Tributes by various writers display the same kind of heightened reflexivity as the editorials, each a variation on the theme of ‘how García Márquez shaped me’. Australian novelist Peter Carey argued in the Guardian that generations of overseas readers with no knowledge of Colombia have been ‘nourished by their misunderstandings’18 of the novelist’s work. As if to demonstrate, he misspelt Macondo throughout. Haitian-born, US-based writer Edwidge Danticat talked about the impact of Gabo’s work on her as a young Caribbean migrant aspiring to write fiction. And here I am in Australia, another link in the signal chain.
Strange that an old journalist who punched out his greatest work on a typewriter should be mourned this way: scattered across the Web. If One Hundred Years of Solitude was a book about the coming of modernity to an isolated Latin American village – the arrival of magnets, refrigeration, the railways, radio and cinema – Gabo’s life, at least the narrative of that life the obituaries tell, seemed to be about the transition from modernity to what comes after. Born the son of a telegraph operator, he had made a living writing for newspapers, and he had died on the Internet.
Late one night after half a bottle of cabernet, I sent R a different kind of email. I told her I still hadn’t found where the yellow butterflies appeared in One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I’d spent two months following their trail across the Web. I told her that I missed her, that I’d made a terrible mistake, a year back, in letting her go. I would fly to Mexico City and meet her, so we could light a candle and leave it at Gabo’s door.
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ she replied. ‘Give me your new address.’
The following Sunday I heard a knock on the door. I went to answer it in my boxer shorts, my face lathered with shaving foam. She was standing on my doorstep with a sky-blue umbrella and a milk crate. Her face was thinner and her hair was cut short, but there could be no mistaking her. The crate was full of kitchenware and utensils I recognised from our time together in the riverside apartment: a silver bowl and a hand-mixer like the one Mercedes sold so Gabo could afford to post his manuscript to Buenos Aires.
‘You’re here,’ I said.
‘I thought you might want these back.’
I left her looking at the bookshelves – English books arranged by author’s surname, Spanish books by country – while I put the crate in the kitchen and went into the bathroom to wipe my face clean. I put on jeans and a blue guayabera she had bought me years ago during a holiday in the Yucatan Peninsula. When I came back, she was sitting on the sofa, flicking through a green hardcover I recognised instantly.
‘Ya las encontré,’ she said, folding the page over.
‘What did you find?’
‘Can’t you guess?’
I sat down beside her and gently took the book from her hands.
‘I thought you were in Mexico.’
‘I came back,’ she said.
She’d been in Australia for three months and was living only a few blocks from me. Her postdoctoral position was not with a Mexican university, as I’d supposed, but with the Australian government agency for scientific research, the CSIRO.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were here?’
‘Why didn’t you come to Mexico?’
I invited her to stay for lunch. She was delighted to learn I still made quesadillas with fresh chillies from our habanero plant. Light rain that had been falling since dawn grew heavier as we ate. It was belting down by the time we finished, a proper Macondo downpour. Her flimsy blue umbrella didn’t stand a chance.
I invited her to stay and put on some salsa and we danced around the living room at half speed, remembering each other, a little solemn despite the energetic music, smiling occasionally but not speaking, avoiding eye contact. After a few songs, we moved to the couch and opened the novel to the page she’d folded over.
‘You read it,’ she said.
‘Sorry if I’m rusty.’
The section about yellow butterflies was only fourteen pages long, but it brought Gabo’s voice back to me in a way none of the obituaries had. We often think of reading as a solitary activity, but it is always an intimate act of communion between writer and reader. When the writer has recently died, it can be a kind of haunting, the return of a familiar voice we thought had left our life for good. That rainy Sunday as I read of yellow butterflies, I remembered the sound of Gabo’s voice. I remembered how it sounded from my own mouth, every Sunday morning for a year, in the grave, old Castilian language it had taken me years to learn and which I now spoke with a Mexican lilt. A person with whom we can share One Hundred Years of Solitude, I thought, is a person with whom we can share a life.
