Amado Nervo’s “La amada inmóvil. Versos a una muerta” (The Immobile Beloved. Verses to a Dead Woman) stands as a profound elegy born from the crucible of intense personal sorrow. This work is prefaced by a deeply moving and intellectually rich commentary by Nervo himself, offering invaluable insight into the genesis of the poems and the author’s state of mind following the death of his beloved companion, Ana Cecilia Luisa Daillez. Edited by Rocío Oviedo Pérez de Tudela, this edition highlights the extensive intertextuality woven into Nervo’s reflections, revealing his engagement with contemporary cultural journalism, occultism, and philosophical thought on death and the afterlife, alongside classical and religious references.
Oviedo Pérez de Tudela notes that Nervo’s varied epigraphs, drawn from over eighty authorities ranging from Victor Hugo, Meister Eckhart, and Paul Verlaine to Mexican and Spanish poets, and particularly figures like Maeterlinck and W. T. Stead, underscore the erudite context Nervo wished to provide for his grief. These citations, often bolder in their exploration of themes like occultism, soul transmigration, and even skepticism than Nervo’s own verses, trace a trajectory from initial desperation to eventual, albeit anguished, acceptance. Nervo’s use of these sources is characteristic of Modernism, not merely imitating the past but recreating it, sometimes through selective quoting or unconventional translations. The “Immobile Beloved,” initially weighed down by the rigidity of death, eventually transforms, in the concluding poems, into something as ethereal and diffuse as a celestial light.
I
I thought Serenidad (Serenity) would be my last book of verses, and I told a friend as much. This statement sealed my fate, for life dislikes having its paths dictated, and the arcane mocks human intentions. Thus, I have returned to composing poems. A new pain, the most formidable of my life, dictated them, and sob by sob, tear by tear, they finally formed the obsidian necklace of these rhymes, which chronologically follow those in Serenidad.
Serenity! I thought that in the maturity of life I would reach that high plateau from which we dominate events, see the caravan of earthly trivialities and miseries pass, and smile piously “at the Circus of Civilizations.” I thought that if until then my life had been turbulent and restless, the deep desire to be serene and the persistence in expressing it would finally make me truly serene, allowing me at last to acquire the most precious gift I have longed for in the turbulence and bitterness of my days: Equanimity.
I delighted in the old simile of the mountain: above, snow, the unchanging, boundless sky; below, clouds, storms, cyclones, raging torrents, uprooted trees…
Poor superman! The hand of God struck me down, and in an instant the Himalayan soul, sheltered by the blue, was nothing more than a poor, bloody, convulsed, and sobbing rag.
I had one affection, just one, the adornment of my solitude, the relief of my melancholy, the flower of my modest inheritance, the dignity of my retreat, the sweet and holy lamp of my darkness, and in a few days, before my terrified eyes, before my astonished love, she departed from my life, leaving me so stunned by reality that I need to clutch my head between my feverish hands and press it as if in a vise to convince myself that what I know, what I think, what is happening to me is true; that this is not a macabre sleight of hand, a dreadful disappearance, and that everything I loved has truly vanished and turned into a ghost.
II
Pages written in the last days of January and first days of February 1912.
It will soon be one month, just one month, and yet, in those thirty days, in those thirty flashes, I have wept more tears than there are visible stars in the night.
It will soon be one month, and in those thirty flashes I have accumulated such a quantity of pain that it seems to me all my past sorrows and all my possible future sorrows converged to invade and fill my spirit, so that not a single space remained unfilled by anguish.
It will soon be one month since, at a quarter past twelve in the afternoon, Ana Cecilia Luisa Dailliez softly passed away. She was an exceptional woman for her grace, her kindness, and the extraordinary persistence of her tenderness, whom I met in Paris on a night when my soul was very lonely and sad, the night of August 31, 1901, and with whom I lived from then on in the most cordial and noble companionship until January 7, 1912, when she died in my arms.
This death has been the most painful amputation of myself. An invisible axe struck me through the middle of my heart. The two halves of my entrails remained there trembling, amidst gushes of blood. Then one of them was snatched away by the omnipotent arm of death, and the other, the other, miserable, kept beating, beating… The tremendous harshness of the blow could not extinguish the rhythm of life… It kept beating, yes, the sad, mutilated entrail; it kept beating among the dark clots, and it beats still.
