Clearly none of this is worrying, but just a salon enigma. The truth is that there shouldn’t be any compulsory books, or books read as penance, and the healthy way is to stop reading on the page when it becomes unbearable. However, for masochists who prefer to carry on in spite of everything, there is a correct formula: put the unreadable books in the bathroom. Maybe several years of good digestion can bring Milton’s Paradise Lost to a happy conclusion.
December 8, 1982, El País, Madrid
From Paris, with Love
I came to Paris for the first time one freezing December night in 1955. I arrived by train from Rome to a station decked out with Christmas lights, and the first thing that caught my attention were the couples who kissed each other everywhere. On the train, in the metro, in cafés, on elevators, the first postwar generation threw themselves with all their energy into the public consumption of love, which was still the only cheap pleasure after the disaster. They kissed in the middle of the street, with no worries about hindering pedestrians, who moved aside without looking at them or paying any attention, as we do with stray dogs that hang onto each other, making puppies in the middle of the town square. Those outdoor kisses were not frequent in Rome—which was the first European city I’d lived in—nor, of course, in the misty and prudish Bogotá of those days, where it was even difficult to kiss in bedrooms.
This was in the dark days of the war in Algeria. In the background of the nostalgic accordion music on the corners, beyond the street smell of chestnuts roasting in the braziers, repression was an insatiable specter. All of a sudden, the police would block off the exit of a café or of one of the North African bars on the Boulevard Saint-Michel and violently drag away anyone who didn’t have a Christian face. One of those, inevitably, was me. No explanations worked: not just our faces, but also the accent with which we spoke French, were reasons for our undoing. The first time they put me in the cage with the Algerians, at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés police station, I felt humiliated. It was a Latin American prejudice: jail was something to be ashamed of then, because as children we didn’t have a very clear distinction between political and common crimes, and our conservative adults took care of inculcating that confusion and keeping us in it. My situation was even more dangerous, because, even though the police dragged me away because they thought I was Algerian, once inside the cell the Algerians distrusted me when they realized that, despite my face of a door-to-door fabric salesman, I did not understand a single word they said. However, since they and I continued to be such assiduous visitors to the nocturnal lockups, we ended up reaching an understanding. One night, one of them said if I was going to be an innocent prisoner wouldn’t it be better to be a guilty one, and put me to work for the Algerian National Liberation Front. He was Ahmed Tebbal, a doctor, who was one of my best friends in Paris during those days, but he died of a different war death after the independence of his country. Twenty-five years later, when I was invited to the celebration of that anniversary in Algeria, I declared to a journalist something that seemed hard to believe: the Algerian Revolution is the only one for which I’ve actually been imprisoned.
Nevertheless, Paris back then was not only a city of the Algerian War. It was also the place for the most generalized exile of Latin Americans in a long time. In effect, Juan Domingo Perón—who was not the same then as in later years—was in power in Argentina, General Ordía was in Peru, General Rojas Pinilla was in Colombia, General Pérez Jiménez was in Venezuela, General Anastasio Somoza was in Nicaragua, General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo was in Santo Domingo, General Fulgencio Batista was in Cuba. We were so many fugitives of so many simultaneous patriarchs that the poet Nicolás Guillén would lean out over his balcony of the Hotel Grand Saint-Michel, on Rue Cujas, every morning and shout out the news from Latin America in Spanish. One morning he shouted, “The man has fallen.” Only one man had fallen, of course, but we all woke up with the illusion that the fallen general was the one from our own country.
When I arrived in Paris, I was nothing but a raw Caribbean. I am most grateful to that city, with which I have many old grudges, and many even older loves, for having given me a new and resolute perspective on Latin America. The vision of the whole, which we didn’t have in any of our countries, became very clear here around a safe table, and one ended up realizing that, in spite of being from different countries, we were all crew members of the same boat. It was possible to travel all around the continent and meet its writers, its artists, its disgraced or budding politicians, just by making rounds of the crowded cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Some didn’t arrive, as happened to me with Julio Cortázar—whom I already admired for the wonderful stories of Bestiario—and for whom I waited for almost a year in the Old Navy café, where someone had told me he often went. I finally met him fifteen years later, also in Paris, and he was still as I’d imagined him since long ago: the tallest man in the world, who never decided to grow old. The faithful copy of that unforgettable Latin American who, in one of his short stories, liked to walk through the misty dawns to go and watch the guillotine executions.
