Andrés Caicedo
LIVEFOREVER
Translated by Frank Wynne
Introduced by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Contents
Introduction by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Translator’s Note
LIVEFOREVER
Discography
Notes
List of Song Lyrics
List of Songs
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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
LIVEFOREVER
Andrés Caicedo was born Luis Andrés Caicedo Estela in Cali, Colombia, on 29 September 1951. A precocious teenager, he was passionate about cinema, about the theatre and especially about literature. While still in his teens, Caicedo acted with the Teatro Experimental de Cali, founded the Cineclub de Cali and launched Ojo al cine, a short-lived but highly influential film magazine. And he wrote constantly. At thirteen, he had written his first short stories; by fifteen he had written a number of award-winning plays. During his life, he published only one novel, ¡Que viva la música! (Liveforever). Begun in the early ’70s and completed in 1975, the novel was resolutely urban, at once a celebration of music and of the city that he loved, and a cry of despair and a conscious reaction against the magical realism in vogue at the time. Liveforever was published on 4 March 1977; on the same day Caicedo received the first printed copy. It was the day on which he took his life. He was twenty-five years old.
In the years since his death, Caicedo’s fame and influence have steadily grown and he has been championed as one of the most original voices in Latin American literature. Much of his work was published posthumously, including collections of short stories and three unfinished novels. His plays continue to be performed today. Liveforever has recently been published in French, Italian and Dutch.
Frank Wynne is a literary translator from French and Spanish. He has translated some forty works of fiction and non-fiction, including books by Michel Houellebecq, Ahmadou Kourouma, Claude Lanzmann and Tómas Eloy Martínez. His translation of Atomised was awarded the 2002 IMPAC Prize, and he has also won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (2005) and the Scott Moncrieff Prize (2008). More recently his translation of Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras garnered the 2012 Premio Valle Inclán, and that of Alex by Pierre Lemaitre won the 2013 CWA International Crime Dagger. He is an Honorary Member of the Irish Translators’ and Interpreters’ Association.
Born in Bogotá in 1973, Juan Gabriel Vásquez is considered one of the foremost Colombian novelists of his generation. His novels, which seek to explore ‘dark corners of Colombian history that have made us what we are now’, include The Informers (translated by Anne McClean and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), The Secret History of Costaguana and The Sound of Things Falling, which won the 2011 Alfaguara Prize. Having spent sixteen years living in France, Belgium and Spain, he has recently returned to Bogotá.
This book is no longer dedicated to Clarisolcita since, when she grew up, she became so much like my heroine that she no longer deserved it.
It’s so sleazy but it’s so good.
Popular Song
I hang on with one hand to desk, write with other.
Malcolm Lowry, Through the Panama
Introduction
Leave Work and Die Happy
I
On the day of his third suicide attempt, Andrés Caicedo dreamed that he was holding a gun and pointing it at his son’s chest, but his mother woke him before he could shoot. In fact, Caicedo had no children: he was twenty-five years, five months and four days old and had long since realized that not only was he not cut out to have a family, he was not cut out for life as he knew it. It was 4 March 1977. At some point during the day, the first copy of Liveforever (¡Que viva la música! in the original Spanish) arrived by post; Caicedo showed it to a friend who dropped by his house, he spent some hours visiting various haunts in Cali looking for a woman, and he wrote two letters. To Patricia Restrepo (the woman he was searching for, the woman with whom he had argued, the woman he loved as only a suicide could love) he wrote: ‘Don’t think that my joy at receiving the first copy of my novel today can compare to my abject misery because of the contempt you have shown me.’ In a line reminiscent of Cesare Pavese, he added: ‘I don’t think I will write any more. I’ve nothing left to say, except don’t leave me.’ To Miguel Marías, a Spanish film critic, he wrote that over the previous days, he had read the complete works of Witold Gombrowicz, four novels by Pío Baroja and three by Virginia Woolf and had watched several films, including Dial M for Murder, Jules et Jim, An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain. Later he wrote: ‘I’ve just received the first copy of my novel. With luck, I hope to be sending you a copy in about a week.’ He did not keep his promise. Shortly after writing these lines, he took sixty Seconal tablets and died, according to those who found him, slumped over his typewriter.
