I am glad to share the prologue of my novel Ghosts for Long Nights, written by the poet and autor Gonzalo Márquez Cristo. I am very thankful. Ghosts for Long Nights will be available in http://www.amazon.com (English and Spanish versions) next month, and also in the Feria del Libro de Bogotá 2014, a publication of Fundación Común Presencia.
“IN THE KINGDOM OF APPARITIONS
By Gonzalo Márquez Cristo
With an exquisite narrative style, which builds up a strong and intimate atmosphere all through her prima opera, Martha Cecilia Rivera successfully creates a stage where enigmatic and perseverant apparitions populate Rebeca Hidalgo’s dispossessed life.
We all knew, even before Freud’s writings that all specters come from the country of loneliness. However, in Ghosts for Long Nights, the author used the word ghosts with the same meaning as that which ancient Greeks did, which is that of apparitions —a word that in Greek language has the same etymology as phantasy—. In doing so, the author makes us hunt, page by page, the evasive creatures that populate our subconscious mind, although they do not reside only in such realms as the one that Henry James had already suggested in The Turn of the Screw, and that of Roman Polanski in Le Locataire (“The Tenant”).
In her novel, the author, adhering to the forces that make such apparitions become visible, aligns her characters with the fundamental purpose of imagination: phantasy is indeed a power destined to reside in the literature (acknowledging that literary characters are the letter’s ghosts) but, most splendidly, to invade our dispossessed existences making richer our deserted lives.
Hence, should the Greek stigma reign in Rivera’s novel, the story of Adela Buitrago (Rebeca’s mother, who has plenty of affronts and grief), fatefully returns to leave a more radical stamp. That is precisely where I must invoke Aristotle’s hamartia: as every mother regularly plants her behaviors and gestures in her daughters (Ingmar Bergman already recognized that in Face to Face), in Rivera’s novel the ghosts are the ones who are merciless to the feminine lineage that, based on cultural deformities, or on an irresistible destiny or perhaps an unresolved guilt, pushes away the “licit” image of a mother to a sensible eclipse where desire flourishes, as usual, because of the extreme exercise of being an other human being.
This way, the wife, a shadowless character, remains exposed to a sunlight that makes it translucent and prevents it from turning into a ritual figure or an avid chaos. That is what the novel’s main character learns when she decides, within a very intense final scene, to abandon her own calm through magic in order to create a voice for her inner moon.
A two-sided question emerges upon finishing reading this unavoidably rhythmic, spirally sensorial novel: Does the author want to take us across a tale where witchcraft intends to renovate itself —or rather to persist— despite of the pragmatism of the 21st century? Or, reciprocally, does this Colombian writer who has voluntarily exiled herself to the Lake of Michigan shore, want to make a contribution (as creators have attempted for centuries) so that apparitions may find us a fertile ground to trick loneliness?
Perhaps the answers to both questions are affirmative. However, something much more evident in this novel is that any woman can be a violent scenario, and that that prevails in spite of the liberating 20th century. This is due to a restless combat that is triggered each time in her inner self as well as in her trembling geography, because (as the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano revealed), what is sacred will never be able to transcend the devastating siege of terror and gracefulness.
Bogotá, March 3, 2014″.
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Martha Cecilia Rivera, March 2014
Florentino Letters 