I don’t want to die tomorrow or ever./ I just want to become the fruit of another star.
And now I realize that I have done nothing else in life but ask questions,
and then reproduce what I thought was the answer.
Gastón Baquero
The poetic, essayistic, and even journalistic work of Gastón Baquero (1914-1997) is full of thematic alternatives, where the reader starts, stumbles, and continues because he learns as when he begins, accompanied, a journey. Yes, the journey is the constant that radiates from the reconstructed world of the boy from Banes, the agricultural engineer, the editor-in-chief of the Diario de la Marina [1], the first to praise in writing, at different times, the also young José Lezama Lima and Gabriel García Márquez, the exile in Spain, who often associated the poetic act with the planting of a seed or the birth of a flower. The journey as the emotional pilgrimage of a life that bears witness by imagining in order to change the world, whether in the distance or in the proximity of death: “To speak of what has not been seen is to create. To attempt to describe what has been seen is a utopia, because reality is elusive to words and even to the gaze.”
Death in Baquero’s poetic work, when not named, is concealed time and again in the loss of innocence and in personal events, in the supposed anachronism of contexts, in transfigurations or “in the successive changes of names” [i]. “The rhetorical self traversing time in a hymn to the imagination that allows it to transcend limits” [ii]. In addition to an approximation of loneliness with death and the atmosphere it creates, due to the lack of bustle, what is the poem that Baquero writes about the park in the town of his childhood about?
The park in my village has/four laurel trees and the bust of a patriot. // When the afternoon is made of quiet light, /the old women arrive silently.// The afternoon is the most beautiful thing in this village, / and its nights are sad, // when the park is left desolate, / with its four laurel trees and the bust of a patriot [iii].
At the age of thirteen, he also composed an elegy in Banes for a deceased classmate. One does not know how much of this is true or added to the story. It does not matter. Although he disowned many of his early poems, Baquero always wanted readers to set aside the anecdotal, autobiographical, and plot elements of the poem in order to delve into its peculiar tone or sound.
In Cómo un cirio dulcemente encendido, the book produced in Cuba that comprises Baquero’s complete poetry, one appreciates the direct and subtle references to the theme of death. From “Qué pasa, qué está pasando…” (What’s happening, what’s going on…), not to mention such well-known poems as “Saúl sobre su espada” (Saul on his sword) and “Testamento del pez” (Testament of the fish), to “La primavera” (Spring), death contemplates and is contemplated. Even when he does not need to mention it, he suggests it, as in “Palabras escritas en la arena por un inocente” (Words written in the sand by an innocent) or “Memorial de un testigo” (Memorial of a witness). In both poems, a number of historical and literary figures appear (Darío, Aristotle, Julian the Apostate…, Napoleon, Bach, Whitman, Raphael, Queen Christina…), and one comes to understand why the poet has called them upon, rather than to recreate a cultural synchronicity, a “historical remembrance” [iv] or a desired multitude in the face of imperious loneliness.
Baquero (…) chooses to open himself up to the appropriation and reordering of a memory that allows him to reflect not on, but from the simultaneity of times, never to overload or hide, but to enchant and reveal. Baquero presents himself to us as the spectator who bears witness to a legacy that integrates and reorders, amplifies and subverts, but which, above all, is resistance to death and its corollary, oblivion [v].
Jorge Luis Arcos draws primarily on “Saul upon his sword” and “The knight, the devil, and death.” In this way, he generalizes a poetics that addresses the condition of sleep. But what kind of dream? Well, the physiological dream and also the one that allows us—with awareness and attentive eyes—to await the arrival of death. “Hence, in his poetry, we appreciate an intense experience of the unknown and a vision of death as a dreamlike flow within life; that is, death is assumed to be a presence within life” [vi].
What are Baquero’s concepts of death? More than concepts, look for appreciations of death in his poetry, essays, and articles as a close presence and as an excuse to recapitulate lives. If in “Jorge Manrique en América,” for example, he says: “One can sing of death in such a way that life remains forever in the song” [vii], “Monólogo con don Quijote” is one of the texts where we find several striking reflections on the subject of death. We are faced with a flurry of doubts that he, with obvious confusion, tries to answer.
Who can tell me that this idea that death is a form of life is true? The daily and historical experience of it is different, very different. Does death live by being dead, which is its life? Or, as we all feel, does death die to life and life remain dead, which is death? That dying is the fact that, by taking us—or leaving us—before the great doubt, leaves no room for any doubt. It may be my ignorance, or insufficient cosmic insight—call it what you will—but I do not understand, no, any doctrine that seeks to explain death to me from the point of view of death itself. I am alive, or what we call alive, or whatever. And while we are alive, we can do nothing but feel alive and never dead [viii].
