2023-06-11 03:03:07
The silence is deep and ancient, owner of two times, in the parks and small squares of London. There is a degree of indulgence in them, an invitation to rest without regrets. The mighty trees muffle the noise of the traffic and the earthly affairs, for a while, do not seem to be ours or so urgent. I’m in Gordon Square, in the Bloomsbury neighborhood, wondering if these green backwaters would bring therapeutic calm to Virginia Woolf’s whirlwind of emotions. This was her favorite square. Opposite her, at number 46, she lived with her brothers before moving a few meters from here, next to another square, Tavistock.
I think of her, sitting on one of the sturdy wooden benches, as if thinking of a friend with whom I share confessions. What ideas or characters would have conceived in this place a century ago? I take out of my backpack a book of his, A room of one’s own. I bought it an hour ago in the monumental railway station of Saint Pancras, still sure of having it somewhere in my library. It is a handmade edition whose cover I caress as a photo of a loved one. I read a few pages, almost hearing his thin, subtle voice, the one I remember from a BBC file, and then I reach for a pad and start scribbling these notes.
There is something about her that has always bothered me: that air of misery and shyness that she later transfers to her prose. Despite the numerous readings of her fiction and essays, I have not come to understand that she was ever happy; or if there was a period or a special occasion when she sailed on calm waters, free from the harassment of her indefatigable ghosts.
Even in the paragraphs in which we find a vehement impulse to absorb life, even in that “desperation” to capture the beauty of what surrounds her, lies the presumption of an imminent loss, of an inevitable fall.
“The sun burns. I see the river. I see the trees dappled and burned in the autumn light. The boats float by, they cross the red, the green. A bell rings in the distance, but it doesn’t ring for the dead. There are bells that ring to life”.
He says this in Las olas and, at first, we perceive in that paragraph a calm mood, even delight, although only if we walk on the surface. If we return to it, the tone is of a slight sadness that announces and approaches and, without a doubt, it will arrive when this fleeting enjoyment dissolves, something that the readers will not be able to see.
Few writers have had a voice so entirely sensory, to such an extent that their narratives sound like inner music, the muffled murmur of a conversation in the dark or the wild rumor of twilight in the countryside; His attentive and sensitive eyes turn the most trivial landscape and the inhabitants of our routines into unique paintings, compositions that move, just as in painting Turner’s or Monet’s sunrises manage to surpass in splendor those that emerge every day from the nature.
An apparent dreamlike disorder runs through his phrases, the “reality” that his stories tell is blurred behind the lens that captures it and transforms it into a state of mind, in a credible and delicate brushstroke; in a “reality”, in short, that we will never find around it but that is at the same time absolutely human.
And this point is reached not only because she, our Virginia, has led us there with words chosen like pearls, but also by “submitting” to the wounds produced by the events related from the senses.
A saying and not saying to tell: avoid taking the last step, the one that leads us towards some certainty, even literary useless evidence. It suggests, it just illuminates a space and leaves us there, alone and full of forebodings. I suspect, upon reaching the end of each of her works, and as a connoisseur of her personal destiny, that it is the same space that she inhabited with a quiet but stormy uncertainty.
At the end of these notes, I head towards one end of the square where there is a portrait of her with her husband. I look at her and smile at her as if she were looking at me. I admit that I also say something to her in a low voice as a farewell, something that her modesty now prevents me from remembering.
© THE GAZETTE
Walter Gallardo – Journalist and writer.
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