Writers can be divided (assuming they could ever agree to be divided. . .) into two groups: the smaller group includes those capable of forging new paths in literature, and the larger one consists of those who make their own way following in the first group’s footsteps. It was ever thus since the world began, and the (legitimate?) vanity of authors is powerless in the face of such clear evidence. Gabriel García Márquez used his talent to open and establish the route of what was later (and wrongly) named magic realism, and along that path have advanced by turns multitudes of followers and, as always happens, detractors. The first of his books to fall into my hands was One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the shock it gave me was such that I had to stop reading after the first fifty pages. I needed to get my thoughts into some order, discipline my pounding heart, and, above all, learn to control the compass with which I hoped to be able to navigate my way along the paths of the new world that had just appeared before my eyes. In my life as a reader there have been remarkably few occasions on which an experience as intense as this has arisen. If the word traumatized could have a positive significance, I would apply it willingly in this instance. But now this word has been written, I will leave it as is. I trust it will be understood.
I think I must have lived in Lisbon’s Penha da França neighborhood for about twelve years, first in the Rua do Padre Sena Freitas, then in the Rua Carlos Ribeiro. For many years thereafter, until the death of my mother, to me the neighborhood was a continual extension of all the other places I would come to live in. I have memories of it that are still vivid today. Then, even the Vale Escuro [Dark Valley] lived up to its name, for it was a place of adventure and discovery for young people, a natural enclave just starting to be threatened by the first new buildings being constructed, but it was still possible to savor the acidic taste of the sweetened tubers of the roots of a plant that grew there whose name I never managed to learn. And it was also a battlefield where Homeric wars could be staged . . . There was the Patio do Padeiro (which did not belong to Penha de França, but to Alto de São João. . .), where “normal” people did not dare to enter, and where, or so I was told, even the police stayed away, turning a blind eye to the supposed or genuine illicit behavior of the inhabitants. What was certain was that this degree of fear and mistrust was caused by the closed-in nature of that little world, segregated from the rest of the neighborhood, whose words, gestures and attitudes clashed with the quiet, self-effacing comportment of the fearful souls walking in its squares. One day, between dawn and dusk, the Patio do Padeiro disappeared, possibly razed by a municipal wrecking-ball, but more likely by the earth diggers of the building constructors, and in its place unimaginative buildings were raised, each one a replica of the next, that would already look old within a few years. At least the Patio do Padeiro had an originality and a physiognomy all its own, however dirty and malodorous. If I could have shared, had I but had the courage to share, the lives of those people and learn about them, I would like to reconstruct the life of the Patio do Padeiro. But it would be a labor lost. The people who used to live there have become dispersed, and their descendants either remade their lives for the better, or else perhaps forgot or no longer wished to remember the tough lives of those who used to live there. The memory of Penha de França (or of the Alto de San João) no longer retains a space for Patio do Padeiro. Some people are born and live their lives without luck. Not one of them left any trace behind them. They died and passed on.
I came to la movida1 late, when she had already left behind her urban-Harlequin catsuits, her fake tears rimmed with black mascara, her false eyelashes, her wigs, her laughter, and her sorrows. I don’t mean that las movidas by definition have to be sad, or to say that great efforts are needed to stop the definitive question, “What am I doing here?” from slipping through their lips in the midst of a fiesta or an orgy. Please take note, I am telling you a story that is not my own. I was never a man for las movidas, and if I ever let myself be seduced, I am as certain as can be I would cut no better a figure than Don Quixote in the duke’s palace. Ridiculousness is a matter of fact, not merely a point of view. Given that this is the case, I do not think I am greatly mistaken when I imagine Pedro Almodóvar, the reference point par excellence of la movida in Madrid, asking his little soul (all souls are little, almost to the point of invisibility), “What am I doing here?” He has given us the answer in his films, which make us laugh at the same time as they produce a lump in our throats, and which insinuate that behind the images lie things that invite us to speak their names. When I saw Volver I sent Pedro a message in which I told him, “You touched perfect beauty.” Perhaps (or no doubt) out of modesty, he did not reply to me.
I need to draw this to a close. In an unexpected manner, for whoever is wasting their time reading these lines, I will summarize them as follows: one expects Pedro Almodóvar to provide us with the great film about death so lacking in Spanish cinema to date. There are a thousand reasons for this, but most of all because it would be a way of rescuing the ultimate meaning of la movida from the shadows.
