SOURCE: "Reader's Guide to Paradiso," in Review, No. 29, May-August, 1981, pp. 47-54.

The Beginnings

José Lezama Lima, the outstanding writer to appear in Cuba in this century, began his career as a founder of literary magazines. Verbum, Espuela de Plata (Silver Spur), Nadie Parecía (No One Appeared), and Orígenes (Origins) form a chain of magazines that rescued Cuba from aesthetic mediocrity and attracted the best Cuban talent of the period—in literature, art, and music—while at the same time introducing the public to the most significant innovations occurring in the arts and letters of the rest of the continent and Europe. Orígenes, which enjoyed the greatest prestige and the longest life, gave its name to the two generations of Cuban authors who gathered around Lezama's editorial ventures. These magazines also carried his first works. Verbum published Lezama's first poem, "Muerte de Narcisco" ("Death of Narcissus"), which already manifests one of the poet's great obsessions, the Fall. Veiled in precious and enigmatic expressions, the perfect and spiritual man of the poem's first lines loses his homogeneity and acquires a body. Fall and materialization lead to time, sex, sickness and death, provoking a devastating anguish only consoled in artistic creation.

This theme and its accompanying anguish persist in Enemigo rumor (Hostile Murmurs), Lezama's first poetry collection, which introduces his other two basic themes: resurrection and the felix culpa or fortunate sin, the two experiences that reconcile the poet with the world and its horrors and lead him to see the unity of the opposites good and evil, light and shadow, fall and resurrection. Artistic creation, which had been a consolation, now becomes a way to salvation as well.

In Aventuras sigilosas (Quiet Adventures), his second volume of poetry, Lezama presents a kind of poetic autobiography, almost a novel, with a plot, personification of abstract principles, conflict, confessions, dialogue, and action. This poetic cycle prefigures Paradiso. The fictionalization undergone by the metaphors of Aventuras sigilosas suggested to Lezama his two novels about the apprenticeship of the poet—Paradiso and Oppiano Licario the first dealing with the family and life experiences that lead the poet to poetry, and the second, with the poet's learning of his craft.

The last prose poem of Aventuras sigilosas initiates a new project for Lezama, the search for a "poetic system" that claims to explain the universe through poetry and such poetic elements as the image and the metaphor. This system is developed most completely in the essays of Analecta del reloj (Clock Analect), Tratados en la Habana (Havana Treatises), and La cantidad hechizada (The Enchanted Quantity). For its part, La expresión americana (American Expression) proposes an interesting theory of artistic expression in Latin America, praising the baroque as the most authentic and original style for the continent, triumphant over other styles and even over the European baroque. In two other collections, La fijeza (Fixity) and Dador (Giver), appear some of Lezama's best poems, such as "Arco invisible de Viñales" ("The Invisible Arch of Viñales") and "Para llegar a Montego Bay" ("The Approach to Montego Bay"), whose hermeticism is matched by the brilliance and abundance of their metaphors. In his posthumous book, Fragmentos a su imán (Magnet Fragments), Lezama returns to the simplicity and anguish of the poetry which he left behind with Enemigo rumor.

The Paschal Lamb

Paradiso is, as we said before, an apprenticeship novel. Here we can find the family, life, and expressive circumstances that surround the child and form the poet. The innocent family stories recounted in the first half of the novel conceal a symbolic foundation beneath their relative simplicity, while the symbolism is much more obvious in the complexity of the second half.

José Cemí, gasping with asthma, his small body covered with a rash, is the first image we see. Subjected to a brutal cure and a cabalistic exorcism by Baldovina and two other servants, he awakes the next day completely restored. The two illnesses set the future poet apart from infancy. His asthma indicates a subtle sensibility, a breathing that seeks wider spaces, as if struggling to keep time with a far-away rhythm that only the poet can perceive, the rhythm of the universe. This struggle will translate into an ever-greater opening out of his life, first from the family circle to the world, in his school and university years, and then, when he becomes a poet, to the stars. The rhythm imposed by asthma will mark his poetry as well. From his first article, Lezama used skin as an emblem for poetic sensibility. On several occasions thereafter, he said that "the forces of attraction between men and things do not take hold between one pore and another, but between the pores and the stars." Hence, the delicate yet tough skin of the child prefigures communion with the stars. The spell cast by the three servants, an allegory of the trinity, confirms the transcendental meaning of the illness, which can only be cured by a sacred rite. The greatest significance of asthma lies, however, in the death and rebirth of the child in each attack, a process that forces on him the poetic rhythm par excellence: for Lezama, poetry is "the image of a resurrection that man can achieve."

Food, as corporeal and spiritual nourishment, also possesses a significance that transcends the trivial plot. Culinary conflict conceals a struggle between the forces of tradition, represented by Rialta and doña Augusta, Cemí's mother and grandmother, and the forces of innovation, headed by the cook, Juan Izquierdo. Colonel Cemí, arbitrator of the conflict, solves it by appealing to the memory of José's Basque grandfather, in the moment in which the old man took symbolic possession of his new homeland, until then obstinately rejected. The drama unfolds under a poinciana tree:

Beneath those intermingled reds and greens a lamb was sleeping. The perfection of his sleep extended throughout the valley, led by the spirit of the lake. Sleep made me stumble and trip, obliging me to look around to find a resting place. Motionless, the lamb seemed to be dreaming the tree. I lay on his stomach, which moved as if creating a rhythm favorable to the waves of the dream. I slept the whole day long.

When I got back, the family was searching for me, trying to follow my tracks, but all marks had been wiped out.

The lamb-symbol is obviously derived from Christianity, and the dream indicates a time different from human time, a time of origins, that belongs to the divine order. The Colonel, inspired by his Father, rehires Juan Izquierdo. Thus, the child is able to learn from the strictness and perfectionism of his grandmother, the creative innovation of the cook, and his father's flexibility in taking the best from each.

The grandfather episode serves as one of the corner-stones of the novel, for it takes place at the axis mundi, a sacred place where an overlapping of levels makes communication possible between earth, heaven, and hell. In the first part of Paradiso, the axis mundi takes the form of José Cemí's family tree, where the terrestrial element—the strong trunk—is represented in the Basque grandfather, the celestial element in the mother and the infernal element in Uncle Alberto.

American Expression

In the second chapter, Cemí learns the lessons of the language of the people and explores the by-ways of "American expression." The "slum rooming-house" episode satirizes the literary world of Havana, setting it on a carnival stage across which parades a long line of picturesque characters. The piece of chalk symbolizes Cemí's poetic destiny: the child's arrival causes the scandal and disturbance that Lezama's own arrival must have caused in the Cuban literary scene, and the accusation made against him: "Here he is, the fellow who deprived us of a clock" alludes to the atemporal, hermetic, religious quality of his writing.

As part of "American expression," Lezama allegorizes the baroque, "America's first master," split into the figures of Tránquilo and Luba. While the former cleans a cut-glass lamp at the top of a stairway, the latter, teetering on a bench, scrubs vigorously at a mirror whose frame is decorated with tropical vegetation. The two reflect the vertical and horizontal movements which, according to Orozco, work together to balance the baroque: the ascending line or yearning for infinity which kindled the Counter Reformation, and the horizontal path, the curiosity about humanity and nature, dating from the Renaissance. Nevertheless, this is a European balance; in America it breaks down, to be reorganized and replaced by a new unity. As the author of La expresión americana puts it: "First, there is a tension in the baroque; secondly, a Plutonism, an originating fire that breaks the fragments apart and reunites them." The tension emerges between Luba's aggressivity and Tránquilo's elusiveness; the Plutonism, in the resulting disorder and damage, expressed with Lezama's usual stylistic brilliance:

Suddenly the unstable balance between Tránquilo's cautious ascent and Luba's fierce and jolly horizontal expansion was lost. The lamp fell, shattering on the top of the ladder, and simultaneously the animals and plants in the mirror frame, liberated from the bombardment of paper and alcohol, recovered their lost natural aspect and primal temperament.

The strange alloy that results is broken by Captain Viole's satirical tirade, in which he reproaches Tránquilo for his magical powers and his unorthodox method of taming horses. Tránquilo symbolizes the poet, as he spends his days on horseback drinking in the sun and his nights absorbing dew:

His nocturnal porous opening up caused distance and starriness to reach into his marrow, giving him a secret and silent security.

Tránquilo works as a horse-breaker because, for Lezama, the "winged horse" is the emblem of poetry, tamed by an unlikely method that ends "with a soft copulative violence."

In contrast to Tránquilo's absorbent pores, the skin of Doctor Copek, who forms part of the staff sent with Colonel Cemí to Jamaica, rejects the sun and prevents it from penetrating to his bones. This rejection leads to a tragicomic episode in which the Doctor is possessed by a roguish divinity who lodges in his left armpit, from where he can be expelled only with a magic rite. Lezama has been accused of racial prejudice for introducing black culture in this way; but the main thrust of the satire here is directed against Doctor Copek's extremely white skin. If black odors are seen as a capricious demon, the excessive whiteness of the Doctor's skin, his inability to absorb the sun's rays, betray a lack of sensibility. Here there is neither white nor black racism, but rather allegoric necessity.

