It was a year ago. Alvaro Mutis joined the sky. The immense Colombian writer deserves to be read and re-read. This sparkling monarchist projected a bridge between old Europe and South America. His poems, his stories, his novels carry and carry our history through the figure of Maqroll el Gaviero, solitary sailor, disillusioned, dreaming of the Empire of Byzantium or the reign of Saint-Louis aboard old tubs close to sinking.
Tag: Alvaro Mutis
Letter to my friend Alvaro Mutis
One day in the 1990s, we were walking down the street, we were leaving the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, and Alvaro Mutis 1 stopped short. We were almost at the corner of the rue de Grenelle, and he said to me: “Emmanuel, I have the impression that we walked like this together a long time ago in a street in Cadiz. And we were having the same discussion. I confess that I no longer remember our remarks. I am certain that if Alvaro Mutis were still alive, he would remember it.
Alvaro Mutis had a special relationship with life. He lived by handling memory and immediate reality. He always put one foot in one and one foot in the other. With him, these two worlds never left each other, they were close, went hand in hand, like conjoined twins, like a one-way life, for the better. Alvaro Mutis was living his life and other lives, lives he had lived before, or would live later. Above all, Alvaro Mutis lived, at all times, accompanied by a young boy, this still child was called Alvarito, he was always with us. Carmen, Alvaro's wife, accepted his presence even though it was not her son. I have never met someone like Alvaro Mutis. I mean there was something terrifying and intriguing about his presence, his presence as a child next to the same middle-aged adult. I told him that often. I told him that Bernanos, whom he loved, also had to live like this with the incarnated afterglow of a young self by his side.
I come here to tell what I know of Alvaro Mutis, Maqroll el Gaviero and a few others… These last years have been slow and long. We corresponded much less. He no longer wrote. He hadn't written for so long. The tremors had taken over. A certain emptiness too. Everything was doomed to disappear like the stump of a dead tree that disappeared in a week in the damp furnace of the Amsud. Everything had to pass, and this spectacle of life in action never ceased to amaze Alvaro Mutis throughout the ninety years he spent on this earth.
Alvaro Mutis on the monarchy
The paradox, quite painful for me, is that very young I was already a royalist. I could almost say, since childhood. My first readings of history led me to research where the monarchy came from and how it worked. I know full well that the monarchy, as I conceive it and other eras have experienced it, is now unthinkable.[…] For me, a power that comes from a transcendence, from a divine origin, and which is assumed as such by the king, as an obligation before a being and an authority superior to men, is much more convincing. From this engagement of the king comes the source, the origin, the reason for this power which is his during his life, as well as the right of his sons to inherit this power, after the ceremony of the coronation. This seems much more acceptable to me, and I commune and live with it much better than with laws, regulations, codes approved by a majority consensus, to which I must submit and which were created by men in my image. That the majority agrees on the fact that society should be like this or like that, for me it means absolutely nothing. For this society to deserve my respect, for me to feel concerned by it and for it to be entitled to my respect, it must be of superior origin, and not the fruit of a logical process, rehearsed and prepared by a group of men who claim to represent the majority of the population. Because in my opinion, it is then the most abominable tyranny that can exist.
Extracts from Souvenirs and other fantasies , book interviews with Eduardo Garcia Aguilar, Editions Folle Avoine.
Excerpt from Le Hussard. Poem by Alvaro Mutis
[…] The century-old must of wine, which is sprinkled with water in the cellars.
The power of his arm and his bronze shadow.
The stained glass window which recounts his loves and recalls his last battle darkens a little more each day under the smoke of the lamps nourished with bad oil.
Like the howl of a siren announcing to boats a shoal of scarlet fish is the complaint of the one who loved him more than any other,
the one who left her home to sleep against her saber slipped under the pillow and kiss her a soldier's hard stomach.
Like the sails of a ship that swell or sag, like the dawn that dissipates the fog on the airfields, like the silent walk of a barefoot man in an undergrowth, the news has spread of his death,
the pain of his open wounds in the evening sun, without pestilence, but with all the appearances of spontaneous dissolution.
The whole truth is not in this story. Missing in words is everything that constituted the drunken cataract of his life, the sonorous parade of the best of his days that motivated the song, his exemplary figure, his sins like so many precious coins, his effective and beautiful weapons.
Excerpt from the poem Le Hussard published in Les Elements du Disaster, Editions Grasset. Tribute day to Alvaro Mutis, extraordinary storyteller, immense writer, wonderful friend.
Night. Poem by Alvaro Mutis
The fever attracts the song of an androgynous bird
opening the way to the insatiable pleasure
that branches out and crosses the body of the earth.
Oh !
the fruitless navigation around the islands Where women offer the traveler
the cool balance of their breasts
And the terrifying sound in the hollow of their hips!
The tender, smooth skin of the day
is falling apart like the shell of an infamous fruit.
The fever attracts the song of the cesspools
where the water carries the garbage.
With the poem Nocturne published in The Elements of Disaster, Editions Grasset, I begin this day of homage to Alvaro Mutis, extraordinary storyteller, immense writer, formidable friend.
Another stopover...
Alvaro Mutis is a very great writer and what does not spoil one of my very dear friends. As he hasn't published any books for a few years, I thought I would pay him a little tribute through quotes from "The Last Stopover of the Tramp Steamer", this short novel is full of the grace that reading Alvaro Mutis provides. To re discover the Colombian writer.