Section IV: The Introspective

Time and Space: From the Categorical to the Holistic

ven a cursory examination of the originals of the poems included in Los Heraldos Negros reveals that Vallejo's earliest work gives evidence of his masery of lyrical modes. There are flawless sonnets, variations of couplets, tercets, and quatrains, and enough neatly-turned images to fill a verbal art gallery:

Va en aceite el ala 			(A wing goes by annointed with oil
y en pureza 			and with purity)

Luna! Y a fuerza de volar en vano 		(Moon! And trying in vain to fly
te holocaustas en opalos dispersos.  	you burn yourself alive in a shower of opals.
Tu eres tal vez mi corazon gitano  		Perhaps you're my gypsy heart
que vaga en el azul llorando versos! 	that loiters in the blue weeping verses!)

No wonder the book was met with such enthusiasm by the academic and literary worlds. Vallejo was at that time employed as a teacher and had extensive connections in literary circles in Trujillo, and even Lima. But the poems in this collection which point to the Vallejo to come are the starker musings on themes of desolation and grief, guilt, yearning, and a wrenching consciousness of human agony which is to carry the young poet far away from the easy success of technical competence and popular conventional themes.

The Neo-paganism of the Modernists was never really accessible as a central stylistic impulse to Vallejo, who was always emotionally, if not intellectually, bound to the Christian symbols and ideals with which he was surrounded as a child, and which must have penetrated to the deepest layers of his subconscious before he ever wrote his first poem.

It is clear from the beginning that these ideals: love of one's fellow man, self-sacrifice, compassion, hope, were never absent from him as he struggled to reconcile them to a world defined by brutality, exploitation, personal and corporate greed, indifference, and cynicism.

As a base from which to begin a study of Vallejo's ethical development, it is of interest to examine the following poem which, except for a couple of leaps of imagination in the imagery, could have been lifted from the General Confession:

 AGAPE

 Hoy no ha venido nadie a preguntar;
 ni me han pedido en esta  tarde nada.

 No he visto ni una flor de cementerio
 en tan alegre procesión de luces
 Perdóname, Señor, qué poco he muerto!

 En esta tarde todos, todos pasan
 sin preguntarme ni pedirme nada.

 Y no sé qué se olvidan y se queda
  mal in mis manos, como cosa ajena.

 He salido a la puerta,
 y me da ganas de gritar a todos:
 Si echan de menos algo, aquí se queda!

 Porque en todas las tardes de esta vida,
 yo no sé con qué puertas dan a un rostro,
 y algo ajeno se toma el alma mía.

 Hoy no a venido nadie;
 y hoy he muerto qué poco en esta tarde! 

 
 AGAPE:

 Today no one has come to inquire:
 nor have they asked me for anything this afternoon.

 I haven't even seen a cemetery flower
 in such a happy procession of lights.
 Forgive me, Lord: how little I have died!

 This afternoon everyone, everyone goes by
 without inqiring or asking me for anything.

 And I don't know what they forget that stays
 wrongly in my hands like something not mine.

 I have gone to the door,
 and I feel like shouting to everyone, 
 If you're missing anything, it's here.
 
 Because in all the afternoons of this life,
 I don't know what doors are slammed in a face,
 or what my soul has taken from another.

 Today no one has come;
 and today, how little I've died this afternoon.

The choice of bipolar images here suggests that the statement of the poem is: 'I am not entitled to enjoy the world because there is so much misery and I should be doing something about it.' However, underlying this statement of the mea culpa attitude of a Christian guilt complex, there are some philosophical ambiguities: Why a 'cemetery' flower? Why does the speaker think he is a thief for being alive? Why does he feel called upon to offer himself up in some kind of redemptive death?

There is no evidence in Vallejo's first book that he had any answers to these questions. but the questions themselves are implicit in one poem after another; for example, in 'Our Daily Bread':

 Todos mis huesos son ajenos;
 yo tal vez los robé!
 Yo vine a darme lo que acaso estuvo
 asignado para otro;
 y pienso que, si no hubiera nacido,
 otro pobre tomara este café!
 
