Read Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) for Free Online

handful. Darío does not attempt to deliver a balanced view. Instead, he is interested in an open, confessed display of subjectivity. His portraits are about exceptional natures, about freedom in art, about talents whose life, like Darío’s, is spent “hunting a form that my style can barely trace.” Needless to say, Darío’s choice of a subject for a book was, in a way, a self-justification. After all, he, too, was un raro, an eccentric who had a huge influence on literature and was recognized as something of a genius. This, by the way, wasn’t the first time he had embraced a tangential approach to writing: Darío was often known to choose a theme in order to talk about himself and his place in society, the place of his poetry in society, and the place of the artist in society. The argument in Los raros is that those who rebel, those who assert their difference, are those whom, in the long run, we most prize.
    It should be added that at this time Darío also started to serialize a novel called El hombre de oro (Man of Gold), which was influenced by Flaubert’s Salambó . As for Whitman, who also tried his luck at writing a novel, for Darío the excursion was not a high point in his career: the volume is more derivative than anything else he ever did, abstruse, distracted. He clearly did not have a talent for long fictional narratives. Nor would he stop traveling and getting himself romantically involved. Then there were the newspaper deadlines to meet, for journalistic squibs were, in the end, his only regular means of support. Actually, these two elements, women and journalism, played a crucial role as Darío’s career entered its last creative stage. Women sometimes seemed almost the entire focus of his attention. He was known as a regular visitor of prostitutes. He also wrote profusely on women. In the short story “The Ruby,” one of the characters says: “. . . I have been but a slave to one, an almost mystical adorer of the other.” Sometimes Darío discussed their role as labor at the dawn of the twentieth century in societies such as Germany, England, and the United States, in order to persuade people that in Latin America “the working mother will make hardworking children, and good citizens”; he also talks of the Nicaraguan woman as possessing “a kind of Arabian languor, a native-born insouciance, joined to a natural elegance and looseness in her movements and her walk.” But when Darío talks about Spanish women, his lyricism is unequaled. He chants:
     
    Nature proceeds and teaches logically; Nature has ordered the creatures and things of the earth according to their place on it, and Nature knows why the Scandinavians are blond and Abyssinians black, why the English have swan’s necks and Flemish women opulent handholds. Spanish females were given several models, depending upon their region in the Peninsula, but the true type, the type best known through poetry and art, is the olive-skinned beauty, somewhat potelée, neither tall nor short, with wondrous large dark eyes and wavy black hair that falls in cascades, all this animated by a marine, Venusian quality that has no name in any other language: sal .
     
    As his first and second marriages attest, Darío also sought to commit himself to women, even though his itinerant life often unraveled those commitments. But the picture that emerges in short stories like “The Palace of the Sun” is never that simple. In it the Nicaraguan talks of anemic maidens overwhelmed by melancholy, a favorite fin-de-siècle malady. Darío talks of “something better than arsenic and iron for rekindling the crimson of lovely virginal cheeks.” What does he recommend? The message is allegorical. He tells the mothers of those maidens, “your enchanting little birds’ cages must be opened, especially when the spring-time comes and there is ardor in the veins and sap, and a thousand atoms of sunlight are buzzing in the garden like a swarm of gold among the