Jean-Jacques Feuchère, Leda and the Swan, 1845

Reading Delmira Agustini leads to the confirmation, always renewed, of her fundamental excess, of her fundamental rarity. Here I open a parenthesis: has Uruguay been sufficiently thought of as a privileged land of rare and truly original precursors? Think, beyond Lautréamont whose nationality can be disputed, of Herrera y Reissig, of Felisberto Hernández, and of Onetti, names to which must be added, for the rupture it marks, that of Delmira Agustini.

Juan Carlos Onetti | Lautréamont | Delmira Agustini | Julio Herrera Y Reissig | Felisberto Hernández

To show in what sense Delmira Agustini was a misfit, I will begin by briefly situating her in the period in which she lived. Born in 1886, at the age of sixteen she began to publish poetry in little magazines and to write a society column (under the splendidly cheesy pseudonym of Joujou) for a Montevideo periodical, La Alborada. In 1907 she released her first book of poems, El libro blanco (Frágil) [The White Book (Fragile)]. In 1910 her second collection, Cantos de la mañana (Morning Songs), was published, and finally in 1913 she released the third and last book published in her lifetime, Los cálices vacíos (The Empty Chalices), featuring a foreword by Rubén Darío. In it she announced an upcoming volume, Los astros del abismo (The Stars of the Abyss), which would be published posthumously under the title El rosario de Eros (The Rosary of Eros) in 1924. She died in 1914 at the age of twenty-eight.

Delmira Agustini: Cuadernos (Notebooks) | Images courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay | Composition by RJ

Emir Rodríguez Monegal has examined the systematic childishness to which Agustini was subjected ever since her first publications. In 1902, when he published her first poem, Samuel Blixen referred to her as a ‘twelve-year-old girl’ when in fact she was sixteen. The following year, in La Alborada, she was described as follows:

One fine morning she showed up at our editorial office, bringing us a work that she deposited with her little doll’s hands on the jumbled papers on our desk. She read it to us later in a delicate intonation, soft and crystalline. It was as if she feared breaking the gossamer of her song as she unwound it from her spinning wheel of brittle paper—delicate like her rosy body, frail like the lace of her verses.

From the same period we have this recollection from Raúl Montero Bustamante:

She smiled shyly while her father expounded on the child prodigy who was beginning to interest the men of letters of the time. She had nothing to add to the conversation, and after leaving the collection on the desk she left in silence.

Delmira Agustini: Tarjetas Pintadas (Painted Cards) | Images courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay | Composition by RJ

Finally, Darío, in his foreword to Los calices vacíos (a foreword that is an all-too-typical invitation to misread the female poet) salutes Agustini—a twenty-seven-year-old woman at the time—as ‘this beautiful child’. Trotting out the threadbare cliché of the femme-enfant, this infantilization is remarkable in that it is adopted not only by those ‘men of letters’ Montero Bustamante mentioned—the paternalistic modernismo establishment—but also by Agustini herself, in the self-image she forges.

Ford Maddox Ford, Millie Smith, 1846

The care that certain writers devote to constructing their image, the energy they spend in fabricating and outfitting their persona, is a subject that merits serious attention. The matter is interesting not only for what it reveals about the writer—eternal Narcissus obsessed with his reflection—and the audience his image is aimed at, but also for what it reveals about the market forces at play in the writer-reader relation. The image is made up of both the writer and his persona. It consists in what the writer is, what he seeks to be, what it is in his interest to be and what he sacrifices for it. It can serve as both a revealing mirror and an opaque shield. These considerations, valid for every writer, deserve special attention when the writer is a woman. Indeed, the female writer’s professional image, being more fluid than that of her male counterparts, is less stereotyped. By not knowing what place she occupies—or thinks she occupies—in the world, she knows even less what place she occupies in literature. In addition to Agustini, by the way, two other writers whose image-building would repay further study are Gabriela Mistral, with her image of unconventional sexuality alongside matronly teacher and adoptive mother, and Victoria Ocampo, who, by devoting herself to disseminating the work of other writers, writers already recognized, shielded her own insecurities.

