Fourth Sketchbook: Leather Cover, No Branding, No Name
Easter Sunday, in Paris, chez Miquel Barceló.
I leaf through, among Miquel’s books, The People’s Act of Love by James Meek. I find the description of a character that, I think, would fit JL—that is, JL as a type is clearly recognizable: He was an architect and builder, one of those charmed individuals whose practical usefulness transcends any amount of snobbery, corruption, and stupidity in the powers on whose patronage they depend.
Since October of last year, when I was visiting here, Miquel has acquired several dozen books. This growth rate is normal for his vast library. Almost all the new books seem to have been used, possibly read.
Tomorrow I’m going to Poitiers to deliver the lecture I prepared on Good Friday in Amatitlán: “Landscape and Biography.”
Monday at noon in Paris.
Last night I dreamed of Pía. She called me on the phone (in the dream, I was in the chalet in Amatitlán where I spent a few days with B+). Pía makes me talk with her maternal grandfather, Don Carlos, a fighter-plane and crop-duster pilot. Jovial conversation. He tells me that he is going to pick me up and, with the speed of dreams, suddenly he is there, in the garden of the chalet, standing next to his sports car (which he actually does not have). He drives me at high speed back to the capital. He drives recklessly, I ride scared. (In my dream I think: he is a fighter pilot, he masters the car.) We stop near a village that could be Villa Canales, where a fair is taking place. There are rides and water games with Maya themes. Great fun. We engage—or rather, I engage, because at a certain moment Don Carlos disappears from the dream—in hand-to-hand combat and war maneuvers, with a background of inflatable plastic pyramids. Childish euphoria.
Last night I had dinner with Claude Thomas, who translated Paul and Jane Bowles into French, near her home in Montmartre. I tell her about the Archive, about the diary I am keeping. She listens with interest. What I tell her has the elements of a thriller, she tells me. Later she asks me if I miss Paul. I assure her that I do. In a simplified version I tell her about my recurring dream about Paul: I go back to Tangier and I find him alive, although very old and sick, in his old apartment in the Itesa building. The apartment is empty, without a single book. I ask him if he does not need his books (which I sold a few years back to Miquel), and Paul says that yes, he would like to have them back. I promise him that I will give them back to him, and then I awake, anguished.
“You must feel guilty,” Claude tells me.
I ask her why I should feel guilty. She does not answer, and we start talking about something else.
Wednesday in Poitiers. Early morning. Insomnia.
A rush of memories from the conversation, more or less alcohol-soaked, with Homero Jaramillo, who came from Montreal for the colloquium on Central American literature. I tell him what I’ve been doing at the Archive, and I tell him about my fear that among those who work there, there might be some who were involved in the kidnapping of my mother. (He was the “political liaison” in Mexico for a Salvadoran guerrilla movement, and there he established links with Guatemalan guerrillas. It was he who, about ten years ago, introduced me to the person who claimed that my mother had been kidnapped by an urban guerrilla commando.) Homero mentions the possibility of earning a scholarship at the University of Toronto. I tell him that perhaps I would be interested. He nods, saying nothing more about it.
Thursday, chez Miquel.
Homero, who was invited to dinner last night at Miquel’s, does not show up. I call him on the phone. He apologizes. He is a bit drunk and very tired, he tells me. He is staying for dinner at the house of Colombian friends who are hosting him, who have lived in Paris for some time. With Miquel, I talk again about the Archive. He tells me that he also assumed, when he heard that I was doing “research” there, that one of my motives would be to find out something about the kidnapping of my mother. I tell him that is not the case, but that of course I would like to learn as much as possible about that.
“Sure,” he says, “but you should clarify for the ‘chief’ that you will not use what you find for legal or judicial purposes—right?”
I tell him that I don’t know if they would believe me.
“Yes,” he answers. “You’re right, they’re not going to believe you.”
Phone call from Lucca, the small town in Tuscany where my sister Mónica settled a few months ago with her four children. She invites me to go visit them. A little later, a call from my mother in Guatemala: she insists that I go to Italy, and she offers to pay for my plane ticket to prevent me from using my wallet as a pretext not to go.
I am pleased to think that Mónica and her children are far away from Guatemala. Safe, I think. I cannot stop imagining that perhaps in the not-too-distant future I will go into exile again. And of course I worry how something like that could affect Pía’s future.
