Читать книгу A Thousand Forests in One Acorn - Valerie Miles - Страница 37
ОглавлениеA THOUSAND FORESTS
FROM LAS MÚSCARAS (MASKS)
[STORIES]
On Saturday, just as Verónica had said, the family arrived: the parents, a petite and opinionated aunt, and a boy about ten years old with something monstrous about his face. Verónica had already warned us that her younger brother was a monster. Behind them, in the latest model convertible, came José Raimundo. I found him unpleasant from the start. Short, chubby-cheeked, he gave the impression of a guy who was pampered, soft, and tyrannical at the same time. All of his country clothing looked like it came straight from the store. I watched him get out of the car, shake hands and greet everyone in the same way, with a mechanical nod and smile.
At that time, he showed no preference for you. Not that afternoon either, when we went for a walk with the aunt and the monster. But the following afternoon I noticed that he stayed close to you and tried to make jokes and kid around, and you laughed halfheartedly. Luckily, he announced after lunch that he had to return to Santiago. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I have some business in Santiago first thing tomorrow.” We waited to hear the car’s engine and then, Verónica and I celebrated his departure, Verónica, boisterously, I, with more discretion because I wasn’t in my own home. Aunt Charito leaped to José Raimundo’s defense; she said he was “talented,” always at the top of his class, in high school and university; and his charm was even more significant considering he was an only child, spoiled by a rich family. “Besides,” added Aunt Charito, addressing you spitefully, “it seemed to me that he was fawning over you quite a bit.” You vigorously denied Aunt Charito’s claim, blushing slightly. “Poor Cristina!” Verónica exclaimed. “The admirer she ended up with!” “Why poor?” asked Charito. “A great match! What more could she want?” “Tell me,” asked Verónica, exasperated, appealing to your direct testimony: “What did you think of my cousin? Tell me honestly!” “He’s not that boring,” you responded, conciliatory, and both Verónica and Aunt Charito thought that you admitted they were right. “You see!” exclaimed Aunt Charito, and Verónica protested, absolutely certain that you were speaking that way out of sheer politeness. I had no doubt, for my part, that Verónica was right. With his pudgy plumpness, his clichéd manners, his impeccable clothes, José Raimundo was precisely the type of person we looked down on, who would never have access to the clique that we formed then. We could disagree about many things, you, Verónica, whose affinity had been revealed to us within a few minutes, and I, but a disagreement on this matter seemed inconceivable to us. The discussion about José Raimundo lasted a long time and eventually Aunt Charito retired to her room, upset, emphatically declaring that in that house nobody escaped gossip. “Don’t bad-mouth me, please,” she said, full of resentment, before leaving the living room, and as soon as she disappeared through the doorway, Verónica burst into laughter that must have burned her ears.
We had a great time with Verónica, there’s no denying it. It had been a long time since we’d had such a great time. The monster was a bit annoying, at times; but rather calm. Pallid, with a sickly and hateful expression, he’d rub against his mother’s skirts, and she tolerated his most absurd whims. One time he threw a temper tantrum in the dining room and grabbed a steak with his hand and threw it on the ground. It made me want to throttle him. But, in general, he didn’t interfere with us; he followed after his mother. On the other hand, Aunt Charito liked meddling and giving her opinion. After that first argument, however, she was more discreet. Of course, she didn’t mention the subject of José Raimundo. On the afternoon walks she became philosophical and talked about religion and death. She would look at, for instance, the sunset and say: “How can there be people who do not believe in the existence of God! It’s impossible for there to be a sincere atheist. Impossible!” I dared to contradict her, not everyone has received His grace, which allows them to believe; the Catholic doctrine itself supports it . . . “True,” she said, and nevertheless, the twilight, the vast horizon, filled with red clouds, which she contemplated with her arms crossed, in rapture . . . We stayed silent. At times, Aunt Charito’s passion was contagious.
—What time do you have?, you ask, without lifting your eyes from your sewing.
—It’s still early. Five of nine.
