I, gentlemen, am from Zapotlán el Grande.

A town that was so big that they made Ciudad

Guzmán a hundred years ago. But we are still such a people that we still call it Zapotlán. It is a
round valley of corn, a circus of mountains with no more adornment than its good temperament,
a blue sky and a lagoon that comes and goes like a thin dream. From May to December, the
even and growing height of the cornfields is seen. Sometimes we call it Zapotlán de Orozco
because José Clemente, the one with the violent brushes, was born there. As your countryman, I
feel like I was born at the foot of a volcano. Regarding volcanoes, the orography of my town
includes two other peaks, in addition to the painter: the Nevado, which is called Colima,
although it is all in Jalisco. Off, the ice in the winter decorates it. But the other one is alive. In
1912 it covered us in ashes and the old people remember with dread this slight Pompeian
experience: night fell in broad daylight and everyone believed in the Last Judgment. To go no
further, last year we were scared with lava eruptions, roars and fumaroles. Attracted by the
phenomenon, the geologists came to greet us, they took our temperature and pulse, we bought
them a glass of pomegranate punch and they reassured us scientifically: this bomb that we have
under our pillow could explode maybe tonight or any given day within the next ten thousand
years.

I am the fourth child of parents who were fourteen and are still alive to tell the tale, thank God.
As you see, I am not a spoiled child. Arreolas and Zúñigas dispute in my soul like dogs their old
domestic dispute between unbelievers and devotees. Both seem to unite far away in a common
Basque origin. But mestizos at a good time, the blood that made Mexico circulates without
discord in their veins, along with that of a French nun who entered them from who knows where.
There are family stories that were better not to tell because my last name is lost or gained
biblically among the Sephardim of Spain. Nobody knows if Don Juan Abad, my great-
grandfather, wore the Arreola to erase his last reputation as a convert (Abad, from abba, which
is father in Aramaic). Don't worry, I'm not going to plant a family tree here or lay the artery that
brings me plebeian blood from the copyist of El Cid, or the name of the spurious Torre de
Quevedo. But there is nobility in my word. Word of honor. I come in a straight line from two
very ancient lineages: I am a blacksmith on my mother's side and a carpenter on my father's
side. Hence my artisanal passion for language.

I was born in 1918, in the ravages of the Spanish flu, on the day of Saint Matthew the Evangelist
and Saint Ifigenia the Virgin, among chickens, pigs, goats, turkeys, cows, donkeys and horses. I
took the first steps followed precisely by a black sheep that got out of the pen. Such is the
background of the lasting anguish that gives color to my life, that concretizes in me the neurotic
aura that surrounds the entire family and that, fortunately or unfortunately, has never resolved
itself into epilepsy or madness. This evil black sheep is still chasing me and I feel that my steps
tremble like those of the troglodyte chased by a mythological beast.

Like almost all children, I also went to school. I could not continue in it for reasons that are
relevant but that I cannot explain: my childhood passed in the midst of the provincial chaos of
the Cristero Revolution. With the churches and religious schools closed, I, the nephew of priests
and nuns in hiding, was not to enter the official classrooms under penalty of heresy. My father, a
man who always knows how to find a way out of alleys that have no way, instead of sending me
to a clandestine seminary or a government school, he simply put me to work. And so, at the age
of twelve I entered as an apprentice in the workshop of Don José María Silva, master
bookbinder, and then in the printing press of Chepo Gutiérrez. From there comes the great love
I have for books as manual objects. The other, the love of texts, had been born earlier through
the work of a primary school teacher to whom I pay tribute: thanks to José Ernesto Aceves I
knew that there were poets in the world, in addition to merchants, small industrialists and
farmers. Here I owe a clarification: my father, who knows everything, has done great things in
commerce, industry and agriculture (always in a small way) but has failed in everything: he has
the soul of a poet.

I am self-taught, it is true. But at the age of twelve and in Zapotlán el Grande I read Baudelaire,
Walt Whitman and the main founders of my style: Papini and Marcel Schwob, along with fifty
other more and less illustrious names... And I heard songs and popular sayings and I really liked
the conversation of country people.

Since 1930 to date I have held more than twenty different trades and jobs... I have been a
street vendor and journalist; porter and bank collector. Printer, comedian and baker. What you
want.

It would be unfair if I didn't mention here the man who changed my life. Louis Jouvet, whom I
met while passing through Guadalajara, took me to Paris twenty-five years ago. That trip is a
dream that I would try in vain to revive; I stepped on the stage of French Comedy: a naked
slave in the galleys of Antony and Cleopatra, under the orders of Jean Louis Barrault and at the
feet of Marie Bell.

Upon my return from France, the Economic Culture Fund welcomed me into its technical
department thanks to the good offices of Antonio Alatorre, who passed me off as a philologist
and grammarian. After three years of correcting proofs, translations and originals, I began to
appear in the catalog of authors (Several inventions appeared in Tezontle, 1949).

One last melancholic confession. I haven't had time to practice literature. But I have dedicated
all the hours possible to loving her. I love language above all things and I revere those who have
manifested the spirit through words, from Isaiah to Franz Kafka. I distrust almost all
contemporary literature. I live surrounded by classic and benevolent shadows that protect my
dream as a writer. But also for the young people who will create the new Mexican literature: to
them I delegate the task that I have not been able to perform. To facilitate it, I tell you every
day what I learned in the few hours in which my mouth was governed by the other. What I
heard, for a single moment, through the burning bush

Juan José Arreola