Excerpts

I'll call him Ricardo, Ricardo Funes, although that isn't his real first name, or last. I won't reveal any factual details about him, except to say that he was from Peru and never forgot that he was an exile, not even after three whole decades in Spain. Funes resided in Spain for thirty years: in Barcelona, at first, and then other Catalan towns during his nomadic phase, in which he devoted himself to selling leather goods at flea markets, and performing stints as a night watchman at various campgrounds, until finally settling in Lloret de Mar. Now that statues have gone up in his honor and he is universally admired after his untimely death, Funes the man has been obscured by the towering shadow of his legend, his history appropriated and fetishized, his works quoted and beloved by all. His literary triumph couldn't have seemed more unlikely when I first met him, a poor immigrant silenced on the margins. A true outcast. That's what I thought that first day: here was a lunatic or hermit, a pariah forced to live on the village outskirts. I've never forgotten the impression he made. I met Funes at the invitation of a mutual friend, a fellow writer who taught at the Universitat de Girona who had discovered Funes the summer previous at a campground near the coastal town of Castelldefells. That's where Ricardo Funes's mother ran a notions shop, up until the day she decamped for yet another inland town, driven by the habitual, ingrained nomadism that defined their little family of two. I decided to accompany my professor friend to Castelldefells after several phone conversations during which he described Funes with an intriguing mix of skepticism and appeal. According to my friend, Funes was more familiar with certain periods of Latin American literature than even some of his department colleagues, but the man expressed himself with declarations so provocative it proved impossible to invite him to give a lecture. "It's like he has to argue until the other person is offended," he said, explaining that Funes had recently been fired from the campground because, while an inebriated English vacationer almost drowned in the pool, Funes was reading instead of making his nightly rounds. Finding himself without a job and with a bit of money, Funes had apparently decided to spend all his savings on a shack near the beach rather than follow his mother out of town. I had heard so much about him from my friend that I decided I would join him on a trek out to Funes's hut. The May day was so cold and rain-swept that it seemed to exaggerate Funes's status as an exiled resistance fighter living in poverty. It's strange to think of how forsaken he was back then given the commotion caused, decades later, by any old manuscript found on his computer. But back in those days, Ricardo Funes was so far removed from ordinary life that he was characterized as somewhat of an outlaw who harried the other villagers: "Watch yourselves now, the Peruvian's mutt probably hasn't eaten in a while," a neighbor advised us, peering out from under the hood of his raincoat when we stopped to check our directions. Such a warning would later prove unnecessary, as I never sensed even the slightest hint of a threat in any of Funes's gestures, not that day nor in any of the years to come. It did, however, serve to amplify the mysteriousness of the scene in which we found ourselves. After the neighbor's ominous words, we pressed on down the dirt road for several minutes, through tree boughs clawing the windshield and muddy patches where our tires spun, until we finally reached an empty clearing. And there, for the first time, I was met with Ricardo Funes's unforgettable figure. I saw him from the car, a hundred meters away, planted in front of the house like a lookout/sentinel guarding his homestead in the Old West. The shack was a rustic, single-story construction with a haphazard tin roof, and Funes stood outside with his dog, clutching not a shotgun, but a stick, surrounded by shirts and pairs of pants strung on a line, flapping like flags in the breeze. We got out of the car, and as my friend and I walked toward him, I sensed his endearing amiability, which I would come to know as one of Funes's characteristic qualities. He donned a summer shirt with green and orange flowers, more appropriate for Caribbean isles than our European latitudes. His hair was long and curly and he sported the round metal-framed glasses he would wear until he died. To round out his general appearance as a stray tourist cum novice farmer, he wore a pair sandals entirely ineffectual at protecting his bare feet from the mud. "Welcome, professor." Funes ironically greeted my friend, shaking his hand with sincere affection. Then he turned to me. I took in his open shirt, unbuttoned to reveal a patch of chest hair and a silver chain. He was thin as a greyhound and in his unmistakable, hoarse voice--perpetual rumble, incurable lament--addressed me in a way that immediately won me over: "And you are also very welcome, señor Vallés, sir," he joked. "I've read all of your books." In time, I would come to learn that those were two of Funes's most emblematic behaviors: to read everything and declare it publicly, and to express his opinions--whatever they were--with total sincerity and no reservation whatsoever, devoid of any strategy to advance his own interests. Pretense was not to be found among his defects. That afternoon, however, I was less taken with his literary reflections than with the spectacle of neglect in which he lived. The house struck me as so chaotic, so unsuitable for