Gabriela Mistral | Victoria Ocampo (Photo: Gisèle Freund)

Delmira Agustini’s deliberate childishness—or better, ‘girlishness’, since she was called ‘La Nena’ (‘The Girl’) and used the appellation as her signature—is subject to diverse interpretations. While most of them are speculative, it is a fact that she was overprotected by her parents and that Mother’s prodigious presence weighed heavily on her. The photos we have of her bedroom, showing a doll enthroned in its center, are a sign of that self-willed infantilization, caricatural in character, that we find in certain Silvina Ocampo stories. The same childishness is found in her love letters to her boyfriend, Enrique Job Reyes, whom she sometimes called ‘Daddy’ or ‘my old man’. Occasionally, as in the following example, her baby talk gives the message a monstrous dimension:

My life! I want, I want… I want a little head of my Ricky [Enrique] that fits nicely in here [drawing of a heart]. I have been a very good girl. I say very, very good night, my dear old man. I’m always thinking of Ricky and I want the little, very little, head of my Ricky. See you! Have a nice afternoon, my dear old man. Your Nena

Think of this letter in relation to what surprised and attracted Unamuno when he read Agustini’s Cantos de la mañana: ‘That strange obsession that you have to hold in your hands, sometimes the dead head of the beloved, sometimes that of God’. Here infantilization, turning the head of the beloved into a toy, increases the strangeness of the obsession.

Uncanny dolls

The figure of ‘La Nena’, in its obvious deliberateness, is clearly a mask for Agustini. That, indeed, is how Rodríguez Monegal sees it: ‘‘La Nena’ was the mask the Pythoness wore in the world; it provided a solution to the family conflict she was caught up in, a conflict driven by a neurotic, domineering and possessive mother’. Arturo Sergio Visea, in his preface to Agustini’s correspondence, shares this interpretation. He understands her baby talk to be a code that, in the face of Mother’s prying eyes, veils the true nature of the relationship between Delmira and Enrique. However, beyond these purely private circumstances (which justify the ‘Nena’ mask), Agustini, in her public persona too, adopted this disguise. Why? Because it offered protection in a difficult situation and provided a solution, however provisional, to her dilemma. Let us now examine a particular instance when Delmira Agustini asserted her persona and used her mask: her relation with Rubén Darío.

Tarjetitas para publicidad de cigarrillos (cigarette advertising cards) | Delmira Agustini Archive | Images courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay | Composition by RJ

A reader and admirer of Darío, Agustini met the poet in 1912 when he was travelling through South America as director of the journal Mundial. As a result of this meeting, there was a brief exchange of letters between the two poets during Darío’s stay in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The letters are interesting for what they reveal of each writer’s attitude toward the other. There is a letter from Agustini to Darío, eloquent in its lucidity, where, while asking for his advice, she describes herself. Here are two excerpts from it:

I don’t know if you’ve ever come face to face with madness and fought with it in the harrowing solitude of a secretive spirit. There isn’t, there cannot be, a feeling more horrible. And the longing, the immense longing, to ask for help to face everything—to face the very Self, above all—from another spirit martyred in the same martyrdom.

The first time my madness overwhelmed me was before you. Why? No one should have struck me in my shyness as more imposing. How can I make you believe it, you who only know the courage of my unconscious? Perhaps because I recognize you as being of more divine essence than anyone I’ve met up to now, and therefore more indulgent. Sometimes I reproach myself for my boldness, and sometimes—why deny it?—I reproach myself for the disaster of my pride. To myself I seem be a beautiful statue with broken feet.

The letter concludes with two announcements: ‘In October I plan to put my neurosis in a sanatorium’ and ‘I have resolved to throw myself, in November or December, into the frightful abyss of marriage’. It ends with a request for a response, ‘a single paternal word’.

