His two most dangerous rivals are two English-language novelists. The first, who had figured without much noise in previous years, has now been the object of a spectacular promotion by the magazine Newsweek, who put him on their August 18 cover as the great maestro of the novel; and rightly so. His full name is no less than Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, he’s forty-seven years old, was born over here, next door to us, on the island of Trinidad, of an Indian father and Caribbean mother, and he is considered by some very severe critics the greatest living writer in the English language. The other candidate is Graham Greene, four years younger than Borges, with as many merits and as many years of delay in receiving that senile laurel.
In the autumn of 1972, in London, Naipaul did not seem very aware of being a Caribbean writer. I reminded him during a friendly gathering, and he was a little disconcerted; he reflected for a moment, and a new smile illuminated his taciturn face. “Good claim,” he said. Graham Greene, on the other hand, who was born in Berkhamstead, didn’t even blink when a journalist asked him if he was conscious of being a Latin American novelist. “Of course,” he answered. “And I’m very happy about it, because Latin America is where the best novelists are these days, such as Jorge Luis Borges.” A few years ago, talking about everything, I expressed to Graham Greene my perplexity and disgust that an author such as himself, with such a vast and original body of work, had not been given the Nobel Prize.
“They’ll never give it to me,” he said to me with absolute seriousness, “because they don’t consider me a serious writer.”
The Swedish Academy, which is in charge of awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature—just this one*—was founded in 1786, without any greater pretensions than to resemble the Académie Française. Nobody then imagined, of course, that in time it would come to acquire the biggest consecrating power in the world. It is composed of eighteen lifetime members of venerable ages, selected by the academy itself from among the most distinguished figures of Swedish letters. There are two philosophers, two historians, three specialists in Nordic languages, and only one woman. But that’s not the only male chauvinist symptom; in the eighty years of the prize, it has only been awarded to six women, as opposed to sixty-nine men. This year it will be awarded by an odd-number decision, since one of the most eminent academy members, Professor Lindroth Sten, died on September 3: fifteen days ago.
How they proceed, how they reach an agreement, what real compromises determine their designs, is one of the best-kept secrets of our times. Their criteria is unpredictable, contradictory, immune even to omens, and their decisions are secret, mutually binding, and final. If they weren’t so serious, one might think they were animated by the prank of misleading the predictions. Nobody resembles death more than they do.
Another well-guarded secret is where the capital that produces such abundant dividends is invested. Alfred Nobel (with a stress on the e and not on the o) created the prize in 1895 with a capital of $9.2 million, the annual interest on which should be shared out each year, by November 15 at the latest, among the five prizewinners. The sum, therefore, is variable, depending on the year’s harvest. In 1901, when the prizes were awarded for the first time, each laureate received 30,160 Swedish kroner. In 1979, which was the year with the most succulent interest rates, each received 160,000 kroner.
Rumormongers say the capital is invested in South African gold mines and that, therefore, the Nobel Prize lives off the blood of black slaves. The Swedish Academy, which has never made a public clarification or responded to any grievance, might defend itself with the argument that it is the Bank of Sweden, not the academy, that administers the cash. And banks, as everybody knows, have no heart.
The third enigma is the political criteria prevailing at the heart of the Swedish Academy. On several occasions, the prizes have led people to believe that its members are idealistic liberals. Its biggest, and most honorable, blunder was in 1938, when Hitler banned Germans from receiving the Nobel Prize, with the risible argument that their instigator was Jewish. Richard Kuhn, a German scientist who had been granted the Nobel Prize for Chemistry that year, had to refuse it. Out of conviction or prudence, none of the prizes were awarded during the Second World War. But as soon as Europe recovered from its afflictions, the Swedish Academy committed what seems to be its only regrettable blunder: they awarded the Literature Prize to Sir Winston Churchill only because he was the most prestigious man of his times, and it was not possible to give him any of the other prizes, much less the Peace Prize.
Maybe the Swedish Academy’s most difficult relations have been with the Soviet Union. In 1958, when the prize was awarded to the very eminent Boris Pasternak, he refused it out of fear of not being allowed to return to his country. The Soviet authorities considered the prize to be a provocation. Nonetheless, in 1965, when the prizewinner was Mikhail Sholokhov, the most official of official Soviet writers, his country’s authorities celebrated with jubilation. On the other hand, five years later, when it was granted to the foremost dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet government blew its top and went so far as to say that the Nobel Prize was an instrument of imperialism. I have it on good authority, however, that the warmest congratulations Pablo Neruda received came from the Soviet Union, and some of them from very high-level officials. “For us,” a Soviet friend told me, smiling, “the Nobel Prize is good when it’s given to a writer we like, and bad when the opposite happens.” The explanation is not as simplistic as it appears. Deep down in our hearts we all have the same view.
