JOSÉ PULIDO in the book INTERVIEWS (2025) by Viviana Marcela Iriart “I'm like a castaway clinging to his tongue”

 

José Pulido. Photo: Vasco Szinetar

José Pulido was part of one of the most beautiful and beloved traditions in Caracas: Sunday, buying the papers, having breakfast at the bakery, going up the Ávila, enjoying the blue butterflies and the singing of Quebrada Quintero, spreading the papers among the stones and then… José Pulido and his interview completed the happiness of the day. It did not matter who he interviewed, because the real pleasure was reading him. And my friends would go: what does Pulido say? Have you read what Pulido said? Pulido is so wonderful! Pulido was the main character. Then came the person being interviewed. Because reading José Pulido is good for you. It gives you joy. It makes you think. Because José Pulido writes with humor, tenderness, compassion, intelligence, love. José Pulido the poet, the writer, the journalist. The interviewer who created a new style. The kind, simple and tender man who creates bridges for people to meet, to cross, to discover the other side of their side.

 

José Pulido, who does not deserve to be exiled like he is today, walking around Genoa while he goes around Caracas.

 

And José Pulido is also Carlos Giménez, who he and I love so much, and that beautiful article he wrote: Carlitos sin olvido (Carlitos without oblivion). And he is that marvelous interview he just made to another wonderful and beloved figure from Caracas: Rolando Peña.  An interview that is like a story written with four hands.  An interview that is like a love letter.

 

And José Pulido is this poem of his, which I find while I'm writing this and then I'm out of words.

 

 

THE OLD SONG

 

Before antiquity arrived

the birds that died

turned into carnelian and tourmaline

John claimed in the Book of Revelation that the face of god was made of jasper and carnelian

birds probably made one of their best graveyards in that face

 

All mountains have been built out of birds' ancestors

 

From a yellow, blue and green bird

who dies when put in a cage and sings in beautiful fury

the mountain of Caracas was born creating ripples of water and branches

 

the Ávila of stones and roots, spit with Pleiades

is our most concrete mountain

 

I wish I could sweep its pathways with a broom of dreams

clean them up of all miseries

 

It is so big it could only fit into the universe once

when the heavens dilated

so that mangos could bloom

 

hummingbirds in the Ávila seem as if they were invented by Borges:

they fly backwards because they care more about the beginning than the end

 

the Ávila is huge but it is not so hard to carry in a bag

it is completely portable when carried as a feeling

especially if you have looked at its mermaid-like curves,

its crests resembling a resting animal

Or if you have ever heard the waters talk in Quebrada Quintero

about how to go down to the Caribbean Sea without having to ask for

directions in the valley

 

In the afternoon the mountain opens its eye made of sun

An eye that falls asleep on the voracious head of dry trees

at night it crouches with its breath of burning plants

ready to jump again on the fearful valley with its rabbit heart

this is the mountain that feeds on looks

that on the beach side is the Ávila of Reverón

deranged by light

and on the Caracas side is the Ávila of Cabré

borrowing the iridescence of the sparkling hummingbird

and all Pleiades sneeze with love when molasses grass stirs,

the delicious herb

and at the top and the bottom it is the Ávila of everyone and no one

a mountain that is like the Virgin of Coromoto and the Virgin of the Valley

like La Chinita and the Divina Pastora

because you do not have to know its pathways

to believe it represents our customs

 

The mountain was a bedroom for clouds a million years ago

and it still is.

The mountain was there making guacharacas

before anyone even thought of building the wall

that we would call town;

this ancient air is what comforts me.

The Ávila is a bird with apple mint in its wings,

it is the pain of fires kept within a case made of roots.

The Ávila is like saying amen when you pray for Caracas.

 

 

 

José Pulido, Salamanca, España.

 

 Carlos Giménez, Barbarito Diez, María Teresa Castillo,
Pablo Milanés,Miguel Henrique Otero, José Pulido...
"Macondo", María Teresas`s house

José, how has coronavirus treated you? What did you do during the quarantine?

 

I don't think coronavirus has treated anyone well. Fortunately I haven't got it because I'm always shut in writing and I only go out to walk up to the nearest mountain. I visit populated areas when I have to read poetry somewhere.

