Maybe today, around noon, you are showering or taking a bath quietly in your house. You may be interested to know (although the anniversary is poetic, the data is quite macabre) that just at that time, 40 years ago, on Wednesday, January 14, 1976 to be exact, the youngest and most gifted of the Canarian poets died in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in conditions similar to those described at the beginning of the paragraph. I am referring, of course, to Félix Francisco Casanova, our —as the newspapers of his time already baptized him— particular Rimbaud.
According to the official diagnosis (whoever wants to look for the ghosts of suicide will find them), his death was due to a gas leak. The most reliable report of the events is provided by his own father, Félix Casanova de Ayala, with the pain still festering, in Poetry as a Premonitory Dream, a communication read at the Ateneo de La Laguna on April 22, 1976, during the First Congress of Canarian Poetry. It says (p. 186), and with this clarifies the cause, whether intentional or not:
"The ventilation window was blocked by the plastic curtain, the shower water faltered and the air became unbreathable."
A tragic domestic accident, which could have happened to anyone, after all. However, in the case of Félix, as the great poet he was, some of his verses and reflections turned out to be prophetic. Thus, for example, in the month of March of '74, as he writes in his diary I would have or had loved, he begins to create a series of short poems entitled «Syndromes» —numbered from 1 to 7—, and the first of them, without going any further, concludes with these two verses: "the shadow of my body / floats like a corpse". In addition, in another annotation in the diary he notes the following: "In the «Syndromes», more than water, there is blood. I had not calculated this at first. […] Therefore I will have to open bifurcations in the path that I proposed: the poems of water, and the poems of blood (although quite watered down), ha! Now I believe in something more hurtful, more penetrating: can the air itself kill!...". Two basic elements, water and air, the first omnipresent throughout his work. Seen like this, a posteriori, it is easy to imagine Casanova himself as a victim, and perhaps executioner, of his own words, poisoned by the air and submerged in the water. And if this did not contain enough drops of mystery, there is also the final poem he wrote, just a month before he died, dedicated to his girlfriend María José, and whose title and last verse foreshadow the fatal outcome: "You are a good time to die".
Be that as it may, that was forty years ago, and we could say, with a little black humor, that it is water under the bridge. What remains fully valid is Félix's vitality, the passion he put into everything he did, his ability to amaze and disarm us with a single line, and above all, as strange and contradictory as it may seem, his distant closeness. Because more than his inexhaustible talent or the verbal waste of his language, what makes Casanova a special poet is his ability to connect with readers who love good literature, to tune into their same frequency even if they come from another era, and to empathize with their pain and their joy. It is like a gigantic green-eyed magnet that stares at you from beyond, attracting you without remedy.
That is why, despite not having had the opportunity to meet him —he died six years before I was born—, I consider him a good friend, and I feel his loss deeply. Because through his poems and experiences, the confessions in his diary, Bernardo Vorace, the character in his novel, he makes you a participant and accomplice in his extraordinary existence, and thanks to that you become fond of him and establish ties and bonds of affection so strong and intimate that they transcend death itself. I suppose this explains why every time I go to Tenerife and have time, I take the opportunity to visit his grave in the cemetery. Because it's like going to see an old friend. I have even taken there, acting as a guide, a few chosen ones from among my closest friends, also admirers of his work, and we have left him as offerings flowers, fragments of poems or a pick so that he can continue playing his electric guitar, because music was what Félix Francisco Casanova loved most, above anything else.
IN THE TOMB OF THE MENCEY OF THE POETS
(Félix Francisco Casanova. Santa Lastenia Cemetery)
Last stop in Tenerife:
two blue roses and a minute of silence,
to meet again and say goodbye
to my poetic amore.
02-11-2015
So, in short, it matters little the decades or centuries that pass, because Félix's words do not age, and although he has been dead for forty years, today he is more alive than ever.
