by John Updike
Several of these tales are García Márquez’s best. “There Are No Thieves in This Town,” the longest of the lot, with magisterial empathy describes the confused, self-destructive behavior of a handsome young idler, Damaso, and the love borne him by his considerably older wife, Ana, and the small-town boredom that stretches stupefyingly to the horizon. The town is so low on recreational resources that Damaso’s theft of three battered billiard balls creates an enormous social vacuum; with no overt touches of the fabulous, an enchanted environment, shabby and stagnant yet highly charged, is conjured up. “Artificial Roses,” showing how a young girl’s love-secrets are detected by her blind grandmother, and “Tuesday Siesta,” sketching the arrival in town of the mother of a slain thief, are smaller but not inferior in their purity and dignity of treatment. “Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon,” a parable of artistry in which the local plutocrat, José Montiel, defaults on paying for “the most beautiful cage in the world,” sidles toward fantasy, and the prize-winning “One Day After Saturday” enters broadly into it, as the town suffers a plague of dying birds. “Big Mama’s Funeral” (attended by the President of Colombia and the Pope) is firmly fantastical and celebrates Macondo, the territory of imagination where the author was to strike it rich. But not immediately: after 1962 García Márquez, living in Mexico City, undertook a new career as a screenwriter and wrote almost no fiction until January of 1965, when “the right tone” for his masterpiece came to him.
The third and last group of stories were mostly composed after the completion and triumph of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and they have the strengths and debilities of an assured virtuosity. One of them, “The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship,” is a single six-page sentence, and two of them, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” are subtitled “A Tale for Children.” For the first time, we feel a danger of cuteness: “They wanted to tie the anchor from a cargo ship to him so that he would sink easily into the deepest waves, where fish are blind and divers die of nostalgia”; “The house was far away from everything, in the heart of the desert, next to a settlement with miserable and burning streets where the goats committed suicide from desolation when the wind of misfortune blew.” Such imagery has become a mere vocabulary, used a bit glibly, though with flashes of the old morbid magic. García Márquez’s conception of an angel as a dirty muttering, helpless old man with bedraggled wings is ominous and affecting, and scarcely less so the drowned corpse so tall and beautiful and virile that “even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination.” But the sea he keeps evoking has the unreality not only of sleep and dreams but of, in the words of the old song, a cardboard sea, a sea that indeed could be packed up and sold like the sea in his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch.
The longest and latest of these later stories, “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother,” has been made into a movie, with a script by the author and under his control, so the two forms of illusion can be fairly contrasted. Having seen the film before I read the prose, I was struck by how much that had seemed obscure was easily clarified—the photographer, for instance, who in the film appeared wholly gratuitous and of unrealized significance, is explained in the story as a natural adjunct of the carnival that grows up wherever the prostituted heroine is encamped. The comings and goings of Eréndira’s young lover, Ulises, baffling on the screen, make simple sense in print. On the other hand, Irene Papas, as the grandmother, cannot look “like a handsome white whale” with “powerful shoulders which were so mercilessly tattooed as to put sailors to shame”; but she does, unavoidably, put a human face on this implacable character, and makes her more disturbing than she is in the book, where her cruelty remains a matter of literary premise and verbal comedy. The scene of Eréndira’s defloration, which in its written paragraph is swathed in subaqueous imagery, in the movie flays the eyes with its real girl, its real man with his three-day beard, its real shack, its real torrents of rain, its real brutality. The film, in short, had a power to stir and scare us quite unrelated to any cumulative sense it was making; its script was logically so loose that García Márquez could insert into it another story, “Death Constant Beyond Love,” for the sake of its photogenic episodes of a painted-paper ocean liner and of peso notes that become butterflies. The one image in “Death Constant Beyond Love” that penetrates into our own experience and lends it a negotiable significance—the frightened yet captivating odor of the heroine (not Eréndira), like “the dark fragrance of an animal of the woods … woods-animal armpit”—could not, of course, be put on film. Thrown into real landscapes, with flesh-and-blood actors, the careless cruelty of “the incredible and sad tale” glared at the moviegoer confusingly, not quite action and not quite poetry. Seeing real human beings go through his motions, one realizes how much stylized dehumanization García Márquez offers his readers.
There is a surplus of sadism in these later stories. Eréndira is made to submit to masses of men and her grandmother is prolongedly slain by a lover whom then Eréndira spurns; the fallen angel is relentlessly abused and teased; and in “Blacamán the Good, Vendor of Miracles” a child is transformed into a miracle-worker by a diet of pain:
He took off the last rags I had on, rolled me up in some barbed wire, rubbed rock salt on the sores, put me in brine from my own waters, and hung me by the ankles for the sun to flay me.… When [he fed me] he made me pay for that charity by pulling out my nails with pliers and filing my teeth down with a grindstone.
