Murió Eliseo Alberto. Santo y sabio, hermoso

"Murió Eliseo Alberto. Santo y sabio, hermoso, melancólico y procurador de dichas. Escribiendo, Lichi nos regaló alegrías que no podemos pagarle más que volviendo a cobrar el gusto de leerlo". (Ángeles Mastretta)

Su padre, el poeta Eliseo Diego, que lo queria mucho, me contaba que las mujeres mas bonitas de la Habana pasaron por su casa en el Vedado. Yo me sonreia, pues Lichi era tremendo personaje, con poco de "Santo" recuerda su amigo y el mío, Julio Ruiz.

La eternidad por fin comienza un lunes
y el día siguiente apenas tiene nombre
y el otro es el oscuro, al abolido.
Y en él se apagan todos los murmullos
y aquel rostro que amábamos se esfuma
y en vano es ya la espera, nadie viene.
La eternidad ignora las costumbres,
le da lo mismo rojo que azul tierno,
se inclina al gris, al humo, a la ceniza.
Nombre y fecha tú grabas en un mármol,
los roza displicente con el hombro,
ni un montoncillo de amargura deja.
Y sin embargo, ves, me aferro al lunes
y al día siguiente doy el nombre tuyo
y con la punta del cigarro escribo
en plena oscuridad: aquí he vivido.

Eliseo Alberto

Nice Guys Finish Last

BY ALBOR RUIZ

Monday, August 11, 1997

MAYORAL hopeful Eric Ruano Melendez is flushed with excitement after his interview with RCN, a popular Colombian radio station in Astoria.
"It went well," he says.
The first woman soccer arbiter in the world that's how she introduced herself a Brazilian in her 50s who was also interviewed, agrees.
"Candidate," she asks him, "may I have a picture with you?"
It is hot in the RCN offices, and Melendez has his jacket off. But he is eager to oblige. He puts the jacket back on, straightens his tie, smiles and poses for the picture.
A nice guy, this Ruano Melendez.
Being nice, though, won't win any elections for the balding, slightly overweight, 49-year-old Guatemalan immigrant. For that, he would have to overcome some pretty impressive obstacles, such as the fact that he has zero name recognition, zero money, zero staff and zero political experience. Zero, zilch, nada.
But Melendez is not deterred.
"It's not impossible to defeat Giuliani," he says, in his mind having already left Ruth Messinger, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Sal Albanese biting the dust in the Sept. 9 Democratic primary. "A Hispanic can do it. I will never quit like Freddy Ferrer did."
For all his naivete, Ruano Melendez is not a complete rookie in the electoral game. In 1991, he ran for a City Council seat in Queens, and in 1992, he ran against Nydia Velazquez for Congress. He was unsuccessful both times.
Melendez has lived in Queens since he was 19, and is a civil engineer for the city's Department of Environmental Protection.
"I like Civil Service," he says. "It gives you a chance to make a difference."
But obviously Civil Service is not enough to satisfy his vocation for public service.
"Politics is in my blood," he says. "My two grandfathers were the mayors of their towns in Guatemala." One was an army officer, as was the candidate's father. He was brought up under a strict regime of order and discipline.
That likely accounts for his proposal to militarize New York. "Let the National Guard assist in law enforcement on our streets," is the way he puts it. Yet, crime is down in the city. Why take such a drastic step at this point, which also would alienate Hispanics by reviving memories of military juntas and dictat orships?
"Well, then let's do it in the public schools," he answers. "Let the National Guard and West Point officers serve as teachers to reestablish order and discipline."
If he ever is elected, Melendez will be, to say the least, a rather unorthodox public official. He would reduce unemployment by using "abandoned areas in the five boroughs to create and promote Disney-style amusement parks." This, together with a casino in the Rockaways, would increase tourism and generate employment, as well as new revenue.
But the cornerstone of would-be Mayor Melendez' plans for the City of New York is to transform it into the 51st state. "If we become a state, we would not have to depend on Albany's Legislature to obtain public funds."
All through the conversation, RCN employes and visitors have been walking by, and many of them have greeted Melendez warmly. "Como estas Eric?"
"Un pacer Sr. Ruano."
These people like him, and they are willing to indulge him, the way one indulges an eccentric and likeable uncle. Liking him is one thing, voting for him another. Hispanic voters have become way too pragmatic to vote for someone just because he is Latino.
"Eric is a decent man," an RCN employe said. "But I would not vote for him. He doesn't have a chance, and he has no experience."
It has been a long day for the candidate. It is almost 10 p.m., but the adrenaline is flowing, and he is not ready to call it a night just yet.
EVERYBODY else is tired, but the mayoral hopeful stands up, puts his jacket back on, straightens his tie and says with a wide smile: "Let's go have dinner."
A nice guy, this Ruano Melendez.

