Remarks prepared by the Argentine novelist Miqueas Suarez for delivery in San Rafael, Sonora, Mexico, September 3, 2008.

(Translated by Jack Gilbert, and re-published with permission of the author’s estate)

I was at the Velodrome, in Blanes, during the Christmas Eve storm of 1987. It was the night that the poet and essayist Andrea Sepulveda, who was in town to give a reading, learned about the death of the Argentine poet Raiquen Parra. Most of us in the audience were displaced Argentines, lowlifes working on the fishing docks, or at the canneries, or, if we were lucky, at the university as janitors where we could steal books and toilet paper and other essentials. Parra had been like a distant star to most of us, an absent father, a father from whom we had fled, not vice versa. And like all displaced children, we treated that absent father as something of a Saint.

Sepulveda, who had been slated to read from his newest collection of critical essays, stood before us while the lights of the cafe flickered and yawed, and told us, his voice wavering, that he had just been informed that ‘the great lyrical voice of the Argentine diaspora has passed into the next life.’ There were some sobs and yowls, some shouts of disbelief. Sepulveda, who was a Chilean and still a devout Catholic at that point, led a prayer. His relationship to Parra was that of a brother. Parra, obviously, was the older brother, and he cast an incomparable shadow. And their relationship had developed accordingly: hostile at times, deeply competitive, but born, ultimately, of an extraordinary affection. They saw, in one another, something of a doppelganger: two working class boys born on the campo, two boys who had probably passed one another in the depths of night aboard the ferries of Lago Argentina, two boys who grew up to voice the ugly truths and urges of two countries that wanted nothing to do with them, that wanted to silence them, that even wanted them dead.

So it was that Sepulveda read the entirety of Parra’s seminal second collection of poems, Monolith. At some point the power in the café went out for good and some candles were lit and Sepulveda continued reading, his voice growing so soft as to be almost a whisper, the tears on his craggy face occasionally being caught in the flicker of the candles. Most of us knew the key passages by heart. We read along with him, giving him strength when his voice faltered. It was a night that I have not forgotten.

The death of a public figure is always a strange thing; all the stranger when that figure is a man of letters. While most public figures derive their allure from a detachment and aloofness, the literary man is most powerful when he is splayed completely open to the public. In fact, he is at his most powerful when he is so open to the people that he is not of them, but below them. From this degraded position he can function as a savant or saint, an emotional cripple or recluse. Here, one imagines Tolstoy wandering the villages of Russia, spewing mysticism. Or, as most of us imagined on that December night in Blanes, Parra in his hut in an olive grove on the Azores, feverish and grief stricken, writing in the late lonely hours of the night, writing as if his life depended on it.

The myth of the author, a myth that we still hold dear, exists only when we believe the author has been stripped of all artifice and superficiality; we need to believe that a few, exceptional men can convene directly with the spare, ascetic truths of the world, armed with nothing more than their fortitude and intellect. At the same time, this conversion or transfiguration that the writer undergoes must not be merely an act, a gesture of good faith aimed at bolstering his own potential myth. It must be an honest expression of his nature.

And this, here, is the first problem with loving literary figures. Of what is a man made? Words or actions? Are the two separate? Does one weigh more than the other? When a Nobel laureate, who writes movingly about colonial oppression and the need for a native identity, is revealed to be a tax cheat and a wife beater, what man are we to trust? The man of the book, or the man outside of it? Can we still identify with the man of the book, can we still feel satiated by his words, or does loving the violent writer betray a deceptiveness and a violence in our own nature that has been previously overlooked?

It is not uncommon, after the death of a famous author, for his relatives to reach out to the newspapers. And while they thank the fans of the writer for their letters of love and support, there is almost always a twinge of jealousy and resentment in their statements: We’re glad so many of you feel connected to the writer, even feel love for the writer, but those of us who lived with him, ate with him, slept with him - that is to say, actually loved him - would like to report that not everything the writer said was brilliant or wise, that he had an awful temper, terrible gas, chewed with his mouth open, was manipulative and dishonest, enjoyed humiliating others for their lack of education, and, during his long senescence, renounced almost all of his early work. It’s as if they can’t help reminding us: you think you loved him, but all you really loved was the façade.

