Queer Places:
Hotel Geneve, Londres 130, Juárez, Cuauhtémoc, 06600 Ciudad de México, CDMX, Mexico
Salvador
Alighieri (born December 29, 1930) was a Italo-Mexican bodybuilder. Prior to the 1940s,
many same-sex-attracted men found it easier to cohabit abroad. Gay Spanish
Republican exile Luis Cernuda, who
regularly visited Mexico City during the late 1940s and early 1950s before
settling there permanently, found it difficult to cohabit with his boyfriend,
Salvador Aligheri, at the time twenty-year old. The inspiration for Cernuda’s
Poemas para un cuerpo, Aligheri and Cernuda regularly met at the Hotel Geneve
until 1955, when Aligheri disappeared and Cernuda moved in with Spanish
writers Manuel Altolaguirre
and Concha Mendez.
When Cernuda met Alighieri in 1951, he was 20 years old and 1.62 meters tall,
nicknamed "El Chocolate" for his brown skin. He had all the attributes that
attracted the author of Reality and Desire, who after vacationing in Mexico in
1949 had been captivated by "the flowers that do not pass, the dark bodies".
After a second visit in 1951, the poet, a prominent member of the Generation
of '27, returned to Mount Holyoke College (Massachusetts), where he had taught
since 1947, to resign and settle permanently in Mexico in November 1952. From
then on, a relationship of "pure love" developed between friends, Alighieri
says in a conversation held in 2003 as part of a long interview. Cernuda, he
recalled, even agreed to confirm his firstborn, Salvador, to establish between
them the very Mexican bond of the compadrazgo and thus "tie a friendship, make
it more mine."
Despite his influence on the poet's life and work, the identity of the young
man who inspired the 16 compositions of Poems for a Body (1957) had been an
enigma to scholars for years. Cernuda himself, always modest, took care to
hide it, but he accurately documented the "late" passion it aroused. In
History of a Book (1958) he identified Alighieri as "X": "I think I was never
so much in love if not so in love (...) never in my youth did I feel so young
as in those days in Mexico." For many years, specialists intuited that this
great love of the poet was called Salvador, because that is the title of the
first composition of Poems for a body. The only reference with name and
surname was found by the researcher of El Colegio de México James Valender
when editing in 2003 the Epistolario (1924-1963) of Cernuda, on the occasion
of the centenary of his birth. In a letter addressed to the Englishman
Sebastian Kerr, dated May 16, 1960, he writes: "A friend of mine, Salvador
Alighieri, to whom I had a friendship very different from the one I have with
Octavio Paz, among other strange peculiarities had to never tell me when he
was going to leave Mexico capital."
That boy of restless and elusive character who, after several years of walking
as a globetrotter settled definitively in Guadalajara, spoke for the first
time of the intimate Cernuda in 2007, "much very tender". Cernuda met
Alighieri at the Hercules gymnasium on Tacuba Street. "He went every other
day, did very light exercises like sit-ups, a little squats, occasionally he
got into the apparatuses, but weights did very little; I think what I wanted
was not to feel so alone," recalled Alighieri, who trained daily to compete in
bodybuilding contests. The friendship began when the boy felt that his
classmates "began to burden his hand (Cernuda) with their jokes," because they
made fun of him being Spanish and his Andalusian accent. "I defended him
because we are of Italian descent – his father was Florentine and his mother
Mexican – and that's when we began to make friends."
In 1951, Cernuda was almost 49 years old, while Alighieri was just 20 years
old – he was born on December 29, 1930 in Mexico City – he was newly married
and already the father of a son, but he did not settle down. As he was
attractive and flirtatious, he had plenty of women. "Luis scolded and advised
me as if he was my father. We would go to a café, Night and Day, and there he
insisted that I should not be so crazy, that I should respect my wife."
