INTRODUCTION

D
 Cristina Peri Rossi: voices to glimpse
eternity

Jesus Gomez de Tejada

University of Seville/IDESH. Autonomous University of Chile

From a prolonged Spanish exile, Cristina Peri Rossi (Montevideo, 1941) is con-
she figures as one of the most significant authors of the 20th century and the beginning of the current one
century in the Hispanic realm. His work, begun in the early sixties with
the publication of the short stories volume We Live (1963), extends with absolute vitality.
reality until 2016 when he just published his latest poetry book for now, The
replicants. Shortly before, it had been preceded by the collection of stories The Loves
mistaken (2015) and another poetic collection, The Night and Its Artifice (2014). The word
dePeri Rossi reveals to us an immediate future full of projects that include new
collections of poems, storybooks, and novels (one of them, perhaps, autobiographical
In these first two decades of the new century, there are several anthologies that
they have collected the stories (Teadoro and other tales, 2000; Finally Alone, 2004; Stories
reunited, 20071, the poems (Collected Poetry, 2005; My House is Writing, 2006; Runes
del deseo, 2008;La balsa de las palabras, 2016;La barca del tiempo, 2016)2and the texts
journalistic (The pulse of the world, journalistic articles: 1978-2002, 2005) by Peri Rossi.
The autobiographical aspect embodied in Julio Cortázar should not be forgotten either.
Cris(2014)3, where it pays tribute to the deep friendship shared with the narrator
Argentine, or essay (Erotic fantasies, 1991; and When smoking was a pleasure, 2003).
The review of their titles allows readers and critics to see how they have developed.
a multi-voiced inter-generic writing through which to rewrite and deepen
to give in to their literary obsessions.
Criticism has been – and continues to be – attentive to Peri Rossi's trajectory: reviews, articles,
Book chapters, collective volumes, and monographs have focused the analysis on
the texts of the Uruguayan author. Although this constant interest has given rise to a pro-
number of articles or chapters published in scientific journals and books of
specific theme (exile, feminism, homoeroticism), the data of exclusively books
dedicated to studying their production is strangely smaller, despite not
stop being very significant: Carlos Raúl Narváez (The plural and infinite writing: The li-
bro of my cousins from Cristina Peri Rossi, 1991), Mercedes Rowinsky (Image and discourse.

1. Prior to these is The city of Luzbel and other tales, 1992. This title represents a selection of
some of the stories that make up his previous volume of stories, Cosmoagonies (1988).
2. Prior to this is the anthology Poems of Love and Heartbreak, 1998.
There is an earlier version titled Julio Cortázar (2001).

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 Jesus Gomez de Tejada

Study of the images in the work of Cristina Peri Rossi, 1997), Parizad Tamara Dejbord
(Cristina Peri Rossi: writer of exile, 1998), Carmen Domínguez (The subversion of
authoritarian discourse in the narrative of Cristina Peri Rossi, 2000), Mary Boufis Filou (Con-
fronting Patriarchy: Psychoanalytic Theory in the Prose of Cristina Peri Rossi, 2009) and the
work coordinated by Romulo Cosse (Critical Papers, 1995). After these invaluable
preceding, this volume, the seventh of the collection Writers of the Southern Cone
Guided by Carmen de Mora, it aims to continue the analytical rigor of these works and
contribute to the knowledge and dissemination of Peri Rossi's work from a perspective
overview that captures the breadth and plurality of its creative proposal, the scope
and thematic and generic diversity of their literary commitment. To this end, it outlines four
lines: eroticism, transgression, exile, and intertextuality.
This book has the privilege of containing the direct voice of Peri Rossi. Various texts
they give us their poetry, their prose, and their conversation; expressive forms that, to me-
naked, they find the boundaries artistically diluted in their writing. Firstly,
The unpublished poem 'The Mysticism of Love' offers us a bridge between production
previous poetry and immediate projects. Probable anticipation of a poetry collection
future that revolves around love as liturgy, as an anointed space and time
sacredness and sacrilege at the same time, as a channel for the apprehension of the eternal moment, that
it dissipates fleetingly. The second unpublished text that it provides us is a summarized
the history of his books, narrated with fidelity to his own style, and therefore, full of love,
intensity, nostalgia, vital and artistic references, transgression and irony. Peri Rossi
she writes in a state of happiness, as she tells us herself. Mission and pleasure encourage.
your writing. Writing as living in an unrelenting desire for the elusive happiness that is so
only the lived moment, necessarily finite, but which allows glimpsing the immense
Surely: to briefly enjoy the eternal. To write in order to –fruitlessly– preserve.
the moment of fullness, to write to retain the irretrievably ephemeral. Here,
in relation to his work (birth, character, destiny) speaks to us about libraries
that contributed to his formation, the love for books, ships, painting,
photography and music. From his condition as an intellectual as a challenge to silence
familiar and social in the native Uruguay, to the marginalization and ignorance suffered
in the Spanish cultural environment (adoptive country), to the inescapable fate that, according to
he taught her, he expected every woman who ventured into the world of letters.
Against this, it builds its literary journey, which thus implies fulfillment
from a childhood dream, through whose cracks, however, happiness escapes in a way
inevitable. It also tells us about the exiles, the misunderstandings, and the tenacity for
maintain as a personal criterion the irrenounceable freedom regardless of the price. End -
mind, in dialogue with the writing of Peri Rossi, Claudia Magliano, from the affinity
spiritual and interpretive sharpness, tends to build bridges of recognition around
The night and its artifice, while the dialogued encounter with Claudia Pérez allows
enjoy the immediate testimony. The word accomplice fulfills its pleasure.
through the conversation –Montevideo religion, it comes to say– and offers the reader new
keys about his poetics and his texts.
The prolific and diverse expression of Peri Rossi is configured in a set of voices.
different, each of which proposes and builds its literary fullness. Multiply-
the thematic city that extends across the entirety of genres that it has encompassed over time
of life: narrative, novel, poetry, journalism, autobiography, and essay. Intertextuality

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 CristinaPerirossi: Voices To glimpse eternity

