In France they say of him:—“A tender soul whom no emotion leaves indifferent.” Fombona remarks that Herbert Spencer calls us hybrid beings, with all the defects of hybridism. Once Rubén Darío wrote a glorious appreciation of Fombona, as Rodo wrote one equally fine of Darío. He declared: “My friend, Rufino, was born only to realize great things.” Darío is dead now; when he was writing so eloquently about his friend he was in Mallorca—and happy. Alas!
There is a Portuguese critic in South America—in Rio—by name José Verissimo, who remarks that America was colonized at one of the most powerful moments of European mind, and that this nature of explorers, conquistadores, the something epic that makes poets, still lives in Blanco-Fombona.
His novels have conquered two worlds; the Old and the New. Spain was enthusiastic. Like Columbus, Fombona set her dreaming of a New World. A young Spaniard says: “... When I think of Fombona I connect his name with the charm of the city where he lived, Caracas ... the name of that city remains a mythological place to me—remote, perfumed, mysterious, a city which Fate will have it, that I shall sometime see. How I have lingered over Fombona’s pages, when they picture the sun of gold in that sky of azure; dawn-fresh, mountain mornings that are chill; the romantic song of old bells in old towers; the iced-water Americans drink ... lots and lots of things that suit my dream-city, city made for adventure and love, and ill luck....”
Hear Blanco-Fombona for a moment himself: (I am translating from memory)—... “and more important than everything else, more important than people, than events, that brilliant sun of America, toward which the breath of our lives ascends continually, like prayer....”
It is not true that the characters of Man of Iron are commonplace as the critics keep calling them. It is because Fombona has looked down upon them from a great height. From such height, perhaps, all the little figures in the game—life—are small and commonplace.
I can not forget his sentences. They sing on and on in my mind. They have the charm of smooth satin. They feel good upon my tongue. La luna—de esas claras lunas.... The moon—one of those clear moons of tropic nights—was laughing down upon the water. Here is another:
In the sky the little stars were twinkling, while afar I could hear the night-thunder of the Carib Sea.
Fombona’s life has been worth while; poetic, enriched with vision, with conscious power—in Caracas, the city of his delight. It is something I like to think about. I can measure its invigorating pulse in his prose. I have esteem for the artist, and admiration for the man and brave fighter, who has never been a coward.
In Man of Iron, Fombona makes the character which is both pitiful and noble, a man, just as Manuel Galvez does in one of his latest novels—La Pasión de la Pampa. And Fombona like Manuel Galvez registered so many of the apparently trifling, overlooked facts that knit up the confusing surface of the present; it resembles the difficult-to-catch, changeful, spread-out shimmer upon a sea.
South Americans picture youth, and the joys of youth, as no one else. One can live over one’s own youth, and then multiple other youths by proxy, in the reading. And every once in a while I come upon a sentence that shakes me with its splendor.