/CORRECTED REPEAT/ LITERATURE-LATAM: Juan Rulfo’s Illuminating Love Letters

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, May 30 2000 (IPS) - The letters young Juan Rulfo wrote to his only love, a girl who became a woman and was to him the breath of the hills, revealed the makings of one of the major writers of the 20th century.

“Aire de las colinas” (Breath of the Hills), a book published by ‘Debate,’ for the first time unites the 81 letters Rulfo wrote from October 1944 to December 1950 to Clara Aparicio. The letters expose the man behind “El llano en llamas” (The Burning Plain – 1953) and “Pedro Páramo” (1955), works that would bring Rulfo international fame.

The collection of letters was one of the most anticipated new releases at Madrid’s Book Fair last week.

Rulfo’s widow recalled that “that there was a force he needed to propel him. This force is something he asked of me… I used to tell him, ‘You can do it.’ There were two forces: love and his own struggle to continue writing the book he wanted,” she said.

Rulfo met Clara Aparicio when she was 13, 11 years younger than he was. When he declared his love for her, she responded that he would have to wait three years to begin the courtship, because she was too young.

In the first letter, from October 1944, Rulfo wrote: “Alongside your name, pain is a strange thing. It is something that looks at us and leaves, like the blood leaves the wound, death leaves life. And life is filled with your name: Clara, clarity clarified.”

Days later, in the second letter, he told her, on that day “love died for an instant and I believed that I, too, was in agony. It was at the time that you, with your two hands, struck me in the centre of my soul. And you said: three years, as if hope could last so long.”

On an unknown date in 1947, while he was in Mexico City and she in Guadalajara, he informed her that one of his stories would be published.

“They are going to publish a story of mine in an Anthology of Mexican authors, ‘Nos han dado la tierra’ (They have given us the land).” He adds that he had also turned in another tale: “Es que somos muy pobres” (Because we are very poor), but the editors “found it arrogant.”

In another letter, in May 1947, he confessed: “If there exists for me a single refuge, the first and the last refuge that is left for me, it is you. And I will go there any way I can, at any moment, whether good or bad, towards it, where you are, because where you are, horrible ugly creature, is the only thing that can console me or make me better.”

Rulfo often called Aparicio “ugly” to tell her that she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

One month later he wrote to her: “This good afternoon when your letter arrived, the heavens opened and a big sun appeared. Then you concluded by further brightening the day and the night. Because I already told you anther time, many years ago, that you are the pure and lively happiness of the days of life.”

The collection is abundantly scattered with thoughts on religion and the Catholic Church.

In March 1948, Rulfo wrote: “Every day I believe more in God and am very thankful that He granted me a little thing like you. Surely it pained Him to see me always sad, and because of this he put me beside you, next to this adored creature of his, to remove my sadness forever.”

After they were married, in October 1950, while he was in Mexico City and she at her parents’ home in Guadalajara, where she had gone to give birth to her second child, Rulfo told her of his discouragement due to problems at the company where he was working and his own the economic hardships.

“Help me to free myself from them, little woman of mine. Help me to find rest. I do not want to be a slave one minute more in an environment contrary to all the passions of the soul.”

The last letter included in “Aire” was written in December of that same year, because after that, Rulfo and Aparicio were never again separated. In it, the writer celebrates the birth of their second daughter. “Look, now we are already four and before it was just me and I was very wrapped up in the middle of the night. You have filled this house with people.”

Clara Aparicio, whose husband defined her as “the breath of the hills” that softly yet firmly buffeted him to show him the way, revealed last week that he had finished a novel, “El hijo del desaliento” (Son of Discouragement). But that he had torn up the original pages so it would never be published, “because it was so sad,” he had said.

“It was about the life of a boy who was always alone,” remembers the author’s wife.

Juan Rulfo was born in 1917 in a small village in Mexico’s Jalisco state. He spent his childhood in an orphanage in Guadalajara, the city where years later he met Clara Aparicio.

Rulfo wrote for newspapers and magazines, and he also wrote film scripts. He published two books: “The Burning Plain, and Other Stories” and his only novel, “Pedro Páramo” – which were enough to turn him into a central figure of Latin American literature.

Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, compared Rulfo to Sophocles, the critical poet of the pre-Christian era, describing him as one of the people behind the scenes and the words who contribute to the founding of civilisation.

Rulfo was awarded the prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize in 1983. He died in Mexico City in 1986.