and intertextuality through which the unavoidable connective texture is evidenced with
other artistic voices and with their own creations. In this volume, the authors are
they echo that plurality of voices that radiate from and converge in Peri Rossi,
they focus on the different manifestations of their production that expand from the
eroticism, transgression and exile, and also, commitment, cultural dialogue,
history and the present. This purpose is made explicit in the different chapters in which it
divide the book. Each of them groups articles with proposals that delve into
each aspect in a diverse manner. However, it relates to the rest, constituting
a theoretical and reflective framework that enables interaction and enrichment.
The author has pointed out that loving and writing (similar channels of living) imply
similar genetic states. To love and to write require a desiring state, a state
of libido that drives both eroticism and literature. The poetry book Evohé: poems
erotic of 1971 is already a confirmation of the confluence of love and writing, of the
word and the woman. Peri Rossi's word establishes subversive representations.
of sexuality, gender, and desire as categories homogenized by the cul-
patriarchal and heterosexual culture. Thus, in the three works of the second chapter, titled
In a state of libido: transgressions of gender and desire, this constant is captured
through the different literary modalities. Poetry, novel, stories, and essays (so-
well journalism, as will be seen in the eighth chapter, dedicated to this facet) are
different channels to unveil the false essentiality of genders and give visibility
subjectivities that break with the biologistic and static notion of sexuality and
they proclaim their sociocultural and changing nature. The metaphor of the mirror, the hall
of the psychoanalyst, the cinematic intertext, the subversive agency of the persona-
jes and the reactions they promote, or the rhetorical games with the subject's identity
poetic in relation to a feminine you is a resource that Jean Fonder-Solano uses,
Jorgelina Corbatta and María Jesús Fariña Bustos provide critical attention while exploring the
transgressions of sexual identity and erotic expressions in Peri Rossi.
In the early 1970s, Peri Rossi was forced to leave Uruguay.
into exile. The urgency of the process led her to Spain, at that time, engulfed in
a similar dictatorial circumstance. The exercise of freedom in articles and books it
led to a forced exit from the country of adoption in a new exilic experience.
Political marginalization can be supplemented by other forms of alienation promoted
by the hegemonic society and culture that condemns to ostracism and to the periphery
subjectivities (for example, those associated with feminine identity and homo-
sexual) that transgress the norms dictated from the centers of power. The X with
which designates the alienated protagonist of The Ship of Fools illuminates ambiguity
and the instability of the identity of the diasporic subject and the diversity of the possible
forms of manifestation of the exilic. Chapter three, 'The diaspora as X:'
commitment and exile" brings together three articles that reflect on the recurrence of exile-
lion in his work. Gloria Medina Sancho refers to the different treatments of trauma
of the exiled in the Perirrosian narrative based on psychoanalytic concepts of
latency and disaster, as well as the frequent setting of the story in
dreamlike, allegorical, or heterotopic scenarios that show an alienated individual
by political or social forces, and that occasionally allow him to put into play
release mechanisms. Joaquín Manzi analyzes the symbolic update of the con-
the concept of hospitality and the dynamics that develop between host and guest in

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 Jesus Gómez de Tejada

certain poetic and narrative works by the writer regarding the condition of
immigration and belonging produced in the political, social, and erotic spheres. Na-
TashaTanna pauses on the relationships between author, reader, authority, and authoritarianism.
Regarding the figure of the author and the effect of authority that their writing has on
the reader and posterity, Tanna analyzes how various narrative strategies of Peri
Rossi generate a tension between minimization and absolutization (dispersion and
unification, fragmentation, and totalization) of the effect of the author's figure on the
textual interpretation by the receiver. This attitude is paralleled with
the Uruguayan author's critique of dictatorial discourses and their appropriation of the
historical truth.
The relationship of Peri Rossi's work with psychoanalysis has been continuous and intense.
Although sometimes it speaks to us of intuitions and coincidences, of feeling before knowing,
their texts are filled with references from this field. Their presence is
materializes thematically through settings and characters, while structuring
It naturally does so from a readable psychoanalytic substrate in the same configuration.
ration of the work. Concepts taken from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Graziella
Magherini or Luce Irigaray have shed light on the critical readings of an important part
aunt of his production. "The Mirror and the Couch," title of the fourth chapter, addresses this
the channel of the perirrosian expression in contact with eroticism, identity, exile,
the family, the transgression. The psychoanalytic notions traditionally developed
since the development of masculine identity are represented through procedures-
deviations that call for balanced theories for the configuration of
identities condemned to the margins regularly. María José Bruña Bragado
analyze the notion of the abject as a means to transgress the normative that is reductive
the patriarchal and heterosexual structures. From the lost essentiality of
subject, links the abject to the realms of desire as erotic exaltation (sacrilegious/
sacred) of the other feminine and of exile as residence and resistance at the borders
(borders). Elena M. Martínez focuses the analysis on several novels by Peri Rossi
in the uses of the mirror image and the circular games of identity and resemblance
that these allow between one self and another, and between art and erotism therefore, to
starting from the representation of mood disturbances such as passion and obsession
(occasionally sublimated in the reworking of Stendhal syndrome). Martí-
It argues how the hegemonic centrality of the male subject is eroded.
parodically and transferred to the periphery through these narrative games sim-
bulics. Similarly, it underscores the parallelism between the subversion of theories
Luce Irigaray's psychoanalytic perspectives regarding Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis with
the construction of a feminine erotic subjectivity - in which the use converges
of pictorial and literary intertexts – that transgresses its canonical configuration as
object of male desire. Julia González Calderón directs attention to the subver-
sessions on the Freudian epic concept and the notion of the Lacanian law of the father
the Peruvian representations of family relations and the child world
in his early narrative. González Calderón emphasizes how the gaze of the child
breaks the conventions of the adult universe in a set of non- narratives
stories and narratives where the worldview and language of children - subjected
an internal exile situation - relate to revolutionary freedom or the

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 Cristina Peri Rossi: Voices To glimpse eternity

transgressive desire in front of the coercion of the dictatorial State and the normativity or the
(paradoxical) immaturity (ineffectiveness) of parent.
Peri Rossi's assertion of exercising a writing of multiple voices that reco-
the entirety of genres corresponds at the intertextual and intratextual level with the
presence in its literature of an organic network of allusions to other literary works
rare and pictorial, among which are included those of my own. The attraction to painting
triggers a broad referential game that extends from titles and quotes
paratextuals, up to the incidence in the structure and the symbolism of the narrative work
and the taste for poetic ekphrasis. In the first article of the fifth chapter, 'I do not speak
with my voice / I speak with my voices’: intratext, intertext, and ecphrasis,” Jorgelina Corbata
describe the function and traits of the intertextual network that identifies and cohesively binds prose
narrative and essay work of Peri Rossi. Highlighting the psychoanalytic aspect of the definition
intertextuality offered by Julia Kristeva that refers to the concept of the frontier
umbra, draws attention to the fundamental threads of the artistic fabric that Peri
Rossi shapes around the theme of exile: psychoanalysis, German romanticism
man and the fantastic narrative of the Río de la Plata. Carlos Raúl Narváez and Marie-Agnès Palaisi
delve into concrete materializations of this network specifically related to the
painting. Narváez affirms that the ekphrastic operations in the poetry and narrative of
the Uruguayan encompasses both the literary transposition of certain pictorial works
as the verbal representation of atmospheres, themes, moods associated
this art and its contemplation. From this perspective, Narváez analyzes meticulously
only the connective coordinates between the narrative and the lyric of perirrosiana and the
paintings of the American painter Edward Hopper. Palaisi dedicates his study to the
maritime images that proliferate in The Unsettling Muses, a collection of poems established
for a set of ekphrases generated around the works of different artists, styles
and eras, where the author condenses the taste for interreferentiality between the two.
arts. It establishes the analysis of these verbal frames on the notion of flesh of the
world that Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses to refer to subjective realization
of the world from the perspective of the subject –perceptive body– that contemplates it and
act included in it.
Transgression is one of the iterative engines of Perirrosian literature.
situations presented and the behavior of the majority of the characters narrates
tivos and the poetic voices represent a deviation from the normative patterns
behavioral motives established from the centers of power. In their first books of
stories, one of the most traveled routes is the cultivation of stories where the ele-
fantastic storytelling becomes a means of denouncing situations of oppression
and in an instrument to unveil the arbitrariness inherent in certain conventions
as accepted as natural without being questioned by society. In 'Transgre-'
daily sessions: unforeseen events and mistakes of unreality and love, chapter
sixth of the volume, Ana Davis González takes a tour through the different fashion
gender nuances in the stories of Peri Rossi to describe how the fantastic
traditional and, especially, the neofantastic allow them to articulate characters, stories,
atmospheres and spaces from a stance of social and political commitment. MeriTorras
it also refers to these everyday transgressions when reflecting on the con-
the establishment of a specific narrative voice in the stories of The Wrong Loves,
whose progressive relevance becomes the channel of the organicity of the whole.

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 Jesus Gomez de Tejada

In this case, the subversive germinates in the disavowal of the model of love.
romantic from the lack of guilt with which this voice narrates everyday life
from a series of meetings - iterative or sporadic - where feelings and
seos characterized by the equivocation or orientation/disorientation and marginality
regarding the archetypes commonly accepted.
Upon reviewing the long exile lived, Peri Rossi notes that the departure from Uruguay took away
(among other things) his beloved profession as a teacher, but the residence in
Spain gave her the titles of journalist and translator. The collection of articles The pulse of
time picks texts published from 1978 to 2002, which provides evidence of the
broad space that this area occupies in its production, which also begins earlier
(still in Uruguay) and continues to this day. Regarding the attitude towards the work p-
In journalism, the author has categorically stated the goal of maximum quality with
that writes each of the articles published in the newspapers where he has worked
and works as a collaborator. In the seventh chapter, "Not a line outside my works"
completes: journalism and essay,” the articles by Mercedes Rowinsky Geurts, Alicia
Rita Rueda-Acedo and María del Cristo Martín Francisco outline a comprehensive journey
through this written manifestation. Rowinsky Geurts describes the traits and themes more
significant, stopping at the characteristics of the column as a periodical text
a guy who channels the author's opinion and allows for the establishment of complicity links
with the press reader. Rueda-Acedo refers more specifically to the elements
of these articles that allow them to be included in the category of literary journalism.
Martín Francisco examines the articles published in the notable magazines Marcha.
the dictatorial Uruguay and time in Spain during the last years of Franco's regime.
In this set, according to Martín Francisco, a process of transformation is observed.
through which Peri Rossi's journalistic action is progressively being refined from
dogmatism until identifying with the specific intellectual function described by
Michael Foucault: make visible the mechanisms used by power to construct a
Truth to measure. This chapter concludes with a study by Beatriz Suárez in
Back to essay books Erotic fantasies and When smoking was a pleasure. Suárez
reflect on the creative engine of the texts and point out similarities and divergences
between both. It asserts that the various fantasies addressed refer to transgression.
as an impulse of desire and comments that the evocation of the pleasure of smoking becomes
in therapeutic literature.
Repeatedly, during an interview, in the course of his work or in this
same book, Peri Rossi has proclaimed that her house is writing: the only real thing
constant mind in a life away from the homeland, in hotels and in residences.
successive. To write like to love, to dress a word like to pronounce to a woman, to live
writing and longing to remain, if only for an instant, in the act of
creation where other authors, other texts, other genres resonate as voices that
they allow us to glimpse eternity and, in that action, transgress the exiles, pursue the
wishes.

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 Stop, moment, you are so beautiful

CrisTinaPerirossi
Writer, teacher, and journalist

I had twenty-four hours to exile myself, I, who had never traveled before ('Didn't
Do you know Buenos Aires? How is it possible that you have never crossed the pond?
Julio Cortázar wondered, surprised, although he didn't like mu- either.
I enjoyed trips and did them more out of duty than pleasure) and I imagined my life
enters in Montevideo: like Jules Verne, I thought that it was enough for a writer to
what I felt and what I imagined. I have always had great confidence in the
imagination. As for emotions and feelings, I don't think there is much
difference between what is felt in one place or another, nor in one era or another: the
seduction rituals or conventions vary from one era to another, from one country to another,
but there are always, the poems of Catullus or the Psalms of the Bible seem so to me
contemporaries like those of César Vallejo or those of Alejandra Pizarnik. The violence,
domination, sexual slavery, human trafficking and compassion, empathy
They existed from the beginning ('if there was ever a beginning,' I quote myself). It is attributed to
Nero offered his Empire for a new pleasure, and in the 20th century, Jorge Luis Borges.
he wrote that since Romanticism, there possibly hasn't been a new feeling.
In those twenty-four hours when I was going to leave my apartment with one of the me-
best private libraries in Montevideo, to my numerous and beloved students, my
rare collections, my sentimental treasures (I am symbolic and ritualistic) to my m-
I miss my sister, with whom I didn't live, but whom I adored, my friends and
friends (the few who were not yet imprisoned, disappeared, or exiled) just
I happened to save my beloved Remington typewriter (a modern model,
it was only ten years old) and hundreds of colorful sheets of onion paper.
They were the two things that made me feel safe. The two things that I did not
I wanted to separate in no way. Exiling oneself with a typewriter and sheets of paper is
a whole revelation. I also exiled myself with a copy of the five books that I had.
publicado hasta entonces:Viviendo,Los museos abandonados,El libro de mis primos,
Panic indicators and Evohé. Part of the responsibility for that exile lay with those books.
although not only them, also my teaching activity, my political struggle. And also the
others, those who constituted that beloved library that I had managed to form since
childhood, pound by pound, sometimes buying a book in uncomfortable monthly installments,
getting in a roundabout way some that did not reach the bookstores of
Montevideo and loving them, always. Parodying Jean Cocteau, I could say; 'The li-
Brothers are essential, although I don't know for what. Some time ago I made the list of the
houses I have lived in, between Montevideo and Barcelona (not counting a stay

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 Cristina Perirossi

that did not last a year, like in Berlin, thanks to the best invitation in the world, the
from the DAAD) and gave me the overwhelming number of nineteen, almost always with the bookstores
on our backs. But it is no longer about that first, beloved library of Montevideo.
I think it was Vicente Aleixandre who said that he had loved his first bi-
library, before the exile, but the second one, not so much. The same happens to me. As the
first, none. From the first, I could remember how I had acquired each book,
where I had bought it, how it got to me. The second, the one about exile, is less
desired, more random, like replicas: they never replace the original in a
efficient (note: my last published poetry book is titled The Replicants). I arrived
to represent my life like that of the snail, always carrying the library on my back, like
a shell. But much faster. I am intense and fast. I imagine a future (in which
I probably won't be) as something lighter: maybe it can all be compressed
the personal library on a mobile device, and the movements in space will be more
comfortable. And here is an essential work tool: romantic relationships will be easier.
Because how many times did I not move in with someone thinking about the library, that
it didn't fit in the other house, and how many times, on the other hand, has it sustained my relationship with pa-
I am already in crisis: I am not separating because I don't want to have to move the library. In reality,
my romantic relationships have almost always been triangular: the beloved woman, me, and
the library (The psychoanalysts, more refined, captivated - like me - by the games
of words would say: she, literature, and you). And when it has not been so, neither is it a
catastrophe: sometimes, just the love and the memory of the books read, of the movies
views, of the music heard. Books do not make relationships better.
such (only more flowery, more lyrical and passionate) but loneliness.
I have known many houses without libraries, and they have always seemed sad to me,
stripped, deprived. They were missing something. And while they serve me a plate of food.
which surely will not bring me much pleasure (gastronomy is not among my
vicious) I wonder where they have the books. Then I come up with a sinister idea.
They will be in the bathroom. There are people who only read there. However, I explain to me-
they would explain in even the smallest detail how to cook the chanterelles.
I not only like books. I also like boats, as anyone knows.
reader of my books. And I collect those models of boats that they sell in
the souvenir shops and in the few maritime houses that exist in the ciu-
port data. But I don’t have the money I had Pablo Neruda, so my
The collection is modest. I believe that the only trip I took for true pleasure was to the Island.
Negra, after the fall of Pinochet, invited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
"sacred" of the new Government to give conferences at the universities. I went, saw all the
collections, I thought I would have done the same –including the shoe collection
feminine - and I lost the desire to be a collector forever.
I miss the Remington. In an act of incredible pragmatism (more attributable to my
couple back then that to me) in one of the moves, one of those that practical people
take the opportunity to rid yourself of things that are excess or old, I let go.
I was wrong about her, just like so many times before: we must preserve what we love, not...
the last. And the last is not always what is most loved. Every time I try to be
pragmatic then I regret it. I was not born pragmatic. I was born romantic: the inheritance
the intangible of my Italian great-grandparents (I love to die for opera, Caruso, the can-
ciones napolitanas, Milva, Mina, Ricardo Cocciante, LucianoPavarotti, Andrea Bocelli,

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 Stop, moment, you are so beautiful

Italian cinema – Antonioni, Visconti, Bolognini, Bertolucci, Fellini, Valerio Zurlini – me

they like the ruins, the shipwrecks of Turner, the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and the
storm and stress, which is not Italian, but would deserve to be. I also like, how could I not,
Richard Wagner, and the aria of Love, madness, and death from Tristan and Isolde (in the version
from Kirsten Flaagstad, whom I lost in exile, and more than twenty years later I recovered.
a new edition) one of the few musical orgasms that I know. Better said:
it is an erotic encounter from beginning to end, with its comings and goings, with its returns,
their new beginnings and the final explosion, so intense that it is not clear whether it is from happiness or
of death (I believe that in the first twenty years of my sentimental life I always did
love, the inaugural time, with the aria of Love, madness and death from Tristan and Isolde. It is
to say, in a poetic and solemn way, mystical and ritual. In the following, I changed a
little: with The Magnificat, sung by Mina. Making love is a ceremony, the most
intense, mystical and profound. That is why capitalism is anti-erotic: it does not shape us to
that, it doesn't give us the necessary time. Communism neither.
I exiled myself, additionally, with an unpublished book of poems, an allegory: Description of a
shipwreck. It was written on onion skin paper in different colors, a small
delicacy that allowed me, like Neruda edited his Barcarole. That was what was
happening then in Uruguay: a shipwreck. The Condor plan subscribed by the armies
Cities of Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil had achieved a macabre success.
and the country was plunged into a state of internal war, a constitutional figure that the
military approved to unleash the most violent and savage repression that could
they gave to conceive. The book poetically narrates that shipwreck, which is that of a project
political, from a generation (the allegorical navy) of a country and of a sen- relationship
It's very difficult for something to survive a tsunami, from an enraged ocean,
like in Turner's shipwrecks. It's one of my best books. I remember having traveled
Montevideo from end to end looking for a logbook, to write the
poems in it, where the nautical terms will metaphorically transform into
erotic descriptions. Until a student informed me that her father, a sailor, told her
I had said that logbooks are never edited, they are a secret. Beautiful shovel-
journal: It makes you dream of jewels, mythical animals, hidden flowers and
sensual (It is easier to write a dictionary of seamanship establishing metaphors.
with the eroticism of strict anatomical terms. Anatomy is characterized by
by words that sound quite bad, such as lobe, penis, pancreas, diastole, sis-
throat, esophagus, pharynx). Couples usually do not survive exile, unlike the emi-
grants. Because the exiles have lost a war, they have failed, on the other hand, the
emigrants have a dream: to live better where they settle. Upon my exile, I
I had no illusions, other than returning as soon as possible and getting my life back.
montevideana: give literature classes, watch all the movies, read all the books,
listen to all the music, talk with my friends and walk through the streets of Mon-
video, full of secrets, of mysterious estates, of extravagant characters and of
a generation that wanted to change the world in the image of their dreams. And to return
to converse. In exile, I lost the conversation, that kind of Montevidean religion.
I don't know any place in the world where conversation brings more pleasure than
in Montevideo. Late capitalism has suppressed conversation, it considers it...
productive. Of course, it only produces pleasure and it is a pleasure that cannot be bought or

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 Cristina Perirossi

selling. Facebook is a terrible imitation of conversation, although in the time

From exile, what relief, what help Facebook would have given me.
I would not have been able to publish a description of a shipwreck in Uruguay, as not
I had been able to publish the story "The Rebellion of the Children" (it was the first literary text)
starring presumed missing persons, when military regimes were still in place
they denied their existence) which ended up, along with others, forming a volume with that title
that I couldn't publish in Spain either, due to Franco's censorship. The first edition
It's from Monte Ávila, in Caracas. It seems paradoxical that someone would be exiled from
a dictatorship in another, but when one exiles himself like I do, in twenty-four hours, no
You have a tourist guide at your disposal to choose which city you want to go to. One does not
they throw him out and he s wherever he can, not where he wants. The pessimistic philosophers
Greeks had a saying: "The best thing is not to be born. But in case of being born, the best...
it is not to be exiled.” They knew what they were talking about.
I exiled myself fully aware of the disaster of my country, of my generation, of the pro-
political project that had sunk and of which I, who had been obsessed as a child
fascinated by World War II, somehow I became a
victim of the process, just like my books, just like my neighbors, just like my students
No. The 'every man for himself' from Description of a Shipwreck was the terrible admonition.
under which I fled, with guilt for fleeing, with pain for fleeing. The guilt of saving oneself is long,
It is hard and its ghosts occupy our dreams for many nights.
that I had saved my skin, I dedicated myself, as soon as I arrived in Barcelona, to fight with-
between Francoism and the Uruguayan dictatorship, with the predictable outcome: in 1974 I had
to flee to Paris, undocumented, heavily prohibited and wanted by military forces of
different countries. My sin had been to write and denounce torture.
I don't know how many lives scorpions have (I was born on November twelfth) but in
In those years, I spent almost all of mine.
I often say that I had the misfortune of witnessing the rise of fascism in my home country.
and the joy of seeing it fall in the country of adoption, and since I am cosmopolitan and Renaissance.
It seems to me that the experience is worth just as much as if I had only seen it in the same place.
Exiles are very painful experiences and at the same time, very enriching, like
love. It's not just for the good times. One of my favorite poems is 'The Art of
"The Loss," by Elizabeth Bishop. It is a brief, unemotional poem that I read for the first time.
my time many years ago, in an anthology, before the love story
between her and Lota de Macedo Soares, the famous Brazilian architect who was taken to the cinema
with the title of Moon in Brazil by director Bruno Barreto. "The art of losing does not
It seems difficult to acquire,” says in the first verse. That's not my case. I get used to it.
Hardly to the losses, I believe that we mourn what is lost and we always feel nostalgia,
even if it is an idealization. The moment, even the happiest moment of existence-
hi, it is corroded by that feeling of fleetingness, of transience. As I write
these lines I am happy, but I will stop being so as soon as I stop, there's no way to
retain the ephemeral, the transient. And life is that, fleetingness. I believe that in one of the
stories from my book The Abandoned Museums (with which I won the award in 1968)
Arca editorial, then directed by Ángel Rama, the best literary critic of the Río
the Silver) I spoke of the ephemeral, metaphorically. Because in reality, the ephemeral-
myrmecophiles are winged insects (the oldest that have survived) and their existence is

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 Stop, moment, you are so beautiful

