Just before we got married in 2005 (M’s family was Catholic; seven years of cohabitation was as much as they could take), I made an urgent trip to Chiapas, Mexico. For reasons I was never able to adequately explain to anybody, including myself, I had a notion that the Zapatistas needed my help to complete their historic leftist guerrilla insurgency. This crucial assistance given, I’d go back to California and become, of all possible unsuitable things, a husband. I took leave from my job and flew to Mexico. For a while, during my training for this mission, I stayed in a kind of expat flophouse in San Cristóbal, epicenter of the Zapatista movement. After a week of conversational Spanish, team building, and trust exercises, I was shipped out to what was called a Caracol, a self-governing area “in open rebellion,” in the back of a truck hauling crates of oranges. At a checkpoint, I surrendered my passport to two well-armed and fiercely sexy revolutionaries in black ski masks. Long live Comandante Ramona and Subcomandante Marcos.
I spent the next two and a half weeks in a village in the mountains. My Spanish wasn’t quite good enough to have many meaningful conversations with anybody, but the Zapatistas welcomed me with kindness and bemused tolerance. They’d seen my kind of gringo on the run before. My sole responsibility was to watch the road. I kept a daily tally of how many Mexican army troop transports rumbled by on the main road in order to intimidate the Caracol. When a truck passed (two or three per day), I’d run to the door of the hut where I slept and make a slash on the notebook paper tacked there. In theory, and in practice (years earlier, people had been killed in the region), my goofy American presence tended to act as a deterrent to violence. The army would shoot Zapatistas of any age, but, it was said, drew the line at glorified tourists in Bermudas and Ray-Bans.
Those two weeks, I also played soccer, reorganized the school library, hunted for snails in the river, and chopped wood. But much of the time, in my role as a human-rights monitor (I got a serious kick out of the title), I spent hours in a hammock reading a certain book left behind by a previous human-rights monitor. It was a collection of novellas and stories by Álvaro Mutis. A fat pink paperback with a spine so faded from the sun you could hardly read the cover: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. The book, which includes a story called “The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call,” has become a part of my ever-growing list of can’t live withouts.
His fellow Colombian García Márquez called Álvaro Mutis his greatest teacher of tales. And it was Mutis who introduced García Márquez to the work of Juan Rulfo when he personally handed him a copy of Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. And so books and stories move around the world, hand to hand to hand. Mutis was known primarily as a poet when in 1986, at age sixty, he turned a prose poem into the first “Maqroll” story. In the next five years, Mutis published six more Maqroll books. The nomadic, talkative, brazen, sometimes law-breaking sailor Maqroll has since become one of the most enduring and loved characters in Spanish-language fiction.
It’s September 2013, and Mutis died last night in Mexico City.
There are two lines of the poet James Wright that I keep above my desk:
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest?
All morning I’ve been thinking of Álvaro Mutis in connection with these lines. As if loneliness were a problem to be solved. And yet this is the ultimate truth, isn’t it? Aren’t we perpetually, one way or another, trying to solve loneliness? The loneliness we feel? The loneliness we know is coming? Maybe this is what I was up to in Chiapas. For years I thought I must have been fleeing from a wedding that even then I must have known wasn’t an answer to the problems M and I were having. Did we really think that the darkness that was closing in on us could be solved by a garden party in Olema?
“The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call” is a sea story about a seeming coincidence. The narrator, an oil executive who travels around the world, happens to see, at different times in his life, at various ports, the same boat, a dilapidated, wandering tramp steamer. It’s as if this single boat has trolled the globe for decades, slowly trailing him. The image of the tramp steamer begins to haunt the executive. It becomes an obsession. He decides that this nomadic piece of sea trash must have something to tell him.
A sea story but, more than this, a love story. In Helsinki, the narrator finally (again coincidentally, but, as Mutis suggests, the very fabric of our lives is made up of these sorts of coincidences) meets the captain of the old tramp steamer and becomes privy to the story behind the boat. As the captain begins to talk, he tells the executive a story he’s never told anybody. And he proceeds to recount what happened after he met a Lebanese woman named Warda.
I lie in my hammock and read. Across the field, the kids are in school singing revolutionary songs. For hours and hours, they sing. Meanwhile, two people fall in love, they fall out of love. The captain says not only is Warda gone, but so is the person he was when he was with her. Gone, he tells the oilman, as if both of us never existed.
Before falling into sleep I needed desperately, I pondered the story I had heard. Human beings, I thought, changed so little, and are so much what they are, that there has been only one love story since the beginning of time, endlessly repeated, never losing its terrible simplicity or its irremediable sorrow. I slept deeply and—this was quite unusual for me—dreamed of nothing at all.
At the time, in my hammock, waiting for the troop transports of the Mexican army to shake the earth (I could always hear them before I saw them), I remember thinking maybe these kids spent too much of the school day singing. You can’t sustain a revolution on songs alone. At some point, maybe some math and science might be in order. This from a person lying in a hammock. Now I think, Why shouldn’t they sing? Why shouldn’t they sing all day? Onward, in my hammock, I sail forth. An old tramp steamer drifts across the oceans. A simple story, really. In the course of wandering from port to port, love’s found, love’s lost. What’s more calamitous?