Friday. Five in the morning. Sleepless.
I had dinner last night with Alice Audouin, whom I had not seen for years. I talked to her about the Archive. She asked if working on something like that didn’t put me in physical danger. I answered—with a bit of exaggeration—that in a country like Guatemala everyone lives in constant physical danger. Alice said: “Ah, the danger, the dignity of danger, here we have lost it.”
I got back to Miquel’s house around midnight. I called B+ several times, both her home and her cell phones. She does not answer. In Guatemala it would be four in the afternoon.
Saturday.
I read Balzac, the short biography by Zweig. He says this about some manuscripts by Balzac: “One can see how the lines, which at first are neat and orderly, then swell up like the veins of an angry man.” Something similar could be seen in my writing, I think.
About Fouché, Napoleon’s minister of police, of whom Zweig also speaks in the work about Balzac: “He needed intrigue as much as nourishment.”
Lunch with Guillermo Escalón, the cameraman. It’s the birthday of his son Sebastián, who is thinking of going to live in Guatemala for a while.
“Why?” I ask him.
“I’m fed up with Paris,” he says. And also fed up with the magazine (by France’s National Scientific Research Center), where he has been working as a reporter for a few years).
I eat dinner alone at the Pick-Clops, near Miquel’s studio.
Then a very late, amorous call from B+. Alluding to a comment of mine about her habit of scolding me, she recites these verses by her beloved Sor Juana: Listen to me, if you can, with your eyes . . . / since my rough voice does not reach you, / hear me, deaf one, as I complain in silence.
“But I cannot see you,” I say.
“That does not matter, silly.” she answers. “It is not about that; you can see me in your imagination, no?”
I ask her what she is wearing.
Sunday.
First night of normal sleep since I arrived in Europe a week ago. A beautiful sunny day. Appointment with Claude to have lunch in Montmartre.
Vague memory of a dream with Roberto Lemus, who works in the Archive and is one of the possible kidnappers of my mother. He is a pallid man, medium height, with drooping shoulders, a round belly, and a certain intellectual air, which, in the dream, makes me think of Allen Ginsberg. He has light green eyes and big jug ears. He reads a newspaper aloud. He has a nasal, phlegmatic voice. (I must listen to the cassettes we recorded during the kidnapping negotiations; that voice could be the voice of the negotiator, I think when I wake up.)
Mónica calls me again on the phone. I confirm my travel plans to Italy next week. She will pick me up at Pisa airport with the landlady of the apartment where she lives.
Difficult viewing and reading, on my laptop, of the CDs with the National Police Yearly Reports that I have brought with me. Thus far, I have not been able to find the reports on the Identification Bureau prepared by Benedicto Tun. Surprise. On the cover of the Yearly Report from 1964, instead of the usual plain cover with no art, a small graphic discovery: a representation in perspective, with a single vanishing point, of a large, open tome. On the bottom edge of the tome, police handcuffs. Above the book, looming over it, a bat with outstretched wings. The caption, “Yearly Report,” in Gothic characters. The effect is sinister.
I show it to Miquel and notice with satisfaction his slight startled jump.
“Man, that is even a little bit scary.” He leans toward the screen. “That bat was lovingly made.”
“Yes. There are those who love their job,” I say.
Monday.
Before getting out of bed, I read the Stendhal by Zweig.
Another splendid day, with a little less heat than yesterday.
A revelation in the shower: it’s not so much that I am bothered by the erudition of others—Miquel’s, Guillermo’s, or Homero’s—in their different “fields of knowledge,” as much as by the awareness of the immensity of my own overall ignorance, the horizons of which, as I acquire new knowledge, or glimpses of knowledge, seem wider each day.
Tuesday.
When I open my eyes, “the dregs of my dreams are lost.” At night, while I tossed and turned in bed unable to fall asleep, my thoughts went to the CDs from the Archive, which I believe came into my hands thanks to Galíndez. I have found copies of several files after 1970, which I am not supposed to see. When I showed Miquel the image of the bat, I mentioned this.
“Those documents,” I said. “I prefer to not even open them.”
“But why not?” he replies. “Maybe they gave them to you because they want you to see them.”
