Correspondence with Horacio Quiroga

Ten days before taking his own life with cyanide in the Hospital de Clínicas of Buenos Aires, Horacio Quiroga wrote, on February 9, 1937, to his friend Ezequiel Martínez Estrada:

“Dear Estrada: (…) I see that your mood runs hand in hand with mine. I’m suffering from a very strong depression, motivated by the delay in my precarious health…”

Thus begins the last letter Correspondence with Horacio Quiroga, sent by him a few days before his suicide to Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. From his retirement in the middle of nature in the Cuenca del Plata, Quiroga found in Estrada a confidant – a brother – with whom to share and let off steam.
Here appear questions of a practical nature, sentimental concerns, economic burden, reflections on music and literature … All this is brought to the surface in some moving missives – written between August 19, 1934 and February 9, 1937.
They palpitate in the loneliness, the narrow economy, and the frustrations of Quiroga during the last years of his intense life. The letters are preceded by an essay based on them. Its title, “Brother Quiroga,” heralds Estrada’s intimate portrait of an essential and “decivilized” human being.
With him he felt shared

“A brotherhood of blood, a spiritual affinity, and an identity of being and destiny such as are known only in myths and legends.”

Martínez Estrada was his most frequent correspondent during the last stage of his life. Testimony of this is this Correspondence with Horacio Quiroga.

“I do not believe that in Quiroga’s life, nor in mine, there has been a being who filled (or rather: filled) the indisputably instinctive need to be with another being without ceasing to be with oneself and alone.”

Ezequiel Martinez Estrada