Tuesday, 10 November 2015

Following your Faded Footprints


My e-mail to Luis Garcia has been replied, yet the answer has not arrived yet.

With this, I mean the message has been seen by Luis’ assistant but, unfortunately, the explanation I was hoping for must wait until our character has a bit of spare time. Therefore, let me take this space to tell you what my question was, and why I formulated it.

Lately, I have been emerging myself in the poems and books written both by and about Montero. I had notice that, at some point during his career, the poet switches from personal sounding poems about love, sex and days of rain such as Tu Me Llamas, Amor(You Call Me, Love…), to those pieces with strong political themes. The poet's romantic communist ideas and ideals rapidly escalated into his second vocation: politics. The 27th of February 2015, he was proposed by the regional left party as a candidate of the community of Madrid.

People usually do not convert and invest their time so passionately in something they have just discovered. What triggered this change in him and how long ago? It was in this state of mind that I started reading his book No Me Cuentes tu Vida (Don’t Tell me your Life). Although the book is a fictional piece about the life of an ordinary man and his Rumanian housekeeper, I cannot help but remark how much his protagonist seems to mirror the life and internal conflicts of the man who created him. The housekeeper, an immigrant from a country with political hardship, reminds me of collection of poems, Quedarse sin Ciudad (Being Left with no City.) The book also explicitly recalls the incident of Rota on the 25th October.

As Montero sais for the newspaper El Mundo “su tiempo y su poesia siempre han sido el  reflejo de sus inquietudes (his time and his poetry have always been a reflection on his concers.” Was he raised in a communist family? Or was he influence by the ideologies of other poets he had a great intellectual admiration for, such as Angel Gonzalez? Was the Rota event a trigger, or an unrelated event used to portray the essence of his beliefs?

My question is, which hypothesis tells the true story?

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