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| Elisa Lerner by Efrén Hernández |
She said it once
the interview had finished, while we were having tea and biscuits in the cozy
kitchen of her Caracas apartment. “Elisa, you've
just given me the interview title” I told her excitedly. “It's from the novel
I'm writing, but you can borrow it” the writer, essayist, playwright, and
winner of the 2000 National Literature Award answered smiling.
However, we had
not begun the interview - one hour before - by talking about her new novel, but
about Julio Cortázar's compliment on her monologue “La mujer del periódico de la tarde”
(The Afternoon Newspaper Lady, 1976):
“Children? No, I don't have any. My negligence, my carelessness, and my
lack of attention have not
allowed me to have them. But now I take care of every wrinkle in my face as
if it were
a child. And what a prolific mother I have become! Of course, my greatest slovenliness has been turning 50. (…) But lately I have been
harboring a certainty that first class products, on a
fifty-year-old woman's face, become second class. (…)
By spreading some oil on my Ponds cream I feel much
a child. And what a prolific mother I have become! Of course, my greatest slovenliness has been turning 50. (…) But lately I have been
harboring a certainty that first class products, on a
fifty-year-old woman's face, become second class. (…)
By spreading some oil on my Ponds cream I feel much
more nationalistic. (…)
For us, inflation begins after 40.
For us, inflation begins after 40.
How expensive it gets at that stage to have a man.”
Julio Cortázar wrote a letter praising that monologue.
Yes, it's a
letter he did not write to me but to a young woman, Susana Castillo, who was a professor at California University and who used to come here
often because she wrote several books about Venezuelan theater. In 1979,
she sent Cortázar my monologue, and he wrote back saying: “Please remember to
tell Elisa Lerner that I loved her monologue”. I have publicly mentioned
this letter but have never published it because it had not been addressed to
me.
At 11 you told your father you wanted to be a writer.
How did you know what you wanted to be at such an early age?
Because I got
very good grades on writing assignments at school, I was always the best, and
that was not easy because I had really smart, brilliant classmates like
Marianne Khon Becker. That is why I believe writing is a gift.
Did you use to read a lot as a girl?
Yes, during my
holidays I would read a lot, and those were actually my holidays—reading. And
on the other hand, I had a sister - I still have her but she's very sick - who
is older than me, Ruth, and who was full of light. She was a very
important person here in Venezuela, she was Minister of Education, UNESCO
ambassador… But to continue with the story, for me the most important thing is
that she was full of light, of happiness for being alive, during all our
childhood, our adolescence, as if she had been leading the way.
Did your sister write as well?
No. If she had
wanted to, she could have written very well, because I read an assignment she
did in primary school about a Spanish classic, and her writing had such a
marvelous fluency. But she chose recital because she had been born in Europe -
I, instead, was born in Valencia and was brought here at 3. Our move happened
to coincide with the death of General Gómez. I found out about this I'm
going to tell you when I read a long interview my sister gave: because of the
fact that she arrived at Venezuela when she was 3 and a half, she did not have
a good command of the language, and even though she was a gorgeous girl I
suppose other girls laughed at her or bothered her in some way because she did
not speak Spanish very well. So one day she stood up at the Bolívar square in
Valencia and started reciting poems. She had a great talent for reciting poems
in a special way, not with solemnity of the professional reciters of the
time. So, thanks to my sister, I listened to the most beautiful poems of
those times, Lorca, Antonio Machado and Rubén Darío, always Rubén Darío, his
long poems… My sister would also recite the great South American poetesses, and
since she had to learn every poem by heart, I was there listening to them once
and again. So I got used to the rhythm of the language, of Spanish. On the
other hand, my mother's native language was German and she had gone to high
school in Czernowitz, a very important city which had been like the last
stronghold of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and my father was from Nova-Solitza,
a small town in the border which at some moments belonged to Russia but which,
when he came here, belonged to Romania. My parents were never able to speak
academic Spanish. When I was very little, my mother would talk and sing
to me in German, for example, to make me drink my milk, which I did not like.