René Magritte, Memory, 1948

It is a tormented letter, excessive if you will, but one by an adult who recognizes a kindred spirit and asks for help. Darío’s response is remarkably depersonalized and curious in the distinction it makes between men and women. He writes:

Stay calm. Stay calm. Remember the principle of Marcus Aurelius: ‘Before all else, remain serene’. Believe above all in one thing: Destiny. The will itself is but subject to Destiny. Live, above all live, and fulfill your duty to joy, good joy. If genius in a man is a mountain of pain he must bear, in woman it is a gift that must be worn like a fiery robe.

Facile commentators on this correspondence agree that Darío’s letter had its effect on Agustini, who responded ‘in a more serene and resigned tone’. Clara Silva adds that Agustini’s second letter, ‘more reserved in tone, is also more literary’. Resigned maybe, literary certainly, but Agustini’s response is above all a disguise. She does what Manuel Ugarte, on another occasion, reproached her for: writing in such a way ‘that the ink serves as a mask’. Indeed, she presents herself as essentially fragile and ‘feminine’, speaking ‘with the heart’, while flirting with the man and poet she flatters with her feigned surrender.

Rubén Darío

Consider these two excerpts that reinforce the stereotype. Note the contrast in tone when speaking of her marriage between the first excerpt and the previous letter.

Since I’m planning on getting married very soon, I told my boyfriend I intend to continue my correspondence with you, the most brilliant and profound spiritual guide. Yesterday he casually asked me if I had written to you or received any news from you. In my embarrassment, I rattled on and on and came to imagine the impossible. Today I wonder, why? I think it’s because today I am another, or at least want to be another. I will be malleable, but be gentle. Sculpt me smiling.

Note, in the second excerpt (below), how Agustini continues to flatter Darío, telling him he is the only one in the world who gives her the ‘exquisite sensation of heightened artistic feeling’.

And you, Master, always give it to me, in every stanza, in every verse—sometimes even in a single word. And so intense, so dizzyingly, like that glorious day when, between a doll and a sweet, I sobbed reading your ‘Symphony in Gray’.

‘Between a doll and a sweet’: she is fully assuming (although not in baby talk) the girlishness that Ibsen highlighted in his plays. (Manuel Ugarte echoes Agustini’s girlish pose when, in one of his letters to her, he asks: ‘Do I deserve a sweet, a letter from you?’.)

John Everett Millais, Apple Blossoms (Spring), 1858 (detail)

Perhaps it is an exaggeration to see this second letter from Agustini exclusively as a response to Darío’s shallow and indirect reply to her plea in which he put her—like other women who write—‘in her place’. Nevertheless, that the letter shows an awareness of the role she is playing—that both are playing—seems clear to me. Compare Agustini’s deliberate self-abasement and the concomitant exaltation of the Master with the laconic note devoid of embellishment in which she recorded ‘for posterity’ her last encounter with Darío as he was about to set sail for Europe:

Today Sunday 6 October at 10:20 a.m. I saw, aboard the Dutch steamer ‘Zeelandia’, docked at Dock A, Mr. Rubén Darío. He was wearing a light-colored suit and a ship officer’s cap. He held his hands behind his back and continuously licked and sucked his lips. He looked at the city for a few minutes and then turned toward the camera. At 10:32 the first whistle sounded. At 10:36 on Solís Street, passing Piedras, I met Professor Rodó who was heading towards the harbor.

Rubén Darío: Madrid & Paris | Photo of Madrid plaque: Antonello Dellanotte (detail)

I turn now to examine the poems and what they reveal: a different kind of encounter between Darío and Agustini, taking place in a domain where the roles are changed, where Agustini, no longer ‘La Nena’ but a writer, responds in a very different manner to her poetic precursor. I want to show how each poet offers their own distinctive interpretation of the legend of Leda and the swan, and by extension, of the swan itself as an iconic motif. In particular, I want to show how Agustini, in composing ‘The Swan’ and ‘Nocturne’ (The Empty Chalices, 1913), necessarily takes into account—and ‘corrects’—Darío’s precursor poem.

