Читать книгу A Thousand Forests in One Acorn - Valerie Miles - Страница 31

THE ACORN

THE TORTURE OF DOCTOR JOHNSON

I selected these fragments from Terra Nostra because they have the unfortunate habit of summarizing my approach to storytelling.

IN CONVERSATION WITH THE DEAD

My dead are all the ancestors I remember (very few) and all of those I am unable to recall (the immensity). I am who I am thanks to them. But in particular I cite my grandmothers. I will tell you why: when I was four I arrived in Washington, D.C. and went to public school and my parents demanded that every summer I go back to Mexico to stay with my grandmothers so that I wouldn’t forget Spanish. So I owe the Spanish language to my grannies. One was from Veracruz, the other was from Sonora, two extremes of Mexico, and with very different personalities. My father’s mother was German, she was very strict and very disciplined. Her husband became paralyzed and she set up a boarding house and every Sunday we would go to a pyramid. She collected pyramids so it was essential for my education, we went to the pyramids again and again and there are lots of pyramids in Mexico. She had a wonderful, severe personality. She didn’t do jokes or anything of the sort. I revered her as I did my other grandmother who brought up her three daughters by becoming the cake-making teacher after her husband died. This great repostería. And then her old friend Alvaro Bregón became president of México—he had delivered milk to her when he was a little boy—and she asked him for a post in the ministry of education which was headed by the great Vasconcelos. So she became a school inspector. And then she married off her three daughters and she was hell for her sons-in-law, whom she bailed out and corrected. One of them was a general and she said “you’ve only had battles with me, general, and you’ve lost them all.” And to the others she would say “didn’t they teach you manners at home?” She got along very well with my father, but she was like a bird that pecked at the greatness of the other men. But her daughters loved her as did her grandchildren, we were very close to her. She came from the north of Mexico, the mining town of Alamos and Mazatlán, the poet’s city and had millions of memories. And she made me read, she made me read Eça de Queirós. When I went from childhood reading to adult reading she was with me and said that I had to read Eça de Queirós and that was very important. My other grandmother gave me books for children that were horrifying, they were all about murders and mutilations and abductions. They were called Las tardes de la granja and an old man called Palemon sat with children and told them these horrifying stories. So you see, these are two very important influences in my life, apart from many others, but I would like to choose these two. The grannies always stay with you, later you go to Faulkner.

CODA

Your life has brought you to live in many different countries and have to communicate in many different languages. How has that affected you as a writer?

I was very privileged in having that kind of childhood, living in Mexico and then in Chile and Argentina—so it was very broad. But I was also anchored in a very nationalist period of Mexican writing, when literature was considered national, and writers had to be national. I remember when Alfonso Reyes, our great polygraphist, was attacked by these nationalistic minions saying “you talk about Greece, why don’t you talk about Mexico?” And it demonstrated that he also talked about Mexico, but that they hadn’t read him. Now that has evaporated, it is no longer consequential. The younger generation of Mexican writers can write about Germany or Russia or whatever they feel with no obligation to the Mexican nation. But let’s go beyond that, I think what you have are writers, you have Günter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, you have Juan Goytisolo or Philip Roth, who happen to write in this or that language or have this or that nationality but who are no longer simply a part of a nationalistic canon. Thankfully, because it was very limiting and noxious I think. So I take pride in myself that, because of my upbringing, I was outside of that kind of nationalistic feeling. I got battered for it when I began writing, they said “Oh, he doesn’t write about Mexico, he writes about witches and silly things” and then I wrote a very Mexican novel, the La región más transparente, and they said “Oh he only writes about Mexico because he doesn’t know about anything else.” What you learn with life is that you don’t bother about what people say, you write for yourself and for your grandmothers wherever they are and don’t worry a bit about the public’s criticism. I feel extremely independent in that sense and very linked to friends of mine who are also writers and who are writers beyond their nationality and often their politics sometimes. I still admire Borges as a writer, for example.

You have been very generous to the younger generations, often providing means and refuge from when you were living in Paris through today.

Literature doesn’t belong to anyone. We belong to a tradition. I think there’s a very straight relationship between creation and tradition. You create in order to prolong the tradition and the tradition gives you the tools for the new creation. So that always puts you in a line with previous authors and coming authors. I think it may be egotistical in helping so many young authors because without them where would I be? I know so many figures who, because of their isolation, have disappeared and I really have a great admiration for many young writers and give them a hand if I can. In Paris in 1960 there were only four Mexican authors published, Mariano Azuela, Los de abajo, Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la solidad, Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo and myself. I went to the Paris bookfair two years ago, where Mexico was the guest of honor, and there were 42 Mexican authors published in France, and that doesn’t include authors from the rest of Latin America. There are some 500 interesting writers in Latin America now, which is extraordinary. So what happened? First, we won independence from Spain so we had to cut everything that seemed Spanish. We had to imitate Europe and the United States, so we had a lot of realism, a lot of naturalism, a lot of Mexican nanas floating around. Then many events happened; there was Borges, I think Borges was very, very important in saying you could write whatever you want. Anything that comes into your head, literature is open. Many people don’t realize that he is a descendent of Machado de Assis. And then there was Carpentier and Lezama Lima and Onetti, who was very important, and then the younger writers Cortázar, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and myself. So the whole spectrum opened and each generation provided ten or twelve new writers. Besides, we felt we had the obligation to say what had not been said. Novels were prohibited by the Spanish crown during the time of the colonies, no novels were written. Then we had this imitative literature during the nineteenth century. So we had a lot of things to say that had not been said. We said it, so now the younger generation doesn’t have that obligation and they write about what is happening today. You cannot classify them, you cannot say this is the subject matter, this is what they are representing. They are representing the variety of contemporary Latin American culture. Pablo Neruda told me that we all have an obligation to our peoples, we go around with the Mexican or the Chilean people on our backs and we must write for them because they have no other voice. Today that isn’t true anymore. There is press, there is congress, there are political parties, there are unions, so now if you speak publicly it is because you want to, and not because you are obliged to do it. And you respect those people who don’t speak in public. So it is a much more modern and creative setup where you are not constrained by dogma or by allegiances that are alien to literature.