April 11, 1958, Momento, Caracas
Misadventures of a Writer of Books
Writing books is a suicidal job. None other demands so much time, so much work, so much dedication in relation to its immediate benefits. I don’t believe there are many readers who finish a book wondering how many hours of anguish and domestic calamities those two hundred pages have cost their author and how much he received for his work. To put it briefly, for those who don’t know it should be said that the author only earns ten percent of what the customer pays for a book in a store. So the reader who bought a book for twenty pesos only contributed two pesos to the author’s subsistence. The rest is taken by the publishers who ran the risk of printing it, and the distributors and booksellers. This seems even more unfair when you think that the best writers are the ones who tend to write less and smoke more, and so it’s normal that they need at least two years and twenty-nine thousand cigarettes to write a book of two hundred pages. What that means in good arithmetic is that just on what they smoke they spend more than what they’ll earn from the book. No wonder a writer friend said to me, “All those publishers, distributors, and booksellers are rich and all us writers are poor.”
The problem is more critical in underdeveloped countries, where the book trade is less intense, but it’s not exclusive to them. In the United States, which is the paradise of successful writers, for every writer who gets rich overnight through the lottery of paperback editions, there are hundreds of acceptable writers condemned to a life sentence of the icy drip of the ten percent. The latest spectacular case of justified enrichment in the United States is that of the novelist Truman Capote with his book In Cold Blood, which in its first weeks produced half a million dollars in royalties and a similar amount in film rights. Conversely, Albert Camus, who will still be in bookshops when nobody remembers the marvelous Truman Capote, was living off pseudonymous film scripts, in order to be able to keep writing books. The Nobel Prize—which he received not long before he died—was barely a momentary ease from his domestic calamities, bringing with it more or less forty thousand dollars, which in those days is what a house cost, with a backyard for the children. Better, though involuntary, was the business Jean-Paul Sartre drummed up by refusing it, for his attitude earned him a fair and deserved reputation for independence, which increased demand for his books.
Many writers yearn for an old-fashioned patron, a rich and generous gentleman who supported artists so they could work at ease. Patrons of the arts do still exist, though they look different these days. There are huge financial consortiums that sometimes in order to pay lower taxes, or to dissipate the image of sharks that public opinion has formed of them, and not very often to ease their guilty consciences, allocate considerable sums to sponsor the work of artists. But we writers like to do whatever we feel like, and we suspect, perhaps without grounds, that sponsorship compromises the independence of thought and expression, and causes undesirable concessions. In my case, I prefer to write with no subsidies of any sort, not only because I suffer from a stupendous persecution complex, but also because when I start to write I have absolutely no idea with whom I’ll be in agreement when I finish. It would be unfair if in the end I disagreed with the sponsor’s ideology, which is quite likely given most writers’ conflictive spirit of contradiction, just as it would be completely immoral if by chance I were in agreement.
The system of patronage, typical of the paternalistic vocation of capitalism, seems to be a replica of the socialist offer of considering the writer as a salaried state worker. In principle the socialist solution is correct, because it liberates the writer from the exploitation of the intermediaries. But in practice so far and for who knows how much longer, the system has given rise to risks more serious than the injustices it was meant to correct. The recent case of two terrible Soviet writers who have been sentenced to forced labor in Siberia, not for writing badly but for disagreeing with their sponsor, demonstrates how dangerous the trade of writing can be under a regime that lacks the sufficient maturity to admit the eternal truth that we writers are a bunch of miscreants on whom doctrinaire straitjackets, and even legal arrangements, pinch us more than shoes. Personally, I believe that the writer, as such, has no other revolutionary obligation than to write well. Nonconformism, under any regime, is an essential condition that can’t be helped, because a conformist writer is most likely a bandit, and most definitely a bad writer.
After this sad revision, it seems elementary to wonder why we writers write. The answer, necessarily, is more melodramatic the more sincere it is. You’re a writer in the very same way you might be Jewish or black. Success is encouraging, support of readers is stimulating, but these are supplementary rewards, because a good writer will carry on writing anyway with worn-out shoes, and even if his books don’t sell. It is a kind of occupational hazard that explains very well the social madness that so many men and women have starved themselves to death, in order to do something that, after all, and speaking completely seriously, serves no purpose whatsoever.