Indian expression—in the Colonel's trip to Mexico—is chthonian, subterranean, and diabolic; here the devil of the Christian tradition forms an alliance with the lords of Xibalbá, from the Popul Vuh, sacred book of the Maya. In a society of hidden, unshared pleasures, a Mexican diplomat keeps an enormous diamond in his watchcase; Taxco dancers conceal their faces behind masks assigned to each one from birth; and a blind man in Cuernavaca, who repeats "for the love of God" incessantly, whether or not anyone is passing by, seems "to be sitting there measuring the time of another eternity by a different standard." In this episode, the forces of light, personified by the Colonel, and those of darkness, symbolized by the Mexicans and Vivo (one of the Taxco dancers) lock into an allegorical struggle. Out of this conflict comes the above-mentioned Plutonism—"that breaks the fragments apart and reunites them"—forming the Mexican baroque, which attained such brilliance.

Family History

Chapters III and VII are dedicated to family history. This is the part that recalls Proust most strongly. Lezama has often been compared to Proust, not withstanding the fact that Proust recounts events which he has witnessed, while Lezama acts rather as listener to family stories, most of which took place before his birth, in order to retransmit the stories charged with symbolism to his readers.

While Proust tries to recapture a time once lived, with its accompanying sensations, and to fix it forever in his book, Lezama seeks to give his family's history, whether or not he witnessed it, a transcendent meaning. If, in doing this, he manages to write a magnificent chronicle of Cuban life at the turn of the century, so much the better.

During the War of Independence, Lezama's mother's family emigrated to Jacksonville, Florida. To this period belongs the vivid image of the child Rialta clinging to the topmost branches of a tree, reaching for an inaccessible nut. Second branch of the family-tree, Rialta puts it into communication with the sky. Rialta is a bridge to the divine:

[she] stretched out along the branches that creaked loudest, to reach the aged shells filled with double concave foreheads, muzzling each other softly…. Suddenly the light began to pour in around her, safeguarding her once more in her secure earthly landing.

But the word used by Lezama, here translated as "landing," is neither "atterizaje" nor "caída," but "levitación"—"levitation"—the opposite of "descent." If the reader does not understand the role played by the little girl in the tree, the word "levitation" makes no sense nor will the other unlikely events which occur in this novel, which depends on symbolic meaning rather than verisimilitude.

The conversation between doña Augusta and Mr. Squabs, which follows, deals with willpower and illuminates one of the pillars of Lezama's poetic system—"oblique experience." The concept is based on the mysteries of the will as illustrated by this verse from Matthew's Gospel: "I reap where I sowed not, and I gather where I have not strewed." "Oblique experience" results when will is added to chance. Lezama has compared it to the act of a man who "flicks the light switch in his apartment and starts a waterfall in Ontario." Through connections that link things with no apparent relation, man can influence the supra-terrestrial world. But the gods are wilful: instead of lighting up our room, they may send us a waterfall, but in Ontario. Thus when dona Augusta asks Flery to describe the mouth of a canon on the evidence of his slippers, the girl replies without hesitation: "Small and very red." A poetic answer is thus extracted from a silly girl:

"Perhaps he wasn't like that," Augusta pondered, "but you can see now, Florita, how the act of giving those slippers produces miracles, so that your daughter can reconstruct his figure perhaps in the shape that the good canon wanted for the final appointment in the Valley of Jehoshaphat."

Lezama's verbal extravagance combined with his gift for observation deepens into metalanguage: this episode is riddled with comments on the magical power certain expressions have for the family. The verbal fertility overflows in the hermetic description of the orgies celebrated by Elpidio Michelena, the boss of Cemí's grandfather, Andrés Olaya. Out of the impenetrable obscurity emerges an impression of superabundant vitality, which is reflected, in its turn, by a superabundance of words. And behind the orgiastic vitality is the pathos of the death of Andresito, the first in a long chain of deaths in the novel: tragic and grotesque deaths, quiet and catastrophic deaths, expected and unexpected deaths, deaths that redeem and others that condemn; each different from the others and all part of the same death that leads to rebirth in light or darkness but always in accordance with the same fruitful mechanism.

