Table of Contents I. Literature and Revolution II. Portrait and Self portrait: The Hispano-american Novel Confronted with Society III. "Der Zauberberg" in the Literature of Latin America IV. Miguel Angel Asturias, Novelist of the Old and the New Worlds V. Alejo Carpentier: Magic Realism VI. Rayuela: or, Order out of Chaos VII. Cesar Vallejo: The Mestizo Masks VIII. Parra anti Parra IX. Anti-literature X. Antipoetry Chapter 7 - Cesar Vallejo: the Mestizo Masks Tell me who you walk with... I walk with Cesar Vallejo for no exact reason, except a certain anxiety to return home and the foreboding that the house has been erased and now I cannot find it like the tourists find theirs. Mestizo, sorrowful mestizo, intimately wounded, Vallejo comes to the Peruvian poetry of the Centennial like Dario arrived in the Romanticism of the 1800's: to cover the native skin with exotic ointments. This is the first impression that the book of the young Vallejo, "The Black Heralds" (1918) produces. Captive in a golden cage, he, rare bird of Santiago de Chuco. His poetic language is, in large part, of mountain ascendancy, precious, searching, and is so because his vision of the world suffers the characteristic locus of the great mestizo Hispano-american rhetoric of the 1900's: of a hard reality, painful, complex and crude, which is covered with a decoration of buildings, institutions, academies and furnishings, as if things, large things, being bigger, help more in giving us a sense of and the key to a civilization that we do not understand, that is strange to us and even hostile. Ruben Dario goes from one country to another country, from one continent to another, thick, slow, brown, in thongs, chaps, vest and gloves, like a more or less living piece of some Atlantis, reciting monstrous perfections in vestibules of royal hotels, moving past luxurious trays of desserts, receiving flowers and administering a dense and heavy cognac which, upon falling into the soul, stirs it like a stone in a well. And stirs the entire Hispano-american literary world: the drunkenness of words in general. But, in those years there arrive also an army of rare hunters: precocious in garb, faces of imperfect beauty, damned subjects whose mission consists of depositing in the modernist nest the egg of a bad line that shall grow destroying its betters. Without going further, Jose Asuncion Silva causes the Emperor and Empress of China to adulterate in the same sonnet, as is said, in the same bed with a pair of fools named Jules. Lopez Velarde beautifully confounds the afternoon with a cow, with the priest, with the parish, with the nation. The Chilean Pezoa Veliz sets his green, crossed eye against the tumult that Dario leaves and, turning it around, takes from it a smell of misery, of dull labor, of liquor. The master Onis shall say that ugliness, like a growth, has located itself in the entrails of modernism. At the edge of literature, what happens is that the poets feel in the stomach the decomposition of the old art, the incongruity of the golden standard that does not reach the heights in its exercise, feel the Peruvian shawl on their necks, the voice not their own and, in consequence, without an echo, see the Western frontier distant, closed and state their resentment, their anguish and their anger. And Vallejo, de Rokha, de Greiff appear, and others. Vallejo, who was speaking like Dario, like Gutierrez Najera or Lugones, comes to notice that his voice breaks and what emerges ceases to be melodic and changes to abruptness, then a groan, then a howl. "Medialuz," for example, is a strange poem: it hatches from the incubator, but it is not the form of emerging which surprises, it is Vallejo's interior imagination, the morbid hallucination, that ominous trait of throwing ourselves to the winds, from behind the Romantic mask, with a cruelty and a violence that soon returns upon the poet himself. Vallejo departs with artful nudges from the company of Najera, Lugones, Dario; he proceeds to become Gothic, brutal, bloody, funereal, begins to throw stones at God, without turning his face if they fall back on him on not hitting the bull's eye; he cultivates horror with an ambiguous intention; he recognizes desertion but, in his abandonment, warns that there are other mestizos as unhappy as himself; he looks with uncertainty behind him; they are expelling him from Lima; he cripples the body; he begins to make his poems with hands of an indian; invents, mixes, exaggerates, shortens, like a village mason gathering dirt, straw, stone; he carefully notes the anonymous, the prosaic and insignificantly vulgar and there finds occasion for the poetic symbol; a spider suffices, some drink, old clothing, wrinkles, the odor of time, to evoke a true sadness in living, to create the image of a small dying.