“The easiest way to attract attention is to do extravagant, stupid things. Standing out from the crowd because of your work is a lot harder. Appearing in the newspaper signing a contract to renovate the locker room of the local soccer team or the south stand, or handing over a check to the local events committee that will pay for all the bulls for this year’s bullfights. That’s easy. Who else is going to waste money on such stupidities? They applaud you on the opening day or when, in front of the press and the mayor, you hand over your check to the councilman in charge of sports, but there’s an end to it, and even then, at that very moment, someone will doubtless be criticizing you, the locals—including the ones who will benefit most from your generosity—will be calling you a spendthrift, a braggart, and wondering aloud if you’re into some form of trafficking, drugs or guns or money-laundering, in order to earn the cash you’re spending like there’s no tomorrow. And instead of climbing up the ladder, you’re on your way down. A few months later, everyone has forgotten your generous gift, but not your dubious reputation.”
“Yes, if you’re hoping to be remembered for doing something no one else is dumb enough to do, namely, throwing away your money, well, even though people are more than happy to pick it up, you’re on your own there,” says Bernal.
Nevertheless, on this luminous winter morning, I—one of the innocuous ones—am the person looking for a stage on which to recreate the natural order, at least in part, with an intimate little drama, a chamber work, offering to restore what history destroyed. I’m preparing the moment, Dad, I’ve taken it upon myself to return you to the place where you would have gone if it hadn’t been for us, I’m restoring the mutilated body of your dignity to make you once more fully a man, a man I never knew, because my other brother, my sister and I only arrived after the mutilation, the children of a reluctantly accepted servitude, beings with no real shape, domestic creatures with no aspirations. The whole country had been deprived of aspirations, and nothing could grow in the midst of all that grayness. It’s up to me now to fulfill your long-postponed wish and return you to your comrades. In fact, I’m putting into practice the lesson my uncle taught me: grant an appropriate death to each creature you hunt, as a restorative act of gratitude to nature, which—like the great tragedy of history or the miracle of transubstantiation—fills with its essence even the tiniest particle, for it is born, lives and dies in each and every one of its manifestations. Use the appropriate bait for each fish. I’m returning to him what I owe him as a son, my life in exchange for several lives, I’m fulfilling my anonymous role in the chain of history, I’m going with him so that in the final act he will lack for nothing, it’s a decisive role, and one that he himself cannot undertake. Civilized peoples honor their dead with a feast held at the graveside. As a proxy at your funeral ceremony, I am a fly growing gradually desiccated, trapped in the sticky web, an insect condemned to be encrypted and caught in the spider’s web of other people’s voices, an echo without a voice: yes, Don Esteban, of course the smell of the orange groves here is good, I’m not saying it isn’t, but the smell of the coffee plant seems to me finer, more delicate, more elegant, you only say you prefer the smell of orange blossom because you’ve never smelled the flowers of a coffee plant, isn’t that right? The perfume is sweeter and the flowers are prettier, like little white, perfumed roses which, in that warm, welcoming climate, fill the air with a scent so dense you can almost touch it. Everything smells of coffee and cinnamon and cocoa. Tropical smells. You’ve never seen a coffee flower, have you, or the fruit of the cacao tree? You never see them here, not even cacao pods. All you can buy is that powdered stuff they sell in the supermarket, and it’s anyone’s guess what that’s really made of. The Indians valued the pods and seeds of the cacao tree so highly that they used them as currency. Hot chocolate, they believed, was the drink of the gods. The other great advantage of those plantations is the unobstructed view: it’s proper countryside, plantation upon plantation growing on the sides of the hills, with the occasional small ranch or a bigger farm in the background, or else on a slope with the snowy peaks of the volcanoes behind, not like here, where all you see are buildings under construction and garbage dumps, the landscape here isn’t calm and quiet, I mean, even on the really narrow streets you have to take care because of all the traffic, the cars and the trucks, it’s like that even now, and yet Wilson tells me that all the building work has stopped. It’s completely different over there: everything is so beautiful, really it is. It’s not the land or the climate that makes us leave, it’s the situation. Men have destroyed paradise, and I don’t think God, who they say can do all things, will ever be able to forgive them for that. He may not want to. The web of voices entrapping you, like an insect caught in a web that suddenly breaks.
On the Edge Page 18