This book is made with painful experiences of life itself... More than a novel, it is a story. A painful history that repents itself and will continue to be repeated as long as there is one homeless man left in the world without freedom and without education; while, walking under the sky, is left a human being martyred by his loneliness or his ignorance (Soto Aparicio, 1956, p. 8)

I watched his chest that arrhythmic was moving, tired of so much struggle. I saw my mother who kept praying in silence, like all that weekend. I approached my wife for strength. I went back to my father and put my hand on his forehead, breathed slow and stopped, breathed again and finally stopped. My hands did not detach from his forehead, I closed his eyes, knew that his struggle was just over, he rested. My mother stood by the bed, prayed a little harder, kissed him, and with an overwhelming tranquility, with the greatest love in the world, dismissed him. It was eight forty in the morning on May 2, 2016.

After a year of struggle, with deep and terrible pains that impelled him to write his Log of the Agonizer, his old machine Olivetti is silent, no longer heard the clatter on paper when he worked with the word he wrote to more than 100 per minute with the fingers of the heart. There will be no more blank pages with their stories and as he always said: “when my voice is silent, my books will scream for me” and that work is just beginning.

In the article “a sea of silence in a world of words” my brother Jaime describes and remembers in a particular way:

I remember it was a complete disaster for manual labor. Small home fixes (something beyond changing a light bulb) became complicated tangles of cables, tools, bruises, and sufferings. My mother had to come to his aid and almost always ended up calling the plumber or the electrician or anyone, who in addition to doing the work had to "undo the wrongs" that my father had caused. If it were up to him, the cars should not have tires not to have to change them, and the only thing he did well was to put gas because of all other maintenance things were forgotten. Yes, my dad was denied for everyday things. But he was a superhero when it came to listening and giving advice.

He left us a great lesson where “love” is the axis of life, its thread, motive, and reason:

I think that love, like life, is a mirror that gives us back the face that we look at it. The love that is surrender, which is to give itself completely, also implies receiving the other in the same measure and is a both-way path that never ends and that, fortunately, is accompanying this road of life. The two parallels go road and path, always seeking that full moment that is perhaps, what justifies us, what gives us north, which becomes a compass to guide us in this sometimes difficult path of life. Love is, then, the companion par excellence, which never betrays and is what projects us beyond the term fixed for life.

All his work has a north, a constant concern to denounce, to show, to evidence the anxieties and questions of man on this continent:

The central axis of all my books is the man from Latin America, with his problematic, his daily anguish, his struggle to survive, his rebellion against injustice, his anger against the oppressors. The man who has to sell his labor power to the highest bidder; the one who does not have a house to live in; the one who, in this vast and alien world, did not have a furrow of his own. The one that learns to drink with the mother’s breast milk, the rebellion against an unsustainable social situation and which, suddenly in the midst of all this daily barbarity, continues to seek peace. The one who can’t afford a notebook for his children and who sees that the State has been closing schools and condemning the people to illiteracy. The one that looks terrified how that same state, that same government has been closing the hospitals, to the point where already the poor people do not have any social service in the field of health. The one who contemplates with amazement how the government he chose to take him along the right path of peace, harmony, coexistence, spends all the money from the national budget in gunpowder [...] we are burning the little money we have in war, and we do not pay a single cent for peace.

A man who kept his daily life to write and read, calm and serene. Among the many memories, my brother Jaime finishes his reflection and notes about my father:

I had, with my brothers, the happiness and blessing of having and enjoying my dad for 60 years, many years longer than most people in this country have their parents alive. Today, with my four flesh-and-blood brothers and my 72 brothers in paper and ink, we feel the loneliness and his absence. Life gave us the opportunity to give him back a little bit of everything he gave us. By caring for him during his illness, the papers were reversed, and he became our son. That's how we felt him: fragile, defenseless, scared, sad, in pain, hopeless ... There we were all: his five children under the organized, diligent, loving and devoted baton of my mother and unconditionally supported by my sister-in-law Maria Consuelo, her brother Eduardo and his brother-in-law Alfonso, dedicated to making his last days less painful, to pamper him, to comfort him, to hide him from death for a few more days. He arranged for us to put many books in his room, stacks of books that accompanied him in his wild dreams and his sleeplessness. He also wanted the light on permanently, we thought it was because he was afraid that the grim reaper would take advantage of the darkness, but I believe that it was to see his books keeping him company, guarding, protecting and sheltering him, ready to surrender to Charon. To pay for their journey beyond the Stygian lagoon, traversing the Acheron towards eternity and glory.

