I imposed this servitude on myself because I was feeling that between one novel and the next I was spending a lot of time not writing, and gradually—like pitchers—it was taking longer and longer to warm up my arm. Later, that artisanal decision turned into a commitment to readers, and now it’s a labyrinth of mirrors I can’t find my way out of. Unless I encountered, of course, the providential writer who would take my place. But I think it might already be too late, as the last three times I made the determination to stop writing these columns I was prevented, with his implacable authoritarianism, by the small Argentinian that I too have inside.
The first time I decided was when I tried to write the first one, after more than twenty years of not doing it, and I needed a week of galley slave work to finish it. The second time was more than a year ago, when I spent a few days of rest with General Omar Torrijos at the Farallón military base, and the day was so clear and the ocean so calm that I was more tempted to go sailing than to write. “I’ll send the editor a telegram saying there’s no column today, and that’ll be that,” I thought, with a sigh of relief. But I couldn’t eat lunch for the weight of my guilty conscience, and, at six in the evening, I locked myself up in my room, wrote for an hour and a half about the first thing that came to mind, and gave the column to one of General Torrijos’s aides-de-camp so he could send it to Bogotá by telex, with a plea that they would send it on to Madrid and Mexico. Only on the following day did I learn that General Torrijos had had to arrange the shipment in a military plane to the Panama airport, and from there, by helicopter, to the presidential palace, whence they did me the favor of distributing the text by some official channel.
The last time, six months ago now, when I discovered upon waking that I now had ripe in my heart the love novel I’d been longing to write for so many years, and that I had no choice other than never writing it or immersing myself in it immediately and full-time. However, at the hour of truth, I did not have enough guts to renounce my weekly captivity, and for the first time I’m doing something I always thought impossible: writing a novel every day, letter by letter, with the same patience, and I hope the same luck, as the hens who peck in the patios, and hearing the fearful footsteps closer every day of next Friday’s large animal. But here we are again, as ever, and I hope forever.
I was already suspecting that I would never escape this cage since the afternoon when I started writing this piece at home in Bogotá and finished it the next day under the diplomatic protection of the Mexican embassy; I kept suspecting it at the telegraph office in Crete, one Friday last July, when I succeeded in communicating with the employee on duty to get the text transmitted in Spanish. I continued suspecting it in Montreal, when I had to buy an emergency typewriter because the voltage of mine was not the same as that in the hotel. I just suspected it again, forever, barely two months ago, in Cuba, when I had to change typewriters twice because they refused to get along with me. Finally, they brought me an electric one with such advanced customs that I ended up writing it by hand in a notebook with square ruled pages, like in the remote and happy times of primary school in Aracataca. Each time one of these setbacks happened to me I appealed with more anxieties to my wish for someone to take charge of my good luck: a writer.
All things considered, I’ve never felt that need in such an intense way as the day many years ago when I arrived at Luis Alcoriza’s house, in Mexico, to work with him on a screenplay. I found him dismayed at ten in the morning, because his cook had asked him as a favor to write a letter to the director of social security. Alcoriza, who is an excellent writer, with a daily practice of a bank teller, who had been the most intelligent writer of the first scripts for Luis Buñuel and, later, for his own movies, had thought the letter would take him about half an hour. But I found him, mad with fury, in the midst of a pile of torn-up sheets of paper, on which there was not much more than all conceivable variations of the formulaic opening: “By means of the present document, herewith, I have the pleasure of addressing you for…” I tried to help him, and three hours later we were still writing drafts and crumpling them up, now half cut on gin and vermouth and stuffed with Spanish chorizos, but without having progressed beyond the first conventional letters. I’ll never forget the compassionate face of the kind cook when she returned at three for her letter and we told her shamefaced that we hadn’t been able to write it. “But it’s very simple,” she said, with all her humility, “Look, sir.” And then she began to improvise the letter with such precision and such fluency that Luis Alcoriza found himself having trouble typing with the same fluidity with which she dictated it. That day—and still today—I was left thinking that maybe that woman, who was growing old without glory in the limbo of the kitchen, was perhaps the secret writer who was missing from my life that I needed in order to be a happy man.
October 6, 1982, El País, Madrid
Obregón or the Boundless Vocation
Many years ago, a friend asked Alejandro Obregón to help him look for the body of the skipper of his boat, who had drowned at dusk, while they were fishing for twenty-pound prochilos in the swampy marshlands of Santa Marta. Both went over that immense paradise of wilted waters for the whole night, exploring the least likely bends with fishermen’s lamps, following the drift of floating objects that tend to lead to pools where drowned people stay sleeping. All of a sudden, Obregón saw him: he was submerged to the crown, almost sitting in the water, and the only thing floating on the surface were the errant strands of his hair. “He looked like a medusa,” Obregón told me. He grabbed the hair with both hands and, with his vast painter of toros and tempests strength, pulled the whole drowned man out, with his enormous eyes open, dripping mud of anemones and manta rays, and threw him like a dead fish in the bottom of the boat.
