"El reposo del fuego": A Germinal Anticipation of Morirás lejos

"El reposo del fuego": A Germinal Anticipation of Morirás lejos Ricardo Aguilar Melantzón The University of Texas at El Paso Mimi Gladstein The University of Texas at El Paso Morirás lejos, José Emilio Pacheco's only full length novel, twice published by Joaquin Mortiz, initially ignored, then hailed in Proceso as one of "los mejores libros experimentales de narrativa que se han hecho entre nosotros en por lo menos los últimos doce años,"1 has been minimally explored by critics on either side of the border. In the only English language article that deals exclusively with Morirás lejos, Joel Hancock investigates the special techniques Pacheco uses to elicit reader participation in working out the message of the novel.2 Barbara Bockus Aponte's more general article examines, through the perspective ofclues gathered from his poetry, the narrative techniques Pacheco uses in his short stories. Professor Aponte illustrates how one verse (Ecos pasos recuerdos destrucciones) from an earlier poem, "El reposo del fuego", serves as an epigraph for the narrative work of José Emilio.3 Although Aponte devotes only one paragraph of her article to Morirás lejos and its relation to that verse, a closer exploration of "El reposo del fuego" suggests that not only is the one verse pertinent, but the entire poem can be read as a germinal anticipation of the carefully structured and symbolically ornamented novel. A close analysis of both works illustrates how Pacheco moves from the economy of poetry to the more expansive medium of prose in order to elaborate his theme through multiple settings, more specific symbols and detailed imagery. 1.Marco Antonio Campos, "Los mejores libros de 1978," Proceso, No. 114 (8 de enero de 1978), 55. 2.Joel Hancock, "Documentation, Conjecture and Reader Participation in José Emilio Pacheco's Morirás lejos," SELECTA, 1 (1980), 102-105. 3.Barbara Bockus Aponte, "José Emilio Pacheco, cuentista," Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century, 7, i (1979), 5-21. 60ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW The theme of "El reposo del fuego" (1964) is one of unaltered, unaltering, and unalterable disaster; the message of Morirás lejos is a working out, in horrifying detail, of the poem's apocalyptic vision. "Nada altera el desastre . . ."; thus Pacheco begins "El reposo del fuego," and in Morirás lejos he unfolds a 2,000-year illustration of that statement.4 Using a contrapuntal structure that fuses events and places, in the novel Pacheco simultaneously locates the reader at a window in Salónica (Mexico City),5 at the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem, in the Warsaw ghetto, with the Nazi military laying siege to the ghetto, with a victim of the Spanish Inquisition in Toledo, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzac, Chelmo, Maj kanek, Sobibor or Treblinka, in Vietnam, and propelled into the future at a countdown for the nuclear holocaust. Though his settings are not as specific in "El reposo del fuego," initially it is in the poem that he uses the technique of amplifying a single location to include past and present worlds. In "El reposo del fuego," the particular setting is "Bajo el suelo de México"; however, the putrefaction (espesamente pútridas, RF, 49), blood and smoke ("sangre y humo alimentan las hogueras," RF, 40) extend to a universal vision: "Llena el mundo la caudal pesadumbre de la sangre" (RF, 36) opens the poem and "todo el mundo está en llamas" (RF, 57) appears at the end. Pacheco reinforces these connections of space and time with a variety of techniques. Early in the poem, in the section called "(Don de Heráclito)", the ancient Greek philosopher's world view of eternal flux through fire, "Y el reposo del fuego es tomar forma/con el pleno poder de transformarse" (RF, 43), is connected to a contemporary situation where disparate things are brought together. In an image that foreshadows the "Salónica" sections of Morirás lejos, the narrator in the poem declares, "Soy y no soy aquel que te ha esperado/en el parque desierto una mañana" (RF, 43). In this manner, diverse settings combine with layered time structure to convey the fact that neither time nor place affect the perpetuation of...