For his friends it was the opposite, the security was so unusual for them, so odd and thrilling, that it was just about all they remembered. When he asked them for their memories of those days they gave him memories of policemen, Do you remember the one who seduced our nanny, Do you remember the two really good-looking guys, everyone had a crush on them, they remembered drawn curtains and locked garden doors. Even in his friends’ eyes he was becoming a sideshow and the police were the main event. But when he tried to recall those days the police often weren’t there. They had been there, of course, but his memory had decided they weren’t.
But sometimes it was impossible to perform his little mind trick. In the snapshots his memory preserved of his South American trip, the policemen of Chile were right in the center of the frame, frightening, unforgettable, loud.
Snapshot of Chile. There were two different police forces in Chile, the uniformed Carabineros and the plainclothes Policía de Investigaciones, and while he and Elizabeth were in the air, flying to Santiago, these two great institutions quarreled about the decision to allow him into the country. He was supposed to speak at a literary fair, but when they got off the plane on a hot glaring airless day they were surrounded by uniformed police and taken to a stifling shed somewhere on the airport tarmac while people shouted in Spanish all around them. Their passports were taken away. No English speaker was produced to interpret, and when he tried to ask what was going on he was shouted at and ordered, with unmistakable gestures, to back off and shut up. Welcome to Sudamerica, he thought, sweating a good deal.
In 1993 Augusto Pinochet was no longer president but he was still commander-in-chief of the armed forces and even in the autumn of the patriarch nobody was in any doubt about his continued power and influence. In Pinochet’s Chile the security forces were omnipotent. Except that in this case the two police systems were in a dogfight, and he was the bone. He was reminded of the passage in Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Emperor in which Kapuscinski described Haile Selassie’s two entirely separate intelligence services, whose chief job was to spy on each other. He also reminded himself, less amusingly, that this was a country in which disappearances and unexplained murders had until recently been commonplace. Had they perhaps been “disappeared”?
After being held in the shed for perhaps two hours they were taken to a police facility described as a hotel. It was not a hotel. The door of their room did not open from the inside. There were armed guards posted outside it. He asked repeatedly for their passports to be returned, for his publisher to be called, and to speak to the British ambassador. The guards shrugged. They did not speak English. More hours ticked by. There was nothing to eat or drink.
His captors grew careless. The door of their room was left open and though the “hotel” was full of uniformed men there was no guard at their door. He took a deep breath and said to Elizabeth, “I’m going to try something.” He put on his sunglasses, walked out of the room, and set off down the stairs toward the front door.
Nobody realized what he was doing until he was two floors down, and then there were shouting, gesticulating men around him on the stairs, but he continued to walk. What you do. Where you go. Not possible. He was at the front desk now and there was a little cloud of braided, mirror-shaded men around him; men with guns, he noted, but then he had grown accustomed to that. Where you go? Stop. You stop. He smiled as sweetly as he could. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, indicating the front door and making a walking gesture with his fingers. “I’ve never been to Santiago before, you know. It looks beautiful. I just thought I’d take a little stroll.” The Carabineros didn’t know what to do. They menaced and shouted but nobody put a hand on him. He kept walking. He was out of the front door now, his feet hit the sidewalk, he had no idea what he was doing, really, but he turned left and marched on. “Sir, it is necessary you stop at once, please.” An interpreter had appeared as if by magic. “I see they finally pulled the rabbit out of the hat,” he said, still smiling, still walking. “Sir, what are you doing, please, this is not allowed.” He made his smile even broader. “Tell them, if I am committing a crime, then they must arrest me and take me to jail,” he said. “Otherwise, I want the British ambassador on the phone within the next two minutes.” Two minutes later he was talking to the embassy. “Thank goodness,” said the official on the other end. “We’ve been trying all day to find out what happened to you. You just dropped completely off the map.”
The man from the embassy arrived at the police facility a few minutes later. No diplomat had ever been a more welcome sight. “You have no idea of the argument that’s been going on,” he said. “They almost ordered your plane to turn around and fly back.” Now that international diplomacy was in on the act Elizabeth and he were allowed to go to a real hotel, where they met a delegation of Chilean writers, including Antonio Skármeta, author of the 1985 novel El Cartero de Neruda, which had recently been filmed as Il Postino (The Postman). Skármeta, a big man with a big heart, greeted him with open arms and a flood of apologies. A scandal. A shame upon us Chileans. Now we will make everything better, now that we know you are here, and safe.
There were things that were not possible and others that were possible. It was already too late to keep the appointment at the book fair. But the next day there would be a gathering of writers, artists, and journalists in a small theater space, and he would be allowed to address it. After that he and Elizabeth would be shown the true hospitality of Chile at the Concha y Toro vineyard and at a beautiful estancia to the south of Santiago. These were good things, but the snapshots of those pleasures faded and vanished. The pictures of their brief “disappearance” in the care of the Carabineros did not fade. Chile did not feel like a country to which it would be good quickly to return.