The family history of Cemí's father parallels that of the country in its counterpoint between the Basque husband and the Creole wife, echoing the counterpoint of sugar and tobacco. This fragment reads like a poetic commentary on Fernando Ortiz' famous book, in which tobacco becomes the badge of the Indian and sugar-cane that of the Spanish conquistador:

When your father packed us up and took us to the Central, he never imagined that he was ruining our whole family. We were used to the gentle labors of Vuelta Abajo, tobacco and honey. We had that refinement of inlanders devoted to the cultivation of the finest leaves and to divining the exterior signs of the insects in relation to the seasons…. One day the whole Méndez troupe arrived at Resolución from Pinar del Río, and those scandalous, foul-smelling expanses of green, those fields of vulgar cane, an effusion of nature to us who were used to a more varied panorama, at first disturbed us, but finally we succumbed to its overwhelming extent. Underneath it all lay the submission of my whole family to your father's brutal decision.

The response to doña Augusta's words about will-power can be found in the improbable dining-hall scene in José Eugenio's and Alberto's boarding school. The Director cuts the bread and throws the pieces at the students from his table, thus forcing them to concentrate on their work while remaining alert to whatever an unpredictable chance or grace might send them. This awareness of "the sudden" forms another pillar in Lezama's poetic system, complementary to "oblique experience." The "sudden" is the instantaneous achievement of poetic knowledge, comparable to Christian revelation or the concept of grace, or to Romantic inspiration.

Although the first half of Paradiso corresponds to innocence, this closed world potentially harbors both good and evil, light and darkness. These possibilities unfold in Chapter V, divided between José Eugenio who represents light and uncle Alberto who represents darkness. The process begins in the school toilets where Alberto has been sent as a punishment, with a hermetic, dream-like scene in which the boy feels the attraction of Angra Mainyu, the force of evil and darkness, the Ahriman of Persian dualism. Alberto escapes from the school and spends the night out in a series of adventures that add up to an initiation into hell:

All around, those not under the infernal spell, those who rock their heads in the perfume of the blessed air, hear songs, the creaking of wheat carts. Only the furtive one, in the little hell of that neighborhood, hears the stony bell, the rotten clapper, the mosquitoes who scratch the stone to bite the archangelic horse of the blacksmith, its mouth full of fine sand.

These adventures include Alberto's sexual initiation by the girl with the cactus flower and his meeting with Oppiano Licario, the personification of poetry. The latter, however, is not named, for, although artistic creation results from the Fall and can be a way to salvation, Alberto's fate is already determined and there is no salvation for him.

The Birth of the Image

Chapter VI, which begins with the celebration of the wedding of José Cemí's parents and ends with the Colonel's death, is full of anecdotes about the protagonist's childhood. Although the Colonel is frequently described as joyful and surrounded by a halo of clarity, the figure which emerges is neither as attractive nor as sympathetic as that of the demonic Alberto. The father is a strong man who strives for perfection and has little patience with the weaknesses of others, especially with that of his children. His lessons, his healing methods, and even his jokes are harsh and counter-productive to the point of cruelty, as in the episodes of the boat, the bathtub, the swimming pool, Demetrio, and the running joke of death behind the door. The Colonel only succeeds in terrorizing his entire family, including himself.

The boat episode prefigures the separation of death, and, indirectly, the break-up of the family. Julio Ortega has said that "the father's finger seems to repeat the gesture of God the Father giving form to Adam." The motifs of the finger and water multiply in Cemi's nightmares, and the boy seeks salvation first through the fish of Christianity and, later, through his mother. In this way, he is able to reconcile his own helplessness, his terror at his father's jokes, his illness, and his mother's role as intercessor. The answer lies in poetry:

Then a broad fish swam up in ingenuous Christmas pinkness, moving its iridescent fins as if combing itself. The fish eyed the forsaken finger and laughed. Then it took the finger into its mouth and began to afford its protection. Towing him by the finger, it brought him to a patch of floating moss where the carefully calculated rhythm of his new breathing began. Then he no longer saw salvation in the fish, but instead his mother's face.

Here the pattern of "Muerte de Narciso" is repeated: separation, anguish, and salvation through poetry, the latter symbolized by "the carefully calculated rhythm of his new breathing." Another prophetic incident is the one of the grindstone and the student. The father shows the child two images, which the latter transposes; asked another day, "What is a student?", the boy answers with metaphors alluding to the grindstone, making his father marvel at "his son's rare gift of metaphor, his prophetic and symbolic way of understanding a profession." Prophetic and symbolic," Julio Ortega has commented:

because, for Cemí, as his destiny unfolds, the opposition between the two images turns out to be false: he integrates them through language, thus replacing his father's didactic finger with his own transposing one.

At his father's death, José Cemí discovers his poetic vocation. From that moment on, he lives in the presence of an absence, his eyes alert to every appearance of the "image"—as Lezama calls the ineffable mysteries—and his ears sharpened for any expression—in Lezama's system, any "metaphor"—that can capture this image and embody it in round, solid words.