I have dinner with Gustavo Guerrero, the editor at Gallimard. He proposes that I write something for the Nouvelle Revue Française about Borges by Bioy, which I consider to be a secretly complex, unique, magnificent book. This, following our conversation about an article that came out a few days ago in El Mundo, where Bioy’s integrity and that of the editors of the book is questioned: “Let us remember,” the article says, “that Bioy never wanted to publish those diaries, and they are being published by others, who may or may not have manipulated the writer’s private mischief.”
I dream about a traffic violation. By mistake, I drive in the wrong direction in front of the barracks of the Fortress of the Honor Guard, on Avenida de la Reforma. Two soldiers standing at the door aim at me with old rifles. I fear they might shoot, but they allow me to turn around and drive away.
Wednesday.
Last night I dined with Marcos Cisneros, the Colombian editor and Homero’s friend. It seems to me that he has not yet read Borges by Bioy, although during our telephone conversation that afternoon he told me that to him it seemed “an excellent book.”
I return late, quite drunk. I call B+ several times; I do not find her.
I wake up out of sorts. I can’t remember any dreams.
At noon, Miquel tells me about the bronze elephant, part of his exhibition opening next Saturday. It is a young elephant with its legs up in the air, balanced on the tip of its trunk. It’s a “comical” piece, about four meters high and weighing about fifteen hundred kilos.
At the last minute, Miquel’s Paris dealer, Yvon Lambert, does not want to exhibit it in his gallery, out of fear that the floor may not be able to bear so much weight. Furthermore, the insurer refuses to cover the risks. Miquel decides to go to the gallery, to propose a solution. I go with him.
YL welcomes Miquel into his office and greets him effusively. However, during the visit Miquel spends his time insulting YL, without YL ever taking the hint.
“This used to be a nice gallery,” Miquel tells YL, “but it seems that each year it gets smaller. Have you moved the partitions?”
YL acknowledges that he has reduced the space of the main showroom in order to add another room. To change the subject, YL asks Miquel about one of his female friends, who used to live in Paris and now lives in Spain.
“What?” Miquel says to him. “You’re into girls now?”
YL’s assistant shows Miquel a copy of the catalog for his exhibition, which she just received from the printer. The color reproduction leaves something to be desired. But Miquel focuses on the new gallery logo, which appears on the cover.
“It’s okay,” he says. “It reminds me of the shirt designer’s logo.”
And so on, until we say goodbye—and by then YL’s mood no longer seems as good as it did at the beginning.
In the afternoon, travel to Italy.
They come to pick me up at the airport, which is about forty minutes from Lucca: Mónica and the Luccan couple—Mr. Rino and Mrs. Angela—who rent her the apartment where she has settled with her children. They are an older couple. As we leave the parking garage, Mr. Rino, who drives a compact Mercedes, has difficulty paying the electronic ticket, and says to his wife: “Ma cosa vuoi? Sono un vecchietto.”
We get lost on the way. We stop to ask for directions in a cozy restaurant, so we decide to have dinner there. It is nine thirty at night. At dinner I learn that Mr. Rino, sixty-six, is retired. He was a tailor. Angela, his wife, treats Mónica with great affection. It seems to me that she has extended her vocation as an Italian mother—she has a daughter already married and no longer living there.
They both evince enormous ignorance about the world in general, an ignorance similar to that which I encountered about fifteen years ago in our Italian relatives from Piedmont—great-uncles, cousins twice removed. When they hear Mónica and me speak Spanish, Mr. Rino expresses amazement. “La vostra lingua è veramente una lingua latina,” he says.
I explain that “Guatemalan” is, except for the accent and some regionalisms, the same language as Spanish.
“But you,” he says, “are not Spanish. The Spaniards killed so many Indians and committed so many atrocities.”
“Yes,” I say. “And they brought the Spanish language to America. We are the heirs to those Spaniards, at least in part.
“Is that so?” he exclaims, a little surprised.
“It is clear,” I say, “that we [I look at Mónica, to indicate her as an example] are not Maya, okay? We have some Maya in us, but our names are European, and we have Italian blood on our father’s side. But we are also descendants of the conquistadors. We are also the bad guys!” I laugh.
Mrs. Angela and Mr. Rino seem dismayed.
We arrive in Lucca at midnight. Mónica’s apartment is small but comfortable. The children seem happy. The two older ones have received scholarships for higher education, and they have already been offered jobs. The little ones learn Italian.