But one day, she stopped talking and signing in German, and that happened when
Nazism began.
Did your mother renounce to her mother tongue because
of the war?
Yes, she did it
out of respect for my father, who was more religious than her regarding
Judaism. However, she did speak in German with other people, but not at home.
So I was left with a longing, a double longing for having lost a language
without having learned it. On the other hand, I wanted to speak perfect Spanish
because my parents had never been able to speak it very well. My mother always
read Venezuelan newspapers, and my father spoke fluent Spanish because of the
work environment, the streets, and Caracas was a very friendly city, open to
immigrants. So there were various factors: having lost a language before even
having learned it; thinking that I would never - this was unconscious - master
the language with the degree of perfection other children with native parents
could, and at the same time, the paradox of always listening to the language
through the poems my sister recited.
Wasn't it distressing to want to be a writer if you
thought you didn't speak Spanish very well?
No, quite the
opposite, it made me extremely happy, because I got very good grades on writing
assignments at school, which gave me great confidence. What I did not feel
confident about was what I was going to say. And it never crossed my mind that
I was not a rich girl and that in Venezuela it was clear that only… this was a
Venezuelan tradition, that when a writer belonged to a rich family, or if he
had been successful and earned money by himself because luck had been on his
side, then he had an open path to devote himself to writing and publish. This
was a problem I did not contemplate at the time. I told my parents “I'm going
to be a writer”, and I did it the day they gave me a pair of shoes which had
little braids, and I thought they were the shoes of a professional writer. So I
felt prepared to set off, with those shoes, on a long journey to Literature.
In one of your chronicles, you say your father gave
you a Parker pen when you told him you wanted to be a writer.
Yes, but that
was not at 11, when I told him for the first time, but during my adolescence.
And what did your mom say?
My mom said
nothing. My mom was the authority figure, while my dad played the indulgent
role, the one related to affection and dreams. My mom was… I believe I could
only think of clean sheets of paper because I had clean sheets in my bed,
appropriate underwear as a child, order, food.
Affection.
A good meal is a
form of affection. The things my mother provided us were very difficult to get
in the Venezuela I was born in, which was terribly poor. For a long time, I was
not conscious of this situation because no one talked about it. I had too
little contact with the girls in my school to realize that what my mother gave
us was not that common.
“Actually, this thing about shoes is one of the most fascinating
topics
in democracy: it marks the boundary between left and right. Flat or low
heel shoes
follow a left-wing line. Because low heels, or flat shoes as well,
are really close to the ground. Now high heel shoes, like Louis XV, for
example
(the Beauty looks at her shoes with
certain discomfort - they are Louis XV), bend
rightward. They are farther away from reality, from the ground. (…)
But the most political thing is going
to the zoo. I met an activist who invited me to go one Sunday to a
zoo
that had been sponsored by Pro Venezuela: all the animals in the zoo
were
from our country. The universal constant does not prevail
there.
Anyway, it was really nice:
there were monkeys and leaders alike.”
Una entrevista de prensa o La Bella de Inteligencia
(A Newspaper Interview or The Intelligent Beauty), Elisa Lerner, 1960
Were you shy?
Oh no, I was not
shy.
Was your lack of contact with the other girls due to
the fact that there was Antisemitism?
Not at all! We
were the most popular ones, Marianne and me, who studied in the same class, and
Dita, her younger sister, who was extremely popular because she had an
overwhelming personality, she was very pleasant, very humorous, she had a great
vitality, and she was very sympathetic and generous.
Like today.
Like today, of
course. Let me tell you an anecdote about Dita. We received the newspaper El Nacional, which was a very important
newspaper - and it still is-, a very literary newspaper, full of hope, because
it had been founded by people who had opposed the dictatorship of Juan Vicente
Gómez. And these were times in which there was a great battle underway against
Nazism, and it was believed that Venezuela was going to deepen democracy. These
were times in which there was an ideological frenzy around the world. El Nacional was in favor of the
Spanish Republic, so there were also articles from Spanish exiles who were
living here. Together with books, this newspaper greatly encouraged me to
believe that someday I might be able to write in a newspaper. There was a young
writer there, Ida, who wrote such beautiful interviews.