Thus "Image" and "metaphor" join the other two pillars of the poetic system, "the sudden" and "oblique experience." The "image" is a thread from the hidden and the invisible made palpable in "the sudden"; the "metaphor" is material things breaking their specific limits through "oblique experience" and making contact with the absent and invisible in such a way as to allow the "image" to show forth. Cemí receives his initiation into the secrets of the "image" and the "metaphor" in stages. The first stage is the game of jacks, a ritual in which the Colonel's image appears to his family, called up by the children's intense concentration, the presence of Rialta—bridge to the supernatural—and the sacred power of the home. Rialta, the children, the jacks, the ball, and the pavement serve as metaphors which, in a series of changing combinations—squares, circles, vertical movements of the ball, horizontal hand gestures for sweeping up the jacks, and, no less important, the symbolism of the numbers—summon up the presence of the absent father:

Suddenly, in a flash, the cloud broke up to make way for a new vision. On the tiles imprisoned by the circle the full tunic of the Colonel appeared, a darkish yellow that grew lighter, the buttons on the four pockets brighter than copper. Above the still collar, the absent face, smiling from a distance, happy perhaps, partaking in some undecipherable contentment that could not be shared, while he watched his wife and children inside that circle that united them in space and time under his gaze.

The second stage comes with Cemí's initiation into poetic language, into "language made nature." It includes two key moments: Alberto's letter on fish and the chess game. A hallucinatory description of tropical fish abounding in sexual allusions and humor, the letter erases the symbolic meaning given to the fish by Christianity and replaces it with a sexual one. Acting as officiant, Alberto, the family demon, here presents the option of salvation through sin, deeply rooted in the symbolist tradition:

"'The north coast is protrusive, promontorial, phallic, the south coast is concave, like a woman's ass. Dry and damp, flute and horn, a grassless glans, a grassy vulva.'"

But the battle for salvation is not truly joined until later, in the chess game, through a brilliant outpouring of images. Lezama once described warriors as:

a group of men who, in victory or in defeat, achieve a unity in which the metaphor of their bond produces one total image.

It follows that the chess game is an image of the image achieved by warriors in battle, and, in Lezama, the image is always linked to resurrection. In this sequence, Alberto suggests the Orphic descent which will make the struggle for salvation possible.

The Fall

The dinner-table scene brings the family together only to disperse it afterwards. As a farewell to childhood and innocence, it is loaded with dark omens: the beet-juice stains on the table-cloth resemble blood stains, the conversation turns to vultures and leprosy, sexual insinuations abound. However, the general tone of the scene is happy, centered around the joy of eating together. Alberto's unexpected death comes only after a long series of ominous and symbolic events. Dr. Santurce announces doña Augusta's grave illness and probable death; the news crushes Alberto. Oppiano Licario tries to approach him, but fails, leaving him to his fate. Fate takes the form of a Mexican guitarist, emblem of death and the devil, who appears to challenge Alberto. The musician's first defeat is only temporary, for Alberto finds him death in the company of another guitarist during a car trip to Marianao. On the road the condemned man sees visions of glory arising from the counterpoint between the landscape and the guitar-player's songs:

Some blue flamboyants under the waxing moon built arches beneath which the carp of the first-born were to pass, homage of the nobility to the progeny of the sainthood, blue created to intensify the passage of a fish on a tray of hammered copper.

Soon the vision changes into one of "a little worm with malignant horns," then into "Satan's hosts," and finally into "the plants that need fire to reach man." Diabolic allusions multiply, until the last song declares Alberto's fate: to spend eternity in darkness and to burn in the fire of hell. Of course, the prediction is indirect, for Lezama believed that "only the difficult stimulates" and tended to be more oblique as the ideas he wished to express became more transcendent.

Alberto's turbulent death drags the young protagonist to his fall and introduces him to a world of sex tinted in the most vivid colors. The adventures of Laregas and Farraluque, two exemplars of virility, run the gamut from simple exhibitionism to homosexuality, covering a range of nuances that includes the ridiculous and culminates in a grotesque absolute with the episode of the charcoal warehouse, an image of hell.

The results of the Fall are the break-up of the family after the trip to Santa Clara; Cemí's awareness of time, identified with the line of the horizon and the fragmentation of self. In Santa Clara, Cemí makes friends with Fronesis, and, on returning to Havana, with Foción. The three friends represent three archetypes, the three parts of the human soul, according to the German mystics: Foción stands for instinct; Fronesis, as his name indicates, for reason; and Cemí, for the divine spark which still burns in man after the Fall.

