Delmira Agustini (1886-1914)

The Beautiful Statue Torn Into Pieces

After six years of engagement, Delmira Agustini fling “to the fearful abysm of marriage” with Enrique Job Reyes on August 14, 1913. One month later, the poet would return to her parents’ house, running away from “so much vulgarity.” She immediately began divorce proceedings. However, she held frequent encounters with who still was her husband, where the bodies freely met without the moral chains of marriage.

For more than a year, the bodies met, fervent, satisfying their flesh urgencies, but also Delmira’s, fulfilling the urgencies that came out of a conception that assimilated the pleasures searched by the body and the soul. But on a July 6, 1914, perhaps due to the imminent divorce, Job Reyes shot Delmira to death. He committed suicide immediately after. They were both 27 years old.

Delmira Agustini was born on October 24, 1886 in a wealthy upper class family. She learned to read and write at five, and by the age of ten she scrawled her first poems. When she turned 21 she published her first volume of poems, El Lirio Blanco (The White Iris), which had the following critic from Carlos Vaz Ferreira: “you should not be capable, not of reading, but of understanding the book you wrote. How did you manage to know, to feel what you wrote what you did on these pages, is something completely inexplicable” (1).

What Vaz Ferreira ignored was that under that submissive youth (her mother told her what to do always) of hypnotic beauty and immaculate manners, an inner voice lived, passionate, intimate and starving of the forbidden carnal desires to women in those times to which Delmira claimed screaming, agonic moans of a young lady conscious of her unhappiness and her lack of satisfaction.

Maybe her biography’s synthesis, happiness that had a place only at her dreams: “was it just a frame of illusion/ on the deep desire’s mirror/ or was her divine and just in life/ that I saw you watching after my dream the other night?”

She designated Eros as her own god “with a dazzling soul and gloomy flesh” and reproached the mortal’s god in his poem Estatua (statue): “God!... Move that body, give a soul to it!... See the greatness that sleeps in its form! The static vision of the Women, here, as a recrimination to god, appears as an apology on a pledge: “Eros: Haven’t you ever felt/ mercy of the statues?// (…) Mercy for the covered bodies/ of the solemn tranquility of the calm.//(…) Mercy for the gloved hands/ of ice, that doesn’t rip// the delightful fruits of the flesh// nor the fantastic flowers of the soul.” Delmira revels against that inertia through her poems, her only possibility to escape “a moment of peace in my eternal painful exaltation.” Due to that dichotomy, that constant back and forth she lives and writes in, tortures her, stops her: (…) these are my saddest hours,” she writes on a latter to her dearest friend Rubén Darío; “during those hours I reach the conscious of my unconscious (…) I don’t know if you have ever meet face to face with madness and fought with it in the anguishing solitude of an hermetic spirit.” All there is left is “the immense desire of shouting for held against everything.”

A year later she married Jobs Reyes, a man she did not love. Maybe the only man she ever loved was Manuel Ugarte, one of the wedding’s best men. While she was doing her divorce proceedings, Delmira wrote; “(…) those two words I could consciously tell him the day after I met him, might have drown on my lips, because they did not in my soul. (…) I should have told you that you made a torment out of my wedding night and my absurd honeymoon. I will never be able to tell you how much I suffered that night.

I went into the room like as if I was entering a sepulcher and with no more console that thinking what I would see. (…) Without knowing you shook my life. I knew you would come to shortly after leave, leaving the sadness of recalls and nothing more. And I rather have that, and the dream of what could have been than all the realities you do not vibrate with.”

Her books: El Lirio Blanco (1907)

Cantos de la Mañana (1910)

Los Cálices Vacíos (1913)

El Rosario de Eros (1924) Posthumous

Los Astros del Abismo (1924) Posthumous

Notes:

1. www.ale.uji.es

Source: Capitulo Oriental #14