In his Theory and Aesthetics of the Novel, Mikhail Bakhtin wrote: “The principal subject of the genre of the novel, that which epitomizes it, that which creates its originality, is the man who speaks and the words he uses.” I believe there has rarely been an assertion of this general theory as precise as that of the literary and human example of Franz Kafka. I wish to leave aside those theorists who, while not devoid of reason, have revolted against the “romantic” tendency to search for a writer in the autobiographical code he left in his work, and in turn search for the meaning of the work in the details of the life. Kafka does not conceal a single example (more, he seems to go so far as to raise noteworthy questions about every example) in his depiction of the factors determining the course of his dramatic life and, consequently, of his work as an author: the conflict with his father, his misunderstandings with the Jewish community, the impossibility of abandoning the celibate life for marriage, and his illness. I consider that the first of these factors, meaning the antagonism that sets son against father and father against son, something he never overcame, is what constitutes the keystone of the whole Kafka oeuvre, and that from it derives—just as the branches of a tree derive from the main trunk—the profound and intimate unease that led him in a metaphysical direction, the vision of a world agonized by absurdity, and the mystification of consciousness.
The first reference to The Trial can be traced to his Diaries and was written on July 29, 1914 (the First World War had been unleashed the day before), and opens with the following words: “One night Josef K., son of a rich trader, following a lengthy argument with his father. . .” So he announced, as he had in those three rapid lines of Metamorphosis, written nearly two years earlier, what would become the central theme of The Trial. When Gregor Samsa, transformed overnight, without explanation, into a loathsome insect—somewhere between a beetle and cockroach—complains of the underserved sufferings that befall the commercial traveler in general, and himself in particular, he expresses it in a manner that leaves no room for doubt: “frequently he is the victim of mere rumor, chance mention, or of a gratuitous complaint, and it is totally impossible for him to defend himself, since he no longer has the least inkling of what he is being accused.” The whole of The Trial is encapsulated in these words. It is true that the father, the “rich businessman,” disappears from the story, and the mother is only mentioned in two sketchy chapters—fleetingly and without filial affection—but it does not seem to me to be overly audacious (unless I am totally wrong regarding the intentions of Kafka as an author) to imagine that the omnipotent and threatening paternal authority could have been, via the stratagems of fiction writing, converted into the overweening might of an Ultimate Law that without precisely specifying what crime has been committed against its codes is implacable in imposing its punishment. The simultaneously anguished and grotesque episode of extreme aggression when Gregor Samsa’s father expels his son from the family’s living room, pelting him with apples until one gets stuck in his carapace, describes a nameless agony that is the death of all hope of communication.
A few pages earlier, the scarab Gregor Samsa had painfully uttered the last words his insect mouth was capable of pronouncing: “Mother, mother.” Then, as if dying a first death, he entered into the muteness of a voluntary silence, an essential sign of his irremediable animal nature, a part of which was his definitive relinquishing of any possession of a father, mother, or sister in his insect world. When at the end the servant sweeps the dried-up shell that is all that remains of Gregor Samsa into the rubbish, his absence from that day forward only serves to confirm the oblivion to which his family had already relegated him. In a letter dated the August 28, 1913, Kafka would write: “I live in the midst of my family, among the best and most loving people one could imagine, but as someone more strange than a stranger. In recent years I have not spoken more than an average of twenty words a day to my mother, and never exchanged more than a passing greeting with my father.” One would have to be a completely disengaged reader not to notice the pained and bitter irony contained in the words “. . . among the best and most loving people one could imagine,” which seem to be there only to be contradicted. One would need to be similarly inattentive, it seems to me, not to attribute a particular significance to the fact that Kafka had proposed to his editor, on April 4, 1913, that The Stoker (the first chapter in his novel America), Metamorphosis and The Verdict should be published in a single volume under the single title The Sons (something that, as a matter of fact, was only done much later, in 1989). In The Stoker, “the son” is expelled by the parents for having offended against the family’s honor by making a servant pregnant; in The Verdict, “the son” is condemned to death by drowning by the father; and in Metamorphosis, “the son” simply surrenders his existence, allowing his place to be taken by an insect. . . More than the Letter to a Father, which was written in November 1919 but which never reached its addressee, it is these stories, as I understand it—most particularly The Verdict and Metamorphosis— that, precisely by dint of being literary transpositions, where the trick of showing and concealing functions as a mirror of ambiguities and reversals, offer us the most accurate description of the extent of the incurable wound that the conflict with his father had opened up in the spirit of Franz Kafka. The Letter assumes, in a manner of speaking, the form and tone of a libelous accusation, set out like a final reckoning of accounts, a balancing act between the owing and owning of two confrontational existences, two mutual oppositions, making it impossible to reject the hypothesis that they are based on exaggerations and distortions of actual facts, particularly when Kafka, at the end of the book, suddenly switches to using the father’s voice as narrator, in order to accuse himself. . . In The Trial Kafka can rid himself of the paternal figure, objectively described, but not of his patriarchal law. And, just as in The Verdict the son commits suicide in accordance with the prescription of a patriarchal law, so in The Trial it is the accused himself, Josef K., who ends up leading his executioners to the place where he will be executed and where, in his last moments when death is already approaching, he will still admit the thought, like a final regret, that he never learned how to fulfill his role until the end, and that he never succeeded in sparing the authorities any trouble. . . That is to say, succeeded in sparing the Father.
