A earth sailor

In Dialogues in a tile roof (Tusquets), of next appearance, the author of Person non burnishes has reunited pictures of personalities, book commentaries and reflections on recent history. As a advance payment, one is published semblanza of Francisco Coloane (1910-2002), one of the great voices of Chilean Literature

I knew Pancho Coloane from my beginnings in the literary life, from the first years of the Fifties. The memory in the house of Pablo Neruda and Delia of the Track in the district of the Sour cherries, towards 1952 ends or at the beginning of 1953, in the difficult days in that Neruda strave in preparing a Congress of the Culture. Jose died Stalin at the beginning of the month of March and the Congress had to delay itself during some weeks. In that time there were two narrators of the sea in Chile: Salvador Reyes and Francisco Coloane. Neruda often said that the diplomacy had extinguished to the doubtless talent of Salvador Reyes. Coloane, however, was reverso almost complete of the diplomacy, to say it somehow, and its narrative talent was in the heat of development. Their Land stories of the Fire, of the seas of the south, are classic of Chilean Literature and the Spanish language. They are of extraordinary a narrative force and have moments of incomparable beauty, pages in which the images, the metaphors, the same language go beyond the normal experience, as if the extreme character of the landscapes, climates, the situations found an equivalent one in the writing.

I see in the memory Pancho Coloane next to personages like Rubén Azócar, Angel Cruchaga Santa Maria, Manuel Rojas. Manuel Rojas was a quiet man, of very few words, a sense of humor socarrón, and in his last years she was matched with a young North American whom a tendency evident had to speak by him and by her.

Coloane, however, was efusivo, touching and used to say raised speeches, more or less disconnected, full of human passion and graceful exits. The subject of the sea, of course, the evocación of the seas of the south, and the subject of the earth sailor was constant. Now I think that in those encounter there was another great writer of the sea, the own Neruda, whose better poetry always was near the sailor and who was a outlandish collector of conches, of sailboats in bottles, large masks of prow, eyeteeth of narval and teeth of Cachalote. Neruda advised to Coloane that wrote novels where there was of everything: enthusiastic fires, kidnappings, suicides, loves and violent deaths, and Coloane was ed ***reflx mng to outbursts of laughter, with a species of infantile joy. The advice, nevertheless, was not perhaps as absurd as it seemed to us at first sight.

I was years later with Francisco Coloane and with Manuel Rojas in Havana, during my brief diplomatic mission there, and I invited them to a supper that could have been called official. Pancho demonstrated once again that the diplomacy was a bitter profession entirely with its temperament. With inescapable his vozarrón, said that during its visit it had reached a conclusion: in order to survive in Cuba it was necessary to be revolutionary santo, thing little frequents, or a perfect hypocrite. Later it showed a broken tooth and it said that there was it lost in a fight in a brothel of Valparaiso. The civil employees who accompanied to us did not seem too comfortable in their seats, but I must recognize that Haydée Santamaría, its main interlocutor, received these commentaries with doubtless elegance and sense of humor.

The day in which I turned fifty years, Pancho Coloane arrived at a meeting of friends and announced that he had a very special gift to me. He pronounced one of his amused speeches, this time about the marine origins of my family, since my tatarabuelo Jorge Edwards Browne had arrived at the coasts of Chile in 1806 in a pirate boat or smuggler of British flag, and in the end removed something of the pocket that I did not reach to distinguish and me he put it in a hand. It was an alive crab, acquired that morning in the central market, a tiny beast that put itself to patalear with remarkable energy, that I loosen of the hand with earth dweller scare and who ran to hide underneath a furniture. All the glad concurrence was put to look for it underneath tables, armchairs, closets, but the search was entirely unfruitful. After its riotous one fled, the crab that had to me given Pancho took refuge in the shade, where I hope that it has had a smooth death.

In already very recent times I traveled with Pancho Coloane and his woman and her son to Lisbon. Their stories had begun to be translated to the main European languages and faithful, enthusiastic readers had conquered him, everywhere. In some sense, Lisbon, marine city par excellence, cradle of great poets and novelists of the sea, inspiradora of marine legend, wore perfectly with the spirit of Coloane. The man spoke in the interviews of sirens, of queens of the sea, mitológicos beings and all the journalists did not know to take the current to him. Memory to a last name critic Carvalho, good critic of Literature, but meticulous, puntillosa person, friend of the details that call "precise", that tried to take to Coloane to earth, concrete and precise answers, and was hopeless of not obtaining it. It was a situation between innocent and humorous and we, to escape of inquisitive critical, decided to leave the city and to visit the Portuguese coasts of more the north. We arrived until a restaurant that advanced on the beach and ate wonderful fish and magnificent wines of the Ribeira do Douro. To Pancho her family took care of, but he did not worry too much about his regime. It was an old plenty of energy, good appetite, eyes bivouacs. He knew to celebrate a wine, a morning, a landscape, and until drinking a whiskey secretly.

I do not know if this will have done to him some badly and rather I imagine the opposite. Behind us, towards the north, in the distance and the relative fog, an enormous rocky promontory was descried.

"It is the Cape Horn", it declared Coloane, with the greater tranquillity, in a tone between socarrón and moved, and that declaration made plan in the table a magic touch, a mystery. I remembered verses of Fernando Pessoa, so different writer and simultaneously, within underground lines, seemed. It was, after all, another poet of the sea, and could have included/understood the kinship between that rocky promontory, of extraordinary proportions, the point of Europe that went into more in the Atlantic Ocean, according to they told us, and the Cape Horn of great myths and the great marine masses.

We enrolled such in the Chilean Academy of the Language in days, almost in common agreement, since we had doubts in which was related to the opportunity and the political moment, and seems to me that we celebrated the event together. It does a little more of a year me I found it in the street, in the environs of the Santa Lucia hill. The era of Chiloé, of the threshold of those seas of the south of its stories and novels, and I always have been inhabitant of this district. One of the questions of Carvalho in the Portuguese television era: it exists something in common between a Chilean of downtown of Santiago and another one of the channels, the seas, cliffs and ventisqueros of the South end of America? It was not a easy question, but the answer, in spite of everything, was given. Pancho said to me that it had been a great idea to buy a department in these places. He walked with the greater parsimony, without haste, by the streets of the center, between executives and civil employees who ran of a side for another one, like trajeadas ants affluent and encorbatadas, and he dreamed about other things and entered his house like in a safe port. Now it entered port more surely still, but their histories, their stories, and until the memory of their oral narrations and their eccentric and graceful speeches are more alive than ever. He is a classic one that happened of a side from the scene to the other, and that it did it with a magnificent prudence, with elegance, without wanting to bother to anybody and remembering the sea until in its last desire. Returning to the sea, that always has been, for the poets and the artists of marine inspiration, from Luis de Camoens, the Portuguese, and from Charles Baudelaire and Claude Achille Debussy, like the mother and the origin of all the things.