Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  What could be more like Borges than this dream: “When I slept this afternoon, I had this dream, like a symbolic and premature commentary on my life: as I was playing a game of croquet, I learned that my part in the game was killing a man. Then, suddenly, I knew I was that man”? Or the lilt of these sentences, with their lifted eyebrow of complicated disclaimer: “He said that he waved his hand, and immediately afterward the gesture seemed false”; “After an extended stay in Paris, Horvath had returned to his own country, almost famous and totally discredited”; “He treated love and women with a dispassionate scorn that was not devoid of courtesy”? Or these fey modifiers, so curiously vibrant: “I experienced an intimate heaviness in my arms and legs”; “She was wearing a dress that was extremely green”; “He had deep circles under his eyes and an expression of astonished fatigue”? Borges’s favorite adjective, “atrocious,” recurs in Bioy Casares, and the image of a labyrinth, and that Borgesian device of the heterogeneous list, shorthand for the inventory of the maddeningly infinite universe. Abrupt islands of mathematical and topological distinctness imply the surrounding vague vastness, and the paradoxes of philosophical idealism are pursued to their monstrous conclusions. A dandified Gnosticism speaks in such an epigram as “To be alive is to flee, in an ephemeral and paradoxical way, from matter.”

  The imitation is startling; who was imitating whom? Borges came late to prose fiction; his first collection, The Garden of Forking Paths, was published in 1941, the same year Bioy Casares won his prize for The Invention of Morel. The older man may well have learned from the younger, or at least acquired from him the courage of his own predilections. But to turn from even the best of Bioy Casares’s short stories (“The Celestial Plot,” say, or “The Perjury of the Snow”) to those of Borges is to reënter the realm of literature; there is greater concision and concreteness, a superior richness of mock-erudition and arch cross-reference, a jauntier and more challenging style. A poetic vision has entered in, and—we do not readily associate this quality with Borges—a warmth, a heat such as is generated deep in the geological strata, a spontaneous combustion of compacted learning and sublimated feeling. Even in those Borges short stories—“The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Death and the Compass,” “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain”—closest to the detective story there is an expansiveness of allusion, an amused intensity of tone that liberates us into something new, a fresh atmosphere, a frontier. These few dense and quirky ficciones lifted the lid on Latin-American fantasy, as Gogol’s “Overcoat” supposedly ignited the great explosion of Russian fiction. “Magic realism,” then, can be seen to have a pedigree that reaches from Borges, back through the fantasy of Chesterton and Stevenson—circumventing the triumphs of the realist-psychological novel—clear to Hawthorne and Poe. Bioy Casares’s tales sound like Poe; they employ the first-person voice of detective fiction (an omniscient narrator would have to give the mystery away) and of travellers’ tales and journals—the voice of Robinson Crusoe and Arthur Gordon Pym, of European man in the menacing strangeness of the New World.

  Resisting the Big Boys

  WHO KILLED PALOMINO MOLERO? by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Alfred Mac Adam. 151 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.

  OF LOVE AND SHADOWS, by Isabel Allende, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden. 274 pp. Knopf, 1987.

  CLANDESTINE IN CHILE: The Adventures of Miguel Littín, by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Asa Zatz. 116 pp. Holt, 1987.

  The Peruvian man of letters Mario Vargas Llosa is almost too good to be true; cosmopolitan, handsome, and versatile, he puts a pleasant and reasonable face on the Latin-American revolution in the novel, and, in such gracious public performances as his panel appearances in New York last year and in Washington this, makes everybody, even North Americans, feel better about being a writer. Yet his fiction has a gritty side, a mode in which the ugly native truths of poverty and brutality abrasively rub through his debonair inventiveness. His recent Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, while in a sense mocking the unreal aspirations and clammy psyche of its Trotskyite hero, also conveyed the sour taste and decaying texture of modern-day Lima and in some of its incidental episodes penetratingly savored of private, as well as political, squalor. Even his farcical love-romp, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, has some authentically harsh touches among its antic, ironically fabricated episodes, and at the end returns the reader to reality with a bump. Vargas Llosa’s newest fictional offering, Who Killed Palomino Molero?, is nasty, brutish, and short; its first words are “Sons of bitches,”‖ and its first page displays the body of a young man tortured to death:

  The boy had been both hung and impaled on the old carob tree. His position was so absurd that he looked more like a scarecrow or a broken marionette than a corpse. Before or after they killed him, they slashed him to ribbons: his nose and mouth were split open; his face was a crazy map of dried blood, bruises, cuts, and cigarette burns.