The only member of the Swedish Academy who reads in Spanish, and very well, is the poet Artur Lundkvist. He is the one who knows the work of our writers, who proposes their candidacy, and who wages secret battles for them. This has converted him, very much to his chagrin, into a remote and enigmatic deity, on whom to a certain extent the universal destiny of our literatures depends. However, in real life he is a youthful old man, with a slightly Latin sense of humor, and with such a modest house that it’s impossible to think that anyone’s destiny might depend on him.
Some years ago, after a typical Swedish dinner in that house—with cold meats and warm beer—Lundkvist invited us to have coffee in his library. I was astonished. It was incredible to find such a quantity of books in Spanish, the best and worst all mixed up together, and almost all of them signed by their once hopeful authors whether living, expiring, or dead. I asked the poet’s permission to read some of the dedications, and he granted it with a kind and complicit smile. Most of them were so affectionate, and some so direct and heartfelt, that when the time came to write my own I thought a mere signature would be indiscreet. A guy could get a complex, damn it!
October 8, 1980, El País, Madrid
* The other four prizes are for: Physics and Chemistry, awarded by the Royal Academy of Sciences; Medicine or Physiology, awarded by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, and Peace, granted by the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament.
Telepathy Without Strings
A noted French neurologist, a full-time researcher, told me the other night that he had discovered a function of the human brain that seemed to be of great importance. He only had one problem: he hadn’t been able to establish what it was for. I asked him, with a certain hopefulness, if there wasn’t any possibility that it might be the function that regulates premonitions, portentous dreams, and the transmission of thoughts. His only response was a pitying look.
I had seen that same look eighteen years earlier, when I asked a similar question of a very dear friend, who was also investigating the human brain, at the University of Mexico. My opinion, already by then, was that telepathy and its diverse means are not the stuff of sorcerers, as some incredulous people seem to believe, but simple organic faculties that science repudiates, because it does not know them, just as it repudiated the theory that the Earth is round when they believed it to be flat. My friend admitted, if I remember correctly, that the area of the br
ain whose functions are fully verified is very small, but he refused to admit that in the rest of those shadows there might be a place to anticipate the future.
I made telepathic jokes that he disqualified as pure coincidences, in spite of some of them seeming too obvious. One night I phoned him to invite him to our house for dinner, and only afterward did I realize there wasn’t enough food in the kitchen. I called him back to ask him to bring a particular and unusual bottle of wine, and a piece of Iberian sausage. Mercedes shouted from the kitchen to ask him to pick up some dish soap as well. But he’d already left his house. However, at the moment of hanging up the phone, I had the clear impression that, by an impossible to explain marvel, my friend had received the message. Then I wrote it down on a piece of paper, so he wouldn’t doubt my version, and out of pure poetic virtuosity I added that he would also bring a rose. A little while later, he and his wife arrived with the things we’d requested, including the same brand of dish soap we used. “The supermarket happened to be open, and we decided to bring you these things,” they said, almost apologizing. Only the rose was missing. That day my friend and I began a different dialogue that still hasn’t finished. The last time I saw him, six months ago, was entirely devoted to establishing in which part of the brain the conscience is found.
Life, more than one believes, is embellished by this mystery. The night before the assassination of Julius Caesar, his wife Calpurnia saw with terror all the windows of the house suddenly opened at the same time, with no wind and no noise. Centuries later, the novelist Thornton Wilder attributed to Julius Caesar a phrase that is not in his war memoirs or in the fascinating chronicles of Plutarch and Suetonius, but defines better than anything the human condition of the emperor: “I govern innumerable men, but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps.” The history of humanity—since young Joseph deciphered dreams in Egypt—is full of these fabulous flashes. I know identical twins who had pain in the same molar at the same time in different cities, and who when they’re together have the sensation that the thoughts of one interfere with those of the other. Many years ago, in a tiny village on the Caribbean coast, I knew a healer who prided himself on curing animals from a distance if he was given a precise description and the place where it was. I saw it with my own eyes: an infected cow, whose live maggots were falling out of ulcers, while the healer was reciting a secret prayer several leagues away. However, I only remember one experiment that had taken these faculties seriously in current history. The U.S. Navy, which didn’t have a means to communicate with the nuclear submarines navigating beneath the polar ice cap, decided to try telepathy. Two compatible people, one in Washington and another on board a submarine, tried to establish a system for exchanging thought messages. It was a failure, of course, for telepathy is unpredictable and spontaneous, and does not allow for any kind of systemization. That’s its defense. Every prediction, from a morning’s foreboding to the prophecies of Nostradamus, comes coded from its conception and is only comprehended when it comes true. If it were not like that, it would defeat itself in advance.
I speak of this with such propriety because my maternal grandmother was the most lucid adept I ever knew in the science of portents. She was an old-school Catholic, so she repudiated as artifices of the black arts anything that pretended to be a methodical divination of the future. Whether they were cards, the lines in a palm, or the evocation of spirits. But she was a master of her omens. I remember her in the kitchen in our big house in Aracataca, watching over the secret signs of the fragrant breads she was taking out of the oven.
