Of Hunger and Certainty, by Jonathan Blunk

César Vallejo, photography by Juan Larrea (Spain) 1926

Of Hunger and Certainty
 
Clutching his hat and a small book, César Vallejo leans against a huge boulder mottled with lichen. He is downcast, as though cast down against a smudged fretwork of black tree trunks, against the certainty of hunger, his ankles crossed.
 
Vallejo arrived in Paris on July 13, 1923, and within weeks fell into poverty. He slept on park benches or in Metro stations. He learned to step skillfully from a tram or subway car to spare the leather of his shoes. To preserve his suit, he always stood.
 
This must have been the finest hat he ever owned. Vallejo wears a ring with a large stone and a double-breasted overcoat now a size too big. His hair seems to flee back from his forehead and shadows pool below the sharp bones of his face. He stands in prayer or meditation; or maybe he’s impatient, and the boulder leans against him. His brow appears chiseled, illuminated; at thirty-four his face is creased by the pain others must suffer.
 
From the time Vallejo left Peru until his death fifteen years later, he published only five poems—two of them in a magazine he edited with the Spanish poet Juan Larrea in 1926. Favorables-París-Poema also printed an essay on painting by Juan Gris. Vallejo revered Gris, who “toiled away heroically.” Though older, Gris, too, watched from the edge of the Parisian feast. They shared the same shy manner, olive skin, dark eyes and hair—both strong-willed, exiled artists.
 
Larrea’s photograph dates from this time. It’s said Vallejo wrote “Black Stone on a White Stone”—predicting his own death on a rainy Thursday in Paris—after seeing this portrait. The poem proved true, mostly, for it was raining in Paris on Good Friday, April 15, 1938.
 
Vallejo is part stone, part blood, part bone. His steady gaze at the earth betrays his obstinate hope, counterweight to the rain that falls endlessly in old photographs of Paris. 

Jonathan Blunk

Jonathan Blunk’s authorized biography, James Wright: A Life in Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), earned praise from The New York Times Book Review, where it was an Editors’ Choice. The Georgia Review has published his essays and reviews, including forthcoming work. Blunk’s poems have appeared in FIELD and other journals, most recently in Nixes Mate Review.