In another, more pleasant job he had to remove the elegant corpse of the richest man in the world from a hotel in Barranquilla. He took the body, standing vertically in an emergency coffin purchased at the funeral parlour on the corner, down in the service lift. When the attendant asked him who was inside, he said, ‘The most reverend bishop.’ In a restaurant in Mexico City, where he was talking in a very loud voice, a man at a nearby table tried to attack him, thinking he really was Walter Winchell, the narrator of The Untouchables, whose voice Álvaro had dubbed for television. During his twenty-three years selling canned films for Latin America, he went around the world seventeen times without changing the way he was.
What I’ve always valued most is his schoolteacher’s generosity, for he had a fierce vocation he could never put into practice because of his accursed habit of playing billiards. No writer I know is as concerned as he is for other writers, especially the youngest ones. He incites them to poetry against the will of their parents, perverts them with secret books, hypnotizes them with his florid gift of the gab, and sends them out to wander the world convinced it is possible to be a poet without dying in the attempt.
No one has benefited more than I from that rare virtue. I’ve already recounted elsewhere that it was Álvaro who gave me my first copy of Pedro Páramo, and said: ‘Here it is, so you can learn.’ He never imagined what he had got into. For with the reading of Juan Rulfo I not only learned to write in a different way but always to have another story ready in order not to recount the one I’m writing. Ever since I wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude my absolute victim in this redemptive system has been Álvaro Mutis. For eighteen months he came to my house almost every night so I could tell him about the chapters I had completed, and in this way I caught his reactions even though they were to a different story. He listened to the chapters with so much enthusiasm that he kept repeating them everywhere, corrected and augmented by him. His friends recounted them to me afterwards, just as he had repeated them, and often I appropriated his contributions. When the first draft was finished, I sent it to his house. The next day he called me in indignation:
‘You’ve made me look like a dog in front of my friends,’ he shouted at me. ‘This stuff has nothing to do with what you told me.’
Since then he has been the first reader of my manuscripts. His judgements are so severe but so well reasoned that at least three stories of mine died in the wastepaper basket because he had an argument with them. I myself couldn’t say how much of him is in almost all my books, but there’s a great deal.
I’ve often wondered how it is that this friendship has been able to prosper in such despicable times. The answer is simple: Álvaro and I see each other very little, and only as friends. Though we have lived in Mexico City for more than thirty years and are almost neighbours, that is where we see each other least. When I want to see him, or he wants to see me, we call each other first to be sure we want to see each other. I violated this elementary rule of friendship only once, and that was when Álvaro gave me an extreme demonstration of the kind of friend he is capable of being.
This is what happened: drowning in tequila, with a very dear friend, at four in the morning I knocked at the door of the apartment where Álvaro endured his sad life of a bachelor, always at one’s service. Before his face still dazed by sleep, we took down a beautiful oil painting by Botero that measured 1 metre 20 by 1 metre, took it away without explanation, and did with it whatever we felt like doing. Álvaro has never said a word to me about the assault or moved a finger to find out about the painting. And I’ve had to wait until tonight and this celebration of his first seventy years to express my remorse to him.
Something else that has sustained this friendship is that, for the most part, when we’ve been together, we’ve been travelling. This has allowed us to be concerned with other people and other things most of the time, and to be concerned with each other when it really was worth the effort. For me, the interminable hours on European highways have been the university of arts and letters I never attended. From Barcelona to Aix-en-Provence I learned more than 300 kilometres’ worth about the Cathars and the popes of Avignon. And the same thing happened in Alexandria and in Florence, in Naples and in Beirut, in Egypt and in Paris.
However, the most enigmatic instruction of those frenzied trips happened while crossing the Belgian countryside, rarefied by October fog and the smell of human shit from recently abandoned fallow fields. Álvaro had driven for more than three hours in absolute silence, though no one believes it. Suddenly, he said: ‘A country of great cyclists and hunters.’ He never explained to us what he meant but confessed that inside him lives a gigantic, shaggy, drooling simpleton who, in careless moments, comes out with sentences like that one, even during the most proper visits and in presidential palaces, and that Álvaro has to keep him at arm’s length when he’s writing because the fool goes mad and begins to shake and stamp his feet because he wants so much to correct his books.