Once she saw 09 written in the leftover flour, and she moved heaven and earth until she found a lottery ticket with that number. She lost. However, the following week she won an Italian coffeepot in a raffle, with a ticket my grandfather had bought and forgotten in the pocket of his jacket the week before. It was number 09. My grandfather had seventeen children of the kind they then called “natural”—as if the ones from marriage were artificial—and my grandmother treated them as her own. They were spread out all over the coast, but she talked to all of them at breakfast time, and found out about the health of each one and how their businesses were going as if she kept up an immediate and secret correspondence. It was the tremendous era of telegrams that arrived when they were least expected and entered the house like a gust of panic. A telegram would be passed from one hand to the next with nobody daring to open it, until the providential idea occurred to someone to get a small child to open it, as if innocence had the virtue of changing the evil of bad news.
This happened once in our house, and the bewildered adults decided to leave the telegram without opening it until later, when my grandfather arrived. My grandmother didn’t bat an eyelid. “It’s from Prudencia Iguarán to let us know she’s on her way,” she said. “Last night I dreamed she was coming to visit.” When my grandfather came home he didn’t even have to open the telegram. He came home with Prudencia Iguarán, whom he’d met by chance at the train station, in a dress covered in painted birds and with a massive bouquet of flowers, and convinced that my grandfather was there due to the infallible magic of her telegram.
My grandmother died when she was almost a hundred years old without ever having won the lottery. She had gone blind, and in her final years she raved in a way that made it impossible to follow the thread of her reason. She refused to get undressed to go to sleep while the radio was on, in spite of our explanations every night that the announcer was not inside the house. She thought we were tricking her, because she could never believe in a diabolical machine that allowed us to hear someone who was talking in another faraway city.
November 25, 1980, El País, Madrid
The New Oldest Profession
The Parisian autumn began suddenly and late this year, with a glacial wind that plucked the last golden leaves from the trees. The café terraces closed at midday, life became unsettled, and the radiant summer that had lasted longer than it should have turned into a fickleness of memory. It seemed as if several months had passed in a few hours. Dusk was premature and gloomy, but nobody really complained, for this misty weather is natural to Paris, what most often and best suits this city.
The most beautiful of the women for rent who routinely stroll the alleys of the Quartier Pigalle was a splendid blonde who in a less obvious place would have been mistaken for a movie star. She was wearing a black pantsuit, which was the height of fashion, and when the icy wind began to blow put on a real mink coat. There she was, offering herself for two hundred francs in front of an hourly rate hotel on Rue Duperré, when a car pulled up in front of her. From the driver’s seat, another beautiful and well-dressed woman shot straight at her seven times with a rifle. That night, when the police caught the murderer, that outskirts drama had already echoed through the newspapers, because it had two new elements that made it different. In fact, neither the victim nor the killer was blond or lovely, but were two fully grown men, and both were from Brazil.
The news did nothing but demonstrate what is already well known in Europe: street prostitution in the big cities is now a job for men, and the most sought after among them, the most expensive and best dressed, are young Latin Americans disguised as women. According to press reports, of the two hundred cross-dressing street workers in France, at least half of them have come from Brazil. In Spain, England, Switzerland, or West Germany, where the trade seems to be even more lucrative, the number is much higher and the nationalities more varied. The phenomenon has different nuances in each country, but in all of them it presents itself as a fundamental change in the oldest and most conservative profession in the world.
When I was in Europe for the first time, twenty-five years ago, prostitution was a prosperous and orderly industry, with precise categories and very well shared out territories. I was still clinging to my idyllic image of Caribbean brothels, those courtyards full of dancing with colored garlands in the almond trees, undaunted hens wandering arou
nd pecking the ground amid the music and the lovely untamed mulatas who sold themselves more for the fiesta than for the money and who sometimes committed the enormous naïveté of lovelorn suicide. Sometimes, I would stay with them, not so much for straying—as my mother would say—but for the pleasure of hearing them breathe in their sleep. Breakfasts there were more homey and affectionate than at home, and the real party started at eleven in the morning, under the dull almond trees.
Brought up in such a human school, I couldn’t help but be depressed by the commercial rigor of the Europeans. In Geneva they prowled the lakeshore, and the only thing that distinguished them from the upstanding wives were the colorful open parasols they carried rain or shine, day or night, like a stigma of their class. In Rome I heard them whistle like birds among the trees of the Villa Borghese, and in London they became invisible in the fog and had to turn on lights that seemed like ship’s lanterns so one could find their course. The ones in Paris, idealized by the maudit poets and bad French films of the 1930s, were the harshest. Nevertheless, in the all-night bars of the Champs-Élysées one suddenly discovered their human side: they cried like girlfriends over the despotism of their pimps, unsatisfied with the night’s takings. It was hard to understand such meekness of heart in women hardened by such a brutal job. So great was my curiosity that, years later, I met a pimp and asked him how it was possible to dominate with an iron fist such rough women, and he answered impassively, “With love.” I didn’t ask anything else, in fear of understanding even less.
The Scandal of the Century Page 22