Yes. So I would
read Ida's interviews and say: Well, perhaps one day I might have the chance to
write… Of course this was something I only said to myself and very hesitantly
because I did not tell anyone that I wanted to be a writer. I had told my
father, and he had smiled and thought this was only a little girl's dream.
And what's the anecdote?
Every Sunday I
would receive the newspaper, which was brought by a town crier. In downtown
houses, where we lived, there was a hall, and at first light he would leave the
newspaper there. Every Sunday, the newspaper included the Literary Paper which
often contained an Ida Gramcko interview in the center page. One day, when I
was about 11 years old, I arrived at school crying my eyes out. Dita asked me
why I was crying so loudly and I told her the reason was that I hadn't been
able to read Ida's interview because the town crier had not brought the
newspaper. The next day, Dita took her newspaper to school and gave it to me as
a gift… And she was collecting them too!
Have you had the chance to meet Ida Gramcko?
Yes, with time,
I became almost a part of her family, because Ida wrote in La grutavenidera, a book Elizabeth Schön published when I was coming out of adolescence. I was so fascinated
with that book that once I came across her while walking on Bolívar square -
she was with Silva Estrada - and I told her, and Elizabeth
Schön, even though we were not friends, gave it to
me as a gift. That book, as well as Ida's interviews and poems, meant very much
to me. She has been a great influence.
More than Ida?Or in a different way?
In a different
way. She was very important to help me get to write my first piece, “La
bella de inteligencia”, but more than that, she was a great friend, a great
advisor, she was like a young aunt or an older sister, older than my sister
Ruth. She was a very sensitive, sensible, protective, moderate woman. When I
saw Queen Sofía of Spain, her blissful smile, she strongly reminded me of
Elizabeth, because she had the manners of a natural queen in her garden at Los
Rosales. I don't know how she could manage - I think she didn't even finish
primary school, though she did some Philosophy courses - to acquire such wisdom
in life, such a remarkable diplomacy. She never complained nor argued about
trivial things, and I say it because it's true. Ida was also a very discreet
woman, but she was more impetuous regarding her moods.
How did you meet Ida?
During my
childhood, when I was a little girl of about 11 or 10 years old, I went with my
parents to an Israeli Ashkenazi Union event to honor León Felipe, the Spanish
poet. I had no idea what was going on, because he was reciting his poems and I
saw everybody was crying. He was saying that it was like the same exile and
that he - because of the fact that he was called León Felipe - had also been
part of the Jewish exile. There I saw that men who were tough businessmen
during the day now had tears in their eyes. And when the ceremony - which was
held in a house - was over, I saw Ida Gramcko in the dining room. I recognized
her because I'd seen her in the newspaper, so I asked for an autograph. She
gave it to me, but I felt like a great coldness, a certain arrogance… She made
no attempt to establish a connection with that little girl who admired her.
What happened then?
After that I
found her during my adolescence when she arrived at the Soviet Union, where she
was named chargé d'affaires at the embassy when she was very young. These were
her glory days, the 40's and 50's were her days of splendor. The problem was
that we were under a dictatorship. I went to the Venezuelan-French Center,
often with RománChalbaud but sometimes alone because it was close to my house…
well, not that close, because I lived in the upper part of San Bernardino.
Anyway, I was a teenager and I took the bus and walked to Los Caobos, and
Caracas was a safe city, a smaller city, and there I would find Ida. I started
a dialog with her, I told her I kept her articles, and she said that was tacky
or something like that. But after that, a sort of implicit friendship began to
emerge, and when she published Poemas
(Poems) - that amazing, famous book of hers - I came across her one day on a
bus in San Bernardino, because she lived in the lower part, and she offered me
her book. Unfortunately, I foolishly told her a friend had already given it to
me, and she was fascinated because I was delighted with her book.