The axis mundi, personified in Rialta, the Basque grandfather, and Uncle Alberto, in the descent toward the Fall, now—in the second half of Paradiso—centers on these three figures, Foción, Fronesis, and Cemí, who participate in the ascending movement that culminates in poetry.

The story of Godofredo the Devil is the most tragic and absurd episode in this infernal chapter, and also the only one to end in punishment, a terrible one: madness, the loss of an eye, and death. Curiously, it is also the only story in which sexual contact plays no part. The villains are desertion, alcoholism, intrigue, infidelity, and sadomasochism. Lezama's attitude is neither that of an ascetic nor of a libertine but rather that of a humanist who looks upon the sexual excesses of youth with an understanding smile and condemns only those who allow cruelty to prevail over natural bodily attraction.

Toward Poetry

According to a principle similar to that of the fruitfulness of death, any chaotic situation, whether revolution or orgy, can open the way for a new revelation; that is why the revolution in Chapter IX has a special significance. When Cemí reaches home after the riot, his mother, who has awaited him anxiously, tells him:

Don't reject danger and always try what is most difficult…. When a man throughout his days has tested what is most difficult, he knows that he has lived in danger, and even through the succession of its waves has been peaceful, he knows that a day has been assigned to him in which he will not see the fish inside the current, but the fish in the starry basket of eternity.

Son of a soldier and grandson of patriots, Cemí feels his ancestors urging him toward action. Yet his temperament, his tastes, and his experiences point him toward meditation and poetry. His mother's words force him to make a choice, to confirm his destiny as a poet. Suetonius' chapter on Nero warns Cemí against a vocation without talent, but his poetic ambitions are reaffirmed when he recognizes himself in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

Now Cemí faces another decisive crossroads, the question of sexual identity. It is posed in a scandalous episode that takes place in the university, in a long discussion about homosexuality, and in the two visions that frame the two incidents. In the debate, Fronesis maintains that homosexuality is an ancestral memory of the mythic age when man reproduced through dreams, without needing carnal union. Foción accuses him of justifying "something that can't be justified, because it's deeper than justification." Foción concludes that homosexuality is a "hypertely" of immortality, a yearning to create something beyond the flesh or even the spirit, something totally new and unknown. He cites several famous homosexuals in support of his belief that artistic works embody a mystery that no normal man can achieve. Fronesis' answer ends with a beautiful hymn to man and to the diversity of the senses:

His body, the carrier of all impulses, reopens in the diversity of the senses, but vice and repugnance reach him only when he picks up a shred of the breeze, and his experience turns to powder when he emphasizes a particular sense.

The discussion is cut short by the arrival of Lucía—a living example of "the diversity of the senses"—who comes to tempt Fronesis. He accepts the challenge more out of courtesy and the will to perform what he considers his duty to explore this diversity, than out of true pleasure. Cemí sees homosexuality as a trap set by the devil, creating "another fall within the fall." He concludes that sin lies in seeking out and persisting in vice, but vice is forgivable as long as it is treated as a stage to be overcome.

After the discussion, as he goes down the University steps, Cemí sees a cart with an enormous phallus and "facing it the vulva of an opulent woman" decorated with a large black bow. Two genies comically point the phallus toward its destination. The black bow links the fear of women to fear of death, two fears which, once overcome, lead to the creation of a new being in carnal union with a woman. This creation in turn becomes the emblem of literary creation and resurrection, the union of contraries, flesh and spirit, a true hypertely of immortality.

Fronesis, representing reason, avoids the pitfall of homosexuality in the episode with Lucía. He exorcises his fear of the vagina dentata by cutting two circles out of his undershirt—the circles of Ouroboros, symbol of immortality—and using them to cover Lucía's vulva. On his way home, he walks along the Malecón mourning the loss of his innocence, and throws the shirt into the sea:

Before sinking, the undershirt coiled itself like a snake on which someone has conferred immortality, while at the same time in the fatty concavities of the man's body the phallic serpent was appearing; it was necessary to create precisely in order to lose immortality. Thus man was mortal, but creator, and the phallic serpent became a fragment that had to rise again.

Here, unfortunately, the translation betrays us. Immortality, in the original, is not lost with creation but regained, since creation is a substitute for surviving in children or works. However, the allusion to resurrection is spelled out in the image of man stripped of his intemporal homogeneity, becoming "a fragment that had to rise again."