Of course, then, what will remain of the writer in a century? Only the façade. Only the myth built out of the façade. Because the great writer, the truly great writer, the one who will endure, creates a hermetic universe in which there are not many novels or many poems, but one novel or one poem. It is in this universe that the author’s myth walks, alive and well, after the man, with all his flaws, has died.

Why is it that we fall in love with these myths? One might as well ask: why do we feel that deep, ineffable pang of immortality when meeting a pretty woman by chance, a woman who seems to understand us on a subterranean level? If one reads enough, eventually you will come across a sentence or a story or a poem that seems to have been written just for you. Just as if one meets enough people eventually you will meet a few that seem to have been born just to come into your life. This is called solipsism and creating a narrative, and these are things we do because we need to feel that the world is not meaningless and random, and that our lives are more than one chance encounter layered upon another.

But this is cynicism! Because as any lover of literature knows, there are books that speak to you, that sustain you. And when you discover such a book or such an author, one feels the strangeness of loving a writer: at once you feel part of an erudite fraternity, a privileged brotherhood - but you also cannot believe that your fellow men, those not indoctrinated, haven’t been opened to the beauty of this particular writer. You want to spread the gospel while at the same time protecting the gospel from being bastardized by popular co-option.

It’s funny, because a man who has fallen precipitously in love with a woman does not go around to other men on the street saying: you must meet this woman and spend an afternoon with her. And this, to me, is one of the ways in which literary love is better than romantic love. It is a love to be shared. It’s a love that reminds us, with time, as we meet more people who love the same writer, that our tastes are not unique or divined, that we are, ultimately, rather ordinary. Literary love is the kind of love on which a community can be saved. And this, ultimately, is what all writers, or want-to-be-writers, believe at their heart: that books can save the world.

We feel this way, of course, because books have saved us. There is a famous anecdote. I’m sure many of you have heard it. After a reading, a man approached Parra, and hastily told him, “Your writing has been keeping me alive for twenty years.” Before the writer, stunned, could respond, the man had disappeared into the crowd. It’s the kind of story that, at first blush, strikes as apocryphal. But the more I think about it, the more I decide that, anyone who has loved literature feels the same way about at least one author. It is perhaps the great pleasure of reading to find one’s despair ameliorated by the familiarity of a voice, that bolt of recognition: this is my voice, this is my idea, this is how I have always felt. I am not alone.

When I was a much younger man, there was a woman I loved very dearly. She was living in Granada at the time, that haunting Moorish city in the south of Spain. I decided, one weekend, to surprise her. I took a train to Madrid, and from there, endured a sweltering, cramped bus ride to Andalusia. I took only a small knapsack, and two books: the first was a novel, some generic thriller that I can’t remember. The other was Parra’s most recent poetry collection, a book I’d read and re-read, a book that was so well worn it’s spine was disintegrating. I arrived, bedraggled but exhilarated. I found my lover’s apartment, and rang the bell. You can probably guess what happened next; the fate that has befallen many an overly ambitious, sentimental lover: a young man in just a towel answered the door.

There were no more buses until morning. I was resigned to walk the streets of a beautiful city that was, suddenly, marred by heartbreak. I marked off every place that me and my lover had been, every café we’d shared a drink, every street corner we’d crossed, and found myself thinking, The last time I was there, we were together. I felt a despair that bordered on bottomless, a kind of loneliness that I hadn’t known since the death of my father. How to explain this loneliness accurately? I suppose I don’t have to; anyone who has loved, and then been surprised by its demise, will understand the pain. I see some of you cringing or nodding right now, in fact. It’s a pain you want to forget but cannot.

