In memoriam

Posted by bangungot@gmail.com in

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If you are ever in Paris, drop by the Père Lachaise cemetery. Between the combatants of the Paris Comune and Oscar Wilde you should find a tombstone that reads Teresa Wilms Montt. Please place a flower on her grave for me. I do not know what rare flower would do her justice and I am no botanologist.  Perhaps a small forget-me-not.

Many a year ago in a library  I fell under the spell of a beautiful young woman. Like most people I have an issue with faded  photographs. They induce in me a sense of melancholy for what has not been lived, which is, as far as I am concerned  the most lethal of melancholies. The woman's sad eyes invocated me to the shelf and made me pick up the magazine from the cover of which she had spied on me during the morning.

Woody Allen once  said "I  took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."

I opened the magazine and read through the article in what seemed like a paroxystic nanosecond. It involved Teresa Wilms Montt. I placed the magazine back on the shelf, after I had written her name down, convinced that the web would be loaded with information on her , that bookstores would have entire shelves dedicated to her and that people don't just vanish into thin air. The following day I discovered I was wrong and while banging my head on every available surface, I lamented not having stolen the magazine the name of which I no longer recall. I briefly considered moving to Chile. (Fortunately, nowadays one can find an article or two about her on the internet.)

Days and months and years passed and I am no mnemonic genius. Teresa slipped away from my thoughts like she had always slipped away from everyone, everything air-impeding, love-prohibiting, life-barring. Like when she left Vina de Mar for Santiago. Like when she left Santiago for Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires for New York, New York for Seville, Paris, London, Madrid.

Heaven forbid one tries to depict Teresa in relation to any spatiotemporal factor. She is timeless. She is timeless and spaceless. She has always lived everywhere and always died everywhere and she has always rebelled. Rebelled against the bourgeiosie values she was braught up with, rebelled against her family's plans for her own life, rebelled against an intollerable marriage, an intollerant society. Rebelled against all that fobade her to be the woman she was.

But just for the record, she was born in Chile in 1893. Labelled anarchist, feminist, probably promiscuous. She loved poetry, literature, the opera.  At 17 she decided to marry the man she fell in love with against her parent's will. Gustavo Balmaceda Valdès, he was called. She left the provincial Vina de Mar and moved with him in Santiago. They had two children while the marriage deteriorated day by day.

Teresa  joined trade unionists, feminists, anarchists. Gustavo took up drinking and jealousy. There were fights during which she used to get hit. She secretely started an epistolary affair with another man who was  a relative of Gustavo. When he found out, he had their daughters taken away from Teresa and had her shut up in the Convent of Precious Blood in Santiago. In the convent she started writing her angst-ridden diary.

She escaped the convent with the help of a friend, Vicente Huidobto and moved with him to Buenos Aires, joined the bohemian literary circles, became a woman admired, adored, a muse. Huidobro wrote of her "Teresa Wilms is the greatest woman to have come out of America. Perfect in  face, perfect in body, perfect in elegance, perfect in education, perfect in intelligence, perfect in spiritual strength, perfect in grace."

Yet she didn't settle down there either. Her destiny was to wander, she said. She moved  away, she roamed like the restless vagabond she was, until the end.

One cold day, in a room in Paris she took way too much Veronal. She was 28.

Teresa, this is for you who I  had forgotten for too long.