(1) He feels romantic, yet love turns into fury: man, woman, dying, sex, the graveyard are muddled. It is not his fault. He is a most confused Christian. He wishes not to offend God, but feels that God treats him badly, and treats worse other subjects in other lands, in other ages. He dwells upon things of them and feels sorry for them. Everything is going wrong. Amidst ivory, the duchesses, the gardens of France, indian in a shawl! Existence is a miserable supper, a Last Supper in which the "bitter human essence" is eaten with a black, wooden spoon. Dario is a gravedigger, Dario and the other dark, chanting witches, given that already there is talk of God's suicide.(2) Vallejo says, "Old Osiris! I have arrived to the forward walls of existence." A ready-made phrase is enough, a colloquial formula, idiom of the neighborhood, the store, the tavern; the gods are put in their lowly place, next to man. Furthermore, it rains everywhere, in every direction, in all tones, sad, soft, wildly: rain of tears and tombs. And esoteric numbers that seem to condense in their abstract unity some truths which the mestizo now wishes not to pronounce. Unity and totality, the superlative and the damned, like the two ancient angels. The home is more and more left behind, and man alienated, losing his own, all of his own, like one who throws away his clothing and walks naked, suffering more. Left is the priest in the wake, the burros, the pathways, the patio, the sermons, the bells. Brothers are now like small llamas in the Andean twilight and shall soon disappear. Some echoes remain, random things that follow you, striking, disintegrating. The world is a curious place, wrecked. It is insufficient to leave. "I was born one day when God was ill."(3) That is "The Black Heralds." Now then, "Trilce" (1922) is a harsh book. For once, Vallejo transfers from the tone of sweet sadness of the old familiar poets. In "Trilce" is dissonance, its composition contradictory, its procedure basic: to reduce to the absurd. He flees from beauty, the modernist conception of beauty, as if it were the devil himself. Upon the face of perfect classical equilibrium he discovers a slight deviation in one eye; at times, in moments of anguish, a cry on the lips, and other times, when everything fails and it is essential to insult human hypocrisy, he simply places a housefly, a dirty insect, on the mouth. The general effect is ugly, of an ugliness that splits the soul, accumulated ugliness so as to denounce a too vulnerable personal goodness, to make bitter that is discharged like maternal milk before human suffering. Only the academic critic can attempt a logical analysis of the poems of "Trilce." To seek a reason for living, for experiencing, that can be done. To speculate upon occult purposes also is possible, always if one remembers that he plays with fire and that Vallejo's givens are targeted and always are of human bone. It is necessary, then, to play "his" game, according to his rules, the first of which seems to be: "Keep symmetry under lock and key..."(4) In those days, those of "Trilce," Vallejo had burned down the alters of modernism. From Dario there remained not even the ashes. But that breaking with precious modernism does not mean a return to reality, but instead a step from Darian abstraction to another abstraction; from the rationally manipulated symbol, Vallejo passes to a world of insignificant and violent myths that sting the head like fleas. His is a free association of tiny myths, a system of absurdity: at times ironic, at times the product of a nervous watchfulness and a furious sadness. Does this mean that "Trilce" represents Vallejo's vanguard epoch? In the extent to which he seems to have assimilated certain techniques of dehumanization: the manipulation of a type of image that eliminates the comparative term, the use of graphic keys, some cosmic remove, this or that grammatical prank. Nothing more. Vallejo, like Neruda, overleaped his radical period, and his neo-symbolism of regional and erotic root acquired in his solitude an existential sediment of agonic nature. From there is the abyss which separates this poet from the witty, spontaneous, brilliant company of the Spanish and Hispano-american extremists of the 1920's. This leap to an irrational mythology of Andean pain Vallejo realizes without losing, on the contrary, his conversational, informal attitude towards the poetic act. Only that now the conversational format is treated as a "leitmotif," that is, as an auditory recourse as well as a suggestive factor. It is a formula for enchantment.... As likewise number, any number out of its usual context, can be. We have here the road towards an essential reality, towards a unitary, lineal image of man before the processes of living and dying.