José Cueli: Words become swords

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Remember the fable already mentioned in previous articles about Don Quixote de la Mancha on the road to Zaragoza, defying whatever came.

What arrived was a herd of brave bulls. One of the lancers began to shout at Don Quixote: "Step aside, you devilish man, the bulls will tear you to pieces!" To which he replied: "Come on, scoundrel, no brave bulls are worth anything to me, not even the ones Jarama breeds on its banks!" Don Quixote had no time to turn aside, and the herd of brave bulls passed by Don Quixote, even though he stamped his feet in the air. With great joy, he went to take the reins of Dorotea's mule and, having stopped it, he knelt down, begging her to give him her hands to kiss and that he would receive her as his queen and lady. To then move on to bullfighting the bull with horns like windmills, mirrors of good bullfighting that provoked cheers and applause, while females with scarlet combs dreamed of Don Quixote, of death in every blade of the windmill and a thought in every drop of blood, agitated and tormented by abandonment. Yes, Don Quixote, sprawling, limp, bullfighting on the cement with natural passes between the horns of the wind.

In the same word, in his autobiography Les Voix , Jean-Paul Sartre recounts, as a teenager, his grandfather taking his writings to a newspaper, the writer's vision of receiving criticism and threats from readers that made him exclaim: There comes a moment in a writer's life when words become swords! In other words, writing is acting.

It's no coincidence that Michel Leiris was a friend of Georges Bataille, whose extensive erotic work includes The Story of the Eye, which narrates the death of the bullfighter Manuel Granero in Madrid's bullring in 1922, in a particularly erotic setting, and which was remarkably translated into Spanish by our colleague Margo Glantz. He was also an inseparable friend of Picasso and shared his boundless love of bullfighting. Three masterful drawings of fighting bulls conclude this article.

How it ends, no matter what threats are thrown at him, the writer has no choice: to continue, to insist, and to impose his fate at the price of death.