Snapshots of Argentina. In the mid-1970s he went to a lecture by Jorge Luis Borges in central London and up there on the podium beside the great writer, who looked like a more lugubrious, Latin American version of the French comedian Fernandel, was a beautiful young Japanese-looking woman, who’s that?, he remembered thinking, and now, all these years later, here was María Kodama walking toward them to welcome them to Buenos Aires, Borges’s legendary widow, María K, with her zebra hair, and they were having lunch in the restaurant that bore her name. And after lunch she took them to her Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges, not actually located in Borges’s old house but in the house next door, because the owner of the actual house didn’t want to sell; the fundación house was a mirror image of the “real” house, and it seemed appropriate for Borges to be memorialized in a mirror image. On the upper floor of the building was an exact re-creation of the writer’s workroom, a spare narrow monastic cell with a simple table, an upright chair and a cot in one corner. The rest of the floor was full of books. If one had never had the good fortune of meeting Borges, then meeting his library was the next best thing. Here on these polyglot shelves were the writer’s beloved copies of Stevenson, Chesterton and Poe, along with books in half the languages of the human race. He remembered the story of the meeting between Borges and Anthony Burgess. We have the same name, Burgess had told the Argentinian master, and then, searching for a common language to converse in that would be unintelligible to the listening ears all around them, they settled on Anglo-Saxon, and chattered away happily in Beowulf’s tongue.
And there was an entire room filled with encyclopedias, encyclopedias of everything, from whose pages had been born, no doubt, the famous fallaciously named Anglo-American Cyclopedia, a “literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902,” in whose forty-sixth volume the fictional characters “Borges” and “Bioy Casares” had discovered the article about the land of Uqbar in the great ficción “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and also, of course, the magical encyclopedia of Tlön itself.
He could have spent all day with these numinous books, but he had only an hour. As they left María presented Elizabeth with a precious gift, a stone “desert rose,” one of the first gifts Bor
ges had given her, she said, and I hope you will be as happy as we were.
“Do you remember,” he asked María, “an essay Borges wrote as preface to a book of photographs of Argentina by a photographer named Gustavo Thorlichen?”
“Yes,” she said. “The essay in which he speaks of the impossibility of photographing the pampas.”
“The unending pampas,” he said, “the Borgesian pampas, which are made of time, not space: That is where we live.”
In Buenos Aires there was security but it was manageable, erasable. News of the Chilean police madness had preceded him and the Argentine cops wanted to look better than that, so they gave him a little breathing room. He was able to do his work for The Moor’s Last Sigh, and even to fit in a little tourism, visiting the family vault in the Recoleta Cemetery where Eva Perón had come to rest, and where a little Lloyd Webber–ish plaque enjoined passersby not to cry for her. No me llores para mi. Okay, then, I won’t, he told her silently. Whatever you say, lady.
He had been asked to meet with Argentina’s foreign minister, Guido di Tella, and on his way to the meeting the British embassy official who was accompanying him mentioned that Alan Parker’s film of Evita, starring Madonna, had been refused permission to shoot at the Casa Rosada. “If you could say something about that,” the diplomat murmured, “it would be helpful. If you could just find a way of dropping it into your chat.” So he did. After Señor di Tella had asked about the fatwa and di Tella had made the now-traditional (and largely empty) supportive noises, he asked the foreign minister about the movie’s problems. Di Tella made a what-can-I-do gesture. “The Casa Rosada, you know, it is the seat of government, it is difficult to allow a movie there.”
“You know,” he replied, “this is a pretty big budget movie, and they are going to make it, and if you don’t let them film at the Casa Rosada they will find another building to play the part of the Casa, in, maybe, I don’t know … Uruguay?”
Di Tella stiffened. “Uruguay?” he cried.
“Yes. Maybe. Maybe Uruguay.”
“Okay,” di Tella said. “Excuse me one moment please. I have to make a phone call.”
Shortly after this conversation, Evita was given permission to film at the Casa Rosada. When the movie came out he read that Madonna herself had personally lobbied the president of Argentina for permission, so maybe that was the real reason for the change of heart. But maybe Uruguay had something to do with it too.
Snapshot of Mexico. Yes, there were policemen everywhere, and yes, he managed to launch his book and talk about free speech and see the relics of the bloody Aztecs and the home of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Coyoacán and the room in which the assassin Mercader drove the ice pick into Trotsky’s skull, and yes, he was able to take part in the Guadalajara book fair with Carlos Fuentes, and was flown by helicopter over the hills where the blue agave grew to the town of Tequila for lunch at one of the old tequila haciendas with the other writers who had spoken at the fair and there was even a mariachi band and everyone drank too much Tres Generaciones tequila and then there were headaches and other familiar aftereffects. And yes, his visit to Tequila gave him the setting for a scene near the beginning of The Ground Beneath Her Feet in which the town is shaken by an earthquake and the vats crack and tequila runs like water in the streets. And after Tequila he and Elizabeth were guests, with Carlos and Silvia Fuentes, at an astonishing house called Pascualitos that was really an archipelago of palapa-thatched cabanas overlooking the Pacific Ocean and was featured in fancy books about contemporary architecture, and yes, he realized that he loved Mexico. But all of that was beside the point.