With it all, my best memories of that errant school haven’t been the classes but the recreational periods. In Paris, waiting for our wives to finish shopping, Álvaro sat on the steps of a fashionable cafeteria, twisted his head skywards, rolled back his eyes, and extended his trembling beggar’s hand. An impeccably dressed gentleman said with typical French sourness: ‘It is effrontery to beg wearing a cashmere sweater like that.’ But he gave him a franc. In less than fifteen minutes he had collected forty.
In Rome, in the house of Francesco Rosi, he hypnotized Fellini, Monica Vitti, Alida Valli, Alberto Moravia, the cream of Italian cinema and literature, and kept them in suspense for hours, recounting his truculent stories about Quindío in an Italian of his own invention, without knowing a single word of the language. In a bar in Barcelona he recited a poem in the languorous voice of Pablo Neruda, and someone who had heard Neruda in person asked for his autograph, thinking he was the Chilean.
A verse of his had disturbed me since the first time I read it: ‘Now that I know I’ll never see Istanbul’. A strange line for a hopeless monarchist who never said ‘Istanbul’ but ‘Byzantium’, just as he didn’t say ‘Leningrad’ but ‘St Petersburg’ long before history sided with him. I don’t know why I had the premonition that we ought to exorcize that line by seeing Istanbul. So I persuaded him that we should go there in a slow ship, as one must when defying fate. However, I didn’t have a moment’s peace for the three days we were there, frightened by the premonitory power of poetry. Only today, when Álvaro is an old man of seventy and I a boy of sixty-six, do I have the courage to say I didn’t do it to ruin a line but to impede death.
In any event, the only time I really thought I was about to die I was also with Álvaro. We were driving across luminous Provence when a demented driver came straight at us from the opposite direction. All I could do was give the steering wheel a hard turn to the right, without having time to see where we were going to land. For a moment I had the extraordinary sensation that the wheel was not responding in empty space. Carmen and Mercedes, in the back seat as usual, were breathless until the car lay down like a child in the ditch of a springtime vineyard. All I remember of that moment is Álvaro’s face in the seat beside me; he stared at me for a second before he turned away with a pitying look that seemed to say: ‘But what is this asshole doing?’
These abrupt remarks of Álvaro’s are less of a surprise to those of us who knew and endured his mother, Carolina Jaramillo, a beautiful, beguiling woman who did not look in the mirror again after the age of twenty because she began to see herself as different from how she felt. When she was already an elderly grandmother she travelled by bicycle, dressed as a hunter, giving free injections at farms on the savanna. In New York I asked her one night to look after my fourteen-month-old son while we went to the cinema. She warned us in all seriousness to be careful, because in Manizales she had done the same favour with a child who wouldn’t stop crying, and she had been obliged to quiet him with a poison
ed blackberry candy. In spite of that we entrusted him to her on another day in Macy’s department store, and when we returned we found her alone. While store security looked for the boy, she tried to console us with the same dark serenity that her son had: ‘Don’t worry. I lost Álvarito in Brussels when he was seven, and now just see how well he’s doing.’ Of course he was doing well: he was an erudite, magnified version of her, and half the world knew him, not so much for his poetry as for being the most congenial man in the world. Wherever he went he left behind an unforgettable trail of his frenzied exaggerations, suicidal feasts, and ingenious fulminations. Only those of us who know and love him most know that they are no more than exaggerations to frighten away his phantoms.
No one can imagine how high a price Álvaro Mutis pays for the misfortune of being so congenial. I have seen him lying on a sofa in the shadows of his study, with a hangover of conscience that none of his happy auditors of the previous night would envy. Fortunately, that incurable solitude is the other mother to whom he owes his immense knowledge, his enormous capacity for reading, his infinite curiosity, and the chimerical beauty and interminable desolation of his poetry.