(5) Vallejo examines the concepts of trinity, duality and unity as if he were speaking of two beings who seek the infinite in an act of accumulation, of abstraction, in the outcome of physical power.... The three dimensions of time are an extensive trap which man invents to create an illusion of change and final permanence. In truth, time is suffering: the present--"stalled noon"--, like the past--"was was was was"--, and the future - "the still warm refuge of being." The unities of time are different names for the same negation. Everything is determined in a cataclysm without beginning or end.... Of course, living and dying are not always seen through a mirror: there will be moments when the duality seems actual. Vallejo, then, establishes a genuine separation between the domestic figures departed forever and their image above a bed in Paris. We shall feel that something that breathes within time may be the illusion of true being of the past: a casual encounter, the exact dimensions of a space; both things, the departed and the reborn affection, for example, immobile, negated, like parts of himself yet definitely foreign, are to be forms of anguish, familiar poison in one instance and, in the other, longing for a peace necessary in nature:(6) I think of your sex. The heart simplified, I think of your sex, before the ripe outcome of the day. I touch that button, in its season. And an ancient sentiment fails ruined in the brain. I think of your sex, furrow more prolific and harmonious than the belly of the shadow, which yet conceives and perishes of the eternal. O, conscience, I think, yes, of the brute freedom which enjoys where it wishes, where it may. In such a state the lovers seek a union that cannot be resolved, except as the illusory contact of two hinges of a door in the act of opening, which nevertheless, are intertwined, but in an equivocal manner, like water in a vessel. In the position of surface against surface (7) a power of divination reverberates: a light, lightning that discharges from the exerted energy of the already finite combat, as if the bodies had to perish so as to reveal their power and their beauty, their eternity. Vallejo, like Whitman, is astonished that the woman can be the door to everything, but while Whitman preaches it, Vallejo says it with bitterness and something of cruelty: The bleeding sex of the beloved which complains sweetly, of supporting so much on such a foolish point. And so the idea of the mother-world is also a sign of alienation and, furthermore, of remorseful impotence. The sought unity hides in the symbol of zero: frightened face, dark meanings, black clothing, much dust on his shoes, in those years in which Vallejo lost his mother, he spent several months in jail, suffered miseries and scorn and left Peru for good. Time-mother-sex-dying are the stations of his poor year, anguish the tone of voice, ugliness the face of his beauty, hermeticism the sense of his journey. In Spain, in France, Vallejo fought off poverty writing articles and publishing a generous travel chronicle: "Russia in 1931." He dedicated himself, as he said, to perishing "from living not from time," drinking misery to the dregs, the bitter dregs that would slowly corrode him. Until the end of his days he released a torrent of poetry: that which his wife and his friends collected in "Poemas Humanos."(8) Through those poems he bled, like one stabbed in the street. His European years contained revelations on the plane of social ideology; he seemed to discover a doctrine, an orientation to rationally translate his rebel half-breed's anger. He embraced, in a certain form, Marxism. He embraced it as it embraced him: breaking buttons, shirts, buckles and bones in the embrace. His revolutionary fervor is lucid.(9) He censures the intellectualism of the surrealists, the indifference of the modernist generation and the defeatism of his own generation, candidly seeks human solidarity through fugitive interviews in a Moscow that he hardly saw. This entire basis of journalistic socialism does not fit with the horrible agony of "Poemas Humanos." With a flag in hand Vallejo went crying, consoling, seeking the outcast beings who needed his Franciscan vocation, avidly dying from within, falling inward, towards an anguish that overflowed his chest and dripped upon and stung his companions. Nevertheless, there are critics who find in this book a basis of "militant solidarity," a sort of Christian socialism that might redeem Vallejo in the midst of his pessimism. Solidarity does exist in the work, but how can a clear hope be seen, a socially redemptive attitude in "Poemas Humanos" without seeing, at the same time, a well of anguish, of spiritual self- destruction, of well preserved dying within a living where all the flags disappear? Vallejo's solidarity is neither epic nor proletarian in the revolutionary sense of the word: it is compassionate, a cruel and wounded reflex of human misery that, suddenly, appears as not simply his, yet instead as the burden of his neighbors. The exaltation is directed not to the powers of rebellion, but to the organs of suffering. In his elegy to the miners he says: Praise to the ancient play of nature, to her sleepless organs to her rustic juices! Tune, to edges and points, her eyelashes! Praise to her golden nature, to her magic lantern, to her cubes and diamonds, to her fluid shapes, to her eyes of six optic nerves.... The human