El escritor Eduardo Halfon (Guatemala, 1971) fue el invitado principal de la 37 Conferencia de Lenguas y Literaturas Romances de la Universidad de Cincinnati, de la cual fueron coorganizadores Aurelio Auseré Abarca y Luis Miguel Estrada Orozco. Estas preguntas, que se extienden indistintamente a lo largo de la obra del autor, surgieron de estos dos días de conversaciones estimulantes.

A la edad de diez años, un joven Halfon se exilió junto con su familia a Florida, huyendo de la violencia y la inestabilidad política que tiñó al país centroamericano durante su período de guerra civil. Después de estudiar ingeniería, regresó a su país natal, empujado a hacerlo por una crisis de identidad. La necesidad de redescubrir sus orígenes lo llevó a graduarse en Filosofía y Letras, y este esfuerzo dio paso a su relativamente tardío descubrimiento de la lectura y su pasión por la escritura. Años más tarde, como escritor establecido, Halfon se mudó a Matute, un pequeño pueblo en La Rioja, España, el país donde ha publicado una gran parte de su trabajo en editoriales pequeñas y minimalistas como Pre-Textos, Libros del Asteroide y Jekyll. y Jill. Continuando con la inquietud cosmopolita que es característica del escritor hispanoamericano y sus antepasados ​​judíos, Halfon continúa con esta tradición de andar errante. Luego de una breve estadía en la ciudad de Nueva York, actualmente vive en el estado de Nebraska.

Todos estos factores conforman el núcleo original de la obra de un autor en constante búsqueda de su propia identidad.

Luis Miguel Estrada Orozco: Eduardo, tu obra se mueve entre la biografía y la ficción, lo que hace que su recepción sea un tanto incierta. ¿Qué efecto pretende crear para sus lectores?

Eduardo Halfon: Cuando nombro a mi personaje Eduardo Halfon, invito al lector a dudar, a participar de una lectura, a no leer pasivamente… No sé por qué lo hago. Tengo diferentes ideas de por qué lo hago. Siempre lo he hecho, desde Saturno(2003), mi primer libro. Es una carta en primera persona escrita a un padre, que se parece mucho a mi padre, escrita o narrada por un narrador que se parece mucho a mí, pero que no tiene nombre, todavía no lo he nombrado. Es un reproche, es un hijo clamando a su padre. El narrador está obsesionado con los escritores que se han suicidado y las historias de todas sus relaciones con sus padres, acercándose cada vez más a su propio suicidio. A medida que avanza el texto, pierde la cabeza. Cuando lo publiqué, no esperaba que la reacción de los lectores fuera tan visceral, en todos los sentidos de la palabra. Tampoco esperaba una lectura tan literal, la gente diciendo: “Halfon necesita ayuda”. En Guatemala publicaron una reseña titulada “Ayudemos a Halfon” porque pensaron que yo era el narrador. Y dije: “Qué maravilla [se ríe], qué maravilla que el lector realmente se tragó el texto. “La había escrito como una carta ficticia, basada en hechos reales, pero ficción al final. Entonces, comenzando con mi segundo libro, le di mi nombre a mi narrador y me sumergí en el juego.

LMEO: Es curioso porque el crítico o lector especializado, la persona que debería ser más capaz de leer entre líneas, es el primero en caer en el engaño o jugar el juego.

EH:Lo que sucedió fue que sentí que estaba transformando a mi lector en un niño pequeño que se une al juego y no hace preguntas. Así sucedió: escribo un libro y pongo “ficción” en la portada y lo compras como novela. En algún momento de mis libros, el lector olvida este contrato. El Halfon que estoy leyendo es el Halfon que escribe, y todo es absolutamente real. Entonces la lectura se vuelve diferente. Algo sucede en el lector que lo cree. ¿Por qué? Lo que quiero, al final, no es darte una idea o una imagen o una política, sino una emoción. Quiero compartir lo que siento con el lector, para que ambos lo sintamos. Y la única forma que conozco de darle una emoción al lector es aprovechando todos esos trucos, todos los trucos que tengo a mi alcance como escritor para crear o recrear esa emoción en ti como lector. Nombrar a mi narrador “EH” es un truco. No es nada más que eso. Es ponerle un disfraz biográfico al narrador “x”, que podría haberse llamado Juan. Pero darle mi nombre y darle mi información crea algo en el lector que encuentro muy interesante.

Aurelio Auseré Abarca: ¿Hay una evolución continua del personaje de “Eduardo”? ¿O realmente mantienes una distancia constante entre autor y personaje?