Ana’s illness lasted twenty-one days; twenty-one days were needed for the conviction that she was going to die to be hammered into my consciousness. This conviction was so disproportionate to my strength that even today, despite all the evidence, I sometimes rebel against it, and then my solitude is joined by the most impotent of despairs.
On Sunday, December 17, the sweet and adorable companion of my life returned home already wounded by the terrible typhoid bacillus. On Monday she began to feel unwell; on Thursday, the 21st, she took to her bed definitively and began her Calvary until January 3rd, when, having lost lucidity, she peacefully sank, gently reclining on the soft cushion of unconsciousness, into the unfathomable bosom of death.
I watched over her every night, with the exception of a few moments of indispensable but restless rest, which perhaps did not add up to ten hours over the twenty-one days. My days were spent in the darkness of the bedroom, by the side of the bed, watching her breathing, straining my eyes to see hers, barely closed or open in the shadows. This perennial and agonizing vigil was only interrupted by an unspeakable torment: that of having to go late in the afternoon to my duties, to inevitably dispatch the multiple affairs of my responsibility.
As our immense affection was sanctioned by no law; as no priest had mechanically recited a few Latin phrases uniting our hands; as no civil judge had droned out a few articles of the Code, we had no right to love each other in the light of day, and we had loved each other in the twilight of an age and an intimacy such that almost no one in the world knew our secret. Apparently, I lived alone, and very rare must have been the friend whose perspicacity guessed, upon visiting me, that there, just two steps away, beat for me, for me alone, the noblest, most selfless, and most affectionate heart on earth.
Few times, very few, did we go out together, avoiding the feverish arteries of the metropolises, where my relative popularity could prepare surprises for me. Instead, on certain trips we made ample amends, and, arm in arm, with our hands entwined in a tenderness that had much of the fraternal, we indulged in that delightful flânerie of Paris, London, Brussels, searching for the graceful bibelot, pausing before the dazzling shop windows, seeking refuge in the intimate and perfumed corners of restaurants, where gourmets of good stock, like ourselves, compensated for so many acridities of life…
But such persistent secrecy was also my persistent torture, and during my Ana’s illness this torture reached its maximum. At three in the afternoon, at three-thirty at the latest, I had to leave my idolized patient and depart. Those were days of incessant work. I had innumerable diverse matters in hand. Furthermore, visitors arrived at all hours. And while the love of my loves writhed, fever-stricken, in her bed, I, three kilometers from my home, was doing sums, multiplications, and divisions, writing notes, smiling at various visitors, answering consultations of all kinds, and inventing a new lie every day to escape invitations, to mislead the curiosity of intimates lying in wait, to escape their torturing company, and to run, fly through the busy crowd, through the tangle of streetcars and automobiles, to my room, climb the stairs with deathly anxiety, knock directly so that the abrupt sound of the bell would not alarm my suffering idol, and ask in a trembling voice whoever opened the door:
“How is she? How is she?”
If one is to believe that our existence is an expiation of past errors, God knows I expiated many faults of other lives, or of this my poor, incoherent, and mediocre life, in which there hasn’t even been a great sin, because its magnitude did not rhyme with my soul, still a type of intermediate evolution.
Finally, one day it was no longer possible to feign, and, despite my little patient hinting to me: “Don’t tell him anything, mon mignon… What for!”, I let my naive secret of so many years fall into the hands of my “immediate superior” (we diplomats, alas!, are nothing but hierarchical animals), so as to have the right to escape the Chancellery as soon as the essentials were finished, and to be an hour earlier at the bedside of the soul of my soul, who was dying on me!
III
One night when her suffering was very intense, and when, abandoned, it seemed, by God and men, I sobbed at the edge of the bed while she writhed in anguish, I said to her, taking advantage of the brief truce in her relief: “My dear, listen to me: you must have the will to live. Make a powerful resolution. Say: ‘I want to live, I want to live!'” (Je veux vivre!). Perhaps I remembered the phrase of Lord Bacon of Verulam, quoted by Edgar Allan Poe: “Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death, save only through the weakness of his own will.”
My poor dear replied: “Oui, mon mignon, oui…” But all in vain! God had already made a sign to death, and the most loved being in my existence, the great affection of over ten years, was sinking, irrevocably sinking into eternity!