We breathed in the songs of Brassens in the air. The lovely Tachia Quintana, a bold Basque woman whom we Latin Americans from all over had adopted as one of our own exiles, performed the miracle of making a succulent paella for ten on a tiny spirit stove. Paul Coulaud, another of our converts, had found a name for that life: la misère dorée, golden misery. I didn’t have a very clear appreciation of my situation until one night when I found myself near the Jardin de Luxembourg without having eaten a chestnut all day and with no place to sleep. I was wandering the boulevards for hours, in the hope that a police patrol sweeping the streets for Arabs would pick me up so I could sleep in the warm cell, but no matter where I looked I couldn’t find one. At dawn, when the palaces along the Seine began to show their silhouettes in the thick fog, I headed over to the Îsle de la Cité with long, decisive strides and with the face of an honest worker who’s just got up to go to his factory. As I was crossing the Saint-Michel bridge, I sensed that I was not alone in the fog because I could clearly hear the footsteps of someone approaching from the opposite direction. I saw him take shape in the fog, on the same sidewalk and with the same rhythm as me, and I saw up close his red and black plaid jacket, and in the instant our paths crossed at the middle of the bridge I saw his unruly hair, his Turk’s moustache, his sad countenance of backdated hunger and sleepless nights, and I saw his eyes brimming with tears. My heart froze, because that man seemed to be me, on my way back.
That’s my most intense memory of those times, and I’ve remembered it with more force than ever now that I’ve returned to Paris on my way back from Stockholm. The city has not changed since then. In 1968, when I was lured by my curiosity to see what had happened after that marvelous explosion of May, I found that lovers were not kissing in public, and they’d replaced the cobblestones in the streets, and they’d erased the most beautiful graffiti ever written on walls: “Imagination to power,” “Beneath the pavement, the beach,” “Make love on top of the others.” Yesterday, after walking around the places that were once mine, I could only perceive one novelty: some municipal workers dressed in green, who traveled the streets on green motorcycles and carried mechanical hands like space explorers to collect from the street the shit that a million captive dogs expel every twenty-four hours in the loveliest city on earth.
December 29, 1982, El País, Madrid
Return to Mexico
I once said in an interview, “Almost the only memory left to me of Mexico City, where I have so many beloved friends, is the incredible afternoon when the sun was shining and rain was falling in Chapultepec Forest, and I was so fascinated by that prodigious weather that my sense of direction was disturbed and I walked around and around in the rain, without finding a way out.”
Ten years after that declaration I have returned to look for that enchanted forest and I found it rotten from the air pollution and looking like i
t hasn’t rained on those wilted trees since that day. This experience revealed to me how much of my life and that of my family has been spent in this Luciferian city, which is today one of the most extensive and populous in the world, and how much we have changed together, we and the city, since we arrived without an address or a dime in our pockets, on July 2, 1961, at the dusty central railway station.
I’ll never forget the date, even if it wasn’t stamped on a useless passport, because the next day a friend woke me up very early in the morning by phoning to tell me that Hemingway had died. Sure enough, he had blown his head off with a rifle shot through the roof of his mouth, and that atrocity remained forever in my mind as the start of a new era. Mercedes and I, who had been married for two years, and Rodrigo, who wasn’t yet a year old, had been living for the previous months in a hotel room in Manhattan. I was working as a correspondent for a Cuban news agency in New York, and I’d never known a more suitable place to be murdered. It was a sordid and solitary office, in an old building of the Rockefeller Center, with a room full of teletypes and an editorial room with a single window that looked out over an abysmal courtyard, always sad and smelling of frozen soot, and from the bottom of which rose the din at all hours of rats fighting over leftovers in the garbage cans. When that place became unbearable, we put Rodrigo in a basket and left on the first bus going south. All our capital in the world amounted to three hundred dollars, and another hundred that Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza sent us from Bogotá to the Colombian consulate in New Orleans. It was a lovely bit of madness: we were trying to get to Colombia through the cotton plantations and black towns of the United States, the only guide we brought being my recent memory of the novels of William Faulkner.
As a literary experience, all that was fascinating, but in real life—even being so young—it was crazy. Twelve days on buses along secondary, sweltering, and sad roads, eating in grotty diners and sleeping in even worse hotels. In department stores in the cities of the south we encountered the ignominy of discrimination for the first time: there were two separate public water fountains, one for whites and the other for negros, with a sign marking each one. In Alabama we spent a whole night looking for a hotel room, and in every one they told us they were full, until one night porter discovered by chance that we weren’t Mexican. However, as usual, what most tired us were not the interminable days under the burning June heat or the bad nights in cheap hotels, but the bad food. Tired of cardboard hamburgers and malted milks, we ended up sharing the baby’s jars of stewed fruit and vegetables. At the end of that heroic voyage we had managed once more to confront reality and fiction. The immaculate parthenons in the middle of the cotton fields, farmers taking siestas under the eaves of roadside stalls, the shacks of black workers surviving in misery, the white heirs to Uncle Gavin Stevens, who walked to church on Sunday with their languid wives dressed in muslin: the terrible life of Yoknapatawpha County had paraded before our eyes through the window of a bus, and was as true and as human as in the novels of the old master.