 

What was the first thing you did when the quarantine was lifted?

 

For me, it hasn't been lifted. I go out to walk but I wear a mask. Here you are fined if you don't wear it in the street. I haven't had any plans for when we get to the end of this. Beer tastes as good at home as it does in the bar.

 

Are you writing anything? What?

 

Poetry. I do some interviews for amusement. Poetry is my constant passion.

 

What are your plans for the mid-term?

 

Not dying yet to see what things have changed.

 

(...)

Excerpt from the book INTERVIEWS by Viviana Marcela Iriart, graphic design by Jairo Carthy, sold on Amazon

On sale on AMAZON

CARLOS GIMÉNEZ, founder of the Caracas International Theater Festival, in the book INTERVIEWS (2025) by Viviana Marcela Iriart: “Our country is the empire of consummated facts, of de facto culture” /

 

Carlos Giménez (born in Córdoba, Argentina, on April 13, 1946, Aries) is the founder and director of the Caracas International Theater Festival, together with María Teresa Castillo, one of the major drivers of culture in Venezuela, who has not hesitated to support him since 1971, when the first festival was held, and who then hired him as Art Director for the Caracas Athenaeum, an institution she has helped create and of which she is the president. Carlos is also the founder and director of the Rajatabla Group, with which he has traveled around the world, winning hundreds of awards, and which put Venezuelan theater at the center of the global theatrical stage.

 

Working as a director since he was a teen, in 1965 he participated in the First Nancy Theater Festival with his group El Juglar. He was 19 years old and he achieved something impossible at the time: without any previous performances in Buenos Aires, he gained international exposure directly from Córdoba to Europe. After that, they traveled to Poland, where the group shared the Honorable Mention with East Germany in Warsaw and received the First Prize in Krakow. Back in Argentina he faced the indifference of the capital's theatrical world towards his achievements in Europe. In response, Carlos created in Córdoba the First National Theater Festival, but was excluded from its organization in 1967, when political repression was starting in his country. This event decided him to abandon his home country.

 

This interview took place in the context of the Pirandello Festival, which is held in every auditorium and every space within the Caracas Athenaeum, and which he is in charge of organizing. According to Carlos Giménez, the “main idea for organizing the Festival comes from the need to connect theater as a social event within the community it is inserted in”—in this case, the significant Italian immigrant population—, to involve private business in cultural activities, to take culture to all social classes, all aspects in which Venezuelan theater has stayed a bit on the sidelines. With this purpose, the Caracas Athenaeum plans to organize annual festivals about other important figures in world theater. 

 

If you had to create a minimal autobiography, what aspects of your life would you choose?

 

My arrival to Venezuela in November 1969. Because this defines a lot, not only professional aspects in my life, but also personal aspects, that is, what I was going to do with my life and my career.

Then, as this event divided my life in two, going back to my experiences in Argentina, one of the most important moments was my high school graduation in 1964 and my departure to Europe. There I discovered a world that was completely unknown to me and I was dazzled by it, which meant, at least for me, that I was not going to stay locked within the parameters set by the city or the country I was born in. I realized there was a mismatch between what I wanted and what my environment, my habitat, gave me.

During that time, I met Jack Lang, who is the director of the World Theater Festival in Nancy, and now Minister of Culture in France, so that was how in 1964 I came into contact with international festivals, which was going to be really important, because Jack Lang invited us to participate in 1965 in the First World Festival in Nancy. This invitation also extended to the group of people who at that time were in Europe without having constituted the El Juglar group yet - the creation of which is another important moment in my life, even though El Juglar never had neither the influence nor the impact that Rajatabla has had in Latin America. This participation was extremely important if we consider that this group that went to the Nancy World Festival and to festivals in Warsaw and Krakow, Poland, in 1965, was a provincial theatrical group that had not left Córdoba to go to Buenos Aires, but to participate in these really important events.

