Enrique Congrains Martín

 

The exaggerated life of a man named Enrique Congrains

 Martín

Source: Letralia Tierra de Letras

The interview of Hispanic American writers on the internet

By Abraham Prudencio Sánchez

The life of Enrique Congrains could easily be the wild story of a man who turned his life into a complex and exaggerated novel. As if driven by a powerful and limitless mystery, in 1954, at the age of 22, he published a set of four stories under the title Lima, Hora Zero; The following year, delving even deeper into social problems, he published Kikuyo.

 

With the same abandon and fervour, he collaborates in literary magazines such as Ya and Pan, with a marked leftist tendency. Dissatisfied with his reality, he immerses himself in intense political activity; this passion led him to join the Trotskyist lines. So blind was his passion for the future of the new ideology that one winter afternoon he found himself involved in an assault, with a gun in hand, at a banking agency; The argument was simple and irrefutable: the guerrilla needed funds to prevail over his new reality. However, his disproportionate actions had immediate consequences, and as it could not be otherwise, he ended up with his bones in the jail of the courthouse. The audacity cost him three months of confinement.

 

To fulfil his mission, analysing the hostile terrain of the 50s in that convulsed Lima, he not only stayed with the ink and the pen. Such an undertaking required a publishing house, and since in those years none of the publishing houses, which could barely be counted on the fingers of one hand, would endorse his madness, he created his own publishing house. This is how, under his humble but own seal, he published his first books. It was not unusual to find him on the streets, package in hand, promoting, like a fair vendor, his own texts. Mario Vargas Llosa says that he introduced himself like this: “Buy me this book, of which I am the author. Have a fun time and help Peruvian literature.” Obviously, with such an effective argument, people had no choice but to put their hands on their chests.

 

With the same intensity as always, but this time already established in Argentina, he published not one but many deaths (1957), a novel that was made into a film in 1983 with the devastating title of Maruja in hell, directed by Francisco Lombardi with a script by poet José Watanabe. After the publication of this book, when he was at the best of his production and to the surprise of Christians and Moors, Enrique Congrains abandoned literature and, as if that were not enough, in 1963 he left Peru for an indefinite period. From that moment, he became a globetrotter, from Argentina he went to Venezuela, Chile, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia.

 

His entrepreneurial spirit takes him from a soap inventor who started in Lima to a promoter of speed reading contests. He creates incredible projects such as tube chess and the art of the microwave. He writes recipe books on Peruvian cuisine and natural medicine; As a cultural promoter, he is tempted to create a large publishing house whose infrastructure would cross borders; as a publisher, he breaks records by selling more than 250,000 of his already famous biographical collections of scientists. Together with a group of friends he is tempted to create Multidic, which was nothing less than a dictionary of dictionaries (he composed 108 specialized dictionaries); However, this project was ruined by the unexpected appearance of a man named Bill Gates, who came to our stone age with a fabulous invention: Encarta. Enrique Congrains and his friends had to step aside and follow in the footsteps of other crazy things.

Such feats were not the result of simple chimeras but required a strong investment, and to the admiration of many disbelievers, there were not only people but also institutions that approved his daring projects by lending him money.

 

He had ideas that, after their application, turned out to be a complete success; overnight fortune seemed to smile on him, but most of the time, if not all, “his madness” turned out to be a total failure, the consequences were obvious, instead of winning it, the money seemed to go up in smoke in his hands, bankruptcy was a common state of mind, he was thus pursued by the nightmare of debts; Many times he was forced to leave a country between roosters and midnight.

 

Many of his friends, with the dream of becoming rich overnight, were left in the most complete ruin, and many institutions, not obtaining results through cordial means, were forced to open legal proceedings against him left and right. Sinister It is said that under this situation he had more than 20 seizure orders.

 

Faced with such a pressing situation, there was only one option: disappear from the place and settle in another to start from scratch, until one jump at a time he ended up in Bolivia. Here he settled, a little calmer, because he had personally found out that in this peaceful place there was no extradition for debts.

He thus remained immersed in almost complete anonymity. He disappeared so much from sight that some thought he was dead, and it was no wonder, because to avoid lawsuits and claims he had no choice but to change his name. Many say that our beloved writer introduced himself as Antonio Rodríguez Solís. This solicitous businessman had taken the place of the indebted narrator Enrique Congrains; The creditors, unable to find him even though they had him face to face and in person, would turn around and return after his steps, totally convinced that the devil had taken the soul of that poor debtor. But neither they nor Antonio Rodríguez Solís himself really knew who Enrique Congrains was.

