Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
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a tertiary arm / that must pupilate, between my where and when, / this stunted adulthood of man.” In poem XXXVI, considered by some to be the manifesto of the book, Vallejo’s absurd description of human existence, in which “[w]e struggle to thread ourselves through a needle’s eye,” leads him to evoke the Venus de Milo, the symbol of perfection that’s missing one arm, because this is the contradiction he sees “enwombed in the plenary arms / of existence, / of this existence that neverthelessez / perpetual imperfection.” As if he had taken Camus’s advice and imagined Sisyphus happy, at the end of the poem he proclaims, “Make way for the new odd number / potent with orphanhood!”
In a similar thread to Trilce is Vallejo’s first book of narrative prose titled Scales. Composed in 1919–22 and published in 1923 by Talleres Tipográficos de la Penitenciaría, Scales belongs to Vallejo’s most experimental period and, like its predecessor, it teeters between gushing sentimentalism and radical innovation. It’s divided into two sections: Cuneiforms, which contains six brief narrative prose poems—the unforgettable “walls” that link Scales to Trilce—and Wind Choir, a section of short stories: “Beyond Life and Death,” “The Release,” “The Caynas,” “The Only Child,” “Mirtho,” and “Wax.”69
Continuing the experimental thread with all the exuberance of the poetic and now-narrative adventure, Cuneiforms might as well be an appendix on Trilce, with its brutal descriptions of existence in prison and desperate encounters with mortality recounted in bold lines soldered by syntax that obeys the author’s meandering ruminations: “Some cartilaginous breath of an invisible death appears to mix with mine, descending perhaps from a pulmonary system of Suns and then, with its sweaty self, permeating the first of the earth’s pores.”70 And in the asphyxiating space of the prison cell, nostalgia insufflates the writing by projecting memories onto the silver screen of the walls: “[A]ll this domestic morning-time aroma reminds me of my family’s house, my childhood in Santiago de Chuco, those breakfasts of eight to ten siblings from the oldest to youngest, like the reeds of an antara” (“Windowsill”).
Wind Choir enters the gothic world of fantasy and madness, of existential predicaments and nauseating feelings of responsibility. In “Wax,” for example, Vallejo places his protagonist Chalé under the Sword of Damocles at a craps table in a boozy Lima. In “The Release” (which could also be translated as “Liberation”) the convict Solís inadvertently drives to madness his dear fellow inmate Palomino, who’s sure he’s being stalked by the family of the man he is accused of killing, and Solís does so by excessively warning the paranoid man to beware of his paranoia. In “Beyond Life and Death” the anonymous narrator journeys home to the rugged countryside to join his family in mourning the loss of his mother, when he comes across a woman who’s convinced that he’s her son who’d died and has come back to life.
The characters of Scales find themselves in unbelievable situations, tempted to interpret their predicaments with supernatural justifications that are rivaled by dry pragmatic rationale. In these early fictions we see Vallejo’s romantic inheritance take on strange new life as it morphs into a fantastic world described with the dissident, bizarre language of his most radical poetic voice. In the thematics of Scales we perceive the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, but the language is shockingly innovative, light-years beyond Poe, and often tests the ability of the narrative mode to bear the weight of its poetic overhaul.
Not long after Scales had come off the press, Vallejo’s other early prose fiction, Savage Lore, appeared in La Novela Peruana, an illustrated biweekly edited by Pedro Barrantes Castro. Relegated to the first experimental phase of his writing, this ambitious novella takes place in a Santiago de Chuco that’s as gothic as it is Andean, a rural place where the unknown is master, an environment filled with inexplicable mysteries and bad omens that shimmer in the reflections of mirrors and pools of water. Like many of these writings, Savage Lore blurs the lines of genre: as fantasy fiction, it narrates the breakdown of the marriage of two peasants and the demise of the husband, Balta Espinar, at the hands of the unknown; as realist fiction, the story recounts the self-destruction of a deranged psychopath.71
Set in the sierra of northern Peru, a pastoral landscape of fields tilled by plows driven by the force of oxen, the heart of this fantasy narration shows a sort of superstition that’s not uncommon in that region. A hen crows, a mirror breaks, the sure sign of imminent catastrophe. Then a stranger appears, at first as a fleeting image. Balta wonders if his mind is playing tricks on him, but no. The stranger is implacable, and his presence is haunting. In drawn-out frenzied moments of suspicion, Balta starts to demonstrate (excessively) peculiar jealousy toward his wife, Adelaida. This drive toward self-destruction is either a symptom of Balta’s psychopathology or a portentous sign of imminent ruin.
With this gesture, as Ricardo Silva-Santisteban explains, Vallejo inscribes Salvage Lore in the literary tradition of the Double, among the works of E. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, and so on. “The figure of the double, which Vallejo has undoubtedly borrowed,” he says, “fits all the criteria of the prototype whose own will leads him to try to destroy the character on whom he depends … The sinister scenario that Vallejo paints in Savage Lore is framed by the resonance of superstition which he integrates into fantasy fiction. He links a literary tradition (of the Double) … with oral culture of the northern Peruvian highlands, as is the superstitious element of the crowing hen that foretells the demise of the marriage.”72
Vallejo’s interest in madness had already shown itself in Scales and, in the wake of Trilce, reveals that genealogy. Savage Lore, on the other hand, prefigures a new thread of narrative that is further developed in “Individual and Society” and “Reputation Theory” of Against Professional Secrets, giving us a glimpse at where the writing is headed. With regard to the theme, this early exploration of superstition would be superseded by an examination of ritual belief in a historical context, as occurred in his next work of prose fiction, Toward the Reign of the Sciris, and the later stage transcreation that it inspired, The Tired Stone.
Even though Toward the Reign of the Sciris wouldn’t be published until after the author’s death—in Nuestro Tiempo—Vallejo did extract some passages and place them in La Voz of Madrid: “An Incan Chronicle” and “The Dance of the Situa.” Set in the Inca Empire prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, this historical fiction was probably first drafted out in 1923, during the Lima–Paris journey, and then edited in 1924–28. As Vallejo himself admitted to Abril, he’d targeted the prevailing symbolist tastes of a wide readership, hoping the exotic aesthetic of pre-Hispanic America would garner mass appeal and lead to more lucrative work. It didn’t.
Although it’s one of the simplest narrations Vallejo wrote with respect to plot and character development, this novella showcases a hybrid language of Castilian and Quechua—a feature he’d only gestured at five years earlier in his indigenist forerunner The Black Heralds—which led him to implement extensive research into his shoot-from-the-hip narrative strategy. The bravado of the creolized Castilian-Quechua tongue is visible, at just a glance, in chapter 1. As the defeated Army of the Sun returns to Cuzco, Vallejo narrates the somber procession of “rumancha masters,” the unfurled rainbow standard “with holes left by a suntupáucar spike,” and angular heroes who carried on their “shoulders the dense mass of queschuar,” behind whom limped “lancers with enormous dangling arms wearing guayacán headpieces with tassels” and “an old apusquepay, with a protruding chin and serene eyes, wearing his yellow turban, tied by a piece of stretched bow string and feathers.”73
Although Vallejo failed to crystalize the conflict of the novella, in chapter 3 we find the central (if underdeveloped) question that, in The Tired Stone, he transformed into masterful drama: is society more fruitful in times of war or peace? Once the Inca’s son and heir-apparent retreated from the north, the Inca called off the conquest because he now “yearned for peace and labor … [that] the sky unfurrow the brows of farmhands and herders; [that] the husband kiss his wife … The Inca now yearned for love, meditation, the seed, leisure, great ideas, eternal images.”74