We were on the top of a hill and in the background you could see the narrow creek, with deep water, that slowly licked the branches of the willows. One afternoon we got onto a raft of rotting planks, in swimsuits, and Aunt Charito started screaming at us, hysterically, from the shore, to come back, that the raft could break. To upset her, Verónica, who was a very good swimmer, began to rock the raft, and you clung to me shrieking with fright. I swim perfectly, but that afternoon I was afraid, filled with fear and revulsion at the idea of falling into the cold, slow-moving water, teeming with fish that would suddenly leap near us, without our being able to see them (we only saw them circle on the surface; in the depths we imagined slimy creatures, tadpoles, larvae, the mud on the bank would crumble when we tried to get out, eroded by moisture, roots resembling snakes). Verónica anticipated my fear and prolonged the ride, full of sadistic joy. Only your crying was able to reach her, at last, and she brought the raft closer to shore. “Don’t joke that way again,” pleaded Charito, her nerves shaken. Verónica, without paying her any mind, submerged herself with one leap and swam to the opposite bank. “Get in!” she shouted from there, clinging to some roots, but you said that you swam very badly and I didn’t want to get in. The mud in the creek produced an insurmountable revulsion in me.
—How strange!, you say. It got pretty late.
You start to abandon your sewing. You look toward the dining room. Then you decide that you have nothing else to do, that this work is the best for easing impatience. The clock, a few minutes late, chimes nine times.
—You see?, I say, It’s not that late.
When we returned to Santiago, my father had become significantly worse. Insomnia kept him from getting any rest. At the dinner table he would drum his fingers and stare into the void. At times, the pace would increase and become troubling. Foods seemed bland to him, after trying two or three bites, he would push the plate away with an expression of disgust. “Don’t eat, if you don’t want to, but don’t leave plates in the middle of the table.” His only response, the increasing pace of his fingers. It’s not that he didn’t want to respond; it’s that he hadn’t heard a single syllable. He forgot the most fundamental things—putting on a tie, buttoning his pants—and spoke with little coherence. His habit of walking the halls at night and inopportunely entering bedrooms had gotten worse. No one was able to sleep anymore. Once when I woke up at three in the morning we argued bitterly; I locked my door in his face, trembling with rage. I have the impression that he was on the other side of the door for a long time, stunned, without managing to move, hazily remembering that he’d argued with someone, with whom, about what . . .
We missed Verónica, who stayed in the country. She alone could save us from the infinite, penniless (there was never money in the house) boredom, before the start of classes. We traveled all around the city on foot, often even reaching the nearby hills or the open country. On afternoons that were beginning to grow shorter, wandering through a forest or field where urbanization projects were plotting the courses of future streets or along the slopes of a hill, we discussed every conceivable topic. You said that men were a burden, that you would never get married, that all of my mother’s insinuations and anxieties produced in you the opposite effect of what she wanted. Your entrance into the University was settled and you announced that you were going to make a living teaching. However poorly they paid. You didn’t need much to live. I mentioned that I hadn’t thought about getting married either. Perhaps we could live together; although we might not earn much, two incomes would be combined. We would have to set aside a monthly fund for travel, of course. You found that the travel fund wasn’t a bad idea. I wasn’t wrong. Although one might earn more than the other, you more than I, the money would be shared and we would use the travel fund equally. “Or differently. If one wants to travel and the other doesn’t . . .” Differently. Independence would be fundamental; a firm agreement; no one would try to impose rules, set curfews, rituals of any kind. Questions would be prohibited. We were going to undermine the order my mother sought to establish, otherwise unsuccessfully, despite her futile complaints. We would carry the refusal of that order to its ultimate consequences. “Don’t you think?” Were you entirely sure? You would say yes, of course. “Wonderful!” I shouted, raising my arms, elated. The night came too soon, the cold wind of the mountains, and you suggested going back. Hunger was nagging at us. We imagined in advance a disappointing alphabet soup or a plate of spinach; at that time, a fried egg over spinach would have been quite an extravagance.