Laura Restrepo, the Colombian author and our friend with whom we share our hearts and ideas, asked Médecins sans Frontières [Doctors without Borders] if she could accompany them to Yemen, in order to provide an account of what she saw, heard, and felt there. This account has now been published in El País Weekly, in an impressive report that opens, like many others previously made on the subject of Africa, with a narrative that Laura—rejecting, as befits her nature as a writer, the emotive affectations of the writer who deliberately appeals to the reader’s sensibilities—expresses in a way that insists on an obstinate search for truths beyond the reach of most observers. Her descriptions of the boats arriving from Somalia, overladen with fugitives who hoped they could find in the Yemen a solution to the problems that had impelled them toward the sea, have a rare and informative impact. In them you can still see the men, accompanied by women and children as always, but Laura Restrepo does not hesitate to demonstrate how common it is to speak of these men without making mention of the women and children too, and how once you mention the children, it is impossible to avoid also speaking of the mothers who bore them, and who carry more still in their bellies. The situations in which these women find themselves when they disembark in the Yemen demonstrate the whole catalogue of moral and physical humiliations to which they are subjected simply because they were born as women. Behind each word Laura writes of them are tears, groans and cries that would keep us all awake at night if our highly flexible consciences had not grown accustomed to the idea that the world is going where those who control it want it to go, and it is enough for us to cultivate our own patches the best we know how, without troubling ourselves about what may be occurring on the other side of our living room wall. This, after all, is the oldest story in the world.
Someone said that in Africa the dead are black and the weapons are white. It would be hard to construct a better epigraph for that succession of disasters that is, and has been for centuries, what is meant by existence on the African continent. The part of the world believed to be the birthplace of humanity was certainly not a terrestrial paradise when the first European “discoverers” disembarked there (contrary to what the Bible myth tells us, Adam was not expelled from Eden; he simply never entered it), but for the blacks the arrival of those white men opened up the gates of hell one after another. These gates remain implacably open, and generation after generation of Africans have been thrown through them into the flames, thanks to the barely concealed indifference or else the careless complicity of world public opinion. A million blacks dead as a result of war, hunger, and curable diseases will always weigh little in the balance with any neocolonialist country, and take up less space in its newspapers than the fifteen victims of a serial killer. We know that horror, in every one of its manifestations—however cruel, atrocious or shameful—shadows and darkens each day like a curse on our unfortunate planet, but Africa appears to have returned to its accustomed place as the laboratory for our experiments, a place where horror is most often experienced as the committing of crimes we would for the most part deem inconceivable elsewhere, as if the African populations had been marked out at birth to be guinea pigs, so that by definition every violence against them is allowed, every torture justified, every crime absolved. Many of us persist in our naïve belief that neither God nor history will come to judge these atrocities committed by men against men. The future, forever willing to decree the type of general amnesty afforded by oblivion disguised as a pardon, is also adept at giving official recognition, tacitly or explicitly, whenever it suits the new economic, military, or political order, to the lifelong impunity of the direct or indirect authors of the most monstrous actions against flesh and the spirit. Therefore it is an error to consign to the future the duty of bringing to judgment those responsible for the suffering of the victims of today, for this future will also not fail to produce victims of its own, and will equally not resist the temptation to postpone until yet another future that still more distant or wondrous moment of universal justice, when many of us will attempt to justify ourselves in the most facile and hypocritical manner, disclaiming responsibilities which were ours alone, and are ours this present day. Does anyone really understand a man who excuses himself by saying: “I didn’t know”? How even more unacceptable, therefore, would it be for us to say: “I would prefer not to know”? The way in which our world operates is now no longer the complete mystery it once was; the machinations of evil have been exposed for all to see; the hands doing the operating do not have gloves big enough to conceal the bloodstains. It should therefore be easy for someone to distinguish between truth and lies, between respect and disdain for another fellow human, between those who are for life and those who are against it. Unhappily, events hardly ever unfold that straightforwardly. Personal egotism, indolence, lack of generosity, the petty daily instances of cowardice, all of these contribute to this pernicious form of mental blindness that consists in being of the world and not perceiving the world, or in only seeing what, at any given moment, is capable of serving our own private interests. In such cases, we can hardly wish for some sign that our conscience will awake and shake us urgently by the arm, asking the point-blank question: “Where are you going? What are you doing? What do you think is going on?” What we need is an insurrection of liberated consciences. But is such a thing still possible?
The man who would be king is Dom Duarte de Bragança, someone moderately well instructed, thanks to the tutors in charge of him since birth, but who nonetheless loathes literature in general and what I write in particular, firstly because he considers that my novel Baltazar & Blimunda insulted his family, and secondly because the said work is, according to the refined jargon of a pretender to the throne, a “big heap of shit.” He has not read the book, but it’s obvious he sniffed it out. Please therefore understand that for all these years I have not thought to include Dom Duarte de Bragança, let it be noted, on my select list of political friends. It does not bother me to be the object of a battering now and then, but the Christian virtue of turning the other cheek to the aggressor is one I am not in the habit of cultivating. In fact I have my revenge in my appreciation of his quality as an involuntary humorist, which this nephew of King João V demonstrates every time he opens his mouth. I owe him some of the most cherished belly laughs of my long life. This then ended, the monarchy was restored, and one has need to be extremely cautious that these words do not turn up elsewhere, resuscitated perhaps by Superintendant Pina Manique or Inspector Rosa Casaco. What does this mean, the restoration of the monarchy? my stupefied readers will ask. Yes sir, the restoration, as he who has the best possible reason for saying so will affirm (meaning the pretender in question). Not that he need henceforth to be described as such, for the monarchy has been restored to us with the unfolding of its blue-and-white flag right there on the balcony of the Lisbon Council Chamber. The lads of Armada 31 (as those who scaled the Council Chamber walls describe themselves) have now assured their place in the History of Portugal, alongside the lady baker of Aljubarrota,2 who—or at least it is currently in dispute—never killed a single Castilian. This is not the current situation. The flag remained there for several hours (had some monarchist infiltrated the Chamber in order to prevent its immediate removal?) while attempts were supposedly made to establish the identity of the authors of the exploit—all of this ending up, as ever, in comedy, in farce, in buffoonery. Dom Duarte does not have the charisma to make rousing addresses to the masses in the city square, ready and prepared to present him with his crown, scepter, and throne.
What a shame that such a glorious deed is going to end like this. But since I am, at heart, a sensible individual, I too will end with a suggestion for Dom Duarte de Bragança. He has already assembled a football team, entirely composed of monarchist players, a monarchist trainer, and a monarchist masseur, every last man a monarchist and, wherever possible, of blue blood. I can guarantee that if they win the league, the country—this land we all know so well—will kneel at his feet.
Each day it becomes even more obvious to the world that the problem with justice is not justice itself, but judges. Justice resides in laws, in the civil code, so applying it ought to be straightforward enough. All it requires is literacy, a comprehension of what is written, and the ability to listen impartially to the statements from the accused and the accuser—in addition to any witness testimonies there may be—and to judge according to the light of one’s conscience. Corruption has a thousand faces, and in the case of justice the worst corrupter is in some sense the nature of the relationship between the judge and the judged. A typical instance of judicial perversion occurred very recently in Guatemala, where an editor named Raúl Figueroa Sarti, of the F&G Editores publishing house, was sentenced to a year in prison, commuted to a fine of 25 quetzals a day and the payment of a lump sum of 50,000 quetzals plus the cost of all of the legal proceedings. What was the nature of the crime committed by Raúl Figueroa? He had published a photograph, at the request and in the full knowledge of his author, Mardo Arturo Escobar, in a book that had just been issued by F&G. The accused was presented with copies of the work under discussion. The judges were not in the least bothered that the said Mardo Escobar had acknowledged giving the photograph to Raúl Figueroa, to whom he had also given verbal authority to use it in the book. What did matter to the judges was that the accuser was their colleague: Mardo Arturo Escobar works in the Court of Penal Verdicts, which means he is the colleague of these judges, officials and magistrates. . .
Yet this is not a simple case of base corruption. For two years, the publishing house of F&G Editores had been the target of harassment, a harassment that has to be viewed within the framework of the repressive situation which prevails in Guatemala, where official power is routinely used to silence discordant voices, that is, those voices that regularly and vociferously continue to denounce the human rights violations in that country. It would appear that the old pun on Guatemala forever becoming Guatepior3 has some validity. Guatemalan citizens must be hoping that this innocuous pun does not turn into a somber reality.