In the morning I discover, outside the window in the dining room, a nice view over a large medieval garden with big trees, where yellow-legged birds flutter above the dark foliage.
Friday.
Last night, I had a cocaine dream, with Carter Coleman, Bret Easton Ellis, Alejandro D—my old friend from Cobán—and JL. A clear substance that, upon making contact with the palm of my hand, turns into small ice cubes. Banal conversation with Alejandro (about something that happened in Cobán). He seemed a bit conflicted. He said that he no longer wants the drug and yet takes it in large quantities.
After lunch, on a stroll along the walls surrounding Lucca, I speak with Mauro, Mónica’s eldest son, about Guatemala. Mauro is interested in knowing how things are over there. I tell him about the Salvadoran congressmen assassinated by policemen, then we talk about the scandal at the Ministry of Education (over the illicit transfer of funds to the Ministry of Public Works for the construction of a new airport), and about Rigoberta Menchú’s presidential run. Mauro asks a series of questions about how a country like Guatemala could change for the better. We come to the conclusion that, miracles aside, there’s nothing good to be expected, except perhaps a moral revolution (unlikely) or intervention by a higher power.
“Like that of the United States in Iraq?” Mauro asks, and we laugh.
I tell him that things are going to get worse long before they get better. I tell him that maybe the thing is not to think about how to change things, but how to get away from it all. That his destiny is not necessarily there, that maybe he should consider the possibility of living in another country.
“I would like to return,” he answers.
“Why not study political science?” I ask, not without irony.
He shakes his head doubtfully, and does not answer.
I talk to him about Haiti, “practically converted into a cemetery,” as a Spanish columnist recently said.
“Guatemala could end up that way too, if things do not change,” I say.
Mauro could very well have asked why I went back to Guatemala, which would be difficult to explain, but he did not ask.
That afternoon I travel back to Paris.
Saturday, chez Miquel in Paris.
Joubert, quoted by Du Bos: La bonhomie est une perfection.
Homero, who had agreed to call me last night to have dinner together (he goes back to Montreal tomorrow morning) does not call.
Late at night at Miquel’s, with his daughter Marcela, we watch Short Cuts by Altman.
Sunday.
Miquel’s exhibit, yesterday afternoon, a success.
The young bronze elephant is on display in a cobbled courtyard, in a private small palace belonging to a friend of Miquel’s, very close to YL’s gallery. People exclaim and smile when they see it, balanced on its straight trunk with its legs extended into the air and its little tail pointing up toward the sky. In the gallery, a display of large canvases with enormous skulls surrounded by burnt matches, open shells, and snails drying in the sun—still lifes, memento mori and vanitas, that simultaneously evoke the tradition whence they come while merrily distancing themselves from it.
In the evening, dinner at Maxim’s. I talk for a while with Castor Siebel, octogenarian art critic, an old friend of Miquel’s. I am surprised by his good memory; he remembers my full name, and the only time that we met before, about ten years ago, with Miquel, in a brasserie. He asks me where I live now. “Don’t you feel threatened,” he asks later, “living in Guatemala?” I tell him that saying yes would be an exaggeration but saying no would not be the exact truth.
On a recommendation from Miquel, I read the first chapters of Zweig’s Fouché, “inventor of the political police,” and often cited by Tun in the Yearly Reports.
In the afternoon, in his studio, Miquel shows me the experiments he is working on with materials and paint for his project for the dome of the Palace of Nations, home of the United Nations Office in Geneva. It is a seascape with a surface area of about one thousand square meters. “The dome is huge,” he says, “like a bullring, but upside down.” He also shows me pieces for a stage set that he might soon create for Peter Brook. They are something like large pillows made with balls of newspaper pasted with a little diluted glue onto undulating sheets. Viewed from the side, they are reminiscent of the cross section of flat, striated muscle fiber of a cactus leaf.
“This,” he tells me, “could be used to make beds and other furniture, and perhaps even homes for poor people.” I think of teaching the technique to Pía after returning to Guatemala.
Almost at dawn, back from the party at Maxim’s, I call B+. She scolds me when she realizes what time it is in Paris, and that I’m “too cheerful.” I tell her she is exaggerating. In the end, we agree that she will pick me up at the airport on Tuesday. The flight, I tell her, will arrive almost at midnight. She complains about the late hour but assures me that she will be there.