The prospect of her death had always awakened such panic in me that in these two decades, I, who despite everything have remained spiritualist; I, who, detached from religious formulas and recipes, have loved God and Christ in spirit and in truth, had almost no other prayer in my mind than this one, which had become a kind of ejaculation: “Lord, make me die before her!”
And I had repeated it with such fervor that I was sure I had been heard. Thus, my disorientation, as the seriousness intensified, was immense. More than three times these words of Jesus are read in the Gospel: “Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give you.” And when my perpetual plea issued from my heart, I took care to add: “I ask you, Lord, in the name of Christ, who told us: ‘Whatever you ask of the Father, etc.'”
In the last days, my prayer was becoming imperative. I believed I had the right to be heard! It was a matter of the promise of the purest, most luminous, and greatest being who had walked the earth. It was a matter of divine dignity. God could not fail to keep the word of the spirit who had loved Him most and approached Him closest through the ages: “Truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father, in my name, it will be given to you.”
And it was not so!
No one has prayed with more fervor than I, and perhaps no one, in ten years, has reminded the Cause of causes with such energy of the Son of Man’s promise.
On the last night of my Anita, my ejaculation and the demand of the promise within it were of a harsh, violent exasperation. I confronted the Unknown wildly and demanded that it honor Christ’s commitment.
One of the attending physicians, summoned violently around eight o’clock, had told me: C’est fini, and then: “But let’s fight the day of death. Let’s keep her alive artificially for eight or ten hours, to see if nature takes advantage of them, attempts a new effort, and saves her. Only,” he had added, “do not harbor hopes… They are so distant, so distant…”
I accepted; what else could I do! I knew, moreover, that the injections would not make her suffer, thanks to her blessed unconsciousness of three days.
And she was injected with camphorated oil, caffeine, I don’t know what! And she was given black coffee with cinnamon and clove essence, and she was galvanized in such a way that, having been expected to die at nine in the evening, judging by her prostration, she died the next day, at a quarter past twelve in the afternoon. And during those hours, when each injection was followed by a momentary resurrection, like those in Poe’s horrible tale, I, atrociously tossed between despair and hope, ceaselessly cried out from soul to soul, from my miserable and meager one to the eternal soul of God:
“Lord, I beg you in the name of Christ, who told us: ‘Truly, truly, whatever you ask of the Father, in my name, it will be given to you.'”
IV
Three or four days before falling ill, my beloved had a presentiment, rare for her character. “This afternoon,” she told me, “on returning home, it suddenly occurred to me that I should point something out to you. If I die, in the third drawer of my dresser, in a circular box, is the key to my secrétaire, in which my papers are. I don’t know why this occurred to me, and I thought: Look, what if I told Amado!”
I felt a wave of ice in my heart… but, not wanting to give substance to her idea, I replied: “I also remind you that in such-and-such furniture, in the drawer you know, is my will.” As usual, when I alluded to my death, she exclaimed excitedly: “For God’s sake, let’s not talk about this.”
And we said no more that day.
But, despite the wave of ice in my entrails, I thought I had nothing to fear, that the man who had perpetually prayed to be granted death before her could not die after. And the magical words, Jesus’ promise, invaded my soul with their comforting certainty:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father, in my name, it will be given to you.”
The uselessness of prayer? Yes, the uselessness of prayer! Oh! Souls who still believe, as my soul still believes: prayer is null and indicates a childish, even offensive, conception of the eternal principle that governs us.
For what? Will that infinitely lucid, foresightful, logical intelligence, for which there is no limitation of space and time, which we diminish by merely giving it a name; that immeasurable being who has ordered, for purposes known only to Him, all universes, will He twist His designs because a poor troubled spirit of a son, husband, or father asks Him to twist them?
The heart is born with a determined potentiality to beat, and it will not give one more beat than the millions that constitute its vital yield, even if you pour out all your tears and utter all your prayers.
What happens must happen, and it is well that it happens thus. God’s designs are revealed in inevitable facts, and everything inevitable is good. “A fact as universal as death must be a great benefit,” said Schiller. The only possible prayer, therefore, is the one Jesus taught us from the mountain, on a mysterious afternoon centuries ago: “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven!”
Yes, the petition is useless; but prayer is not. The human soul must rise to a serene and constant contemplation of the Arcane. The life par excellence is that of the man whose daily activities are employed in good and whose superior mind, a spiritual peak, is in perfect contact with the invisible. We must pray, yes, to reunite with the Uncreated; but it is necessary not to ask for favors of the kind that Jesus told us would be given as an added bonus.