This episode, which Obregón tells me again because I ask him to every time we get lethally drunk—and which also gave me the idea for a story about drowning victims—might be the moment of his life that most closely resembles his art. That’s how he paints, in fact, as if he’s fishing for drowned men in the darkness. His paint with horizons of thunder spills out bullfighting minotaurs, patriotic condors, billy goats in heat, and impudent barracudas. In the midst of the tormented fauna of his personal mythology wanders a woman crowned with a garland of flowers, the same one as ever and as never, who prowls around his canvases with the clues switched, for in reality she is the impossible creature for whom this reinforced concrete romantic would have wished to die. Because he is as all we romantics are, and as we have to be: without any shame.
The first time I saw that woman was the same day I met Obregón, thirty-two years ago, in his studio on Calle de San Blas, in Barranquilla. It was two large, plain rooms through the widespread windows of which climbed the Babylonian uproar of the city. There she was in a different corner, among the latest Picassian still lifes and the first eagles of his heart, with her hanging lotus flowers, green and sad, holding her soul in her hand. Obregón, who had just come back from Paris and was running around as if dumbfounded by the fragrance of guava, was already identical to this self-portrait of his that watches me from the wall while I write, and which he tried to kill one crazy night with five heavy-caliber shots. Nevertheless, what most impressed me when I met him were not those diaphanous pirate’s eyes that made the market fags sigh, but his big, tough hands, which we saw him use to knock down half a dozen Swedish sailors in a brothel fight. They are old Spanish hands, gentle and barbarous at the same time, like those of Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, who fattened his hunting falcons on the doves of the woman he loved.
Those hands are the perfect instrument of a boundless vocation that gives him not a moment’s peace. Obregón has been painting since before he had the use of reason, at all hours, wherever he is, with whatever is at hand. One night, back in the days of the drowned man, we had gone to drink mullein in a sailors’ canteen still only half constructed. The tables were piled up in the corners, among bags of cement and
lumps of lime, and the carpentry workbenches, to make the doors. Obregón was lost in thought for a long time, unhinged by the smell of turpentine, until he climbed up on a table with a can of paint, and in a single masterly broad stroke painted a green unicorn on the bare wall. It was not easy to convince the owner that this unique brushstroke was worth much more than the house itself. But we did. The nameless canteen was called El Unicornio from that night on, and it was an attraction for gringo tourists and idiots from Bogotá until it was blown away by the inexorable winds that take everything away in time.
On another occasion, Obregón broke both his legs in a traffic accident, and during two weeks in hospital sculpted his totemic animals in the plaster of his casts with a scalpel a nurse lent him. The masterwork was not his, however, but what the surgeon had to do to remove the two sculpted legs, which are now in a private collection in the United States. A journalist who visited him at home asked him with annoyance what was wrong with his spaniel puppy that didn’t calm down for an instant, and Obregón answered, “She’s nervous because she knows I’m going to paint her.” He did paint her, of course, as he paints everything he comes across, because he thinks that everything that exists in the world is there for him to paint. In his viceroy’s house in Cartagena de Indias, where the whole of the Caribbean Sea pours in through a single window, one finds his daily life as well as another painted life everywhere: on the lamps, on the toilet seat, on the glass of the mirrors, on a cardboard box in the fridge. Many things that in other artists are defects are legitimate virtues in him, such as sentimentalism, such as symbols, such as lyrical raptures, such as patriotic fervor. Even some of his failures live on, like that woman’s head that was burned in the kiln, but which Obregón still keeps in the best spot in his house, with one side eaten away and a queen’s tiara on her forehead. It’s not possible to think that failure was not desired and calculated when one discovers in the face without eyes the inconsolable sadness of the woman who never arrived.
Sometimes, when there are friends at his house, Obregón goes into the kitchen. It’s a pleasure to watch him setting out on the table the blue bream, the pig’s snout with a carnation in its nose, the rack of veal ribs with the trace of the heart still visible, green plantains from Arjona, yucca from San Jacinto, yams from Turbaco. It’s a pleasure to watch how he prepares everything, how he cuts and distributes according to their shapes and colors, and how he puts it all to boil in big pots of water with the same charm he paints with. “It’s like putting the whole landscape into the stew,” he says. Then, as it boils, he tastes the broth with a wooden spoon and empties into it bottles and bottles and bottles of Tres Esquinas rum, which gradually replaces the water in the pot as it evaporates. In the end, we understand why we had to wait so long and as ceremoniously as for the supreme pontiff, and it’s that this Stone Age sancocho stew that Obregón serves in achiote leaves is nothing to do with cuisine, but is an edible painting. He does everything like this, the way he paints, because he doesn’t know how to do anything any other way. It’s not that he only lives to paint. No: it’s that he’s only living when he paints. Always barefoot, in a cotton shirt he must have previously used to clean his brushes and trousers he’s cut off himself with a butcher’s knife, and with the kind of bricklayer’s rigor that God would have liked his priests to have.
October 20, 1982, El País, Madrid
Literature Without Pain
Not long ago I indulged in the frivolity of telling a group of students that you can learn universal literature in one afternoon. A young woman in the group—a fanatic of belles lettres and clandestine author of verses—immediately asked me to be more specific: “When can we come over so you can teach us?” So they came over the following Friday and we talked about literature until six, but we couldn’t get past German romanticism, because they too indulged in a frivolity: leaving to go to a wedding. I told them, of course, that one of the conditions of learning all of literature in one afternoon was not accepting a wedding invitation for the same time, since for getting married and being happy there is much more time available than for learning poetry. It had all started and continued and finished as a joke, but in the end I was left with the same impression as they were: if we hadn’t learned all of literature in three hours, at least we’d gotten a pretty acceptable notion of it without having to read Jean-Paul Sartre.
When you hear a record or read a book that dazzles you, the natural impulse is to look for someone to share it with. This happened to me when I discovered by chance Béla Bartók’s Quintet for String Quartet and Piano, which was not so popular then, and it happened to me again when I heard on the car radio the very beautiful and rare Concerto Gregoriano for Violin and Orchestra by Ottorino Respighi. They were both very difficult to find, and my closest music-loving friends had never heard of them, so I went all over the place trying to find those records so we could listen to them together. Something similar has been happening to me for many years with Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo, an entire edition of which I think I’ve bought just to always have enough copies for my friends to take with them. The only condition is that we meet as soon as possible to talk about that beloved book.
Of course, the first thing I explained to my good students was my idea, perhaps too personal and simplistic, of teaching literature. In fact, I have always believed that a good literature course should not be anything more than a guide to the good books that people should read. Each era does not have as many essential books as teachers who enjoy terrorizing their pupils claim, and you can speak of all of them in a single afternoon, as long as nobody has an unavoidable commitment to attend a wedding. Reading these essential books with pleasure and good judgment is another matter for many afternoons of life, but if the students are lucky enough to be able to do so they’ll end up knowing as much about literature as the wisest of their teachers. The next step is more frightening: specialization. And a step farther is the most detestable one a person can take in this life: erudition. But if what students want is to excel at visits, they don’t have to pass through any of these three purgatories, but simply buy the two volumes of a providential work called Mil libros—A Thousand Books. Luis Nueda and Don Antonio Espina wrote it back in 1940, and there, in alphabetical order, are summaries of more than a thousand basic books of universal literature, with their plots and interpretations, and impressive notes on their authors and their times. There are many more books, of course, than the ones I’d need for my afternoon class, but they have the advantage that you don’t have to read them. Nor do you have to be embarrassed: I have those two savior volumes on my desk where I write, I’ve had them for many years, and I have saved myself from grave predicaments in the paradise of intellectuals, and by having them and knowing them I can assure you that those who pontificate at social occasions have them too and use them, as do the newspaper columnists.
Luckily, the books of a lifetime are not so many. Not long ago, the Bogotá magazine Pluma asked a group of writers which books had been most significant for them. They said to name only five, without including the obvious ones, such as the Bible, The Odyssey, or Don Quixote. My final list was this: A Thousand and One Nights, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, Moby-Dick, Floresta de lírica española, which is an anthology by Don José Manuel Blecua that reads like a detective novel, and a dictionary of the Spanish language that is not, obviously, that of the Royal Academy. The list is debatable, of course, like all lists, and offers subjects for many hours of conversation, but my reasons are simple and sincere: if I had only read these five books—as well as the obvious ones, of course—I would have read enough to write all that I have written. That is, a list for professional purposes. However, I did not arrive at Moby-Dick by an easy route. At first, I had in its place Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, which, to my mind, is a perfect novel, but only for structural reasons, and that aspect was already more than satisfied by Oedipus Rex. Later I thought of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which in my opinion
is the best novel ever written in the history of the genre, but actually since it is, it seemed fair to omit it as one of the obvious books. Moby-Dick, on the other hand, whose anarchic structure is one of the most beautiful disasters of literature, instilled me with a mythic impulse that I no doubt needed in order to write.
In any case, the one-afternoon literature course as much as the survey of five books leads one to think, once more, of so many unforgettable works that recent generations have forgotten. Three of them, a little more than twenty years ago, were first rate: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe, and Le Grande Meaulnes by Alain Fournier. I wonder how many of today’s students of literature, even the most diligent, have even taken the trouble to wonder what might be inside these three marginalized books. One has the impression they had a marvelous, though momentary, destiny, like some by Eça de Queiroz and Anatole France, and like Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley, which was a sort of epidemic in the blue years of our adolescence; or like The Goose Man by Jakob Wassermann, which I might owe more to nostalgia than to poetry; or like The Counterfeiters by André Gide, who might have been even falser, even more counterfeit, than their own author suspected. There is only one surprising case in this rest home for retired books, and that’s Hermann Hesse, who was a sort of dazzling explosion when they gave him the Nobel Prize in 1946, and then he plummeted into oblivion. But in recent years his books have been rescued with as much strength as before by a generation that maybe finds in them a metaphysics that corresponds to their own doubts.
The Scandal of the Century Page 29