I read De Quincey, Essays on Style, Rhetoric, and Language, and through him I come to Salvator Rosa, the “bandit painter and satirical author from the seventeenth century” (possibly our ancestor?) beloved by the English romantics, who wrote:
“Our wealth must be spiritual, and we must content ourselves with small sips while others choke on prosperity.”
Monday.
Last night, with Miquel, we saw Notes from the Underground, a curious and interesting adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s story transplanted to Los Angeles. We spoke once again of the expedition project to El Golea (Algeria), to look for the blockhouse with the frescoes by François Augiéras.
I have a dream about an experiment with “Barceló blocks.” In the dream, Pía and I build a great pyramid in a vacant lot in Guatemala City, where I return tomorrow.
Tuesday. Seven thirty in the morning (before leaving for the airport).
Yesterday, Guillermo Escalón took me to visit Jacobo Rodríguez Padilla, a Guatemalan artist who is eighty-five, exiled in Paris since the fifties, shortly after the overthrow of Arbenz and the Revolutionary Government. Tiny studio apartment: the antithesis, one could say, of Miquel’s studio. He has some very curious canvases, part surrealist and part naïve. A vague palette that allows for all colors. He showed us several very small sculptures that I liked a lot, especially one made of alabaster that made me think of an ancient Chinese work. The artist is small, very thin, and seems exceedingly fragile, like a little bird, one could say. He told me that Guillermo has told him about the project at the Archive that I have been working on. Jacobo asked several questions. I told him about the Identification Bureau. He immediately mentioned Benedicto Tun.
“Could he have been related to Francisco Tun, the painter, or not?” he asked in jest, and then, he added, in seriousness: “That man was feared. He knew a lot. He was considered a technician or a scientist more than a policeman. But we were not sure it was advisable to keep such a person at his post, after the Revolution. In any case, he stayed there.”
Later, after leaving the studio, while we walked towards Le Prosper, Guillermo told me that Jacobo’s sister was killed by the Guatemalan army.
“He has not managed to shake off his guilt over this,” he explained. “He once told me: ‘Imagine. I got her into all that. I led her to the party, and just a month later they captured her.’”
Guillermo went on to tell me that the young woman had four or five children, and that her husband, who had also gone into exile in Paris, committed suicide shortly after.
“He was crazy,” Guillermo said. “You know how he killed himself? He threw himself off the top of a cardboard replica of Mount Everest at a zoo on the outskirts of Paris. Can you believe it?”
Wednesday morning, in Guatemala.
B+ comes to pick me up at the airport, she stays over. All is well.
I listen to the messages on the answering machine. Calls from the bank, due to activity on my credit card and some deposit from a literary agency. Another call from Lucía Morán, whom I think I neglected to tell I was going to be traveling. And another from a company that offers funeral services at home.
Afternoon.
I pick Pía up from school at noon. While I wait for the violin lesson to finish, her teacher—who months ago had asked me to come and tell a story or a fable to the class—tells me that she is very worried because she believes that for some time now she has been watched. The teacher, a lady in her fifties, is a redhead with a voluptuous shape, a bit extravagant and no doubt attractive for her age.
“There is something angelic about her,” says the father of another one of the girls in her class, and I have to agree. She is naturally sweet, although somewhat nervous, and she has the curious tic of covering her mouth with one hand when she speaks.
“Two guys sit in their parked car in front of my house almost every morning. When I look at them, they look away and do whatever, like play with their cell phones or look at a newspaper or a magazine. Now I have to change my route every day to come to school, to the extent that’s possible, of course,” she says, with her nervous laugh.
I tell her that I think she is doing the right thing (even if her followers are imaginary).
Very hot night, and dreamless.
I call Benedicto Tun in the morning. He tells me that he has gathered more material about his father. I agree to call him next Wednesday to arrange another interview.
I call the chief at the Archive Recovery Project. A woman answers his cell phone; she tells me that he is traveling and won’t be back until Saturday.
Lunch at Magalí’s house; her daughter Alani celebrates her seventeenth birthday. I tell María Marta and Alejandra, Magalí’s youngest daughter, about the call I got from the funeral company. María Marta says, as if to minimize any implied threat, that she got a call several days back with the same offer.
