Now, traveling again from Lisbon to Caracas, I’ve landed again in Paramaribo, and my first impression was that we’d landed in the wrong city. The airport terminal is now a luminous building, with big glass windows, very faint air conditioning, smelling of children’s medicine, and that canned music that’s repeated pitilessly in all the public places in the world. There are shops selling duty-free luxury items, as abundant and well stocked as in Japan, and a crowded cafeteria where the seven races of the country, their six religions, and uncountable languages are found scrambled and boiling all together.
My professor Juan Bosch, author of, among many other things, a monumental history of the Caribbean, said once in private that our magic world is like those invincible plants that are reborn under the concrete, until they split and shatter it and flower again in the same place. I understood this more than ever when I walked out an unexpected door of the Paramaribo airport and found a line of old women sitting impassively, all black, all wearing colorful turbans and all smoking with the lit end inside their mouths. They were selling local fruit and handicrafts, but none of them made the slightest attempt to convince anyone. Only one of them, who wasn’t the oldest, was selling ginger root. I recognized her instantly. Not knowing where to start or what to do in reality with that find, I bought a handful of ginger. While I was doing so, remembering her state the first time, I asked her without preambles how her son was. She didn’t even look at me. “It wasn’t a son, but a daughter,” she said, “and at twenty-two years old she’s just given me my first grandchild.”
January 6, 1981, El País, Madrid
Poetry, in Children’s Reach
A literature teacher warned the youngest daughter of a great friend of mine last year that her final exam would be on One Hundred Years of Solitude. The girl was frightened, with every reason, not only because she hadn’t read the book, but because she was concentrating on other, more important subjects. Luckily, her father has a very serious literary education and a poetic intuition like few others, and he subjected her to such an intense preparation that, undoubtedly, she arrived at the exam better armed than her teacher. However, he asked her an unexpected question: What is the meaning of the backward letter in the title Cien años de soledad? He was referring to the Buenos Aires edition, the cover of which was designed by the painter Vicente Rojo with one letter turned backward, because his absolute and sovereign inspiration instructed him to. The girl, of course, did not know how to answer. Vicente Rojo said when I told him that he wouldn’t have known either.
That same year, my son Gonzalo had to answer a literature questionnaire prepared in London for an entrance exam. One of the questions purported to establish what the rooster symbolized in No One Writes to the Colonel. Gonzalo, who is very familiar with our house style, could not resist the temptation to pull the leg of that distant scholar, and answered, “It is the rooster of the golden eggs.” We later learned that the person who received the highest grade was the student who answered, as the teacher had taught him, that the colonel’s rooster was the symbol of the repressed power of the people. When I found that out, I was again glad of my tactful lucky star, for the end of the book I had planned, and which I changed at the last minute, was to have the colonel wring the rooster’s neck and make out of him a soup of protest.
For years I’ve been collecting these pearls bad teachers of literature use to pervert children. I know one who in very good faith believes the heartless, fat, and voracious grandmother who exploits the naive Eréndira to collect a debt is the symbol of insatiable capitalism. A Catholic teacher taught that Remedios the Beauty’s ascent to the sky is a poetic transposition of the Virgin Mary’s ascension in body and soul. Another taught a whole class on Herbert, a character from some story of mine who resolves problems for everyone and gives away money hand over fist. “He is a lovely metaphor for God,” said the teacher. Two Barcelona critics surprised me with the discovery that The Autumn of the Patriarch has the same structure as Béla Bartók’s third piano concerto. That caused me great joy because of the admiration I have for Béla Bartók, and especially for that concerto, but I still haven’t been able to understand those two critics’ analogies. A literature professor at the Havana School of Letters spent many hours on an analysis of One Hundred Years of Solitude and reached the conclusion—flattering and depressing at the same time—that it offered no solution. Which completely convinced me that the interpretive mania eventually ends up being a new form of fiction that sometimes gets stranded on a foolish remark.
I must be a very ingenuous reader, because I’ve never thought that novelists mean to say more than what they say. When Franz Kafka says that Gregory Samsa woke up one morning transformed into a gigantic insect, it doesn’t strike me as a symbol of anything, and the only thing that has always intrigued me is what kind of creature he might have been. I believe that in reality there was a time when carpets flew and genies were imprisoned in bottles. I believe Balaam’s ass spoke—as the Bible tells us—and the only regrettable thing is that his voice was not recorded, and I believe that Joshua destroyed the walls of Jericho with the power of his trumpets, and the only regrettable thing is that no one transcribed the demolition music. I believe, indeed, that the lawyer of glass—by Cervantes—really was made of glass, as he believed in his madness, and I truly believe in the joyful truth that Gargantua pissed in torrents over the cathedrals of Paris. Even more: I believe other similar wonders are still happening, and if we don’t see them it is in large measure because we are impeded by the obscurantist rationalism inculcated in us by bad literature teachers.