 All my bones are another's
 and maybe I stole them!
 I came to take for myself what maybe was
 meant for someone else;
 and I am thinking, if I hadn't been born
 some other poor wretch could be drinking this coffee!

The important point here is that problems are conceived of as existing in terms of a black and white duality: everything must be judged as either good or bad, happy or unhappy, explainable or bewildering. An even more striking example of this division of emotion into polarized categories is another poem from Los Heraldos Negros:

 A MI HERMANO  MIGUEL

 Hermano, hoy estoy en el poyo de la casa,
 donde nos haces una falta sin fondo!
 Me acuerdo que jugábamos esta hora, y que mamá
 nos acariciaba: 'Pero, hijos . . .'

 Ahora yo me escondo,
 como antes, todas estas oraciones
 vespertinas, y espero que tú no des conmigo.
 Por la sala, el zaguán, los corredores.
 Después,  te ocultas tú, y yo no doy contigo.
 Me acuerdo que nos hacíamos llorar,
 hermano, en equel juego.

 Miguel, tú te escondiste
 una noche de agosto, al alborear;
 pero, en vez de ocultarte riendo, estabas triste.
 Y tu gemelo corazón de esas tardes
 extintas se ha aburrido de no encontrarte. Y ya
 cae sombra en el alma.

 Oye, hermano, no tardes
 en salir. Bueno? Puede inquietarse mamá.

 
 TO MY BROTHER MIGUEL

 Brother, today I'm on the stone bench by the house,
 where you have left us a bottomless emptiness!
 I remember we used to play at this hour, and Mama
 would soothe us, 'Now, boys . . .'

 This time, I sneak away
 as before, from all these prayers
 at evening, and I expect you won't find me.
 Through the parlor, the entryway, the halls.
 Afterwards, you hide, and I don't find you.
 I remember we made each other cry,
 brother, in that game.

  Miguel, you stole away
 one August night, just before dawn:
 but instead of laughing when you hid, you were sad.
 And your heart's twin of those perished afternoons
 is tired of not finding you. And now
 a shadow falls on the soul.

 Listen, brother, don't wait too long
 to come out. All right? Mama might be worried.

The central conceit of this poem challenges time and space. But there is no resolution of the dilemma of here/there, now/then, joy/sorrow, life/death; there is only the consolation of pretending that the intolerable event didn't happen, by bringing up a memory so charged with the details of the past that it seems to hold time and events, for a moment, in suspension. Vallejo's ability to project himself into the fantasy that his dead brother is only hiding can be regarded as a first step toward his later ability to create displacements of time, place, and identity so convincing that they carry a sense of heightened reality, as though the poet were reporting, moment by moment, the details of an experience as it is actually happening.

A perceptible step forward in psychological acuity and the ability to manipulate imagery and syntax to create such immediacy is evident in the Trilce poems. The following poem is an interesting example.The occasion for the poem was an unexpected visit that Vallejo made to his parents' home. He has arrived on hoseback in the middle of the night, and as he waits for an answer to his knock, his imagination careens from one extreme to the other as he explores the memories, fears, doubts, expectations, and perceptions which take place almost simultaneously in a state of anxiety. At the end of the poem, it is the innocent animal consciousness which is shown to remain calm and confident in the midst of all the turmoil of the higher intellectual centers. This observing, or objective, consciousness represented here by the horse is an early stage of the persona chosen by Vallejo to represent that synthesizing, non-judgemental, non-partisan consciousness which dominates the fully-developed last poems. In the Trilce poems to be cited in the section dealing with the poems of compassion, it will be seen how the same impulse informs another kind of altered perception by being projected as the persona of a child. A significant sidelight on the Trilce poems is that none of them have titles and they all purport to be speaking from the present moment.

 LXI

 Esta noche desciendo del caballo,
 ante la puerta de la casa, donde
 me despedí con el cantar del gallo.
 Está cerrada y nadie responde.

