Under the Skies of Jerusalem
I must begin with what is most obvious and say how honored I feel to receive a prize that not only rewards a literary work but also recognizes the efforts of an intellectual in the service of freedom. It particularly pleases me that this award is called the Jerusalem Prize and that it is being presented to me in this city and at this moment.
I doubt there is a job in the world today that is as necessary but also as fraught with difficulty as the struggle for freedom. Just a few years ago, in 1989, as metal and stone rained down in the happy tumult of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an optimistic wind swept the planet and our spirits were lifted, because it seemed that particular battle had entered its final phase and soon a new international order based on equitable laws, respect for human rights, and the coexistence of mutually tolerant societies and individuals would reign. At last, the dream of a reconciled humanity living in peace with its diverse ideas, beliefs, and customs and competing in a friendly way for progress and prosperity would come true.
Barely six years later, that hope has been succeeded by a deep-seated pessimism. The reemergence of old demons we believed forever vanquished or at least tamed—like nationalism, religious fundamentalism, border disputes, ethnic and racial conflicts, and the refinement and spread of terrorism, which plague many regions, destroy countries, and litter streets and fields with the corpses of the innocent—is now leading many to despair and to wonder whether it is worth fighting to change a world that is lurching so drunkenly and that, to borrow a few lines from Shakespeare, seems to have been created by a sinister little god, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.
When I hear such declarations of anthropological masochism or I feel in myself the temptation to succumb to the morbid pleasures of nihilism, I close my eyes and recall my first trip to Israel, in 1977. The recollection grounds me, as others are grounded by prayer or a swallow of whiskey. I was here for the first time seventeen years ago, with the ostensible purpose of giving lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. What I really came for was to see and learn; to discover what about this controversial country was reality and what myth; to listen, see, read, and touch everything. I was here for only a few weeks, but the lessons I learned have stayed with me for a long time. At the foot of the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, there was a girl with golden hair and a gray cape that flapped in the wind who wanted to fight in every revolution and was against all laws, beginning, as the poet says, with the law of gravity. “My countrymen have bought you,” she told me. “You’ve become a Zionist!”
At the time I had just endured several years of intellectual and political reconstruction, after having renounced the collectivist and statist utopia that I embraced in my youth, and now I was defending democratic pragmatism to this girl as a more realistic and human alternative. I found myself leaning toward liberalism (though I still had many doubts) in the continual polemics that I tend to be drawn into by what appears to be my congenital ineptitude for all forms of political correctness. But I was still living with an uneasy nostalgia for what the revolution always seemed to possess in abundance and democracy to lack: the flurry of action, the release, the ascesis, the devotion, the generosity, the risk—in a word, everything that thrills the young and bores the old. In the history of Israel’s creation and its fight for survival I found all of those things, in doses more than sufficient to satisfy my appetite for romantic political sentimentalism—an appetite I have never been able to tame completely—since here I saw that in order to live life like an adventure, to reform society, and to change the course of history, it wasn’t necessary to do away with freedoms, ride roughshod over the law, support an abusive power, silence criticism, or jail or kill dissenters. Ever since then, I’ve said that the biggest surprise of my trip to Israel came when I allowed myself to discover that despite what my adversaries, many of my friends, and even I myself thought, my break with authoritarian messianism hadn’t turned me into a fossilized “reactionary” rather, I was still secretly in touch with the desire for rebellion and reform that usually (and entirely unfairly) is seen as the exclusive patrimony of the left.
Don’t think I’ve come here to sing Israel’s praises in return and thanks for the Jerusalem Prize. Not at all. Before and after that 1977 trip, I’ve disagreed with the politics of different Israeli governments, and I have criticized them—for their stubbornness, for example, in refusing to recognize the Palestinian people’s right to independence and for the human rights abuses committed in the repression of terrorism in the occupied territories—but I’ve always made it clear that these were also criticisms formulated here, by many Israeli citizens and sometimes with blazing virulence, in a climate of the most unrestricted freedom.
This aspect of Israel’s history—its always having remained a society open to discussion, criticism, and the regular election of officials, even at the most critical moments and in the throes of war, when its very existence was imperiled—is the most lasting lesson Israel has to offer the rest of the world, especially all those so-called Third World nations, in which internal or external difficulties and problems are often brandished as the excuse for violating freedoms or used to justify the tyrannies that keep so many of them sunk in barbarity and backwardness. What country has confronted more obstacles and problems than tiny Israel? Keeping the flame of freedom alive in its breast hasn’t made it weaker or poorer; it has, on the contrary, brought it honor and given more weight to its cause before the nations of the world. This was one lesson of my trip that helped me to clarify many ideas and would lead me always to cite Israel as living proof that there is no better guarantee of progress and survival for a nation than the culture of freedom, no matter what the nation’s circumstances or level of development.
The other lesson, which personally delighted me even more, since I am a novelist and I devote my days and nights to the extremely pleasant task of inventing lies that will pass as truths, was to discover that fiction and history don’t always repel each other but can in fact mesh in certain cases like two lovers intertwined. Let us not forget: before it was history, Israel was a fantasy that, like the creature from Borges’s story “The Circular Ruins,” was transferred to the real world from the numinous mists of the human imagination. Literature is full of such magic, of course, but, as far as I am aware, Israel is the only country in the history of the world that can pride itself, like a character from Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, or The Arabian Nights, on a lineage so explicitly abstract, on having been first longed for, invented, assembled from the subtle subjective matter of which literary and artistic specters are made, and then smuggled into real life by force of daring and willpower.
