Lezama Lima, the immobile traveler, arrived at FIU in a documentary about his life

September 26, 2018

Each generation of readers may have imagined a different portrait of Cuban writer José Lezama Lima. For many he is one of the great Latin American authors and one of the few who reaches the stature of Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz; for others he is the founder of the most important Cuban cultural publication of the twentieth century: Revista Orígenes; the author of that immense and "complicated" novel that is Paradiso; the immobile traveler of Trocadero Street whom Cuban authorities endeavored to condemn to oblivion.

Each of those avatars of the giant of Trocadero can be discovered in the documentary Lezama Lima: soltar la lengua, by Cuban filmmaker based in Mexico Ernesto Fundora, who will be present at the screening organized by the Instituto de Investigaciones Cubanas (CRI), this Tuesday, September 25 at Florida International University.

"A Havanan, cigar smoker, gossip, great conversationalist, asthmatic, devoted friend, generous teacher, charming storyteller, exquisite food lover, unparalleled host, he has left in his passage through the humble neighborhood of Colón on Trocadero Street # 162, a legend where the Dantean and the Quixotic refound the carnival of dissimilar musings," thus describes him Fundora, who sets out in search of the Lezama that dwells in the memory of more than twenty artists and writers who knew him, who have studied his work and who admire him.

Those writers, mostly Cuban, the filmmaker finds in Havana, in Miami, in Mexico, in Costa Rica, and their anecdotes confirm what the viewer knew or imagined of Lezama, but also of those same people who remember him.

Fina García Marruz chooses the phrase "the quiet quality of light" to speak of Lezama. The writer from Camagüey Félix Guerra describes him as a "simple" man. Silvio Rodríguez tells his anecdote about Lezama in a way that in the end becomes an anecdote about him or about the importance of the guitar and his song.

The late art and literature critic Carlos M. Luis recalls how Lezama cries like a "child" when telling them of the death of his mother, Rosa Lima, when his friends in exile call him from New York to offer their condolences for the loss. Something that does not surprise us from one of the writers who best described that feeling by defining that a person only stops being a child at the death of the mother, because for her, until the last day, he will always be a child.

Others remember Lezama's "asthmatic" intonation when speaking, or that he knew all the delinquents in Havana because he was a librarian in the prison of Castillo del Príncipe. Others discuss his sexuality and affirm that he was inexperienced in those matters, that he "admired masculine beauty," but that he was heterosexual. Some mention an unknown woman who seems to have been important in his life, a mysterious brunette who used to wait for him at the door of La Moderna Poesía in the 1950s when a group of writers frequently gathered there.

They affirm that his family was humble and that for that reason the house on Trocadero Street, where his sisters also lived, was just a few steps from the neighborhood of Colón, an area known for the number of brothels it housed.

José Prats Sariol confirms that indeed he could not afford those culinary banquets that he imagined, and that it was his friends with more resources, José Rodríguez Feo, who financed Revista Orígenes; the writers Mario Parajón and Gastón Baquero who invited him to restaurants.

It is also Prats Sariol who points out that Lezama found his voice as a writer from the beginning, from the publication of his first poetry collection Muerte de Narciso, in 1937, and that he maintained it until his death in 1976, at the age of 65.

The conversation about his work is equally fascinating as that of biographical details, but if seeing him through the eyes of others is not enough, the photographs taken by Iván Cañas offer him to us in full, with family, smoking his beloved cigars. The views of Paseo del Prado and other corners of his Havanan neighborhood situate him in the geography that was his and that he gave to the world in Paradiso.

And if all that did not leave us satisfied, hearing him recite the verses of Una oscura pradera me convida invites us to let ourselves be carried away by his poetry.

Fundora has been working on the material for this documentary since 2009 and it is difficult to imagine a more complete image of Lezama Lima.