In memoriam, Amada.

• Author: Reid, Alastair
• Position: Short story

The story "In Memoriam, Amanda" has a curious genesis. I had heard it told a number of times in Spain, about the poet Juan Ramon Jimenez, but from sources both wispy and unverifiable. I decided that it should best become a "fiction," that form much loved by Latin Americans in which language takes over reality, a form they use constantly to give everyday happenings a mythic cast. To give the fiction some illusion of truth, I put it in the mouth of Judas Roquin, the Costa Rica-born writer, whose work I have often translated, and who has been, for me, the source of much inspiration.

Judas Roquin told me this story, on the veranda of his mildewed house in Cahuita. Years have passed and I may have altered some details. I cannot be sure.

In 1933, the young Brazilian poet Baltasar Melo published a book of poems, Brasil Encarnado, which stirred up such an outrage that Melo, forewarned by powerful friends, chose to flee the country. The poems were extravagant, unbridled even, in their manner, and applied a running sexual metaphor to Brazilian life; but it was one section, "Perversions," in which Melo characterized three prominent public figures as sexual grotesques, that made his exile inevitable. Friends hid him until he could board a freighter from Recife, under cover of darkness and an assumed name, bound for Panama. With ample royalties from his book, he was able to buy a estancia on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, not far from where Roquin lived. The two of them met inevitably, though they did not exactly become friends.

Already vain and arrogant by nature, Melo became insufferable with success and the additional aura of notorious exile. He used his fame mainly to entice women with literary pretensions, some of them the wives of high officials. In Brazil, however, he remained something of a luminary to the young, and his flight added a certain allure to his reputation, to such a point that two young Bahian poets who worked as reporters on the newspaper Folha da Tarde took a leave of absence to interview him in his chosen exile. They travelled to Costa Rica mostly by bus, taking over a month to reach San Jose, the capital. Melo's retreat was a further day's journey, and they had to cover the last eleven kilometers on foot. Arriving at evening, they announced themselves to the housekeeper. Melo, already half-drunk, was upstairs, entertaining the daughter of a campesino, who countenanced the liaison for the sake of his fields. Melo...