The Mad Poet's Window

There is a house on a corner in León, across from a small park, where Rubén Darío grew up. It's a museum now. Most people go for Darío — the cradle, the desk, the photographs of the child who became the most famous poet in the Spanish language. That's not why I send people there.

I send them because of Alfonso Cortés.

In 1927, at thirty-four, Cortés moved into that house. He had spent years gathering up Darío's scattered poems for Francisca Sánchez, Darío's widow, and in gratitude she gave him the house she'd inherited. He moved in. And that same year, on the eighteenth of February, at midnight, he went mad — the date is recorded that precisely, because everyone who tells the story tells it that way.

His family chained him to the iron grille of the window. He was violent at times, and they were afraid he'd hurt himself. And it was 1927 and that’s how this was handled in 1927. He stayed chained, on and off, for years. People who visit the house say you can still see where he bent the bars. Eventually, in the 1940s, he was committed to a hospital in Managua, and he spent most of the rest of his life there and in his sisters' house, with stretches of lucidity in between when they would unchain him and he would play the guitar and write in the margins of newspapers, in handwriting so small you need a magnifying glass to read it.

The poems he wrote after he lost his mind are the ones he's remembered for. The most famous is called "Ventana."

Window.

In English the line everyone quotes runs something like: a fragment of blue has more intensity than the whole sky. The English is fine. The Spanish does something the English can't, which is to say the language makes the small blue piece feel contained and endless in the same breath.

I think about that line more than I'd like to admit.

Sometimes at four in the morning and usually on a boat. And there’s a grey square of window pretending to be the whole sky - or maybe the whole ocean. It’s hard to tell.

I think about. And I thin about why I think about it.

A man chained to a window, who by every reasonable measure had every right to write something furious, wrote instead about looking. Not about the chains. Not about the injustice of being a poet kept in a back room while the country built a museum to the poet who'd lived there before him. He wrote about the blue in the window and how it was somehow more than the sky it was a piece of.

The looking wasn't a way of coping with what he'd lost. The looking was the whole poem.

It took me a long time to understand why this matters to the work I do here, and I'm still not sure I have all of it. But part of it is this. The people who come down on retreat arrive from mostly enormous lives — the jobs and the houses and the calendars and the long roster of people who need them. By about the third day they start to notice that the size of the life has been costing them something. The cook at the lodge, the woman who runs the fruit stand, the guy hauling his boat up the sand at dawn — their worlds are smaller, in the literal sense of how far they range, and they tend to look at things harder than my guests do. Cortés, chained to one window, looked harder than anyone.

He didn't choose his small world. Our guests, by and large, chose theirs. Our retreats and the space Nica creates, for them, starts to signal a retreat to something . But the instruction is the same either way. A fragment of blue has more intensity than the whole sky. Make the frame smaller and you see more, not less.

If you go to León, go to the house. The staff are careful about the room and they should be. But late in the morning, when the light's good, if you ask and you wait, they'll usually let you stand in it. Stand there a minute. Look at the window. Then walk back out into León— the heat, the school kids, the motorcycles, somebody frying quesillo down the block. Then and carry a little of the room with you.

Cortés died in 1965 in León, at his sisters' house. He's buried inside the cathedral, a few feet from Darío — the most celebrated poet in the language and the mad one who lived in his house, side by side under the same roof, the lions of León keeping watch over both. Most people come to see Darío's tomb and don't know whose grave is next to it. It's worth knowing. It’s worth standing at both.