Very briefly: as soon as they stop being larvae and can mate, they live only twenty-four.
hours, to make love and then die. A specialist, John Lloyd describes it this way:
Adult mayflies never eat: they are only interested in sex. Huge swarms
males invade the air simultaneously, and the females fly among them,
mating season. Mating occurs in mid-flight and as soon as it ends, the
the male falls into the water, dead. The female lays eggs immediately in the water and,
then, it also dies." When I wrote that long story, I did not know of the existence
of the real ephemerals, but it seems completely symbolic of the philosophy of
Nature: the only meaning of life, some scientists say, is to perpetuate itself.
They are born solely to make love, and once it is done, they die, but they have left eggs.
Will art, books, music, movies, architecture, drawings in the
caves, the graffiti, the verses on the Internet, photography, science and technique
eggs that we, men or women, deposit before we die? When I
I fall in love, I lose my appetite. It's not that I feel those silly butterflies in my stomach.
of the bad verses, it's that like the ephemeral, I only wish to make love, although I know
that then the anguish of the finite, of death will come. When I write, it happens to me that
same. I can rejoice in a good metaphor or a good story, but after
After laying the egg, what to do? How to return? Just like drug trips, the
The return is painful. And I don't do drugs more than with my inner drugs, they're enough for me.
I have enough difficulties with them. The day when the brain is no longer a mystery,
they will give us, at birth, the formula of our chemistry. Then, instead of consulting
the horoscope, a sensor will tell us, at dawn: adrenaline, 50%, endorphins, 25%,
pheromones, 10%, and we will know if that day we are more willing to get intoxicated with
our inner fantasies or to make a good investment in the stock market.
I think the awareness of the ephemeral (of death, in other words) has me
always tormented, but I consider it nothing more than a manifestation of anguish
a desire to live. The same, perhaps, that drives all animals to reproduce and has not-
not just about having children, but about those "eggs" (the aria Mi chiamano Mimi, sung by
Renata Tebaldi, the poem 'Considering Coldly, Impartially' by César Vallejo,
office painting in New York, by Hopper, a photograph by Diane Arbus or a movie
by Margarethe von Trotta) that we deposited before dying, like the ephemerals.
The first time someone included me in a Spanish poetry anthology
(in 1974, he had obtained nationality in a convoluted manner that is not relevant to the
if telling, as Cervantes recounts the idyll between Rocinante and Sancho's donkey
Belly, but referring to him) was the poet and editor Víctor Pozanco, in the book: Seven poets of
resurgence. I was the only one born outside the peninsula. This inclusion cost her
I caused a few disappointments: they were not willing to consider me Spanish like that.
how so, despite the papers and I learned firsthand, once again, how powerful
there are envies and rivalries even among your supposed friends. Pozanco me
he requested a poetic piece to include along with the poems. He says:

I write for the love of everything alive and fleeting; for the beings that come and go ("like the ge-
generation of leaves, so is that of men," wrote Homer, at the beginning of the Iliad,
to certain objects that invite us to rejoice; I write for the love of words and emotions-
actions, to everything that over time will be a bad memory and evanescence. I write to
to preserve and keep the vain and fleeting moment, against death. And to invent
what does not exist (sufficient reason to be invented) and to testify to what exists,

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 Cristina Perirossi

soon it will cease to be. I write because time changes everything. By witnessing things
I modify them, recreating them, and in that sweet occupation of enjoying, feeling, appreciating shapes,
colors, textures, gestures, landscapes, ideas and fix them in writing – so that they do not un-desire
they seem – I feel that I participate, humbly, in the creation. I think, then, that
I write because I am dying, because everything happens quickly and sometimes I experience
the desire to retain it; literature is testimony precisely because everything is contained
I need to disappear, and that moves us, it cries out for residence. I write because
I am momentarily alive, in transit, and I don't want to forget that street, a face.
what I saw while walking, the horror in the face of injustice, the hatred for oppression. Sometimes
I write to say what others do not say or cannot say. To fix it in a material.
evanescent and ambiguous - the word - the flow and the transition of the real and the fantastic.
"Stop, moment, you are so beautiful," wrote Goethe in Faust. Or are you so cruel, so
curious, so strange. Poetry participates in the essential duality of being: solitude and the
attempt to express, to communicate, to break the boundary of the self.

This confession was written more than forty years ago, but I would endorse it today.
also. Not in vain, in one of my latest poetry books (The Night and Its Artifice,
ed. Cálamo, Palencia, 2014) there is one whose title is a quote from Goethe and begins:
Like the young Faust seduced by Mephistopheles
as I lean over your body
I want to kiss your smile
when you light up your breasts like the lighthouses of Alexandria

I said: "Stop, moment, you are so beautiful"

[...]
Without this mad (Mephistophelean) desire to hold onto the fleeting moment, perhaps it would not exist.
The drawings in the caves of Altamira, nor the poems of Homero Aridjis, nor the rela-
neither the works of Felisberto Hernández, nor the Studies of Chopin, nor the paintings of Richard Estes.
These terrifying photographic cameras attached to the mobile would not exist that then spill
about social networks their infinite vomit: the vomit of the instantaneous over a mate-
fungible rial and that will disappear just a little slower than the destroying machine of
Memory. All memory is bad memory, that's why I write, a victim of transience.
I love photography. I spent the first years of my youth trying to save.
to be able to buy myself a camera, and in the end, I got a camera from Germany
A gifted Oriental girl with a wonderful lens. But she didn't photograph people. She was very
aware of the metaphorical sense of photography: it is a form of possession. Photogra-
To deceive someone, even with their consent, is a way of making love, of violating them.
and if Susan Sontag already analyzed it sufficiently in her essay on photography,
I narrated it in my novel 'Love is a Hard Drug'. I only photographed landscapes, the sea,
obsessively the sea, the forests, the long ocean beaches, and with the shutter almost
closed, to obtain black and white scenes of an unreal contrast. I saved the cá-
I regained the love of exile during one of my travels, only to lose it in a separation.
Sentimental, later. What dictatorships do not kill sometimes dies from conflicts.
personal. And someday it will be found, among my unpublished papers (even if I lived
many more years I couldn't publish everything I have written) a story of the first
youth, narrated under this obsession of transience. It is a tale of the misnamed
science fiction, which even then Julio Cortázar and I called anticipation
Rados, both, from the fascinating stories of J. G. Ballard, beautifully translated by