The point was that one evening in Mexico City Carlos Fuentes said, “It’s crazy that you have never met Gabriel García Márquez. It’s too bad that he’s in Cuba right now, because of all the writers in the world you and Gabo are the two who need to meet.” He got up and walked out of the room and came back a few minutes later to say, “There’s somebody on the phone that you have to talk to.”
García Márquez claimed not to be able to speak English but in fact he understood it pretty well. As for himself, his spoken Spanish was lamentable but again, he could understand some of what people were saying as long as they didn’t use a lot of slang or speak too rapidly. The only language the two of them had in common was French, so they tried using that, except that García Márquez—of whom it was impossible to think of as “Gabo”—kept sliding back into Spanish; and he heard more English than he intended coming out of his own mouth. But strangely, in the snapshot his memory took of their extended conversation, there was no language problem. They were just talking to each other, warmly, affectionately, fluently, saying things about each other’s books and about the worlds from which they sprang. He talked about the many aspects of Latin American life that chimed with the South Asian experience—these were both worlds with a long colonial past, worlds in which religion was alive and important and often oppressive, in which generals and civilians vied for power, in which there were great extremes of wealth and poverty to be found and a good deal of corruption in between. It wasn’t surprising, he said, that the literature of Latin America found such a ready audience in the East. And Gabo said—“Gabo!” It seemed presumptuous, like calling a god by his intimate family nickname—that the writing of South American writers had been greatly influenced by the wonder tales of the East. So they had much in common. And then García Márquez paid him the greatest compliment he had ever been paid. Of all the writers outside the Spanish language, he said, the two I try always to follow are J. M. Coetzee and you. That sentence alone made the whole trip worthwhile.
Only when he had put the phone down did he realize that García Márquez hadn’t asked a single question about the fatwa, or about the way he had to live now. He had spoken writer to writer, about books. That was a high compliment as well.
Snapshot of the collapse of time, before the day when. They flew from Mexico to Buenos Aires to Tierra del Fuego and up along the Chilean coast toward New Zealand. When they crossed the international date line his brain gave up. You could have told him it was four-thirty last Tuesday and he would have believed you. The date line was so bewildering that time crumbled in your hands like stale bread and you could say anything about it and people would say okay, sure, why not. The date line revealed time as a fiction, a thing that wasn’t real, it made you think that anything could happen, the days could run backward if they felt like it, or your life could unspool like a reel of film spilling crazily onto the floor from a broken projector. Time might be staccato, a series of disconnected moments, random, without meaning, or it might simply throw up its hands in despair and come to an end. This sudden chronological bewilderment made his head swim and he almost fainted. When he came to his senses he was in New Zealand, and back in the English language, which was comforting. But a greater bewilderment lay ahead. He didn’t hear the wings of the exterminating angel, but they were up there, above him, coming lower all the time.
Snapshot of the days before the day when. In New Zealand and Australia the security was more sensible, less intrusive, easier to accept. But there was something they didn’t know. As they drove across the North Island past Mount Ruapehu, which had been erupting for months, and from which a column of smoke leaned angrily across the sky, they weren’t thinking of signs or portents. In Australia they spent a weekend at the aptly named “Happy Daze” property in the Blue Mountains near Sydney as the guests of Julie Clarke and Richard Neville, the great post-hippie, ex-editor of Oz, one of the defendants in the famous Oz Schoolkids Issue obscenity trial, and chronicler of the sixties counterculture in the seminal memoir Hippie Hippie Shake, and in that blissed-out zone (they slept in a tree house) it was not possible to think about much except peace and love. They could not have guessed that they were two days away from coming as close as they ever came to being killed, the most nearly lethal moment in all those menacing years.
Snapshot of the day when. They had decided to stay on after the working part o
f the trip was completed and have Christmas in the sun, and the police had agreed that they could do without protection as nobody would know they were still in the country. The novelist Rodney Hall, who lived in a beautiful, secluded seaside property at Bermagui, New South Wales, four hours’ drive south of Sydney, had invited them to come and stay. Christmas in Bermagui, Rodney assured them, would be totally private, and idyllic too. Zafar flew out from London and joined them in Sydney after his school broke up. Zafar at sixteen and a half was a tall, broad-shouldered young man with remarkable physical confidence. On the morning when the police backed off and left them alone they had a celebratory coffee in a place near Bondi Beach, and an Arab-looking man shot odd looks at them and then went to stand on the sidewalk and made urgent, gesticulating phone calls. Zafar got up and said, “Maybe I’ll just go and have a word,” and his father had the strange and likable feeling of being protected by his son, but asked him not to bother. The man making phone calls turned out to be unimportant and they headed to where their rented Holden saloon car was parked to begin the long drive south.
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