JOURNEY TO A PATAPHYSICIAN’S LIBRARY

By John Saldarriaga

EL COLOMBIANO Newspaper, Wenesday 9th of November, 2005

Translated by Juan Felipe Cano

• Cristóbal Peláez does not have so many books stored as read. For him, authors are friends.
• This man of theater has had three literary wetnurses. Three voracious and dedicated readers who present authors to him.
• When he dies, he should be buried with Nostradamus and The Nostradamus’ son, by Michael Zévaco.
• Organized according to his needs, but without obsession, Cristóbal Peláez’s library, the director of the Matacandelas Theater, contains the books and authors which are of his affections because every moment he feels the need of visiting them again.
• The nature of things and Soap, by Francis Ponge, are two books that Cristóbal Peláez values specially. Ponge is an author who he initially did not consider, but who in the course of time was getting into the list of his dear friends.

More than a material library, Cristóbal Peláez González, the director of the Matacandelas Theater, has a mental library.

Reading is a vice he got soon and, as the years passed, this one took another one to him, theater, which is his way of handling with the compulsion of the first one and, on the other hand, not less importantly, of making it practical.

Because Cristóbal belongs to those people who need to be turning things practical. For example, he says that if he should learn a cuisine recipe, he would go inmediatly to the kitchen to experiment it. In the same way, and thanks to theater, if he reads Kafka he runs to see how Kafka carries out in life, that is to say, on the stage.

“I worried about this intellectualistic position of reading and reading... and nothing more. And especially considering that it is an activity that demands so many hours, which, certainly, one always wanted they were more.”

His vice of reading is so strong, that this pataphysician becomes compulsive when he enters to a bookstore. It does not happen in the same way when he goes to a musicstore or to any store... Well, in the remote case in which he had to enter. It is demonstrated if we regard that he does not have any disc and not even a tape recorder that sings to him while he falls asleep.

Talking about this in the Matacandelas Café, at closed doors, the tables supporting topsy-turvy chairs except ours and a bustle of actors and actresses who go in and go out with musical instruments in the hands and in front of the look of some authors recorded in posters which hang on the walls. There Andrés Caicedo laughs. Drinking coffee and smoking Luckies like chimneys at full production. After a big sip, he says: “I can say that I grew up reading books and listening to the radio. I believe that it was profitable because word contains image.”

Wetnurses

The fact is that this man has been lucky. He has had in his life three wetnurses who nourish him in reading. When he was a child, his brother Fernando; when he was in his teens, Eduardo Murillo, best known as Johneras, and Oscar González, in the last times.

When he was an infant of four years old, his brother Fernando was already eleven and was feverish with adventures. Fernando presented to him the first books that he would see in his life. Stories published by Editorial Tor. Among these, a couple of books that he has lost and recovered 20 times: Nostradamus and The Nostradamus’ son, by Miguel Zévaco. “Two shameless volumes that do not let you live. They do not let you sleep, do not let you eat nor satisfy the physiological needs. They just let you read them. I had lost them and a friend of mine appeared this week telling me that he inherited the Doctor Heart’s library, in which they were, and since they know that these two books make me crazy, he is going to bind them to give them to me.”

He also read the novels of the French booklets as Mysteries of Paris, by Eugène Sué; Víctor Hugo’s stories; Paul Feval. And Colombian novels as Maria, The vortex, Manuela. And he “scraped” The village Library by Jorge Zalamea: “I remember that letters were magic for me: I wrote a message on a paper and asked my brother what was there said. He obviously read and answered. After a few minutes I returned to ask him about the same message and he repeated it. And how do you know?, I asked him. And he answered me: because the words that are written remain. It seemed to me magical that  something could be read for the second time.”

He met Eduardo Murillo in the high school. This one seemed to go crazy when he was reading. Maybe it was the reason why in the high school,  “with this silly way they have of teaching literature,” they did not achieve to put out his flame.