Translated by Lisa Boscov-Ellen
*
FROM EL MUERTE DE MONTAIGNE
[A NOVEL]
Michel de Montaigne, incidentally, was a marvelous reader. In the Latin American world there are only three or four writers who read, who connect with the history of literature, who converse with the dead (to quote don Francisco de Quevedo), in a comparable manner, akin to his. I think of Jorge Luis Borges, of the Brazilian Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, of Alfonso Reyes. I think of them and their origin, their relatives, more numerous than one would think, of their progeny. I don’t know which Spaniards we might cite: Cervantes, Quevedo, Gracián, Azorín, José Ortega y Gasset? In my adolescence and in my early adulthood, as some people know, I read Azorín with delight, whose short works quoted Montaigne once in a while. Brevity, by the way, was an intention or a weakness to which both writers confessed. Later I abandoned the reading of Azorín in a foolish, probably sectarian way. And now I come to the conclusion that there was an aesthetic itch in his prose, an affectation, a verbal coquetry, which wears thin over time. Even in Borges, suddenly a similar coquetry appears from somewhere. Not, on the contrary, in Alfonso Reyes. One could argue that Alfonso Reyes is the strongest prose writer of all, but this, perhaps, is an abuse on my part. Regarding the writing of the Lord of the Mountain, we might say that it’s an astonishingly natural, playful writing, of unparalleled rhythm, predisposed to somewhat disjointed digressions, fragmented almost by definition. Suddenly, without saying “heads up!” he inserts a note that’s crude, dissonant, sharp. In this respect, Montaigne is less formal, less cautious, than any of the writers I’ve referenced above. Furthermore, he frequently introduces dissonance, sets up the effect of surprise, through a quotation. Surreptitiously. As though an indiscreet muse might have whispered something in his ear. For example, he reminds us that Horace, one of his favorite Latin poets, raises the following question: does lack of literacy make one’s member less hard? Interesting question, which has a certain and definitive answer. In the opera by Dimitri Shostakovich, Lady Macbeth, the great provincial lady, in love with a worker at her husband’s factory, is, without knowing it, proof of what Horace suggests. The worker was less literate, but his manly attributes, as Montaigne would say, were more compelling.
Judging from my own journey through the essays, which often repeat themselves, which tend to relapse, Montaigne’s preferred readings are more or less known. Among essayists, ethicists, historians, in a prominent place, in the front row, are Plutarch and Seneca. Austerity and stoicism from Seneca; from Plutarch, the power of his depictions, sentences sculpted with a chisel. A language without fat, without appendages, of stainless steel. Successive and fragmentary writers, who one can start reading from any point. He didn’t feel the same identification with or the same affection for Ciceronian discourse. He had the impression that Cicero was bombastic, full of himself, and that his great verbal jabs usually fell a little wide of the mark. He loved, however, Horace’s concise, sharp verse, and deep prolonged harmonies, and he felt dazzled by Virgil’s lyric tirades. We, ignorant, read the Virgilian strophes cited by Montaigne, those marvelous strophes, and are left flabbergasted. He prefers the Georgics, and suggests that in certain passages of the Aeneid the author neglected to take it up a notch. He uses an ancient word, pigne, which I don’t find in my dictionaries, but the pignon is a cogwheel that serves to move another wheel. In short, another turn of the cogwheel, of the pigne or the pignon, valid advice for us all.
I have already said something about the literary succession of Michel de Montaigne and now I’m in a position to add some more detail, some detail that is more than a detail. Montaigne had a sense of nature, of the natural, which touched many things, which influenced his way of being, his style, his way of composing essays and even his manner of writing essays and well-structured, meticulously composed non-literary texts. He maintains somewhere that he is a “naturalist,” before that word was invented to apply to men of science dedicated to the study of the natural sciences. That said, what could be defined, essentially, as love for nature, respect for the natural, often leads our figure to express himself bluntly, with minimal affectation. His literary heirs, abundant, diverse, present in the most unexpected areas, did not always understand this aspect of Montaigne’s prose, which sometimes stemmed directly from the Latin and Greek classics, but which also related, in another way, by other means, to the rural world around him. We have already seen, for example, that when Montaigne criticizes the know-it-alls, the idolaters of knowledge, among whom, in his completely naïve opinion, figured Pierre Eyquem, his father, he references Horace without major bias, who pondered whether by being less literate a person would have a more flaccid member. In this respect, Azorín, fussy, skittish, lean in body and soul, wouldn’t follow the master in any way. Gustave Flaubert, who kept his essays as bedside reading, probably so. Guy de Maupassant, his spiritual—and perhaps corporeal (as some academic gossips suggest)—son as well. André Gide—elegant, aloof, modern, and classic—less so, but for different reasons than Azorín, given that his relationship with, let’s say, the male member, his awareness in that regard, his point of view, were different.