habitation, that it was a wonder he had already been living there for months. The first jolt was the strong smell permeating the place: the odor of a closed, musty pantry, or of the thick air of an unaired bedroom. It smelled as though Funes lived on nicotine and caffeine and wore his clothes so many times in a row that he didn't remember how to wash them to expunge the pervasive stench. In the main living area--the only room besides the bedroom--there was a kitchenette and sink piled high with plates and pots and pans, a couch covered in an array of blankets, clothing strewn across the floor, and books stacked in towers on shelves and atop the television. My friend and I sat down at a small table pushed against the wall that appeared to be used both for eating and working at his typewriter. We sat quietly, taken aback by the shambolic state of his quarters, as he showed us the folders where he kept his manuscripts, organized in a color-coded filing cabinet with a meticulousness completely at odds the rest of the house, by year and classification--poetry, short story, or novel. "Your first book is your best," he said, crossing his legs and establishing the candidness that would govern the terms our future friendship. He lit his first cigarette before my friend or I had even ventured to try the coffee he offered. The rest of the conversation unfolded along those lines, a succession of erudite comments and rash declarations. Funes didn't hesitate to show contempt for acclaimed writers, or extol the virtues of others we hadn't even heard of, all with a confidence in his own judgment that I had rarely seen in anyone else. "He'll get old so fast that soon his work will seem like it's from the nineteenth century," he said about a popular prize-winning novelist. Or, in reference to a poet he had always admired who lived as a recluse: "He's one of two or three who will actually last," calming his dog with a pat. The animal hadn't stopped yipping, whining, and sniffing our legs under the table. The situation was an ironic one, since by that time, I had already published several books and had a weekly column in La Vanguardia, as befit the profile of the sort of writer I represented, vaguely bohemian but from a well-to-do Barcelonese family, and my beguiled professor friend balanced his own writing with teaching at the university in Girona, and yet here was this man, tucked away in a peasant's shack, lecturing us with his strident, melodramatic opinions. Eventually, the professor redirected the conversation toward more exotic subjects: he asked Funes to tell me about negacionismo, a poetic movement he had apparently founded as a young man in Mexico, where he went into exile during the Peruvian dictatorship. The movement's literary tendencies embraced a puzzling appetite for rebellion: Funes claimed to have sabotaged readings given by the most renowned poets of the day and published irreverent pamphlets railing against the dominant national canon. Funes drained his black coffee in a single swallow and lit a second cigarette from the first; behind his thin lips, I noted the teeth destroyed by lack of oral hygiene and many years of dental neglect. As he started to speak, his eyes shone with enduring pride of his turbulent teenage years. He talked enthusiastically about the magazines he published with his handful of co-conspirators, and evoked the years which immediately preceded his departure for Barcelona: vibrant days of his youth in Mexico City, an adolescence in which he must have felt that the city streets had been paved expressly for him to roam them at dawn with his silhouette shining nobly, unstained by disappointment; a time when he yearned to wield language as a tool for destroying all the limits apathy had erected and all the traditions he wanted to shatter. By then, the room was filled with smoke--tobacco smoke and smoke from the conversation, which had become a monologue, replete with names of streets and old Mexican associates and obscure books of poetry. While outside the rain fell with increasing force, inside intimacy reigned, accentuated by the sound of the raindrops pattering on the metal roof. Funes waxed poetic about his minor feats, reminiscing about his years of excess and even alluding to the punishments meted out when a member crossed over to the ranks of the powerful, punishments that called to mind the rituals of masonic sects or other insurgent cabals. After a brief pause, he reached for a knife stuck through a newspaper clipping into the wall, pulled the weapon out, and viciously stabbed the same piece of paper again. "Traitor! Sold. For a chair and an office." He explained that the figures in the photo were an old negationist comrade and a powerful literary critic, one who had apparently taken the poet under his protection for some future gain. Between threats directed at the man in the picture, Funes detailed the scope of the knife-pierced individual's unforgivable sin: that of putting his own future before his loyalty to the group, of abandoning his tribe of aspiring-poet friends who read each other's verses scrawled in notebooks, in exchange for an institutional scholarship, or inclusion in some anthology. There was no graver offense in Ricardo Funes's mind, as I would observe over and again throughout the years. He clung to that peculiar poetic cause sparked in the Americas protecting its distant flame like it was his only source of warmth, the final thread connecting him to his origins. Excerpted from Last Words on Earth by Javier Serena All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.