In his well-known essay Why Read the Classics? (1991), Ítalo Calvino reminds us that a classic never stops saying what it needs to say, despite the passage of time. Thirty years after Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s death, La palabra del mudo (The Word of the Speechless), a collection showcasing all his short fiction, continues to be a classic in Peruvian literature. Ribeyro was, without a doubt, one of the most versatile twentieth-century Peruvian writers. Over a span of four decades, he published novels, plays, essays, personal diaries, and short prose. His most significant contribution, however, were his short stories, and he became one of the great Latin American masters of the genre. His prolific body of work, including the hundred stories he wrote, is a rich exploration of the idiosyncrasies characterizing contemporary Peruvian society, with many of his observations holding up today. And here we have the first lesson about his work: with his vast collection of stories, Ribeyro anticipates the tribulations of the urban subject within the Peruvian social dynamic, the fragmentation of a large metropolis, Lima, and, by extension, the fragmentation of an entire society.
As with the works of all great artists, Ribeyro’s body of short stories is visionary because, through its many characters, it illustrates Peru’s paradoxes and contradictions, and lucidly probes Peruvian individual and collective psychology. Consequently, we could talk about a Ribeyrian figure: a subject whose existence lies between dreams and defeat, the most absurd hopes and the crudest disappointments. This figure is certainly a being who is constantly hounded by the temptation of failure, to cite the title of one of Ribeyro’s most memorable books.
Published in the 1950s, Ribeyro’s first stories emerged at a time when many Peruvian authors were writing neorealist and urban works to represent the new challenges facing Peruvian society. During this period, Lima was going through a difficult transition. While it had been a large town prior, it grew rapidly during this time and became a metropolis, one that needed to renegotiate its identity as a shared space in order to enter a new phase of modernity. Ribeyro’s first stories—memorable works such as “Los gallinazos sin plumas” and “Al pie del acantilado”—tell this story. They are important testimonies of a changing, contradictory urban space, a product of Peruvian internal migration. Subsequently, the city must face a difficult process of mestizaje.
After publishing Los gallinazos sin plumas (1955), he wrote Cuentos de circunstancias (1958) and Las botellas y los hombres (1964). All these collections portray Lima as a rapidly growing city, but one that nonetheless remains precapitalist and fractured, plagued by significant contrasts and social rifts. For these reasons, it’s fair to say that today, magnified by the size of a metropolis with over ten million inhabitants, the classic Ribeyrian figure wanders about: that subject struggling to carry the weight of frustration and mediocrity, but who fights tirelessly to integrate into a society that marginalizes him over and over again. We must only recall figures such as Roberto López, the protagonist of the story “Alienación,” and his fruitless struggle to “de-lópez” himself in an effort to rid himself of his blackness at any cost and become a white person from the United States. His efforts are so hair-brained and absurd that, despite fulfilling his wish of going to New York, where he ends up living among other marginalized subjects like himself, his American dream turns into an absolute nightmare. I also think of Pablo Saldaña, the chatty protagonist of “Explicaciones a un cabo de servicio,” who, finding himself unemployed and with no prospects, unleashes his pathological lying at a table in a bar in Lima. With a few drinks in him, Saldaña turns into a rich yet temporary businessman, since his lying gets him locked up for the night after he can’t pay his bar tab. Fernando Pasamano, the protagonist of the story “El banquete,” is similar to López and Saldaña. Pasamano is a landowner who has fallen on hard times but who is determined to regain his economic power and social influence. To do so, he burns a hole in his pocket putting together a huge party attended by the president of Peru. When it seems his efforts have paid off and his fortune will be recovered, an unexpected turn of events ruins his plans: there’s a coup d’etat while the party is going on at his house. Strangely, a trusted minister of the president organized the coup, which subsequently forces the president to step down. With Pasamano’s party going on and the president away from his post, this minister ends up taking advantage of the president’s absence to overthrow the government and assume power. All these adventures and misadventures, which abound in Ribeyro’s short stories, are nuanced with a subtle irony that, when it is not a harsh and revealing humor, exemplifies the vicissitudes and frustrations of Peruvian life. Ribeyro gives voice to many characters who are otherwise punished or forced into trivial and mediocre lives. He gives them fleeting moments of hope, until the institutional order, social prejudices, or simple disappointments push them back into the harsh reality of things.