July 1966, El Espectador, Bogotá
I Can’t Think of Any Title
Before the revolution I was never curious to see Cuba. Latin Americans of my generation imagined Havana as a scandalous brothel for gringos where pornography had reached its highest category of public spectacle long before it became fashionable in the rest of the Christian world: for the price of one dollar it was possible to see a woman and a man of flesh and blood making love in real life on a bed in a theater. That pachanga paradise exhaled a diabolical music, a secret language of the sweet life, a way of walking and of dressing, a whole culture of relaxation that exercised a cheerful influence on daily life on the Caribbean. However, those better informed knew that Cuba had been the most cultured colony of Spain, the only truly cultured one, and that the tradition of literary tertulias and poetic floral games remained incorruptible while the gringo marines pissed on the statues of their heroes and the president of the Republic’s gunslingers held up the courts with weapons drawn to steal the proceedings. Next to La Semana Comica, an ambiguous magazine that married men read in secret in their bathrooms to hide it from their wives, one could find the most sophisticated arts and letters journals in all of Latin America. The radio drama serials that went on for interminable years, and kept the whole continent flooded in tears, had been engendered alongside Amalia Peláez’s delirious flaming sunflowers and José Lezama Lima’s mercurially hermetic hexameters. Those brutal contrasts helped to confuse much more than comprehend the reality of an almost mythical country whose risky independence war had still not ended, and whose political age, in 1955, was still an unpredictable enigma.
It was that year, in Paris, when I first heard the name of Fidel Castro. I heard it from the poet Nicolás Guillén, who was suffering a hopeless exile in the Grand Hôtel Saint-Michel, the least sordid on a street of cheap hotels where a gang of Latin Americans and Algerians awaited a return ticket eating rancid cheese and boiled cauliflower. Nicolás Guillén’s room, as with almost all of them in the Latin Quarter, consisted of four fading and peeling walls, two chairs with worn upholstery, a sink and a portable bidet, a single bed for two, where mournful lovers from Senegal had been happy and had committed suicide. However, twenty years later, I can’t really summon up the image of the poet in that room, but I do remember him in circumstances in which I never saw him: fanning himself in a wicker rocker, at siesta time, on the veranda of one of those big plantation houses out of a splendid Cuban painting of the nineteenth century. In any case, and even in the cruelest times of winter, Nicolás Guillén maintained in Paris the very Cuban custom of rising (without a rooster) at the crowing of the first roosters, and of reading the newspapers as he sipped his coffee lulled by the sweet wind of the sugar mills and the counterpoint of guitars in the clamorous dawns of Camagüey. Then he opened the window of his balcony, also as he would in Camagüey, and woke up the whole street by shouting the news from Latin America translated fro
m French into Cuban slang.
The situation of the continent at that time was very well expressed by the official portrait of the conference of heads of state that had met the previous year in Panama: you can barely see a civilian in the midst of all the uproar of uniforms and war medals. Even General Dwight Eisenhower, who in the presidency of the United States usually hides the smell of gunpowder in his heart beneath the most expensive Bond Street suits, had put on his brasses of a warrior at rest for that historic photograph. So one morning Nicolás Guillén opened his window and shouted a single piece of news:
“The man has fallen!”
There was a commotion in the sleeping street because each of us believed the man who had fallen was his. The Argentinians thought it was Juan Domingo Perón, the Paraguayans thought it was Alfredo Stroessner, the Peruvians thought it was Manuel Odría, the Colombians thought it was Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, the Nicaraguans thought it was Anastasio Somoza, the Venezuelans thought it was Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the Guatemalans thought it was Castillo Armas, the Dominicans thought it was Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, and the Cubans thought it was Fulgencio Batista. It was Perón, actually. Later, talking about this, Nicolás Guillén painted a distressing panorama of the situation in Cuba for us. “The only thing I see for the future,” he concluded, “is a kid who’s getting a lot done over in Mexico.” He paused like a clairvoyant, and concluded:
“His name is Fidel Castro.”
Three years later, in Caracas, it seemed impossible that name had made its way in such a short time and with such strength to the top level of continental attention. But even then nobody had thought that the first socialist revolution of Latin America was gestating in the Sierra Maestra. Instead, we were convinced that it had begun to gestate in Venezuela, where an immense popular conspiracy had foiled General Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s tremendous apparatus of repression in twenty-four hours.
Seen from outside, it had been an implausible action, for the simplicity of its approach and the speed and devastating efficacy of its results. The only order that had been imparted to the population was that at twelve noon on January 23, 1958, they should sound their car horns, stop working, and go out into the street to overthrow the dictatorship. Even from the editorial offices of a well-informed newsmagazine, where many of the staff were involved in the conspiracy, that seemed a juvenile order. Nevertheless, at the appointed hour, an immense clamor of unanimous horns exploded, an enormous traffic jam stopped traffic in a city where traffic jams were already legendary, and many groups of university students and workers took to the streets to confront the regime’s forces with stones and bottles. From the surrounding hills, covered in colorful shacks that resembled Christmas nativity scenes, descended a devastating swarm of poor people who turned the whole city into a battleground. At nightfall, in the middle of dispersed gunshots and the howling of ambulances, a rumor of relief went round the newspaper offices: Pérez Jiménez’s family had hidden in tanks and sought asylum in an embassy. Shortly before dawn the sky fell abruptly silent, and then an earsplitting shout of crowds exploded and the church bells rang and the factory sirens and car horns sounded, and out of every window Venezuelan folk songs poured out and went on almost ceaselessly for two years of false illusions. Pérez Jiménez had fled his stolen throne with his closest accomplices, and was flying in a military plane to Santo Domingo. The plane had its engines warmed up since noon at La Carlota airport, a few miles from the Miraflores presidential palace, but nobody had thought to move a staircase up to it when the fugitive dictator arrived closely followed by a patrol of taxis that were a very few minutes from catching him. Pérez Jiménez, who looked like a big baby in tortoiseshell glasses, was hoisted up into the cabin by rope with great difficulty, and in the extravagant maneuver he forgot his briefcase on the ground. It was an ordinary black leather briefcase, which contained the money he had hidden for his out-of-pocket expenses: thirteen million dollars.