By using a collage technique, Lezama is able to intercut scenes from the encounter between Lucía and Fronesis with Fronesis' family history and Foción's adventure with the redhaired boy. Fronesis' mother is presented as a two-headed dragon: the fleshly mother, tangled in the chaos of her instincts, manipulating, unscrupulous; and the spiritual mother, kindly and serene. By contrast, Foción is the product of an uncertain paternity shrouded in a fog of drugs and madness, and a mother who represents pure materiality, hopeless chaos. Foción's encounter with the red-haired boy, in which the former sinks deeper into his desperate chaos, contrasts with Fronesis' struggle with and final defeat of his fears. Fronesis' sacrifice, implying an acceptance of the Fall, allows him to understand creation. This theme will grow in importance and lead to Cemí's discovery of poetry. That is why, in a conversation on Nietzsche the next day at the University, Cemí tells Fronesis, "Ego te absolvo": the sacrifice has acted as a felix culpa or redeeming sin.

The fibrous heart tumor—"a dragon run through by a lance, by a ray of light"—for which Cemí's mother is operated sums up this sacrifice and symbolizes the union of contraries. Since "mother" and "matter" have the same root, the tumor becomes an emblem for poetry.

Lezama has called any combination of matter and image monstrous, especially when it occurs on a high level, as in poetry and orchestral music. The mother's operation repeats a sacrifice that opens the way to a new life, the first step toward literary practice.

"The ascent of number put to song," which Cemí and Fronesis achieve in the University, is the first example of this practice. Numbers, along with fractions and multiplication, pertain to the fallen man, and the Fall led to the sanctification of numbers practiced by Pythagoras and his disciples, and continued by the two friends. The dragon motif—symbolizing matter—has gradually changed its shape and now appears in the form of a chorus of students who surround Cemí and Fronesis, passing through successive transformations until they become a symbol of resurrection:

But once again St. George with his miraculous spurs will alert his courser to jump and tire the dragon. Urged on by the terrestrial explosions of that day of resurrection. St. George, now astride Pegasus, will fall upon the constellation Draco, breaking his chains of stars, his ember head, his maw fattened with febrile moon.

St. George, astride Pegasus, is an emblem of the poet, for as he pursues the image of resurrection, he fulfills the function assigned to the poet in Lezama's system. Resurrection in the flesh, a Christian concept that overcomes the duality between matter and spirit, provides the model for this duty to unify which Lezama imposes on the poet. He proposes to rescue the flesh from the contempt in which it has been held and to present it as an integral part of the totality created in resurrection and in poetry.

The three young men redouble their literary exercises. Fronesis dedicates a poem to Cemí; Foción dedicates another to Fronesis; and Cemí experiments with images and space-time groupings like the one of the bacchante, the Cupid, and the silver cup from Puebla, and makes an important verbal discovery in the word tamiela, which he analyses into ten different meanings, two of which, 'treasure' and 'latrine,' are complete opposites:

The site where one guards both the most valuable and the most insignificant or abjured, but which, nevertheless, favored the course of the seasons with its demoniac, sulphurous aid to the earth. This warns us to beware distinctions. It commends to us the great One, the treasure of excretion and the excretion of treasure.

This discovery by Cemí corresponds to Fronesis' conjuration and is inverted in Foción's incestuous and homosexual adventure in New York, when he, in his own way, manages to unite the contraries "sun, earth, and moon." Foción sinks into madness, Fronesis disappears, and dona Augusta's death marks Cemí's arrival at poetry.

The Destruction of Time and Space

In the ecstasy of the poet, as in that of the mystic, time stops flowing and eternity takes its place, gathering all moments into one. Lezama expresses this passage of time into eternity and its contrary movement through a story with a spiral structure consisting of four anecdotes which illustrate four alternative ways to defeat time: by fame, in the story of Atrius Flaminius; by repetition, in the anecdote of the child and the vase; by insomnia, in the one of the wakeful man; and by sleep, in the story of the music critic. Two of these characters, the child and the insomniac, seem to be alter egos of Cemí's, part of another effort to cancel time by showing the same person at different moments in his life. But all of these attacks on time are literary. Time is finally and definitively destroyed only in death, where "that sin no longer exists," and that is why all of the characters in the story die: Atrius Flaminius, the child, the insomniac, the music critic, and his guardian. Their deaths are emblematic: they die to the world and submerge in the divinity reached through poetic or mystical ecstasy.