Adolf Erbsolp, Leda and the Swan, 1909

Rubens, Leda and the Swan, 1599 | Swan photo: Malcolm Schuyl

Swan photo: Malcolm Schuyl l Franz Russ the Younger (1844-1906), Leda and the Swan

Agustini’s reading of the swan is as sacrilegious as González Martínez’s famous sonnet, published three years earlier. Perhaps even more subversive: in González Martínez, the poem, clearly didactic, discards one icon to replace it with another. The swan that ‘does not feel / The soul of things, nor hear the landscape’s voice’ is replaced by the owl, interpreter of the mystery. In contrast, Agustini’s two poems do not discard, do not replace, but insist on semantizing the icon—and even the emblematic encounter of Leda and the swan—in another way. They break with Darío’s practice of proceeding by accretion, of not discarding—Darío neutralizes signs only to recharge them with meaning, in fulfillment of imaginative demands. Not in vain do these two Agustini poems belong to The Empty Chalices, a title that already announces, in contrast to the ‘full’ chalices of Darío (see, for example, The Amphorae of Epicurus), the divergent, inquisitorial purpose of the poems it overarches.

Owl photo: Dmitrii Zhodzishskii | Swan photo: Malcolm Schuyl

The emblematic character of the swan is established early in Darío’s work: in ‘Blasón’, to be precise, from the 1896 collection, Prosas profanas y otros poemas. A heraldic image, the swan is a symbol that, depending on the poem, works in different ways. A flexible symbol, Darío, with his usual tendency to add on rather than take away, loads it with all manner of meaning. To give a few examples, the swan (in Darío it is always the swan: he uses it as an archetype) is:

– culture (‘Blazon’)
– the new poetry (‘The Swan’)
– the enigma of artistic creation (‘I Seek a Form…’)
– eroticism (‘Leda’)
– Hispanicism (‘Swans I)

[‘Leda’ can be found three rows down; the four other poems mentioned here are presented at the bottom of this page.]

Photo: Malcolm Schuyl

By making her swan male, Agustini reduces the symbolic field: what is an emblem in Darío is shorn of culture and ‘discredited’ in Agustini. Her poem proceeds in inverse manner to that of Darío’s ‘Swans III’, ‘Swans IV’ and ‘Leda’ (all from Songs of Life and Hope), poems I shall consider as ‘pre-texts’ to Agustini’s poem. In Darío, the encounter between Leda and the swan is presented as a spectacle, a scene from a ritual, with its full charge of the sacred. The poem shows: both speaker and reader are ‘before the heavenly, supreme act’, as observers, worshippers and vicarious participants. This participation, expressed directly in ‘Leda’ with its scene of voyeurism—‘the screen of teeming foliage parts and the wild / green eyes of Pan stare out, wide with surprise’—is more indirect in ‘Swans IV’: ‘Melancholy of having loved / with the fountain of the grove nearby, / the luminous neck outstretched / between Leda’s white thighs!’, and is expressed directly again in ‘Swans III’, a poem in the first-person founded on identification: ‘For one moment, oh Swan, I will join my longings / with those of your two wings that once clasped Leda,’. In Darío, then, a scene already constructed, already framed and distanced by myth, is presented frankly or surreptitiously to our gaze—to be celebrated and to serve, perhaps, as a mirror for self-recognition.

Cornelis Bos, Leda and the Swan (after Michelangelo), 1555 | Swan photo: The Blowup

The dynamics of Agustini’s poem are very different. It is not an aspect of a well-known scene, it is not a dimension of the myth (not once does the name ‘Leda’ appear); instead, it is a first-person voice that actively generates a personal sphere, a purely artificial landscape (a common process in modernist poetry) that is the metonymic background of the self. ‘My park’, writes Agustini, ‘my lake’. Here is the first stanza, which opens with a metaphor undeniably reminiscent of Darío:

Photo: Satria Hutama

In this domain where the imaginary reigns, this insubstantial, almost chimerical realm—mirror, clear, crystalline—a swan begins to emerge. Although in the first stanza the poem presents the external characteristics of the prototypical Darian swan—prince, lily, rose, candid bird—right from the next stanza it is clear that the erotic impulse is driving the poem, gradually diverting the swan from its model. Thus Agustini’s swan is endowed with ‘two human eyes’, with ‘wicked charm’ and a ‘fiery beak’ (in contrast to the beak of ‘translucent amber’ of Darío’s swan) and his embrace is clearly sexual: ‘Holding me in a warm embrace / His white wings unsettle me.’ Note how these verses center the perspective of the poem. Here the disturbance of the encounter is not, as in Darío, in the observer outside the scene (spying eyes, Pan, the speaker, the reader) but in the ‘I’ itself, at once author of and actor in the scene. The woman (‘fevered Leda’ Monegal calls her) and not the swan, not the epicene reader, generates the growing erotic passion: she desires and communicates her desire. To simplify, Agustini utters—excessively, with ‘fierce femininity’ (Alfonsina Storni)—what Darío leaves aside. She gives voice to a feminine eroticism that in Darío is lost or ‘wasted’.

Swan photo: Malcolm Schuyl | Giambettino Cignaroli, Leda and the Swan, 1766

We read in the last stanza of Darío’s ‘Leda’: ‘She struggles, naked and lovely, and is vanquished, / and while her cries turn sighs and die away…’. Unlike in Darío, in Agustini eroticism needs to be spoken, to be inscribed—not as the sighs, lost in the wind, of one defeated, but as triumphant and frightening pleasure.

William Shackleton, Leda and the Swan, 1928 (detail) | Swan photo: Malcolm Schuyl

In Agustini, the eroticized ‘I’ infects the poem with desire: there is an eroticism of disequilibrium, of the labile, of movement, while in Darío the eroticism is of the fixed, of what attempts to be fixed. In this regard, see, for example, the powerful sexual image that, after the geographical vertigo of the preceding stanzas, serenely closes ‘Divagación.

‘And next to my golden-horn unicorn, your dromedaries will have roses and honey.’

Alfonsina Storni astutely pointed out that Agustini possessed ‘to an exalted degree the feminine qualities of passion, imagination and a horror of immobility’. In connection with this dynamic of desire that inspirits the swan in Agustini as it does not in Darío, it is worth noting how, starting with the embrace already mentioned, tokens of ardor, evident in the occurrences of ‘fire’ and instances of ‘red’, proliferate in the poem: ‘No lips have ever burned’, ‘The bang of blood in his veins / Transports twice-human philters’, ‘his burning red beak’, ‘his fiery beak’, ‘frightens with its redness’, ‘ruby’, ‘fire’, ‘red’. Compare this mounting fever, this headlong rush of red, with the draining of color that Darío employs as a distancing device in ‘Leda’, making the moment of rape, paradoxically, the least bloody:

Swan photo: Malcolm Schuyl | Charles-Joseph Natoire, Leda and the Swan, 1735

Darío’s eroticism is undemanding whereas Agustini’s is urgent and fearsome: ‘The swan frightens with its redness, / And I, with my whiteness, am frightening’. By a kind of erotic vampirism—‘I give him water from my hands / And it’s fire he seems to drink; / The whole vessel of my body / I seem to lay before him’—the desiring self, at the expense of ‘the whole vessel of my body’, has been emptied of substance. The usual erotic image—the male filling up the glorified female body—that we find not only in Darío’s references to Leda (‘your sweet womb’, ‘Leda’s sky-blue egg’) but throughout his poetry, is subverted in Agustini: It is the ‘I’, the woman, who has filled the white swan—the translucent ‘flower of the air, flower of the water’—giving it substance (blood, fire) and at the same time, wasting away.

