The stealthy novel by José Guirao | Culture | EUROtoday

I do not forget that each time I invited José Guirao to talk to my college students, when reviewing his in depth and intense curriculum in cultural administration, he used to jokingly say one thing that, then again and sadly, actuality confirms all too usually: José Guirao had been Minister of Culture and Sports – one of the solvent and revered, between 2018 and 2020 – however anybody could possibly be a minister. His nice challenge was the invention of La Casa Encendida, he warned the scholars. For my half, it was a boutade half-hearted, particularly for somebody who had devoted his life to res publicaeven when he labored for personal foundations, as a result of the res publica It is nothing apart from taking care of the widespread good, scrupulously respecting shared values ​​and actually managing collective cash.

In this subject, José Guirao was unbeatable, demonstrating in every of his obligations – from Andalusia to the central Administration – his beneficiant, negotiating, trustworthy and dialogue dedication with the neighborhood. This perspective, up to now faraway from dogmatism, was the explanation for his permanence as director of the Reina Sofía Museum – between 1994 and 2001 – upon the arrival of the Popular Party, regardless of having been appointed by a PSOE authorities. Perhaps that very same discreet, skillful and clever disposition, by no means docile or accommodating, was what prompted the arrival of the Guernica to the Reina from the Prado. At the Reina, Guirao decidedly opted for Latin America, one among his nice passions, particularly by way of the good challenge Southern variations ―which occupied your complete museum and the Retiro buildings― and below his route the competitors for Jean Nouvel’s enlargement was held, which he by no means inaugurated.

However, it isn’t the general public servant within the strictest sense of the time period who we want to keep in mind on this event, though in so many positions of the very best accountability Pepe Guirao by no means left apart his sagacity, his delicate and calm spirit – of a Roman senator -; his humorousness, the unbeatable ardour for the humanities and literature. I want to do not forget that challenge that I highlighted in entrance of my college students, the situation the place he developed his passions in apply – together with his early environmental dedication. La Casa Encendida, stuffed with younger folks and which I now learn as chapters in a type of journey pocket book, had one thing of the place the place Pepe was fully free and let the remainder be free too. The identify itself, the title of a poem by Luis Rosales, was giving clues to the key now revealed; indicators introduced – though silent – by way of the fascination with Edmund Jabès or the buddies with whom he by no means interrupted the dialog the place the phrases take us – Goytisolo, Olvido García Valdés, Valente, José Miguel Ullán, Soledad Puértolas… -.

Rimbaud would arrive at La Casa Encendida ―amongst many different poets― in one of many exhibitions that Pepe loved essentially the most ―or so I believe―. Patti Smith, a singer with whom Pepe had a particular relationship, got here to sing Rimbaud. Patti Smith within the Valencia Round! How may we not suspect what, clandestinely, was hidden from view someplace. “And you, Pepe, don’t you write?” I requested him one evening, late, in Venice. He smiled slyly. She checked out me in that lovely manner of hers, with glowing eyes. He did not say a lot: Pepe was very reserved regardless of his extraordinary heat.

I simply remembered the element whereas I completed the pages of the novel that he left as a legacy, half written, lately printed by Pre-Textos, The waters of the evening, in an exquisite guide as an object, a kind of that Pepe and Ullán would have favored. José Guirao, Concerned about making issues simpler for others, remembers his buddy and collaborator Carlos Alberdi within the prologue of the furtive novel, he guarded over time, that point in writing that is just one’s whereas writing, that doesn’t belong to anybody. The first sentence provides him away: “He never knew how to write stories. He was overwhelmed by the very idea of ​​putting into words those stories that arose in his head and that worked naturally in him.” For me, it expresses the vertigo of the wounded lyricist: on the time of writing it, he was already trapped.

Then, little by little, by way of the narrator, the author that Pepe was emerges, an exquisite testimony of so many issues, from the household and its large and small troubles, to the libraries which can be liked and on which the narrator’s story – and that of the writer himself – is constructed; even the lights that remodel the seasons earlier than our eyes, within the countryside and within the metropolis. Or the walks by way of the landscapes that the writer liked and traveled till his energy failed – and past – and that on this novel he lends to the narrator and protagonist. Just because it occurs to baby readers – the one who was Pepe -, the protagonist of The waters of the evening He desires of residing inside a guide about Japan: he’ll go to it sooner or later. It was the journey that the enigmatic Pepe undertook alone and from which I preserve a tender silk scarf that I put on hardly ever to protect it from the passage of time.

Living inside a guide is an idea associated to Bachelard’s “poetic space”: “We feel that we should live there, between the same lines of the engraving,” writes French. It is about evoking the anticipation of the locations that we are going to finally go to, when the journey turns into a actuality, and that may usually disappoint us by showing uninhabitable of their physicality. “Why must we always look for what we cannot find, what we will never find?” Guirao asks in one of many concurrently lyrical and existentialist moments that recall his mystical poets. Towards the tip, instantly, the textual content turns into Borgesian, Pepe seems in his luminous contradictions: “The books that had saved him during his life became a single, unfathomable book.” It is just not a destructive feeling, however relatively an proof: it’s what occurs when the reader turns into a author. At final.

All that is still is to thank Carlos Alberdi’s effort – and care – in revising this textual content to share it with readers, respecting the textual content itself, with the help of Eduardo Lago and the remainder of his associates, whom Alberdi thanks for his or her assist and involvement. The textual content, Lago factors out, thus enters the magical Olympus of unfinished novels. There you’re, with Bouvard y PecuchetPepe. Not dangerous firm, proper?