That this has been possible is, of course, very encouraging for a novelist and, in general, for all of us who have made labors of the imagination the center of our lives: it proves that our vocation is not as gratuitous as one might think, but rather a public necessity, a vaccination against social lethargy and stiffening of the joints. But in addition to boosting the morale of the cloud-dwellers, this realization promises much for those nations—unfortunately, most of the countries of the world—that aspire to climb out of misery, ignorance, despotism, or exploitation. It is possible. Hopes and dreams can come true. It isn’t easy, of course. A steely resolve and a capacity for sacrifice and idealism are required, of the kind possessed by the ragged pioneers who made water spring from hostile soil and crops grow where there were stones and who erected shacks in the desert that became towns and then modern cities. History isn’t preordained, and no hidden laws, dictated by stern divinity or despotic Nature, govern it. It is written and rewritten by the women and men of this world to the measure of their dreams, effort; and will. This inescapable fact lays a tremendous burden on our shoulders, of course, and prevents us from seeking excuses for our failures. But it also represents the most formidable incentive for nations that feel aggrieved or dispossessed, because it proves that nothing must remain as it is, that history can be what it should be and what we want it to be, and that it depends on us alone.
For this invaluable lesson, which has helped me in my life as a writer and has been the strongest validation of my political convictions so far, I am indebted to Israel. In fact, when seen from the proper angle, what my militant friend at odds with the law of gravity (who, if memory doesn’t fail me, outshone the light of day with stockings in seven colors that were brighter than the rays of a Jerusalem sunset) suspected has in a certain way come true: here I contracted an incurable weakness for Zionism, or at least for what there is in it of a quest for a realizable Utopia, of a fiction that was incarnated in history and changed the lives of millions of people for the better.
To be perfectly frank, however, there is another side to the Zionist Utopia with which I cannot sympathize: the side that legitimizes nationalism, historical homeland borders, and that cataclysmic nineteenth-century conception of the nation-state that has caused as much bloodshed worldwide as the wars of religion. Although I love the Peruvian land where I was born, which furnished me with the memories and nostalgia that fuel my writing, and also Spain, which has enriched my life by granting me a second nationality, let me be quick to say, borrowing a title from an essay by Fernando Savater, that I am “against homelands” and that my ideas on the subject were expressed quite well by Pablo Neruda in those early verses often quoted by Jorge Edwards: “Homeland, / sad word, / like thermometer or elevator.” My own political dream is of a world in which borders are allowed to fall into terminal disrepair, passports are moth-eaten, and customs officials take their place alongside pharaohs and alchemists as curiosities of interest only to archaeologists and historians. I know that such an ideal seems a bit distant now, with the frenetic proliferation of new anthems and flags and the escalation of nationalist sentiment, but when I hear my yearning for a world unified under the sign of freedom mocked as a foolish novelist’s invention, I am always ready with an irrefutable reply: “And what of the wild fantasies of the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl? What of the Zionist dream? Didn’t they come true?”
At millennium’s end it would seem that human history, envious of the kind of Latin American novel dubbed magic realist, has begun all of a sudden to produce such marvels that even the most wildly imaginative novelists are left dazed by the competition. The borders that seemed most unyielding—those separating fiction and reality—seem to have dissolved with events as unexpected as the collapse of the Soviet empire, the reunification of Germany, the disappearance of almost all the dictatorships of Latin America, the peaceful transition of South Africa from a racist and oppressive regime to a pluralist democracy, and so many other happenings that have left us speechless each morning for quite some time now; so why not admit that the gradual integration of the planet, now realized in large part thanks to the internationalization of markets and communications and the globalization of businesses, may keep extending itself into administrative and political realms until the only barriers left standing between people are those that grow and extend themselves freely, that is to say, the fecund barriers of language and culture? The task is difficult, of course, yet not illusory. It is an arduous but worthy undertaking and the only one that can finally bring an end to the custom of slaughter that has accompanied human history like a fateful shadow, from the time of loincloths and clubs up to that of space travel and the information revolution.
The peace accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization is one of those extraordinary recent occurrences that astonish and move us, one of those events that until not long ago belonged to the beguiling domain of fiction. With so much hostility aroused, so much blood spilled, and so much hatred stored up, it seemed impossible. Nevertheless, it has been signed, and it has survived fanaticism’s mad attempts to destroy it. One has to salute the audacity and valor of those who dared to opt for negotiation and peace, to open the door to a future collaboration of two peoples facing each other in a conflict that has already caused so much suffering and loss. And each of us must do the possible and the impossible to support it from where we stand, so that the civilizing clockwork that the accord has put in motion may continue to overcome the suspicions of the disbelievers, win over the pessimists, and inspire the lukewarm until the accord is indestructible and all attempts to turn history into a hell on the part of those seduced by apocalypse are dashed against the will for understanding and harmony that sustains it.
Then the second part of the dream that the Zionist pioneers brought from the four corners of the earth to this barren and vulnerable country, at the time a lost province of the Ottoman Empire, can begin to come true. Those pioneers, let us remember, didn’t just want to build a country or create a safe, free, and honorable society for a persecuted people. They also dreamed of working shoulder to shoulder with their Arab neighbors to overcome poverty and of setting out in friendship on a quest for justice and modernity with all the peoples of the land richest in gods, religions, and spiritual life that humanity has ever known. In the turbulence that Israel has weathered since its independence, this aspect of the Zionist dream has disappeared behind dark clouds of confrontation and violence. But now, under the difficult aegis of peace, that noble ambition appears again from behind the mountains of Edom, in the clear sky that so disconcerts the first-time visitor to Jerusalem, who, welcomed by its brightness and bathed in translucent light from above, experiences something strange, like the brush of invisible wings that is felt upon contact with great poetry. Maybe the mention of this promising sign sparkling in the sky over Jerusalem is a good place to end these ramblings of a novelist who offers you once again his joy and gratitude.