 El poyo en que mamá alumbró
 al hermano mayor, para que ensille
 lomos que había yo montado en pelo,
 por rúas y per cercas, niño aldeano;
 el poyo en que dejé que se amarille al sol
 mi adolorida infancia  . . . ¿Y este duelo
 que enmarca la portada?

 Dios en la paz foránea,
 estornuda, cual llamando también, el bruto;
 husmea, golpeando el empedrado. Luego duda
 relincha,
 orejea a viva oreja.

 Ha de velar papá rezando, y quisás
 pensará se me hizo tarde.
 Las hermanas, canturreando sus ilusiones
 sencillas, bullosas,
 en la labor para la fiesta que se acerca,
 y ya no falta casi nada.
 Espero, espero, el corazón
 un huevo en su momento, que se obstruye.

 Numerosa familia que dejamos
 no ha mucho, hoy nadie en vela, y ni una cera
 puso en el ara para que volviéramos.

 Llamo de nuevo, y nada.
 Callamos y nos ponemos a sollozar, y el animal
 relincha, relincha más todavía.

 Todos están durmiendo para siempre,
 y tan de lo más bien, que por fin
 mi caballo acaba fatigado por cabecear
 a su vez, y entre sueños, a cada venia, dice
 que está bien, que todo está muy bien.
 

 (TRILCE) LXI    

 Tonight I get down from my horse 
 by the front door of the house, where
 I waved goodbye as the rooster crowed.
 It's locked and no one answers.

 The bench where Mama showed
 my older brother how to saddle
 backs I'd ridden bare 
 along the roads and fields, village kid;
 the bench where I left , to yellow in the sun,
 my painful childhood . . . and that pain
 that frames the doorway?

 A deity in the strange peace,
 the beast, as though calling too, sneezes
 and sniffs, stamping the paving-stone. Then, doubtful,
 he whinnies
 with a lively shake of his ears.

 Papa must be praying late, and perhaps
 he'll think it's I who've kept him up.
 My sisters, buzzing with their fantasies,
 simple and bubbling over
 with plans for the party coming soon,
 and now almost nothing is missing.
 I  wait, I wait, my heart
 an egg about to hatch, past its time.

 Numerous family we left
 not long ago, now no one keeps watch, not even a candle
 set in the niche for our safe return.

 I call again, and nothing.
 We fall silent and begin to sob, and the animal
 whinnies, whinnies again.

 They're all sleeping forever,
 and so much the better, since finally
 my horse begins to nod from drowsiness
 in his turn and between naps at every bobbing says
 that it's all right, everything's quite all right.

Vallejo has begun here to employ one of his most effective tools for the manipulation of time and events into a montage of past, present, and future. This tool is the use of frequent changes in the tense and voice of verbs, which has the effect of a shifting of time frames, reminiscent of that which exists in actual fantasy as we imagine, even as our senses are bombarded with immediate data from our surroundings, that past events are still continuing and future ones taking place, all in the same moment. Much of this subtle complexity is lost in translation due to the relative poverty of verb tenses available for common usage in English. In the original Spanish, the use of the imperfect, the subjunctive, and the imperfect subjunctive tenses lends a richness and density of repetitive sound not possible in English, where those tenses either do not apply or require the use of auxiliary verbs not necessary in Spanish. Even so, we can detect a movement through the poem as translated here, which is heightened by tonal changes as the verbs shift back and forth between past and present, suggesting the flickering of consciouness from fantasy to memory to perception and back to imagination. This vacillation of consciousness is finally objectified physically by the nodding of the horse that says, by being able to drop off to sleep, that the terrors of the imagination are not real, nor are the promises of fantasy; that what is real is simply being. The introduction of the horse as a 'deity' paves the way for the resolution at the end, which demonstrates the intrinsic survival potential of the animal consciousness (which can be equated with the instinct for self-preservation.)