The child has his revenge: when he becomes a miracle-worker, and his master is dead, he revives him in his tomb and leaves him inside, “rolling about in horror.” He revives him not once but repeatedly: “I put my ear to the plaque to hear him weeping in the ruins of the crumbling trunk, and if by chance he has died again, I bring him back to life once more, for the beauty of the punishment is that he will keep on living in his tomb as long as I’m alive, that is, forever.” Not a pretty tale, but, then, we might be told, neither is life in Latin America.† Nor were García Márquez’s two post-Solitude novels, The Autumn of the Patriarch and Chronicle of a Death Foretold, pretty tales. The former seemed, to this reader eager for more tropical dazzlement, tortuous and repetitive, and the latter astringent and thin. Both left a bad taste.
Even before he won the Nobel Prize, García Márquez was worried about the effects of celebrity and fame: “It tends to isolate you from the real world,” he explained to The Paris Review. “I would really have liked for my books to have been published after my death, so I wouldn’t have to go through all this business of fame and being a great writer.” Being a great writer is not the same as writing great. He writes slow: “On a good working day, working from nine o’clock in the morning to two or three in the afternoon, the most I can write is a short paragraph of four or five lines, which I usually tear up the next day.” He writes, he informed the interviewer, “for my friends,” and the knowledge of “millions of readers … upsets and inhibits me.” The bold epic qualities of his masterpiece, his genial and handsome jacket photo, and his outspoken leftist political views combine to give a false impression of a robust literary extrovert; reading his collected stories suggests instead that his inspirations are extremely private and subtle. And, it may be, fragile. “The point of departure for a book for me,” he recently told an interviewer from The New York Times, “is always an image, never a concept or a plot.” He also confided, “When you are young, you write … on impulses and inspiration.… When you are older, when the inspiration diminishes, you depend more on technique. If you don’t have that, everything collapses.” To write with magical lucidity along the thin edge where objective fact and subjective myth merge is a precarious feat. Though he emphasizes technique—“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry,” he said to The Paris Review—there is much in the process beyond conscious control, however artfully monitored the promptings of the subconscious are. One Hundred Years of Soli
tude was a work of consummate ripeness. The author’s sparse production in the eighteen years since its writing betrays the effort of fending off rot.
Latin Strategies
THE REAL LIFE OF ALEJANDRO MAYTA, by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Alfred Mac Adam. 310 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.
THE OLD GRINGO, by Carlos Fuentes, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden and the author. 199 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.
Mario Vargas Llosa, a fifty-year-old Peruvian, has replaced Gabriel García Márquez as the South American novelist for gringos to catch up on; the agreeable impression made here four years ago by the translation of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter was deepened by last year’s awed reception of The War of the End of the World, which won the fifty-thousand-dollar Ritz Hemingway Award last year in Paris. His newly arrived novel, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, is a dazzling performance—perhaps, it might be offered in cavil, a bit too much of a performance. But never mind; Señor Vargas Llosa has all the moves, and the reader’s awareness of the author’s virtuosity is in this case woven right into the intricate and suspenseful texture of his tale. In Spanish, the novel is called simply Historia de Mayta; the English title reminds one of Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight—and, whether or not the echo is intentional, Nabokov does keep coming to mind as Vargas Llosa ingeniously, incessantly shuffles past and present, writer and character, “I” and “he,” a historical Peru and a futuristic Peru, a mock-documentary manner and the ingenuous camaraderie of the professed fictionist. He begins by describing himself (or a narrator very like him) jogging along Lima’s Malecón de Barranco, and lamenting to himself the dumping of garbage in this fashionable district, down the cliffs that look toward the sea. “The spectacle of misery was once limited exclusively to the slums, then it spread downtown, and now it is the common property of the whole city, even the exclusive residential neighborhoods—Miraflores, Barranco, San Isidro. If you live in Lima, you can get used to misery and grime, you can go crazy, or you can blow your brains out.” A new paragraph marks the next sentence: “But I’m sure Mayta never got used to any of it.”
