Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who accompanied Magellan on his first voyage around the world, wrote about his passage through our southern America in a rigorous chronicle that still seems to be an imagined adventure. He said he had seen pigs whose navels were on their backs, legless birds whose females hatched their eggs on the shoulders of the males, and others, such as tongueless pelicans whose beaks resembled a spoon. He said he had seen a monstrous animal with the head and ears of a mule, the body of a camel, the feet of a deer, and the whinny of a horse. He said they placed the first native they came across in Patagonia before a mirror and the maddened giant lost the use of his reason because he was terrified by his own image.
This brief, fascinating book, in which there are already glimpses of the beginnings of our novels today, is by no means the most astonishing testimony from that time to our reality. The chroniclers of the Indies left us countless others. El Dorado — our illusory country, so intensely longed for — appeared on numerous maps for many long years, changing location and shape according to the cartographers’ fantasy. Searching for the Fountain of Youth, the legendary Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of Mexico for eight years on an extraordinary expedition whose members ate one another, and only five survived of the six hundred who started out. One of many unsolved mysteries involves the eleven thousand mules, each carrying one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day to pay Atahualpa’s ransom and never reached their destination. Later, during the colonial period, hens raised on alluvial plains, their gizzards containing small nuggets of gold, were sold in Cartagena de Indias. This gold fever of our founders pursued us until very recently. Just in the last century, the German mission responsible for studying the construction of an interoceanic railroad on the Isthmus of Panama concluded that the project was viable only if the rails were made not of iron, which was a scarce metal in the region, but of gold.
Independence from Spanish rule did not save us from madness. General Antonio López de Santa Anna, three times the dictator of Mexico, had a magnificent funeral for his right leg, lost in what was called the Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno governed Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch, and a vigil was held for his corpse, which wore his dress uniform and a breastplate of medals and sat on the presidential chair. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who exterminated thirty thousand peasants in a barbaric slaughter, invented a pendulum to determine whether food was poisoned and had the streetlights covered in red paper to combat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The monument to General Francisco Morazán, erected on the main square of Tegucigalpa, is in reality a statue of Marshal Ney purchased at a warehouse of second-hand sculptures.
Eleven years ago, one of the celebrated poets of our time, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, enlightened this setting with his words. Since then, in the good consciences of Europe, and at times in the bad as well, spectral news of Latin America, that immense homeland of deluded men and historic women whose endless intractability is confused with legend, has erupted with more force than ever. We have not had a moment’s peace. A Promethean president entrenched in his burning palace died fighting alone against an entire army, and two suspicious and never clarified aerial disasters cut short the lives of another president with a generous heart and a democratic military man who had restored the dignity of his people.
There have been five wars and seventeen coups, and a Luciferian dictator appeared who in the name of God carried out the first ethnocide in Latin America in our time. Meanwhile, 20 million Latin American children died before their second birthday, more than all the children born in Europe since 1970. Those who have disappeared for reasons of tyranny number almost 120,000, which is as if we did not know today the whereabouts of all the residents of the city of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested when they were pregnant gave birth in Argentine prisons, but the whereabouts and identities of their children, given up for clandestine adoption or placed in orphanages by the military authorities, are still unknown. Because they did not want matters to continue in this way, approximately 200,000 women and men have died throughout the continent, and more than 100,000 perished in three small, intransigent countries in Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. If this had occurred in the United States, the proportional figure would be 1,000,600 violent deaths in four years.
One million people, 10 per cent of its population, have fled Chile, a country with traditions of hospitality. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million residents, considered the most civilized country on the continent, has lost one out of five citizens to exile. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced a refugee almost every twenty minutes. The country that could be formed with all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway.
I presume to think that it is this singular reality, and not only its literary expression, that has deserved the attention this year of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not made of paper but one that lives with us and determines every instant of our countless daily deaths, and that sustains a constant surge of insatiable creation, filled with misfortune and beauty, of which this errant, nostalgic Colombian is simply another number marked by good fortune. Poets and beggars, warriors and scoundrels, all of us who are creatures of that disordered reality have had to ask very little of our imaginations, because the greatest challenge for us has been the insufficiency of conventional devices to make our lives believable. This, friends, is the core of our solitude.
If these difficulties hamper us, who are of its essence, it is not difficult to understand that the rational prodigies on this side of the world, enraptured by the contemplation of their own culture, have been left without a valid method for interpreting us. It is understandable that they insist on measuring us with the same yardstick they use to measure themselves, not remembering that the ravages of life are not the same for everyone, and that the search for identity is as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality using foreign systems only contributes to making us more and more unknown, less and less free, more and more solitary. Perhaps venerable Europe would be more understanding if it tried to see us in its own past. If it remembered that London needed three hundred years to construct its first wall and another three hundred to have a bishop; that Rome struggled for twenty centuries in the darkness of uncertainty before an Etruscan king established it in history; and that even in the sixteenth century, the peaceful Swiss of today, who delight us with their mild cheeses and intrepid clocks, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand German mercenaries in the pay of imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its residents to the knife.
I do not claim to embody the illusions of Tonio Kröger, whose dreams of union between a chaste north and a passionate south Thomas Mann exalted here fifty-three years ago, but I do believe that Europeans with an enlightening spirit — those who struggle here as well for a larger homeland that is more humane and more just — could be more helpful to us if they thoroughly revised their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone until it is concretized into acts of legitimate support for peoples who take on the dream of having their own life in the ordering of the world.
Latin America does not want to be, nor is there any reason for it to be, a pawn with no will of its own, and there is nothing chimerical about its plans for independence and originality becoming a Western aspiration. And yet the advances in navigation that have reduced so many distances between our Americas and Europe seem to have increased our cultural distance. Why is the originality granted to us without reservation in literature denied us with every kind of suspicion when we make our extremely difficult attempts at social change? Why think that social justice, which advanced Europeans strive to establish in their own countries, cannot also be a Latin American objective using distinct methods under different conditions? No: the inordinate violence and pain of our history are the result of countless secular injustices and animosities, not a conspiracy hatched three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have believed this, with the childishness of grandparents who have forgotten the fruitful madness of their youth, as if no other destiny were possible than living at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, friends, is the size of our solitude. And yet, in the face of oppression, pillage, and abandonment, our response is life. Neither floods nor plagues nor famines nor cataclysms, not even eternal wars lasting centuries and centuries, have succeeded in reducing the tenacious advantage of life over death.
An advantage that grows and accelerates: each year there are 74 million more births than deaths, a number of new lives that could increase the population of New York by a factor of seven every year. Most are born in the countries with fewest resources and, among them, of course, are those of Latin America. On the other hand, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating sufficient destructive power to annihilate a hundred times over not only all the human beings who have existed until now, but the totality of living creatures that have spent time on this planet of misfortunes.
On a day like today, my teacher William Faulkner said in this place: ‘I decline to accept the end of man.’ I wouldn’t feel worthy of occupying this spot that was his if I weren’t fully aware that, for the first time since the origin of humankind, the colossal catastrophe that he declined to accept thirty-two years ago is now nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this terrifying reality that throughout all of human time must have seemed a fantasy, the inventors of fables we all believe feel we have the right to believe that it still isn’t too late to undertake the creation of a contrary utopia. A new, overwhelming utopia of life, where no one can decide for others even how they’ll die, where love is really true and happiness possible, and where the peoples condemned to one hundred years of solitude at last and forever have a second chance on earth.