There is often a feverish, almost hysterical, quality in the Trilce poems. Whatever experience it is that Vallejo chooses to recapitulate, he seems to zoom in on it with a magnifying lens, isolating one detail after another until the very atomic structure of emotion is laid bare before us. But the isolation is still isolation, and the voice is 'as one crying in the wilderness'. He has not yet found his way home.

There are apparently no biographical data available to us which will explain, in terms of events, what happened in Vallejo's life to change the tone of ironic acerbity notable even as late as 'Piedra Negra ...' to the mellow, though anguished, acquiescence characterising the voice of the latest poems. That the significance of this change was deeply, if not conventionally, religious is clear from his increasing use of Christian symbols after a very long spell of reaching in every direction for a symbolic language of his own, during which time the poems moved very far away from the traditional bread, wine, and guilt triad which characterizes so many of the poems in Los Heraldos Negros. The symbolism of these latest poems becomes less concerned with the trappings of Christian practice and more deeply involved with the religious emotion, even when outright Biblical or liturgical language is used.

It was Vallejo's restless and hypercritical intellect at war with his need to believe in the perfectability of human beings and social institutions which kept him perpetually tortured and perpetually searching for "the answer". It is reasonable to conclude that his faith in Communism was more mystical than political, as it is equally evident that his faith in Christianity was more mystical than doctrinaire.

That he was intensely concerned with the philosophical and metaphysical significance of shifts in consciousness is evident by the frequency with which he repeats images contrasting 'being' and 'existing' (rendered in Spanish by the verbs ser and estar). In the following poem, from the middle poems in Poemas Humanos, this distinction is a central image in his attempt to gather together into a single unit of experience past and future, life and death, 'reality' and imagination.

 Alfonso: estás mirándome, lo veo,
 desde el plano implacable donde moran
 lineales los siempres, lineales los jamases.
 (Esa noche, dormiste, entre tu sueño
 y mi sueño, en la rue de Ribouté)
 Palpablemente
 tu inolvidable cholo te oye andar
 en París, te siente en el teléfono callar
 y toca en el alambre a tu último acto
 tomar peso, brindar
 por la profundidad, por mí, por tí.

 Yo todavía
 compro 'du vin, du lait, comptant les sous'
 bajo mí abrigo, para que no me vea mi alma,
 bajo mi abrigo aquel, querido Alfonso,
 y bajo el rayo simple de la sien compuesta:
 yo todavía sufro, y tú, ya no, jamás, hermano!
 (Me han dicho que en tus siglos de dolor,
 amado sér,
 amado estar,
 hacías ceros de madera. ¿Es cierto?)

 En la 'boite du nuit', donde tocabas tangos,
 tocando tu indignada criatura su corazón
 escoltado de ti mismo, llorando
 por ti mismo y por tu enorme parecido con tu sombra,
 monsieur Fourgat, el patrón, ha envejecido.
 ¿Decírcelo? ¿Contarselo? No más,
 Alfonso; eso, ya nó!

 El hotel des Ecoles funciona siempre
 y todavía compran mandarinas;
 pero yo sufro, como te digo,
 dulcemente, recordando
 lo que hubimos sufrido ambos, a la muerte de ambos,
 en la apertura de la doble tumba,
 de esa otra tumba con tu sér,
 y de ésta de caoba con tu estar;
 sufro, bebiendo un vaso de ti, Silva,
 un vaso para ponerse bien, como decíamos,
 y después, ya veremos lo que pasa . . . 

 Es éste el otro brindis, entre tres,
 taciturno, diverso
 en vino, en mundo, en vidrio, al que brindábamos
 más de una vez  al cuerpo, 
 y menos de una vez. al  pensamiento. 
 Hoy es más diferente todavía;
 hoy sufro dulce, amargamente,
 bebo tu sangre en cuanto a Cristo el duro,
 como tu hueso en cuanto a Cristo el suave,
 porque te quiero, dos a dos, Alfonso,
 y casi lo podría decir, eternamente. 



