Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  London, 17 August 1995

  Neruda at a Hundred

  When I was still a boy in short trousers, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where I spent the first ten years of my life, my mother had on her bedside table an edition of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda, that had a blue cover with a stream of golden stars on it, which she read and reread. I had barely begun to read and, attracted by my mother’s devotion to these pages, I tried to read them as well. She had forbidden me to do so, explaining that these were not poems for children. This ban made the verses extraordinarily attractive, making them seem rather disturbing. I read them secretly, without understanding them, excited, and intuiting that behind some of the mysterious exclamations (‘My rough labourer’s body tunnels into you/And makes the child leap up from the depths of the earth’, ‘Ah, the roses of the pubis!’) there lay a world that was all about sin.

  Neruda was the first poet whose poems I learned by heart: I would recite them in my adolescent years to the girls I fell in love with. He was the poet I most imitated when I began to scribble down verses, the epic and revolutionary poet that accompanied my years at university, and my political involvement in the group Cahuide during the sinister years of the Odría dictatorship. In the clandestine meetings of my cell, we would sometimes interrupt our readings of Lenin’s What is to be Done and Mariátegui’s Seven Essays to recite, in a state of trance, pages from the Canto General and Spain in My Heart. Later, when I became a more discerning reader than as a young man, very critical of propaganda poetry, Neruda continued to be one of my favourite writers – I even preferred him to the great César Vallejo, another icon of my youth – no longer as the writer of Canto General, but rather the Neruda of Residence on Earth, a book that I have reread many times, as I have done with a very small number of other poets, like Góngora, Baudelaire and Rubén Darío. Some of the poems in that collection – ‘The Widow’s Tango’, ‘The Single Gentleman’ – still send a shiver down my spine and give me that sense of wonderful unease and shock that only the best literature can produce. In all aspects of artistic creation, genius is an inexplicable anomaly in our world of reason, but in poetry it is more than that: it is a strange, almost inhuman gift, something that has to be described with those much abused adjectives: transcendent, miraculous, divine.

  I met Pablo Neruda in Paris in the sixties, in the house of Jorge Edwards. I still remember how excited I felt to be face to face with the very man who had written that poetry that was like an ocean of different seas and infinite species of animals and vegetables, unfathomably deep and enormously rich. I was struck dumb. I finally managed to blurt out a few admiring remarks. He received the praise with the naturalness of royalty and declared that it was a good night for us to eat the sausages that the Edwards had prepared for us. He was fat, friendly, gossipy, greedy (‘Mathilde, get over to that dish right now and save me the best bits’), a good conversationalist, and he made an enormous effort to break the ice and make me feel at ease, as I sat there, overwhelmed by his imposing presence.

  Although we ended up becoming quite good friends, I think that he was the only writer that I could never treat as an equal. When I was with him, despite the fact that he was always very warm and generous towards me, I always ended up feeling both intimidated and reverential. The man intrigued me and fascinated me almost as much as his poetry. His pose was anti-intellectual, contemptuous of the theories and complicated interpretations of critics. When someone floated an abstract, general topic, inviting a discussion about ideas – something that Octavio Paz shone at – Neruda’s face fell and he immediately made sure that the conversation became trite and prosaic. He made a great effort to show that he was simple, direct and completely down to earth, a world away from bookish writers who preferred texts to life and who could say, like Borges, ‘I have read a lot and lived only a little.’ He wanted to make everyone believe that he had lived a lot and read very little, because he rarely mentioned literature in conversation. Even when he showed, with great pride, the first editions and the marvellous manuscripts that he’d collected in his splendid library, he avoided making any comments about literary value and instead focused on the purely material aspect of these precious objects filled with words. His anti-intellectualism was a pose, of course, because without reading a great deal and assimilating and reflecting on the best literature, he would not have been able to revolutionise poetic language in Spanish the way he did, or have written such diverse and essential poetry. He seemed to think that the worst risk a poet could run was to become confined in a world of abstractions and ideas, as if this might take away the vitality of the word, remove poetry from the public arena and condemn it to obscurity.

  What was not a pose was his love of things, objects that could be felt, seen, smelt and eventually eaten and drunk. All of Neruda’s houses, but in particular the house at Isla Negra, were creations that were as powerful and personal as his best poems. He collected everything, from figureheads to little matchstick ships in bottles, from butterflies to marine shells, from handicrafts to very early editions, and in his houses one felt enveloped by an atmosphere of fantasy and immense sensuality. He had an infallible eye when it came to detecting unusual and exceptional things, and when he liked something, he became like a capricious, difficult child who would not stop until he got what he wanted. I remember a marvellous letter that he wrote to Jorge Edwards, asking him to go to London and buy him a pair of drums that he had seen in a shop when he’d been passing through that capital city. Life was unliveable, he said, without a drum. In the mornings in Isla Negra, he sounded a trumpet, put on his naval beret and raised the flag on the mast that he had on the beach: the emblem was a fish.