“Death endures all indiscretions, all details.
That is her way of longing, once again, for life.”
La envidia o la añoranza de los mesoneros
(The Envy or the Longing of the Waiters), Elisa Lerner, 1974
Why do you say that Elizabeth Schön was you theatrical
influence?
Because she
wrote La Gruta venidera, which was a
book I really liked, and then she wrote Intervalo, which
is a theatrical piece and she read some extracts to me and I believe this… I
also read Beckett of course. I was also influenced by the fact that I did not
know, when I wrote La Bella de
Inteligencia, that I had written a theatrical piece. I had just graduated
from Law School. I'd never had a great vocation, but I thought that if I
studied Arts… the School of Arts did not have the prestige Law School had when
I started studying. I felt my thing was not teaching but writing, and I was
right - I don't like teaching. I know that sometimes when I speak, I can
experience things that only happen to me when I write, but it may also happen
that, when I'm speaking, I may mistakenly believe I am writing, I may betray
myself in some way.
Have you been able to live off literature?
No one lives off
literature. In a country like Venezuela, at least, that is very difficult.
However, I can say that during some time my theatrical pieces, especially Vida con Mamá (Life with Mother), which
was fairly successful, did produce some money, and I got payed for my articles.
But of course I must recognize that I'm a writer from the periphery, that I'm a
writer from these parts.
And how did you manage to live and keep writing in
these parts?
Well, I did many
things. My first job was in a magazine, but they payed me very little, so my
mother got fed up and asked me to quit. My sister got upset because I had quit
but I did not stay. After that, I had an unpaid job at the Casa de Observación,
which was directed by Dr. Renée Hartman. This helped me a lot because I was
able to go to the United States with a modest grant. I also wrote for Radio
Nacional, though I lost that job after being away for a year, and I gave half
of what I earned to my mom, who had become a widow. I worked for the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, and in Madrid I was Cultural Counselor. Throughout my life,
there were times I had more luck, times I had little luck, but I've always had
to work.
Was it easy to get your plays
mounted?
It
was very easy to get my first piece mounted, and they mounted it several times.
What was difficult was to get El
vastosilencio de Manhattan (Manhattan’s Vast Silence) mounted. This was a
play no one wanted to mount in Venezuela - Argentinians liked it but
Venezuelans did not, they said there were too many characters. I remember CipeLincovsky talked a lot with Carlos
Giménez to get him to
mount the piece with her, but Carlos was a bit complicated, he had many
engagements and apparently he was enchanted by the play but in the end he did
not mount it, though he did monitor the setup of Vida con Mamá, which I could not see because I lived in Spain.
Finally, after many years, the piece was mounted by Gustavo
Tambascio, with whom I
have a beautiful friendship because later on he went to Spain, while I was
living there, and with his sister too, who has already died unfortunately - she
was a great friend.
“Daughter:
I went to a party where Billo's Happy Boys were
performing.
People were gobbling down a lot of Russian salad.
Mother:
A pure thirst for knowledge.
Stalin, Marxism.
(…)
Mother:
Perhaps there's a political refugee coming.
(Intermittent
shots are heard).
Daughter:
I hear shots. The city policy once again.
Mother:
It's the gate of the building. When it opens, it
sounds like a shot.
The refugee should already be here!
Daughter:
I can still hear shots. At night, in the street,
there are more policemen than prostitutes. It won't be
long till the guys that slept
with the whores have to do it with the policemen.
(…)
Mother:
These mailmen were like honorable literary
critics:
they commented on the letters they brought, as if they
had read them. ”
Vida con Mamá, Elisa Lerner, 1975
Has your mother
seen Vida con Mamá?
She
has, yes. She was delighted. My mother was so happy when my plays were
being mounted that there was a change in her, a great closeness, though she
used to buy me the Billiken magazine when I was a child, but there was an
immense affection from the moment she saw how my plays were mounted.