Alighieri used to visit the poet, first at the Hotel Geneve, and then in his
apartment on Madrid Street. "I would do push-ups on the carpet while he looked
at me, smoked a pipe and made notes. I was a fool, but I thought it was
uneducated to see what I was doing." Probably, the poet wrote some of the
verses of Poems for a body, which refer to the contemplation of the beloved
figure. Alighieri did not know about these poems then, and knowing four
decades after the death of his friend who inspired them, moved him.
A lover of the sun and the beach, Cernuda invited his young compadre to
Acapulco several times. "He told me 'I have holidays and I want to go to the
sea, are you coming with me?' We would go and he paid for everything. I must
say that it helped me not only morally but financially; He once told me in his
Andalusian accent: 'Man, Salvaor, you don't have shoes, I'm going to buy you
some.' I was very sorry." The coldness that characterized the character who
from a young age assumed the classic image of the dandy, was transformed when
he was with Salvador. Cernuda loved him, how did he prove it to him? In his
gestures, he didn't have to hug or kiss me to show that tenderness; he
overflowed him despite being a very serious person. "Sometimes he hugged me
very tightly, not like any friend, but radiated that appreciation that on my
part was reciprocated. I knew he was gay, but I think he believed that if
something (carnal) had happened, that charm he felt would have been broken.
His relief was for me to be with him, even if we didn't talk. I don't deny
that I once kissed him on the cheek because I felt it (that desire) and I
wanted to show him that I loved him. He left, he just laughed and shuddered.
But it did not go beyond that because Luis was not mannered, he had no eyes
other than for the classes he gave (at UNAM), for his poems and I think for me
too. It was a pure, platonic love."
The letter to Kerr describes Alighieri's tendency to elope, so the poet
used to reproach him: "Oh, Salvaor, you have a bad ass!" Cernuda wrote: "I
could never get him (Salvador), despite our friendship, to tell me his
departure before embarking on one. The procedure was: summon us somewhere, and
his non-appearance. You will understand that my bad mood was raining on him
when he appeared later." Alighieri fully acknowledges himself in that
allusion. "I was so immersed in the gym that I didn't go, or a girl crossed
me, it was a time when I was very crazy, I was walking from one place to
another." One day, around 1955, the elusive young man disappeared
definitively, as usual, without saying goodbye. He had problems with his wife,
from whom he later divorced and, although he already had two children, he
decided to go to Nuevo Laredo. He was unable to cross the border and stayed to
work as a collector at the international bridge. There he continued to
practice the passion that was awakened in him as a child, bodybuilding, which
at the end of 1963 brought him to Mexico City to a competition, where he won
the title of Mr. Mexico Junior. He also came to marry for the second time, a
union that gave him four more children. "Then they told me that Luis had just
died (November 5, 1963) and I was depressed because I thought that after so
many years of not seeing him I had come to know that he no longer existed. I
haven't had a friend like him again, those friends have each other only once
in a lifetime, and today I miss him very much."
Luis Cernuda did not boast of being homosexual, but he did not hide it
either. From the 1930s he wrote homoerotic poems such as El joven marino and A
un muchacho andaluz. In that sense "he gave – for his time – an amazing lesson
in naturalness," says Luis Antonio de Villena. In the final verses of the poem
The Blackbird, the Dove, from The Forbidden Pleasures (1936), he wrote: "For
someday I will be all the things I love: / The air, the water, the plants, the
teenager." Another poet, Tomás Segovia, has stressed that the divine thing for
Cernuda was "the youth of the beautiful desirable boys who cross his world".
De Villena affirms that the poet "fell in love with an ideal, with an
impossible", which confirms Poems for a body, where the relationship with the
beloved is platonic: "If I spoke to you / How love holds / His reason for
living and his madness, / You would not understand./ That's why I say
nothing".
"He (Cernuda) loved me as a friend, as a son, as a lover, he loved me like
everything that could happen, that's why I say that I did not appreciate him,
but I loved him for his way of being." At 76-year-old man Alighieri worked as
a technician in a leather tanning workshop in Guadalajara.
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