The early emergence of this author on the Peruvian literary scene marked a turning point in the prevailing themes of the moment. Lima, Hora Zero, thus becomes the founding text, with this book inaugurating urban realism in Peru.

 

 

 

The immigrant, before the emergence of Congrains, is heading towards the Promised Land; Young people, especially, see Lima as the city where they can fulfil their dreams, because there were so many businesses that it was impossible not to have work.

 

 

 

The pen of this young author tells us about those same characters but already settled in young towns, in the sandy areas, in places where in those years it was impossible to think of settling and being able to live as long as they wanted. This is how the San Cosme, Agustino, San Juan de Miraflores, Zárate, Comas, Los Olivos, and a long etcetera hill were formed.

 

 

 

He is the migrant subject from the Sierra who arrives loaded with dreams. There is no other solution, Lima is the only city where they will be able to progress and stop being “forgotten”, but from forgotten they will have another category perhaps worse than the previous one, from that moment on they will be “marginalized” and will be treated that way. for those who had already been there from the beginning, but especially for those who have arrived a few days before.

 

 

 

In “The Boy Next to Heaven,” perhaps one of his best stories, he portrays this reality: Esteban, recently arrived from his native Tarma, asks for “permission to visit the city,” he wants to tour the place, but he is not in Miraflores. or San Isidro as he would have liked but in the periphery, far from everything, “he had descended from the hill to the road,” and as he submerged he asked himself in disbelief: “Was that Lima, Lima, Lima?” At just ten years old, he had no better phrase to name that reality; that place was not the one he imagined but “the beast with a million heads.”

 

 

 

That great “beast” made up of people coming from all over, trying to survive as best they could. However, that million-headed beast receives him with a “surprise”: just after getting off the San Cosme hill, Esteban finds ten soles; This apparent “luck” was another game of fate, since he not only finds the ten suns but also Pedro, a child without parents who survived thanks to his cunning. We could say that Pedro was the same as him, only that he had arrived earlier and had already become accustomed to that reality; Life experience had taught him that if he wanted to survive in that world he had to lose all kinds of morals and feelings; It is for this reason that upon learning of the “good luck” of his lucky friend, he does not hesitate to propose a prosperous business, Esteban would invest the ten soles and he would invest the “knowledge of life” in him.

 

 

 

Esteban, excited, thinking that the Beast was not as bad as he had believed, lets himself go without knowing how ruthless he could be. Pedro, to finish his plan, distracts the naive boy by sending him to buy something to eat; This carelessness is well taken advantage of to disappear with the money and all the profit from the sale of the magazines. Esteban, hours later, resigns himself, “Pedro was not in that place, nor in any other”, the Beast did not forgive the naive or people of good faith. While he returned home, it was surely in his “little head” that if he wanted to live in that place he should act like Pedro or perhaps worse.

 

 

 

With a language typical of the 50s, Enrique Congrains captures that Lima full of contrasts, violent and difficult. He inserts himself into the life of the immigrant to tell us in simple and direct language the series of misfortunes that uprooted people go through in their eagerness to settle into this new reality. The migrant subject of the mountains will be a recurring theme in his first three books.

When everyone had already forgotten about him and when the schoolbooks republished his stories as the best tribute to who Enrique Congrains was in life, one winter morning in 2007 he burst onto the Lima literary scene with kicks and punches. But he did not come alone, he had a couple of books under his arm, The Storyteller and 999 Words for Planet Earth, and as if that were not enough he also brought with him a monkey's paw that he brandished in the air like a blunt weapon.

 

 

 

Many took him, whether from near or far, as a madman, and others as an unparalleled eccentric, but in reality he was just a person who wanted to make his life whatever he wanted; He went where he wanted and wrote what he wanted, he resisted until the last second of his life to be part of that every day and frivolous world, and if he could have continued with his madness, but death had been following him for a long time with the same urgency as their creditors.

 

 

 

 

 

On July 6, 2009, in peaceful Cochabamba, plagued by respiratory problems, he left this world to go to the world of imagination that he had created so precociously.

With affection,

Ruben