It is necessary to pray, yes, because, however remote we suppose the creative intelligence to be, it is intelligence, it is soul of the same essence as ours, and the impulse and thought of one soul will always reach another soul. There is no distance across which two souls cannot build a bridge. Let us build it through contemplation between us and God; but let us never ask for anything. Our destiny is as inflexible as the hand that carries us across the abyss.
V
Our destiny is inflexible, yes, and its inflexibility is the sign par excellence of its divinity. A crooked, polygonal destiny, twisting at every turn due to our prayers, would be unworthy of our reverence and deserving of our contempt. God cannot have pity, because this would imply a regression in the uncreated will, something like a rectification, like a repentance.
My logic conceives all this… and yet, night after night, my soul filled with agitated anguish, with immeasurable despair that gnaws at my bones, I ask God to restore my Ana to me.
In what form can He restore her to me? Over two thousand years have passed since Jesus told Lazarus, “Come out,” and exclaimed of Jairus’s daughter, “She is not dead, but sleeping.”
There are only two forms of restitution: either she comes to me spiritually, or I go to her by the great path, by the royal road of death. Regarding the first way, hundreds of thousands of men claim to converse with the dead, to penetrate the astral plane where they live, to see them and follow them in their evolutions.
According to them, the dead surround us. They are not absent, but invisible, as Hugo said… But we, unless we have developed that sixth sense of subconscious vision, of evidence, cannot see them… Perhaps, as Maeterlinck says, “they continue to live around us; but they do not succeed, despite their efforts, in making themselves recognized or in giving us an idea of their presence, because we do not have the necessary organ to perceive them…” Only the dead can see the dead…
According to William T. Stead, among the dead there is as much skepticism about the possibility of communicating with the living as there is among the living about the possibility of communicating with the dead. Both sides understand that a sea of mystery stretches between them…
Only, the hundreds of thousands of men I spoke of earlier claim to have crossed that sea in a magical ship called clairvoyance, astral vision, and with enigmatic helmsmen called mediums or adepts. Stead himself exclaims: “I have seen, and therefore I believe. I have seen my son materialize before my eyes…” And the eminent Leadbeater, based on personal experiments, assures us that death does not exist.
Now then; I have been denied all clairvoyance until today. What hundreds of thousands of men claim to have seen, I have never seen. And yet, although I am small among the small, although I constitute a type of average evolution, it must be difficult to find in the world a man who has knocked on the steel door of mystery with more ferocity, that stands imposing on the mountain, in the middle of the night. The knocker echoes in the darkness, with terrifying sounds: but no one answers me!
All the longings of my life have flown towards the arcane. I may have been vicious, mediocre, bad…; but in my spirit there has always been a fluttering, an anxious throbbing towards the Unknown. I have always believed in God, not in the anthropomorphic God of religions, but in the incomprehensible cause of causes, and certainly for that faith, which if it has suffered eclipses, because I am but a man, they have been momentary eclipses, I would perhaps deserve that now, when I have lost the only good I had in life, the inner pupil that we all have in germ would open and finally! look at the beyond, the borderland of the English, the super-physical plane where my dead one lives, my adored dead one, a life more ample than mine, who perhaps flutters around me, with the anguish that I perceive neither her words of consolation nor her divine, impalpable kisses!
“Strange spectacle,” says “Julia” in her Letters, “From your side, souls filled with anguish for the dead; from ours, souls filled with sadness because they cannot communicate with those they love… What could we do to unite these sad people, overwhelmed with sorrow?”
On a certain occasion she told me: “Last night I dreamt that I was dead and you were crying inconsolably near my corpse. But I continued living, I was by your side and told you: ‘Don’t cry! Here I am. Look at me…’ Only, you did not look at me and kept crying.”
Could this, my God, be the marvelous present reality? Was her dream true? Is she by my side and I do not see her, because my inner pupil inexorably refuses to open?