Caracas
He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea.1
– Simón Bolívar, 1830
I flew into Caracas, alone, a few days before Easter. The road into town wound through densely wooded hills. From the bus window, between tree trunks, I glimpsed shirtless men with machetes cutting palm fronds in a clearing. They were lashing long and short stalks together to make crosses for the holy week processions. Sombre grey skyscrapers huddled in the valley, encircled by hillside slums. Descending into the foothills, we flashed past crooked, tin-roofed adobe shacks in tropical colours. The only hostel in town was east of the Parque Central, just off the Sabana Grande mall. It had an electric fence, gates topped with broken glass, and a scabby, sad-eyed, scarlet macaw that someone had trained to say ‘Chávez! Carajo!’ in a cage on the rooftop.
I didn’t know what to make of President Chávez or his Latin American socialism for the twenty-first century. At 24, I’d lived under the conservative Australian government of John Howard my whole adult life. My heart hoped Venezuela would live up to the promises of leftist campus activists in Australia. But my head feared the Tory newspapers were right. I was in Caracas to learn more. With limited language skills and no local contacts, it wouldn’t be easy.
The other Australians at the hostel weren’t impressed with Bolivarian socialism.
‘This’s a fuckin’ nanny state,’ complained Mick, one of a group of half-a-dozen rowdy young blokes from Sydney who’d stopped over on their way to the cricket World Cup in the Caribbean. They were incensed because Chávez had banned alcohol sales over Easter to reduce the holiday road toll. Luckily for them, and unluckily for the rest of us, they’d stockpiled enough rum and beer before the shops closed to keep them guffawing on the terrace until dawn each day. They played pounding house music so loud not even the cockroaches in the dormitories could sleep. With businesses shut in downtown Caracas, and a fair chance of getting mugged in the street, I was stuck in the hostel with Mick and his mates for nearly a fortnight, waiting for the Brazilian embassy to reopen and issue me a visa.
In April 2007, I was already three months into a question mark–shaped loop around Latin America. I didn’t know what the question was, but I hoped to figure it out on the 7000-kilometre bus and boat leg between Caracas and Buenos Aires. Two years out of a literature degree, I knew I wasn’t like Mick and friends, but I didn’t know who I was. I’d delivered pizzas, detailed cars, stacked library shelves, been a conveyancing clerk and taught English as a second language. Nothing felt permanent: jobs, relationships, the places I lived. I’d decided, under the influence of too many 1980s travel writers – Bruce Chatwin especially – that the best place to figure myself out was the road. I wanted to learn about the ‘pink tide’ of socialist governments sweeping across Latin America. I wanted to improve my Spanish so I could read Latin American writers in their own language. I wanted to overcome my awkwardness with women. Above all, I wanted a period free of work and study commitments to read and make sense of my life – no travel companions, no itinerary, no hotel bookings – just a vague notion of travelling south for a year, watching the landscape change.
In the mornings, a few of the other guests and I helped the Venezuelan staff clear the broken glass and empty bottles from the rooftop terrace, and listened to them mutter darkly about the ‘borrachos australia
nos’. During the long, hot afternoons the museums were closed, I struck up a friendship with Valentina, a trainee primary school teacher from Belgium, who was a year or two younger than me, spoke six languages and played the melodeum. For more than three years, she’d been avoiding the final semester of her education degree – the actual teaching practice – by backpacking around South America, slowly spending an undisclosed sum inherited from her grandparents. Her shaved head made her resemble the Buddhist nuns I’d seen in Cambodia, and she wore an assortment of grimy, shapeless ponchos acquired on the road.
‘What are you reading?’ she asked one day from the hammock next to mine.
‘Absalom, Absalom!’
‘Didn’t you say you’re trying to learn Spanish?’
‘My Spanish still isn’t good enough to read proper books. Besides, García Márquez says Faulkner’s practically a Caribbean writer. What are you reading?’
‘Transcendental Meditation by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.’
‘That doesn’t sound very Latin American.’
‘Shut up.’
