Un desangramiento frenético

Abstract

R. Arenas committed suicide on the 7th of December 1990 in New York when he was in the last phase of HIV infection. However, before ending his life, he tried to complete his work El Color del verano, la Pentagonía,the first four volumes of which were already on sale. He finished his book of memories Antes que anochezca by revising the third poem of the poetic trilogy, Leprosorio. It’s hard to believe that he could set himself such an enormous task whilst enduring the last stages of disease. A sense of failure infuses his last three works but feelings of hatred become much more apparent when he refers to the cause of this failure, Fidel Castro. The most interesting aspect of the aesthetic representation is related to the changeable nature of memory and how the inconstancy of this exiled writer’s memories help to develop the work he started months or – in the instance of Leprosorio - even years ago. At the same time, those changes affect also his interpretation of the irreparable twilight that lights up at the last moment and which creates the certainty of unlimited liberty achievable at the final limits of life and by himself alone.