Swan photo: Malcolm Schuyl | Odilon Redon (1840-1916), Leda and the Swan

Note that this transfer of substance, an indication of fullness in Darío (a ‘good expenditure’, so to speak) indicates something very different in Agustini, where the self is spent by giving itself (‘I’, ’whiteness’ [bloodless]), draining the desiring object of its desire: ‘He buries his beak in my lap / And remains still as if dead’. This curious erotic collaboration, freely assumed—‘But in his flesh he speaks to me / And I in my flesh understand him’—decisively distances us from Leda and the swan as seen by Darío. Indeed, it leaves us clearly on the other side of harmony (‘white urns of harmony’, ‘Swans IV’), on the other side of happiness (‘Love will be happy’, ‘Swans III’), on the other side of ‘celestial melancholy’ (‘Swans IV’), in full and terrible excess where pleasure is confused with—where pleasure is—pain.

Swan photo: Malcolm Schuyl | Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre (1714–1789), Leda and the Swan

François Boucher, Leda and the Swan, 1740 | Swan photo: Malcolm Schuyl

Swan photo: Drazen Neske | François Boucher, Leda and the Swan, 1742

Pleasure is pain: In Agustini’s posthumous collection, The Rosary of Eros, in ‘Your Love, Slave’ and ‘Mouth to Mouth’, the instrument of desire reappears under the sign of pleasure-pain. ‘A raven’s beak with the fragrance of roses’, we find in the first, and in the second: ‘Red beak of the vulture of desire / Your blood and soul inside my mouth, / From your long and resounding pecking / A sore sprouted like a rock flower’.

Vulture photo: Andrey Tikhonovskiy

There is a second poem by Delmira Agustini that involves the swan. It can be read, I believe, as a definitive and secret farewell. Significantly, it is titled ‘Nocturne’.

The ‘inner realm’ (Darío, Profane Hymns and Other Poems) is reduced here to its simplest expression: a lake, a swan, a ‘you’ and an ‘I’. The calm lake, ritualized and arrested in time, has a tranquility rare in Agustini—set, crystal, lustral water, alabaster vessel, mirror—as if magnified in the transparent night. The quietude of this symbolic lake—‘lake of your soul’—is finally troubled by a discordant ‘I’ that is the swan. The swan (and not a swan) is a destroyer of harmony, a violator of purity, a defiler: it stains, it blurs, it rearranges, and then it takes flight. In Agustini there is a total identification with the swan, the swan changed in symbolic sign, whereas in Darío the swan is never finally the emblem of the ‘I’.

Delmira Agustini | Swan photos: Malcolm Schuyl

One question remains. To whom is ‘Nocturne’ addressed, who is the ‘you’ invoked? The answer may be found, I believe, if we link this poem to ‘I Seek a Form’, the sonnet that closes Darío’s Profane Hymns and Other Poems.

I maintain that Darío’s poem underlies Agustini’s. I suggest one read ‘Nocturne’ as a violent and iconoclastic response to a master whose poetry Agustini has separated herself from. And finally (to continue with the speculations that are the shameful pleasure of the critic) I would like to see, in the relation between the two poems, the cipher of the true dialogue that took place between Agustini and Darío: beyond the exchange between the Master and ‘La Nena’, a dialogue between poems.

Venus de Milo: Louvre | Rose: Chirag Saini | Swan: Robert Woeger

Sylvia Molloy (b. 1938, Buenos Aires) is a novelist, essayist, and leading literary critic of Latin American literature. She is Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities Emerita at New York University, where she taught Latin American and comparative literatures and established the Creative Writing in Spanish Program. Her critical work includes La Diffusion de la littérature hispano-américaine en France au XXe siècle; Las letras de Borges; At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America; Hispanisms and Homosexualities; Poéticas de la distancia, and Poses de fin de siglo. She is also the author of two novels, En breve cárcel and El común olvido, and several books of short prose pieces: Varia imaginación, Desarticulaciones, Citas de lectura, and Vivir entre lenguas. She has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.