Moreover, 1965 was the year when all the movements which would have a huge impact in the theatrical world started all at the same time, like Nancy, Grotowski, Eugenio Barba, Jack Lang, Els Joglars from Barcelona and La Comuna from Portugal. In Poland, we presented a play which won one of the awards of the International Theatre Institute (ITI-UNESCO), called “El Otro Judas” (The Other Judas) from Abelardo Castillo, one of the most eminent Argentine intellectuals from that time and director of “El Escarabajo de Oro”. With this play that I directed we won the Honorable Mention together with East Germany in Warsaw and, in Krakow, we received the First Prize.

 

How important was your success in Europe for your career?

 

It was crucial. That moment and then the cold reception we had in Argentina when we presented the same play decided me to leave my country.

 

And did you come directly to Venezuela?

 

No, I started in 1968 with what would be another fundamental event in my life: a tour by land from Córdoba to Caracas, which took us 3 months. We went to the main mining centers in Bolivia, where we presented our shows. I vividly remember the experience we had in Chorolque, a peak that is 5,000 meters above sea level and has the highest tin mine in the world. There, since there was no electricity, we performed using the miners' lights - that is, surrounded by 40 miners who provided us light with their helmets while we performed a children's play. This tour meant a terrifying discovery of Latin America, not just skin-deep. We came into contact with utter poverty in Latin America. We also performed in fishing centers in Peru, we did a wonderful tour around Peru, we performed in Colombia and in 1968 we arrived at the Manizales Festival. In this festival, we presented a play called “La Querida Familia” (The Dear Family), a baroque anthology by Ionesco, and the jury formed by Ernesto Sábato, Pablo Neruda, Jack Lang, Miguel Ángel Asturias, awarded us the prize. However, we still couldn't get to Venezuela - we only managed to do that after participating in the Second Manizales Theater Festival in 1969, where we met Omar Arrieche, Director of the Barquisimeto Educational Experimental Theater, who got us a visa to enter by land.

(...)

Excerpt from the book INTERVIEWS

Caracas, Intermedio Magazine, May 1984

INTERVIEWS, with graphic design by Jairo Carthy, is available on  AMAZON in paperback and ebook versions.

 

INTERVIEWS, the new book by Viviana Marcela Iriart in Amazon (may 2025)

 

Julio Cortázar, writer: "A day in my life is always a beautiful thing, because I am very happy to be alive"

Esther Dita Kohn de Cohen, founder of the Anna Frank Space: (in the Holocaust, the family) "there were more or less about 500 people; we don't know exactly how many were killed, that was terrible”

Julio Emilio Moliné, co-director “Joan​ Baez in Latin America: There but for fortune” (clandestine documentary, 1981): “Joan received death threats, and was banned, persecuted…”

Elisa Lerner, writer: “Solitude is the writer's homeland”

Susy Dembo, visual artist: "Engraving is alchemical, it is magical"

Nava Semel, writer:  And the Rat​ Laughed with Jane Fonda

José Pulido, poet: “I'm like a castaway clinging to his tongue”

Rolando Peña, visual artist: "We baptized the group in a bathtub, and the godfather was Andy Warhol"

Carlos Giménez, theater director: “Our country is the empire of consummated facts, of de facto culture”

Beatriz Iriart, poet: “By when I was 10, I was an old woman already. Writing poetry was a way of transmuting that pain”

Dinapiera Di Donato, poet: "Imagination creates versions of life, but I cannot understand life without a version."

María Lamadrid, founder of "África Vive": “We are the first disappeared people in Argentina”

Mariana Rondón, filmmaker: "During my childhood, I thought cinema was only​ one movie: Yellow Submarine"

Roland Streuli, photographer: “My life is color, I am not an opaque or black and white person”

Viviana Marcela Iriart (1958) is an Argentine-Venezuelan writer and interviewer. She studied journalism for a year in La Plata, Argentina, but for being a pacifist, she was exiled by the Argentine dictatorship in 1979. Venezuela granted her asylum, and four months later, at the age of 21, she wrote her first professional report... on Julio Cortázar, an interview included in this book.

She has published novels, plays, and three books on Carlos Giménez: ¡Bravo Carlos Giménez!, Carlos Giménez el genio irreverente, and María Teresa Castillo-Carlos Giménez-Caracas International Theater Festival 1973-1992.

