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  After Flor leaves, Delmira sits down at her desk beneath the sloped ceiling of her room. She composes letters, quickly in succession, as if stringing beads to establish the long connections that will become her legacy to literary history, the correspondence with critics and writers in Latin America.

  Manuel Ugarte, what did she see in him? It began on his side with a 1912 letter in which he compliments her books. “You are an exceptional talent,” he writes. Maybe she can be forgiven for falling for his flattery. Manuel Ugarte, the literary Don Juan of Buenos Aires, is known for seducing with his looks and words. Much later, he befriends the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni, who ends her life by walking into the sea. Perhaps Ugarte has that effect on women; perhaps he stirs a suicidal impulse. Nothing wounds a serious writer more than witnessing the success of a dilettante.

  After a few letters, Ugarte shows up in Montevideo and meets Delmira in visits supervised by her mother. These are chaste discussions on the sofa in the living room. Delmira plays the piano for him. Meanwhile, in the background, Enrique Job Reyes is courting the poet. When she finally accepts the horse-trader’s proposal to marry, Ugarte does not have the wisdom to withdraw. He hangs around Montevideo and attends the wedding on August 14, 1913 at the Agustini residence. The celebration is, by all accounts, a disaster.

  Guests mingle, drinking champagne while a quartet plays in the living room filled with flowers arranged in vases by Flor, lavish bouquets of winter roses and ferns. At some point during the celebration, Ugarte ambushes Delmira in an alcove by the kitchen. Something happens, one kiss or more, enough to throw her off. That night, in her new home, she cannot consummate the marriage. Unaware of Ugarte’s effect on his new bride, Reyes blames the mother and her repugnant advice, claiming in a later letter she warned Delmira not to bear his child, not to let him touch her.

  Ugarte returns to his debonair life in Buenos Aires but Delmira can’t leave him alone. “You tormented my wedding night and honeymoon,” she writes. “I can never say how much I suffered…your spirit so close to me among all those people…I am deeply wounded.” He replies with a formal letter, disregarding her passion, unwilling to acknowledge his obvious efforts to thwart her marriage. But in 1914, less than one year after the wedding, Ugarte reads of the Reyes-Agustini divorce in the newspaper and sends her a note. “Congratulations on your heroic deed of liberation.” Delmira replies, admitting the cost of the divorce to her spirits, and begs him to visit her. Ugarte maintains that his work requires him to remain in Buenos Aires. When Delmira sends him “Serpentina,” he replies with a poem of his own, insipidly infantile. Delmira’s poem will be published in a posthumous collection. No one reads Ugarte anymore.

  La inmensa ansiedad

  Of all her letters, the correspondence with Rubén Darío stands out for its pure exaltation. In the 1890s, when Delmira is beginning to write, the Nicaraguan poet is in Paris cavorting with Verlaine and the symbolists. Modernismo is catching fire in Latin American letters, lit by Darío’s commitment to denounce obscurity, embrace the cosmopolitan, celebrate language as spoken in his hemisphere.

  Delmira’s early poems draw from Darío’s verses. She too poeticizes the supernatural, leans on mythology and idolizes the grotesque. And, like him, she writes of the swan, overused symbol of poets, particularly the modernistas. But doubt of Delmira’s agility and brilliance as a poet is laid to rest in her handling of the symbol. In her poem “The Swan,” the “soul of the lake,” the “candid and solemn bird has a wicked charm.”

  For Darío, the swan is an emblem of beauty. In one of his poems, more heavy-handed than deft, the swan’s neck takes on the form of a question mark. His overreliance on the symbol prompted another modernista, a Mexican, to attack the Nicaraguan in his poem: “Wring the swan’s neck who with deceiving plumage / inscribes his whiteness on the azure stream; / he merely vaunts his grace and nothing feels / of nature’s voice or the soul of things.” This provocation by Enrique González Martínez, translated by Samuel Beckett, appeared in a 1958 anthology edited by Octavio Paz. By that time, the modernistas had been succeeded by the vanguardistas, creacionistas and post-modernistas.

  But at twenty-six, Delmira’s admiration for Rubén Darío is unreserved. She records that her greatest happiness is the day in 1912 in Montevideo when she meets the forty-five-year-old poet on his book tour. And gift of all gifts, he agrees to write introductory words of praise for her third book, published just before her wedding. In the last collection of poems before her death, Darío proclaims, “Of all the women writing verse today, no one has impressed me like Delmira Agustini for her unveiled soul and her floral heart…. If this beautiful girl continues in the lyrical revelation of her spirit as she has done so far, she will astonish our world of Spanish language….she says exquisite things that have never been said. May glory, love and happiness be with her.” How can she not recoil at his sexism, the condescension of his words? Or has she become immune to this treatment by her mostly male colleagues?

  When Darío travels on to Buenos Aires, Delmira can’t resist firing off a letter. Crossing professional boundaries, she confesses her torment. “I have reached a moment of calm today in this eternal, painful exaltation and these are my saddest hours. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked insanity in the face and fought the anguished loneliness of a hermetic spirit…the anxiety, the immense anxiety.”

  “Tranquilidad,” Darío advises. “Believe in destiny above all else. To live, to live, to have the obligation of happiness.” The poems in her book, he says, are “muy bello” but urges more sincerity, signing his letter El Confesor.

  Delmira’s response is immediate. She exalts his verses, crowns him king of poets, “god of El Arte.” Then she plays the next card in her epistolary game. “My letter should be secret. Do not write back. Surprise me. I will wait. Let it be spontaneous.” The master is travelling extensively, busy transforming Latin American poetry and nurturing his hemispheric dreams. Finally Delmira breaks down and sends him some new poems. He responds with detached encouragement. “Be optimistic, Delmira, and receive your destiny smiling.” The patronizing tone of his letter must have scalded her soul.

  Tanta vulgaridad

  Unlike the crafted epistles to Darío, the words she writes her future husband are silly and childish. “Yo tiero”…I wove you. Her letters to Enrique Job Reyes expose the enigma of her dual personality.

  Reyes is not her first boyfriend. She meets him in 1908, probably through mutual friends. Montevideo is small and the bourgeoisie’s circle is tight. In between chaperoned visits with Delmira, he spends his days at auctions, his nights drinking and playing cards with other horse-traders. Their courtship lasts five years before they marry. All along they’re seen as the ideal couple with love, money and glory.

  After the wedding, they move into a house on Calle Canelones. A love nest with new furniture, the house should represent a new start at a safe distance from interfering families. But it unravels quickly. One month and twenty-one days after her marriage, Delmira returns to her parents. “I cannot take so much vulgarity,” she famously declares. Montevideo gasps at her audacity.

  What happened? Delmira is a young twenty-six-year-old, accustomed to a disciplined routine around which her family and Flor revolve. Enrique Job cruises the town, brings his cohorts home for games of cards. They drink whisky and smoke cigars, make lewd jokes and take no interest in the needs of the precocious poet in their midst. There’s also this: shortly before the wedding, Delmira’s third and most important book is published. The Empty Chalices, with a short prologue by Rubén Darío, includes twenty-one new poems of shocking eroticism. “To Eros,” “Your Mouth,” “Oh You!”…the titles and verses glow with desire and sexuality. During the intense period preceding the wedding, Enrique Job probably never got around to reading the book and when he does, he’s shocked. The lovers in Delmira’s poems do not resemble him at all.

  His fury escalates when she lea
ves him. A caballero of the old school, where appearances count for everything, he adheres to Uruguay’s machismo. Angry letters accuse Delmira of staining his honour. In the Iberian cult of tradition, this is a valid motive for murder.

  Enrique Job sells the furniture and rents a furnished room in a house on Calle Andes where his friend Germán da Costa is living. Around the mirror in his room, Enrique Job hangs portraits of Delmira and her many drawings and paintings. In a ranting letter, he claims to have always behaved like a gentleman, refers to a night before the wedding when she wanted to make love and he refused to do so out of wedlock. He takes on his mother-in-law, whose “repugnant advice” created Delmira’s terror and panic the night of the wedding. “Your mother is hateful,” he says, the first pass in a duel, a glove thrown to the ground.

  Señora Agustini’s influence, her tutelage and authoritative devotion are no match for the husband. At home again, Delmira submits to her mother’s care. The woman tends to her daughter’s shattered nerves, indulges her with unconditional love and, along with Flor, steers her back into the family fold. Delmira resumes her routine, writing intensively by day, corresponding and flirting with men she meets in Montevideo. She also takes advantage of her provincial country’s one progressive law. Back in 1907, almost a century before divorce is legalized in Argentina, Chile and Luscano, the parliament of Uruguay enacts legislation allowing divorce. Delmira initiates legal proceedings and newspapers report on her impending divorce.

  During the nine months between their separation and deaths, Enrique Job Reyes is tormented by jealousy and passion. Nights, he is seen raging outside her home. His sister blames Delmira for trying to make a lover out of a husband.

  Twice a week until her death, Delmira secretly visits Enrique Job in his rented room. Amid the speculation as to why she continues to see her ex, defenders of her will to live swear she was merely trying to get him to sign the divorce papers.

  Doble personalidad

  Was her death the result of a suicide pact? According to his friends, Enrique Job Reyes is crazed with anger. He possesses a gun. The tickets to Buenos Aires found in his nightstand might be a decoy, a planted distraction, or a final effort to save them. He is consumed. If he cannot possess her, he will kill her to silence the gossip, put an end to the embarrassing poetry, save his family and his reputation from further stain. And destroy the mother.

  At dusk on July 6, 1914, Delmira Agustini leaves her parents’ house. In one hand, she is holding an umbrella against the winter rain. In the other she carries a purse with a hand mirror and an unsent letter addressed to the editor of a periodical in Buenos Aires. She apologizes for her silence. “I’ve been ill,” she writes and promises to collaborate with his magazine in the future.

  Her spirits have been drawn and quartered by the pull of her husband on one side, her mother on the other. Abandoned by all those she respects, the lovers and mentors who dismiss and patronize her, and suffocated by the unbearable burden of existence, she knocks on the door to 1206 Calle Andes…

  11

  Xenia staggered into the courtyard with an armload of blankets and towels. Alma closed her laptop. “Let me help!” Hannelore had been so stubborn Alma had never realized how single-minded Xenia could be. She refused to allow Alma to throw out any of her mother’s belongings, insisted on airing them out before packing them in suitcases. Yesterday they’d gone to the station to purchase the bus ticket to Todos Santos and the agent had emphasized the two-suitcase limit per traveller, particularly in Xenia’s case. Her journey involved several stops and transfers, first in Asunción, then, after crossing the border into Bolivia, in Sucre and Cochabamba. Alma took the largest blankets and spread them over the table and chairs while working to convince Xenia to send the bedding by mail.

  The overhead sun was searing and Alma’s eyes burned from the effort of typing and squinting at the little screen. She wasn’t sure about what she was writing, the work hadn’t taken form yet, but Alma hoped that in the creating of it, she’d find out. It was a struggle to restrain the years of academic training and let the poet’s story emerge as confession more than reportage. But now that over a month had passed since her mother’s death, it seemed essential to be reclaiming a daily rhythm of work.

  After carefully arranging Hannelore’s best blanket over one of the wicker chairs, Xenia sat down on the stoop to the kitchen. “What are you going to do with this place, m’hija?”

  “I have until Christmas to figure it out.” Before returning to Montréal, she’d have to sell or rent the house.

  “You should keep it. There are no houses like this one in Todos Santos.”

  “I can’t afford to keep the house and my apartment in Canada.”

  Xenia pointed at the stacks of books and notes next to the laptop. “Work hard, write your book, you’ll be able to keep the house. That’s what your mother would say.”

  Alma went to sit by Xenia’s side just to feel the strength of her and smell her scent of sweet grasses. She’d miss Xenia, her resilience and clarity, but most of all her intuition. Alma told her of the poet and her enigmatic death.

