RAINY WEATHER

December 17, 2023

She lived and fictionalized reality with her rich, cultured, vivid thought, full of events but at the same time built of fragments. Here evocations, there traces of intense, plural, heterogeneous readings, retained by a memory never exhausted of inquiring, of reaching deep thoughts, of eviscerating the language to express in short, subordinate phrases, the insights found in many hours of joyful effort between readings and notes on Homer, Epicurus, Paul of Tarsus, Velázquez or José María Arguedas, that Peruvian writer who committed suicide twice, even while researching on his ancestors – “the family is a microcosm in which the whole world fits”- or Charles V. And all to build a baggage of freedom, the same freedom she found in her childhood in the mountains near Borela, back in Cotobade, armed then with a knife (which she always kept with her) and a leather belt with a bag containing rye bread, ham, sausage and an apple. That’s how the girl climbed to the top, she did it with her grandmother’s animals and the natural intelligence of her grandfather Daniel, a cosmopolitan village man who educated her as if she were a courtesan. “There I was happier than I had ever been in my life”, in Cotobade. This allowed her to scan horizons, experience the landscape and human nature, surrounded by the north wind, the howling of wolves, and reach a primordial introspection fruit of social isolation. There the girl met the fabulator, there she returned in many paragraphs of The Republic of Dreams. From there she would become President of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and winner of the Prince of Asturias Award.

Meanwhile, back in Rio de Janeiro, Nélida would acquire in her youth the education and impetuosity of her mother, and the discipline to write trained at the German school, already the successor of a reading proclivity. Little by little she would reach a maturity impregnated by a prodigious, magical imagination, reflection of an orderly din of archaic and geographical cultures amalgamated in her writing: Brazil, Galicia, Spain, Portugal, Europe, Africa, Asia.

He had acquired the ferment through his readings, the classics -most prominently the Greeks-, but also through Indian and cowboy novels- and the avant-garde, cinema, theater, ballet, music -Wagner, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, etc.-, travel, art, museums… and the admiration for Homer, Virgil, Cervantes, Camões, Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis Borges, fundamental in her life and work. Likewise, her personal relationships with all the great literary contemporaries – Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes or her great friends Clarece Lispector and Carmen Balcells…; from politics – Fidel Castro, Manuel Fraga -, from society – Bethy Lagardère, the Mariños, Beth Foulard, Carmensa de la Hoz, Dolino Luis Geraldo, Karla and Kristie de Vaconcelos etc. – made her “leverage” her personal relations…. A sum of traces, of feelings and also of perplexities, which have been reflected in each line, in each thought, in each article, in each essay, in each novel with the imperishable music of his first Hermes typewriter. “Our irradiations are Latin and Iberian. They integrate our being and the mystery that surrounds it. We are multiple, dispersed, mestizo, we were Visigoths, Iberians, Celts, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, before we were Ibero-Americans.” Nélida is one and exponential. “One,” she wrote, “is the succession of oneself and of all humanity.

Genetics, intelligence, training, wandering curiosity, coherence, commitment, culture, sensitivity, femininity and feminism – “as in any movement, there are excesses, but the important thing is that inside there is dignity, defense of honor, and a strategy of conquest”. Passion for literature – “fidelity to a vocation”-, passion for friendship -how many Galician friends like Luis Tosar, Carlos Casares, Víctor Freixanes, Darío Villanueva, Ramón Villares, Beatriz Piñeiro and her brothers, etc.-; passion for good food and gastronomy; and consequence with a motto: “every day you have to go home with a loaf of bread under your arm and a story to tell”. She was always aware of her ethical duty to herself, to her fellow men, to her readers, to her work, even, if I may say so, to her geographies and to her beloved dogs – Garavetinho, Suzy and Pilara-.

And being all that, the best thing is to listen to her truth in her words when she says: “I am mestizo and I like it (…) I am a woman, Brazilian, writer, cosmopolitan, villager, a being from everywhere, from all ports (…) I am diverse, I am many”. “Yes, I am a woman of fantasy, of reality, I am the woman of the past left behind, I am the woman who will meet tomorrow. A woman in permanent metamorphosis. We are all multiple. Life takes changes, changes, alternatives. Intelligence promotes change, the very reading of a newspaper”.

Nélida remains in our daily life, she crosses the seas of the eternal in her multiple writings, in them she remains, as in the hearts and memories of those of us who admired and loved her. For a year now we have been commemorating December 17 as the beginning of a blissful eternity.

Alberto Barciela, Spanish journalist, is vice-president of EditoRed.

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