In the thirty-six years since then, Caicedo’s reputation and his fame have continued to grow. Liveforever, published in the slim, 200-page volume he received just before he died, has become – at first in Colombia and later throughout Latin America – a genuine example of a much misunderstood and misused term: the cult novel. Caicedo’s book provokes passions, heated arguments between friends, fierce loyalties; it is passed from hand to hand like the secret key to some Masonic lodge. For over a decade it could be read only in photocopied and pirated editions, until Caicedo’s friends finally overcame their grief at his death and devoted themselves to promoting his work. There is a poetic justice of sorts in this, since it was in part for them that Caicedo wrote it. Liveforever is a novel about the last years of adolescence – or at least the last years of a certain type of adolescence: as aimless, frantic, furious and demented as an LP played at 45rpm. The adolescence portrayed in this novel is not the kind that naturally leads on to adult life; instead it is cut short – more or less like the novel itself, which ends with a list of songs and unidentified lyrics. An adolescence in which the world is sensed and understood through salsa, the music young people in Cali danced to then and still dance to today. For the characters of the novel salsa, a fusion of Caribbean rhythms and Afro-Cuban jazz, is not simply a musical style: it is a sentimental education. In Liveforever salsa lyrics are the closest thing the characters have to a philosophy of life. To quote María del Carmen Huerta, the blonde narrator of the novel:
I open my mouth to speak and no one stops me, and all that comes out are lyrics, because before me came a musician, someone infinitely more powerful and more generous, someone happy to let people sing his lyrics without having to take responsibility, and so I wake up in the morning with a lyric that will run through my head, over and over all day long like a sort of talisman against every miserable moment … (p. 75)
Salsa is a way of being in the world. ‘Music that knows me, music that inspires me, fans me or shelters me, the pact is sealed’ (p. 117), as María del Carmen says. And the reader cannot help but wonder: what pact?
II
Like all Colombians, particularly those who gorged on novels since childhood, I first read this book when I was the same age as Caicedo’s characters. Rereading it now, some twenty years later, I was a little apprehensive; I tiptoed through each page, each scene, terrified that at any moment the spell that had bewitched me in my youth might be broken, and I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I was surprised to discover a novel as brash, as vivid and as relevant today as it was on the day it was published. In other words, Caicedo’s novel has not remained fixed in the generation for which it was w
ritten – the washed-up generation, to paraphrase the author (p. 84), who were born in the middle of the last century. This is what María del Carmen means when she says: ‘Oh, I had high hopes for my generation!’ (p. 44).
The fate of Liveforever has not been to sit around waiting. Over the course of its history, Caicedo’s novel has continued to speak to successive generations of young people, washed up or otherwise. With each generation its reputation has grown, and the novel has never been so avidly read outside Colombia as it is today. The Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet recently tried to explain the reason for the ‘Caicedo phenomenon’. ‘In an age of Twitter and iPhones, of chatrooms and Skype, WhatsApp and YouTube,’ he wrote, ‘Caicedo seems the obvious author to tell the story of this new generation: of people at once connected and disconnected, overdosing on information but experiencing emotions they don’t fully understand or can’t control.’ But beyond such technological analysis, Liveforever is a whisper in the ear of every truly disillusioned soul. Though I have always mistrusted the modish rebelliousness of so many overly self-conscious writers, I feel there is an aching sincerity in the story of the blondissima María del Carmen Huerta, a palpable vulnerability that immediately makes her real and genuinely moving: a character we feel we could talk to, one we are fascinated to listen to. And the reasons for this are obvious: Liveforever is not a Bildungsroman, a sentimental education, but a sentimental miseducation. In these pages, we witness a frantic, inexorable quest whose weapons are salsa, cinema, (relatively) suppressed violence and (relatively) uninhibited sex. But it is a quest that leads not to enlightenment, not to insight, but to ever deeper levels of frustration and despair. The pages read like a riotous hymn to life, and yet the novel ends with a kind of manifesto that invokes violent death and even suicide. ‘For the hatred instilled in you by the censor, there is no better cure than murder,’ writes Caicedo. ‘For shyness: self-destruction’ (pp. 154–5).
Yet it is not this wilful iconoclasm, this marriage of James Dean and Janis Joplin, that has ensured Liveforever has remained forever young. There is a different, much more subtle rebelliousness at work here, one that lies not in what Caicedo’s novel does, but in what – stubbornly, persistently – it fails to do. Let me try to explain.
III
In 1975, Caicedo wrote the only suicide note we are aware of. Though he did not commit suicide on that occasion, the document is one of the most revealing that we have. ‘Please try to understand my death,’ Caicedo wrote to his mother. ‘I wasn’t made to live any longer. I feel a terrible weariness, a disappointment and a sadness, and I know with every passing day, those feelings are slowly killing me. So I would rather get it over with now.’ We can assume that this weariness was the product of his hypersensitivity, of the turmoil in his love life, his creative anxieties and his frequent clashes with a father whose views were utterly at odds with Caicedo’s emotional world. But a few lines later we come across an agonizing sentence, a keyhole through which we can glimpse an entire world: ‘I’m dying,’ Caicedo writes, ‘because I’m not yet twenty-four and already I’m an anachronism.’
An anachronism: the verdict is (painfully) accurate. In Latin America, particularly in the ’70s, the lives and interests of young intellectuals – and though he despised them, Andrés Caicedo was a young intellectual – were inextricably linked to a certain kind of political engagement which, in turn, was inextricably bound up with left-wing politics in general and the Cuban Revolution in particular. In those days, the worlds of cinema and literature established rigid boundaries between the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary, between avant-garde and bourgeois art. Something recently reaffirmed by the playwright Sandro Romero and the filmmaker Luis Ospina – two friends of Andrés Caicedo who were largely responsible for rescuing his work and for collecting and publishing his papers. ‘If you were involved in the arts, you were expected to be militantly left wing,’ Romero told me. ‘Andrés was in sympathy with these ideas, but he also liked American cinema, rock music and salsa. The problem was that salsa was played by Puerto Rican musicians living in New York, musicians who were seen as being reactionary.’ Caicedo did not share, and would never manage to share, the political passions of his contemporaries. The words ‘revolution’ and ‘Cuba’ appear only once or twice in this novel, and every time they drip with irony or caustic cynicism. ‘This was not helped by the coup d’état in Chile in 1973,’ Luis Ospina told me. ‘For those of us who were politically involved, Pinochet’s coup was the last nail in the coffin to our dreams of revolution.’
