by John Updike
Some reviewers in the United States have taken The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta to be a satire on left-wing commitment. It is true, comedy and even farce are found in the ineffectuality of the seven-man Trotskyite cell—utterly isolated, with its strenuous jargon, from the masses it seeks to educate and liberate—and in the inadequacies of Mayta’s uprising, whose main troops consist of seven schoolboys who, failing to learn “The Internationale,” instead sing a school song and the national anthem as they bounce along in the revolution’s solitary truck. But, Vargas Llosa seems to say, a revolutionary seed is planted that day, amid all the absurdity; and in any case the need for a change shouts out on all sides, in the circumambient misery and disorder. His is a model of the most that political fiction can be: a description of actual social conditions and a delineation of personalities motivated by political concerns. Such motivation, of course, comes mixed with sexual and other intimate, clouded motives; yet it exists. All of the political-minded interviewees are left-wingers; there are no junta spokesmen, no intransigent landowners, no fresh-faced norte-americanos insidiously urging the virtues of free enterprise. But in his shrewd and lively portraits of Peruvian lawyers and barbers and storekeepers Vargas Llosa catches well enough the tone of the cagey, improvising citizenry that makes do with a system and, having made do, resists sweeping change. The conservative inertia of a society is suggested, while its agitators are dramatized. The dozens of little anticlimactic careers sketched in the margins of Alejandro’s own anticlimactic career persuasively imply the limits of human aspiration and the defeat that awaits each dreaming, idealistic organism. If the novel has a moral, it might be, as a Peruvian bureaucrat tells the narrator, “When you start looking for purity in politics, you eventually get to unreality.”
The intelligence of Mario Vargas Llosa plays above the sad realities and unrealities with a coolness that should be distinguished from Nabokov’s hermetically aesthetic ardor and Gabriel García Márquez’s surreal fever. These two write prose that crests in poetic passages; whereas Vargas Llosa, to judge from this translation, writes in a way that is always adequately evocative but never spectacular. In the three hundred pages there is scarcely a simile. We are told that Mayta’s splayed feet “looked like clock hands permanently set at ten minutes to two,” and the sound of rats in the ceiling stirs the prose to this flourish: “Just then, they heard above their heads tiny sounds: light, multiple, invisible, repugnant, shapeless. For a few seconds it seemed like an earthquake.” Vargas Llosa is a great noter of the undermining sensation, the private crosscurrent: Mayta all through his day of violent revolution struggles against the dizzying, thumping symptoms of mountain sickness, and during his crucial hearing within his Trotskyite cell he “felt that the pile of Workers Voice he was sitting on had begun to tip over and he thought how ridiculous it would be if he slipped and took a fall.” This is one of the few novels I have read where the characters, in the midst of fighting for their lives, catch colds, realistically. As to the translation, I wish that Mr. Mac Adam [sic] had suppressed the rhyme in this rendering: “Yes, the small man in his vest and hat, surrounded by guerillas, ducking bullets being fired by guards from up in the mountains, begins to sneeze. Trying to put the squeeze on him, I ask …” And he disturbingly translates josefinos—the small boys from the Colegio San José who are meant to run errands for Mayta’s revolution and who end by carrying its rifles—as “joeboys,” a word I found in no dictionary but one of American slang, where it is defined as “the male counterpart of a flapper,” and ascribed to “subdeb use” circa 1941.‡
Almost the only rich character alluded to in the tangled history of Alejandro Mayta is called Fuentes. It may be a coincidence, but the real Carlos Fuentes is indeed rich in acclaim and honors, on both sides of the border; he is Mexico’s best-known novelist. His commendable determination to comprehend both his native land and the United States (where he now lives, in Boston) and his generous desire to explain one to the other make me regret my opinion that his new novel, The Old Gringo, is a very stilted effort, static and wordy, a series of tableaux costumed in fustian and tinted a kind of sepia I had not thought commercially available since the passing of Stephen Vincent Benét:
… the others blindly remembering the long spans and vast spaces on both sides of the wound that to the north opened like the Rio Grande itself rushing down from steep canyons, as far up as the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, islands in the deserts of the north, ancient lands of the Pueblos, the Navajos and Apaches, hunters and peasants only half subdued by Spain’s adventures in the New World, they, from the lands of Chihuahua and the Rio Grande, both seemed to die here, on this high plain where a group of soldiers for a few seconds held the pose of the Pietà, dazed by what they’d done and by an accompanying compassion, until the Colonel broke the spell.
