The coming and going of the wind is always a return. Wind is not just the movement of air, the uniform rotation around the earth’s surface, or the coalition of ethereal forces. It is also the constitutive element of a poetics. And the creation of all poetics implies the lifting of meanings. So the wind can be a smell, the ominous future of a town, a nightmare, a curse or a disappearance. Especially a language. The language of the wind. On another occasion, the first, I spoke of a literature of the cold to refer to the writing of Natalia García Freire. Time has passed and the writer, who continues to take care of her garden and her cat, has not published a second novel, but rather she has launched a universe. In other words: the cold wind of the moor has given birth, painfully, like every act of creation, a language.
You brought the wind with you (The Swiss Army Knife, 2022), however, is not the creation of a town or a country, but the confirmation of their existence. I want to think that Cocuán, the lost and forgotten region to which Natalia takes us, is the territory of her narrative, her creative universe, the texture of her language. I feel that it belongs to him, without naming him, our dead skin, his first novel. With her decision, Natalia has put aside the urban landscapes of her native Cuenca and the Madrid of her studies, to look at the forests, the tiny villages wrapped in mist, the syncretism of the deep Andes. This is not strange, but brave. William Faulkner founded Yoknapatawpha, a county northwest of the Mississippi River, whose capital is the fictional city of Jefferson. There he raised the narrative of him. Perhaps among those landscapes of the deep south, Santa María de Onetti, Macondo de García Márquez, or Santa Teresa de Bolaño were born, among other unforgettable towns.
But let’s go back to Cocuán, which is at the height, in the ashes of one or several mythologies, in the last gleams of certain languages, and their images; languages or dialects that were spoken in the Andes centuries ago, and that have disappeared, as languages, empires, literatures, and religions always die. In this novel Natalia has decided to explore, in the act of creating a language, the sense of religion, of faith, or the perennial wait for a spiritual sense of the tragedy that covers earthly life. Themes that are as human as they are ancient: “You have to see how easy it is to convince people to hurt themselves.” And it is that these beliefs, which arrived in the caravels of the Spanish, over time established interactions with the deities of the dominated. You brought the wind with you It accounts for that exacerbated baroque spirituality, and its dystopian decantation, so present in our environment, and so difficult to understand, not only from anthropology, but from the violence that characterizes our Latin American day to day.
The town that Natalia García Freire has founded is so ours, precisely, because it fuses our original myths and legends with the dogmas on which Western culture is built. Isn’t that how our life is? Our syncretism? Because, as the author writes, if the answer is Cocuán, what is the question? We cannot know, we only know that where Mildred’s old house was, the protagonist of this story, she smelled of fresh grass and rain. Not like we human beings smell, like rotten milk or stagnant water, but like the vegetable smell of pigs, of the cold wind of the moor. Perhaps that intense was also the marine smell of the Mississippi River, so different from other rivers, so close to the happy and painful songs of Africa, so mythical in terms of the backbone of a domestic empire. William Faulkner said: “An artist is a creature driven by demons.” Natalia García Freire has written a book, “as the ancients of these peoples believed in the myths”, with that force, with that cadence, with that need and with that faith. Because, “there is also hate in faith.”
Among the contemporary voices of literature in Spanish, that of Natalia García Freire is one of the most complex, in the brilliant sense of the term. He does not seek the light like someone who has lost it; her writing enjoys and moves in the darkness of the world, because she never loses her visibility. She says: “The magic is not in the hand that takes the hare out of the hat, but in the hare that passes from one world to another when it slips into its hole in the forest, the black hole.” If any of his characters see the dead, he doesn’t know if it’s them or he’s the ghost. The fear felt by the beings in these stories understands that death is full of future, or is the future of humanity, without remedy. It is an Andean fear. Intellectuals and erudition are not interested in this writing, because “we fools are the only ones who hear our own cries at birth.” Natalia García Freire’s language is vegetal and has a scent, she lives with insects, the chuquiraguas, the frailejones and the curiquingues. It is a language that the wind moistens with its dew. So neat, so transparent. (EITHER)
Miguel Molina Díaz: You brought the wind with you | Columnists | Opinion