condition that earns his complaints is not of a social character, but instead a condition of individual anguish, a basis of shock before the incomprehensible punishment which man received daily, accumulated, like the blows that are given to a dog. The dog does not reason, nor the man. Both look askance, wounded, with the tail between the legs, cowed. Cesar Vallejo has perished, struck by all to whom he did nothing; they hit him hard with a stick and hard also with a rope.... Pain is the key word in Vallejo, neither rebellion nor anger, except if the anger is directed against himself. Pain on every conceivable level, pain which often appears to us in the ambiguous form of an uncontrollable misfortune, as if our luck were to suffer so as to deserve the consciousness that separates us from the animal. Vallejo proceeds fatalistically complaining, feeling beset by a bad destiny: thus it is with the man on the burro in the Andean sierra, thus the tender of llamas, thus the miner changed into a tin statue and thus the man of dark clothing, of poor health, of little food who seeks refuge in obscure European flats. The man suffers and joins his suffering to that of other men, makes of it a hope like a great loop. Furthermore without having illusions of grandeur. Not for suffering shall we cease to be "comrades in small amounts." Forget me and support me by the chest, donkey that you rein up to embrace me; doubt a few seconds your excretion, observe how the air begins to be the lifting sky, little man, fine man, man of the taco, care for me, accompany me...(10) Vallejo must seek the root of this pain so insupportably concrete: the surprised encounter, shocked, first in his body. I suffer counting the years with corn, brushing my clothes to the sound of a corpse... or seated drunk in my pall...(11) The organs of the man are a constant mirror of his end, but also are attributes of horror, as if man carried his corpse encased in his own body: I shall close my baptismal tower, this window, this fright with breasts, this steeple of a finger, earnestly united to my skeleton. These are my sacred writings, these are my alarmed companions. This must be my navel in which I killed my natal fleas, this my trembling thing. There shall come the day, hold strongly to your lower intestine...(12) This man, with so much suffering and such sublime capacity to assimilate punishment, is, nevertheless, an ordinary thing, of little grandeur, most varied and emotional, infinitely pitiable. Beloved are the ears of Sanchez, beloved the unknown one and his woman, the stranger with sleeves, collar and eyes! Beloved be the one with blisters, he who walks beneath the rain, who adorns the body with bread and two candles, who catches a finger in a door, who has no birthdays, who lost his shadow in a fire, the animal, who resembles a parrot, who resembles a man, a little rich, the purely miserable, the poor poor! (13) The customary man in his anxiety, accustomed to encasing his penury in little compartments that he calls home, country, wife, children, office, hotels, churches, rooms, soon to fill them with more bitter and acid sorrows like filling the drawers of a dresser, such that to a man, to Vallejo, it hurts down to the chaps, the socks, the hat, to say nothing of the shoes and soon it will hurt in the utensils, the spoons, the forks, the buttons. From the man emerge threads of pain: they are connected by wires, as in an open art, to fatal discharges. Living is a thorn that has entered the foot. How it screws! And there are those who respond by turning the other cheek. There is no justice. Vallejo is enraged by the dissimulator, who does not call pain by its name and does not seem to recognize in his existence the irremediable pact already signed, the trap in which man breaks. You, poor fellow, live; do not deny it, if not; do not deny it, if you perish of your age, O, and of your epoch. And, although you cry, drink, and, although you bleed you feed your hybrid tooth, and your candle of sorrow and your organs. You suffer, you pity and you return to horribly suffer, disgraced monkey offspring of Darwin, something that you scrutinize, atrocious microbe. And you know at what point, which you ignore, is giving in to crying. You, then, were born: that too is visible from afar, unhappy one and be quiet, and support the road that favored you down to the appetitive navel: Where? How? My friend, you are completely, down to the hairs, in the thirty-eighth year, Nicholas or Santiago, or whoever, is with you or with your failure or with me and captive in your enormous liberty, flattened by your Herculean autonomy... But if you can count on your fingers to two, it is worse; do not deny it, little brother. Or no? Or yes, but why no? Poor monkey! Give me your paw! No. The hand, I said: Cheers! And suffer! (14) Is the human condition this, how to have face to invent a sense of profound, consequent, creative finality, out of desperation? Yet, does man go about erecting his little ovens, his