Some spell. We are asked to believe that Ambrose Bierce—perhaps the least appealing figure of enduring worth in American literature—joined up with Pancho Villa in 1914; this has been often rumored, but the verifiable facts show only that he disappeared into Mexico in 1913. Bierce, in Fuentes’s fantasy, crosses the Chihuahua desert and becomes an instant father-figure both to Tomás Arroyo, a young rebel general who has returned to destroy the Miranda hacienda where he, the illegitimate son of the owner, was raised as a peasant, and to Harriet Winslow, a thirty-year-old schoolteacher from Fourteenth Street in Washington, D.C., who has arrived to give English lessons to the Miranda children, not knowing that the entire family has suddenly and shrewdly departed. Harriet’s biological father, we are often reminded, was an Army captain who supposedly died in Cuba but by another interpretation surreptitiously lived right over on Sixteenth Street, sleeping with a black woman in the basement of a derelict mansion. Bierce, meanwhile, the old gringo, just wants to die, if only to get away from William Randolph Hearst, who has been employing him off and on for forty years. He marches straight into enemy fire but it doesn’t touch him; finally he has to court death by burning the precious papers—“papers as brittle as old silk,” a grant from the Spanish Crown—that prove to Tomás Arroyo his legitimate claim to the hacienda and its acreage. While waiting for their sour spiritual father to rig this roundabout suicide, General Arroyo and Miss Winslow take note of each other, and she is not too much the embodiment of interfering North American Puritanism (“Look at them, what these people need is education, not rifles. A good scrubbing, followed by a few lessons on how we do things in the United States, and you’d see an end to this chaos”) to do some fancy rutting in the general’s railway carriage, while thinking sweet nothings like “damn him, damn the brown fucker, damn the ugly greaser.” From these earthy moments (the lowest point comes when “he kissed her again, entombed in her mouth as in a cellar of menacing dogs”) the prose beats upward to such flights as “If it is necessary, our atomized consciousness invents love, imagines it or feigns it, but does not live without it, since in the midst of infinite dispersion, love, even if as a pretext, gives us the measure of our loss.” There is much similar rumination, leavened by a smattering of overheard Hemingway (“Harriet looked at the old gringo exactly as he wanted to be looked at before he died”), a neat trick or two (“Each closed his fists over the other’s”; “From the middle of the silent throng of sombreros and rebozos emerged those gray eyes fighting to retain a sense of their own identity, of personal dignity and courage in the midst of the vertiginous terror of the unexpected”), lots of phlegm and ochre dust, and dialogue of the fruitiest wood:
“No, I’ll never forget,” General Frutos García told his friends after the Revolution, after the former colonel was promoted, to make amends this way for Villa’s defeat and unite the many factions of the Revolution. “The gringo had come looking for death, nothing more. What he was finding, though, was glory—and the bitter fruit of glory, envy.”
The Greek chorus of talk about the central figure (“The old gringo came to Mexico to die”; “Yes sir, you could see ‘farewell’ in his eyes”) doesn’t bring Ambrose Bierce
to life, nor does the occasional paraphrase of one of his stories. He doesn’t even have a sense of humor, this writer of a thousand sardonic jokes. He remains a fist clenched upon nothing, upon the announced intention to die, as Harriet Winslow and Tomás Arroyo remain clenched around a few stylized, heavily insistent memories. The most vivid and least programmatic pages of The Old Gringo portray a middle-class Mexican woman’s reaction to a sudden rebel onslaught; this passage kindles an unforced interest, as if taking by surprise Fuentes’s stiff army of symbols. But generally the only thing moving in this dead landscape is the author’s mind as it spiders among his checkpoints, thickening the web of mirrors and keys and Oedipal fixations.