“Well,” I answer, “then I’m letting myself be carried away by my imagination. Perhaps it was not a threat.”
“Maybe,” says Alejandra. “Or maybe they want to threaten both of you, or the entire family. Me, on the other hand, not having the same last name, not even funeral homes call me, and no one bothers to threaten me. Very sad, my case,” she laughs.
Friday.
Yesterday, after returning to the apartment with Pía from the supermarket where we’d been to shop for the weekend, it occurred to me to call back the number of the supposed funeral home while she was amusing herself with the little dresses, books, and jigsaw puzzles that I brought her from Paris. There was no answer.
A bit later, the phone rang and I answered. At first, I heard nothing. Then, there was a giggle like that of an old lady, which I can only describe as evil. The number, “unknown.” Suddenly, I felt an attack of nausea, and I ran to the bathroom. Pía, who came behind me, was scared to see me, arched as I was over the toilet bowl, vomiting.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked, on the verge of tears.
I told her that maybe something I ate at lunch did not sit well with me.
I felt very weak. I lay down for a moment on the makeshift sofa in the living room. Then I got up to give Pía some cereal, and I had some yogurt. We got into bed and fell asleep immediately.
Today I woke up with a fever, with pain all over my body. I called Pía’s maternal grandmother (her mother is traveling). I explained that I am sick, that I will not be able to take Pía to school. The grandmother came to pick her up a bit later. At noon, B+ brings me fever reducers, pain killers, and several bottles of water.
I must find out whose number I called yesterday afternoon, although I suppose it could be a public telephone.
Saturday.
Reading Fouché. In the afternoon, already without discomfort and without a fever, I go to pick up Pía at her grandmother’s, then we go to visit my parents. At night, mild abdominal and back pain.
Incredible period, ominous and homicidal, when the Universe is transformed into a dangerous place.—Zweig.
I think about how to use “Barceló blocks” to build a refuge-labyrinth that could also serve as an allegory.
I wake up at six. Uneasy. Dissatisfied. I’m cured.
It’s a gray morning. The cries and calls of birds can be heard, as always, drifting up from the ravine below the window in my room.
Last night I brought a stack of newspapers from my parents’ home to go through the news for the days when I was away. Sad pastime. But, what other country could I live in now? I ask myself. I think of the bourgeois condemned at the time of Fouché to “the dry guillotine,” as they called exile in places like Guyana—or Guatemala? But the idea of emigrating yet again—to the United States? Europe? Mexico? Argentina? or even Africa?—does not seem reasonable to me, at least not yet. That is to say, I do not feel sufficiently threatened to flee. Meanwhile, I keep looking at the news.
I have the idea that, instead of throwing away the newspapers, I can use them to make “Barceló blocks” with Pía for construction projects. Who knows, maybe that way we’ll find a path, an exit, or at least a lasting distraction: building houses for the poor, or dollhouses, pyramids or walls, labyrinths of bulky, fluffy newspaper blocks.
Afternoon.
Late in the morning a cool, dry northern wind began to blow. The weather has changed now, and it is placid, with a sky as blue as a day in December.
Instead of going to El Tular like I do almost every Sunday, I ask Magalí for permission to experiment with the paper blocks in her yard. At Magalí’s house, two men from Petén, Danilo Dubón and his assistant César, are repairing the thatched roof that the winter winds have damaged. Danilo, whom I met in Petexbatún several years ago, is a woodworker and builder of extraordinary integrity and taste. He has emigrated to the capital in search of employment as a master builder, and in one year he has become quite prosperous; he just bought land on the outskirts of the city and is starting to build his home.
While he and César replace the damaged thatched roof on the house, Pía helps me crumple pages of old newspapers—though she saves some of them, those she wants to keep because of a picture of a baby or a pet—and I glue them together in alternate rows on the spread-out sheets. In a few minutes we use up three or four newspapers and we have the first block, similar to the ones I saw in Miquel’s studio in Paris, so I consider the experiment a success.
At the end of the morning, I show the blocks that we have made to Danilo and César, submitting them to their judgment as builders. When they see them, they laugh. Danilo tries to compress a block with his hands, and the block resists. They now seem to grasp the possibilities.
“And that paper,” César tells me, “you can get everywhere.”
“It could work,” says Danilo. “Maybe with a little varnish on top, in case of rain, or fire.”