little bombs, administering his complicated rockets, his lovers' beds, his psychiatric couches, his museums of oily sweat, his bald sculptures, his presumptuous eternity, his constricted glandular delight? If he goes somewhere it gives, in truth, fright to imagine where. Vallejo opposes with sad sarcasm the two masks of man in this transit. On one side, the man who goes with bread on his shoulder, who scratches and removes a flea from his pelvis, who enters your soul with a stick in his hand, who coughs, spits blood, who seeks bones and shells in the mud, who robs, lies and solitarily cleans a rifle in the kitchen. On the other side, the man who writes, who speaks of psychoanalysis, of Surrealism, of the deep I, of the infinite, of the academies, of the beyond. Clever trap set to catch the unprepared. How does he conclude, "to speak of the not-self without uttering a cry?"(15) That cry is of fundamental importance in Vallejo's poetry. It derives from a long experience by which things became independent so as to attack man; returning the man within to his primal animal, to jump upon other men with bloody jaws, and returning him again to within his skeleton, "seated drunk in his bier," so as to put living and dying in their place - the point, trap or tomb, which they deserve; releasing the words and the numbers, loosening the grey threads by which they still hang, and setting to essay a play of symbols in which everything has its consequences: desolation, bitterness, fiasco; it overthrows the content and the sense of nostalgia, since the victim cannot be missed without cutting the definitive bonds, without him warning that when we are missed it is because we are already defunct and so they remember us, the poor departed, those whom we killed. And if this experience was so decisive, how will it not end in a cry? It could be called a measured cry, the voice of the hanged who, in the last instant, seems to have said something we do not understand. Friend Vallejo "speaks," but in reality he is shouting. "In the end I cannot express my living except by dying,"(16) he says, and adds: Dying is not good, Sir, if in living nothing is left and in dying nothing is possible except what is left from living."(17) Something must be left from living, then, something like the features of our suffering, the face beneath the mask, the tracks of blood on the cloth, something that attests to our passing and gives sense and reality to our dying. So that we shall not be stale and corrupted bodies. So that our dying be a true individual dying, nourished by that portion of horror that we imbibe daily as we give over our skeleton to the gleaming teeth of our neighbors. There is no more glorious dying than the live nagging, hungry, virulent, ragged one, who made his path with humility, tenderness and hatred among men. Because he learned of what dying consists and because man amasses between his fingers what others call their eternity. We have here the ethical lesson presented by a great Mestizo poet like Cesar Vallejo: we violently attempt to love existence, we recognize that the reality of dying only can be accepted as a bitter and stirring reminder that accompanies us in living, a double exposure, in the language of photography, a mirror that spins around oneself and, in turning, dizzies us a little, gives us a little vertigo that we may call eternity. "Probably I am another; walking at dawn, another who marches to the beat of a long record..."(18) No, Vallejo, not another, the same, the same and no more. The same hat, the same coat, the same pants, the same shoes, the same floor, the same anguished foreboding, the same countenance that is being erased, damn, and the same faces that we begin to forget and which go onto other people. The same. Not a double nor another distinct person. Why should it be? Is help needed to fiasco? "To be born so as to live our dying!"(19) This is what I call love of living: to proceed towards dying without hurry, to feel it tranquil and active in the belly, to nourish it, protect it, fill it with loving, with anguish, with solitude, with forgetfulness, so that it has to ruminate for however many years you have at your disposal. Look long at man: observe him in handkerchiefs, seated, wet, admire his natural sense of pomp, of envy, of expectation, his sense of order in the massacres, his respectability and transcendence in his cannibal activities, his power that surpasses the bestial in the execution of the crime and the metaphysical loneliness with which he produces his golden artifacts; consider his hunger, his fleas, his rodents, his architectonic instinct for surrounding himself with tombs and monuments, weep at his agreeable little deprivations, at his love sorrows, crying, holding up his pants, feel how we have been alone while extinguishing other species of poisonous predators, all this and, at the same shout: "I would like to live forever, so said the stomach."