I have great respect, and most of all great affection, for the job of teacher, and that’s why it hurts me that they too are victims of a system of learning that leads them to spout nonsense. One of my unforgettable beings is the teacher who taught me to read at the age of five. She was a lovely and wise girl who didn’t pretend to know more than she knew, and she was also so young that with time she has ended up being younger than me. She was the one who read to us in class the first poems that rotted my brain forever. I remember with the same gratitude my high school literature teacher, a modest and prudent man who led us through the labyrinth of good books without farfetched interpretations. This method allowed his students a more personal and free participation in the wonder of poetry. In short, a course in literature should not be much more than a good reading guide. Any other pretension is no use for anything but frightening children. That’s what I think, here in the back room.
January 27, 1981, El País, Madrid
The River of Life
The only reason I’d like to be a child again would be to travel once more by boat up the Magdalena River. Those who didn’t do so back then cannot even imagine what it was like. I had to do it twice a year—once up and once down—during my six years of secondary school and two of university, and every time, I learned more about life than at school, and better than at school. When the water level was high, the upstream voyage took five days from Barranquilla to Puerto Salgar, where we caught the train up to Bogotá. In times of drought, which were more frequent and more fun to travel, it could take up to three weeks.
The train from Puerto Salgar climbed as if crawling up rock cornices for a whole day. In the steepest sections it would back down as if to gather momentum and try the ascent again puffing like a dragon, and on occasion it was necessary for the passengers to get off and walk up to the next cornice, to lighten the load. The villages along the way were freezing and sad, and through the carriage windows, the lifelong peddlers offered big, yellow chickens, cooked whole, and snowy potatoes that tasted like hospital food. The train reached Bogotá at six in the evening, which since then has been the worst hour to live. The city was mournful and bitter, with noisy streetcars that spat out sparks at the corners, and a rain of water mixed with soot that never let up. The men, dressed in black, walked quickly and stumbling as if they were running urgent errands, and there was not a single woma
n in the street. But there we had to stay all year round, pretending to study, although in reality we were only waiting for it to be December again so we could travel once more down the Magdalena River.
These were the times of three-story boats with two funnels, which passed through the night like an illuminated village, and left a trail of music and fanciful dreams in the sedentary villages on the banks. Unlike the boats on the Mississippi, the drive wheels of ours were not outboards but in the stern, and nowhere in the world have I ever again seen ones like them. They had easy and immediate names: Atlántico, Medellín, Capitán de Caró, David Arango. Their captains, like Conrad’s, were authoritarian and kindhearted, ate like barbarians, and never slept alone in their isolated cabins. The crew members were called mariners, by extension, as if they sailed the sea. But in the canteens and brothels of Barranquilla, where they mixed with the mariners of the sea, they were distinguished by an unmistakable name: vaporinos, steamshippers.
The trips were slow and surprising during the day; we passengers sat on the balconies to watch life go by. We saw alligators that looked like tree trunks at the river’s edge, with their jaws wide open, waiting for something to eat to fall in. You could see throngs of cranes taking off startled by the boat’s wake, flocks of wild ducks from the marshes inland, interminable schools of fish, manatees that nursed their young and cried as if singing on the empty beaches. Sometimes a nauseating stink would interrupt our siesta, and it was the cadaver of an immense drowned cow, floating downstream almost immobile with a solitary vulture standing on its belly. All through the voyage, one would wake up at dawn, bewildered by the racket of the monkeys and the scandal of the parrots.
It’s unusual nowadays to meet someone on an airplane. On the Magdalena riverboats passengers ended up resembling a single family, for we would make arrangements every year to sail on the same voyage. The Eljaches embarked at Calamar, the Peñas and the Del Toros—paisanos of the legendary alligator-man—embarked at Plato; the Estorninos and Viñas, at Magangué; the Villafañes, at Banco. As the trip advanced, the party grew bigger. Our life was linked in an ephemeral, but unforgettable, way, to the stopover villages, and many got tangled up forever in their destiny. Vicente Escudero, who was a medical student, went into a wedding dance without being invited in Gamarra, danced without permission with the most beautiful woman in town, and her husband killed him with one shot. Pedro Pablo Guillén, on the other hand, got married during a Homeric drunken binge to the first girl he fancied in Barrancabermeja, and is still happy with her and their nine children. The irretrievable José Palencia, who was a congenital musician, entered a drumming contest in Tenerife and won a cow, which he sold on the spot for fifty pesos: a fortune back then. Sometimes the boat would get stranded for up to fifteen days on a sandbar. Nobody worried, for the party went on, and a letter from the captain sealed with his friend’s coat of arms was a valid justification for arriving late to school.
One night, on my last voyage in 1948, we were awakened by a heartrending wail coming from the riverbank. Captain Clímaco Conde Abello, who was one of the greats, gave the order for the searchlights to look for whatever was making that distressing sound. It was a female manatee that had gotten trapped in the branches of a fallen tree. The vaporinos dove into the water, tied a winch rope around her, and managed to unstrand her. It was a fascinating and touching animal, almost fourteen feet long, and her pale and smooth skin, and her womanly torso, with big breasts of a very loving mother, and from her enormous and sad eyes sprung human tears. It was also Captain Conde Abello who I first heard say that the world was going to end if people kept killing the animals of the river, and he banned shooting from the boat. “Anyone who wants to kill someone should go kill him at home,” he shouted. “Not on my boat.” But nobody heeded him. Thirteen years later—on January 19, 1961—a friend phoned me at home in Mexico to tell me that the steamship David Arango had been set alight and burned to ashes in the port of Magangué. I hung up the telephone with the horrible impression that my youth had ended that day, and all that was left of our river of nostalgia had just gone to hell.