 Alfonso, you're watching me, I see it,
 from that implacable plane, the dwelling place
 of forevers and nevers lined up row by row.
 (That night you slept, between your dream
 and my dream, in the rue de Ribouté)
 Palpably,
 your unforgettable halfbreed hears you strolling
 through Paris, senses you on the phone becoming silent
 and picks up, on the wire, your latest act
 taking shape, a toast
 from the depths, by me, by you.

  I'm still
 buying "du vin, du lait, comptant les sous"
 under my overcoat, so that my soul doesn't see me
 under that same overcoat, dear Alfonso
 and under the simple beam of the compound temple;
 I still suffer but you, no more, never, brother!
 (They've told me that in your centuries of pain,
 beloved being,
 beloved existing,
 you made zeros of wood. Is it true?)

 In the "boite du nuit" where you used to play tangos,
 your indignant protege touched to the heart,
 leading yourself, weeping
 for yourself and for your enormous resemblance to your shadow,
 Monsieur Fourgat, the owner, has grown older.
 Tell him about it? Recount it to him? No more,
 Alfonso; that's over now.

 The Hotel des Ecoles is always open
 and they still buy tangerines;
 but I suffer, like I tell you,
 sweetly, remembering
 what we suffered together, at both our deaths
 in the opening of the double tomb,
 of that other tomb with your being,
 and  this mahogany one with your existence; 
 I suffer, drinking a glass of you, Silva,
 a little pick-me-up, as we used to say,
 and afterwards, well, we'll see what happens.

 This is the other toast, among three
 taciturn, diverse
 in drink, in the world, in glass, how we drank
 more than once to the body
 and less than once to the mind.
 Today is even more different,
 today I suffer sweet, bitterly,
 I drink your blood on behalf of Christ the firm
 I eat your bone on behalf of Christ  the yielding,
 because I love you, two by two, Alfonso,
 and I could almost say, eternally.

That Vallejo has achieved at least a certain peace of mind about the dilemma posed by the existence of suffering and death and the loss of loved ones is clear by the tone of this poem. There is no doubt in the mind of the poet that Alfonso is dead, and that the speaker has accepted and reconciled himself to that death on a totally different level of reality than that which informs 'To My Brother Miguel'. There is no attempt here, as there was in that poem, to fuse opposites by bringing them into closer and closer juxtaposition until each seems to lose its separate identity and melt into the other. The opposites (past and present, death and life, pain and joy) are kept firmly in their places, but there is a synthesizing spirit which allows them to coexist as parts of a coherent and unified whole. The entire poem takes place in the present tense. When the past is introduced, it is introduced as memory, and because it is not asked to take the place of present reality; it assumes a reality of its own, which gives the two time frames -- past and present -- a sense of genuine coexisence.

We are pepared for this holistic view by the image in the third line, which suggests a kind of geometrical infinity stretching back to a memory and forward to the toast that is about to be offered from the other realm. The image of the double tomb is so overloaded with symbolic resonance that an attempt to verbalize any single meaning would limit its value in functioning as the pivotal center of the poem.

That the wine and the toasting should lead to the image of that strange Eucharist in the last stanza is so unexpected that it earns the use of such a word as 'eternally' to end the poem.

The fact that this poem does not bear a date supposes that it was written sometime after 1932, the year that Vallejo returned to Paris from his exile to Spain, and before 1937, since all the poems of that last four-month period of productivity are dated. To this period also belongs the poem beginning 'Dulzura por dulzura corazona' to be discussed in the next section.

These pieces, then, seem to be transitional works, in which Vallejo, even before the agonizing experience of watching the systematic razing of Spain, has obviously come to terms at least with his own relationship with himself. Something has happened to open him to new possibilities of understanding and synthesis. It was undoubtedly this capacity to bear the pain of the world even when he was to be forced to witness the annihilation of his most cherished hope for its alleviation that made it possible for him to turn the violence of the destructive energy of the Spanish Civil War into "España aparta de mí esta cáliz" (Spain, take this cup from me), his last symphonic outpouring of compassion and mourning, united with an inextinguishable love for human beings in whatever plight they find themselves.

© Sandy McKinney