In the preceding chapters I have focused on the broad sense of temporal loss in Montejo’s work, taking such loci as the childhood homestead and the poet’s father’s bakery as leitmotivs through which the effects of temporal - and temporolinguistic - loss are presented. But the importance of these locales in their own right attunes us to the fact that the overriding sense of loss in Montejo’s oeuvre is played out in terms of place and habitat as well. It is a thematic which is most prominent in the collections of Montejo’s mid-period, that is, Algunas palabras, Terredad, Trópico absoluto, and Alfabeto del mundo, as well as the heteronymic work El cuaderno de Blas Coll, although, as with the temporal, Montejo continues to engage with this topos in his late production.

In order to prepare the ground for an investigation of this general topos of place and habitat, it is necessary first of all to take up where the previous chapter ended: with the image of the poet toiling away at night, following the example of the panaderos of old. ‘The night’ is one of the most persistent motifs of Montejo’s work from Algunas palabras onwards. In every collection up to and including Fábula del escriba it appears as the time of poetic work indicated by Montejo in his descriptions of the taller blanco: in ‘Nocturno al lado de mi hijo’ from Algunas palabras, for example, the night-time provides the backdrop for the poet’s ruminations on the generational cycle; in ‘Labor’ from Terredad, he focuses on the image of ‘los poetas en vela hasta muy tarde | [que] se aferran a viejos cuadernos’ (T, 63); and in Alfabeto del mundo Montejo pays particular attention to the image of the poet working by the light of his lamp, a nod to Montejo’s Romantic sensibilities and already alluded to in poems such as ‘Dormir’ (AP) and ‘Réplica nocturna’ (TA), depicting it as ‘cansada ya de arder, de tanto estar en vela | frente a la oscuridad del mundo’ (‘Mi lámpara’, AM, 161).1 This long-standing thematic thread, spanning some thirty years, is particularly marked in Partitura de la cigarra, not least in ‘Noche en la noche’, which depicts the poet’s entire life, in which he has seen his poetic comrades disappear one by one, as one long night working alone by his lamplight: