Chapter 8 Deadly Life (1) Zenovia Kampruvi

Some people call anything love.Such as the pathological need for others, the most cruel and destructive parasitic habits.There is no doubt that the writer Juan Ramon Ximenez, the 1956 Nobel laureate, needed his wife, Zenovia Campruvi, in an excruciating and indescribable way; but Doesn't necessarily mean he loves her (or even that he loves her, can a character so freaking self-centered love someone?).Yet some Juan Ramon scholars have insisted for years on constructing a mirage of conjugal love, a rainbow-like lie of the perfect couple.So over the decades, they wrote a lot about the "model marriage" and "the relationship they kept so beautifully."Until 1991, Graciela Palau de Nemes edited and published the first part of Zenovia's diaries.Oddly enough, Professor Palau tries to salvage the irredeemable in her prologue—the saga of the rose of the love story.Perhaps she didn't realize that what she had unearthed was a bomb—a sad and terrifying book, an exhaustive and unconscious study of the human condition—a couple as destruction, as evil trap.

① Costa Brava: The Mediterranean coast in northeastern Spain, an important seaside tourist attraction——annotation. But we need to start from the beginning.Zenovia was born in Costa Brava in 1887.She was the daughter of a wealthy Puerto Rican woman and a Catalan civil engineer.In short, she came from a well-to-do family.English was her mother tongue (she also knew French) and she spent a few years in America as a teenager, so when she finally returned to Spain in 1909, she was called the American girl because she was not like a native.Unlike the locals because she is elegant, lively, comfortable, and stylish.She believed in God in a very free way, agreed with the spirit of service to others typical of that era, a kind of enlightened charity of the upper class (we have to say that the social inequality at that time was huge), its most essential and most The result of responsibility and sobriety was the founding of the "Society for Liberal Education".After returning to Spain, Zenovia also opened a school for rural children and worked with various charities.

Zenovia receives a small annuity from her mother's estate, as well as various job subsidies.In exile, she taught languages ​​and literature first at a university near Washington and then at the University of Puerto Rico.Before the war she had a crafts shop in Madrid, where she carefully furnished apartments rented out to foreigners.Juan Ramon's income was meager and intermittent.During the forty years they were together as a couple, they lived mainly on Zenovia's annuity and part-time jobs.In her diary, Zenovia complained repeatedly about her husband's apparent inability to earn money: they experienced repeated financial hardships as a result.But Juan Ramon's inability to cope with practical life is a minor, even sympathetic, flaw compared with the general failure of their relationship as a couple and other daily betrayals.

As we all know, Juan Ramon was a patient.He first stepped into a psychiatric center (then called a madhouse) when, at the age of nineteen, his father died suddenly in his sleep, and he himself was shaken out of a dream to be told the terrible news.He couldn't get over it all: "My father's sudden death was reproduced in my soul and body as on a mirror; or rather, on a photographic glass plate. My father's death body, like a reality shone on a glass photoreceptor. With the death engraved on me, I feel like I am dying every moment." He is a hypochondriac who in his worst moments thinks he is dying : Doesn't eat, doesn't wash up, doesn't plan for the next day because he thinks he'll be dead by then.He's full of eccentricities, like accumulating tons of newspapers and clippings and then being unable to throw them away, or keeping the windows shut because he can't stand the draft.

Undoubtedly, he suffered—a point echoed sympathetically and ritually by all scholars who have studied him.But my idea is that there are lunatics and insane people; there are respectable and touching patients who hurt only themselves;Rilke said that we all die by our own death, and I also believe that we are all mad by our own madness.Juan Ramon, for all his occasional great noble gestures, was—or was said to be—uncharacteristically selfish; a dry, despondent misanthrope, a man who was often cruel and miserly.He has many enemies (Bergamin, Arveti, Guillen, Neruda, Salinas) because he speaks ill of almost everyone.He seemed to express tenderness only for animals and children; and I suspect it was because in some way he saw his own childhood reflected in these creatures.That is to say, he has difficulty appreciating anything other than himself.Luis Cernuda wrote that in Juan Ramon embodied the most pronounced double personality he had ever seen, he was the embodiment of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; like Mr. Hyde, he was "a Humble little man".

Juan Ramon's work is against his sickness, the constant pain of death and the insidious nothingness of non-existence: he transforms and reorganizes a literary creation time and time again, obsessed with longing for something impossible, taking him from A "complete and perfect work" rescued from a blip.Juan Ramon struggles with his actions against a chaotic existence: a traditional masculine answer.Zenovia, on the contrary, fights by destroying herself, melting her own personality into that of her husband: a traditionally feminine response. What makes Zenovia's annulment all the more remarkable, among many similar situations, is the potential this woman had prior to self-mutilation.She is smart, generous, active, elegant, and happy.She also wrote, and from an early age she showed a clear creative ambition.When he was a teenager, he published short stories in English in an American children's magazine.I had read "Margrat," a short story she wrote in Spanish when she was fifteen.It was a marvelous text, surprisingly good for her age.The diary, published by Graciela Palau, didn't have that force, nor that stylistic intent—clearly Zenovia had backed down by then.Except for a few here and there, where the sentences are so beautiful that you get glimpses of her literary talent (such as when she explains how Juan Ramón discarded drafts of his poems: "He tore the paper into little pieces with joy, as if a Workers dismantling scaffolding"), and the diaries dryly, almost ceremonially, record their two years (1937-1939) in Cuba.Previously, shortly after the outbreak of the civil war in August 1936, Zenovia rescued Juan Ramon from Spain "in order not to go mad".

This is a sad book.Zenovia began on her wedding anniversary: ​​they had been married for twenty-one years, she was approaching fifty, he was fifty-six.In short, their relational code is well established, which is a code of complete and total obedience.Whenever her husband asked her to do something, Zenovia canceled all her plans and commitments.Transcribe poetry for him, or just be with him.It must have been extremely difficult to live with a man so full of death, a man who could hardly enjoy anything, and Zenovia had to keep an eye on his many neurotic eccentricities.Because they had no money, they lived in a shabby hotel room that gradually became frantically and suffocatingly stuffed with Juan Ramon's newspapers, "with the result that the waiter could only come in every three days, I think It was as if I were living in a pigsty. I was sick of having to see that pile of newspapers all the time." Furthermore, Juan Ramon "couldn't stand any sound or movement, which is completely understandable," when he wrote, As a result, Zenovia hid in the bathroom all day, even when he took a nap. "When Juan Ramon took a nap, I was locked in the bathroom and I was nervous because the weather was so beautiful."