Remarks prepared by the Argentine novelist Miqueas Suarez (1951 - 2005) for delivery in San Rafael, Mexico, September 3, 2005.

(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 Andrea Sepulveda, the great Chilean poet, learned about the death of 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 stood before us while the lights of the bookstore 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 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. Their relationship had developed accordingly: hostile at times, deeply competitive, but born, ultimately, of an extraordinary affection. They saw something of a mirror in one another: 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 desires 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 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. Here, I imagine Parra in his hut in an olive grove on the Azores, feverish with grief over the death of his wife, scribbling away in a notebook, writing to save his life. We need to believe that a few, exceptional men can convene directly with the spare truths of the world, armed with nothing more than their fortitude and intellect. At the same time, this conversion 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?

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 were the words, which were not the same as the man. Which is where we as writers say: what have we but words?

But maybe they have a point. Let’s look at it from their perspective. Men who were courageous on the page were often cowards in real life. Men who wrote beautifully about colonial oppression, oppressed their wives through beatings. Men who wrote about the splendid beauty to be found in the banal killed themselves to escape the banal. Books can lie.

But in a way, the great writer lies so well that it becomes truth. What will remain of the writer a century after his death? The man who was a coward, or the heroic books? The great writer, the truly great writer, creates a closed universe in which there are not many novels or many poems, but one novel, 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 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.

Some will call this solipsism. They will say we are manufacturing a narrative, and we do this 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 a special 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 of this writer, while at the same time, you try to protect that gospel from being co-opting by agents of commerce.

It’s one of the funny things about loving a writer, this desire to share. 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. No, he tries to keep her all to himself, sometimes at the cost of his sanity.

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 as we meet more people who love the same writer, that our tastes are not unique or God-given; that we are rather ordinary. Literary love is the kind of love on which a community can be built or even saved. And this is what all writers, or want-to-be-writers, believe at their heart: that books can save the world.

We feel this way because books have saved us. There is a famous anecdote about this. 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 Parra, stunned, could respond, the man had disappeared into the crowd. It’s the kind of story that, at first blush, struck me as made-up. But the more I think about it, the more I think that anyone who has loved literature feels the same way about at least one author.

When I was a much younger man, there was a woman I loved very deeply. She was living in Granada then, 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 late at night, exhausted 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 turned ugly 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 alleyway 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 and got married. 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, 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. 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. There will be no more new books from which to draw strength.

It’s more than that, of course. We cry because the writer takes to his grave 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 universe, 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 a forest of literature, and searched my many redwoods 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 burnished the snow covered roofs and streets of my small city. I went inside, sat down, and I started to write.