However, all the emotion of that experience went all to hell when we reached the Mexican border, dusty and dirty Laredo that was already familiar from so many movies about smugglers. The first thing we did was go into a cheap restaurant for a hot meal. The first thing they served, instead of soup, was a dish of tender, yellow rice, prepared in a different way from on the Caribbean coast. “Praise the Lord,” Mercedes exclaimed. “I’d stay here forever, if only to keep eating this rice.” She could never have imagined to what extent her desire to stay would be fulfilled. Not for that plate of fried rice, though, because destiny would play a very funny joke on us: the rice we eat at home we have brought from Colombia, almost as contraband, in the suitcases of friends who come to visit, because we’ve learned to survive without our childhood foods, except for that patriotic rice the snowy grains of which can be counted one by one on the plate.
We arrived in Mexico City on a mauve evening, with our last twenty dollars and nothing in the future. We only had four friends here. One of them was the poet Álvaro Mutis, who had already had some hard years in Mexico, but hadn’t yet reached his soft ones. Another was Luis Vicens, one of the great Catalans who had come from Colombia a short while before us, fascinated by Mexican cultural life. Another was the sculptor Rodrigo Arenas Betancur, who was planting monumental heads all across this interminable country. The fourth was the writer Juan García Ponce, who had been to Colombia as a jury member for a painting prize, but we barely remembered each other, due to the dense state of intoxication we’d both been in the night we met for the first time. He was the one who phoned me as soon as he heard of my arrival, and shouted with his florid way with words, “That bastard Hemingway blew his fucking brains out with a shotgun.” That was the exact moment—and not at six o’clock the previous evening—that I truly arrived in Mexico City, without really knowing why, or how, or for how long. That was twenty-one years ago now and I still don’t know, but here we are. As I said on a recent memorable occasion, I’ve written my books here, I’ve raised my children here, and I’ve planted my trees here.
I’ve revived this past—rarified by nostalgia, it’s true—now that I’ve returned to Mexico like so many times before, and for the first time I’ve found myself in a different city. There are no courting couples left in the Chapultepec Forest, and nobody seems to believe in the radiant sun of January, because it’s such a rarity these days. Never, ever, have I found so much uncertainty in the hearts of my friends. Can this be possible?
January 26, 1983, El País, Madrid
Okay, We’ll Talk About Literature
Jorge Luis Borges said in a long-ago interview that the problem with young writers then was that at the moment of writing they were thinking of success or failure. Whereas, when he was starting out he only thought of writing for himself. “When I published my first book,” he said, “in 1923, I had three hundred copies printed and I distributed them among my friends, except for a hundred copies, which I took to the magazine Nosotros.” One of the editors of the publication, Alfredo Bianchi, looked at Borges in terror and said, “But you don’t expect me to sell all those books?” “Of course not,” Borges answered, “in spite of having written them, I’m not completely crazy.” Anyway, the author of the interview, Alex J. Zisman, who was then a Peruvian student in London, told in an aside that Borges had suggested to Bianchi that he could slip copies into the pockets of the overcoats people left hanging in the office closet, and thus get some reviews published.
Thinking of this episode, I remembered another perhaps too well known, about the wife of the then famous North American writer Sherwood Anderson finding the young William Faulkner writing in pencil leaning on an old wheelbarrow. “What are you writing?” she asked him. Faulkner, without looking up, answered, “A novel.” Mrs. Anderson only managed to exclaim, “My God!” Nonetheless, a few days later Sherwood Anderson sent someone to tell Faulkner that he was prepared to take the novel to a publisher, on the condition that he didn’t have to read it. The book must have been Soldiers’ Pay, which came out in 1926—in other words, three years after Borges’s first book—and Faulkner had published four more before he was considered a recognized author whose books were accepted by publishers without too much of a runaround. Faulkner himself once declared that after those first five books he felt forced to write a sensationalist novel, since the previous ones hadn’t earned enough money to feed his family. That obligatory book was Sanctuary, and it’s worth noting, because this reveals very well what Faulkner’s idea of a sensationalist novel was.
I’ve remembered these episodes of the origins of great writers in the course of an almost four-hour-long conversation I had yesterday with Ron Sheppard, one of the literary writers for Time magazine, who is preparing a piece on Latin American literature. Two things about that interview pleased me. The first was that Sheppard only spoke to me and only made me speak about literature, and demonstrated, without the least sign of pedantry, that
he knows very well what it is. The second is that he had read all my books with close attention and had studied them very well, not only individually, but in order and as a whole, and he’d also taken the trouble to read numerous interviews with me so he wouldn’t fall back on the same old questions as ever. This last point doesn’t interest me so much for flattering my vanity—something that, in any case, cannot nor should not be discarded when talking with any writer, even with those who seem most modest—rather because it allowed me to better explain, with my own experience, my personal conceptions of the job of writing. Every interviewed writer discovers immediately—by any tiny carelessness—if interviewers have not read a book they’re talking about, and from that instant, and maybe without them noticing it, place them in a disadvantageous situation. On the other hand, I have a very fond memory of a very young Spanish journalist, who conducted a very meticulous interview about my life believing that I was the author of the song of the yellow butterflies, which was playing everywhere at the time, but who had not the slightest idea that the music had been inspired by a book and that, moreover, I was the one who’d written it.
The Scandal of the Century Page 30
