The quality of Juan Gracia Armendáriz’s literary work (Pamplona, 1965) quickly proved itself and earned recognition in his poetry and later in his novels, as well as in the bravery of his diaries and his opinion columns. And, of course, in his books of short fiction. From Noticias de la frontera (1994), an early and mature display of micro-stories, he followed with the twelve narratives in Queridos desconocidos (1999). Then came the fourteen pieces that make up El año en que murió John Wayne (The Year John Wayne Died). One of them is “Nuevo Mundo” (New World).
The personality of Juan Gracia Armendáriz is also evident in his novels: Cazadores, La línea Plimsoll, La pecera, Guía de extraviados, and his indispensable —indeed— diary-essay creation, radiant with intimacy and intelligence: Diario del hombre pálido, Piel roja, and Fuego amigo. And there are more titles: chronicles, literary portraits…
That talent sheds light on “New World,” where one remains fascinated by how the narrator recalls a part of the past and what he foresaw about what might come. More than a sequence of events, what moves is the perception that this boy has — and continues to have long after — of his father and of the family situation. Of everything.
It is striking how, at that age, he glimpses the coming of the future and its vistas when his retrospection crystallizes into intimate imaginative details: “I associate the composition of Dvorak…,” “I was reading…,” “I turned off the light….” Exhibits of clairvoyance and omens, and of the subtlety and sensitivity of observation. Even in the dim light.
The narrator revives the presence of cultural elements from classical music, the plastic arts, literature, or even Western films. They are not adornments; they reinforce the story. And that lucid fantasy — the whiskey, the Winston cigarettes, the Winchester rifle, caravans, whips, horizons of Arizona — manages to turn a familiar, everyday, plausible setting into nothing less than a voyage through wild territories that readers are willing to share. Biography and art. And seeking new air and a different place. Like the castaways who survived nearly two weeks on the fragile timbers of The Raft of the Medusa, after the disaster of that French frigate steered by an incompetent captain. Those dispossessed ones catch sight, fortunately, of a distant rescue ship, a new world. Or like that famous conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, reputed to be authoritarian, who circled the globe with his records. Or like that precocious outlaw, Billy the Kid, portrayed by Sender in his novel as a case of fragility, of abrupt crimes, and of loyalties that belong to adolescence too.
And this page by Juan Gracia Armendáriz about new continents carries within it, moreover, wide contents, ideas. It is evident in the mention of an economic crisis with its threat to the emotional stability of all the family members, capable of altering behaviors. The anxiety and vulnerability of the adults are perceived. Of course, the capacity of music and literature to give meaning to what we do not fully understand. And ideas intertwine, such as the links between reality and fiction, beyond imagination as refuge or a stratagem to escape. In any case, the urge to escape implies the expectation of a new life, of a different world. The symphony by Antonin Dvorak broadens the possibility of starting anew, of finding a way out of a situation that becomes unbearable.
And it leads one to consider that central paradox: that the father seeks a “new world” to escape his difficulties, but that perceptive and aware son imagines that world as a dangerous territory in which the entire family remains subject to the father’s will. A perceptive move. Like the talent for sketching character psychology in so few lines. The mother, for example, stands out with few words: prudent, conciliatory, and protective, she tries to calm the father by ushering the children into the living room to say good night. Thus the outline is drawn of a family bound by an uncertain destiny from which it cannot easily escape.
In Gracia Armendáriz’s literature, in the singular beauty of his prose, there is, I think, a privileged place of meaning for borders, limits, barriers, sometimes closed rooms, hallways, bottles or display cases… They form “the stormy frontier that dad was crossing then,” or, as the melodic title of his poetry book suggests, Como si al otro lado latiera (As If the Other Side Were Beating). The step beyond, the day beyond. For at the same time there is the land of promise, the hope of a larger life, the anticipation of a world that improves even though it is distant. Although the space of freedom is near violence, the inevitable adventure, fear and uncertainty, there remains the gift of survival. An always uncompromising survival.
Nuevo Mundo
When dad was losing his sanity, he would shut himself in the living room, turn on the stereo, and the chords of La sinfonía del Nuevo Mundo would even reach our bedroom. The volume was so loud that, according to the neighbors, the Berlin Philharmonic played in full some nights, right there in our living room. I associate Dvorák’s composition with the stormy border my father was crossing at the time: a man of forty who sought, in that music, a new horizon, a land of promise, something to help him run away and leave behind the storm of debts that threatened his business and the family’s stability. Those notes gave me goosebumps because it seemed they foretold a rocky American coast, in the chill dawn’s mist, seen from the bow of a makeshift raft where the whole family crowded, like castaways in The Raft of the Medusa. Those images filled the living room where my father, alone, with a whisky in one hand and a Winston cigarette in the other, directed his invisible orchestra of ghosts. To calm him, my mother would have us come into the living room, where he already rested on the sofa with the stern expression of Von Karajan. We would say good night with a trembling kiss on the cheek and then go to bed without a sound. At that time I was reading El bandido adolescente by Ramón J. Sender, and I imagined before me a borderland, dusty and arid, where red-haired young killers and a wild-eyed recklessness roamed. When everything seemed calm and the house was soaked in a silence still full of notes and measures, I would switch off the nightstand lamp and dream that my father was directing a caravan. He did so with a whip in one hand and a Winchester rifle in the other, his face red from alcohol, under the merciless Arizona sun, and that the whole family, including our poor dog tethered to the cart, ventured into a vast expanse of savage lands.
In Nuestro Tiempo magazine, University of Navarra, no. 665, November-December 2010, p. 97; and in El año en que murió John Wayne, Valencia, Pre-Textos, 2022, pp. 21–24.