That is why, along with his monumental work, read by thousands, his love verses, his words denouncing injustices, his faith in love, the fight raged for a year against his illness, knowing that he had already won the race to the death of oblivion through his books that will scream for him forever, the image that we keep as a writer and as a man will last forever with millions of readers who will continue to travel through his pages to do his work a wonderful legacy to the Castilian letters in this part of America for the World.

Carlos Soto

Master, you're still here.

A year after your departure, your leisurely walk, sweet smile, intelligence, favorable comments; sometimes scathing, most kind, are still here. Your presence is felt in the Faculty of Education and Humanities. You are in the pleasant memory of your wisdom, your amiable gestures, in the evocation of your infinite and intelligent patience in the face of clumsiness and mediocrity, in the opportune quotation that is often heard of your illustrated phrases and celebrations pronounced by professors, in the meetings of the reading club that bears your name and that you founded and impulse until the last moment, in the investigations that we make of your works of deep historical, political, bioethical⁵ content, in the study of your books and poems in the interior of Literacy classes. Really, you're still here.

It may happen that it is not necessary to have to personal interaction with a writer to be able to know him in his deepest dimension that of his own action, there in day-to-day life, in the nakedness of daily living, in the simple world of fine print. It happened to me with Cortazar, later with Serrat and almost at the same time with Blades. Just reading and listening to them, I knew them to be deeply human.

With the master, Fernando Soto Aparicio has not been different. I could never look closely at his eyes; neither experience the sensation of being at the head of a great human being. I only knew that I missed the delight of his direct conversation and that his prose and these recent poems of always, testified to his personal greatness

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From our jobs are no longer observed his permanent cubicle companions: his books and his cats. Who did not know about his devotion to reading and the eagerness with which he expected people to read and understand what makes us better people? Frequent visitors came to the office wanting to hug him, congratulate him on his literary work, receive advice to write, light, a tip, some illustration of how to performed the poetic and literary work; others raided his desk to make a film record or take a picture. Almost always we saw them leave not only with the pleasant memory of being attended with the simplicity that only owns who is wise, also they used to carry under the arm a copy of his books, always given away with absolute detachment and complacency, adducing its celebrated arguments “a book must go, there is nothing sadder than a book kept or displayed in a shop window” or, “a book does not have a hundred sheets, a book has a hundred wings, a book takes us to unknown worlds, peek us through wonderful windows, makes fly our imagination, moves our feelings and sensations that otherwise could not”.

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Long ago, I used to go to an old café in the center of the city, sitting there in a red chair as old as the table and like the coffee itself, I used to drink a delicious black coffee that came out through the arteries of an immense German machine brought in 1938 and manipulated only by Mrs. Ines, the administrator of the place.

On one occasion, sitting at the far end of the room was the master Soto Aparicio, tasting the red wine and reading-writing what was perhaps the correction of one of his many works.

The people greeted him very respectfully, and some asked him about his things, his writings. He would greet them and respond to them broadly, as if he wanted to retain every moment of conversation, every piece of the other's existence, being generous with the word.

I wanted to go up to greet him, as the others did, but I did not do it, I did not know what to say. Just look at him at a discret distance.

In the background one could hear, at a moderate volume, the bambuco four questions interpreted by Obdulio and Julian.

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The collection of cats that adorned the office was a testimony of love and admiration for them and at the same time, a demonstration of the love expressed by those who knew him and knew that this made more pleasant his stay in the office. They witnessed the exception of the time when we had the privilege of having his presence in this house of studies for more than seventeen years.

In an interview conducted by Hernán Orjuela for television, about the publication of Camino que anda, the Master, in his unequaled style, tells how this text tells the recent history of Latin America, describing the rigor it represents the research that precedes not only this one but each one of his works, more than seventy books, behind which there is a conscientious and strict study. The secret notebooks, in which he recorded all the work that preceded his books, are the real testimony of the social and committed writer who gives an account of the history of our time, whose daily work we were fortunate to accompany in recent years, his desire to register and go to friends and close relatives to trace, for example, the indigenous cultures of the South of the continent to have more information than they already had and write La sed del agua How not to remember and to miss also the beautiful writings that he gave us on Woman’s Day, Mother’s Day or the greetings in New year’s Eve; always full of poetry and wisdom.

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I discovered his poetry a long time after learning of some of his novels, novels that "put me" to read in school and other few that I read for personal taste when questions about society and life of people began to prowl the head and feel. Then I was certain of the concern of the Master Soto Aparicio for the unnamed, the unfortunate, the excluded, the people for whom I asked myself and I was revealed his permanent denunciation of what happened in his narrations that seemed to me real denunciations.