It was in March of that ill-fated year that Caicedo began writing the first pages that would grow initially to become a long story and, later, this novel; after Salvador Allende’s death in September the novel lost any interest it had in politics, or rather confirmed it had never really had any. ‘Our revolutionary hero wasn’t Fidel Castro, it was Jean-Luc Godard,’ Caicedo once wrote in a letter to the Colombian novelist Jaime Manrique. This was the kind of statement that could – and, in fact, did – turn him into a pariah, an outcast. To another friend he wrote: ‘I know, I understand, I accept the fact that my presence doesn’t always foster harmony, order or coherence, for the simple reason that the people I work with tend to be unambiguous.’ Not so Caicedo, who was messy, incoherent, ambiguous. Andrés Caicedo: the anachronism.
Traits that are – unsurprisingly – shared by his novel. Liveforever was written during the reign – or perhaps we should say the imperium – of the Latin American Boom: the magisterial generation led by Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa that forever transformed Spanish-language literature and redefined for the whole world the meaning of ‘Latin America’. The publication, during the prodigal 1960s, of novels such as The Death of Artemio Cruz, Conversation in the Cathedral and in particular One Hundred Years of Solitude, proposed a paradigm that was virtually impossible to oppose. The great Latin American novel was epic, it was political without being politicized and capable of moulding history into fiction. In History of a Deicide, his 600-page essay on García Márquez published in 1971, Vargas Llosa coined the phrase novela total – the ‘total novel’ – to refer to those fictions that aim to compete with reality in their richness and diversity. This ambition, this ethic of excess, went hand in hand with the ineluctable sense that Latin American history was one long string of lies and that, as Carlos Fuentes wrote, the novel had a duty to ‘say all that history has hushed up’. The Autumn of the Patriarch by García Márquez and Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes embody this dictum, two major works published in 1975 even as Andrés Caicedo, a stuttering, introverted twentysomething (yes: shy and self-destructive), cowered in a dark corner of the literary world, writing a novel that was the polar opposite of what his elders were instructing him to write.
So it goes. Liveforever, this intimate, idiosyncratic and erratic monologue, rejects all the intricate obligations that the Latin American novel had taken upon itself. It is almost apolitical and certainly anti-historical: it flatly refuses to squeeze the whole world into fiction, content to be bounded by a few snatches of salsa, a few streets in Cali, the apartments of a few friends; the reader will search in vain for some eloquent pronouncement about historical tensions or the fate of the Latin American peoples, and will have to make do with the private angst of a teenage girl searching for a humble epiphany through dance and music, sex and drugs; and the voice of that young girl – oh, the voice of la pelada! – owes more to the skaz of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield or of William Burroughs than to any narrators in her own language. The name García Márquez is not mentioned in Caicedo’s letters; but Vargas Llosa’s is, almost always referring to The Time of the Hero (1963), his novel describing the ‘sentimental education’ (or miseducation) of a group of teenage cadets at a military academy. But the fundamental issue remains. Compared with the great Latin American literature
of its time, Liveforever is like Melville’s Bartleby who goes through life saying: ‘I would prefer not to.’ Or, to put it another way, like Peter Pan: refusing to grow up, rejecting the social responsibilities, the political concerns of adulthood. ‘[P]retending not to grow up,’ says María del Carmen, ‘that’s what nostalgia is’ (p. 31).
The disgust Caicedo felt for the adult world is a thread that runs through his public works and his private writings. Neither he nor María del Carmen can understand other people’s eagerness to grow up, to become part of a world full of hypocrites and (to use Holden Caulfield’s word) phonies. It was a disgust Caicedo had been cultivating for several years before he started writing Liveforever. In fact, it is obvious in the dedication that holds open the door to the novel for us: ‘This book is no longer dedicated to Clarisolcita since, when she grew up, she became so much like my heroine that she no longer deserved it.’ No: in Caicedo’s ethos, growing up is not acceptable. Clarisolcita was a twelve-year-old girl Caicedo met around 1972: Clarisol Lemos and her brother were, as he described them years later, two ‘wildly precocious and deeply perverse’ children. Caicedo joined their gang – or rather, he joined in order to become its leader, as though they were the Lost Boys – and with Clarisol he was able to ‘create the appearance of a child who does not – or refuses to – grow up’. The two made an unholy pact: ‘You pretend to be my age and I’ll pretend to be yours.’ It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in his dedication he castigates her for breaking her promise. Towards the end of Liveforever their childhood pact becomes a philosophical maxim, an existential mode d’emploi:
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