At nightfall, still under a persistent rain, the bus entered the cobbled courtyard of an enormous, gloomy building, situated in the middle of a nature reserve. The woman responsible for the others made them disembark with slightly childish instructions, as if they were schoolgirls. But they were all grown-ups, faded and absent, and they moved in a way that did not seem of this world. María was the last to get out, without worrying about the rain, since she was soaked to the skin anyway. The woman in charge of the group then handed them over to others, who came out to receive them, and left in the bus. Until that moment, María had not noticed that those women were thirty-two placid patients being transferred from some other city, and that where she actually found herself was a mental asylum.
Inside the building, María separated from the group and asked an employee where there was a telephone. One of the nurses who was guiding the patients made her get back in line while saying in a very sweet voice, “This way, honey, there’s a phone down this way.” María followed, along with the other women, down a dark corridor, and finally entered a dorm room where the nurses began to assign beds. They assigned one to María as well. Rather amused by the mistake, María explained then to the nurse that her car had broken down on the highway and she just needed to use the telephone to let her husband know. The nurse pretended to listen to her attentively, but took her back to her bed, trying to calm her with soft words.
“Sure, sweetie,” she said, “if you behave yourself you can call whoever you want. But not now, tomorrow.”
Understanding all of a sudden that she was about to fall into a lethal trap, María ran out of the dormitory. But before she reached the gate, a corpulent guard caught up to her and got her in a headlock, and two others helped to put her in a straitjacket. A short time later, since she didn’t stop shouting, they injected her with a sedative. The next day, since she persisted in her insurrectional attitude, they transferred her to the ward for the violent patients, and subdued her until she was exhausted with a ice-cold water from a high-pressure hose.
María’s husband reported her disappearance just after midnight, when he was sure she wasn’t at the house of anyone they knew. The car—abandoned and dismantled by thieves—was recovered the next day. After two weeks, the police declared the case closed, and took it for granted that María, disappointed with her brief matrimonial experience, had run off with another man.
At that time, María had not yet adapted to sanatorium life, but her spirit had been crushed. She was still refusing to participate in outside games with the patients, but no one forced her. After all, the doctors said, they all start out like that, and sooner or later they end up joining the life of the community. Toward the third month of her confinement, María finally managed to gain the confidence of a social visitor, who offered to get a message to her husband.
María’s husband visited her the following Saturday. In the reception room, the director of the sanatorium explained in very convincing terms the state María was in and how he could best help her to recover. He warned him of her dominant obsession—the telephone—and instructed him on how to treat her during the visit, to prevent her from having a relapse into one of her frequent crises of rage. It was all a matter, as they say, of going along with her.
In spite of him following the doctor’s instructions to the letter, the first visit was dreadful. María tried to leave with him at any cost, and they had to resort to the straitjacket again to restrain her. But little by little she grew more docile on subsequent visits. So her husband carried on visiting her every Saturday, bringing her a pound box of chocolates every time until the doctors told him it wasn’t the most suitable gift for María, because she was gaining weight. From then on, he only brought her roses.
May 5, 1981, El País, Madrid
Like Souls in Purgatory
It was many years ago now that I first heard the story of the old gardener who killed himself at Finca Vigía, the beautiful house among huge trees, in a suburb of Havana, where Ernest Hemingway spent a large part of his writing life. Since then I have continued to hear it many times in numerous versions. According to the most common one, the gardener made the extreme decision after the writer decided to discharge him, because he insisted on pruning the trees despite instructions not to. One hoped that in his memoirs, if he wrote them, or in any of his posthumous writings, Hemingway would tell the real version. But it seems he did not.
All the variations concur that the gardener, who had been there since before the writer bought the house, disappeared all of a sudden without any explanation. After four days, following the unequivocal signals from the vultures, they discovered the body at the bottom of a well that supplied Hemingway and his then wife, the lovely Martha Gelhorn, with drinking water. However, the Cuban writer Norberto Fuentes, who has meticulously scrutinized Hemingway’s life in Havana, published a little while ago another different and maybe more well-founded version of such a controversial death. The former house steward told him that the well where the man had died did not supply drinking water but just water for the swimming pool. And, according to the steward’s version, they frequently put chlorine tablets in it, though perhaps not enough to disinfect it of an entire dead body. In any case, the latest version belies the oldest version, which was also perhaps the most literary, and according to which the Hemingways had been drinking drowned man’s water for three days. They say the writer had said, “The only difference we noticed was that the water had become sweeter.”