The Master must have been part of that select group of well-known Latin American writers who told what was happening on the continent in the harsh times of dictatorships and rebellions. But he did not have the same recognition. (Jorge Pinzón)

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So hard (those “times of dictatorships and rebellions”) as reflected in the lives of countless characters. In his first novel, The Blessed, the characters are punished without apparent reason or guilt, as is the case of Mario, who is paying a high price to unleash his love impulses to Tona: “The young man fell to the floor, bathed in blood. It was part of his punishment” (55).⁶ In a way, the characters experience that same lack of recognition or understanding by a markedly hostile environment, all of which causes the author to call them, not without the necessary irony, “blessed”. (Luis Flores Portero)

How not to remember the poetry of Fernando Soto Aparicio? This one, with which we were privileged to our enjoy hours of work, occupies a place of honor in Colombian and Latin American poetry; reveals not only his literary and artistic wealth but his values, his feelings, his wisdom. The Master succeeded and would continue to do it with his fruitful work as he constantly repeated, to be the expression of a silent society: "The writer has an obligation to speak for them, for those who are silent, for those who have no voice, for whom are afraid. " His eagerness to educate through literature was evident; his mottos about reading were his daily work and living, wise, as anyone who read and appreciated the arts would distance himself from ignorance and violence. He was a preacher of peace and love like no other.⁷

Fernando Soto Aparicio was and will continue to be the political and human writer who knew, as few, how to portray the history of his time, always critical of corruption, violence and any form of injustice; faithful to its principles and values, managed to personify the true essence of an ethical life. The Master Soto, undoubtedly, belongs to the category of full letter humanist. He possessed the generosity that was so elusive to his comrades in the arts and so absent in the State.

Literature is a draconian discipline, terrible, but wonderful. There are very valuable people, I will not say names because I would let some out, but there are people who have collected the flags that maybe we are going to leave. There are people who will replace us with luxury, who are winning us, who have accepted the international challenge of literature. I am very pleased for that; every new author is as if I had discovered, is a great joy.⁸

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I discovered his poetry quite sometime later when I wanted to listen to several friends who knew of his poetic virtues; I found the letters of love and exaltation of the woman and I knew that it was true:

Or from the poem Pecado (Sin):

Or simply of life and its outcome in the poem Olvido (Forgotten);

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Very few in the interior of the country do justice to their extensive and valuable work. Surprising to hear as writers who belong to the society of mutual praise, they ponder each other without even mentioning the Master Soto, who is one of the greatest. To the State for which he worked for more than twenty years in the court of Santa Rosa de Viterbo and in the Consulate of France and from which he received nothing in return, not even the rights which he had by an old-age pension. In the aforementioned interview with Hernán Orjuela, this journalist said that it was incredible that in Colombia he had not received any awards from the government while on behalf of national institutions, other countries and continents, the titles and decorations represent a long list.

The master Soto happened to him as one of the historical personages of his books, “Pedro Pascasio, hero before 12 years”, to whom the promised reward never arrived. Justice, to Pedro Pascasio, is made the text of the master, showing his integrity and rectitude. He records in that book how the history of independence could have followed another course if it were not for this intrepid and forgotten teenager.

The truth is that Fernando Soto Aparicio, was a writer who had to forge a name against the tide, as usually happens with who is priceless, nor does it match power or money. On the contrary, like Don Quixote, he deals with injustice and the needy. The same master Soto referred how, after touching many doors of universities, publishers, etc. in our country, was in Spain, participating in a contest, where he managed to publish his first book: The Blessed. Indeed, his role in the world obeyed somewhat to what Gonzalo Arango said in 1966:

This Fernando Aparicio, so serene, so quiet, so absent in his presence, gave me the impression of being like those street posts that are not seen, that are not noticed because they are always there, net and necessary, and that to discover them have to stumble upon them, and even to blow their noses against the strength of their resistance. I saw it and felt it like a power pole whose existence a dog discovers when it pees, but so present despite the uninterested looks. So necessary and justified in his condition of 'post' because he knows that his mission is to be there to transmit the light, to communicate to men

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Today, for very wonderful reasons, I find myself closer to the master Soto Aparicio, paradoxically after his departure. Today I am sure that I would approach my table and not know exactly what to ask him, perhaps I would try to talk about the music, the corridor, and his atavistic guilty ancestor..., but beautiful.

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It is certain that the time and the undoubted importance of your work will immortalize you in Colombian, Latin American and world history. For now, it is enough only to say that, your absence is felt more and more, that the university is not the same without you, although we have your writings and memories; the void is impossible to fill, men of your size are few, we have the comfort of your work which will continue to "scream" in this society of deaf, where, fortunately, some refine their eyes and ears discovering your enormous and rich literary production. Hope for a better future with less inequity, inequality, and injustices as you dreamed, will have the inspiration and teachings contained in your beautiful work, master.