26
 Stop, moment, you are so beautiful.

Aurora Bernárdez). It recounted the experiment of a scientist who managed to establish himself
a chip (the word didn't exist then, I think I used the term cell) in the brain
who filmed his entire life twenty-four hours a day, and recorded all the sounds and
thoughts. That crazy desire to preserve everything, to outsmart death led him to the
frenzy of fixing all things, of not losing a minute, no matter how inconsequential it was,
el plato de lentejas, el molinillo del café, las gotas de la lluvia, el momento de defecar,
las heces, la maquinilla de afeitar, la pasta de dientes, la tarjeta del metro, el condón
dirty, the beer can, the fruit labels, the peels, the stains of the ca-
mice, the cat's whiskers, his wife's yawn, the baby's diapers, the manure
from the pigeons, the pleas of a beggar, but then, when the machine began
to reproduce incessantly every moment, without respite, without pause, it began to become
crazy, and unable to stop his invention, swollen with memory, but not with memory
selective, where the irrelevant mixed with the mundane, committed suicide, from an excess
of reality. Because the fundamental difference between life and art is the capacity
to select, that is, to choose, just like in love. To love, we choose, no matter how much
instinctive, irrational, and unconscious as the choice of object (it is a blessing: if
the choice was rational, only some objects would receive our love) and to paint,
to poetize, to narrate, to make music, to photograph, we also select, although the key to
this selection is completely subjective (when Montaigne was asked,
grieved by the death of his friend, for why he had loved him so much, he replied: "Because
he was he and I was I.” Perfect answer after which it is only appropriate to be silent).
I don't want to remember everything, just that moment of fullness, of sensory ecstasy.
the imaginative in which I brushed against eternity, in which I had a glimpse of immortality.
I capture it using the camera, I write the poem, I record the music... but
Inevitably, over time, the intensity of the emotion fades away,
condemned to repeat it in life or let it die. That's why I hardly keep photographs.
and I have let myself be photographed very little. So that the feeling of loss is not so
fierce. Apart from that, memory is completely random, and it is not true that re-
let's remember more according to the intensity of what we lived (Why, of my first love experienced
with great intensity and under the same roof I keep few memories, and obsessive-
mind, instead, a small coffee stain on the pearl gray dress that
I had designed for her?). I wrote several essays on photography, in various
magazines, and the protagonist of my novel The love is a hard drug (which should have been called
The Stendhal syndrome, but the title seemed too scholarly to the then director.
Tor de Seix-Barral) is a photographer, very aware that photographing is a way
of possessing, of stopping time. One of those machines to stop time that
We would all like to possess at some point for me is writing. Not just a
time machine. It is the only 'home' I have had, the only residence, as I titled
two poems and an anthology published in Uruguay: "My house is writing".
Time transforms everything, loses everything. To live is to lose, to strip away. The worst
is to be aware of it. If the key to happiness and survival is the lack
from memory, the capacity for adaptation, writing, fixing with the camera, filming are in-
efforts to preserve perishables.
One of the first times the word writer appears in History is in the
time of the pharaohs. They appointed officials called scribes, whose
the function was: to testify the present and to foretell the future. I mean, everything: because in the

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 Cristina Perirossi

The ephemeral ones are present just like the elections in Spain, the way of doing
the love of two teenagers and the way to try to cure cancer, the armies and the
religions, wars and television series, poetry and newspapers. In
As for predicting the future, I believe that literature has done it many times; because
Baudelaire wrote: 'Nature is a divine temple' (the sonnet 'Correspondences')
that I often quote) and my novel The Ship of Fools is an almost choral parable about the
the wandering condition of the exiled, in the 20th century, is as testimonial as the next one,
Lonesome for love, completely lyrical and psychological, lacanian, the description of a
passionate delirium of symbiosis. Writing is always a testament to something, to the fan-
subjective tediums or a fragment of reality that is like a mosaic. If life
it makes sense, it is a gigantic fresco of mosaics that some creature extra-
the terrestrial watches, with curiosity and strangeness, as the houyms (the
wise horses) to the shipwrecked humanoid, Gulliver, in one of the best novels
that have been written in the history of literature.
That is why the myth that most inspires me, moves me, and seduces me is that of Casanova.
drawn, destined to guess the future, without anyone believing her. The worst of punishments. The
Writers are often like lost Cassandras in the hell of existence.
without anyone to listen to us. Cassandra has to fulfill her punishment: to prophesy, without being
heard. Something like this led Stefan Zweig to commit suicide, and Adorno to say that after
Writing poetry in Auschwitz made no sense. That observation by Freud was fulfilled.
that culture fails in the face of the death drive. I can understand Adorno and
however, I keep writing poetry, because my goal is not to save humanity
You're welcome, it didn't serve any purpose that I posted Panic clues in Montevideo, warn-
metaphorically about the advent of the military coup. Poetry is a
superstructure, to put it in Marxist terms, and it can be an intense pleasure and
delicate in times of peace and inspiring and strengthening in times of struggle, but not
Protects nothing, nor does it serve to gain peace, not even sustenance (In 1976 I was invi-
You go to a Congress of poets for freedom, in Quebec. When filling out the form
For admission to the country, I didn't dare to put poet in the profession item. Nor writer.
I put journalist. That fit within the system, the other did not. And I thought of Baudelaire and
the stern Colonel Aupick, his stepfather, who pursued him so that he would have a pro-
a profitable profession, like yours. What is it to live off poetry? A fantasy.
A chimera). But literature serves one of the most primitive yearnings of being.
human: the knowledge of subjectivity, of emotions, of desires, of the
feelings, of conflicts, of anguish, of dreams. It does not bring happiness and with-
I walk very little. A few years ago, I was the victim of a very serious traffic accident.
On the night of December 24th, I found myself alone in my rented apartment, with
a huge burn on the leg and several broken bones. The employee had
left some food close by, so that I could eat but would not see again
nobody for several days and I would have to treat my wounds by myself. In good spirits
and an adequate dose of morphine, I set out to read. But none of the books in my
a library could relieve my stress, neither the pain, nor the loneliness: I had read the ma-
y none helped a stressed, hurt, and lonely woman. I decided to search among the
unread books. By chance, I had bought a couple of books by an English author,
David Lodge that I hadn't read. It was an excellent choice. It has irony, a sense of
humor, freshness, and a benevolent perspective on human conflicts that made me

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 Stop, moment, you are so beautiful

smile and I thanked him mentally. I had found a useful author not only for
to suffer, but to relieve the pain.
But literature is sensuality, too. Words are sounds, in addition to
meaning, and its musicality provokes very subjective sensations and emotions in us. I
it's fun, in poetry, sometimes comparing them to whores playing among themselves,
They seduce, deceive, and then go out to conquer the naive. It is an allegory.
that amuses me.
To consign the present and to predict the future (Kafka said one day to his friend, Ja-
"Literature is sometimes a clock that runs fast" are missions. Observing the
life with impartiality, objectively, almost everything seems imbued with this slogan of
mission: stock market investors want to increase their wealth, political parties
to govern, the actors to act, the women to give birth, the men to command, to have the power, the
football players win and lawyers win cases. Only hedonists escape
to this conception of life as a mission, or the great narcissists, and I believe that
I have very little of a hedonist (a life without missions would seem absurd to me) and little.
narcissism.
Therefore, because it is necessary to record the present, a novel like The Ship of the...
as compromised as Love's Solitary: the fundamental difference lies in
that which they record.
Exile forced me to abandon my other great vocation, teaching literature,
In Spain, I could not practice it, like most exiles. Instead, I won
others: journalist and translator. The first much more than the second, because I believe
since I arrived in Barcelona, there hasn't been a single month that I haven't
published several articles in newspapers or magazines and years ago, the professor Mercedes
Rowinsky published a selection. Good journalism seems to me to be part of
Literature. And journalism, when it is not venal, is a form of teaching.
Here I am, at the end of my life, as always, in an uncomfortable situation. I am
a Uruguayan writer who lives in Barcelona, writes in Spanish and is therefore,
a kind of foreigner everywhere. For the Spanish, I am from Barcelona, for
the Barcelonans, I am Uruguayan, and for Uruguayans, I am Spanish. Which shows...
Perhaps there is not much to say about being, because essences do not have
name, but existence. First it is felt, then it is known. The misunderstanding spreads
also to my work. The truth is that critics and booksellers do not like a
writer poet, narrator and essayist. They subtly hint at the suspicion that
perhaps it is because she does not feel fully fulfilled in any genre, which is a
a meanness that is hard to admit. How does one classify a writer like that? Well, and what about
why don’t we set classifications aside? I write with my voices, not with my voice, and
if I mix genres and sometimes I am very lyrical in a novel and very narrative in a poem
It is precisely to affirm the freedom of art, which should not be restricted by molds.
Art, fortunately, is not normative. True art is always transgressive, unsettling-
aunt, liberator, even when what liberates is precisely what we must
repress to live in society.
Sigmund Freud says that all adult happiness is the fulfillment of a dream in-
As a child, I wanted to be a writer. That wasn't the only thing I wanted, I also wanted that-
I could be a saint, pianist, painter, biologist specialized in animal behavior, and a player.