Since then and during the whole of 1958, Venezuela was the freest country in the entire world. It seemed like a real revolution: each time the government glimpsed some danger, it immediately consulted the people by direct channels, and the people took to the streets against any attempt at regression. The most delicate official decisions were made in the public arena. There was no matter of state of a certain size that was not resolved with the participation of the political parties, with the communists at the forefront, and at least in the first months the parties were aware that their power was based on the pressure in the streets. If that were not the first socialist revolution in Latin America, it must have been due to the black arts of conjurers, but not in any case because the social conditions had not been most favorable.
The government of Venezuela and the Sierra Maestra established an undisguised complicity between them. The men of the 26th of July Movement stationed in Caracas spread propaganda by all possible means, organized massive collections and sent aid to the guerrillas with official endorsement. Venezuelan university students, who’d been hardened by their involvement in the battle against the dictatorship, sent a pair of women’s underpants in the mail to Havana university students. The Cuban students concealed very well the impertinence of that triumphalist package, and in less than a year, when the revolution triumphed in Cuba, returned them to the senders with no comment. The Venezuelan press, more from the pressure of internal conditions than from the will of the owners, was the legal press of the Sierra Maestra. It gave the impression that Cuba was not another country, but a piece of free Venezuela that had not yet been freed.
The New Year of 1959 was one of the few Venezuela celebrated without a dictatorship in its entire history. Mercedes and I, who had gotten married during those joyful months, returned to our apartment in the neighborhood of San Bernardino at the first light of dawn and found that the elevator was out of order. We walked up the six flights of stairs, pausing to rest on the landings, and we were barely inside the apartment when we were shaken by the absurd feeling that an instant we’d already lived through last year was repeating itself: the shouts of frenzied crowds suddenly rose up from the sleepy streets, and the church bells rang and the factory sirens and car horns sounded, and from all the windows came a torrent of harps and four-stringed guitars and braided voices singing of the glory of popular victories. It was as if time had been running backward and Marcos Pérez Jiménez had been toppled for a second time. Since we didn’t have a telephone or a radio, we bounded back down the stairs, wondering what kind of hallucinogenic alcohol they’d given us at the party, and someone who ran past in the early-morning glow stunned us with the latest incredible coincidence: Fulgencio Batista had fled his stolen throne with his closest accomplices and flown in a military plane to Santo Domingo.
Two weeks later I arrived in Havana for the first time. The occasion presented itself sooner than I expected but in the least expected circumstances. On January 18, when I was tidying my desk to leave for home, a man from the 26th of July Movement arrived panting in the magazine office in search of journalists who wanted to go to Cuba that very night. A Cuban airplane had been sent for that purpose. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and I, who were the most resolute supporters of the Cuban Revolution, were the first to be chosen. We barely had time to go home and grab a bag, and I was so used to thinking that Venezuela and Cuba were the same country that I didn’t remember to look for my passport. It didn’t matter: the Venezuelan immigration agent, more Cuba-loving than any Cuban, asked me to show him any identity document I had on me, and the only piece of paper I found in my pockets was a laundry receipt. The agent stamped it on the back, killing himself laughing, and wished me a pleasant flight.
The serious problem showed up at the end, when the pilot discovered that there were more journalists than seats on the plane, and that the weight of the teams and baggage was above the acceptable limit. Nobody wanted to stay behind, of course, and nobody wanted to leave any of what they were bringing, and the airport official was dete
rmined to send the overloaded plane on its way. The pilot was a mature and serious man, with a graying moustache, in a blue uniform with golden trimming of the former Cuban air force, and for almost two hours he impassibly resisted all kinds of reasons. Finally one of us found the lethal argument:
“Don’t be a coward, Captain,” he said, “the Granma was overloaded too.”
The pilot looked at him, and then he looked at all of us in muted fury.
“The difference,” he said, “is that none of us is Fidel Castro.”
But he was mortally wounded. He reached over the counter, ripped the page of flight regulations off the pad, and crumpled it into a ball in his hand.
“Alright,” he said, “we’ll go like this, but I’m not leaving a record that the plane’s overloaded.”
He put the paper in his pocket and motioned for us to follow him.
The Scandal of the Century Page 18