Sylvia Molloy | Photo: Javier Narváez

Delmira Agustini – The Rosary of Eros | Translated by Richard Jonathan

Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Cristo Crucificado, 1700 | Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, La Dolorosa, 1665

María Izquierdo, Viernes de Dolores, 1945 (detail) | Paul Gauguin, The Yellow Christ, 1889 (detail)

El Greco, Christ Crucified, 1611 (detail) | Ecuador, The Seven Sorrows of Mary, 1830 (detail)

Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Cristo Crucificado, 1600 | Nero di Bicci, The Ascension of the Virgin, 1465 (detail)

Luis de Morales, Virgin Dolorosa, 1565 | Juan Carreno de Miranda, Christ Crucified, 1665 (detail)

Marietta, I’m sitting at a table in an all-night bar, soothed by the mint-green walls and cool Atlantic breeze. In a corner, two prostitutes are playing chess. The one with a sparkle in her eyes is losing to the one with a sultry languour. Opposite me sits Ximena. We’re drinking a dark, brooding Oloroso. More than the nudity of her shoulders, I like her centre-parted hair that leaves her forehead bare; more than the ripeness of her lips, I like her full-throated laughter. She’s studying Maritime Archeology and the History of Seafaring at the University of Cádiz. Wants to work in cultural heritage management. She’s from Montevideo. Her grand-parents fled Italy in 1943, just before the Nazis raided the Jewish ghetto in Rome after the Italian capitulation. It was inevitable we’d meet: Not only did she recognize me, she’d just bought, at an all-night bookshop, a bilingual edition of Holograms of Happenstance (a collection of my haiku, with watercolours by Liselotte). I’d come here because sleep wouldn’t come; it wasn’t long before my mind became a magic lantern, turning up memories of you. I’d just finished writing up the third one when Ximena approached me.

Ariadna Gil : Ximena

After I’d signed Holograms—To Ximena, from a man who still dreams of ocean voyages under the stars, of Pedro de Sintra, Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco de Gama—she told me of her life in Montevideo (sitting on her patio reading Baudelaire, the scent of wisteria no match for the perfume of Les Fleurs du mal). I then asked her to read me something from the second book she’d bought, El rosario de Eros by Delmira Agustini. I remember only an image of a marble statue with a head of fire, and I remember the poet’s story: Divorced one month after her wedding, she declared, ‘Marriage is a vulgarity’. Then, shifting from wife to lover, she began seeing her husband in a bordello. Before killing himself, the bastard shot her dead. In the onyx of Ximena’s eyes the murder still smouldered, their watery black took on a fiery glow.

Delmira Agustini & Enrique Job Reyes – Police photos taken at the scene of the crime, 6 July 1914

Ximena then asked what I’d been writing; I passed her my notebook. She read the first entry:

Sitting sideways in your reading chair, your legs slung over the armrest, you hold the phone to your cheek and explain to Pascale how to make that lasagna dish you served at dinner on Sunday. Stretched out on the sofa, I lay To the Wedding down and watch you, moved. Moved by this fleeting moment, moved by the innocence of your beauty in the light of the etched-glass lamp.

John Berger, To the Wedding

Outside the living room, the streetlights conspire with the twilight to persuade me I’m dreaming. After all these years, Marietta, they’ve finally succeeded: Suspended in that moment now, I am a floating feather—one puff and you’d blow me away.

̶  I see, Sprague, that for you marriage is not a vulgarity.
̶  No, Ximena, it’s not.
̶  May I read another one?
̶  Yes.