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 Cristina Perirossi

of football. I remember that one Sunday, family lunch day at my grandmother's house,
where all the relatives gathered, in the midst of the general conversation I became
I stood up in my chair and declared, with all the strength of my voice: 'I am going to be a writer!'
Suddenly, there was a general silence. Only the clinking of a fork could be heard.
the plate. In the end, my maternal uncle, single, intellectual, public official, great reader,
lovers of music, but misogynist, neurotic, and frustrated, exclaimed: 'What did he say?'
the girl?" I, already emboldened, replied: "That I'm going to be a writer." This time, instead of
From the silence, there was a frenzy of simultaneous dialogues. "What does it say?" he asked.
gullible, a great-uncle. "She's crazy," my grandmother would declare, who had always
made to feel like a weirdo. "Writer? Where did that come from?" she proclaimed.
another. The only one who did not speak was my mother, but she sighed deeply. My
my mother had always suspected it, since I learned to read on my own (she
I had taught the letters, I just put them together) and devoured the volumes of the Treasure of the
youth that she brought me from the little school where she taught. Some time later, one day in
who caught me next to his library, reading, as always, my uncle (the communist, ele-
gante, great reader, neurotic and frustrated) questioned me. "Do you know how many books there are in
this library?” she asked me. I had counted them more than once, promising myself the
duty and the pleasure of reading them all. "Nine hundred and fifty-two," I answered with precision.
session. "Have you read them all?" my uncle continued. Since I am a great lover of truth,
I confessed, 'No, I haven't read them all, but I plan to,' I said. 'Have you seen how many there are?'
were written by women?" my uncle continued. "Only three," I replied. Indeed, I did not
I had not yet read all the books, but I knew all the names of the authors.
and the titles. "There is one by Sappho, another by Alfonsina Storni and three by Virginia Woolf" (my
Uncle was very eclectic, I was too, in terms of literary tastes). "Have you read their bio-
graphics on the flaps?” I nodded affirmatively and replied: “The three
They committed suicide." "Have you seen?" my uncle concluded. "Women don't write, and when
they write, they commit suicide.
I could not refute that terrible sentence. I could not say it was a figment of my imagination.
uncle, who, on the other hand, was as much of a liar as I was. Could that have something to do with that
warning that my grandmother often gave me, like the housekeeper of Don Quijote, said-
telling me that people who read a lot went crazy, lost their sense of reality?
Women do not write, and when they write, they commit suicide. I spent time thinking about
this revelation a long time, although I kept reading, of course. There was something
in the fact of being a woman (inferior creatures, according to my uncle) and the writing that deses-
It stabilized enough to induce suicide. Of course, in the library
from my uncle there were a couple of books by authors who had committed suicide: Cesare Pavese and
Stefan Zweig, but the disparity was enormous. I made a decision: I was going to be...
writer, and the thing about suicide could wait for later. In any case, my childhood had been
so unfortunate, brutal, and lonely that suicide didn't seem like any
crazy hypothesis. But I had to find out what the relationship was between being a woman,
writer and to commit suicide, because it seemed to me of fundamental importance.
The rest of the childhood wishes, in some way, also came true. I studied
piano, although my mother could never buy me one, but I managed to exchange
the class hours for the care of the teacher's house in her absence, and for
luck, her house was filled with books, all matching: from the beautiful and com-
Complete Losada collection, arranged by the color of the spines. This other library

30
 Stop, moment, you are so beautiful

It replaced my uncle's. It was as interesting as the other one. I couldn't study the branch.
from biology dedicated to animal behavior (modernly called ethology) but
I have always had an immensely empathetic relationship with animals, I read as much as
I can tell you about them (especially about primates and bonobos, those delightful ones.
intelligent and peaceful creatures, dedicated only to two pleasures, but in a way that is
sensitive: to eat and mate, this without prohibitions of sex or age, except for incest
until the age of three). Some of that is reflected in my upcoming novel: 'The Idyll of Bubú'
and Elisa.
As for painting, I soon accepted that I didn't have the right conditions, I
limited to being a fervent admirer, until many years ago, I decided to write
a book of poems about those paintings that inspired me the most, those that I
they seemed to form a kind of universal art gallery; not all are in The Muses
disturbing, but spending almost two years looking at paintings, reflecting on them,
feeling them was one of the most stimulating literary occupations of my life. The
I owe the title to Giorgio di Chirico. He has two oil paintings with the same title and, as
Many paintings are both a philosophy and an aesthetic experience at the same time.
I didn't play soccer more than until adolescence, but in Spain I have had...
Once upon a time, I wrote an opinion column about football in the newspaper El Mundo. It remains
the thing about saints, and that's debatable and I will not be the one to do it (Saints are humble.)
But Freud was wrong. It's not enough to fulfill a childhood wish to be happy.
While I am a writer and in all genres, as I desired (my dreams are very...
demanding) my uncle never read one of my books, and my mother, to whom I dedicated the
first, Living, never read it, fearful, according to her words, of knowing what he thought
and I felt. I think that while I lived in Uruguay, he never read any of my books.
if my uncle had promised me when I was a little girl that the day he died I would
I would give up my library, I had hoped that he would take care of mine, the one I abandoned.
in exile and he didn't do it. Not only did he not read any of my books, but he stopped reading
forever when I published the first, under the pretext that literature with-
temporary (that is, me) was worth nothing. Only many years later, in exile, in
A letter, my mother told me that my uncle had wanted to be a writer in his youth.
I could not escape all the interpretations of this self-castration of my uncle.
even if some are very obvious. Even though he was a communist, he never wrote to me,
he didn't come to see me during the exile: that was his revenge. Something very hard to endure,
if we take into account that I had admired and loved him throughout my childhood
and adolescence.
Just like in my uncle's library, there were few books written by
women, there were no books by Uruguayan authors, except for the Stories of love, of madness and
of the dead by Horacio Quiroga and the novel Ismael, by Eduardo Acevedo Díaz. My uncle, a
afrancesado, like any Uruguayan intellectual, despised national literature
and Latin American women in general. So I assumed that not only the women who
they wrote, no matter where they were from, they committed suicide, but the Uruguayan men
they also didn't write. Or if they wrote, they did not deserve to be read by cultured men
European like my uncle. On the other hand, during my adolescence, in school and in the
high school, we also did not read Uruguayan authors or authors, except for the admirable Juana de
Ibarbourou. One could think that she was the only existing Uruguayan writer, and very