I imagine that Jean Giono planted more than a few trees in his lifetime. Only a man who had dug the earth to free up a root in the hopes of nourishing a tree could have written such a unique narrative as The Man Who Planted Trees, an indisputable masterpiece of the art of storytelling. Naturally, for such a thing to take place it was essential for Jean Giono to have existed, but that fundamental premise, happily for us all, is already an established and confirmed fact: this author did exist, and it only remained for him to have written the work. For that, it was necessary for time to go by, for old age to arrive, and for him to appear and say, “Here I am.” Only then, presumably, at the very advanced age that Giono had by then attained, was it possible to create, as he did, in the colors of a lived reality, a history conceived as the most secretive of fictitious elaborations. Elzéard Bouffier, the tree-planter who never existed, is no more than a character drawn using the two magical ingredients of literary creation—the ink and paper with which he wrote. Thanks to these, we learn to recognize this character from the first reference onward as a man we have been awaiting for a very long time. The fictitious Elzéard plants thousands of trees in the French Alps, and to these thousands, through the action of nature properly assisted, you can add the millions of birds that will return to them, and the numbers of animals that return as well, and the water flowing in a place that once suffered from drought. The truth is that we are all waiting for the appearance of any number of real Elzéard Bouffiers. Before it is too late, for us and the world.
PS: Dom Duarte de Bragança is correct: it was my book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, not Baltazar and Blimunda, that he decried, but he’s not so correct when he says that in it I attributed the paternity of Jesus to a Roman soldier. Not one of the millions of readers who have read the book up to today would confirm his assertion. I knew of that theory, but thought, due to the exigencies of good taste, I would not make use of it in writing my novel. By way of compensation, I dedicated a number of pages to Jesus’ conception by Joseph and Mary, his parents. Allow me to suggest to Dom Duarte de Bragança that he should read my Gospel. Go on, don’t be shy, dare to give it a try. I promise that it improves with reading.
Almost twelve years have already elapsed since the massacre at Acteal, in the southeastern part of the Mexican state of Chiapas. On December 22, 1997, when members of the Tzotzil community of Las Abejas [The Bees] gathered together for prayers in their humble chapel, a rural building of poorly assembled unpainted wooden boards, ninety paramilitaries of the Máscara Roja [Red Mask], deliberately brought there and supplied with firearms and machetes, launched an attack that lasted seven hours. By the time they left the terrain, forty-five of the indigenous men, women and children were dead and many others were wounded. The crime of these victims was to have lent their support to the Zapatista Army for National Liberation. Only 200 meters away there was a police station, from which came not the least movement in the direction of the massacre, not even to see what was happening. They already knew too much about it. Pilar and I were in Acteal only shortly afterward, and we spoke and wept with some of the survivors who had managed to escape. We saw the traces left by the bullets on the chapel walls and the place where the graves were excavated, and we climbed to a cave entrance in a hillside where a number of women had attempted to hide with their children and where they were murdered, some by machetes and some by machine-guns fired at point-blank range. We returned to Acteal a few months later, and you could still smell the terror in the air, but justice was going to be done.
Only in the end it wasn’t. Alleging procedural errors, the Mexican Supreme Court ended up freeing nearly twenty members of the Máscara Roja who had done time for (just imagine) the illegal bearing of arms, deliberately ignoring the fact that these arms had been fired and used to kill. In my opinion, those who are still in prison won’t be spending much more time there before being released, either. But there is no way to release—or resuscitate—the forty-five dead Tzotzils, murdered with the most extreme cruelty. I wrote only a few days ago that the problem with justice is not justice itself, but judges. Acteal is one more proof of this.
I hadn’t thought of it before, when I listened to Carlos Paredes playing his guitar, but remembering his music today, I realize that it was composed of days dawning, the dawn chorus of sparrows heralding the sun. Although we had to wait another decade before another dawning, that of liberty, the unforgettable tune of “Verdes Años” that song of ecstatic joy with its intermingled arpeggios of a muted but irrepressible melancholy, became for us a kind of secular prayer, a call to unite our hopes and desires. That in itself would be something, but it isn’t everything. The other thing that we still need to know is the man with fingers of genius, the man who taught us that it was possible to be beautiful and strong to the sound of a guitar and who, besides being an exceptional musician and performer, was an extraordinary example of a character of great simplicity and grandeur. It was never necessary to ask Carlos Paredes to open the gates to his heart. They were already and forever open.
