Fanny Buitrago: The wonderful thing about knowing yourself alive and unhappy

It retains, after so many years, the same curiosity as the beginning. He is surprised like a girl, cries, gets angry, laughs. Remember what you have left behind, the people who have left and those who have arrived. He never stops doing it, remembering. That is one of the engines of his writing. At home, he keeps notebooks with notes, ideas for whole books. He has manuscripts that have not seen the light, and perhaps should not, and others that he refuses to show, out of modesty, perhaps, or because of his insecurity. Write, write, write all the time. For Fanny Buitrago, life is that. He doesn't do anything else, he doesn't know how to.

I met her a few years ago. He showed me his memories, allowed me to enter them. Yours is one of those presences that one values too much. She is a guide and protector. She owns a breadth of mind and heart that few people in this world of books have, or have forgotten to have. He sits at the table and talks about books, about those writers who no longer care about cultivating the craft, but their image. It matters more, now, to the writer than his work itself. “Everyone wants to figure, to be their own protagonists,” he says. In her case, her books speak for her, and either for better or worse, they always end up saving her skin.

For a couple of years now, her work has begun to resurface, after a long time when she was approached as if she were a writer of a single book. The harassing summer of the gods is one of the great pieces of Colombian literature in the 20th century, but it is not the only one of his good books. His work has been around almost every genre. He has yet to write the script for a series for Netflix and with that everything would be covered. He has written everything from short stories to novels, plays and essays, as well as books for children. Fanny Buitrago is one of the most versatile and prolific writers in Latin America over the past 100 years.

At the time, she was recognized as 'the rebellious girl of Colombian literature' and Juan Rulfo said, and this has been repeated to exhaustion, that she was one of the best Latin American writers, because she wrote as a man. She was at that time of the Boom and should have been part, like so many other voices, but she wasn't, she fell behind. Works such as Foxtail, Bahia Sonora or Lady of Honey would have to be part of that canon they have insisted on for so many years. Fanny Buitrago's literary work is one of those that allows us to trace the course of Colombian narrative in modernity. The topics he handles and the way he does it, dictate a different path, set a rhythm. Language is transgressive, it is the gateway to and from a universe that emerges from the real, but it is in fiction that it acquires all its nuances.

A native of Barranquilla, but more Bogota than the changüa, Fanny lives in the center of the city, in an infinite apartment building. The whole house is full of books, how could it be different. There are them in the living room, in the bedrooms, on the tables and one or the other on the stairs. There are paintings, several, like the one that Grau made to her. Fanny walks the house like a lost girl in the middle of a flower garden. “That was the cover of the first edition of El hostigante,” he tells me. “And that was one of the first texts that came out about me in the newspaper.” Letty, her sister, tells me about those early years of Fanny as an author, tells me that everything went very quickly. Together they show me the photos with friends, with family. In all of them is she, Fanny, smiling, or looking away. That's how she looks at you, but she looks the other way. His head is always thinking about stories.

His life should all be recorded in a book. Walking through it, one traces the recent history of Colombia, the history of art and books. She has been present in almost every important stage, whether as a protagonist or looking from afar, recording everything, as a chronicler. In 2022, Grupo Planeta, under the endorsement of the publisher Juan David Correa, after publishing in 2020 Around the Frenzy, the author's first unpublished novel in several years, decided to republish Bello Animal, one of the most chameleonic and perhaps the most critical, among the several she has written. For its part, the publishing house of the University of Antioquia recently published an unpublished collection of his stories: The Moon on Water. Both titles are part of the Bogotá International Book Fair.

I remember this conversation that has been reluctant to go out, but I don't give it complete, because I reserve the most endearing part of it, and I remember Fanny, as she reminds me of me, like a few years ago, or yesterday we saw each other, like the time we celebrated her birthday in 2019, with the whole family and friends present, and when in the middle of christmas told me: “Every writer needs to start writing in order to do it well,” and he gave me a notebook and a pen. This is the Fanny that I have with me, the one that is mine, and it is a memory for your readers, or I hope it is, of how wonderful it is to know yourself alive and unhappy.

She started out very young as a writer, and also with a novel that ended up being quite an event at the time. What was the process of your writing like?

It was a very long process, but it wasn't that complicated for me. I had been writing since I was very young. Mom said I saw myself in those when I was 6 years old. As a child I was a reader, so, somehow, I ended up getting into writing. It was all I did. The only thing I've ever done: read and write. My sister helped me type my first stories. I wrote by hand. When I started with The Harassing Summer of the Gods, I had already written a novel. I still have the manuscript. I never finished it and today I haven't reread it. I didn't dare, but I know it was good, although not so good, that's why it didn't come to light.

The novel is published and the revolution is coming. How does she end up getting involved with the nadaists?

I didn't get involved. They got me in. One went to parties, to meetings, and all of a sudden, she was always seeing them. Then, as they saw me with so-and-so and with Zutano, they began to say that I was with them, that I was a nadaist.

There are times when you stop depending on yourself. The others make it up to you. And I was invented as a writer. That hurt me on several occasions. Publishers were reluctant to publish some of my books. They were looking for less scandalous topics, somehow. The only thing I had to do with the nadaists was the fact that we shared a table in a café. I was interested in being in those spaces because there was talk of books, there was the creation of the culture of the moment. The press took it upon themselves to say that I was a nadaist. My dad was really upset about that and he was mad at me for a while, and angry with the press. Even today I am considered a nadaist and I have taken it upon myself to say things as they are.

This need to write has allowed me to explore diverse records. At what point do you begin to conceive that you can navigate between one genre and another?

Once I was at a party in Cali and a strange boy, very strange to me, asked me to dance. He had light eyes and long hair, very well-groomed. You could tell he was a very well-dressed guy. I hadn't published anything and he stares at me in the eye. He tells me: “You are the reincarnation of such...” He was referring to a French writer. I didn't pay much attention to the comment because what interested me was to be seen. Literature wasn't in the first place. I was that age when boys are the only thing that matters. I didn't know anything about love, I had no idea, but I wanted to be there. Then, as many times the world didn't open up to me, I imagined it. That's when I started writing with another vision and I think that a little bit that need to imagine everything is what allows me to be in so many genres, besides the fact that I'm extremely curious.

Somehow, his books are permeated by the figure of his grandfather, from novels to children's stories. How do you manage to plunge into intense tenderness, having previously written something of a much darker or heavier burden, starting from this reference to grandfather?

I was either a very happy child, or unhappy. Children are like that. One day they are jumping for joy and the next they are mired in tears. My house was gigantic, where I vacationed, there I could get lost, play all day. There were seventeen rooms and three patios, a very large room. One went through it as if it were a game. There you could do whatever you wanted. That childhood in the house moved to the cinema. That was the activity with grandpa. Watch the Mexican movies and get to the house to talk about it. Grandpa had a beautiful library and was always reading. That example of grandfather, and also that pimp, allowed me to plunge fully into this world. The stories come from grandpa, many of them. His tenderness is in everything, and it's kind of mine. Writing children's books, my mind rests. It is not the same requirement, but it is the same level of care.

Among so many words that you have allied with to create your books, what would be the most beautiful?

What a complicated question! I'd say “soul.” I like it very much. “Gold”, because it never rusts. I am fascinated by many words. “Aura”, for example. But if it comes to choosing just one I would say “cosmos”. So vast and inexplicable.

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