“Wise stories” by Alfonso Pexegueira

“Iqbal recognized that stories are wiser than we are.” Narrative as a storehouse of knowledge, as a source of pleasure, as a way of seeing the world — “I share eyes with people, but not a look” — is at the center of the author’s latest book Alfonso Pexegueiro (Angoares, Ponteareas, 1948). The next day, the month of big birds came to me (Lumbría) is one of those works that cannot be classified because its own poetics tends to be a genre unto itself: story, photography, drawing, indirect creative self-portrait and music are woven into its pages in a tapestry that claims that the ability to dream is not only a skill from childhood, but crucial for the whole life. “We are ill-populated childhoods,” the book says, talking about losing the ability to see beyond reality.

As they did before the works celebrated as The little Prince, The next day, the month of big birds came to me he proposes the recovery of this ability in order to place it at the very center of the personality. And he does it mostly through words. “We are only a language,” says the character, Cuento, to Iqbal, the leading figure on whom Pexegueiro pours out his anxieties about creation. In this sense, his last book is not only related to Saint-Exupéry, but also to Rodari or Ende, and to this homage to the fascinating power of the word that is Arabian Nights. Not forgetting Dante, whom Pexegueiro read in the “excellent” versions of José María Micó and Daría Xohán Cabana when he finished the book, whose writing began more than thirty years ago.

imaginative freedom

The work is also directly related to Pexegueir’s earlier title, Rizo and Riza. A toast to life, a work in verse that divides ethical and aesthetic positions. Both books justify imaginative freedom and the rewriting of lives and historical episodes against a predetermined monolithic version: “History, that false madness they have made us live,” says the latter book. Faced with this, he suggests “building the dreams of the past”: that is the way to move forward.