  Watching him eat was a wonderful spectacle. That time that I met him, in Paris, I interviewed him for the Radio-Television channel. I asked him to read a poem from ‘Residence of Earth’ which I love: ‘The Young Monarch’. He agreed, but when he found the page he exclaimed, in surprise: ‘Ah, but this is a prose poem.’ I felt a dagger to my heart: how could he have forgotten one of the most perfect compositions ever to come from the pen of a poet? After the interview, he wanted to go and eat Middle Eastern food. In a Moroccan restaurant in the rue de L’Harpe, he gave the fork back and asked for a second spoon. He ate with great concentration and happiness, brandishing a spoon in each hand like an alchemist mixing his vials, about to create the definitive potion. Watching Neruda eat, one realised that life was worth living, that happiness was possible and that its secret was sizzling in a frying pan.

  The fact that he became so famous and so successful throughout the entire world, and could live so comfortably, stirred up envy, resentment and hatred that pursued him everywhere, and, on occasion, made his life impossible. I remember once in London indignantly showing him a newspaper from Lima, which contained an attack on me. He looked at me as if I was a child who still believed that storks brought babies. ‘I have chests full of cuttings like that,’ he said. ‘I think that at some time or other I’ve been accused of everything disgusting under the sun.’ But when this happened, he knew how to defend himself, and, at some points in his life, his poems were full of insults and ferocious diatribes against his enemies. But curiously, I cannot remember him ever saying anything bad about anyone, and only very rarely indulging in that favourite sport among writers which is to take fellow writers apart. One night, in Isla Negra, after an enormous meal, through half opened, tortoise eyes he looked at me and said that he had sent five signed copies of his latest book to five young Chilean poets. ‘And not one of them wrote back to me,’ he complained sadly.

  This was in the last years of his life, at a time when he wanted everyone to like him because he had forgotten all the old enmities and grudges and was making peace with everyone. Although he remained loyal to the Communist Party and, out of this loyalty, had at certain moments sung the praises of Stalin and defended dogmatic positions, in his old age he began to be more critical of what had happened in the communist world and he becam
e more tolerant and open. His poetry was no longer belligerent or resentful, and became serene, joyful and understanding, celebrating the things and the people of this world.

  There is no other poetic work in the Spanish language as exuberant and as vast as that of Neruda, a poetry that has touched so many different worlds and stimulated so many different writing talents. The only comparable case that I know in other languages is the work of Victor Hugo. Like the œuvre of the great French Romantic, Neruda’s work was uneven: it could be intense, surprising and strikingly original, but also facile and conventional. But there is no doubt that his work will last and will continue to bewitch future generations as it has bewitched our generation.

  There was something childlike about him, with his obsessions and desires that he expressed without any trace of hypocrisy, with the healthy enthusiasm of a naughty boy. Behind his good-natured appearance, there was a man who was a keen observer of reality and also someone who, in exceptional circumstances, in a small group, after a well-lubricated meal, could suddenly reveal a heart-rending intimacy. And it was then that we could see, behind the Olympian figure, celebrated the world over, the small boy from the province of Parral, full of enthusiasm and amazement at the wonders of the world, this boy that he never stopped being.

  Madrid, June 2004

  How I Lost My Fear of Flying

  There are certain naïve people who believe that a fear of flying is, or can be explained by, a fear of death. They are wrong: fear of flying is fear of flying, not of death, a fear as particular and specific as a fear of spiders, or of the void, or of cats, three common examples among the thousands that make up the panoply of human fears. Fear of flying wells up suddenly, when people not lacking in imagination and sensitivity realise that they are thirty thousand feet in the air, travelling through clouds at eight hundred miles an hour, and ask, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ And begin to tremble.

  It happened to me, after many years getting on and off aircraft as often as I change my shirts. I continued getting on these airborne missiles, but for a long time, I was sweating buckets on every flight, especially when we hit turbulence. My friend Saso, a most delightful air hostess who feels safer above the clouds than on terra firma, and who guffawed at my panic in the air, tried to cure me with the aid of statistics. She proved to me what everyone knows. That to travel by plane is infinitely safer than travelling by car, boat, train and even by bicycle or on skates, because every year many more people have accidents using those forms of transport. And even that going on foot, on a gentle and innocuous walk, is, statistically speaking, more dangerous than going in a plane. But, in my case, abstract statistics are incapable of stirring emotions or dispelling terror, so that even though rationally I was convinced by the figures that ploughing through the skies inside a plane is safer than sleeping in my own bed, I continued to have a terrible time on every flight.