I have seen him hidden from the world in the elephantine symphonies of Bruckner as if they were divertimentos of Scarlatti. I have seen him in an isolated corner of a garden in Cuernavaca, during a long holiday, a fugitive from reality in the enchanted forest of the complete works of Balzac. From time to time, like someone who goes to see a cowboy movie, he rereads Remembrance of Things Past in one sitting. A good condition for his reading a book is that it has no fewer than 1,200 pages. In the Mexico City prison where he was incarcerated for a crime that many of us writers and artists benefited from and that he alone paid for, he spent sixteen months which he considers the happiest of his life.
I always thought that the slowness of his creations was due to his tyrannical occupations. I also thought it was made worse by his disastrous handwriting, which looks as if it were made with a goose feather, by the goose himself, and whose vampirish strokes would make mastiffs howl with terror in the mists of Transylvania. When I told him this many years ago, he said that as soon as he retired from his galley slavery he would bring his books up to date. That this has happened, and that he has jumped without a parachute from his eternal aeroplanes to the firm ground of abundant, well-deserved glory, is one of the great miracles of our letters: eight books in six years.
It is enough to read a single page of any of them to understand everything: the complete works of Álvaro Mutis, his very life, are those of a seer who knows with absolute certainty that we’ll never again find the paradise we have lost. That is: Maqroll is not only Mutis, as people say so easily. Maqroll is all of us.
Let those of us who have come tonight to celebrate with Álvaro these seventy years be left with this risky conclusion. For the first time with no false shyness, with no stinging insults because we’re afraid to cry, let us just tell him with all our heart how much we admire him, damn it, and how much we love him.
THE ARGENTINE WHO ENDEARED HIMSELF TO EVERYBODY
Mexico City, February 12, 1994
I went to Prague for the last time, with Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar, in the historic year of 1968. We were travelling by train from Paris because the three of us were united in our fear of aeroplanes, and we had talked about everything as we crossed the divided night of the Germanys, their oceans of beets, their immense factories which made everything, the devastation of their savage wars and excessive loves.
When it was time to sleep, it occurred to Carlos Fuentes to ask Cortázar how, and at what point, and by whose initiative the piano had been introduced into the jazz orchestra. The question was casual, not meant to find out more than a date and a name, but the answer was a dazzling lecture that went on until dawn, between enormous glasses of beer and icy sausages with potatoes. Cortázar, who knew how to weigh his words very carefully, offered us, with barely credible knowledge and simplicity, a historic and aesthetic review that culminated at first light in a Homeric apologia for Thelonious Monk. He spoke not only in a deep organ voice with laborious long rr’s but with his big-boned hands as well, more expressive than any others I can remember. Neither Carlos Fuentes nor I will ever forget the astonishment of that incomparable night.
Twelve years later I saw Julio Cortázar in front of a crowd in a park in Managua, with no weapons other than his beautiful voice and one of his most difficult stories: the tale of a boxer down on his luck that the protagonist recounts in Lunfardo, the underworld dialect of Buenos Aires, whose comprehension would be completely forbidden to the rest of us mortals if we hadn’t caught glimpses of it through so much malevolence; yet that was the story Cortázar himself chose to read on a platform in a huge illuminated garden before a crowd composed of everyone from consecrated poets and unemployed masons to comandantes of the revolution and their opponents. It was another dazzling experience. Although, strictly speaking, it wasn’t easy to follow the sense of the story, even for the most expert in Lunfardo slang, you felt and were hurt by the blows the poor boxer received in the solitude of the ring, and his illusions and misery made you want to cry, for Cortázar had achieved so intimate a communication with his audience that no one cared any longer what the words meant or didn’t mean, and the crowd sitting on the grass seemed to levitate in a state of grace because of the spell cast by a voice that didn’t seem to be of this world.