On the back of the book jacket the author states, “I have lived with this story for a long time.” He conceived it forty years ago, wrote the first ten pages in 1964, and took it up again for a month in 1970. He held the inspiration and its emblematic figures too long in his head, perhaps; they became petrified. Although the novel goes through the motions of establishing geographical and historical authenticity, we learn little about Mexico we didn’t know after seeing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Viva Zapata! The glimpses of Washington, and Harriet’s life there, seem more animated, more exciting to the writer, than the horde of rebel Mexicans, with their slit eyes and terse mutterings. Revolution, which in Vargas Llosa’s book figures as a refracted complexity of mini-events and psychological shadows, has become in The Old Gringo a stock phantasmagoria the writer has sought to enrich with portentous Freudianism. Apropos of international as well as personal relations, Fuentes makes a point—“Did you know we are all the object of another’s imagination?”—not far from the point of Vargas Llosa’s ambiguous mock-researches. But in the Peruvian novel, the details are seen in a constantly changing light, by a restless intelligence. Though Fuentes is certainly intelligent, his novel lacks intelligence, in the sense of a speaking mind responsively interacting with recognizable particulars. Its dreamlike and betranced glaze, its brittle grotesquerie do not feel intrinsic or natural; its surrealism has not been earned by any concentration on the real. Latin-American surrealism has enchanted the globe, but its freedoms cannot be claimed as a matter of course. Mere mannerism results.
The Great Paraguayan Novel and Other Hardships
THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR, by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Randolph Hogan. 106 pp. Knopf, 1986.
I THE SUPREME, by Augusto Roa Bastos, translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane. 438 pp. Knopf, 1986.
A FUNNY DIRTY LITTLE WAR, by Osvaldo Soriano, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor. 108 pp. Readers International, 1986.
THE LONG NIGHT OF FRANCISCO SANCTIS, by Humberto Costantini, translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. 184 pp. Harper & Row, 1985.
THE INVENTION OF MOREL and Other Stories, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated from the Spanish by Ruth L. C. Simms. 237 pp. University of Texas Press, 1985.
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, beautifully produced by Knopf and given a bright, smooth-running translation by Randolph Hogan, is not, actually, fiction, but a “real-life” adventure—the account by a twenty-year-old Colombian sailor, Luis Alejandro Velasco, of his ten days adrift in a raft in the Caribbean without food or water. It happened in the winter of 1955, and Velasco briefly became a national hero for his feat of survival. At the time, Gabriel García Márquez was a staff reporter for the Bogotá daily El Espectador; interviewing the young sailor in twenty sessions of six hours each, he was pleasantly surprised to find that Velasco had “an exceptional instinct for the art of narrative, an astonishing memory and ability to synthesize, and enough uncultivated dignity to be able to laugh at his own heroism.” Fifteen years later, in an introduction written for the first book publication of the resulting story, García Márquez recalled how he and his interview subject “put together an accurate and concise account of his ten days at sea. It was so detailed and so exciting that my only concern was finding readers who would believe it.” The story, under the sailor’s by-line, ran in fourteen consecutive installments, and “readers scrambled in front of the [newspaper] building to buy back issues in order to collect the entire series.” The government was less enthusiastic, as Velasco’s narrative revealed that he and seven drowned fellow crew members were swept overboard not due to a storm but because their destroyer, returning from eight months of repairs in Mobile, Alabama, was loaded with contraband American goods—refrigerators, television sets, washing machines—that spilled from the deck in heavy seas on a sunny day. The Rojas dictatorship denied the scandal, and El Espectador countered by printing sailors’ on-board snapshots showing the illegal cargo in the background. Within months, El Espectador was shut down by government reprisals, and Velasco himself, who refused to change his story, had to leave the Navy. By 1957 the former national hero occupied the obscurity of “a desk at a bus company.”
