A diplomatic reception in Malabo, the Equatoguinean capital, in which the author of the text participated, serves as a justification to talk about the writer’s work, his relationships with power and the importance of writing. To do this, he holds on to the arm of one of Cristina Rivera Garza’s reference works, There was a lot of fog or smoke or I don’t know what, in which he follows the figure of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo.
The spell of flattery has been with me since I attended for the first time a diplomatic commemoration organized on the occasion of Columbus Day in Malabo, capital of Equatorial Guinea. She debuted as a woman in heels – for protocol reasons – and as a writer without territory or profession, because in just one year, throughout 2016, she had published two novels of accentuated obscenity. Nobody would bet a penny on me, I thought then, until later I came face to face with the precarious and questioned work life of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, documented by the writer and academic Cristina Rivera Garza in the book There was a lot of fog or smoke or I don’t know what. (2017).
Juan Rulfo (Apulco, 1917), Rivera Garza highlights, is supported by the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in 1983, the National Prize for Literature of Mexico in 1970, and a diversified artistic career in creative writing, film, photography, television, as well as at least a dozen books, being Pedro Paramo his most controversial and international work. The Mexican is also supported by the scrutiny of his group of readers, focused on the dubious honesty of “who he worked for” and “where he worked”: sometimes he did it for institutions that violated the human rights of indigenous peoples or that repressed groups of organized workers in the demand for their rights. This reading is recorded in There was a lot of fog or smoke or I don’t know what.a work published on the occasion of the author’s centenary, and which in turn describes a Juan Rulfo who “did work” in any profession and in a Mexico governed by the dictatorship of capitalism.
There was a lot of fog or smoke or I don’t know what. bears the mark of Rivera Garza, an author with a sword in hand against literary production that omits the crossing of literary genres or their confrontation. The Mexican, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in the Biography/Memoirs category for her outstanding work Liliana’s invincible summer, and who confesses that she has been a reader of Juan Rulfo since she was a child, presents him to us with a serene countenance and flattering speech. He presents him to us defeated, like the literary panorama of his time. He presents it to us as circulating like a chameleon between one profession and another, some of which have a questioned reputation. He presents him to us as willing to earn a living while continuing to write about his country in different artistic formats.
In There was a lot of fog or smoke or I don’t know what, Rivera Garza does not offer the readership a chronology of Juan Rulfo looking for a job or running through the streets of Mexico so as not to be late for an interview. It does not show him in heels, attending a diplomatic commemoration organized on the occasion of Hispanic Heritage Day in Malabo, capital of Equatorial Guinea. In the Spanish-speaking African country I would have discovered, as I did, that not only us can be asked what we live for, what we work for and who we do it for. You can also be smarmy with politicians, asking “Hey, besides being a minister, what do you really work for?” “Who do you work for?” and “Where do you work?” I learned to do it, to speak for several minutes repeating the same thing, because the world of diplomacy belongs to politicians, the world of job offers too, as well as the world that limits job offers to those who practice a profession that makes them uncomfortable, such as writing.
There was a lot of fog or smoke or I don’t know what.by Rivera Garza, dialogues with a Juan Rulfo who traveled to all corners of Mexico mapping misery and progress. Talk to a responsible parent. Dialogue with a writer who included female characters and queer in a still provincial Mexico. I imagine the Mexican in a job interview. Maybe writing a novel about the close writer, but without breaking out in high heels like I did after writing two books with pronounced obscene content and being left without territory or profession, but literary flattery. From then on I began to respond without stuttering to the question: “Madam writer, what do you do?” Juan Rulfo responded with “I just work…”.