This view of the human condition in Ribeyro’s work, however, is not limited to the Peruvian context. In Paris, where he arrived at the beginning of the 1950s and would write much of his work, Ribeyro lived firsthand the dilemmas of exile and alienation. Such experiences are clear in a handful of stories in the series titled “Los cautivos,” published for the first time in Lima in 1973 as part of the second volume of La palabra del mudo. In these stories, Ribeyro explores the heartache of the marginalized in Europe and examines the otherness of the Peruvian subject within a new cultural context. This is particularly true of the title story, “Los cautivos,” as well as “Agua ramera” and “Los españoles.” Europe is not a particularly hospitable place for Ribeyro’s characters in these stories; rather, it is the backdrop for subjects who wander through its old cities. While they are drawn by a certain wanderlust, they are also marked by solitude, astonishment vis-à-vis an unknown world, and a sense of existential tedium. His protagonists generally stay in cheap hotels or modest pensions in which they form friendships with other marginalized people within European society. They are characters who, given their anonymity, vaguely identify as “Peruvian,” when not referring to themselves simply as “South Americans.” Another example of European disillusionment is in “La juventud en la otra ribera,” from 1977, a story in which Ribeyro wittily expresses his desire to demystify Paris’s splendor. The protagonist is a very Ribeyrian character: a bureaucrat. In the story, Dr. Plácido Huamán, a “doctor of education,” is sent from Lima to take part in a conference in Geneva. Before getting to his official destination, Huamán plans a visit to the French capital to fulfill a wish he’s had his entire life; that is, to see Paris, and, if he’s lucky, to have a romantic fling there. At first, Dr. Huamán’s wishes seem like they might come true when he meets Solange in a Parisian café. She is a beautiful French woman with whom he has a short-lived, shallow romance. Nonetheless, in the mediocrity of his existence, Huamán classifies his fling with Solange as one of the “golden pages of his life.” The truth is, his luck in love is short-lived and, in a kind of bitter paradox, it’s Paris itself that teaches the aging educator a cruel lesson. In reality, Solange and her group of miscreant friends are only interested in robbing the naïve doctor of the few dollars he has and, after doing so, murdering him. Thus, far from being a city of splendor and romance, in Ribeyro’s stories, Paris becomes a rotten city, a place full of petty thieves where Huamán meets his cruel destiny.
It could be said that a tone of skepticism and a discrete air that seeks to maintain human dignity in the face of humiliation and adversity consistently accompany Ribeyro’s characters. However, it would be incorrect to reduce his entire body of short stories to the categories described above. We must remember that Ribeyro was prolific in this genre and that, beyond his initial neorealist and urban themes, his short story writing is full of experimentation and offers a range of proposals. That said, it’s no exaggeration to say that Ribeyro’s stories easily dialogue with those of the genre’s best writers. In stories such as “La insignia,” “Ridder y el pisapapeles,” or “Doblaje”, but also in the superb work “Silvio en El Rosedal,” Ribeyro displays his deep familiarity with fantastic literature and establishes important points of contact with works by Poe, Kafka, Borges, and Cortázar. Additionally, his reserved, elegant style calls to mind the best works of other short story masters, such as Chekhov or Ribeyro’s much-admired Maupassant. These are authors who, like Ribeyro, examine the lives of individuals wrapped up in solitary battles and living in a reality that vanquishes them time and time again. In this same vein, the many lost battles Ribeyrian characters face may lead readers to believe that defeat is a constitutive part of the human experience, and even a universal literary theme. This said, it is also true that, despite their repeated failures, Ribeyro’s characters are always dignified in the face of adversity. They possess a quiet heroism, and their greatest virtue is awakening the strongest sense of empathy in readers, while, at the same time, moving them to reflect on their own life adventures.
With the passage of time, it has become clear that Ribeyro’s work was written in quiet defiance and against the flow of his historical moment. Recent texts on his work by writers who are now beginning to gain recognition in Latin American literature, such as Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez or Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, remind us that in the 1960s, when Latin American literature exploded with novels rich in the verbal experimentation and lofty, totalizing aims of the Boom, Ribeyro remained faithful to his voice and art. He stayed at the margins of the great literary banquet of the time period. In this faithfulness lies our second big lesson about Ribeyro’s work: he personifies the ethics of an artist who, far from the temptations of success, continued working with exemplary tenacity until he forged a body of work that, in its apparent anachronism, is transcendent today.
A more intimate Ribeyro emerges in the fourth and latest volume of La palabra del mudo, published for the first time in Lima in 1992. In it, we are confronted with a series of texts in which the author encounters the past; these stories revisit moments from a life that begins with the innocent world of a child from Miraflores and ends with the wise skepticism of old age. On the one hand, we encounter an autobiographical tone in stories such as “Sólo para fumadores,” “La casa en la playa,” or “Surf.” On the other hand, a nostalgic air traverses the pages of the “Relatos santacrucinos” series. As the protagonist of “La música, el maestro Berenson y un servidor” indicates, these stories look to recuperate the traces of “happy and unhappy times, finding only the ashes of some, and the call of those still alive.”
A new reading of the stories in La palabra del mudo is likely to remind us that, given their lot in life, Ribeyro’s characters will feel progressively empty inside, or disillusioned, or will be plagued with bad luck. But, as stated in the prologue of the last volume of La palabra del mudo, if “writing is a form of conversing with the reader,” then we, the readers, only stand to thank Ribeyro for the privilege of taking part in this fascinating conversation. Luckily, thirty years after the Peruvian writer’s passing, the dialogue continues, because classics never allow for goodbyes. They only offer opportunities to meet again.
Translated by Amy Olen
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
