A very serious problem that our disproportionate reality poses for literature is the insufficiency of words. When we speak of a river, the furthest a European reader can go is imagining something as big as the Danube, which is 1,700 miles long. It is difficult to imagine, if it is not described, the reality of the Amazon, 3,500 miles in length. From the riverbank in Belem, in the Brazilian state of Pará, you cannot see the other side, and the river is wider than the Baltic Sea. When we write the word “storm,” Europeans think of thunder and lightning, but it’s not easy for them to conceive of the same phenomenon that we want to depict. The same happens, for example, with the word “rain.” In the Andes mountain range, according to the description a Frenchman called Javier Marimier wrote for his countrymen, there are storms that can last for five months. “Those who have not seen those storms,” he says, “cannot imagine the violence with which they develop. For hours on end the lightning strikes follow each other in rapid succession like cascades of blood and the atmosphere trembles under the continual shaking of thunder, the blasts of which echo off the immensity of the mountains.” The description is very far from being a masterwork, but would suffice to give horrified shudders to the least credulous European.
So it would be necessary to create a whole system of new words for the size of our reality. The examples of that necessity are interminable. F. W. Up de Graff, a Dutch explorer who traveled the upper Amazon at the beginning of the century, says that he found a stream of boiling water that made hard-boiled eggs in five minutes, and had passed through a region where people couldn’t speak out loud because it would trigger torrential downpours. Somewhere on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, I saw a man recite a secret prayer in front of a cow with maggots in her ear, and I saw the maggots fall to the ground dead as the prayer went on. That man assured me he could apply the same cure from a distance, as long as he had a description of the animal and was told where it could be found. On May 8, 1902, the Mont Pelée volcano, on the island of Martinique, destroyed in a few minutes the port of Saint Pierre and killed and buried in lava all of its thirty thousand inhabitants. Except for one: Ludgar Sylvaris, the town’s only prisoner, who was protected by the invulnerable structure of the individual cell they’d constructed for him so he couldn’t escape.
Just in Mexico many volumes would have to be written to express its incredible reality. After almost twenty years there, I could still spend entire hours, as I have so many times, contemplating a bowl of Mexican jumping beans. Benevolent nationalists have explained that their mobility is due to a living larva they have inside, but the explanation seems poor: the marvelous thing is not that the beans move because they have a larva inside, but that they have a larva inside so they can move. Another of the strange experiences of my life was my first encounter with an ajolote (axolotl). Julio Cortázar tells in one of his stories about meeting an axolotl in the Jardins de Plantes in Paris, one day when he wanted to see the lions. When he passed through the aquariums, Cortázar says, “I glanced at a lot of ordinary-looking fish until I unexpectedly came across the axolotl.” And he concludes: “I stayed there staring at them for an hour, and left, unable to think of anything else.” The same thing happened to me, in Pátzcuaro, only I didn’t watch them for an hour, but for a whole afternoon, and I returned several times. But there was something that impressed me more than the animal itself, and it was the sign nailed to the door of the house. “Axolotl syrup for sale.”
That incredible reality reaches its maximum density in the Caribbean, which, strictly speaking, extends (northward) to the southern United States, and south to Brazil. Don’t think that’s an expansionist’s delirium. No: it’s that the Caribbean is not just a geographical area, as geographers of course believe, but a very homogeneous cultural area.
In the Caribbean, the original elements of the primal beliefs and magical conceptions previous to the discovery are joined by the profuse variety of cultures that came together in the years following it in a magic syncretism the artistic interest and actual artistic fecundity of which are inexhaustible. The African contribution was forced and infuriating, but fortunate. In that crossroads of the world, a sense of endless liberty was forged, a reality with neither God nor laws, where each person felt it was possible to do what they wanted without limits of any kind, and bandits woke up converted into kings, fugitives into admirals, prostitutes into governors. And the opposite, too.
I was born and raised in the Caribbean. I know it country by country, island by island; maybe my frustration that nothing has ever occurred to me, and that I could never do anything more surprising than reality, springs from there. The furthest I’ve been able to go is to transpose it with poetic resources, but there is not a single line in any of my books that does not have its origin in a real event. One of those transpositions is the stigma of the pig’s tail that so worries the Buendía lineage in One Hundred Years of Solitude. I could have resorted to any image, but I thought the fear of the birth of a child with a pig’s tail was the one that had the fewest possibilities of coinciding with reality. However, as soon as the novel began to become known, confessions surfaced from men and women in different parts of the Americas who had something resembling a pig’s tail. In Barranquilla, a young man showed his in the newspapers: he had been born and raised with that tail, but he had never revealed it, until he read One Hundred Years of Solitude. His explanation was more astonishing than his tail. “I never wanted to tell anyone I had it because I was ashamed,” he said, “but now, reading the novel and hearing from people who have read it, I’ve realized that it’s a natural thing.” A little while later, a reader sent me the clipping of a photo of a baby girl in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, who was born with a pig’s tail. Contrary to what I thought when I wrote the novel, they cut the girl’s tail off in Seoul and she survived.
Nevertheless, my most difficult experience as a writer was the preparation of The Autumn of the Patriarch. During almost ten years I read everything possible on the dictators of Latin America, especially the Caribbean, determined that the book I was planning to write would resemble reality as little as possible. Every step was a disappointment. Juan Vicente Gómez’s intuition was much more penetrating than true foresight. Doctor Duvalier, in Haiti, had all the black dogs in the country exterminated because one of his enemies, trying to escape the tyrant’s persecution, had slipped out of his human condition and turned into a black dog. Dr. Francia, whose prestige as a philosopher was so widespread that Carlyle wrote an essay on him, closed the Republic of Paraguay as if it were a house, and only left one window open so the mail could arrive. Antonio López de Santa Anna buried his own leg with splendid funeral rites. Lope de Aguirre’s severed hand sailed downriver for several days, and those who saw it pass by recoiled in horror, thinking that even in that state the murderous hand could brandish a dagger. Anastasio Somoza García, in Nicaragua, had a zoo in the courtyard of his house with double cages: on one side were savage beasts, and on the other, scarcely separated by iron bars, his political enemies were locked up.
Martínez, the theosophist dictator of El Salvador, had all the street lighting in the country wrapped in red paper, to combat a measles epidemic, and he had invented a pendulum that he held over his food before eating, to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. The statue of Morazán that still exists in Tegucigalpa is actually of Marshal Ney: the official commission that traveled to London to get it resolved that it would be cheaper to buy that forgotten statue in a warehouse than to commission an authentic one of Morazán.
In short, Latin American and Caribbean writers have to admit, hands on hearts, that reality is a better writer than we are. Our destiny, maybe our glory, is to try to imitate it with humility, and as best we can.
July 1, 1981, El País, Madrid