Only then, in 2043, will our love have reached its own thirty-two years. When I’m sixty-two, Alejandra will be fifty-two.
Just yesterday while I stared at Alejandra watching TV, I started to hum in my head, to ask her in silence: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?” To come across this text precisely today, July 31st of 2012, the day I turn thirty-one, is enough to make you think of the matter with some method: to sit down and think by writing. Although the text was published in the magazine Casa de las Américas in the month of August 1968, Dalton makes a reference to a night in another August, in 1965, when he met Régis Debray in the apartment Oswaldo Barreto was assigned in Prague. “And suddenly I saw the greying soul of thirty-one years almost caressing the scarf of its retreat in Prague and I felt in some way complicit with a form of being a certain age that couldn’t be mine consciously.”ĭalton speaks of old age, of that unrepeatable instant when a man sees with no distortion his own senescence, the slow acceleration towards death. It belongs to an essay titled “The Night I Met Régis” and it goes:
(Photo taken from the blog Tribulaciones y Asteriscos.)
The Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton and the Venezuelan writer Elizabeth Burgos in Havana in 1970.
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