She is the founder of the publishing house Escritoras Unidas & Cía. Editoras and the cultural blog of the same name.

INTERVIEWS, with graphic design by Jairo Carthy, is available on  AMAZON in paperback and ebook versions: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F8RDDP2X

 

Julio Cortázar: handwritten letter, Paris, 11/30/1979

 

"Paris, 11/30/79

Dear Viviana,

Thank you for sending me a copy of Semana. 

The interview you did to me came out really well given the chaotic circumstances we had to deal with. You really took into account some of the things I told you and I hope readers feel the dual authenticity of you work and my words.

Thank you again. Kind regards from your friend,

Julio Cortázar"

Letter to Viviana Marcela Iriart

Translation:  ©Luciana Valente

"JULIO CORTÁZAR: LETTERS 1977-1984": letter to Viviana Marcela Iriart. The story behind the letter / Viviana Marcela Iriart, April 22, 2013, photographs by Eduardo Gamondés, translation by Luciana Valente

  "Paris, 11/30/79

Dear Viviana,

Thank you for sending me a copy of Semana. 

The interview you did to me came out really well given the chaotic circumstances we had to deal with. You really took into account some of the things I told you and I hope readers feel the dual authenticity of you work and my words.

Thank you again. Kind regards from your friend,

Julio Cortázar"

Julio Cortázar not only was kind enough to agree to an interview in Caracas in late September 1979, when I was a 21-year-old unknown exiled freelancer, writing for free for Semana - a dying magazine - but he was also extremely generous for sending me a letter to thank me for the interview once it had been published, saying beautiful words that only a wonderful person like him could write and that, of course, I did not deserve.

 

Cortázar was in Caracas to participate in the First International Conference on Exile and Latin American Solidarity in the 70s (October 21-29), which opened in Caracas and then continued in Mérida, bringing together the greatest writers of the time: Mario Benedetti, Eduardo Galeano, Antonio Skarmeta, Ernesto Cardenal…

 

I signed the interview using a pseudonym (the name was chosen by the editor in chief) because Cortázar was one of the most famous and combative opponents of the Argentine dictatorship; my mother and my sisters were living in Argentina and I feared they could suffer retaliation. Cortázar, with his characteristic humanity, understood my fears when I explained the situation.

 

When we met at the Anauco Hilton Hotel lobby, we did not kiss in the cheek, in Argentine style, but shook hands instead, in Venezuelan style, because that was the first thing I had learned after ending up hovering in mid-air several times with the person I was trying to kiss staring back at me in surprise. Cortázar, who had been in Venezuela several times, seemed to know about this custom quite well.

 

He did not ask why I had been forced to live in exile and I did not tell him about it. I admired him too much to waste time talking about myself. I only wanted to hear his thoughts. He was with Carol Dunlop, who looked charming with her big tender eyes full of amazement like a little girl, and Cortázar was very patient when I attacked intellectuals who urged people to fight but hid behind their books when bombs started falling. Of course, he was not like that, but I had met so many who were during my last months in Argentina, while trying to run away, that intellectuals disgusted me. Cortázar, who seemed to intuitively know I was bleeding out in exile, responded to my attacks with patience and great gentleness. 

 

He looked very young and handsome (and he was 65 years old), but he seemed to be a very sad man - although at some points in the interview I say he smiled like a child - he seemed very worried and physically exhausted. 

 

 

 

When the interview finished and we were both standing, saying goodbye, when I saw that he was starting to walk and that he would be out of my life forever, I somehow plucked up the courage - even though I was extremely shy - to stop him and say:

 

                                - Cortázar, could I ask you a favor?

                                - Of course! —he answered kindly.

                                -  Can I give you a kiss?

 

Cortázar burst out laughing with surprise and joy, and for the first time I saw his eyes sparkle happily. Carol, by his side, smiled at me with a knowing look in her big eyes.

 

- Sure! —he answered with a wonderful smile and leaned so that I could reach his cheek.

 

A kiss, an interview, a letter. Who could ask for more? Cortázar was my best gift in exile (together with Joan Báez, but that is another story).