All blood has its history. It runs tirelessly through the labyrinthine interior of a body, without losing either sense or direction, suddenly reddening or increasing the pallor of a face when it flees; it roughly breaks out in a scratch to the skin’s surface, before turning into the protective coating over a wound; it floods battlefields and torture chambers, and transforms the asphalt road into a river. Blood is our guide, it swells in us; we fall asleep to the rhythm of our blood and rise to it next morning; we can be either lost or saved through blood; our blood is our life, and it can be our death. It turns into milk to feed infants at their mother’s breast; it turns into the tears shed over the murdered; it turns to rebellion, and is raised in a clenched fist holding a weapon. Blood helps our eyes to see, understand, and judge; helps our hands to work and caress; helps our two feet to go wherever duty calls or directs them. Blood belongs to both man and woman, whether they are dressed for mourning or for feasting, with flowers in their belts, and when it assumes names that do not belong to it, it is because these names belong to all those who share the same blood. Blood knows a great deal; blood knows the blood it bears. There are times when blood mounts a horse and smokes a pipe; times when it looks out from eyes that are dry because pain has withered the power to weep. Sometimes it smiles with a wide grin or closed lips; and there are other times when it conceals a face but allows a soul to be bared; a time when it beseeches mercy from a dumb, blind wall; a time when it is a bleeding child being carried in a pair of arms; times when it outlines vigilant figures on house walls; times when it occupies the fixed stares of these figures; times when it binds, and times when it unleashes; times when it becomes gigantic in order to climb walls; times when it boils, times when it calms; times when it’s a furnace burning all around it; times when it is an almost gentle light, like a sigh, a dream, a head resting in the shadow of blood just there beside it. There is blood that burns until it freezes. This kind of blood is as eternal as hope itself.
An irresistible and already automatic association of ideas always causes me to recall Dürer’s Melancolia whenever I think of the work of Eduardo Lourenço. If Só [Only] by Antonio Nobre is the saddest book ever written in Portugal, we had yet to reflect and meditate on the sadness it contains. Then along came Eduardo Lourenço, who explained to us who we are and why we are this way. He opened our eyes, but the light was too strong for us. That was why we decided to shut them again.
I consider that Huntingdon’s thesis on the “clash of civilizations,” attacked by some and lauded by others ever since it first appeared, now deserves a more meticulous and less impassioned study. We have become accustomed to the idea that culture is some kind of universal panacea, and that cultural exchanges are the best route to conflict resolution. I am a little less optimistic. I believe that only a manifest and active desire for peace can open the door to this multidirectional cultural flow, without the will to dominate emerging from any one of its parts. The desire for peace may well exist out there, but there are no means to forge it. Christianity and Islam continue to behave like irreconcilably estranged brothers incapable of reaching the long-hoped-for nonaggression pact that could somehow bring a degree of peace to the world. Ever since we invented God and Allah, with all the disastrous consequences we know of, perhaps the solution lay in creating a third god with sufficient powers to oblige the importunately wayward to set down their arms and leave humanity in peace. And then this third god could do us the favor of withdrawing from the scene, where the old tragedy continually unfolds: an inventor, man, is enslaved by his own creation, god. It is most likely, however, that there is no remedy for any of the above and that civilizations will continue to collide, one against another.
Young and innocent as I was all those many, many years ago, someone persuaded me to take out a life insurance policy, no doubt of the most rudimentary kind then on the market—twenty reis that would be returned to me twenty years later if I hadn’t died, and naturally without the company being obliged to provide me with any account of the eventual profit from the interest accrued by my miniscule investments, still less to permit me to share in the proceeds. Alas for me, however, if I failed to pay my premiums. At that time, those twenty reis represented a considerable sum to me; I needed to work hard for almost a year to earn that much, so I was looking forward to seeing a fair return on those earnings, although I never quite managed to avoid the disagreeable feeling of distrust that told me, insistently, that I had been swindled, even though I did not know exactly how. In those days, it was not only the proverbial small print that deceived us, even the large print amounted to little more than a fistful of dust thrown in our eyes. Those were other times, when ordinary people—among whom I include myself—knew little of life, and even this little was of little use. Who would dare to argue not only with the actuary but also with the investment company broker or claims adjuster, who always had the gift of the gab?
