The book of Emma Reyesa memoir in correspondence by Emma Reyes
Columbian Memoir
Original title – Memorias por correspondencia
Translator – Daniel Alarćon
Source – personal copy
Well, I will now review a couple of Latin American memoirs. This is the first from the Columbian artist Emma Reyes, who was known as the godmother of Latin American art. Her art ranges from simple child like sketches to vibrant painting. One of her fans was her fellow Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who had encouraged he to write down her life story. She struggled to put down her thoughts until she happened upon the letter form, and hence, the letter she wrote over a few decades described her early years. She had a hard childhood, and when she grew up, she became a citizen of the world and mixed with leading artists and writers of the time. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, in particular, The book has 23 letters that give an insight into what happened til she escaped a convent at 19 and started her life.
The house we lived in consisted of just one very small room with no windows, and a door that faced the street. This room was located on Carrera Sép-tima in a working-class neighborhood in Bogotá called San Cristóbal. The tram passed directly in front of our house and stopped a few meters ahead at a beer factory called Leona Pura and Leona Oscura.
In that room lived my sister, Helena, another child whose name I didn’t know whom we called Piojo, and a woman I remember only as an enormous tangle of black hair; it covered her completely, and when it was down I’d scream with fright and hide under the bed.
The house she was born into as a child with her older sister
It is easy to say Reyes had one of the toughest childhoods with her older sister. She was born in a room with no windows in a working-class area. Her mother was troubled, and they had a tough childhood. Emma’s earliest memories are of emptying the family bedpan on the garbage heap in the morning. She and her sister follow their mother around various rooms in Bogota and are looked after by various community members who take care of the girls. They also try to avoid being seen when left alone by their mother. But all this ends when she leaves them at the gate of a convent for an orphans where her and her sister 6 and 7 at the time spend the rest of their childhood a tough Christians upbringing as they are viewed as being born in sin. They live with a variety of nuns, from the strict to an aged Italian nun with poor Spanish, but all are hard on the sister as she seeks to use her mind to escape the world she finds herself in. Parts of this feel like a nod to Marquez at times. A hard few years in the convent where all they earn is by attending masses for this and that; I loved the list of how many they had attended.
My dear Germán:
There were no girls in that convent. It was a convent where they made nuns. There were some very young ones, but they were all novitiates, and we weren’t allowed to be with them. We weren’t allowed beyond the first courtyard, where the entrance and the visitors’ rooms were. Next to the entrance were two rooms, one where the doorkeeper slept, a very old, pigeon-toed lady who talked to herself all day; in the second room, full of furniture and packages, they arranged a bed for the two of us, because Helena didn’t want me to sleep alone. In the doorkeeper’s room was a large table, where food was left for us whenever the nuns brought food for the doorkeeper.
When they were left at the convent door
I brought this up after seeing it had made some end-of-year list a few years ago, and the quote from Diana Athill she said, “No other book I’ve read has left me so deeply involved with the author” This is so true, I think hitting on the letter as the form to tell her story draws you in as a reader the little snippets love the years the letters are from thirty years she wrote them from mainly Paris you sense how she must have tried to remember every detail, but she also captured the childlike feeling of being in these horrific situations living hand to mouth with her mother., then the brutality of the convent life. I think this should be better known. It is a wonderful insight into poverty, sisters , a mother that abandons you and the horrific nature of growing up in a covenant. Have you read this book?
Winston’s score – B solid memoir of the early years of one of the leading Latin American artists of the 20th century.
Winstonsdad's Blog 