(20) To eloquently conclude: Considering also that man is actually an animal and, nevertheless, his sadness gets to my head... Examining, finally, his secret rooms, his toilet, his desperation, at the end of his bad day, erasing it... Understanding that he knows that I like him, that I dislike him intensely, and he is to me, overall, indifferent... Considering his general documents and viewing with spectacles that certificate that proves he was born very small... I make him a sign, come, and I give you an "abrazo," moved, What else to give! Moved... Moved... (21) This is love of existence: what makes the art of an individual a lesson for humanity, a call to recognize and accept the arm on our shoulders, the arm of all men upon our shoulders, and a hand in the funeral of all persons. Vallejo's pain, his tenderness, his piety, his luminous cohesion to the living, we have here the existential position which gives light to all his poetry. Not given in Vallejo are the most obvious conditions of the epic poet: that sonority, that liking for dust, that smell of leather, the rumor of excited crowds and those echoes of the plaza with shouts, flags and bombs, those proclamations of the individual against social evil and the processes of mortality, that are elements of heroic poetry. Nor did he have, properly speaking, the language of fire, the cruel eye of the classic insulters who need those things too to waste the enemy. Nevertheless, he sang of the popular glory of Spain in the supreme sacrifice of the battle against fascism. In "Espana, Aparta de Mi este Caliz" (1940), he sang with a human voice: elevated, lyric, wounded, triumphant, with his own voice, without borrowing accents from anyone, neither from Quevedo nor from Unamuno nor from Machado nor from Neruda. Attacking as one, discoursing as another, entering into the soul of the people as a third, exalted, surrealist, magician, as the last. His language of war is the same as that of peace: desperate, anguished, in solidarity, defeated and victorious at the same time. He views the militia a little incredulously, he sees them fall and his eyes fill with tears, he sees the people moving quickly, he wishes to follow them, he knows not how. But he too goes, as he can, to place his bomb, to light its fuse, to move among the fallen beneath a dense, all-powerful dust, that begins to fill the world, helping one body "to perish" and another body to fill with humanity and another to arise and embrace men and another to kiss his bleeding limbs, showing how the pariahs of Europe and the Americas are becoming potential warriors, walking among the casualties, dividing up fallen weapons, speaking with women and ancients, covering himself too with dust and mortality, the shock of so much suffering and of so much cruelty, something like the bearded Whitman in the North American Civil War, male nurse, yet more violent, with more blood, tears and cries, tried by the destiny of that absurd people who mean so well and who give so well of their lives to punish the foreign meaning; martyr community, treacherous, heroic. "Battles? No! Passions!... The world exclaims: A Spanish affair! And truly it is, we suppose..."(22) A people--a god become man, Pedro Rojas--or Ramon Collar, desolated, but victorious, at last, over mortality.... Vallejo becomes a bard, a voice of the people, a prophet of blue sky, he, whom shortly before "they all hit him... they hit him hard with a stick" and who perishes shouting to man, "Poor monkey! Give me your paw!" What has happened? The Spanish Civil War, the tremendous, incommensurate Spanish Civil War that, like a sealed and bloody envelope, still encloses the key to the war cataclysm of the 20th century. As in the case of Neruda, the Civil War awakened in Vallejo a well of the sorrowful, complex and desperate Spaniard--tinted, no doubt, by the black ointment of the Conquest, of the colonies, of the half-breed night--, and he responded with a poetry of chaste fury and spirituality, setting to combat the two angels, the khaki of war, and the red of liberty. Limping, falling, dusty, near to the end, Vallejo took the rifle of Spain and set off all his love for humanity. Afterwards, he kept silent. I want to write, but froth emerges, I want to say much and am dumb; there is no spoken symbol that is not a sum, there is no written pyramid, without a gallows. I want to write, but I feel blank; I want laurels, but am stricken. There is no spoken voice that does not become mist, there is no God nor type of god, without development. Let us go then, therefore, to eat herbs, meat of the lamb, fruit of the garden, our melancholic soul in preservation. Let us go! Let us go! I am wounded; let us drink the already drunk, let us go, cow, to birth your calf.