According to the painter Kurt Landor, one of the protagonists Bramante’s staircase (Seix Barral, 2019), a novel by Leonardo Valencia, in the first moment before the picture, words are not needed. “When a picture is revealed, neither words nor people are needed”, he believes, precisely when recalling the unfinished portrait of his friend Dora Lerner, which he began in his youth, and to which he must return at the end of his life and career. . His thinking is, I think, about the appearance of art, a picture or a creative moment: “The viewer who thinks about a work of art repeats the same quiet moment in which the painter, abandoned to the silence sought in his studio, without interruption, without waiting for anyone, stops in front of an empty canvas and he gropes his materials as if he doesn’t know what to choose. Maybe that first moment in front of a blank canvas or a blank page of a novelist is more significant, more difficult and more mysterious than the same picture or the same novel that emerges from that moment. And maybe it’s a big theme or one of the big themes of the novel that Leonardo Valencia wrote for ten years and which saw the light of day in 2019.

I read it in New York, at the dawn of summer that year, almost straight and out of breath. Finishing reading the last few pages felt like a disaster. That is, how essential books feel. I, who prided myself on being a book reviewer, could not write anything. I had no words. Read Bramante’s staircase it was like seeing for the first time a picture they had longed for for many years. Days later, I remember, I went to Europe, in the context of an academic project in, perhaps, Kafka’s footsteps, and I could not stop thinking about Leonardo Valencia and his novel when I finally thought about the works of Tina Blau, Emil Nolde, Egon Schiele or Gustav Klimt in Beldevere Palace; that primordial emotion that Goya, Van Gogh and Dalí, as well as the great musicians who were and remain, evoked in me many years ago sound track of my life.

Leonardo Valencia claims that Ecuadorian painter Araceli Gilbert met jazz musician Sydney Bechet in Paris between 1951 and 1952. In reality, they never met, or he her. Gilbert heard her at the Pleyel concert hall and could never forget her music. He said that every instrument tells a story and every story has its own language. He had too many stories in him, because he needed different languages. One Man Band it was a concert of his contradictions. When Araceli Gilbert heard it, the clear and distinct sound of the clarinet and saxophone, a deep melancholic register, remained engraved in her memory in a seemingly arbitrary combination of colors and sounds. Literature is, therefore, the key to memory, not only ours, but everyone’s. That’s why it says Valencia in Bramante’s staircase: “A museum guide, Landor concludes, will never make you see a painting. It’s there so you don’t get lost, literally so you don’t get lost in yourself.” (OR)