It had indeed. The Magdalena River is dead, with its waters poisoned and its animals exterminated. The recuperation work that the government has begun to talk about since a concentrated group of journalists made the problem trendy is a distracting farce. The rehabilitation of the Magdalena will only be possible with the continued and intense effort of at least four conscientious generations: an entire century.
People speak too easily of reforestation. This actually means planting 59,110 million trees on the banks of the Magdalena. I’ll repeat that just to be clear: fifty-nine thousand, one hundred and ten million trees. But the biggest problem is not planting them, but where to plant them. Almost all the useful land on the riverbanks is private property, and complete reforestation would have to occupy ninety percent of it. It would be worth asking which property owners would be kind enough to cede ninety percent of their lands for tree planting and renounce ninety percent of their current profits.
The pollution, moreover, does not just affect the Magdalena River, but all its tributaries. They are the sewer systems of the riverside cities and towns that drag and accumulate industrial, agricultural, animal, and human waste and flow into the immense world of national filth called Bocas de Ceniza. In November of last year, in Tocaima, two guerrillas dove into the Bogotá River while fleeing from the armed forces. They managed to escape, but were on the verge of death from infections contracted from the water. So the people who live on the Magdalena, especially in the lower reaches, have not been drinking or using pure water or eating healthy fish for a very long time. They only receive—as the ladies say—pure shit.
The task is enormous, but that is perhaps the best thing about it. The complete project of what must be done is in a study carried out by a joint Dutch and Colombian commission, the thirty volumes of which sleep the sleep of the unjust in the archives of the Institute of Hydrology and Meteorology (IMAT). The deputy director of that monumental study was a young engineer from Antioquia, Jairo Murillo, who dedicated half his life to it, and before it was finished he relinquished what was left of it: he drowned in the river of his dreams. On the other hand, no presidential candidate in recent years has run the risk of drowning in those waters. The inhabitants of riverside towns—which in the coming days are going to be in the front lines of the national intention with the voyage of the Caracola—should be aware of that. And remember that between Honda and Bocas de Ceniza, there are enough votes to elect a president of the republic.
March 25, 1981, El País, Madrid
María of My Heart
A couple of years ago I told the Mexican film director Jaime Humberto Hermosillo about a real-life episode, in the hopes that he would turn it into a movie, but it didn’t seem to have captured his attention. Two months later, however, he came to tell me without warning that he had the first draft of a script, so we continued working on it together until it was in its definitive form. Before structuring the characteristics of the central protagonists, we agreed which two actors could best embody them: María Rojo and Héctor Bonilla. This also allowed us to be able to count on the collaboration of both of them when writing certain dialogues, and we even left some of them barely sketched out so they could improvise them in their own language during filming.
The only thing I had written of the story—since hearing it many years ago in Barcelona—were a few random notes in a school notebook, and a projected title: “No, I only came to use the phone.” But when it came time to register the script project we thought it wasn’t the most appropriate title, and put a different provisional one: María of My Love. Later, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo decided on the definitive title: María de mi corazón—María of My Heart. It was the one that best suited the story, not only its nature but also its style.
The film was made with everyone’s contributions. Artists, actors, and technical specialists all contribu
ted our work to the production, and the only ready money we had at our disposal was two million pesos from the University of Veracruz; that is, about eighty thousand dollars, which, in movie terms, is barely even pocket change. It was filmed on 16 mm color film, and in ninety-three days of hard labor in the feverish atmosphere of the Colonia Portales, which strikes me as one of the most characteristic neighborhoods of Mexico City. I already knew it well, because more than twenty years ago I worked as a pressman for a printer in that colonia, and at least one night a week, after we finished work, I’d go out with those good artisans and better friends to drink everything up to and including the alcohol in the lamps in the neighborhood cantinas. We thought that was the natural setting for María of My Heart. I have just seen the finished movie, and I’m pleased to see that we weren’t wrong. It’s excellent, at once tender and brutal, and as I walked out of the screening room I felt shaken by a gust of nostalgia.
María—the protagonist—was in real life a twenty-five-year-old woman, recently married to a public service employee. One afternoon of torrential rain, when she was driving alone on an empty road, her car broke down. After an hour of futile signals to passing vehicles, a bus driver felt sorry for her. He wasn’t going very far, but María just needed a telephone to ask her husband to come and pick her up. It would never have occurred to her that on this rented bus, completely occupied by a group of lethargic women, an absurd and unwarranted drama had begun that would change her life forever.
The Scandal of the Century Page 24
