Sometimes, a book is a house where one sits to watch the rain. Other times, it is a window open to the night, to the elements, from which to feel the wind and hear the distant murmur of the sea. From where to contemplate the birds that we do not know if they come to the garden or are leaving.
I pause today to write to Begoña Hernández Batista after having carefully read her "Letters I Write Myself" (Escrituraentrelasnubes, 2025). Her letters are refuge and journey. An intimate correspondence, sustained with herself and with the invisible presences that accompany us all: those we lost, that we dreamed of, that we were. I write to her from an intimate need to respond. From the first poem, where her voice is presented as a compass that turns in the middle of the fog. I understand that she is not looking for certainties, but orientation. This book, these Letters are written from a wound impossible to name. And yet, she finds a way to do it.
There are books like this that are felt. That persistent tremor that only true things leave is felt in the soul. It is a poetic truth that glides delicately over the wound, without hiding it, without naming it many times, but revealing it in each verse. From the title I understand that we are facing a work that is directed to the deepest self, to that inner voice that is reconstructed from fragmentation.
The voice of Begoña Hernández Batista is a voice that has passed through time. Not only because she speaks of time as one who touches it, carries it and drags it, but because she has been transformed by it. Her wisdom gained through loss. Memory, identity, uprooting, the desire for shelter, the home that is dissolving in the rain or recomposing itself in the word she knows well. The tenderness that envelops a bond, even in the final devastating and luminous silence.
A voice that is written to find itself. In the tone of her voice there is a broken delicacy, as if she were speaking from the remains of a storm, but with the clarity of someone who knows how to distinguish between what hurts and what redeems. This serene, lacerated and courageous voice of hers is a voice that comes from pain but also from art, from the craft of painting, from the learning of the gaze. It shows that she is a painter. There is in her verses a will to construct images that shape the way she inhabits the world. Her poems have depth of field, color, texture. She works the language as if she were applying layers of glazes, seeking at the same time density and transparency.
The care of rhythm in her verses is appreciated, but also the need to leave space for silence. Her poems are constructed from a free verse, from short verses, from a syntax that advances by accumulation of images with a soft musicality. The punctuation is light, scarce so as not to interrupt the flow of words. Many poems end in suspense, in a whisper. She does not seek to close a meaning, but to share a state of the soul.
In these Letters there is pain but also resistance, beauty, a search for meaning despite everything. Begoña Hernández Batista observes, waits, rewrites. Sometimes she asks herself, other times she confesses or simply observes and tries to capture the essential in an instant, in a flash. With persistent stroke she dwells on absence, time, childhood, the need for consolation and the impossibility of closing certain wounds.
I have thought a lot about her birds. There are birds that announce storms and others that return to rebuild the nest, like those sparrows that, in their daily gesture, show the inertia of living. Birds that fly over childhood, over the patios of the house. Birds that one day do not return. Birds are messengers, like incarnations of the soul that survives, witnesses of a world that is no longer there. Fleeting presences that reveal a deep nostalgia. They are vulnerable creatures, close to the heart. Their flight evokes the hope of a liberation that is always postponed, the need to fly away from pain. In their flapping there is memory, desire, loss and longings for beauty. When they stop coming to Begoña's garden, something breaks.
As for the island, as a symbol, it is not only the physical place, the islands that we share —Lanzarote, Tenerife— but also a metaphor for loneliness, emotional isolation, the desire to belong to a world that seems to be always in retreat. The island is garden and exile. At the same time, ultimate refuge: where life continues even after the shipwreck, the place where it has survived.
And then there is the sea. The sea is on the forehead, like a line of fire, like a memory that is leaving us. The sea appears in the poems of Begoña Hernández Batista as a figure of time, of origin. Sometimes it is consolation, other times threat. But it is always presence. This is what mourning is like. It merges with the idea of ships without direction, of shores to which one cannot return, of the home that can no longer be inhabited. The sea is immensity and loss. Movement. A changing, insatiable surface. Sometimes it is calm, other times it lashes against the walls and drags the remains of an uninhabited house.
Finally, letters —and with them writing itself— are a form of conjuration. It is a symbol of the human attempt to communicate, with oneself, with the dead, with what cannot be understood. With her letters she tries to keep you afloat. They are not sent letters: they are letters written to console, to remember, to understand. And they await a response, even if it does not arrive. This gesture of writing to herself reveals an essential paradox: we write to remain, to give shape to pain, but also to survive.
The Letters are a notebook of mourning, a logbook written from the tremor. An involuntary memory, a series of missives sent to the past, to this vulnerable present and also to the future. A way to resist from absence. A testimony and an offering. A refuge and a mirror. A way to continue living through the word. Even if the letters are not sent. Even if there is no longer a port.
I have read the Letters of Begoña Hernández Batista as one who approaches the sea at dawn. With the intuition that an intimate, unrepeatable truth awaits there. Where memory, loss, beauty and helplessness are summoned with tenderness as small illuminations. They hurt and embrace. I finish writing and I think that "Letters I Write Myself" deserves to be read slowly, with recollection, as one who opens an album of old photos or listens to the voice of someone dear from afar.
Thank you, Begoña, for allowing us to enter this house of words of yours. Reading your Letters is remembering that there is a form of love that consists of continuing to name what seems unnamable, even if everything hurts. Even if no one answers.