EH: Creo que va y viene. Hay textos en los que se aleja más y comienza a trabajar de manera muy diferente a mí. En otros, se acerca. Es dificil de explicar. Te diré una idea que me gusta usar para explicarlo: cómo lo hago. No sé por qué lo hago, pero sé cómo lo hago. Cada texto que he escrito comienza con algo muy cercano a mi realidad. En Monasterio[Monasterio] (2014), Elegí la boda de mi hermana. Escribí las primeras páginas, en las que los dos hermanos llegan a Israel, y luego los dejé acumular polvo durante años porque no sabía qué iba a pasar. No sabía a dónde iba la historia hasta que me di cuenta de que no era una historia sobre una boda. También pensé, como cualquier lector que se acerca al libro, que se trataba de la boda de la hermana. Pero la boda nunca llega, porque no se trata de la boda de la hermana. Entonces todo texto comienza muy cerca, pero luego esa emoción que trato de comunicar al lector no funciona solo con mi realidad. No pude lograr el efecto que busco solo escribiendo sobre una boda en Israel. Necesito volar de alguna manera. Pasar de este espacio a otro espacio. Y por esa razón, está el otro Halfon. Me ayuda a distanciarme de este Halfon. El Fuma, él es bueno para volar, yo soy malo para volar, no tengo que explicarte eso. Es intrépido…

LMEO: That other Halfon, who takes journeys, is the same one who betrays the reader’s expectations. You think he’s going to a wedding and the wedding doesn’t show up anywhere. He’s a constant traitor.

EH: He deceives. He deceives me too.

LMEO: And that happens in several places. In the book Signor Hoffman (2015), when he goes in search of the apartment where his grandfather lived in Lodz, he finds a run-down flat inhabited by an elderly porno actress. On several occasions he makes the reader believe that he’s about to witness something sublime or find a place that’s important to his family history, but this never happens. In a sense, when he travels to places that are important to his past, memory ends up being defeated in a way. There’s nothing epic about what he finds.

EH: In my books, the searches always fail. Or they fail in their original intention. He doesn’t find what he hopes for in the apartment, he doesn’t arrive at his sister’s wedding… that original intention falls, but something else comes up. He finds something else that he wasn’t looking for or that he didn’t know he was looking for. I see the whole journey of my Halfon character through the books I’ve written as a sort of quest. We don’t have a word for “quest” in Spanish. “Search” isn’t really enough, because “quest” implies internal self-examination. My character is seeking to understand something about himself. That’s what I intuit: he seeks something about himself, and so he moves through the world, trying to pin down something that always escapes him. I think if he manages to find it he might stop. Maybe that would be the end of the journey. Or he might die. Or I might die; that is to say, he might kill me. Those are the only three possible endings to a search, a quest, of this nature. And believe me, I’ve thought about killing the guy.

AAA: In your first novel, this character already exists in some way. Could killing him be a double-edged sword for you as a writer?

EH: It wouldn’t be bad. I’m not entirely opposed to doing that when it’s finally time to stop. And that time will come. I don’t know when, but at some point I have to stop. And shut up. I don’t know when that moment will come, but I hope I’m able to detect it.

LMEO: We talked before about the types of searches that your character undertakes on the journeys that have to do with his family. But the indigenous world of Guatemala also enters into your narrative quite frequently.

EH: I’d call it the world of Guatemalan identity, which is so complex. Just like the Jewish world. The Guatemalan layer is another layer of my identity. But it’s not enough to say “Guatemalan,” just like it’s not enough to say “Jewish.” What kind of Jewish? Orthodox Jewish, secular Jewish, Ashkenazi Jewish or Sephardic Jewish? But it’s the same when you say Guatemalan, what Guatemalan? The Guatemalan of a certain social class from the capital is a particular type, that’s where I come from. But there’s also the indigenous Guatemalan, who makes up eighty percent of the country and who I approach at times. Like Juan Kalel in The Polish Boxer (2008). I like that story so much because of the investment that takes place between student and teacher. Kalel guides his former professor toward another Guatemala, the rural and indigenous Guatemala where my narrator, Eduardo Halfon, goes to look for him. That’s why the title is “Distance,” the distance that exists between these two Guatemalas and Juan Kalel’s need to guide the professor in a world that is unknown to him, where he feels unsafe. Juan Kalel feels the same way in the university life of the capital. They are two worlds, and each of them is a foreigner in the other’s territory. Even though they’re in the same country, literally kilometers apart, a distance you could travel by car. In an hour you pass from one world to the other. Just like in the story of the coffee-growers in Signor Hoffman. It’s a curious story because I wrote it for the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank). They hired me to go and live with the coffee-grower who appears in the story

AAA: In Monasterio you depict a scene charged with eroticism in which Tamara and Eduardo play on a beach by the Dead Sea while they talk about the wall that separates Palestine from Israel and Jewish identity.

EH: That’s the most solemn moment of the novel. While something is happening in literary, political terms, everything comes together there on the shores of the Dead Sea and I suddenly start to play with the erotic at the same time. But I do the same thing with humor. My sense of humor comes out at the worst possible moments. I tend to resort to it at the moment of highest tension. It’s like a valve. I see eroticism the same way. It’s an escape valve, almost a juxtaposition between two things that are apparently opposed, like talking to Tamara about salvation while playing with her leg at the same time.

AAA: That’s when Eduardo’s character tries to justify his political ideas to her, while all of that is going on.

EH: She’s confronting him. She’s holding him accountable.

AAA: And he starts telling her stories about Jewish characters who covered up their identity. That’s the source of the story that gives the book its title. As well as the dream of the airplane.