Music Legend Is Gone, But His Beat Goes On

BY ALBOR RUIZ

Thursday, November 12, 1998

HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE made their way on Tuesday to a Corona funeral home for the wake of the Colombian composer, musician and singer Luis Carlos Meyer.
Today, Meyer's body will be flown back to his native country, where he will be buried in Barranquilla, his hometown. He died in the Bronx on Nov. 7 of renal cancer and old age. He was 82.
"That's what he wanted, to be buried in Colombia," says Elba Medina, a Puerto Rican nurse assistant who took care of him for the last five years.
A Mass will be held tomorrow at the Barranquilla cathedral. That city's dignitaries as well as prominent culture and music personalities will be present to pay their respects.
The Orquesta Sinfonica of Barranquilla will escort him the man so many musicians called maestro to his final resting place playing "Micaela," "El Gallo Tuerto," "El Hijo de mi Mujer," a few of his many lively compositions.
"Those songs are still heard in Latin America," says Javier Castano, a reporter from the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario-La Prensa. "They brought him fame."
So many honors, so much concern. . . . It is ironic.
In the 1940s, '50s and '60s, the heyday of his popularity, Meyer was internationally known as El Rey del Porro, the king of a kind of music heavily influenced by African rhythms. But he would have died anonymously if not for Medina and Castano.
For five years, the man who proudly gave to the world the music from the Colombian Atlantic coast languished penniless and forgotten at the Laconia Nursing Home. With no family and no friends, no one visited him, no one knew who he was.
Occasionally, the frail old man, his blue eyes lighting up, would talk in Spanish about long-gone times of music, applause, fans and women.
"He kept telling me," says Medina, one of the few Spanish-speakers at Laconia, "that he used to be 'somebody.' "
Few paid attention. Those who did had no idea what he was talking about. Yet, Medina thought there was more to Meyer's words than the ravings of an old man. Last year she decided to investigate.
"I didn't want him to die like that," Medina said. She called Castano, also a Colombian.
The reporter was able to verify Meyer's identity, and wrote several moving articles in October and November 1997, revealing his sad condition.
Meyer's life changed after that. People began to visit him, he became animated, and sang again for the first time in many years. He had regained his identity.
When Castano played for him a tape of his music, Meyer smiled and, holding Medina's hand, said: "I hadn't heard my voice in 10 years."
Castano, who takes his profession very seriously, could not help becoming part of the story. He contacted everybody he could think of, including the Colombian consul; his friends at El Tiempo, the biggest Colombian newspaper; Rep. Jose Serrano, a Bronx congressman.
On July 16, with the help of many people, he was able to grant Meyer some of his final wishes. That day he traveled with the composer to Colombia, where the old man was received as a favorite son. On July 17, some of Colombia's best musicians played in honor of El Rey del Porro at Barranquilla's Amira de la Rosa theater.
On July 21, Meyer returned to the Bronx, the maestro again, no longer forgotten.
Two hours before the musician's death, the reporter told him to go in peace, that his songs were beautiful, that history would remember him because the Colombian Ministry of Culture had published a book with his music and his life, written by Castano.
"You were in Barranquilla," Castano told him. Then kissed his forehead and told him: "We love you."
A man had been lost and had been found. At the time of his death, Meyer's words to the compassionate nurse, who took a liking to the lonely old man, were no longer an inaudible whisper: He was somebody.

His eyes were cheerful and undefeated until the end

When Papa Hemingway's Pal Died

BY ALBOR RUIZ

"Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same colour [sic] as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated."
He was describing Santiago, the fisherman of his novel, "The Old Man and the Sea," but Ernest Hemingway could have been talking about Gregorio Fuentes. The real-life Cuban fisherman is said to have been the model for the old man.
Fuentes died Jan. 13, 2002 at his home in Cojímar, the fishing town 10 miles east of Havana where Papa set his literary masterpiece.
The Cuban sailor was 104 when cancer got the best of him, but friends and family attest to the fact that his eyes, just like those of the old man in the book, remained cheerful and undefeated until the very end.
The novel tells the agonizing story of an ancient fisherman fighting with heart and soul to reel in a gigantic fish. "The Old Man and the Sea" won the writer a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was partly responsible for his 1954 Nobel Prize in literature.
Widely thought to be the novelist's inspiration for the weather-beaten sailor, the cigar-smoking Fuentes credited another old, anonymous Cuban fisherman.
"I was with Hemingway when he got the idea for 'The Old Man and the Sea,' " he recalled in 1999, in an interview with USA Today.
Fuentes, who captained Hemingway's yacht,the Pilar, for 20 years, remembered they were sailing along Cuba's north coast when they came across an old man in a small boat trying to reel in a marlin. He was battling sharks that had completely surrounded him.
"We stopped and offered to help, but the old man shouted for us to get away," Fuentes said at the time.
"Later, we heard the old man had died, which saddened Papa deeply. I know that is why he wrote the book."
It was friendship at first sight for Fuentes and Ernesto, as Cubans simply called the famous writer.
"You and me, we're like brothers," Hemingway would tell Fuentes.
They met in 1928, when the fisherman rescued the writer, whose boat had run out of fuel off Cuba's coast during a tropical storm. Hemingway moved to the island from Key West in 1940 and Fuentes became the skipper of his yacht.

