could forever sail on the waters of time and become a castaway.
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| ANTERIOR | ÍNDICE | SIGUIENTE |
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© Alberto Sibaja Álvarez. San José, Costa Rica
® The Stress of Storms