Cristóbal remembers to have seen him in the Envigado’s park, with a book in the hand, almost shouting that García Lorca was a son of bitch, that how could he think to write this way, with this superhuman level. “It is not possible to write this way! —he complained— this man defies God and Satan!”

“He charted a course in my life with books. A psychopathic love for these. Eduardo Murillo was the one who presented Fernando Pessoa to me. Listening to him reading  the poem Tobacconist's shop is an initiatory experience. Have you heard it?”

He also would present Alfred Jarry and his son, Ubú, to him.

When he was 18 years old he changed his plan of reading. He was no longer interested in stories of adventures. He included poetry and simbolistic and surrealistic writers’ narrative. Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Flaubert, Fernando González, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht, Sylvia Plath, Andrés Caicedo, Tomás Carrasquilla, León de Greiff, Cepeda Samudio and Ciro Mendía.

“One attach oneself very much to these insects. I believe that the writer who most sensuality produces me is Baudelaire. But this one has to become jealous of Flaubert. And the one who gets most deeply about shaking me is Samuel Beckett. He questions thoroughly the human condition of uncertainty and nonsense.”

Cristóbal has in his library three books to work, that is to say, to perform on theater: Six memos for the next millenium, by Italo Calvino; Style exercises, by Ramond Queneau, and Letters, by Flaubert. “There is all, rather.”

He keeps a brief silence, puff his cigarette strongly, retains the smoke inside his humanity, which goes out smoking the words: “I believe that the reader is the one who makes the book. It is not enough to read very much, it is necessary to read well.”

The third literary wetnurse who he has had, Oscar Gonzalez, is a dedicated, methodical reader, who also presents authors and, especially, points of view to him.

“Some day, Oscar gave me a little book. The nature of things, by such a Francis Ponge. I did not read it  —now I think I was fool—, I left it there occupying a space. At some time someone came to my apartment and I told him: I give you this little book. Why, the another one answered, that book is to dispose of. So, throw it away, I answered him. Then I investigated and thought that he was a tenacious writer. And that this little book which I despised was not obtainable in Colombia. I ran to the friend of mine and I told him about my distress. He said: I believe that I threw it away. A moment later he appeared with it and told me: you are lucky, I forgot to throw it out. I got my breath back.”

“One year ago, I entered to an antiquary in Manizales and I found Soap, by the same author. In it he speaks about soap, about who uses it and the author thinks about the ephemeral relation between the two ones... I believe this book can be the fourth on this list of texts to work that I mentioned. It taught me that it is preferable to see the particular things than the general ones”.

After ten mysteries we go in his library, organized, but without obsession, inside of his apartment of Bomboná. He digs a book and another one, many of the mentioned ones. He renegates for having lost sight of some volumes and he promises that he will check it shortly to find them. He says that one of his biggest distresses is not to have the complete collection of The pataphysics college, the biggest printed treasure of the 20th century humanity.

“But the major one is that at this tempo I will die without reading The Pardaillan, by Miguel Zévaco. For the time being I have already said that I want to be buried with Nostradamus and The Nostradamus’ son. Suddenly in death one wakes up, reads and re-reads forever these two little jewels.”

Help for the reader.

Few authors, but always loyal to them.

Cristóbal Peláez says that he already calmed down the distress he was supporting for not reading very much any more time. He follows, in this respect, another Schopenhauer’s advice: to have few authors and to be always loyal to them.

He is not interested in reading new authors, books nor best seller, when in literature there are marvels in which he plays it safe.

Maybe it was because of this reason that he tells that when he was a child he felt as something magic that letters were remaining on a paper and could return to be read later, that the passion for re-reading books developed for him. Maybe he enjoys it more than reading them for the first time.

Times ago he left behind the interest in accumulating books, maybe after he read Marx. And even he periodically prunes his library, in order not to fill his space with things he does not use.

“When I was a boy I thought that if I daily get a book, in one year I would have 365  — if it was not a leap year— , and the idea seduced me, later I thought that to accumulate for accumulating does not make sense.”