Nowadays things are very different. We have lost our innocence and would not dream of avoiding a dispute, flaunting the strongest convictions, including on subjects of which we may only have the remotest idea. Let them not come to us afterward with their stories, for we have learned to know you well, O Mask. The bad thing is that masks change and change hugely, but what lies beneath them never alters. Nor can it even be taken as certain that we have lost our innocence. When Barack Obama, in the heat of his presidential campaign, announced a health reform that would afford protection to the 46 million people in the United States excluded from the system that currently provides coverage to the rest (meaning those who, directly or indirectly, pay their various insurance policies), we hoped a wave of enthusiasm would sweep across the United States. This did not occur, and now we all know why. The processes that were to lead (or would lead?) to the establishment of this reform had barely begun when the sleeping dragon awoke. As Augusto Monterroso wrote, “the dinosaur was still there.”4 It was not merely a matter of the fifty North American insurance companies that control the current system gunning against the project; it was the whole gang of Republican senators and representatives, along with an appreciable number of Democratic senators and congressmen and women. The real underlying philosophy of the United States establishment has never been more exposed than by this: if you are not rich, it has to be your own fault. Forty-six million North Americans do not have the money to pay for health insurance, 46 million poor people who, it would seem, don’t even have a place to fall down dead. How many more Barack Obamas will we need to bring the present scandal to a close?
Their names are Ramón Lobo and Enric González. Their profession is journalism, and they exercise it at the highest level of any journalism you can find in the pages of any newspaper. However, I prefer to view them as writers, not because I want to separate and grade the two professions hierarchically, but because what they write expresses emotions and defines sentiments that, at least in principle, are naturally found in literary works of high quality. I have been reading Ramón Lobo for many years, but Enric González is a recent discovery. As a war correspondent, Ramón possesses the exceptional ability to place every word according to its precise terms of reference—eschewing rhetoric and sensationalist oratory—in the service of what he sees, hears, and feels. It seems so obvious, but it’s not as easy as it sounds to achieve, and only an exceptionally sure command of the language he deploys allows him to succeed. Enric González was not someone I had read before. I saw his column in El País, but my curiosity was not strong enough to lead me to include his entire body of work in my daily reading. At least, not until the day when I found myself with his book Stories of New York in my hands. The word “dazzling” would not be an exaggeration. Books about cities are almost as common as stars in the sky, but as far as I know, there’s not another like this one. I thought I knew Manhattan and its surroundings reasonably well, but the extent of my error became clear from the very first pages of his book. Few literary experiences have given me as much pleasure in recent years. Take this brief text as a homage and a demonstration of gratitude to two exceptional journalists who are, at the same time, two noteworthy writers.
It was nearly a hundred years ago, on October 5, 1910, when a revolution broke out in Portugal that overthrew the old and collapsing monarchy and proclaimed a republic that, between decisions and errors, between promises and failures, and by way of nearly fifty years of a fascist dictatorship and with all the sufferings and humiliations that imposed, has survived until today. In the course of the confrontations involved, seventy-six people—soldiers and civilians—were killed, and 364 were wounded. One incident in this revolution in a small country on the extreme western tip of Europe, on which the dust of a century has now accumulated, happened to lodge in my memory—something I read long ago and cannot resist recalling to mind. Fatally wounded, a civilian revolutionary was in his final agony on a street right beside a building on the Rossio, the main square in Lisbon. He was alone, and knew he had no hope of rescue, since no ambulance would dare come and pick him up, for crossfire prevented the safe arrival of any emergency services. So this humble man, whose name, as far as I know, history has not recorded, traced with trembling fingers—almost fainting and falling as he did so—on a wall in his own blood, using the blood streaming from his wounds: Long live the Republic! He wrote the word Republic and died, and this one word said, as much as if he had written them too: hope, future, peace. He left no other will or testament, he left no riches to the world, just one word that to him, at that moment in time, perhaps signified dignity, a thing one can neither sell nor permit others to buy, and which is the greatest thing a human being can possess.
It is now over sixty years since I should have learned to drive a car. I knew well, in those remote times, about how those generous work and leisure machines functioned. I would dismantle and reassemble their engines; clean their carburetors; tune their valves; investigate differentials and change gearboxes; replace the brake shoes and renew tire inner tubes—in short, beneath the precarious protection of my blue overalls, which afforded me the best protection they could from oil splashes, I managed to perform with reasonable success nearly any operation a car or a truck might be obliged to undergo from the moment they entered the garage for a checkup, mechanical or electrical or any other kind. All I needed to do was sit down one day behind the steering wheel and receive the practical lessons of a driving instructor, which were supposed to culminate in an exam and the long-awaited approval that would permit me to enter into the daily growing social order of licensed motorists. However, this remarkable day was never to arrive. That was not merely a question of the legacy left by the infant traumas that condition and influence adult identity, for those suffered during adolescence can also have disastrous consequences, and, as happened in the present case, radically and negatively determine the future relationship of the trauma victim with something as everyday and banal as a motor vehicle. I have solid grounds for believing that I am the deplorable outcome of just such a trauma. Furthermore I wish to add that, however paradoxical such a thing might appear to those for whom the connection between cause and effect seems like a wholly elementary concept, had I not spent the green years of my youth working as a blacksmith and mechanic in a garage, I would today probably know how to drive a car, and I would be a proud driver rather than one of the humble driven.