Drinking buddies
During the 20 years the writer lived in Cuba, the two men would go out fishing and would share the warm sun, the clear moon and more than a shot or two of golden Cuban rum. Hemingway enjoyed his skipper's company, and Fuentes knew he had become part of the writer's literary imagination.
Fuentes was born July 18, 1897, in the Canary Islands but arrived in Cuba in his early adolescence, never to leave again. Not long ago, he was still a common sight at the restaurant Las Terrazas in Cojímar, looking out into the sea and telling those who cared how he and his friend used to "come here" to savor a good seafood meal.
Until 1960, when Hemingway moved back to the U.S. for medical treatment (he committed suicide in 1961), Cuba was the backdrop not only for "The Old Man and the Sea," but also for many other of his writings.
Cubans liked the larger-than-life, bearded Americano who loved drinking mojitos at Old Havana crusty bars. They also understood his greatness, and El Vigía, the farm where he lived outside the Cuban capital, is today a widely visited museum dedicated to remembering his life and works.
But with the death of Fuentes, skipper, friend, fellow adventurer and literary inspiration, Hemingway's memory also died a little. No one else in Cuba was as close to him as was the fisherman. And no one else can truly say, as Fuentes could, "I remember him every day of my life."

The poignant story of a literary pioneer

Brilliant Writer We Almost Lost

BY ALBOR RUIZ

Monday, March 10, 2003

This year, Felipe Alfau, a true literary pioneer who died lonely and forgotten in 1999, would have turned 100. And somehow, it seems like a good time to remember his poignant life, full of small ironies and undeserved cruelties.
Born in Spain, Alfau was the first Spanish speaker to write and publish a novel in English in the U.S.
He came to New York in 1916, at 14, with no knowledge of English. He taught himself the language so well that in 1928 he did something unprecedented: He wrote a novel in English: "Locos: A Comedy of Gestures," published in 1936. The author was paid all of $250 for it.
Critics loved the experimental novel, and among other accolades, Alfau has been compared with the author of "Lolita," the great Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who also wrote in English. "Locos," though, remained on bookstore shelves mostly unread.
Alfau worked for some time at the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario and finally settled on a translator job at the Morgan Bank on Broad St., where he remained until he retired.
But in the 1940s, between translations, he managed to write a second novel, also in English.
When he couldn't find a publisher for "Chromos," his new book became his last. A disillusioned Alfau would never write fiction again.
Reality can be stranger than fiction, and the story of how "Chromos" finally was published in 1990, 50 years after it was written, is one of those cases.
Steven Moore, the owner of a small editorial house, had found "Locos" at a garage sale. He liked it so much that he looked up Alfau in the telephone book and asked him for permission to reprint it.
The old man was not enthusiastic. By then he was a resident at the Rego Park nursing home.
But Moore persisted, and talked Alfau not only into letting him reprint "Locos" but also into letting him publish his second novel.
"Chromos," the book rejected by publisher after publisher a half-century before, became one of five finalists for the 1990 National Book Award, one of the country's highest literary honors.
Alfau was 88 by then, and wished only for death.
"Chromos," an experimental work with no plot to speak of, is beautifully written. This is an excerpt:
"There is something about most of the East Side, rain or shine, that lies somewhere between what we call reality and what we call a dream. It is the quality of a memory that has lain forsaken like an unattended grave. Nowhere else in New York can one find so ever-present the spirit of the has-been, of the window of a shop on Sunday inhabited only by our own reflection as we go by."
But the author did not crave recognition any more. He died at 97, another lonely old man among the thousands of forgotten lives in New York's nursing homes.
That is why, 100 years after his birth in Spain, we want to remember the poignant life of - Felipe Alfau, true literary pioneer.

Breaking the Ice

This is it. Finally. My first post to my first blog. Just trying my hand,
More to come....