Leonardo Padura’s obsessions

By Graziella Pogolotti

From the magazine Cubarte

HAVANA – The Villa Clara publisher Sed de Belleza has just released A Man on an Island, a compilation of essays, chronicles and articles by Leonardo Padura, who was a journalist before becoming a story teller.

Inevitably, the journalist establishes a mandatory dialogue with the writer. Then – as Padura’s companion, Lucía, points out in the foreword – some of the writer’s obsessions come to the fore, as in a work put together hurriedly.

Implicit in Padura’s overall work, an esthetic position is defined here that adheres to the writer’s notion of commitment. Behind the coverage of the debate about cultural policies, brought to light in connection with the freedom to create, lie contradictory trends.

Some emphasize the autonomy of literature, whereby texts are written in succession, one after another. At the opposite end are those who demand that artistic creation merely illustrate political ideas, for the purpose of teaching.

That is the context that ruled the so-called “socialist realism,” with its almost acknowledged derivations, a point of view that leads to utilizing the work in favor of what’s immediate and therefore ephemeral.

Padura, on the contrary, favors social perspective. He is the witness, the guardian of a memory, a man committed to the exploration of the conflicts of his day. In his tales and his reflexive prose, Padura pursues the configuration of the Cuban person. In reality, he tries to define that person or to continue his construction.

Like Jean-Paul Sartre, I believe that existence precedes essence.

When the writer hopes to rescue for the present the novel of the life of José María Heredia, he tries to give continuity to the utopic enterprise begun by the singer of Niagara, who contemplated the grandiose spectacle of nature while gripped by the dream of a nation that would be formed in the war of independence.

The novelist sides with the poet and brands Del Monte as both a person and a personage, as the representative of a line ruled by an instrumental concept, the concept of Arango, the annexationists and the autonomists of every kind.

In a new people, formed by colonialism, culture and nation follow the same course. Aware of the vulnerability of an island open to the ocean’s infinite horizon, we are shaken by the “horrors of the moral world.”
Among Padura’s obsessions are the recognition of memory and forgetfulness as decisive factors in the construction of culture and nation. There are intentional omissions, with fateful results, when we try to erase areas of our historic past. Other omissions, no less harmful, come from the reductionist simplification of complex realities.

Memory finds shelter in subjectivity, which can leave tangible trails in documents, press releases, letters, diaries, autobiographies, all of it fragmentary, tendentious, dotted with bitterness or efforts to justify behavior, impregnated by epochal circumstances. Because I am anti-essentialist, I counter the concept of an unmoveable human nature with the more porous concept of a human condition.

It so happens that, after an intense half-century of Cuban Revolution, successive generations coexist and interact. I knew the splendor of a newly founded School of Literature, where Padura studied in the 1970s. While Padura practiced a creative journalism in the 1980s, I participated at the ISA* [Higher Institute of Art] in a singular experience: promoting the emergence of a new vanguard from inside academia.

Selective out of necessity, similar to what the ancient called “soul” and as intangible as the soul, memory feeds from the mind and the heart, analysis and life experience. That’s what happens in the individual and collective levels. It is a legacy that is complemented by oblivion. It resurfaces when circumstances summon it in heroic events and critical circumstances, with the greening of the picaresca, along with latent values of petit-bourgeois origin. [Translator’s Note: Picaresca is a Spanish literary style in which the writer satirizes society.]

A Carpenterian** all along, Leonardo Padura retains his fidelity to the author of The Lost Steps. His closeness is not that of a mimetic student. It is manifested, in my opinion, in his preoccupation with context and the systematic research that accompanies his narrative creation. It then happens that the intense documentation that preceded the writing of The Man Who Loved Dogs permeates his re-reading of [Carpentier’s] Spain Under the Bombs.

His perspective and mine are counterpoised because my life experience is different, the experience of a girl who took down an unforgettable dictation at an Italian school, under fascism. It began thus: “Today is a day of celebration for all of us, because the heroic Italian troops, along with the Spanish Falangists, entered Madrid.”

In those dark days, there was no room for shadings. As Alejo often said, one had to choose between Burgos and Madrid, especially when the Western powers acted as Franco’s accomplices, under the cloak of neutrality. [Translator’s Note: The city of Burgos was the seat of Franco’s Nationalists; Madrid was held by the Republicans.]

Specifically, France put into concentration camps those who managed to cross the Pyrenees in the final stampede, where Julio Cuevas – the Gaspar of The Consecration of Spring – preserved the joy, the willingness to live on with his celebrated “reculez, reculez…”

My personal recollection, forged by all trends of exile, leads me to think that the key to Carpentier’s Spanish chronicles is in the urgent need to join forces and wills in defense of a torn country and to stress the will to live, even under the bombs, as opposed to Millán Astray’s defiant “Long live death, death to intelligence!”

Paradoxically, the title of this compilation – A Man on an Island – contains an intentional ambiguity designed to provoke in the reader a disquiet and a controversy, to remove our small gray cells.

Padura rejects the notion of “the damned circumstance of water all around.” On the contrary, the island is a promontory that opens to a broad horizon and has substantial roots, an inescapable point of reference and the reason for intellectual commitment. For that reason, his esthetic orientation turns to things social and prompts him to broach multiple themes via the direct route of journalistic communication.

Present in his writings are the problems derived from the link between the market and artistic creation.

I would like to think that his works on this issue are not intended to pronounce the last word but to ask for a profound debate that will bring back the critical vision of the transformation of the editorial world from the days when Argentina and Mexico held an almost absolute dominion over Spanish-language literature and thought.

Also, to inquire about other facets of the same phenomenon, such as the visual arts articulated with financial speculation as a secure investment, because of the nature of art works as objects of luxury.

With a little salt and some pepper, Leonardo Padura exhorts many on the island to feel the itch to continue to build the utopia of the Cuban being, taking sides with Heredia and against Del Monte.

• The Higher Institute of Art was founded on Sept. 1, 1976, by the Cuban government as a school for the arts. Its original structure consisted of three schools: music, visual arts, and drama.

•• Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (26 Dec. 1904-24 April 1980) was a Cuban novelist, essayist and musicologist who had great influence on Latin American literature.

Note from Progreso Weekly: Graciela Pogolotti, writer, essayist, arts critic and baseball fanatic, is one of the most important figures in Cuban culture.