  The time is 1954, in the strongman Presidency of General Manuel Apolinario Odría, an era of Peruvian history in which Vargas Llosa has located most of his novels. The place is Talara, in northern Peru; the protagonists are two members of the Guardia Civil, Lieutenant Silva and Officer Lituma, who, with resources so slender they must take the town’s one taxi on their investigative journeys, attempt to unravel the murder. The victim, they soon discover, was Palomino Molero, a young recruit at the local Air Force base, who was distinguished chiefly by his lovely voice and his skill at singing boleros. The Air Force is not coöperative, and Lieutenant Silva, who has some of Sherlock Holmes’s uncanny gifts, persists in his investigation mainly as a favor to his Watson, Lituma, who has been touched and rendered indignant by the crime. Silva seems to know that the society will ill reward their successful police work, and his interest keeps slipping to an incongruous amorous pursuit of Doña Adriana, the hefty married proprietress—“old enough to be his mother”—of a local restaurant. Yet he and Lituma detect on, through a series of dusty and heated interviews that in sum sketch the meagre, furtive, and faintly menacing life of the Peruvian provinces. The ruling oligarchy of “the big boys” figures as a presiding apathy, an ominous airlessness in which the two policemen gasp for truth.

  The Pacific coastal-desert towns are less cheerful in their torpor than Gabriel García Márquez’s Caribbean Macondo. In Piura, the victim’s home town, the air smells of “carob trees, goats, birdshit, and deep frying.” Talara’s principal recreational facilities are a whorehouse on the edge of town and an outdoor movie theatre whose screen is the wall of the parish church (“so Father Domingo determined which movies … could show”) and whose projector needs to be reloaded after every reel: “The movies, accordingly, were strung out in pieces and were extremely long.” The weather is hot, the nearby oil refinery’s housing compound with its gringos and swimming pool keeps the locals aware of their lowly status, and an emphatic racism divides the society. Officer Lituma (who figures, at least in name, in one of the soap-opera episodes of Aunt Julia) is a cholo, a half-breed, and as such instinctively subservient to Lieutenant Silva, who is “fair-skinned, young, good-looking, with a little blond mustache.” Palomino Molero was also a cholo, and Lituma sympathetically imagines him “in the half light of the streets where Piura’s purebreds lived, beneath the wrought-iron bars on the balconies belonging to girls he could never love, captivating them with his pretty voice.” When Molero and the daughter of the base commandant, Colonel Mindreau, fall in love, trouble is certain. In Lituma’s view, the Air Force men “all thought they were bluebloods,” and also thought “the Guardia Civil was a half-breed outfit they could look down on.” “These damned whites,” Lituma says to himself. Another character complains of being treated “like some damned nigger.” Generally we credit our Latin-American neighbors with less racism than northern Europe and the United States. As the historian Allan Nevins rather grandly put it: “Aside from a small white ruling class, society in the greater part of Spanish
America was comparatively level and devoid of racial antipathies.… Long before the Moorish conquests, before even Hannibal’s invasions, the people of what are now Spain and Portugal had been familiar with their African neighbors, had intermingled with them, and had learned to attach no excessive importance to the color line. The burnished livery of the sun carried little if any stigma.” But in Peru, where the sun-protected viceregal aristocracy lived and ruled and where a mining economy was based upon Indian slavery, distinctions of bloodline are still jealously observed, to judge from Vargas Llosa’s fiction. The question of his title implies the answer “the society”—a society, we see in the flurry of idle gossip at the end of this detective novel, willing to believe anything but the truth.

  Sherlock Holmes and his myriad successors in American and English mystery fiction had the satisfaction of social approval; the identified criminal was hauled off to justice, and the detective’s ingenuity was richly remunerated, sometimes, by a grateful client. At the least, a significant clarification was achieved and the rule of law and reason reaffirmed. In the Peru of Who Killed Palomino Molero? the diligent detectives are demoted, and their findings dissolved in a babble of xenophobic rumor: “With all these murders there had to be Ecuadoreans in the woodpile.” For the book’s final words, Lituma again pronounces, “Sons of bitches,” and such do seem to be running this corner of the New World as of 1954. What, then, impels our two officers of the Guardia Civil to serve, via rickety taxi and rough encounter, the cause of truth and justice? Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Tristes Tropiques, asks much the same question in regard to the chiefs of the nearly extinct Nambikwara Indians: why do men seek power when it offers next to no rewards? He concludes, “It is because there are, in every group of human beings, men who, unlike their companions, love importance for its own sake, take a delight in its responsibilities, and find rewards enough in those very burdens of public life from which their fellows shrink.” Just as no society is ideal enough to erase our darker impulses, so our more noble and altruistic tendencies persist, it would seem, even in the worst-managed system.