  When Xenia heard of the murder in the small rented room, she placed her hand on her heart. “It’s because she didn’t have children. Or maybe she was pregnant and desperate. When I was pregnant, I was not myself. Already in mourning, as if I knew my children were not for this world, that I was just their temporary coffin.”

  Alma had read of a theory somewhere that Delmira Agustini had miscarried in the months before her death and that this loss had shattered her completely. But it was only conjecture.

  “Each time I lost my baby, I became mad,” Xenia said. “La Loquita, they called me. I had to leave Todos Santos to recover my mind. I chose life in the end because who else would pray for and remember my babies and my husband?” She placed her sturdy hand on Alma’s knee. “You know, m’hija, when you came home that night, I was very worried you’d choose not to live.”

  The day of her release from La Cuarenta, Alma had been gripped with a feverish energy. She’d locked herself in the bathroom, drawn a hot bath and scrubbed her skin with a rough sponge. Soaping and scrubbing her body, stepping out of the grimy water, draining it from the bathtub, running water again and again until the hot water tank was depleted. And her mother knocking, threatening to break down the door. Alma had asked for Xenia. When she saw the infected burn on her shoulder, Xenia opened a towel, patted her down, found an antibiotic salve, talking to her quietly, murmuring “m’hija” with such calm and resolve, Alma had been able to dress, eat and pack her things before her father drove her to the airport.

  “When I saw how you packed your suitcase, when I heard the anger in your voice, I knew you’d be all right. If your poet had found her anger maybe she would not have allowed this man to kill her.”

  It was true. There was little rage even in Agustini’s most passionate poems. The letters where she’d shared her deepest thoughts showed profound distress but not rage. Alma thought of her own anger. Inside the prison, fear had suffocated anger, but once released, she’d become indignantly angry. For lack of a specific target, she’d been angry at all of Luscano. Her anger was made even more potent by guilt that she’d survived while others had been tortured to death. This kind of rage, unexpressed, could engender the most despicable thoughts and lead a person to question the value of living.

  In the afternoon, Alma packed up the blankets into parcels and took a taxi to the post office. She lugged the packages up the marble stairs of the colonial building and waited in a long, disordered lineup. Above her, on the domed ceiling encircled with gold leaf, cherubs floated in a garishly blue sky, some failed Iberian painter’s rendition of Renaissance art.

  Finally, she made it to a wicket and hoisted the parcels onto the counter. “Bolivia?” the woman asked. “No, no, you have to come back on Monday. We’re closing now and it takes time to complete the forms for Customs.”


  “They’re just some old blankets.”

  “A gift?”

  “You see, my mother died and we — ”

  The woman grabbed and squeezed Alma’s hand. “I’ll see what I can do.” Soon enough, the parcels were stamped and dropped into overseas’ bins.

  Alma left the post office just as the guards were locking the entrance. She walked across the Plaza Federal, reflecting on the random kindness she’d encountered since her mother died. Almost every time she faced an official behind a desk to obtain the certifications, annulments and other official documents she needed in connection with Hannelore’s death, she’d been offered coffee, handed tissues, embraced and consoled. “How hard it is to lose your mother,” strangers would say. “Mine died two years ago and I’m still devastated.” While Alma tried to steer the discussion back to the purpose of her visit, the person would go on and on until they either botched the work or redirected her elsewhere. Still, the humanity she encountered transcended systemic incompetence.

  Alma approached the bookstore and peered into the sooty window of La Librería Internacional. A few customers browsed in the narrow aisles and further back, Roma stood behind the counter. She hurried to greet her at the door, slinging her arm over Alma’s shoulder. “Gabriel Seil’s back there, morose as ever,” she whispered. “Help cheer him up, will you?”

  Gabriel struggled to rise from a low plastic chair. Alma kissed him on one cheek, then went for the second, not yet cured of Montréal’s double kiss. “Sorry,” he mumbled, after their heads collided. In jeans and sneakers, the only trace of his cemetery persona was the colour of his T-shirt, jet black and logoless.

  The high shelves were jammed with books, no signs of the candles and cards taking over Canadian bookstores. It was as a bookstore should be, Alma thought, the hallowed domain of books and books alone.