(23) This is the self-portrait of Cesar Vallejo in the act of creation. His poetic art. Weary, rough, wounded, seeking the height, the essence, obsessed by the number as symbol of supreme abstraction and perfection, melancholy and tearful, honored but stricken, giving up to the tremendous connection that will perpetuate the cycle, Vallejo possesses a clear consciousness of his art: of the internal impetus as much as the fleeting surface of the aesthetic form. He struggles with forms so as to arrive at the Form; in "The Black Heralds" he walks equipped with luminescent jewels and some false ones; incongruous, pathetic, insecure, but already angry. In "Trilce" those worldly offerings have been removed, he has thrown them to the ground, attacked with sticks the paper ornaments of a modernism covered with flyspecks and he begins to attempt symbols that are not distinguished with any clarity, codes which confuse and are confused; he touches clothing and skeleton, murmurs, vocalizes, but his sounds are harsh, ugly, melancholic, associations of unfreedom, a structure halfway tied, like an old suitcase from which intimate things and some strange things keep falling. The form that he sought is fully given in the "Poemas Humanos." Their technique consists, in part, in using repetitions of a conversational phraseology, or, purely rhythmic. When it is rhythmic, the phrase becomes a "leitmotif," not the ingenious, melodic repetition of Modernism or of extremism, but instead the magical formula which, by repeating, creates a fatalistic sense. Or better, he proceeds to decompose traditional syntax so as to evoke subconscious processes. Or he invents words beginning, at times, from popular sounds and, at times, creating adverbial meanings upon a base of his own noun forms. He will tend, likewise, to adopt a fixed design, a synthetic or conceptual mold, within which he plays capriciously so as to suggest, at last, a little of the style of the old poetry of Provenza, whose play of contrasts, for example, seem models for some of those "Poemas Humanos," or of the surrealist manner by which the "leitmotif" is a key to subconscious processes. And contrast, not only as a rhetorical recourse, but as an aesthetic principle becomes an essential part of his poetic creation; it is the key to his method of self- destruction, of the final negation of bourgeois values, is his form of placing against his poetry his Anti-Poetry, the daily conversation of the desperate, the sarcastic, brutal expression of his humanism at the base of which his anguish at daily existence is toiling as if yoked. Contrasts of the essential and the accessory (24), of idealist propaganda and the human, brutal, contemptible deed ("C'est Paris reine du monde! It is as if she were urinated upon." "These are my sacred writings, my frightened companions"), the contrast of Christ on the cross who is seen with tremendous laughter; the contrast of the tender anticipation and the ugly descent (..."me rising and sweating/ and causing the infinite between your muscles"), final contrast: "In sum, I have no way to express my living, except in my dying." Cesar Vallejo is the poet who gave the low blow to Romantic-Modernist-Hispano-American rhetoric, to middle- brow sensuality and sentimentality; Vallejo is the true owl in the sonnet of Gonzalez Martinez, or better said, is the clipped condor who waited beside the bier of Dario, on foot beside the american dump, examining its miseries; the anti-poet conversationalist who deflated by jabs the radicals' globe, heroic parent of a revolutionary surrealism that already was proclaimed by shouts in other places. Vallejo, very "mestizo" and unable to cease being stoic, kept returning to our poetry the humanity that had been delicately castrated from it by the blue magicians of metaphor. He was a man who lived his existence in the Court without essentially changing the image that he brought from his Andean province, and to explain the absurdities which killed him he did not adopt what he could learn in the European academies. His eye and his thought continued to be "mestizo," he never concealed them, nor negated them; with them he went to the wall. And with them was revived. Notes 1 Cf. "Absoluta," "La Piedra," "Desnudo en Barro," "Huaco," "Terceto Autoctono," "La Arana." The citations are from "Poesias Completas," 1918-1938, Buenos Aires, Editorial Losada, 1949. 2 Cf. "Retablo." 3 Cf. "Espergesia." 4 "Poesias Completas," op.cit., p.112. 5 Poem V which begins: "Decennial group. Opening/ in the rocks, hints of trinity" and concludes: "So say not 1, that echoes to infinity/ and say not 0 that silences so/ until waking at the feet of 1/ 0 doubled group." A personal relation. See also the poem XXXII in which, through number, he endeavors to express the idea of physical power. 6 Poem XIII. 7 Poem XXX. 8 Paris, 1939. 9 "Fabla Salvaje," novel (1923). "El Tungsteno," Madrid, 1931. "Rusia en 1931," Madrid, 1931. 10 "Poesias Completas," op.cit., p.183. 11 Ibid., p.223. 12 Ibid., pp.156,156,209. 13 "Trespass Between Two Stars," pp.186-187. 14 "The Soul that Suffered of Being Your Body," pp.198- 199. 15 "Poesias Completas," op.cit., pp.199-200. 16 Ibid., p.224. 17 Ibid., p.237. 18 Ibid., p.220. 19 Ibid., p.218. 20 Ibid., p.169. 21 Ibid., p.180. 22 Ibid., p.252. 23 Ibid., p.171. 24 Ibid,, p.153.