These unfortunate consequences—which helped precipitate García Márquez into a wandering exile and his eventual fate as a world-class novelist—add a mere footnote to the sorry history of Latin-American censorship and mendacious repression; what matters now is that the shipwrecked sailor told and the youthful journalist conjured into print an enchanting tale, quite thrilling in its lucid, unhistrionic, often comic revelation of human fortitude and ability to absorb hardship. In its exposition of suffering solitude it ranks with Admiral Byrd’s Alone and Mungo Park’s Travels; along with the stoic heroism, the succession of perils and extreme sensations, there is something rollicking and colorful, an ironic good humor, which we tend to credit to the author more than the narrator. The power of invention, of course, is also the power of discovery, and perhaps García Márquez’s only contribution to the story’s many vivid surreal touches was to hear them and put them down. Velasco’s Alabama girlfriend, for instance, is named Mary Address, and the surname is so unusual it stops us cold and makes her as oddly real as Olive Oyl, or the bar called the Joe Palooka where the Colombian sailors congregate. Oddly real, too, is the fin of a shark as it glides past the little raft: “In fact, nothing appears more innocuous than a shark fin. It doesn’t look like part of an animal, even less part of a savage beast. It’s green and rough, like the bark of a tree. As I watched it edge past the side of the raft, I imagined it might have a fresh flavor, somewhat bitter, like the skin of a vegetable.” The starving sailor, on the fifth day of his ordeal, manages to capture a small gull and to wring its neck; but his attempt to eat the bird raw proves a grisly failure:
At first I tried to pluck the feathers carefully, methodically. But I hadn’t counted on the fragility of the skin. As the feathers came out it began to disintegrate in my hands. I washed the bird in the middle of the raft. I pulled it apart with a single jerk, and the sight of the pink intestines and blue veins turned my stomach. I put a sliver of the thigh in my mouth but I couldn’t swallow it. This was absurd. It was like chewing on a frog. Unable to get over my repugnance, I spit out the piece of flesh and kept still for a long time, with the revolting hash of bloody feathers and bones in my hand.
What he can chew and swallow, and what gives him courage to keep living, is a casually pocketed business card from a clothing store in Mobile: “I could feel a tiny piece of mashed-up cardboard move all the way down to my stomach, and from that moment on I felt I would be saved, that I wouldn’t be destroyed by sharks.” His attempt to disassemble and eat his shoes is less successful and produces, when he is safe in Colombia, his appearance in shoe advertisements—“because his shoes were so sturdy that he hadn’t been able to tear them apart to eat them.” The grinning gods of anticlimax hover above Velasco’s entire adventure: having finally sighted land and swum to where his feet can touch ground, he is almost drowned in the undertow and then is driven nearly crazy by his frustrated attempts to open a coconut on the shore. His return to civilization has many macabre wrinkles: his rescuers feed him only sugar water, and he is escorted to the distant hospital by a parade of six hundred men, plus
women, children, and animals—a procession out of one of García Márquez’s thronged novels.
The starved, sun-baked, semi-delirious sailor, at last granted human contact, discovers within himself a primary aesthetic impulse: “When I heard him [the first man he meets] speak I realized that, more than thirst, hunger, and despair, what tormented me most was the need to tell someone what had happened to me.” Throughout Velasco’s narrative we feel the thinness of the difference between life and death—a few feet of heaving ocean separate him from his less lucky shipmates in the confusion after they are swept overboard, and a fragile cork-and-rope raft holds him afloat, through the black night and burning day, in “a dense sea filled with strange creatures.” The closeness of the living and the dead is one of García Márquez’s themes, but in this journalistic narrative it emerges without morbidity, as a fact among many. The factuality of the real sailor’s direct and artless telling bracingly mingles with the beginnings of the writer’s “magic realism.”
• • •
I the Supreme, by Augusto Roa Bastos, is a deliberately prodigious book, an elaborate and erudite opus saturated in the verbal bravura of classic modernism. Its Paraguayan author, a professor at the University of Toulouse until his retirement last year, has lived in exile since 1947; he found haven in Buenos Aires until 1976, when—to quote an interview he gave the Madrid journal Leviatán—“the military dictatorship was beginning to deploy the hecatomb” and “it was necessary to escape the rather sinister climate which was incubating.” A journalist and poet in Paraguay, he began to write fiction in Argentina, most notably a long novel centered upon the Guariní Indians, Hijo del hombre (Son of Man), and Yo el supremo, published in 1974.