These two memories of Cortázar, which affected me so much, also seem to be the ones that defined him best. They were the two extremes of his personality. In private, as on the train to Prague, he seduced with his eloquence, his lively erudition, his millimetric memory, his dangerous humour, with everything that made him one of the great intellectuals in the good sense of another time. In public, in spite of his reluctance to be a spectacle, he fascinated the audience with an inescapable presence that was somehow supernatural and at the same time tender and puzzling. In both cases he was the most remarkable human being I’ve had the good fortune to know.
Years later, when we were already friends, I thought I’d see him again as I saw him that first day, for I think he recreated himself in one of his most accomplished stories, ‘The Other Heaven’, in the character of a Latin American in Paris who attended executions by guillotine out of sheer curiosity. As if he had done it in front of a mirror, Cortázar described him in this way: ‘He had at once a distant and curiously fixed expression, the face of someone who has become immobilized in a moment of sleep and refuses to take the step that will return him to wakefulness.’ His character went around encased in a long black smock, like Cortázar’s own overcoat when I saw him for the first time, but the narrator of the story didn’t dare approach to ask about his origin, fearing the cold anger with which he himself would have received a similar question. The strange thing is that I didn’t dare approach Cortázar either on that afternoon in the Old Navy bar, and because of the same fear. I saw him writing for more than an hour, not pausing to think, not drinking anything but half a glass of mineral water, until it began to grow dark and he put his pen in his pocket and went out, his notebook under his arm like the tallest, skinniest schoolboy in the world. On the many occasions we saw each other years later, the only thing that had changed in him was his thick, dark beard, for until two weeks before his death the legend that he was immortal seemed true, because he had never stopped growing and always stayed the age he had been when he was born. I never had the courage to ask him if it was true, as I never told him that during the sad autumn of 1956 I had seen him, without daring to say anything to him, in his corner of the Old Navy, and I know that wherever he is now he must be cursing me for my timidity. Idols fill you with respect, admiration, affection, and, of course, great envy. Cortázar inspired all those feelings as very few writers do, but he also inspired another, less frequent one: devotion. He was, perhaps unintentionally, the Argentine who endeared himself to everybody. However, I dare to think that if the dead die, C
ortázar must be dying again of embarrassment because of the worldwide consternation caused by his death. Nobody dreaded posthumous honours and funeral pomp more than he, either in real life or in books. Besides, I always thought that death itself seemed indecent to him. Somewhere in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, a group of friends cannot contain their laughter at the evidence that a friend of theirs has committed the absurdity of dying. That was why, because I knew and loved him so well, I refused to take part in lamentations and elegies for Julio Cortázar.
I preferred to go on thinking of him as he undoubtedly would have wanted, with immense rejoicing that he had existed, with deep joy at having known him, and gratitude for his having left the world a body of work that may be incomplete but is as beautiful and indestructible as his memory.
LATIN AMERICA EXISTS
Contadora, Panama, March 28, 1995
I waited till the last to speak, because yesterday at breakfast I didn’t know anything about what I learned during the rest of the day. I’m a diehard conversationalist and these tournaments are implacable monologues in which the pleasure of questions and replies is forbidden. You take notes, ask for the floor, wait, and when it’s your turn the others have already said what you were going to say. My compatriot Augusto Ramírez had told me on the plane that it’s easy to know when someone has grown old because everything he says he illustrates with an anecdote. If that’s the case, I told him, I was born old and all my books are senile. These notes are proof of that.
President Lacalle gave us our first surprise with the revelation that the name of Latin America isn’t French. I always thought it was, but no matter how hard I think about it, I haven’t been able to remember where I learned it and, in any case, I couldn’t prove it. Bolívar didn’t use it. He said ‘America’, without adjectives, before the North Americans appropriated the name for themselves alone. But, on the other hand, Bolívar compressed into six words the chaos of our identity to define us in the Jamaica Letter: we are a “small human race”. That is, he included everything left out in other definitions: our multiple origins, our indigenous languages, and the European indigenous languages — Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Dutch.
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