This is one of so many fascinating stories—written or told—that stay with a person forever, more in the heart than in the memory, and which fill up everyone’s lives. Maybe they are the souls in purgatory of literature. Some are legitimate pearls of poetry that we’ve come to know on the fly without really registering who the author was, because they seemed unforgettable; or that we’d heard someone telling without asking who, and after a certain while we no longer know for sure if they were stories we dreamt. Of all of them, undoubtedly the most lovely, and the best known, is that of the newborn baby mouse who met a bat the first time he went outside of the family cave, and returned astonished, shouting, “Mother, I’ve seen an angel.” Another, also from real life, but outdoing fiction by leaps and bounds, is that of the Managua amateur radio enthusiast who, at daybreak on December 22, 1972, tried to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world to let people know of the earthquake that had erased his city from the map. After an hour of fiddling with the dial and hearing nothing but sidereal whistles, a more realistic companion convinced him to desist. “It’s useless,” he said, “this happened all over the world.” Another story, as truthful as the previous ones, was suffered by a symphony orchestra in Paris, which ten years ago was about to liquidate itself due to an inconvenience that hadn’t occurred to Franz Kafka: the building they’d been assigned as a rehearsal space only had one hydraulic elevator with a maximum capacity of four persons, so the eighty musicians began going upstairs at eight in the morning, and four hours later, by the time the last of them got up there, they had to start going down for lunch.
Among the written stories that dazzled me from the first reading, which I reread again every chance I get, the best to my taste is “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs. I only remember two short stories that seem perfect to me: this one, and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” by Edgar Allan Poe. However, while we can identify everything up to the quality of the latter writer’s undergarments, what is known of the former is very little. I don’t know very many scholars who can say what his double initials stand for without looking it up once more in the encyclopedia, as I have just done: William Wymark. He was born in London, where he died in 1943, at the modest age of eighty, and his complete works in eighteen volumes—though the encyclopedia does not say so—occupy twenty-five inches of library shelf space. But his glory rests completely on a masterpiece five pages long.
Finally, I wish I could remember—and I know some chari
table reader is going to tell me in the coming days—who the authors are of two stories that profoundly incited the literary fever of my youth. The first is the drama of the disappointed man who threw himself off a tenth-story balcony, and as he fell was looking through the windows into the private worlds of his neighbors, the small domestic tragedies, the furtive loves, the brief instants of happiness, news of which had never reached the communal stairwell, so that by the moment his head split open on the sidewalk his conception of the world had completely changed, and he had reached the conclusion that the life he was leaving forever by the back door was worth living. The other story is that of two explorers who manage to take shelter in an abandoned cabin, after having endured three anguished days lost in the snow. After another three days, one of them died. The survivor digs a grave in the snow, a hundred yards from the cabin, and buries the corpse there. The next day, however, when he wakes from his first restful sleep, he finds him back inside the house again, dead and frozen stiff, but sitting like a formal visitor in front of his bed. He buries him again, maybe in a more distant grave, but when he wakes up the next day he finds him sitting in front of his bed again. Then he loses his mind. The truth of his story is found in the pages of the diary he has kept up till then. Among the many explanations that tried to clear up the enigma, one seemed to be the most plausible: the survivor felt so deeply affected by his solitude that he sleepwalked and dug up the corpse that he had buried in his waking hours.
The story that made the strongest impression on me in my life, the most brutal and at the same time the most human, was told to Ricardo Muñoz Suay in 1947, when he was imprisoned in Ocaña in the province of Toledo, Spain. It is the real story of a Republican prisoner who was executed in the early days of the Spanish Civil War in the Ávila prison. The firing squad took him from his cell at dawn on an icy morning, and they all had to walk across a snow-covered field to reach the execution spot. The Civil Guards were well protected from the cold in their capes and gloves and tricorn hats, but even so they were shivering as they crossed the frozen wasteland. The poor prisoner, wearing only a fraying wool jacket, didn’t stop rubbing his freezing body, while he complained out loud about the deadly cold. At a certain point, the commander of the squad, exasperated with the complaints, shouted:
“For fuck’s sake, stop playing the martyr about the goddamn cold. Spare a thought for those of us who have to go back.”
May 12, 1981, El País, Madrid
Something Else on Literature and Reality
A very serious problem that our disproportionate reality poses for literature is the insufficiency of words. When we speak of a river, the furthest a European reader can go is imagining something as big as the Danube, which is 1,700 miles long. It is difficult to imagine, if it is not described, the reality of the Amazon, 3,500 miles in length. From the riverbank in Belem, in the Brazilian state of Pará, you cannot see the other side, and the river is wider than the Baltic Sea. When we write the word “storm,” Europeans think of thunder and lightning, but it’s not easy for them to conceive of the same phenomenon that we want to depict. The same happens, for example, with the word “rain.” In the Andes mountain range, according to the description a Frenchman called Javier Marimier wrote for his countrymen, there are storms that can last for five months. “Those who have not seen those storms,” he says, “cannot imagine the violence with which they develop. For hours on end the lightning strikes follow each other in rapid succession like cascades of blood and the atmosphere trembles under the continual shaking of thunder, the blasts of which echo off the immensity of the mountains.” The description is very far from being a masterwork, but would suffice to give horrified shudders to the least credulous European.