Space also disappears in the ecstasy of creation. Lezama annuls it in the perpetual motion of a magical omnibus guided by a bull's head rotating on a steel wheel. Like those medieval ships that carried the dead to their final port, the magical bus takes poets to poetry, personified by Oppiano Licario. Thus the Havana literary world left behind in Chapter II reappears with its almost forgotten characters. The stalled omnibus represents a literature paralyzed by routine. When it acquires a new bull's head and new passengers, it starts on its way again. Inside, Oppiano Licario—Icarus of the word—forms the center of a heterogenous group which lacks neither a Judas—Martincillo, who robs the treasure of poetry (Licario's coins) and abandons it when it proves worthless to him—nor a saviour, Cemí, who restores the treasure to its rightful owner. Here Adalberto, Vivino, and Martincillo represent the systaltic or tumultuously passionate style, while Cemí exemplifies the hesychastic alternative, spiritual equilibrium.

Oppiano's coins are stamped on one side with a Pegasus, emblem of poetry, and on the other with an Athena. The goddess testifies to the intellectual and balanced character of poetry, what Lezama has called "aristia," or "Athena's protection in the whirlwind of combat." The stolen coins belong to the elect, for, in the end, only those who have been chosen enter Oppiano's house.

Attaining Poetry

The last chapter of Paradiso shows a complexity capable of upsetting any attempt at interpretation. Here we find Oppiano Licario's daily life, his poetic method, and the traps which he lays to lead Cemí into his mortuary chamber. Oppiano's poetic method is based on a magic in which words control reality. By means of "the shock of the poetic syllogism," his answers provoke a reality which can be either future, historic, or recent, because his words aim at the center of eternity, the very source of time. Just as the poet once transposed the student and the grindstone, so now he transposes places and epochs. "Oblique experience" and "the sudden" govern this poetic syllogism.

Sometimes the poet's sentences emerge incomplete and seek their complements. At other times, they burst out with overwhelming force and impose a complete picture of a situation or an epoch. Historic incidents are incessantly transposed with recent events—such as those following Cochrane's party—in order to illustrate Oppiano's method. The resulting stories—allegories of the struggle against the devil, Salado, the Salty One, the Destroyer—emerge from emptiness or from a phrase. For example, the story of Baron Rothschild and Kamariskaya is born when Oppiano reads a mysterious inscription in an empty vitrine "Pieces belonging to a service marked with the kirimon or trifoliate paulownia of the Imperial Family of Japan, lost during the Baron's lifetime." The anecdote of the Venetian senator's murder may come from The Venetian Gazette or from the Compilation of Notices for Amsterdam Merchants. The story of Logakón derives from the phrase "next to him on the left" and from three empty spaces: the neighboring seat at the Opera during a performance of Faust; the room next-door at the boarding house; and the neighboring table in the café. The magic of these apparently simple words manages to call a man out of eternity and to give him flesh. His name, Logakón, comes from Logos, 'the word.' He is the word incarnate, although the reference is not to Jesus but to the poetic word that acquires its dazzling prestige through the reverberations of analogy.

After Logakón's suicide, Licario imagines his last adventure. He will plant himself head-down in the earth, sending forth roots, branches and leaves like a tree: an image of resurrection (from an aerial perspective) which prefigures Licario's own death and resurrection.

From death, Oppiano spreads the nets that lead Cemí into his funeral chamber. As he strolls through the night, Cemí sees a three-story house with all the windows lit (lost nature); then a playground and, on the merry-go-round, a caretaker looking like "the helmsman of some infernal machine" (fallen nature); and, lastly, a forest "where the trees climbed up over each other" surrounding a house which suggests the supernatural. Cemí enters the deserted house and on the terrace finds many emblems:

And every trefoil showed a key as if nature and super-nature had been united in something meant to penetrate, to jump from one region to another, in order to reach the castle and interrupt the feast of the hermetic troubadours.

This is poetry, the crown of Lezama's system: an enchanted castle where the invisible and the palpable—what Lezama has called causality and the uncaused—lock in combat, from which there emerges a new "causality that unites man and divinity, or death and the circle." Cemí reaches poetry by closing up "the space of the Fall," for his encounters are punctuated by the same songs that followed Uncle Alberto to his death. Only one testimony remains from that overwhelming encounter: the poem which Licario's sister delivers to Cemí in the funeral chamber:

     Reason and memory by chance
     will see the dove attain
     faith in the super-natural.

In the funeral chapel, the rhythm of poetry makes itself felt together with the rhythm of the universe and the lack of response, for the poet shoots his arrow into the infinite without hope of any response, without any assurance of hitting the mark. Poetry is a stumble, a kind of madness which Cemí must now assume under the lead of his master Licario, whose last words—"rhythm of hesychasts, now we can begin"—belong to the ceremonies of initiation he will perform in the pages of the novel Oppiano Licario, where the three friends meet again in order to achieve a new and definitive unity.