What is “Monologue with Don Quixote” if not an invocation of a dual literary figure (Don Quixote/Don Miguel de Unamuno) who cannot die in the pages of a book once the reader knows him and decides to take him with them. His monologue is an extensive portrait that is well worth reading if this poet/essayist/journalist invites us to reflect on the subject of death: “Turning our heads toward the stars when the mud has already won over our hearts is our glorious advantage over the beasts.” How beautiful is that image of the lifeless body!
Baquero’s curiosity in the biographies of many personalities reveals his desire to recognize—in order to recognize himself—the man who becomes a creator, the creator who, because he lives, suffers his daily life and, because of or in spite of it, proposes work until he dies: “(…) we men have no history, only biography.”
Although there are other noteworthy texts in his work, closely related to the “last” departure or to the intimate and circumstantial nature of the absence/presence pairing, the reader cannot overlook “Horacio Quiroga: a response to death.” Here, the Uruguayan writer is described as a messenger of destiny who came, not to incite us to die, nor even to teach us the right moment to leave this world on our own. Quiroga also came to narrate an untimely farewell that, of course, he would not be able to fully appreciate. How can someone pit their life against their art in this way? Fear of existence? Lack of control over the measure of life? Perhaps the South American writer’s inner demons whispered to him: “Your final fall may be more aesthetic than all your dubious conquests. Remember how much you have lived to see death.”
Quiroga constantly opposes the relentless presence of Death with the relentless presence of recognition. A powerful intuition—one might say a message from life—told him that there is no more perfect way to evade terror than to immerse oneself, face to face, in the waves of terror [ix].
A traveler who contemplates; a tenacious pilgrim because he dreams and imagines. A tireless witness who recreates the “supreme passing to stay that is Death…”, Gastón Baquero seems to remind us of a declaration of principles that is, in time, an inspiring testament and his defense of the nonconformist poet and man—Baquero and death would be enough for a whole book: “The only thing that has interested me on this journey towards dying that is being alive is to invent, to fabulate, to imagine for any reality the part—the whole—that I believed was missing. I am not unaware of the arrogance in this, but arrogance is also an indomitable instinct.”
[1] It was in the Diario de la Marina (1832-1960)—famous not only for its conservative and reactionary tendencies, but also for the great Cuban and foreign writers it welcomed into its pages—that he devoted himself to journalism in a conscientious and quantitative manner, publishing more than a thousand articles. As a result of the criticized preferences and political ideology of the self-proclaimed “dean of the Cuban press,” there has been a tendency to dismiss its great cultural content, to which Baquero was an indisputable contributor, in addition to having been one of its distinguished editors-in-chief. Any treasure, wherever it may be, deserves to be sought out and more. For it is not the desire to search—the supposedly most fundamental and vital condition, if you will—that makes the treasure important. It is valuable and will remain so, once we feel the need to appropriate it upon finding it.
[i] Antonio José Ponte: “Baquero en el árbol de la poesía cubana” (Baquero in the tree of Cuban poetry), in Proposiciones magazine, Year 1/Issue No. 1/1994, p. 62.
[ii] Carlos Barbáchano: “El hombre que ansiaba las estrellas” (The man who longed for the stars), in the magazine Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos. January 2015, No. 775, Madrid, p. 27.
[iii] Ibid., p. 11.
[iv] Regarding Gastón Baquero’s poetry, María Zambrano wrote: “For time passing through the sky is the first lesson in history, and anyone who has not seen Alexander ride, empires agonize, and the thousand joyful deaths of martyrs in the clouds slowly marching toward the horizon will never be able to understand history. The ‘human’ must be ‘imagined’, according to the ancestral method of my Andalusian philosophers, which I see encouraged in this Cuban poetry of counter-anguish.“ (María Zambrano: ”La Cuba secreta” [Secret Cuba], in Orígenes, Year V, Havana, 1948, p.6).
[v] Gastón Baquero: Como un cirio dulcemente encendido (Like a Sweetly Lit Candle). Complete Poetry (Compilation and prologue by Pío E. Serrano/Epilogue by Manuel García Verdecia), Ediciones La Luz, Holguín, 2015, pp. 15-16.
[vi] Jorge Luis Arcos: “Gastón Baquero o la poesía en el jardín de la muerte” (Gastón Baquero or Poetry in the Garden of Death), in Proposiciones magazine, Year 1/Issue No. 3/1995, p. 56.
[vii] Gastón Baquero: A Small Sign on the Chest of the Star. Essays (Selection, prologue, and chronology by Remigio Ricardo Pavón). Ediciones La Luz, Holguín, 2014, p. 335.
[viii] Ibid., p. 331.
[ix] Ibid., p. 256.