Some people
think that Vida con Mamá is
your life.
Not
at all. As you know, a theatrical piece or a book may produce admiration but
also a certain anomalous form of admiration which is gossip and envy. If that
were my life, I wouldn't have been able to go to Spain, I wouldn't have been
able to keep on writing, I wouldn't be able to live alone in an apartment nor
fight against an awful disease such as blindness - a problem that started when
I was very young. But actually, that is not a problem - a problem would have
been marrying a Venezuelan man and having to work like mad and not being able
to continue writing. I also had the luck of having met, since my high school
days, very pleasant people, poets, who told me - even my teacher Dr. Caldera - that I was a writer. Dr. Velásquez too.Always. I wanted to work in culture. During
my years at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in Caracas, I worked
with Eugenio
Montejo, our
famous poet, in a magazine that was published abroad, and I also worked in
Radio Nacional. I wouldn't have been able to write if I had married. Do you
know what would have been terrible for me? Having to take care of two or three
children, to teach or to be a lawyer at a ministry or a lawyer's office, for
which I had no special talent nor vocation, and, on top of that, having three
Bar Mitzvahs a week and a wedding every Saturday. When would I think? When
would I write?
Weren't your
mother and father worried that you did not want to marry?
Well,
the truth is that in the end my mother was no longer worried. She finally
understood that my thing was writing and that I was very particular. If I
had found a man who supported me as a writer, like Virginia Woolf, who had a
husband that even accepted her alleged lesbian adventures - though this is not
my case because I'm not a lesbian - that would have been great. I have
always liked men but not to the point of sacrificing my writing, not as an
unhealthy passion.
Are you
religious?
Jewish
heritage is very present in me but it is expressed through my writing. I don't
talk much.
“At times writing is like a vessel that is getting
away from us…
A victorious bottle of wine that shatters into pieces
and does not stain
tablecloths but something more arduous and intense with
which we are born.”
El país
odontológico (Dental
Country), Elisa Lerner, 1966
Are you writing
anything at the moment?
Yes,
I'm writing something.
What's the
genre?
I
don't know what the genre is, as you know now genres… (Hesitates whether to tell or not). It's prose.
When will you be
able to show it to the public?
No, I
don't know that because I don't know when I will be able to finish it, given
that last year my health was very poor and this year… I hope I can finish it. I
had been working on this for several years when I realized that I had largely
failed, that during those years I had not achieved like the smoothness, you
know, as if you put on some cream on your face when that was not the
appropriate treatment.
Do you write
every day or only when you feel inspired?
No, I
write when life allows me to, because there are many things that sometimes get
in the way.
Did your life
change when you won the National Literature Award?
Not
at all.
Didn't that open
any doors to publish more, or mount more plays?
No, I
don't think so. Though Blanca Pantin reedited Carriel for the third time, and I practically rewrote the book
from its first edition, which had a really nice prologue by Ramón J. Velásquez.
I mounted Ávila, directed by Alexis Márquez, he published a chronicle book I
had written, and then I published a small story book that I had written in
Madrid, Homenaje a la Estrella
(Homage to the Star), and the novel De muertelenta (With a Slow Death), which I finished in 2005 but
was released in early 2007. However, I don't think any of these had anything to
do with the fact that I had won the prize.
Which genre are
you most identified with?
Well,
I'm going to tell you what Carmen Ruiz
Barrionuevo says about me.
She holds the Ramos Sucre chair at Salamanca University - an absolutely wise,
humane and charming woman. She wrote an essay saying that mine is a plural
siege on literature that goes beyond genres. People don't know that when I was
16 years old I wrote several prose poems - not many, about three - and one of
them was published in El Heraldo, which
was a very prestigious newspaper at the moment. When I was between 16 and 23 I
wrote a story book but it got lost along the way. I started to write chronicles
and plays, and I had a novel set in New York. When I met Emir Rodríguez Monegal
he got interested in the novel, and I read some chapters to him and he told me
there was a wonderful novel there. But I made the mistake of reading it to
another person - because that comment was a disproportionate compliment coming
from Rodríguez Monegal - and the answer was not good, so I got discouraged, I did
not continue with the book, and that turned me away from narrative.