So it would be necessary to create a whole system of new words for the size of our reality. The examples of that necessity are interminable. F. W. Up de Graff, a Dutch explorer who traveled the upper Amazon at the beginning of the century, says that he found a stream of boiling water that made hard-boiled eggs in five minutes, and had passed through a region where people couldn’t speak out loud because it would trigger torrential downpours. Somewhere on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, I saw a man recite a secret prayer in front of a cow with maggots in her ear, and I saw the maggots fall to the ground dead as the prayer went on. That man assured me he could apply the same cure from a distance, as long as he had a description of the animal and was told where it could be found. On May 8, 1902, the Mont Pelée volcano, on the island of Martinique, destroyed in a few minutes the port of Saint Pierre and killed and buried in lava all of its thirty thousand inhabitants. Except for one: Ludgar Sylvaris, the town’s only prisoner, who was protected by the invulnerable structure of the individual cell they’d constructed for him so he couldn’t escape.
Just in Mexico many volumes would have to be written to express its incredible reality. After almost twenty years there, I could still spend entire hours, as I have so many times, contemplating a bowl of Mexican jumping beans. Benevolent nationalists have explained that their mobility is due to a living larva they have inside, but the explanation seems poor: the marvelous thing is not that the beans move because they have a larva inside, but that they have a larva inside so they can move. Another of the strange experiences of my life was my first encounter with an ajolote (axolotl). Julio Cortázar tells in one of his stories about meeting an axolotl in the Jardins de Plantes in Paris, one day when he wanted to see the lions. When he passed through the aquariums, Cortázar says, “I glanced at a lot of ordinary-looking fish until I unexpectedly came across the axolotl.” And he concludes: “I stayed there staring at them for an hour, and left, unable to think of anything else.” The same thing happened to me, in Pátzcuaro, only I didn’t watch them for an hour, but for a whole afternoon, and I returned several times. But there was something that impressed me more than the animal itself, and it was the sign nailed to the door of the house. “Axolotl syrup for sale.”
That incredible reality reaches its maximum density in the Caribbean, which, strictly speaking, extends (northward) to the southern United States, and south to Brazil. Don’t think that’s an expansionist’s delirium. No: it’s that the Caribbean is not just a geographical area, as geographers of course believe, but a very homogeneous cultural area.
In the Caribbean, the original elements of the primal beliefs and magical conceptions previous to the discovery are joined by the profuse variety of cultures that came together in the years following it in a magic syncretism the artistic interest and actual artistic fecundity of which are inexhaustible. The African contribution was forced and infuriating, but fortunate. In that crossroads of the world, a sense of endless liberty was forged, a reality with neither God nor laws, where each person felt it was possible to do what they wanted without limits of any kind, and bandits woke up converted into kings, fugitives into admirals, prostitutes into governors. And the opposite, too.
I was born and raised in the Caribbean. I know it country by country, island by island; maybe my frustration that nothing has ever occurred to me, and that I could never do anything more surprising than reality, springs from there. The furthest I’ve been able to go is to transpose it with poetic resources, but there is not a single line in any of my books that does not have its origin in a real event. One of those transpositions is the stigma of the pig’s tail that so worries the Buendía lineage in One Hundred Years of Solitude. I could have resorted to any image, but I thought the fear of the birth of a child with a pig’s tail was the one that had the fewest possibilities of coinciding with reality. However, as soon as the novel began to become known, confessions surfaced from men and women in different parts of the Americas who had something resembling a pig’s tail. In Barranquilla, a young man showed his in the newspapers: he had been born and raised with that tail, but he had never revealed it, until he read One Hundred Years of Solitude. His explanation was more astonishing than his tail. “I never wanted to tell anyone I had it because I was as
hamed,” he said, “but now, reading the novel and hearing from people who have read it, I’ve realized that it’s a natural thing.” A little while later, a reader sent me the clipping of a photo of a baby girl in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, who was born with a pig’s tail. Contrary to what I thought when I wrote the novel, they cut the girl’s tail off in Seoul and she survived.
Nevertheless, my most difficult experience as a writer was the preparation of The Autumn of the Patriarch. During almost ten years I read everything possible on the dictators of Latin America, especially the Caribbean, determined that the book I was planning to write would resemble reality as little as possible. Every step was a disappointment. Juan Vicente Gómez’s intuition was much more penetrating than true foresight. Doctor Duvalier, in Haiti, had all the black dogs in the country exterminated because one of his enemies, trying to escape the tyrant’s persecution, had slipped out of his human condition and turned into a black dog. Dr. Francia, whose prestige as a philosopher was so widespread that Carlyle wrote an essay on him, closed the Republic of Paraguay as if it were a house, and only left one window open so the mail could arrive. Antonio López de Santa Anna buried his own leg with splendid funeral rites. Lope de Aguirre’s severed hand sailed downriver for several days, and those who saw it pass by recoiled in horror, thinking that even in that state the murderous hand could brandish a dagger. Anastasio Somoza García, in Nicaragua, had a zoo in the courtyard of his house with double cages: on one side were savage beasts, and on the other, scarcely separated by iron bars, his political enemies were locked up.
Martínez, the theosophist dictator of El Salvador, had all the street lighting in the country wrapped in red paper, to combat a measles epidemic, and he had invented a pendulum that he held over his food before eating, to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. The statue of Morazán that still exists in Tegucigalpa is actually of Marshal Ney: the official commission that traveled to London to get it resolved that it would be cheaper to buy that forgotten statue in a warehouse than to commission an authentic one of Morazán.
The Scandal of the Century Page 25