Ours was one of those friendships of convenience that characterise lonely travellers. Though we disagreed on nearly everything, a male companion made her life more comfortable, and I relied on her language skills. On Palm Sunday, we watched a broad-shouldered, square-jawed blonde in a miniskirt cross themself as a procession of pilgrims in purple robes bore a crucifix towards the luminous-white Romanesque arches of Caracas cathedral. The next day, we took the cable car to the summit of El Ávila, a peak north of the city, and looked towards Cuba across a washed-out sea. In 2007, all of Venezuela was, in a sense, looking towards Cuba.
‘Do you think Fidel Castro’s still alive?’ Valentina asked. ‘Or are they just pretending, like people say?’
‘I don’t know. I was only there three weeks.’
‘Were people happy?’
‘I feel like I barely scraped the surface.’
In Havana, I’d illegally rented a room from a school-teacher who hated the revolution.
‘You can’t read that here,’ she said when she caught me browsing an anthology of Fidel’s speeches and essays over a plateful of papaya. ‘Seriously, if I catch you with it again, I’ll use it for toilet paper.’
But her best friend worked for Prensa Latina, the state news agency. She took me cycling through the tobacco plantations and cane fields at Viñales.
‘See how happy the workers are? See how beautiful life can be when they have real dignity?’
‘And did they look happy?’ asked Valentina, now.
‘Of course. That’s why she took me there. What does that prove?’
‘I haven’t been, but I’d like to believe…I mean, I want so badly for there to be a better way to do things.’
‘I wasn’t convinced…’
A couple of days later we rode the metro over to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, where they had a complete set of Picasso’s Vollard Suite, a series of 100 etchings made in the lead-up to the Second World War. It was disorienting to step out of steamy, polluted Caracas into air-conditioned luxury. The Picasso etchings from the early 1930s are sensual and decadent: a sculptor and his model drink wine together, then retire to bed. But the tone darkens as the decade draws on. In The Embrace, a minotaur disrupts the sculptor and model’s lovemaking to rape the woman. One of the final and most famous of the etchings, The Combat in the Arena, abandons the sculptor’s studio. The minotaur confronts two naked toreros in a bullfighting arena. This is a direct reference to massacres in bullrings during the Spanish Civil War, but the etching, through its composition, also suggests a view of history as a turning wheel with violence at its centre.
The theme of cyclic violence was also at the heart of Memories of February Twenty-Seven, 1989, an exhibition of wall-sized, black-and-white Caracas street scenes by the photojournalist Tom Grillo. In these images, Grillo bears witness to the Caracazo, a popular uprising in the streets of the Venezuelan capital in 1989 that culminated in an army massacre of civilians. That year, when hunger, hyperinflation and a hike in public transport costs sparked rebellions in poor neighbourhoods, the military was called in to ‘restore order’. They slaughtered as many as 3000 civilians. The Caracazo motivated Hugo Chávez’s first attempt to seize power, a failed coup in 1992. As elected President from 1999 until his death in 2013, Chávez liked to say the massacre was the moment Venezuelans rose up against the neoliberal economic and political consensus and began their brave experiment with Bolivarian socialism.
Returning to the hostel with our minds full of hellish images – trucks laden with coffins, corpses lying on these very Caracas street corners – we were stopped by five police officers on motorcycles, just off the mall. They wore black flak jackets, carried bolt-action rifles, and wanted to see our passports.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t have mine on me.’
‘You need to carry your passport. Otherwise you can be fined.’
The head officer rubbed his thumb and fingertips together for emphasis. Together, we tried to make them understand my passport was with the Brazilian embassy. We even showed them the receipt. But they didn’t understand or didn’t care.
‘Show us what you have in your bags.’
Both of us emptied our backpacks onto the pavement. When Valentina produced a photocopy of her passport, the police seemed satisfied. We’d been advised to carry photocopies of travel documents in Caracas, not originals. Apparently, dodgy cops would often confiscate passports and force tourists to pay a bribe to get them back. I finally managed to locate my photocopy, but my heart sank as I unfolded the sheet and held it up to show them. A couple of months ago, in Quito, I’d clipped out the photo to make an ID card for a salsa class and I’d never remembered to make a replacement. The police glared at me through the hole where my face should have been.