  Of Love and Shadows is Isabel Allende’s second novel and is smaller, paler, and less magical than her first, The House of the Spirits, which transposed into an upper-class, Chilean key the dreamlike sweep of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rather than the Trueba family living through eighty years of history, Of Love and Shadows tells of three families—the upper-class though no longer wealthy Beltráns, the middle-class Spanish émigrés the Leals, and the lower-class Ranquileos, whose mother, Digna, runs a farm and whose father, Hipólito, is a circus clown. One of the Ranquileo children, Evangelina (she is actually a Flores, but was switched with the real Evangelina Ranquileo in the hospital; the mothers, unable to buck the obdurate system, were compelled to abide by the mistake), becomes subject, at the age of fifteen, to noontime fits that are taken by some of the superstitious to signify sainthood. Irene Beltrán, a journalist, and Francisco Leal, a photographer, come together on assignment to cover this newsworthy phenomenon and then to investigate Evangelina’s abrupt disappearance, and while investigating fall in love and into conflict with their unnamed country’s military regime. Evangelina, during one of her trances, has struck Lieutenant Juan de Dios Ramírez and, with supernatural strength, thrown him out of the Ranquileo house. From this unconscious affront to military authority her own doom and that of Irene and Francisco flow. Evangelina is the only magical character in this somewhat misty but basically realistic novel, and her fits, her curious swap with the Flores infant (also called Evangelina), and her alleged miracles consort uneasily with the book’s burden of political protest. So-called magic realism I take to be basically a method of nostalgia: the past—personal, familial, and national—weathers into fabulous shapes in memory without surrendering its fundamental truth. Fantasy, for García Márquez and his followers, is a higher level of honesty in the rendering of experiences that have become subjectivized and mythologized.a But in rousing the reader to care about a contemporary evil—the thinly disguised Pinochet regime—fantasy intrudes as a softening veil; it allows us to take the protest more lightly. If Evangelina’s miracles are merely a manner of speaking, then the cave of corpses that the lovers discover, and the good Cardinal to whom the lovers confide their discovery, and the ordeals and disguises to which they submit, also can be felt as a manner of speaking.

  And speaking deteriorates into rhetoric. The diction suffers from primness, of a radical rather than conservative bent. We read of Francisco’s “black eyes shining with understanding; the boyish grin when he smiled; the different mouth, thin-lipped, hard, when he saw evidence of man’s cruelty to man.” A worker-priest is not merely described but posterized:

  Although José Leal did not claim to be the Cardinal’s friend, he knew him through his work in the Vicariate, where often they worked side by side, united in their compassionate desire to bring human solidarity where divine love seemed to be lacking.

  This sentence, with its concluding rap on God’s knuckles, does help animate the worker-priest movement; but when it comes to a family parting, the mural style smears into lugubrious cliché:

  … and their voices and footsteps resounded dully in the desolate air like an ominous omen.… Tense, beyond words, they embraced for one last time. Father and son clasped each other for a long moment filled with unspoken promises and guidance. Then Francisco felt his mother in his arms, tiny and fragile, her adored face unseen against his chest, her tears at last overflowing.… When they turned the corner, a harsh sob of farewell escaped Francisco’s breast, and the tears he had held back during that terrible evening rushed to his eyes. He sank to the threshold, his face buried in his hands, crushed by ineffable sadness.

  Perhaps the translator should share the blame for “ominous omen” and “ineffable sadness”; in general the English seems stiff, compared with Magda Bogin’s flowing version of the earlier novel.

  Of Love and Shadows comes to life mostly in its corners: Professor Leal’s quixotic vow never to wear socks until Franco is deposed, and Irene’s fiancé’s return from an Antarctic sojourn with “his skin burned almost black from the reverberating snow,” and Señora Beltrán’s old-age home full of senile dreamers and her young lover who lazes his life away in a far-off beach resort and her incorrigible taste for luxury and her vain armory of “little bottles of oil for her breasts, collagen for her throat, hormone lotions and creams for her skin, placental extract and milk oil for her hair, capsules and royal jelly and pollen of eternal youth.” The senior Leals are unpredictable and vivid in the account of their escape from Fascist Spain and of their joint descent, when a son dies, into an abyss of mourning from which they jointly return. The mystery of why military dictatorships are repeatedly allowed to arise is illuminated in a phrase: Irene’s soldier fiancé explains to her, “I thought the nation needed a respite from the politicians.” A respite from politicians is what Oliver North, for his moment on television, offered enchanted millions; more tragically, it is what the Latin-American armed forces, from Bolívar on, have stood ready to offer the nations to our south.

  A Chile both more real and more surreal than Isabel Allende’s is fragmentarily glimpsed in Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín. Littín is a filmmaker who, in 1970, was appointed by President Salvador Allende to be head of the newly nationalized Chile Films. When, on September 13, 1973, the Allende government was toppled in a bloody coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, Littín just barely escaped with his life. Since 1973 he has lived with his family in Mexico and Spain, and his name has remained on the government list of exiles forbidden to return to Chile. In May of 1985, disguised as a Uruguayan businessman, he returned to Chile on a false passport, and for six weeks travelled throughout the country, directing a number of film crews in capturing, on over a hundred thousand feet of film, twenty-five hours of life under the Pinochet dictatorship. This footage was smuggled out and subsequently edited to make a four-hour film for television and a two-hour featur
e for movie theatres. In 1986, in Madrid, Littín described his feat to Gabriel García Márquez, and the novelist persuaded the filmmaker to undergo “a grueling interrogation, the tape of which ran some eighteen hours.” Out of nearly six hundred pages of transcript García Márquez condensed the ten chapters of this short text, much as, over thirty years ago, as a young journalist in Bogotá, he produced from interviews with Luis Alejandro Velasco The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor. Both narratives come to about a hundred printed pages, and in both cases the story and perhaps the words are another’s but the élan is all Gabriel García Márquez’s.