Julio Ramón Ribeyro, the storyteller attached to a cigarette skinny
By Gabriel García
La Tercera, 26 March 2011
A man looking for traces of cigarette butts at the edges of the Seine. In his pockets, empty like a scarecrow, only a handful of matches with a thin Julio Ramón Ribeyro nicotine turns to winter in Paris.
They run the 50, and the Peruvian writer is forced to sell their books of Balzac and Flaubert to pay a flat with windows facing the street. That precariedad, donde vagan los derrotados, así como de ceniza y vino tinto, está hecha la obra de quien revive en las librerías gracias a una nueva edición de sus cuentos completos y narrativa breve.
Publicada por Seix Barral con el título La palabra del mudo , según el crítico Julio Ortega "si el Perú desapareciera, éste podría ser reconstruido, gracias a estos relatos que quedan entre Chejov y Maupassant".
Nacido el 31 de agosto de 1929 en un barrio limeño de clase media, si Ribeyro es considerado una de las mejores plumas de Latinoamérica, esto en gran parte se debe a "ese 3% que la ciencia le deja al milagro", dice a The Third his friend Alfredo Bryce Echenique.
"That's what I told the doctor that operated textual Julio Ramón by a metastatic esophageal cancer in 1973. And that is when I was 40, he was left in a section of fogged glass that is usually left to dead to be taken away now, "says the author of A World for Julius on a life marked by misfortune. Absent
indefinitely
Quiet, melancholy and skeptical, the Peruvian who won the National Prize for Literature in 1983 wrote as if he were living child credits his own tragedy. This is how one character states of The word dumb "He slipped through the world unnoticed, like a drop of rain in the middle of the storm." Titled
Life gray, with the text Ribeyro debuted in the literature in 1948, the Bolivarian Mail magazine. Now in the reissue rescued along with his first book, The vultures featherless (1955), and his autobiography smoking only (1987), that story I wrote while studying law career when her mother enrolled him to take out of the ruin of the family who had just buried his father.
However, 1952, a scholarship enabled him to sail to Europe and pursue what he really liked. "Despite what one thinks and says that writing disorder, smoking, drinking or carrying or three things at once, Julio Ramón was a genuine writer and full of ideas and projects," says Bryce on compatriot with that sealed a fellowship in Paris. It was a day
Ribeyro anyone showed up at his house looking for a camera to record your child was born. As Bryce had no machine, spent the afternoon walking, eating and drinking pisco, wine and hot water in the bars where Atahualpa Yupanqui took naps or Hemingway, in another era, killed Surf. The hours became days and the child he fathered with his wife Alida Cordero was born without it.
"It was a thin man with a tremendous expression of forgetfulness, as if it had arrived by the back door and walked in always looking for an escape," Bryce remembers it.
Having to create
Concierge, junior and recycler of newspapers first, then France Presse journalist, cultural advisor and ambassador to Unesco in the late 80's, Ribeyro did everything to survive while producing short stories, essays and works of theater. Epistolary bookworm, among the best of their production are stateless and Prose diary Temptation of failure.
"The conformity is so ingrained in me that I can get used to everything, including happiness," confessed loner type Ortega remembers "elegant even in poverty." "He had the gift of the right word and fable," he says.
But he had the same significance for contemporary Mario Vargas Llosa. Though they were friends for 30 years and came to share an apartment in Paris, the author of The city and the dogs Ribeyro not spare the sympathy that he had with the president and revolutionary general Juan Velasco Alvarado. Ribeyro responded that the Vargas Llosa of Conversation in the Cathedral was not universal or that his friend had jumped on the bandwagon of celebrity. " had a tendency to impose his voice, to listen less to stop," he wrote in his diaries about the lunch they had in 1971.
Vargas Llosa in 1993 portrayed him worse. In his memoirs The fish in the water Ribeyro to accommodate accused successive governments in order not to lose his diplomatic post in Unesco. The chapter is called cheap The intellectual and produced an irreparable split between them. Ribeyro, this time, no answer. "Considered it would be an unequal contest as Vargas Llosa, had access to media and would always have a wider audience, "reveals the critical Ribeyro, Jorge Coaguila.
Allergic to the interviews, according to Bryce his passion for the story over the novel and its reclusive nature, it marginalized the boom . But some Peruvian writers, as the then student Coaguila, could enter his apartment in Barranco and break its secrecy. "Receiving the evening with a glass of red wine, listening to boleros, facing the sea, talking without a protocol is not something oblivion. His interest in mediocre characters who suffer a disappointment is a registered trademark. In his books there are no winners, "he recalls Coaguila, who is now preparing a anthology of correspondence.
"Come to my apartment. If I am I open, if not, it's because I'm dead," said Ribeyro when urged to leave. In the 90 cancer became fierce, but he, but five years of abstinence, "could not write without snuff," says Coaguila.
"It's always needed a dose of suffering in order to create," said Ribeyro in 1994 to the Peruvian TV when it appeared saved again. Had won the Juan Rulfo Latin American and the award was out of the shadows. "He had the stoicism of the resignation makes a lifestyle. But when it awarded the first thing he did was to visit New York. He pretended had made a character in his stories, refused to continue giving, and gave a taste of that last trip, "says Ortega.
Two months after the prize announced on 4 December, when his friends went looking for the ceremony, the door of his house just would not open. Ribeyro this time riding in a coffin bearing the Peace Gardens cemetery in Lima, with a Marlboro in his lapel. He was 65. His shadow was muttering in the Sena.
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