I sat down on the front step of a closed grocery. This was down a narrow alley near the cathedral, at the foot of the Albayzin. I sat there and I sobbed uncontrollably, pitifully, hoping for someone to notice me. Hoping that someone would sit down beside me and listen to my sorrow. But there was no one around. I was alone. I couldn’t stand that thought, that aloneness. I didn’t know what to do, but sitting there sobbing alone was unacceptable. So I took out my well worn copy of Parra, and I started to read. At first the going was difficult. My thoughts kept turning to my lover, to the man in the towel, to the beautiful city forever ruined in my heart. But soon I found my way into the spare, natural verses. Soon I found that the sentiments Parra was writing about, previously veiled to me, were suddenly opened. It felt like a dear friend was sitting beside me, his hand on my shoulder. But it was more than that. It felt like a ghost at the center of this inexplicable universe was embracing me.

There is a poem in that collection about a man whose wife has died. It’s about Parra, of course; a poem he wrote after his long isolation in the Azores, where he ran off with a student of his. The woman died unexpectedly, quickly. In the poem, the narrator, sitting at a café in a faceless, nameless city, watching the traffic go by, listening to the advertisements on the radio, remembers sitting in his stone hut six months after his wife has died. He remembers how when he was repotting a plant of hers, he found a strand of long, black hair in the dirt. A hair of hers. He remembers crawling on all fours through the house, scouring the place by candlelight looking for another hair of hers, just one more hair. And sitting at this café, this moderate and temperate café, the narrator misses that devastation. He misses its magnitude.

I thought then, lost in my own devastation: this pain will eventually pass. You will get over this woman. You will love other women, and lose them, and get over that pain, too. And someday you will miss this pain. Someday, all you will want is to be this young again, this naïve, this heartbroken over a woman. My pain didn’t lessen of course; but it transfigured from something to be escaped into something to be savored.

This is what the great writers do. And it is why we fall in love with them. And when they die, it is why we feel that loss so acutely. It’s why we cry for them; because we are crying, selfishly, for ourselves. Because the memories that the great writer eternalizes become our memories. We draw on them for strength in our times of loneliness and sorrow. Because the degraded writer, far more than any of our friends - with their vanities and their egos - manages to write purely, without ego. And in our most squalid moments, which are also our most human moments, this is the fraternity we need. We cry over their deaths because a bond has been broken: they, as writer, are supposed to draw on their memories to create provender from which we draw sustenance.

It’s more than that, of course. It is empathy, and humility. It is mortality. We cry because a light has been extinguished. We cry because the writer takes to his grave a reliquary of beautiful moments that will never again be visited. We cry because we are reminded that our memories, too, will someday vanish. In these moments of literary loss, we are spurred forward: to preserve what we can while we can. To create our own provender, fallow as it may be, so that future generations might pull from it what nutrients they can. To erect a world in which our own myth might walk.

After that stormy Sepulveda reading all those years ago, I went home feeling wrung out, the way one feels when tackling enormous grief or enormous beauty, which are, ultimately, nearly the same thing. I found a bottle of whiskey and poured myself a glass and then I went into my bedroom, which was, at the time, a forest of literature, and searched my many parapets of books for my collections of Parra’s verse. I could only find one, even though I knew that, at one point in time, I had owned all seven of his books, even the two of his that were out of print and exceedingly rare. I had lent all but one of his books to friends, family, lovers. The one that remained was, in fact, his last book, my least favorite of his works. Still, I sat down, and read on my balcony until dawn. I drank and I read every poem in the book aloud, feeling the words anew, feeling the man anew, all his longings and sorrows and triumphs that were coming alive inside me, and inside the other readers around the city, the other readers around the world who were mourning this man, this boy from the campo born to shepherds. I was walking with his myth in the poem he had built. And as we walked, we were spinning a thread, a thread that extends both backward and forward into perpetuity and that connects me to my fellow readers, wherever they might be.

I finished the whiskey, and shortly thereafter I finished the book, the great writer‘s final book. It was dawn. The frozen red sun was burnishing the snow covered roofs and streets of my small city with its pale flame. I went inside, sat down, and I started to write.