No matter how much one insists otherwise, there are things (phenomena, ideas, objects, texts, bodies) that are indivisible—at the risk of breaking irreparably—or that resist fragmentation. Personal libraries would qualify for both statements, perhaps because, as a whole, they seem like pure substances composed of elements that may not be chemical, but are certainly sentimental (a word from which, by stretching the meaning and etymology, we can derive the phrase “seed” and the action “to feel,” as accidents of the verb “to be”). Libraries are the fundamental quark of a writer-reader.
And when one is a nomadic subject, an exiled (removed from the land), uprooted (removed from the roots) person; when one has to carry in one’s memory the titles and contents of volumes that one leaves behind in one’s moves—as in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—the symptom is much worse.
Deprived of what one has accumulated, one is an ex, one has taken a leap outside. According to the website Etimologías, “the word exile comes from the Latin exsilium, which in turn comes from exsul, meaning banished. Exsul was formed with the verb salire, meaning to jump, preceded by the prefix ex, meaning out. The original etymological meaning of exsilire was to jump out.” Poetry, that angular, oblique mode of thought, forgets the parachute as it plunges into the void of its own explanation:
The mobile homeland
very often.
The dissonance,
more certain
than any truth.
(María Negroni, Exilium, Vaso Roto, 2016)
“Mobile homeland” is an arbitrary synonym for the portability of a pile of books. Here is one of those dissonances, a snapshot of the itinerant wealth of a displaced poet, an exilic testimony:
This photograph is an eclectic fragment of a bookshelf from what was my library in the house in Santo Domingo that we sold after the pandemic: a wooden snail-ash tray with a missing horn (bought in Rome in 2008); a small clay virgin brought by my wife in 2017 from her native Bogotá by her friend Consuelo; and a pencil head with the figure of El Chavo del 8 in his barrel, which we bought in Mexico in 2010. And a cigarette box-book by Leónidas Lamborghini, so that the poor mollusk could rest his head, resting in turn on the Poema de la hija reintegrada (Poem of the Reintegrated Daughter) by the Supreme Pontiff of the Sacred Hill, Domingo Moreno Jimenes (crushed at the bottom, as a reminder of the “coup d’état” of his posthumous companions and the peculiar volatility of poets). And more bookish disorder.
Sometimes I think about that house, a duplex, whose mortgage we took out at the end of 2009, and which would be our first property. We were attracted by a sonic incentive (the foreign cachet of the neighborhood and the street: a cul-de-sac in Sans Souci, and multiple Italian-Dominican families) and an olfactory one (the hordes of invisible drops laden with saltpeter that constantly besieged the air from the Caribbean Sea 100 meters away). Our only daughter arrived there a month after she was born in Beverly. Our first dog, a purebred gift from a prominent journalist, got lost there, and later Picasso arrived—an adult with a short life—and, barely weaned, Biquini, a wonderful Chow Chow/Pug mix who is still around, giving us something to bark about. In the courtyard, I found a useless little bitter guayiga plant that I never wanted to dig up, I harvested bananas, planted a guava tree, and ate ripe mamones, under whose tree I also read every day and to which I transplanted an orchid. The guest room was designated as a shelter for my books, strangers who, like me, would one day leave.
Let’s continue with the image: the snail-shaped ashtray is a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. We abhor tobacco, but Ivelisse and I were instantly drawn to its pragmatic rusticity, sold as if it were nothing special on a blanket in the freezing December streets of Civitavecchia. And since then it has been with us, although it has never been used for anything other than decoration. It has not aborted volutes or eclipsed incandescence, nor has it harbored ashes in its hand-carved shell. The wooden horn that is missing was amputated by our daughter when she began to walk like a hurricane.
The Virgin with the baby Messiah in her arms is by no means stylized, let’s face it, but it is nonetheless a charming piece (I’m sorry to write it in English, but the translation “encantadora” is simply flat). I didn’t know its origin, unlike that of other virgins we own (are they still possessed?), until the Colombian-Spanish poet Ivonne Sánchez Barea clarified that it is a ceramic virgin from Raquira, Boyacá, Colombia.
We also bought the pencil head with the figure of El Chavo on the street, but in Mexico City, along with several other characters from the Chespirito universe. I love to use it to disrupt the geometry of the spines, to break the solemn solitude of pretentious volumes, and I usually place it, for example, in front of Popper’s Endless Search, the printed copy of Being and Nothingness, or Larva, Babel de una noche de San Juan, by Julián Ríos, whose copy (number 196 of 303 copies of the first edition, Ediciones del Mall, Barcelona, 1983) I inherited, of course, from José Kozer.
The book in the shape of a cigarette box, by Leónidas Lamborghini, is titled Partitas and was published in Buenos Aires in 2008 by the National Library. I got confused imagining that it also came to me via Kozer, perhaps mixed up with the accordion-booklet La salvación de Wang-Fo by Margarite Yourcenar, which he definitely (it is underlined and has handwritten notes) left me, along with hundreds of others and dozens of bibliographic rarities, when they left Forest Hills in 1997 for the small Spanish town of Guadalupe and from there to Hallandale in Florida. The utilitarian position of the boxed book under the spout of the snail-shaped ashtray was a gag from my human comedy: Lamborghini’s poems, which are quite good, would be “unreadable” (when in fact they are not, quite the contrary).
Someday I will tell how I ended up being the main recipient of the enormous Kozerian library, and how, two decades later, I returned some of those works that he had painfully parted with when he left. We exiles understand each other. The mestizo diaspora is now assimilated to the levels of the Jewish diaspora. Just watch the news.
This composition, this snapshot between calculation and spontaneity, I would like to think that in some way defines me: religious emblem of an agnostic, living nature but dry wood, inane television figure, pure poetry from which to apostatize. It looks like a Joseph Cornell box intervened by Lorenzo García Vega, to the point of having no edges and being horizontal.
The rest that can be seen (the asymmetry of the books, their torticollis-like stacking, the blinds without curtains…) is not disorder or chaos: it is the anarchy of my order. There is a reason why I am the author of Vicio, Pseudolibro, and Un minuto de retraso mental.
