Enemy Rumor

Alejandra Pizarnik: The Bloody Countess

She wanted to recover the lost time. All the blood that escaped from her hallucinated eyes, running into an empty sky, with no angels. She knew that there were not windows for a pain which was older than her. Alejandra Pizarnik didn't try to find those windows, but the fate made her look through the cracks, to meet the only face of her vertigo that didn't need masks: the silence. For that reason her existence was nothing more than a pretext to illuminate us with the melody of that silence: the symbols in the macabre dance that illuminated her perpetuated nights. Alejandra found the silence in the words. Unlike Rilke, who was concern about dying his own death, she didn't plan to die because she knew that she was dead since being born. She wrote from the absence and for that reason her suicide became language. The passion, that passion that Kierkegaard considered indispensable for poetry, that passion that maked her fear "couldn't name what doesn't exist", is managed for her exquisite lucidity with brightness. The language obsesses her, and she tried to dominate and and subvert it: "for that reason each word says what it says and also more and another thing" (A.P.).

Many readers have asked me who was Alejandra Pizarnik, recurrent character or epigraph in all my books. In fact, just like a lot of Latin American authors', Pizarnik is almost unknown in Latin America, in spite of being one of our few published and readed poets in Europe. I write this rumor about her, knowing that I will never reward all that I owe to that extraordinary and tormented Argentinean poet.

She was born in 1936, in Buenos Aires, leaving this world by her own decision, in 1972, to the early age of 36 years. She studied Philosophy and Literature, both unfinished careers, and after that she studied painting with the Uruguayan surrealiste Juan Batlle Planas. From 1960 to 1964 she lived in Paris, being part of the collaborators committee for the Lettres Nouvelles review, and collaborating with some of the most important journals from Europe and Latin America. She translated Antonin Artaud, Henry Michaux and Aimé Césaire texts. In 1968 she won the Guggenheim scholarship. Her poetry and her painting were simply an instrument to reveal her complaining memory of all that was lost and never recovered, in the notions of childhood, fear and solitude. For her, as Orietta Lozano says, "the art is a damned and desperate son, an out-class of this vast territory; one that makes and undoes the figure and appearance of this world," where the creation becomes the pain and the fascination; the creation as a terrible and solitary act; the art, not the artistic show." I Remember the virtual words Plinio Chahin send to me, now recovered in our communications through the cyberspace, regarding Valery: "do you think that Valery will be someday a bestseller? I really doubt it. The torn transparency of Valery is dangerous for the health and the capital." It is true, perhaps. Maybe is healthy that the Pizarnik poetry never become part of the art show or the market. Alejandra, who wrote everything from her death, would agree. For that reason she sentenced: "Hoping a world to be exhumed for the language, somebody sings the place in which is forming the silence." That somebody was herself, the one that sings: "The death has restored to the silence its enchanting prestige. And I won't say my poem and I'll have to say it. Even if the poem (here, now) doesn't make sense,doesn't have destination."

The work of the Argentinean could be considered as the construction of a wall, under the hallucinated effect of a demanding compulsion toward the perfect architecture; for that reason, her saying was almost always succinct. Instantaneous and lacerated gleams of a thought confined by the urgencies of a time and a space that she always forsaw as brief. Consciously. This is evident in her first books: La Tierra Ajena (1955), La Ultima Inocencia, (1956), Las Aventuras Perdidas (1958), Arbol de Diana (1962) and Los Trabajos y las Noches (1965); until her last two finished texts: Extracción de la Piedra de la Locura (1968), and El Infierno Musical (1971), where her anxiety overflows, making her talk about her own poetics (her hell), and where we will find longer poems, sometimes wrote in equally torn prose. In fact she wrote some texts in prose, from a long and terrible encouragement, like "La condesa sangrienta"; about this book, she commented to a friend in a letter: "I am glad that you have been interested in the essay on the damned countess (allude to Elizabeth Bathory)- I hope it has been my first and last encounter with the sadism, that I didn't understand, that I will never understand." Also her lucidity produced excellent essays, like "El verbo encarnado", one of the most brilliant reflections about another tormented poet: the French Antonin Artaud, and also interviews (it is a pitty we can not find them in the bookstores); the one carried out with Borges, and another one with Roberto Juarroz, which are remarkable.

Alejandra Pizarnik died in Buenos Aires, September 25, 1972, after several attempts to committ suicide. It has been recovered some texts of her correspondence which can give us some light:

"Buenos Aires, 12 of February of 1972: Juan, your book is beautiful. If the doctor let me, I will make you a review (three weeks ago a car ran over me again, of course: I was very alert). I'm not able to read the messages sent to me throughout disasters and pains (.) I Undertake some things but I discovered that during the sixteen past years the tenderness drowned in me. Par Litterature. J'ai perdue ma vie. Now I need everyone smile. Strange. Why is there so much misfortune?(...)"

The solitude had become word and argument. It was late, life and work were confused in her last innocence. She died alone, and we were awared.

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