Read Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) for Free Online Page A

half-open roses.” When describing the female body, the Nicaraguan’s language is invariably lush. He talks of the “pink flesh” of precious princesses, describing them as “gay, delicious songbird[s] of black eyes and red mouth.” They are voluptuous in their innocence, nymphs that become not only love objects but idols to be adored. In “The Ruby,” Darío states: “My human woman loved a man, and from her prison she was sending him her sighs. The sighs passed through the pores of the earth’s skin and found him, and he, still loving her, would kiss the roses in a certain garden, and she, his beloved, would have sudden convulsions . . . in which she would pucker her pink, cool lips like the petals of a damask rose.” In the spirit of the Romantics, Darío seems infatuated by a woman’s nakedness, which he describes by invoking flowers—roses, lilies, ivory hillocks crowned with cherries. His infatuation reaches such a degree that it often makes him lose all inhibitions. Voyeurism leads to lust, and lust might result in violent possession. This approach might appear scandalous to our eyes, but think of popular examples in Darío’s age, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, first published in 1897, as well as Alexandre Dumas’s play La dame aux camélias, on which Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata is based. Women in them are discontented beings or sheer objects of uncontrollable male desire, or both. Surely Darío was not unique in his fixations.
    In 1899, Darío, again traveling to Spain—first to Barcelona, then to Madrid—met Francisca Sánchez, an illiterate peasant from Navalsáuz, whom Darío taught to read. The couple relocated in Paris, where he worked as a correspondent for La Nación, focusing on the Exposition Universelle de Paris . His pieces for La Nación were at times reportage and others columns and op-eds. And this was only the principal newspaper he worked for. His articles were reprinted in others elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world, as well as in weekly and monthly magazines. Plus, on occasion Darío worked as an editor himself for a periodical. This effort needs to be seen in context. Latin America was swept by a spirit of independence that had begun in 1810. Throughout the century, the nations of the continent strove to break away from Spain as an imperial power and to establish autonomous, self-sufficient nation-states all across the hemisphere. By the conclusion of the nineteenth century, a new bourgeoisie was on the rise in major urban centers on this side of the Atlantic, from Mexico to Peru to Argentina. This was also the period in which positivistic thinking penetrated the region, encouraging the educated classes to endorse science and technology as approaches that needed to replace the awkwardness of religion, which had prevailed as a system of thought throughout the colonial age. Modernity, then, arrived just as open markets and free thinking made inroads among the educated.
    In substantial ways, the Modernista revolution was an intellectual modality that needs to be seen as intimately related to the consolidation of capitalism in Latin America. I hinted at this in the brief discussion of Darío’s short story “The Bourgeois King,” but in fact this socioeconomic aspect might be found in numerous places in his work, from Azul . . . through Los raros to El canto errante (The Wandering Song). Angel Rama, in his book Rubén Darío y el modernismo, disagrees with scholars who suggest that Modernismo was a reaction to capitalism. Instead, he suggests that it is a by-product of it. Rama analyzes Darío’s self-awareness as a dilettante, his view of the poet as a conduit expressing dissatisfaction with contemporary life, his faith in Catholicism as a way to satisfy humans’ ancient desire to communicate with the supernatural, and so on. One should also add to this Darío’s role as a journalist, the only way a Nicaraguan of humble means or background could support both his career as a