My dead one, my dead one, must I then have no other vehicle to communicate with you than my own body, which convulsively twitches with my sobs? Come, see with my eyes the infinitely bleak solitude of my life! Taste with my mouth the saltiness of my tears. Do good with my poor hands that clench or tremble in the darkness. Walk with my feet, in pursuit of all misfortunes, to succor them; be moved with my heart by all human sorrows; make my life a continuation of yours… My spirit will not hinder you from infusing yours into my brain. Are you not perhaps more me than myself? Thus shall we realize the dream of two souls in one body! Swedenborg, in his treatise on the Delights of Angelic Wisdom concerning Conjugial Love, says: “And behold, in that instant a chariot appeared descending from the highest or third heaven; in that chariot one angel was seen; but as it approached, it was seen that they were two…”
But let us speak of the second way for her to be restored to me, which is to go and find her, by the royal road of death.
When she lay in her black coffin, surrounded by candles, covered with flowers, displaying that prodigious smile of serenity with which some dead people smile, I experienced, and I have experienced it since with great vehemence, the desire to kill myself, which the Portuguese call with such accuracy “a vontade da morrer” (the will to die)…
Remy de Gourmont, in his delightfully skeptical book, A Night in the Luxembourg, impiously puts into the mouth of Christ this defense of suicide: “Suicide is a monster we should accustom ourselves to look at calmly. Compared to certain physical ills, certain pains, certain misfortunes, it would soon show itself as a very ugly but very cordial friend. Does it not deserve the sweetest names? Is it not the consoler? Is it not manumission?”
Within me, someone also defended the annihilating act in similar terms; but… I was afraid! afraid that, as so many readings claim, my voluntary destruction would forever separate me from the adored object, in pursuit of whom I precisely wanted to go.
Several times I caressed the “cacha” (grip) of my browning, a veritable toy, made in Belgium, which could automatically fire six armored bullets into my temple, like so many keys to open the doors to the au-delà (beyond)… But I was frightened, not by the vulgar apprehension of death, but by the horror of an even more terrible absence, inflicted as punishment, beside which this flash, this illusion, this phantasmagoria of life, behind which Ana awaits me, perhaps, with her invisible, loving arms wide open, means nothing!
“Unhappy one!” exclaimed Théophile Gautier’s Spirite, pressing Guido, who was about to commit suicide, against her phantom heart. “Do not do that! Do not kill yourself to unite with me! Your death thus provoked would separate us without hope, and would open abysses between us that millions of years would not suffice to cross! Come back to yourself! Bear life, which, however long it may be, lasts no longer than the fall of a grain of sand… To bear time, think of eternity, in which we can love each other forever.”
And this is how inveterate spiritualist ideas, which anchored in my soul since childhood, deepened by so many readings, have prevented my death; thanks to them… I can neither live nor die!
VI
The torment, however, of this mutilation, of this brutal surgery of death, does not consist for me, precisely, in the separation, in the atrocious pain it brings; it consists, above all, in an irremovable, inescapable idea that weighs on my heart and presses on my soul mercilessly: the idea that life, in whose arms we are nothing but miserable blades of grass, must necessarily recover its power and must necessarily bring me oblivion. This idea is so intolerable to me that it makes me wish fervently, passionately for death. In condolence letters, in the comforting words of friends, this horrible idea, daughter of the millennia-old experience of men, is found at every turn: “You will resign yourself. You will forget. You will calm down. It is inevitable. No one escapes that Lethe… No one! No one!” Pain follows the same rhythmic laws as movement, and like a pendulum whose oscillation decreases in amplitude, the excitement of anguish subsides and changes into a kind of apathy, as metaphysics teach.
And my entrails bleed when I hear and read them, and I experience ineffable anguish, because I too know that, irrevocably, I have to be consoled; that not even I, a mediocre, mesocratic, petty soul, can aspire to the privilege of weeping, as long as I live, for my dead one… unless I live little! This fatality of consolation is more odious to me than the fatality of torture, because pain ennobles (La douleur c’est la noblesse unique) and consolation, joy, are villainous. In the invisible arms of that giant who seems somber and is luminous: pain, I have felt a little dignified. Since my Ana fell crushed by fever, I have grown. My moral stature has gained a few centimeters. And must I shrink again? Must I smile again and utter sonorous phrases in the trivial assemblies of men? Must bureaucratic tasks absorb me again? Must I put on and take off my tails to bow and distribute smiles in mundane salons? And the curb I have placed on my desire, on the irresistible impulse of life, must it break? And must I seek the female? – I who had at my side the almost perfect woman, full of amiable dignity and graceful haughtiness; the solicitous woman, who enveloped me, penetrated me, saturated me with her tenderness!…
Oh, may those whose delicate souls have passed through the bitterness of these thoughts have pity on my plight. Fate tells us: “Poor creature; you are not even given the chance to suffer perpetually; you are not even capable of weeping a whole life! To suffer always requires chosen souls! Yours is not of their temper. I want you to live, even if you do not want it. That is my affair. What do your ideologies matter to me! Are you not flesh? Well then, eat, laugh, seek the pleasurable female… and weep sometimes, yes, but for other things. That these things will be less noble than what now penetrates and dominates you? And what is that to me! It is not human to dwell in spiritual excellences like those you dream of… You must descend, you must descend to the lower layers to which your spiritual density drags you.