Over and above the operations I mentioned to start with, and as a compulsory component of some of them, I would also change the carburetor, meaning those fine plates lined with copper leaf, without which it would be impossible to prevent leaks of a gaseous mixture of air and combustion between the engine head and the cylinder block. (If the language I am employing seems ridiculously archaic to those who understand only modern cars, more controlled by computers than by the brains of their drivers, it is not my fault: I speak of what I know, not what I don’t know, and you’ll be in luck indeed if I don’t set about describing the construction of wooden wagon wheels and the best ways of harnessing draught animals to the yoke. The subject in which I had a degree of competence is equally archaic.) One day, having completed my work and put the engine back in place, and having deployed the full force of my nineteen years to unscrewing the nuts that joined the engine head to the block, I set about accomplishing the last phase of the operation, meaning that of filling the radiator with water. I struggled to remove the plug and began pouring water into the radiator opening from an old watering can I had filled in the garage for just this or a similar purpose. A radiator is a container; it has a limited capacity and cannot hold even a millimeter beyond the precise quantity of water it is designed for. Any more water you continue pouring into it will spill over the edges. But something strange was happening with this radiator: the water went in and in, and the more water I poured into it, the less seemed to bubble up at the lip of the opening, the one sign that the filling process was nearly completed. The water I had already tipped into the insatiable throat beneath should have been sufficient to satisfy two or three big-truck radiators, yet it had vanished without a trace. Sometimes I think that today, sixty or more years later, I would still be attempting to fill that tunnel of the Danaides if at some point I had not finally registered the sound of cascading water, rather as if a small waterfall had just appeared inside the garage. I went to take a look. From the car’s exhaust pipe there emerged a large jet of water that beneath my astonished eyes gradually diminished in volume to a few final and melancholy drops. What was going on? I had badly joined up the carburetor, jamming the engine head and the block that should have been left open, and, much more seriously even than all this, opening up passageways where there shouldn’t have been any. I never found out what moves I had managed to make to get the poor water to find an escape route through the exhaust pipe. Nor do I wish to be told now. The shame is grave enough as it is. Perhaps that was the day when I first considered becoming a writer. It is a career in which we are at the same time engine, water, steering wheel, speedometer and exhaust pipe. Perhaps, in the end, the trauma was worth it after all.
The motto says that all things, good and bad, must pass, and that fits like a glove the work that is ending here and the person who did it. You may find something good in these posts, and on that I congratulate myself, without vanity; and others may encounter something bad, and for this I apologize—but only for not having written of certain subjects better, not for having failed to write of different subjects, since, if you will excuse my saying so, that was never an option. Farewells are always best when briefly bidden. This is no opera aria into which can now be inserted an interminable addio, addio. Farewell, however. Until another day? I sincerely think not. I have begun another book and wish to dedicate all my time to it. You will see why, if it all goes well. Meanwhile, you will have my Caim [Cain].
PS: On second thought, there is no need to be so drastic. If one day or another I feel the need to comment or opine upon something or other, I may come and beat a path to the Notebook, that place where I can most express myself according to my desires.
1 “La movida” is a Spanish cultural movement that arose with the new democracy following Franco’s death and was epitomised, in cinema, by Almodóvar s racy, eclectic, and outrageous films.
2 According to one version of this story, Brites de Almeida was a valiant woman baker who had been a soldier of fortune before she turned to a quiet life making bread. When Spain invaded Portugal in 1385 she took part in the crucial battle of Aljubarrota, where she lived. On returning from the battle, which Portugal won, she found her oven door shut suspiciously tight and ordered the seven Spanish soldiers hidden in it to come out, and as they did so she whacked each one with her baker’s shovel. She also led troops of other women around the region routing out stray Spanish soldiers and rebels. Then she went back to being a peaceable padeira.
3 The Spanish suffix -mala means “bad,” and -pior means “worse.” In other words, the country thus goes from bad to worse.
4 This is the final part of what is known as (because it isn’t obviously, of course) the shortest story ever written: “On waking the dinosaur was still there,” by the Guatemalan author Tito Monterroso (after Ernest Hemingway).