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beautiful, moreover, a thing that had earned her the admiration of some Spanish poets,
like Juan Ramón Jiménez.
There were also no important Uruguayan publishers. In that sense, we were a
Colony of Buenos Aires.
Once I discovered a book of poems by Delmira Agustini and began to suspect
why the women who wrote committed suicide... or were murdered by their husbands
two ex-husbands. Everything was very, very complicated. It seemed that being a woman and writing is
more, publish, violated the identity of a woman, and besides, if one was Uruguayan, it violated
It stripped away the condition of cultural colony that constituted us.
My first book, Living, published in 1963, was publicly ignored by the
generation of '45, for my family (this one looked the other way) and for my female companions
of the Artigas Teacher Institute, too busy meeting the demanding
career, besides I was a weird kid, the favorite student of the linguist Coseriu, but
as he said, for having writer's intuition, not for following the silent course
mind (she wouldn't let anyone talk, except for me). And while they read the books of the
program of the Institute, that is, Greek, biblical and French literature, I was walking through
there reading Faulkner, Saroyan, Carson McCullers, Salinger, Cesare Pavese and
to Jean-Paul Sartre. Since I had no money to buy books, I started making
the full day at the National Library of Montevideo. I was excited.
There were many more books than in my uncle's library and I could obtain all the in-
the training I wanted. One day I discovered The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, that
I read the two volumes thoroughly, and it definitely clarified the issue for me.
about feminine identity and writing. I had no one to talk about it with, but I remember
that in the final exam of the Artigas Institute of Teachers I cited it extensively and the
male teachers nodded with great chivalry. They had not read it, but...
Guno promised to do it. And I have to confess that unlike what happened in
my family, or among my friends, all the teachers at IPA thought I was going to
being a writer. Still in Uruguay. And they also accepted my proposals. I will never forget.
to Anglés and Bovet, an old professor of Spanish Language who smoked in slippers, read with
candlelight and I renounced sound cinema. I dared to write the final thesis on language.
cinematographic work of Michelangelo Antonioni in The Adventure, comparing it with the
literary language. The old professor, who had stopped going to the movies thirty years ago,
not only did she give me the highest grade, but she also told me that she had gone to see the movie,
to clarify me, and that he had liked it a lot (In the adventure the characters speak
very little. Real cinema).
About my first book, Living, I believe that only one review was published in a newspaper.
nocturne of good shooting, and signed by Mario Benedetti, which began to be a
Uruguayan writer read, besides Horacio Quiroga and Juana de Ibarbourou. I keep
a single copy of the book, and I do not regret it at all, quite the opposite. In
one of the stories, titled "The Dance", a woman disguises herself as Harlequin, to seduce
to another. I had no explicit intention of writing about cross-dressing, whose
existence only knew in the ancient forms of theater, but has read many
years later, I think it is a delicate story, psychologically very tender and subtle of the
I desire to be like an octopus to seduce someone, as they have the ability to
to instantly change sex, in order to mate.

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 Stop, moment, you are so beautiful

Regarding the scandal that my first book of poems caused in Montevideo,

Here, both on the right and on the left (in certain things they are similar) the pri-
I was surprised. I assumed that my leftist political activity would be supportive.
sufficient protection against the erotic transgression of the book (in a country, moreover, where
Delmira Agustini had published The Empty Chalices and Juana de Ibarbourou a poem
like "Rebelde") but I was mistaken. The weekly Marcha, where I had the great pri-
I was reluctant to write, there was a great silence about my book, until six months later.
After it was published, a poet and teacher, Washington Benavides, wrote a critique.
very complimentary.
And I think my story 'From Brother to Sister', from The Afternoon of the Dinosaur is from
the first to describe, in the first person, incestuous feelings and desires
of a teenager for his sister, like the story 'The Labyrinth', from The Rebellion of the
children, perhaps I am one of the first to describe the desires of an adult man
for a girl, if we refer to the literary tradition in Spanish.
I have always wanted to write about repressed desires, barely sketched out, about
the conflict between desire and social norms, about what we dream and cannot
to carry out because moral interdiction prevents it. It seems to me the great theme of art, and
excites my imagination.
The silence with which my dearest and most familiar surroundings received my first
The book heightened my sense of guilt. Being a writer and a woman was a defiance, a trans-
regression, and confirmed my condition of being a weirdo.
Until 1968 I did not publish again, although I had not stopped writing. But something very
important had changed then in Uruguay: Uruguayan literature was beginning
slowly to be read by the elite, perhaps because the elite itself, the generation of '45
I also wrote. But I had nothing to do with them. Ángel Rama wrote a
since my work could not be inscribed within any specific tradition, that I
it was a generation, and it was not wrong. In its editorial, thanks to an award
that I won as a person under thirty (that was the condition) I published my second book
The abandoned museums.
When I arrived in Barcelona in such a dramatic way, I had read a lot of literature.
Spanish, including that of the exile: all the poets (up to Salvador Espriu, who could not
publish in Catalan) and some novelists. I quickly realized that there was no
correspondence. When Esther Tusquets gave me a job at her publishing house, Lumen (the
first time I worked for a private company) my five published books
In Uruguay, they were regarded the same as if they had been published in Timbuktu.
"We have to start everything all over again," was my conclusion. Yes, we had to start everything.
again: nobody knew what Uruguay was, nor Montevideo, nor Felisberto Hernández, nor
the Rambla parallel to the sea, neither nostalgia, nor feeling lost, uprooted. I came to
to exile myself among those who had not exiled themselves. To start over, given that, as in
Uruguay, lacking sponsors and lineage, implied winning prizes. Almost immediately
I won the poetry prize from the City Council of Gran Canaria with the book Diaspora.
but they never paid me for it, nor delivered it to me, nor edited the book as they said they would
bases: it seems that the prize was intended for a Spanish poet and for discretion-
The jury granted it to me, this newcomer and unknown.
Another hard lesson. I used the word "diaspora" for the first time to talk about exile.

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 Cristina Perirossi

South American, and the word traveled a very long way. Since then, it has been talked about.
of diaspora to designate it.
My work at Lumen was short-lived (Esther Tusquets was as good an editor as
capricious, proud and arrogant. But she taught me some things that I didn't want to learn.
to learn. One day he told me: "You are in the wrong country. Here, what matters is not the
intelligence, but submission.) and since then I lived like most of the writ-
South American towers in Spain: translating, giving conferences, doing gigs and
writing in all the newspapers and magazines. I can say, proudly, that I never wrote
a line that I wouldn't have thought to include in my complete works, not even an article
venal. The poverty I experienced in childhood and youth has accompanied me.
I always have and before normal beings (those who do not write) it constitutes an enigma:
They think that with the good number of books published, I should have already gotten out of it.
I have never wanted to be rich, it has not been my dream, but it is true that insecurity
economic, the uncertainty are heavy burdens and weigh down daily life. For the
I have turned down major literary narrative awards twice and very well.
endowed by not accepting modifications to the original text. It is possible that any
I regret the day, especially now, in old age.
I still love to write. Despite having a very painful back (scoliosis deformed
surada, three fractured vertebrae and the sacrum: two accidents in a few years) and that perhaps,
if not a single book were to be published anymore in the world, culture would not lose much. The
mission ends only with death, just like pleasure. And these two things are what it's about. I
reaching seventy-four years without committing suicide (although I have wished for it and regretted it)
sad sometimes, but what human hasn't done it) despite writing many
books (some published, others not) and I believe that after the age of sixty-five,
suicide is euthanasia, so I showed my uncle that sometimes women
they write, and despite that, they do not commit suicide.
I want to express my heartfelt thanks and sincerity to Professor Carmen de Mora,
to the coordinator of this project, Jesús Gómez de Tejada, to all the teachers and pro-
professors who have dedicated part of their time to writing the articles and to the Editorial
from the University of Seville who have made it possible. Literature is a lover.
hysterical: asks for a lot and gives little, but it is well known the charm exerted by the great
seductive over obsessive minds, like mine. Let's say obsessive (it's more
tender and more real).
To all of them, my gratitude and I trust that "the things I say in this little book do not
they would be what I would ultimately tell you, but let this be the first among many
gifts of love: a present made of all that I was in long-ago years, before
to meet you" (The beautiful dedication of William Saroyan to Carol, his love of
all life.

Cristina Peri Rossi, May 2016, Barcelona.

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