The society of dead poets

res friends writers They made suicide their legend. His last story, such as our Antonieta Rivas Mercado, who would write others. On February 18, 1938 Leopoldo Lugones, in the Delta del Río San Fernando, place of intense green and constant humidity, after looking long at the landscape he drank what his last whiskey would be. A slight bitter taste and a vague smell of almonds betrayed the cyanide with which he mixed it. It was a violent death, according to doctors; A radical farewell that of the top Argentine writer, who in Borges’s opinion: If we had to encrypt the whole process of Argentine literature in a man, that man would be indisputably Lugones.

In a posthumous note, found in the El Tropezón farm cabin, he asked to be buried without coffin.

Horacio Quiroga, author of notable stories and friend of Lugones, had a constant and strange proximity to death. His grandfather began when he was shot by accident with his shotgun in front of his family; His stepfather, who after having been semi -signal because of a stroke, shot in his mouth with a shotgun while Horacio entered the room; Years later, his friend Federico Ferrando decided to beat in a duel and Horacio, when reviewing and cleaning his stir, accidentally shot Federico in the mouth of Federico killing him in the spot; His wife, who agonized for a week after ingesting photography revealing and, finally, his own death, when he decided to take his life with a cyanide glass. His three children, years later, would replicate his father’s action.

Alfonsina Storni, knowing about Quiroga’s suicide, wrote a kind of epitaph in verse in which for many he anticipated his own immolation: “Dying like you, Horacio, in your balances, / and as well as in your stories, it is not bad. / A ray in time and the fair is over … / more puddle, Horacio, than death, / that goes behind. ”

From the suicide of the three friends only that of Alfonsina Storni is the best known. A song performed by Mercedes Sosa was the cause of tattooing in the collective imaginary his legend. The acute and serious intense of his control voice made the poet’s legend vibrate with more lie than truth: he did not pass through a soft sand path that licks the sea to the deep water as the song says. He jumped to the Sea of ​​La Plata from the high peak The pearl, On October 25, 1938. Anyway, the beautiful Zamba composed of Ariel Ramírez and the writer Félix Luna has become one of the songs that has had the most interpreters. So far, 93 acquaintances, such as Mercedes Sosa, Soledad Bravo, Los Angeles Negros, Miguel Bosé, Diego The Cigala, Plácido Domingo, Mijares, Pandora, Tania Libertad, Chabuca Granda, Lucho Gatica, Vicente Fernández, Shakira, Raphael, Natalia Lafourcade and Lucha Villa.

But the zamba Alfonsina and the sea It recovers among the iridescence of the legend the mysterious verses that Alfonsina wrote in his last poem. Who did he mean?: And if he calls, never tell him that I am. / Say that I have gone.

El poem I’m going to bedpublished a day after her death and that she herself sent the newspaper The nation, He leaves no doubt about his suicidal decision: “You, Fine Nodriza… have the Earth’s sheets / and the edredon of Escardado Mosses. / I’m going to sleep, mine nurse, let me go. ”

Death is a constant issue in Storni’s poetry. In one of his youth books literally says: I have the impression that I have to live very littleand later write even: An epitaph for my grave.

Carnal love, eroticism, introspection and the search for equality between man and woman are some of the axes of his poetry. You love me white It is, perhaps, his most radical and feminist poem: “Flee to the forests / go to the mountain; Lip your mouth; / Live in the cabins … And when the meats are tornrated, / and when you have put / in them the soul / that on the bedrooms remained entangled, then, good man, / pret me white, / priente me nívea, / prieister me caste ”.

Although death is inescapable and democratic, some decide to convene it and not allow chance or the precise laws of the universe to surprise them.

If they are writers, they form, without pretending, a kind of society of dead poets. Robin Williams knew it.