EH: And all of them come close to denying identity, in part. In the dream on the airplane, some terrorists hijack a flight and someone puts a gun in that Eduardo Halfón’s face and says, “You’re Jewish.” He says he’s not Jewish but Arab and he tries to speak Arabic. He says a few words he remembers from infancy, the food his grandma, who was Jewish but grew up in Arab countries, used to cook. That’s when I finally understood what Monasterio was about. It was a recurring dream I had dreamt many times. What would happen if I had to confront a situation like that? Would I be willing to deny a part of my identity in order to save myself? What would I have done during the Holocaust? Would I deny my Judaism in order to save myself or not? I think it’s a great question.

LMEO: The narrator refers to the characters’ tone when he talks with Tamara. They don’t just deny his identity, they also assume another. One cannot be someone without identity. A negation implicitly requires the acceptance of another identity.

EH: Something similar happens in Signor Hoffman. They invite the narrator to give a talk about the Holocaust in Italy, but the emcee can’t pronounce “Halfon,” or it sounds strange to him, and he addresses the narrator as “Signor Hoffman.” The narrator ends up accepting the mistake and he introduces himself as Hoffman when he realizes that no one else understands his surname either. Since he’s losing his identity, because no one can recognize him by his name, he comes to terms with this mistake, he is Hoffman to them. You can’t survive without those layers of identity. And if you don’t have them you invent them.

LMEO: This ends up in a search for the midpoint between what the other expects of you and your expectations of the other. Names are important in Signor Hoffman, for example, when you tell how the writer and musician E.T.A. Hoffman was assigned to officially register the names of Jews in Poland. He gave them the names with which they would be known. We might wonder if this story is true or not, but in the end it seems that it doesn’t matter too much because its symbolism is what’s truly relevant.

EH: My German editor called me when he read that scene. He told me, “This can’t be,” I told him it was so and sent him the reference to his biography so he could confirm it himself. E.T.A. Hoffman worked for the Prussian army naming Jews.

LMEO: There we return to the juxtaposition of the solemn and the trivial. He gives them names depending on his mood at the time…

EH: It depends on what’s on his mind, if he’s coming from church, from eating, from having a drink… It’s a name that will define you for your whole life, and not only you, but also your family. When you asked me before the interview about the origin of the name “Halfon,” I mentioned that an immigration officer in New York, on Ellis Island, transgressed my identity with the stroke of a pen when he cut off half of my grandfather’s last name. My name is a mistake. All our names come from an invention, from a place name, from something. Think of last names in Spanish. My wife’s family, from La Rioja, all has last names based on places: Fuentes, Corral… that may have been Jewish. Because many of these last names or toponyms belonged to converted Jews who took the name of whatever was closest at hand. Little by little, I got more and more interested in the subject of the name. In my new book, I continue to develop it. There’s something about it that really interests me. And it’s obvious that it’s one of the main themes in Signor Hoffman. It wasn’t always called that. It was called “Until love kills us all,” which are the last words of the story. But my French editor told me, “This is high flown, this isn’t Halfon.” Besides that, in French they don’t take it well when you use the word “love.” But in its first iteration, in Revista Ñ, it was published under that longer title.

AAA: Before we finish, I’d like to ask you about your stay in Spain, specifically in La Rioja. When you arrived as a new writer from Guatemala, how was your immersion in the circle of Spanish or Latin American writers then based in Spain?

EH: I arrived in La Rioja as the husband of a Riojan. I didn’t arrive as a writer. But in short order a friend of my wife’s family introduced me to the man who would become my Riojan editor. He published my books Clases de dibujo [Drawing classes] and Clases de hebreo [Hebrew classes]. They’re published in La Rioja. They’re both very short books. I met him in the first week and I immediately got involved in the Riojan literary world. I started to meet with them, with many poets. They have a festival and I participated in it. My entry into the Riojan literary world was very easy, very organic. And I remain there. In a few weeks the third Clases book will come out, a new book of short stories called Clases de chapín [Guatemalan classes], as Guatemalans call each other. It’s the third volume, although it includes the two previous ones. My Latin American colleagues, and there are many of them, were mostly in Madrid and Barcelona. If it had reached any of them, I would have gotten in touch with them more quickly. But it was fast anyway. You’re bonded by the fact of being Latin American in Spain. You feel you’re among your own. I felt very “Latin American” when I was with them. Much more “Latin American” than “Guatemalan.” We were more united by the fact of being Latin American writers living in Spain. Like having soldiers in your troop.

AAA: Have you ever thought of including Spain or the United States in your novels? Because they are also parts of your life…

EH: No es que lo haya pensado, es que va a pasar. Escribí mucho en La Rioja, pero no escribí sobre La Rioja. Y sobre Estados Unidos, por supuesto; eso está en mi nueva novela, y es fuerte. Parte de esta nueva novela, Duelo [Duelo] (2017), es mi infancia en Estados Unidos, que es cuando el niño empieza a darse cuenta de que su tío no murió ahogado. Gradualmente descubrí, a través de algunos descubrimientos, que esta historia era falsa. Y eso es lo que sucede cuando está en Florida. Recreo esos momentos de despertar a las realidades de la muerte de ese hombre.

Traducido por Arthur Dixon