On 19 August last year, a time when almost no one writes letters, Salvador Elizondo sent me a handwritten:
Dear Friend
First of all I want to thank and congratulate you on your splendid article in the Journal of the University on Moleskine notebooks .
Then I want to apologize for this old system of communication I have to communicate with you, but this is all I have or I have left. I used when I lived in Paris, Moleskine notebooks and there must be some among my memories of that time. I do not know about where you were, only that since I have not had missed. My current condition forces me to use things that were whims and follies of my youth, gloves, cane, hat, but one thing I've always needed were the books. Please, where to buy them here in town?
I thank you and wish you health. Your friend
Salvador Elizondo
Inclasificable as narrator, very strange to the prototype of the writer Latin American have in Europe, Salvador Elizondo in an instant ceased to be among us, his readers, his wife, his children, his friends, his brothers, his students, his comrades on Wednesday 29 March. 73 years completed a full and exemplary life for generations of writers: his country showed what the commitment to art, talent, elegance and dignity of a true intellectual. Besides art
narrative admirable and originally ran in novels like Farabeuf or chronic a moment, The secret hypogeous , The grafógrafo , Salvador Elizondo served as Octavio Paz called "the thesis without evidence", ie the literary essay is sometimes dealt with the painting (he studied architecture, he wanted to be a painter and filmmaker) and later of photography and literature. Photo
In some catalogs of photographs ever saw the hand of Salvador Elizondo to meditate, for example, pictures of Paulina Lavista. In his book, Contexts, fortunately for us, Elizondo rescued one of his most memorable, "Nicephore Niepce," in which strings of words with surgical precision, not only records the scientists who traveled avatars chemical research to fix images since the late eighteenth century. It also reflects on the photo that has pigmented impregnating the everyday nature of our lives. It is curious
Salvador Elizondo to the production of Niepce and Daguerre, the inventor of photography: the magnitude of his achievement is only comparable to that of Gutenberg.
Niépce "opposed a temporary dam to channel Heraclitean that somehow allows us to bathe twice in the same river."
Without photography, Elizondo argues, would be impossible two notions that underpin the life and politics: information and communication.
"Two of the highest offices of state archiving and propaganda, would be impossible without the discovery of this medium of expression less perfect but more likely that the descriptive writing. "
In a tone of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust's novel, the author of Camera Lucida and Elsinore feels that "our personal pantheons have the form of a photo album and photograph not only permeates our memory and our history in we are located but also the mirror-like Mephistopheles, is capable of showing instant figure, if not the actual presence, in a fleeting and elusive, ideal. " Literature
A Mexican writers who Elizondo was literally better deciphered Juan Rulfo. I knew him since 1953, when both agreed as coordinators of the literary workshop of the Mexican Center of Writers, which had with the author of Pedro Páramo a friendly debate. Elizondo Rulfo claimed that invented the language and Rulfo replied that no, that language that structures his narrative is not one and neither could only be the language spoken daily in the villages of southern Jalisco (San Gabriel, Apulco, Sayula , San Pedro Toxin, Tuxcacuesco).
"His modesty is too great an artist couple, it is impossible that the people speak naturally to a literary pitch so marked that it is not noticed. I have been in Jalisco " Salvador Elizondo said, "and I've never heard anyone like Rulfo's stories. What happens is that he is the essence of this language and can be moved to the writing, which is the most difficult problem that exists for a writer. Transcribe speech written literary language and preserve their status talks. " Painting
When I was 18, the painter Arnaldo Coen met Salvador Elizondo.
- What you do you do? Asked the writer.
-A painting, "said Arnaldo.
- You know who was Paolo Uccello?
"I saw your stuff in books. I know that he painted in Florence in early fifteenth century, during the Renaissance, but nothing more.
"Well, when I saw The Battle of San Romano in the National Gallery hung up his brushes. I never painted. Thereafter
Arnaldo Coen picked up the brush left hanging Salvador Elizondo.
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