Galego | English

Non fiction

Respirar polo idioma (Os galegos e Julio Cortázar)

By Francisco X. Fernández Naval

About this book

Julio Cortázar (Brussels 1914- Paris 1984), had a close relationship to Galicians, in particular those who lived in exile in the years after the Civil War and who chose Buenos Aires as the place to live. This contact was maintained over time and it was enriched and enlarged during his years in Paris and was further established when Cortázar married Aurora Bernárdez, the daughter of Galician immigrants and a crucial person in the life of the author. This relationship with Galicians in exile was so intense that we can reconstruct and understand the biography of the writer through it in the years before he moved to France.

Book fragment

“Workers who dreamt of an eccentric life but who did not find anything close to that twinkle of their dream in reality” is the description of Galician immigrants in Buenos Aires (125) by Luís Seoane. There we have the taxi drivers with the little shoe of a grandchild hanging from the rearview mirror, the carpenter who turns on the radio to distract himself while he works, the shop owner who saves banknotes ridiculed by Quino in his famous Mafalda strips, the owners of cafeterias who name them after their little village hanging a prominent sign over the door, the tram driver Lacroze, who stands with patience the disdain of his “compadritos”. All of them helped build not just Buenos Aires but America.

All of them are not the same, each has her or his own personality and maybe they do not all show that trace of character that Leopoldo Marechal used to attribute to Galicians, watching the ironer of Adán Buenosayres. “She is Galician, a lyrical race” (126). Some may have been lyrical and others otherwise, there may have been good people and others who were not, maybe they were all more or less honest workers, trustworthy, fighting daily with the curse of their race, the jokes and sentences that tried to represent a whole group with disdain.