Roy Lichtenstein, M-Maybe, 1965

She then read the second entry:

‘Puma’ in glitter sparkling on your chest, your breasts flattened by a sports bra, you stand at the bar separating dining room from kitchen and drink from a bottle of Heineken. A thin film of sweat brings a glow to your skin and sticks a strand of hair to your cheek. Once again I am overcome by your virile femininity, once again my bowl brims over with your beauty. The sunlight conspires with the blinds to persuade me I’m just a pilgrim who’s walked a mile too many. Was it just an hallucination, then, when I stepped up behind you and kissed the hollow behind your ear? Sunlight and blind proclaim their victory as I hover in that moment: A flick of your finger would suffice, Marietta, to knock me down now.

̶  Are you still together?
̶  No.
̶  May I read one more?
̶  Okay.

Roy Lichtenstein, Oh Jeff, 1964

She then read the third entry:

Under the skylight, as snow whirls outside, you stand in your bodysuit and stay-ups, ironing your shirt. A beep announces an email. You sip your coffee as you read it: Again the headhunter—he just won’t stay away. In half an hour your taxi will be here. You finish ironing the shirt then slip it on; you step into your skirt and zip it closed. Your headband holding back your hair, before the mirror you put on your make-up. And then, giving your hair a final brushing, you decide to pin it up after all. Along the perimeter of the mirror, as you gather your hair in your hands, the tube of continuous light conspires with the amber of your eyes to persuade me I’m still a sleeper. When you twirled your hair and stuck in the stick, was that pang in my heart just my imagination? I succumb to the amber of your eyes, I surrender to the continuous light: A bat of your eyelids now, Marietta, would obliterate me.

̶  Such lightness! Did things get heavy, in the end?
̶  No. ‘What is good is light; everything divine runs on delicate feet.’ Marietta is divine.

Roy Lichtenstein, Yellow and Green Brushstrokes, 1966

Outside the café we walked some way together; then, there where her centre-parted hair leaves her forehead bare, I kissed Ximena goodbye.

Into sandstone walls as I walk the streets, daybreak mixes gold dust and magenta. At the market, a woman fetches buckets of roses from a van, men unload a fish truck. The day summons me to renew my senses, the day commands me to refresh my soul. I will go for a café solo and ensaimada, I will return to my hotel for a shower and a shave. Then I’ll walk past the fortress, I’ll walk past the beach, I’ll walk along the shore to where the wild grass grows. There, before structuring my compulsion to recall, I’ll lie down and give free rein to my reverie. If I become regretful, remind me you are not a bird that flew; if I get sentimental, give me another turn of the screw: Marietta, hear me now, that I may honour you!

Roy Lichtenstein, Modern Art II, 1996

Writing was the game that Agustini played with death. In the face of sidelining and silencing, in a world of intellectual men, the epistolary genre and the arduous craft of literature were the defences that safeguarded her voice.

Delmira Agustini Memorial Fountain | Edvard Munch, Madonna, 1895 | Delmira Agustini, Summer Residence, Sayago

Leonardo da Vinci, Studies for ‘Leda and the Swan’, 1505 | Lohengrin, Deutsche Oper Berlin, 2012

Ludwig II of Bavaria (Click/Tap: Ludwig II of Bavaria’s Queer Swans) | Madame de Pompadour

Garcilaso de la Vega, from Eclogue III, translated by John Dent-Young

Francisco Jover y Casanova, Un guerrero del siglo XVI, 1884 | Felipe Ariosto, Alfonso IV, 1634 | Juan de Juanes, Caballero santiaguista, 1560

Rubén Darío, ‘Swans I’, tr. Will Derusha & Alberto Acereda | Swan photos: Malcolm Schuyl

French School,  A Portrait of Montaigne, 16^th c. (detail) | Museo Rafael Núñez, Rafael Núñez miniature, Cartagena (Colombia) (detail)

Hendrick Goltzius, Helen of Troy, 1615 | Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Helen of Troy, 1863 | Gustave Moreau, Helen on the Trojan Ramparts, 1885 | Swan photo: Malcolm Schuyl

Leda and the Swan: D.H. Lawrence, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Butler Yeats, Robert Graves