In 1926, Maurice Maeterlinck published, with great success, as did everything he published, which was one and sometimes two books a year, The Life of Termites, an entomological treatise. It was a rather blatant plagiarism of Die Siel van die Mier, by South African writer Eugene Marais.
Marais had been publishing his ideas on the termite mound as an organic unit in the South African press, in Afrikaans, during the 1920s. Maeterlinck wrote in French and spoke Dutch, the language from which Afrikaans derives, and the reproduction of articles in Afrikaans in the Flemish and Dutch press was common at the time.
Plagiarism was served, but Maeterlinck did not seem to have all his wits about him, because in the introduction he tried to justify the absence of references on technical grounds and so as not to overwhelm the reader. This is common in such cases. Supported by a group of friends, Marais cried out for justice in the South African press and wanted to take the matter to an international court.
He only achieved some notoriety by trying to transform personal grievance into national affront: “I wonder if Maeterlinck blushes when he reads the critical acclaim and if he stops to think about what he has done to a poor, unknown Boer worker.” The worldly, acclaimed writer who devours the provincial, peripheral writer: we’ve seen that movie before, and it’s still playing.
Some even attribute Marais’ subsequent suicide to Maeterlinck’s plagiarism and lack of reparation. Marais retreated to the Karoo desert and abstained forever. The story goes that when social media appeared, I opened an account in Maeterlinck’s name and naturally illustrated it with a photo of Marais. Also because my street is named after the only Belgian Nobel Prize winner. And I am a neighborhood symbolist, very much into red ants and blue birds. And social media is just a way of being in the world, “for now.”
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Iñaki Uriarte recalls what Franco’s police had written on Savater’s file: “Moderate anarchist.” Which reminds me of the distinction made by Nicanor Parra when referring to Octavio Paz: it is not the same to be a diplomatic surrealist as it is to be a surrealist diplomat. Some time ago in France, a series of 20th-century police files were exhibited. Mann, Hitler, Dalí. On Cocteau’s file it reads: “Poet, anarchist, homosexual in Paris.” It is one thing to be homosexual and, apparently, quite another to be homosexual in Paris.
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In my childhood, suicides were published in the press in great detail. They were treated in the same way as crimes. There was always a neighbor who claimed that the suicide was normal, or a brother-in-law who took advantage of the coverage to spread vile rumors. Everything conspired to make suicide seem like a crime, whatever it was.
That made me feel somewhat uncomfortable. It was a contradictory discomfort, because it also aroused my curiosity to know why. It is mysterious to someone who is driven by a tremendous desire to live that someone should decide to kill themselves. As you go through life, you see some friends die by their own hand, and that represents a conversion. It is no longer curiosity that draws you to the suicidal person, because you are already close to them. In such cases, all you can do is try to understand.
I haven’t thought much about this, but it seems to me that suicide is now relatively normalized in the country where I live, at least on the surface of social life. It’s another thing in people’s consciences, in their feelings. It depends on the case, but the little cloud of guilt that remains floating despite everything is sometimes carried by the suicidal person themselves and sometimes by those who were close to them. Because they were there or because they weren’t.
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One Sunday afternoon in 1960, two children are walking down a street in Santiago, Chile. They are both eleven years old.
That day, they are taking part in a trip to the countryside organized by their school’s scout troop. But they misbehave and, as punishment, the leaders send them back on a bus. They are on their way home, resigned to having to tell only half the story. They are Rodrigo Lira and Sebastián Piñera. As life goes on, the former will become, in his own words, a skilled manipulator of language.
The other would become the businessman who introduced credit cards to Chile and later the President of the Republic. Roberto Careaga tells the story in his Vida de Rodrigo Lira.
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Bolaño once claimed that Rodrigo Lira had committed suicide to protest against the rise in the price of bread. A boutade.
Even so, it was a mistake. Because nothing was further from Lira than social realism. It’s not that he didn’t know or deny it, it’s just that he wasn’t even remotely interested in it. Rodrigo, as is well known, killed himself on his thirty-second birthday, the day after Christmas.
He waited for the day and hour of his birth to slit his wrists and let himself go. And that, that chosen circumstance, was very much Lira’s style. Combining “birth” and “death” (birth as in giving birth and death as in passing away) was the artist’s last pun. The last of his short life of relative anonymity and the first of his long life of relative celebrity. Because at the very moment of his death, the human Lira gave birth to the character Lira. The conversion was instantaneous, as those who denied his talent discovered when they found themselves at his funeral alongside the leading figures of Chilean literature, Nicanor Parra, Enrique Lihn, and Claudio Bertoni, paying their respects.
However, posthumous fame can end up making you what you were not and even the opposite of what you were, and you cannot defend yourself against that. In the case at hand, it could turn Lira into a teacher, as a website called Poemas del alma (Poems of the Soul) tells us very seriously. The rumor will soon make its way into encyclopedias and from there into posterity. Of course, how could we have missed it: if the Pedagogical University was his ecological niche, then Lira must have been a teacher.
Excerpts taken from Camino de Santiago (Laurel Libros, Santiago, Chile, 2024).
Image: Clair de lune (1895), by Felix Vallotton. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