What Cortázar did not know - and had no reason to know and actually never knew - was that I had been forced to live in exile for being a pacifist and the editor of a small, underground culture magazine, Machu-Picchu, where I had expressed my opposition to the war with Chile in September 1978. The result was persecution, secrecy, asylum at the Embassy of Venezuela in Buenos Aires and exile - in that order. And lacking any political militancy, I was very naive to think using a pseudonym was enough to hide from the dictatorship.

 

Because Alberto Boixadós, an Argentine writer who supported the dictatorship and whose book “Arte y Subversión” (Art and Subversion) includes a chapter dedicated to attacking Cortázar called “Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa. ¿Son francotiradores o constituyen ejército regular?” (Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa. Are they free agents or part of the regular army?), can be read - even today! - in the Argentine neo-Nazi blog calledWeltanschauungNS: 

Blog cover

 

Alberto Boixadós published the book “La Revolución y el arte moderno” (The Revolution and Modern Art) in 1981 and, continuing his attacks on Cortázar, he says:

“Revolutionary passion leads him to distort the truth reaching the absurd.

In an interview to Cortázar performed by Viviana López Osornio for Semana magazine #581, November 1979, in a corner of the Anauco Hilton Hotel on the occasion of the first International Conference on Exile and Latin American Solidarity in the 70s, he answers: ‘For me what is and has been traumatic is a phenomenon which not everyone considers and which, in the case of an exiled artist, is fundamental. It's what I would call the cultural exile (…)”

 

Sources: Universidad Católica de Córdoba (Argentina), Google Books

   

This demonstrates two things.

 

First, how much Cortázar’s words bothered the Argentine dictatorship and its followers, because “Semana” was a bankrupt magazine (it closed a few months later) and therefore had very few readers and very little influence on Venezuelan political life, and because the interview had been performed by an absolutely unknown and insignificant person in 1979. 

 

However in 1981, when the book came out, I was an active opponent of the dictatorship through my pro bono work at Amnesty International and the “Coordinator for Human Rights in Argentina” (created by part of the Argentine exiles in Venezuela); I had stopped using the pseudonym in 1979 and had become a small public figure - just as insignificant, but for the dictatorship any flea could mean the risk of getting a huge bump.

 

Second, that there were traitors among Argentine exiles in Caracas, because only the people around me knew that that interview to Cortázar had been performed by me and it had never been republished with my name. (Besides, in 1980 I adopted my mother's surname, Iriart, and I have been known by that name since then.) Who were those traitors? 

 

Living in exile, among other things, was always like walking down a mined road - you never knew when you could explode into pieces, because the dictatorship never stopped persecuting us. Or if the helping hand that was extended to you was actually the one that was trying to kill you.

 

In the interview, Cortázar says sorrowfully: “Because here I can tell you this, but no one will listen to me in Argentina, nobody will read it. You can publish it, but unless someone takes it there by carrying it in their pocket, no one will be able to read it there.” I thought the same thing. How wrong we were! We had forgotten about traitors, handing our heads on a plate for money, envy, ambition, perversion or mere hatred. 

 

Cortázar was not invited to Alfonsín's investiture when democracy returned to Argentina in December 1983. And if anyone deserved to be invited for how he had fought and for all he had given and all he had stopped doing for himself and sacrificed for Argentine democracy, it was him. 

 

Cortázar was also betrayed by democracy.

 

And I only hope that traitors have been punished, either by justice or by life, and if they have not, so be it: they will always be a piece of shit under a military boot or a democratic shoe.

 

Cortázar is still one of the greatest writers of all times, in the whole world. One of the most loved human beings. And I live in peace. 

 

And now that the letter he sent me in 1979 has become part of the book “Julio Cortázar: Cartas 1977-1984” (Julio Cortázar: 1977-1984 Letters), which contains 5 volumes with almost all the letters Cortázar wrote in his life, I can only say once again: Thank you, Cortázar, for letting me be part of your life.

 

 

©VivianaMarcela Iriart

April 22, 2013

© Photographs by Eduardo Gamondés 

Translation:  ©Luciana Valente