  My late friend, the Uruguayan novelist Carlos Martínez Moreno, who once travelled by plane with me, spent the whole flight clutching an edition of Madame Bovary, worn and tattered from so much handling, that he did not read, but stroked continually. It was an amulet that guaranteed him a peaceful and safe flight. He’d taken this book on his first flight and it would later accompany him on all other flights, because intuition, fantasy or madness told him that it was this novelistic talisman and not the smooth running of the engines or the skill of the pilots that kept the planes he travelled in free of all harm and mishap. But Martínez Moreno’s remedy did not work for me, because of my strong scepticism of any form of witchcraft (especially its modern variants), or simply because I have yet to come across the spell that might convince me and convert me to the faith of witchcraft.

  A Puerto Rican friend, a wealthy widow who travels the world, revealed to me that she had cured her fear of flying through whisky. She’d always take a good supply with her on board, hidden in a small bag, and at the second or third sip, the ship could turn somersaults or be tossed about by the wind and she’d be giggling and happy, impervious to everything. I tried to apply her formula, but it did not work for me. I am very allergic to alcohol, and gulps of whisky, far from taking away my fear of flying, just increased it, and gave me headaches, shivers and nausea on top. I would probably have needed to become a hardened alcoholic, seeing little green men, to achieve the indifference to flying that my Puerto Rican friend managed with a few sips of alcohol. The cure would have been more damaging than the illness.

  At the other extreme to my Puerto Rican friend, some puritans argue that fear of flying is a result of heavy meals and an immoderate ingestion of spirits (wine and alcohol) on the journey. And for my serenity in the air, they recommended that I should abstain from eating and drinking wine on flights, and just drink large, and, for them, sedating, glasses of water. It didn’t work. Quite the reverse, these forced diets made me very miserable, and added to my fear the demoralising torture of hunger and constant peeing.

  Seconal, sanax and all those other pills invented to cure wakefulness and abolish insomnia, are no use to me either. There are marvellous people (they merit both my admiration and my envy) who become immediately somnolent on a plane and who sleep peacefully through the whole flight, lulled by the buzzing of the reactors. And others who, in order to reach that same state, stuff themselves with pills, which daze and anaesthetise them. But sleeping pills gave me palpitations or the most dreadful nightmares in which I saw myself sweating with terror inside a plane. So the relative, artificial sleep induced by medicaments did not take my fear away, but rather displaced it onto an oneiric and subconscious plane, and, as another side effect, turned me into a depressed zombie by the end of the flight.

  The solution came in a most unexpected way, on a flight between Buenos Aires and Madrid which, by chance, was commemorating the first flight between those cities (by an Iberian Airline Douglas DC4) on 22 September 1946. I bought at Ezeiza airport a copy of a short novel by Alejo Carpentier that I had not read: The Kingdom of This World. Nothing had prepared me for the surprise. From the first lines of the story, which recreates the hallucinating life of Henri Christophe and the building of the famous Citadel in Haiti, this superbly written and even better constructed narration in which, as in all literary masterpieces, nothing could be added or taken away, absorbed me body and soul and took away my surroundings, transporting me, for the ten hours or so of the flight, away from the frozen starry night into a prodigious epic account of Haiti in the previous century, where the most ferocious violence intermingled with the most fevered imagination, and everyday and trivial events blurred into miracles and legends. I read the final lines when the plane touched down in Barajas; the book had lasted the flight, and had taken away my fear for the entire journey.

  It is a remedy that, from that time on, has never failed me, so long as I choose for each flight a masterpiece whose spell is both total and lasts for exactly the time that I am defying the law of gravity. Of course, it is not easy to choose the right work, in terms of quality and length, for each trip. But with practice I have developed a sort of instinct to choose the right novel or story (poetry, plays or essays are not as strong antidotes against the fear of flying). I have also discovered that it is not necessary to have new works, for rereading can be just as effective provided the work in question can cast a spell that is as new and refreshing on third or fourth reading as it was the first time. Here is a list (as a token of my appreciation) of these reliable friends who in my recent, successful, attempts to emulate Icarus, helped me to conquer my fear of flying: Bartleby and Benito Cereno by Melville; The Turn of the Screw by Henry James; ‘The Pursuer’ by Cortázar; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by R. L. Stevenson; The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway; ‘The Monkey’ by Isak Dinesen; Pedro Páramo by Rulfo; Complete Works and Other Stories by Monterroso; ‘A Rose for Emily’ and ‘The Bear’ by Faulkner and Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Fortunately for me, the literary chemist store has limitless reserves of these medicines, so I still have plenty of plane journeys (and good reading)
ahead.