‘Ya tienes un problema, joven,’ said the oldest, an officer with a neatly trimmed moustache who wore black shades under the visor of his helmet. ‘You’ll have to accompany us to the station.’
A stocky, thick-necked young policeman with a shaved head and tattooed biceps patted me down. Standing behind me, he thumped the heels of his hands hard into my back and buttocks. As he finished the search, he squeezed my balls and released them in a swift, stealthy movement, hissing ‘puto’ in my ear.
‘Fuck, mate. Take it easy. We don’t want any trouble.’
‘Get on the bike. Your friend can go home.’
Valentina was crying.
‘He doesn’t have any money,’ she said. ‘Neither of us have any money.’
A shopkeeper intervened. We were not, after all, in some gloomy alleyway. We were standing outside a shoe store in broad daylight in one of the biggest shopping malls in Latin America.
‘Do not under any circumstances go with these men,’ said the shopkeeper. He turned on the lead officer, speaking loudly so that others in the street could hear. ‘Señor, we have all seen you stop dozens of foreigners here today. What crime have they committed?’
‘Mind your own business.’
‘That is exactly what I’m doing. You are frightening away our customers. My brother is a magistrate and I’m sure he’d be happy to look into this matter.’
By now, a group of business owners and curious bystanders had formed around us. In the face of all the attention, the cops decided we were not worth the effort and roared off on their motorcycles.
‘My friend,’ said the shopkeeper, switching to English. ‘We have enough problems of our own here. Please, be more careful.’
Valentina and I didn’t dare leave the hostel for two days after that. It was cool and tranquil on the rooftop, once the other Australians had left. If you inhale deeply in Caracas, a hint of jasmine can be detected beneath the exhaust fumes. In the evenings, we sat up late, observing the street life from above. One night, a lanky, grey-bearded bald man, barefoot, with a peculiar rolling gait and a torn red t-shirt stained with engine oil, lowered himself onto a scrap of cardboard on the fo
otpath. He crossed his legs like he was going to meditate, but then began smoking through a Pepsi can, muttering to himself, rocking back and forth. A well-dressed woman in her forties approached. She wore a clean, white blouse and black pencil skirt, as if she had just come from the office. Her left leg was crippled and she walked with crutches. Sitting beside the bald man, she offered him a pipe, which he packed with powder, lit and passed back to her. From her handbag, she produced an electric-blue butterfly mask. Her face hidden, she sat smoking in the alley with the hobo for two hours. They spoke animatedly, like very old friends.
‘Maybe they knew each other in a past life,’ said Valentina.
‘Maybe.’
I pulled out my bus ticket to the border town of Santa Elena de Uairén to check the departure time: eight o’clock the next morning.
‘You’re really going?’
‘Yes, I’m headed south.’ I would go to Brazil first, then Bolivia, and Argentina. ‘No flying. I want to feel every pothole and speed bump. What will you do now? Back to Belgium?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go south, too.’
For the first three or four hours the highway east of Caracas ran parallel to the coast, past mangroves and lagoons, through scrubby, arid forest. Around midday, just outside of Barcelona – an oil town nothing like the Spanish city – the sea came into view again, shining behind the tanks and towers of a refinery. Then we turned south-east onto Highway 16 and followed the Guyanese border all day, the towns thinning out, the road narrowing, the vegetation growing thicker. In the evening, still a few hours from Santa Elena, we had our second encounter with Venezuelan authorities.
The bus stopped at a military checkpoint somewhere in the Canaima National Park, where a soldier ordered us to disembark and fetch our luggage from the cargo hold. It had been hours since we’d sighted another vehicle. At the roadside, dense thickets hummed with insects, and two large tables were set up under floodlights at a wooden shelter. Everyone had to empty their belongings out to be examined by the bored, surly teenage soldiers. It took well over an hour for all 50 of us to file past, and they became steadily more aggressive.
Requiem with Yellow Butterflies Page 3