Ah, I dreamed that my Ana would accompany me to old age. I thought that, in an indefinite future, one of us (probably me) would leave first, but saying to the other: “Look, I must take the train at this station for the common destination, for the serene city, where we are going… You will continue a little longer, alone, until the next station, and there you will take the train in turn, and we will meet in the city soon. I await you there!”
But for her to leave thus, in the prime of youth, and leave me at forty-one, alone, at a station, perhaps very far from where I must undertake the definitive journey…
Unless… Yes; unless the mercy of God finally shines upon my head, and Destiny makes another sign to death…
Oh, friend, who will perhaps read these rambling, disconnected, and sad pages! May it be that, upon reading them, you already know that my wish was fulfilled!
May it be that, filled with generous sympathy for me, you exclaim: Death was not inexorable with him! From the station where he was left alone to the one where he was to take the train for the Serene City, the distance was short. But he did not know it! His beloved did, and that is why she smiled in her coffin with that smile that brought peace!
God did not want that in my life, resulting from a mediocre Karma, there should be great nobleness. Not even the little good I attempted has been given to me to achieve. But who tells me that, before the humility of my plea, the shadow will not have ears? Who tells me that the supreme and undeserved concession I crave will not gladden my bones? Who tells me, in short, that I shall not depart, still young, in search of my soulmate, before she ascends to planes where the spiritual air, rarefied for me, will not allow me to breathe?
Among the verses of Serenidad there are some that say:
Do not stray from my side,
die you when I die.
Let me carry you, for I brought you!
You were a noble
travel companion.
Let our destinies rhyme
for all the paths
we must tread
in the immensity of the arcane,
and let us go through death hand in hand,
as we went through life: fearless!These verses pleased her immensely. She repeated the last ones several times, and the metal of her accent still vibrates in my ears when she insisted on the end: fearless!
I am but the string plucked by unknown hands.
I do not compose my verses: I merely write them!
I am the hand that traces the lines. The spirit blows where it wishes. Ego sum vox clamantis in deserto. (I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.)
Then… there is hope: that I have been right!
Oh, God, in whom I believe and whom I love above all things: grant me this supreme happiness of dying now! On the other shore there is a loving hand, extended, waiting for mine for the divine journey! Do not delay the union of the two! Give my verses the prestige of a prophecy made by the angels.
And let us go through death hand in hand,
as we went through life: fearless!And if, as theologians affirm, death is but a periodic incident in an endless existence, hand in hand we will go through successive lives: hand in hand through lives and through deaths.
VII
But if, reader, on the contrary, upon reading these notes you know that I exist, pity me. I am growing old in some metropolis, caught in the gears of daily life; perhaps I have formed ties… I have duties, perhaps tedious; and meanwhile, my poor disappeared one sinks, sinks into the abysses of the infinite: she navigates alone through the black oceans of becoming, she moves away, from one heaven to another, towards shores so remote that our mind wearies merely of thinking of them.
Les morts font de longs voyages (The dead travel long journeys)…
Pity me, because God did not want to hear me, and I did not merit from His mercy that serene dignity of death. I shall fall, but later, profaned by the drool of the world, overwhelmed by trivial efforts of those demanded hour by hour by the struggle for existence.
Perhaps – oh, supreme shame! – like the convict who ends up loving his stinking straw bed and the damp gloom of his cell, I shall have ended up selfishly loving life, and coughing and limping, I shall cling, nevertheless, to the horror and vulgarity of my days.
