Poe was published in Masticadores for 47 weeks in Spanish and then became a book. Its author Félix Molina, along with two translators, sent it to us exclusively, to inaugurate Latinos. It will appear every month and we will enjoy this book. Thank you, Félix Molina! —j re crivello Editor
The Alley
The alley, the bucket of filth, the bottle. There
I always find him, it is his home and the dream that
crown each of his days. But the resemblance is pure
evidence: the same lack of definition of the chin, the
asymmetry and descent of the left eye, the
minimal bangs licked on two halves, equally
asymmetrical, the ants with the moustache… It’s the face
of the Master! He is –although he does not know it– his twin
(from Alexander London’s diary: Baltimore, March 8th, 1849).
I was sick-sick unto death with that long agony; and
when they at length unbound me, and I was permit-
ted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me
(The Pit and the Pendulum).
The alley
Poe is not dead. He escaped death while surviving the brief minutes of his mock funeral, thanks to the advice he remembered from the pathologist and surgeon J. Mason Warren and the plan drawn up by the engineer Alexander London, which included a prodigious gallery from his grave to a Baltimore basement.
London had been immersed in reading Poe while his life was a transfer on the first steamers that made their voyage between Bristol and New York. There, crouched in his cabin next to the machines, he divided his time between the Manuscript found in a bottle reproduced in a well-thumbed copy of Baltimore Saturday and the threatening boil of the spigots.
He met Poe at the anti-alcoholic assembly that the Presbyterians organized by the dock. There, they themselves drew up the plan and established its location central: the basement of one of the two-story houses in which the engineer initially settled, when the shipping company assigned him to that increasingly bustling port.
London was not only a philanthropist, but above all an atrocious reader whose myopia had forced even the design of special lenses, with very dense steel rings, which supported the weight of the glass with apparent lightness. The agreement with Poe included a first
reading of the new stories before they may circulate in the country’s newspapers and magazines, taken from the darkness of the basement by an intermediary executor
that both of them would name.
London visited the basement only twice, as he was very scrupulous with the details that guaranteed the success of his mission. The first was to supply Poe of the foods essential for their survival and a mahogany-tinged, cinnamon-scented concoction that served as whiskey. This operation was then entrusted, under a promise of silence, to a subordinate with many favors to be grateful for.
The other decline was months after establishing Poe in his lair, to load himself with the plot of the simulated testimonies of his death, which a brigade of well-connected ex-alcoholics would handwrite and then send to the press, proclaiming themselves witnesses of a fatal beating or the final ravages of a
drunkenness. Or even complicit in an electoral scam that used kidnapping and drunkenness.
And also to make himself —a precious roll under his coat of blue ears— with the new stories.
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