Alejandro Mayta was the narrator’s classmate at the Salesian School. A pudgy, awkward boy of humble background, Mayta was unduly sensitive to the beggars and other unfortunates of the Lima streets, and once asked the priest of his Communion class, “Why are there rich and poor people, Father?” The question never rests for him; he goes on a hunger strike, loses his Catholic faith, and becomes a Communist revolutionary—for two decades, a purist of the left who finds doctrinal adequacy in a tiny, seven-man cell of Trotskyites, and then, at the age of forty, an incongruous man of action, a leader of an abortive uprising in the Andes town of Juaja, in 1958. (This chronology, we might observe, puts Mayta’s birth in 1918, which makes him and his classmate a generation older than Vargas Llosa, who was born in 1936.) Now, twenty-five years after the uprising, in a Peru supposedly racked by guerrilla warfare and turned into a battlefield by a “Russo-Cuban-Bolivian invasion” and American Marines supporting the ruling junta (fiction, though the conditions to make it plausible exist), the narrator decides to explore the life of Mayta, and to compose a novel based upon the violent events long ago in Juaja. He interviews a number of people around Lima, and in the process gives a good walking tour of the once-beautiful viceregal capital, now an overcrowded, filthy, and run-down urban sprawl. These interviews—with Mayta’s aunt, with former Trotskyite associates, with radical nuns and a former Stalinist whose paths have crossed Mayta’s, and with a woman, Adelaida, whom Mayta, a homosexual, had persuaded to be his wife—all alternate, sometimes several times on a page, with scenes from, as it were, the novel in progress, from Mayta’s life in 1958 as the writer imagines it. The double focus is expertly manipulated and sometimes—as when a present-day senator’s smooth slanders are interspersed with scenes of his homosexual seduction by Mayta as a young man—provides a stunning stereoptical effect, of lives as they exist in the depths of time. On occasion, Vargas Llosa seems to have too much going all at once, as when the former wife’s description of the sham marriage and the fate of the son she conceived with Mayta is played against not only her present marriage, middle-aged self, and dumpy surroundings but an apocalyptic background of the destruction of Cuzco in the imaginary Peruvian war. This science-fiction element, when the plain truth about Peru would be bizarre enough, unnecessarily confuses a novel already luxuriantly complex; also, in this chapter the narrator’s “I” creeps over into Mayta’s consciousness, slipping one more transparency into the overloaded projector. Still, having elected certain instruments, an artist is obliged to use them to the hilt, and all manner of interesting anticipations and retrospections are generated by Vargas Llosa’s glinting devices. Generally, any sustained double focus—other examples are Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust and Anne Tyler’s Earthly Possessions—drains tension from the foreground action; the frequent interruptions emphasize the authorial presence and suggest that everything exists on an airier level than forward-plodding, one-day-at-a-time reality. However, this novel’s climactic chapters, portraying the abortive revolution at Juaja, seamlessly blend the accounts of surviving eyewitnesses with the twenty-five-year-old events, and a fine cinematic momentum is achieved.
Even here, the reader can’t ignore the novelist-reporter, a more volatile and accessible character than do-gooding, pedantic, flat-footed (literally) Alejandro Mayta. We are invited to admire, as spontaneously as we admire the handsome, pin-striped hidalgo on the back of the book jacket, the imagination that can conjure up, say, the comic fussiness of a tiny left-wing splinter group in solemn session, or the nauseated feelings of a young wife who discovers that her husband is a homosexual, or the numb exaltation of a citified idealist engaging, while beset with altitude sickness, in a gun battle in the Andes. All wonderfully done, though we are disconcertingly reminded that it might have been done quite otherwise, that art is as arbitrary as truth is relative. The last chapter, like one of those Nabokovian endings in which the scenery falls away and the cocky puppetmaster faces the audience directly, piles twist upon twist and should be left its provocative surprises. The author, all but naming himself Mario Vargas Llosa, engagingly confesses to his character, “This conversation is my final chapter. You can’t refuse me now, it would be like taking a cake out of the oven too soon.”
The question keeps arising, in the reader’s mind and on the printed page, why did our hero, the author, take as his subject this obscure and defeated revolutionary, Alejandro Mayta? Because, the answer suggests itself, the subject is political, and it is the proper and inevitable task of the South American novelist to write politically. As the Vargas Llosa persona explains to an interview subject, “I think the only way to write stories is to start with History—with a capital H.” Lima, the city founded by Pizarro, from which Spain administered a continent of gold and slaves, certainly has History; the riddle of Latin-American poverty and unrest and crisis has its answer here if anywhere. The physical degradation of the city is far advanced; ubiquitous garbage begins and ends the novel. The proliferating slums and even the horrors of the dreadfully overcrowded jail are remorselessly described. Nor is there a rural idyll to offer contrast or relief; the Indians still flock to the wretched shack cities, from Andean towns like Quero:
All the houses in Quero had to be like that: no light, no running water, no drainage, and no bath. Flies, lice, and a thousand other bugs must be part of the poor furniture, lords and masters of pots and pelts, of the rustic beds pushed up against the daub-and-wattle walls, of the faded images of the Virgin and of saints nailed to the doors.… Yes, Mayta, millions of Peruvians lived in this same grime, in this same abandonment, amid their own urine and excrement, without light or water, living the same vegetable life, the same animal routine.