Later, perhaps due to my mother's death, the sickness, the changes in the
country, I turned towards narrative again. I have published a short story book
and a novel. Not long ago I published a chronicle about a teenage memory of
when I met Ruiz Pineda by chance at my sister's house. He was a leader,
a man who had had to make many sacrifices due to the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship,
a real treasure full of nobleness, and that chronicle had a great impact. But
right now I'm writing this book which you could say is a novel, a story, a
memory simulation, I don't know what it is.
And you don't
want to reveal anything.
The
thing is that I cannot reveal anything because I can't even say if I'll get to
finish it. I see that what came before does not flow the way I wanted, anyway,
I feel very insecure. And you know that revealing too much in advance…
Is never good.
Well,
I had a bad experience with my first novel, which was left unfinished.
Yes,
but that was almost by accident. The one who really confronted dictatorship was
my sister Ruth and my brother in law, who died in December. What happened to me
was accidental. I had received some letters that were regarded as a serious
offense by the regime, because one of our friends, who became desperate in his
fight against Pérez Jiménez, did not take into account that my house was being
watched closely. Dr. Ramón J. Velásquez always told me: You can express your opinions but do not get
into trouble because your mother is not well, and my father was ill -
he died soon after that- and Ruth was abroad. But without even realizing it, I
got into trouble, one of those crazy things you do when you're young, but it
was an awful experience.
Were you in jail?
You were
questioned by Pedro Estrada?! (The feared, bloodthirsty Chief of National
Security)
Yes,
and when I saw the interrogation would be with Estrada, I told myself: Nothing
is going to happen.
Why?
I
don't know why I had that feeling. I knew that they had been watching the house
for a long time, I felt that something happened with the phone, that some guys
were following me. It was horrible, really horrible, and the night before, I
could not sleep. It was terrible. And Estrada told me: Why does a pretty girl from a Jewish family
mix with these people from the Democratic Action. These are thieves, they have
no care for you, how can you get involved in this? And I had a book from a
friend of mine, from the Sardio magazine group where I started writing, Adriano
González León, which was
called Las Hoguerasmásaltas (The Biggest Bonfires), and with that name and the
cover, which was somewhat orange, you might be led to believe it was a
Communist book. So he told me: What do
you think about Adriano, the writer? And I said: Well, who is going to talk
about the freeways? And I'm planning to be a writer. What do you think Mr.
Estrada? And the dialog went on like this.
And they let you
go?
They
let me go.
And they never
bothered you again?
They
used to annoy me a lot on the phone, especially at night. But fortunately they
arrested me in July 1957 and they fell in January 1958.
Weren't you
terrified after that?
I was
terrified, yes, but only for some time. I did not go out much, and I did not
sit for all subjects that year. I had received those letters because it was
hard to say no, because the situation in the country was difficult and because
when you're young you don't consider the consequences, you don't make
calculations because you think you have all the time in the world.
And now, when
you look at this regime, do you make calculations?
The
thing is that I have experienced it in a different way.
How do you feel
about this reality?
In
this reality, what I have had to deal with is my sister's illness.
And what about
the political situation?
Look… There's not much I can tell you. When they
gave me the National Award, I did have the honor that two of the members of the
jury were Eugenio Montejo, one of our greatest poets, and Salvador
Garmendia, one of our
greatest prose writers, who both died soon after that, so it is a very
significant National Award for me. But look, about that… I would prefer that
people read what I write.
“What a strange
day that deprives me of the city bridges when the
trees of spring have not yet woken the sky!”
trees of spring have not yet woken the sky!”
El vasto
silencio de Manhattan,
Elisa Lerner, 1963-64
Caracas, May 13,
2012
Translation
by ©Luciana Valente
All
extracts are taken from the book:
