On January 26 like today (in 1926) José Mª Valverde was born, one of the great poets of his generation. A boy from Extremadura who, at the age of 19, published his first book of poetry where one of his most quoted verses appears: "I am called a man of God, but I am without God." That shortly after he was in Madrid studying Catalan on his behalf: because they have told him that there is a terrific Catalan poet named J. Maragall, and he wants to read him. That he got a doctorate in philosophy (against the opinion of Dámaso Alonso who predicted a great future for him as a poet) and in the mid-fifties he landed in Barcelona with a chair of aesthetics. I had to attend his classes and I didn't like it because I wanted him to talk about poetry, and he started talking about Le Corbusier and other architectural geniuses...
Everything already augured a peaceful future for him. But around 1965, the Galician dictator suspended José L. Aranguren and Tierno Galván from their ethics chair, and our poet reacted by rhyming in consonance with the mistreated: “without ethics there is no aesthetics”. It was his most famous verse that led him to resign from the professorship and his transfer (with Pilar, his wife and their small children) to the United States where he was offered to teach Hispanic literature.
Once again, all seemed pacified when the news circulated in Virginia that the US government primarily called up young foreigners for the Vietnam War. The threat to her children is so real that she decides to leave again, going to Canada.
After the dictator died, he returned to Spain and for a few years we were neighbors in Sant Cugat. He translates the Gospels there and causes another scandal among the clergy not only because of the title (The Good News of the Kingdom of God), but because the parable known as "of the ten virgins" (from Matthew 25, 1ss) translates it as "of ten girls. National Catholicism is annoyed as if it had taken away the dignity of those poor fictional young women, who appear in the Gospel only as guests at a wedding.
He continues to be involved in all left-wing causes: with Mao's China and above all with the Central American revolutions, always with his irredeemable radicalism. One day we ran into each other by chance in Barcelona, in the Plaza de la Catedral and he explained to me that he doesn't know whether to receive Rigoberta Menchú because she has met Jordi Pujol!... "But José Mª, -I dare say to my old teacher- It is that there are things that are inevitable”. Then I visit him a few times in his new apartment in Barcelona (I think it was in Balmes street but I'm not sure). He tells me about his obsession with language: its possibilities, its limits, its meaning. He always in front of his electric typewriter, without deciding to switch to the computer because he feels too old for that.
There I met and became intimate with Pilar, his “stradivaria” wife (I intentionally use the epithet of the violin rather than the almost homonymous adjective because the refinement of that woman had something as inspiring and pacifying as good music). There I know the last drama of the family: a son with AIDS (which had just exploded in those eighties). And I remember their reaction to such a new and alarming problem: not to solve it for themselves but to help so many bewildered people. They found (or become part of it, I don't know) a center to help families with children with AIDS. And Pilar tells me two significant anecdotes: a) in meetings with parents of patients, they always blame themselves: "it's that we were too liberal, we tolerated everything to the son and what had to happen ended up happening." And on the other hand: "the fault is ours because we educated the child with too much rigor and severity, and then he did not know how to use freedom when he had it." And b): in so many years of marriage she had never seen a condom; and now I'm distributing them in the Center...
One day, on one of those visits, I told him that in Tübingen I had heard Ernst Bloch say that when he died, he had to meet Hegel and tell him two things: he didn't know how but that had to happen. Weeks later I received the book by José Mª: Nietzsche: from philologist to antichrist. And I thought to tell him that when he died he would also meet Nietzsche to tell him that the aforementioned sentence (without ethics there is no aesthetics), Nietzsche had completed it by turning it around: without aesthetics there is no ethics. Because all the Nietzschean critique of morality, beyond its typical provocations (and its outrages about the mistreatment of the weak as an affirmation of the strong), rests on an intuition like this: “without aesthetics there is no ethics”. First cousin of that other by Agustín de Hipona: "whoever does good out of fear and not out of love for the good, that one is not good but a coward." Without aesthetics there is no ethics but self-righteousness.
It is therefore very regrettable that Wagner's widow Cosima (who lived until 1930), with whom Nietzsche was in love all his life and whom he treated with incredible respect, took with her all the letters that he wrote to her (those from Cosima a Nietzsche, published not long ago by Trotta, are very suggestive). There we would have heard him speak in a different, less provocative and more educational way.
And it is that, correcting Machado and Serrat: everything passes, but not everything remains...