Oh! I certainly deserve this twilight… but now I do not want to foresee it! Illusion, nurse of souls, do not abandon me! Let me believe that I am loved by the gods, and that in the fullness of my manhood I shall yield my spirit and fly freely beside the soul that awaits me beyond the gates!
Every night, upon feeling the soft invasion of sleep, I say to myself: “Perhaps I shall not wake up.” And I take pleasure in crossing my hands over my chest, in that definitive attitude of rest… which I so crave! And in the mornings the dawn that creeps in, with its unbearable blue tint, through the cracks, produces unfathomable despair in me. This is the most terrible hour of the twenty-four, which daily pierce my heart like two dozen daggers. The anguish of living creeps up to my throat, and produces invincible nausea in me.
Outside, the winter, of exceptional harshness, shakes the trees, the wind howls, the rain lashes the window panes; low, bulging clouds, of a coppery lead, pass by tormented and tragic.
And I, summoning my reserves of will, painfully make the prior effort to live, and with the resigned gesture of the sick person who agrees to take the nauseating potion, I begin to swallow the turbid contents of the cup of existence.
But I do not blaspheme: I accept. The inevitable is the only certainty we have of God’s will.
“Everyone and everything adores me,” says the Eternal in a dialogue by Renan, “through the resignation they show in bearing life for purposes known only to me.”
And nothing, not even the frightful mutilation I have suffered, can tear from me my faith in Christ. He has broken my heart in two, but in the bleeding and trembling half that remains, there is still enough love to bless Jesus!
VIII
On the marble of her dresser, her hat remains, just as she placed it the last day she went out upon returning home. Her furs and her black blouse, hanging from the hanger where her hands placed them with that meticulousness that was characteristic of her and that made her the ménagère par excellence, still have her scent of a clean woman, her scent that I breathed for over ten years. The other items of her clothing hang limp in the closet. Everywhere her traces meet me. The empty bed seems immense to me:
Half the bed will be empty for me,
and half of my soul will be missing.Frequently I place a chair at the edge of the bed, next to the spot where she expired, and in the gloom of the bedroom I evoke an entire life: the night in Paris when I met her, August 31, 1901. I was looking for a girl from the Latin Quarter, with whom I allowed myself to kill time, which back then, following great setbacks, held nothing but boredom for me. The girl did not show up for the appointment and, instead, the mysterious hand that weaves destinies placed Ana and me face to face. She was walking with a sister and, as I learned later, had gone out that night driven by a boredom as great as mine. She also had sorrows, and her sister, solicitous, distressed to see her weeping in the corner of her room, insisted that she go out: “Si tu restes,” she told her, “tu deviendras folle” (If you stay, you will go mad). She allowed herself to be persuaded… The arcane was about to cast her into my arms.
A minute more or less, and we would not have met. But it was written.
Our sympathy was immediate; but despite it, the naive and fearful little soul resisted surrendering. Life had been harsh with her and she was afraid.
“I am not a woman for one day,” she said energetically, but smiling.
“Then for how long?” I asked, half-jokingly, half-anxiously.
“For life.”
“Very well!”
And when finally (after delicious days in which the persistence of love, though not achieving possession, already promised it serenely) she surrendered without reserve to the man she was beginning to know and esteem, we repeated: “For life!” And for life it was… from that blessed night of the summer of 1901, until this pale morning of the winter of 1912 when her dying hiccup echoed like a frightful sound in my heart.
More than ten years of a trusting love, full of abandon. More than ten years of that delicious and divine thing called affection, which summarizes all the cordialities, all the intimacies, all the certainties of life.
Paris, London, New York, Mexico, Brussels, Rome, Venice, Florence… Half the world saw us together. Where shall I go now that I do not encounter her phantom! In what place shall I not see her blessed trace! What landscape shall not reconstruct her for me!
Wherever my bleak destiny pushes me, I must open my arms to press her adored spectre against my heart, and I shall only embrace my anguish… my anguish and the braid of her brown hair, imbued with the sweat of her agony, which is the only material thing left to me of the unique companion of my life, she who loved me poor and sad, sick and forgotten; she who always generously offered me the cordiality of her arms, the certainty of her support, the lucidity of her instinct; to whom I owe the orientation of my existence and not having definitively fallen so many times into the pitfalls of the path.
Ah, Lord!, how not to believe in You, when we see all this dissolve into the incomprehensible blackness of death. An invincible instinct forces us to grasp with a clenched hand the promise of Jesus: “I am the resurrection and the life: he who believes in me, though he die, yet he shall live.” It is impossible that this instinct deceives us. Nature has not tormented our soul with thirst for immortality, only to turn us into inexplicable Tantaluses in a hypothetical infinite (natura nihil facit frustra – nature does nothing in vain). This love, this avidity for the absolute so contrary to material demands, this invincible attraction that the arcane exercises over our spirits, this immeasurable longing to persist, are a sure indication of eternity.
I believe in You, Lord; I believe that the living and the dead are, in the same sense, in Your arms. In You we live, and move, and have our being. Death, as I so often repeated to my beloved, is only an illusion. Death does not exist! I proclaim it with energy, despite my apparent solitude, despite my ineffable anguish! My poor soul is enclosed in this fortress of the body. It is a sad princess confined in an impenetrable tower, with five miserable little windows (the five senses) to guess the immense outer world. Sometimes it seems to hear something like the sound of a sea that, with rumors of tearing silk, beats against the feet of its fortress… Sometimes it believes it has seen winged beings pass by who majestically flap their snowy plumage; sometimes it hears harmonious murmurs of words, fragments of music… It will long to stand on tiptoe and see the horizons it senses… But the five windows are very high, very narrow!
My soul, the infinite prisoner, knows that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy; it knows that the beloved dead, who, upon the collapse of their castle of flesh, acquired the privilege of flight, struggle to approach her, solicit her, await her; but it also knows that the castle is impregnable for now, that the armor of flesh is invincible…, that only sometimes, when it sleeps, that periodic death of sleep opens the doors of the prison; but that upon waking it finds itself again captive and can only remember with an enigmatic vagueness its conversations with the other souls…
It knows all this, yes, and resigns itself to the law of God, who one day will piously crumble the painful architecture of its bones. Its indestructible conviction tells it that loves like the love it was given are more powerful than death, and filled with unction, it exclaims:
“Oh, death, where is your sting? Oh, grave, where is your victory?”
Furthermore, a pious reasoning argues thus to console it: “When you lived with her, each instant separated you, because it brought you closer to the dreaded day of her death; now that she is gone, each passing instant brings you closer, because it is an instant less in life and therefore of absence, because it shortens the time after which your soul, which will exhale from your colorless lips, and her soul, which awaits you on the shore, will wildly merge in a divine kiss of love!”
Thus, reader, you who perhaps expected to find in this book, as in the previous one, the atmosphere of Henri Martin’s celebrated painting called Sérénité, that atmosphere full of twilight radiance, of august tranquility, and that assembly of most noble beings, in a forest saturated with peace, you only find yourself with a new sob from the afflicted poet of the Místicas and the Jardines interiores.
Henri Martin's painting Sérénité (1899) at Musée d'Orsay, symbolizing the peace Amado Nervo sought but found replaced by resignation in La Amada Inmóvil.
Musée d’Orsay. Serenité, 1899
Serenity! Did I deserve it perhaps? It is the privilege of spirits incomparably higher than mine. My serenity in this book is called Resignation.
Forgive me, you who read me. I could have suppressed the intimacy of such a somber preface; but I felt I owed these pages to my Dead One. Here, where I write them, barely two months ago, I was still reading her my verses…
All that remains for me now is to say to my Ana what I thought when I kissed her forehead (so cold that even her hair was frozen) at the supreme moment when they were about to close her coffin:
Thank you, my idolized one, from the depths of my soul, for the ten years of love you gave me. May God bless you!
And you, reader, if you believe in Jesus’ promises and have reached these lines, pray for Ana Cecilia Luisa Dailliez, for whom I lovingly write this book. Pray for her and may God bless you too!
Amado Nervo
February 1912, Madrid
References:
Nervo, Amado. La amada inmóvil. Versos a una muerta. Edited by Rocío Oviedo Pérez de Tudela. Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. (Original source).
(Other cited authors mentioned in the text include Virgil, Maeterlinck, Lacordaire, Meleager, Saadi, Leon Denis, Paul Verlaine, G. Leroux, Lao-Tse, Hebbel, Malherbe, W. James, W. T. Stead, Leadbeater, “Julia” (Letters), Swedenborg, Remy de Gourmont, Théophile Gautier, Renan, Henri Martin).