The side that’s dirty, mischievous, sensual, provocative, in the Lord of the Mountain’s prose appears in many of his anecdotes. The essays consist of interspersed, interwoven reflections and anecdotes, which emerge from the ardor of writing and which come, in many cases, from the personal memory of the author, and in others, from his favorite books, from the library on the third floor of his tower. He tells a story—I don’t know now whether regarding inebriation or some other matter—that took place in his region some years ago. A fairly young widow, a peasant, rural, with generous curves, went to a party in the countryside. She tried wines from the new harvest, she became quite animated, and on the way back she fell asleep under some bushes. She didn’t remember much the following day, but after a few weeks she realized that she was pregnant. We assume that she was spread out at the edge of the path and that her skirts, rumpled, hiked up, would have revealed the hint of some tempting thighs. The widow, wasting no time, issued a notice, that is, she posted papers on doors, in squares, town halls, in which she claimed she would marry the person who came forward and confessed to being the perpetrator of the crime. A young farmhand from the area around her village came forward, confessed, and together they lived as a happy couple for many years. I imagine that Michel de Montaigne would watch them go by from the vantage point of his tower, beneath beams engraved with phrases of his favorite Latin authors, arm in arm, speaking excitedly and he would smile, content, grateful for life. With a pen in his hand, perhaps.
Jules Michelet, the great nineteenth century historian of the French Revolution, of the History of France, of Joan of Arc, of Henry IV, of Louis XI, of so many things and so many people, passionate, ebullient, romantic, admired Michel de Montaigne’s prose, he couldn’t help admiring it, but he felt very little affection for the author. He argued that he, Michelet, was the historian of la foule, the masses, the multitudes, the people, and that Montaigne, on the other hand, was the historian of himself. In other words, Michelet was an epicist, a rhapsode, a visionary, a creator of worlds, while Montaigne (his Montaigne) was a subjectivist, an intimist, a dandy, completely indifferent to popular voices. I’ve heard arguments in this vein many times and referring to many writers. Of course, I always fare badly. To put it another way, the subjectivist, the intimist, the limited, is I. Do you think, from here on out, I’m going to maintain that I am Montaigne, as they say Flaubert declared, that Madame Bovary c’est moi? Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not a madman who from remote, dreadful Chile (as the other said), believes himself to be Michel de Montaigne. You’re not going to catch me in this unspeakable weakness. No, gentlemen.
But the story about the young widow who got drunk at a party in the countryside, of the notice she issued, of their marital happiness over the years, opens up a whole new world to us. Not in the manner of Jules Michelet, the epicist: in another way. Michelet’s narrative prose moves enormous masses, human strength that suddenly seems more than human. When he describes the events of 1588 in France, during the decline of Henry III and the Valois dynasty, at the time of religious wars, on the eve of the arrival of Henry IV of Navarre and the Bourbons to the throne, and relates the steps that Philip II of Spain’s Invincible Armada is taking, what happens with his hundred and fifty-odd ships of great importance off the Breton coast, and Elizabeth of England’s defensive preparations, and the consequences that the victory of the Invincible might have had for France and for all of Europe, we witness an enormous movement, a grand drama. The Invincible Armada, carrying in its core the Spanish inquisitional darkness, is, in Michelet’s narrative, a gigantic bird, spreading its black, ominous wings, over all of northern France and the British Isles. And when Queen Elizabeth descends from a white horse and announces the disaster of the enemy fleet, the English soldiers fall to their knees, weep with emotion, revere their still-beautiful monarch of fifty years of age. It is an opera on a global scale, an astonishing scene. And yet, the thighs of the young widow, who in her misfortune found her happiness, do not move me any less. Montaigne’s smile persists, prevails, overcomes all. We have an organ, Montaigne says, that does not always obey us, that leaves us high and dry at the least opportune times, that answers only to itself. Here there are no palaces like El Escorial, no invincible armadas, no white horses of significance. We find ourselves in the realm of the individual soul, and of the body, no less individual. A kidney stone lying across the urethral canal can send us straight to hell in life. During his trip to Italy, and during his 1588 trip to Paris and Chartres on horseback, Montaigne, because of his repeated kidney stones, was subjected to unbearable suffering. The Invincible sailed along the course of its black destiny, and he, on his horse, was sweating from a cold pain. One of the stones that he passed, according to his detailed description, had the exact shape of his phallus in miniature. Can we contrast a phallus in miniature to the massive movements Michelet recounted? No, probably, and, in some sense, yes. Montaigne, from his tower, from his distance, glimpses the fires of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, the commotion of battles, the crimes in alleys or in palace verandas. And Michelet, suddenly, precisely, renders a single dignified brushstroke of Montaigne, unforgettable. When he tells, for example, that Louis XVI, already at the gallows, approached a corner, looked at the crowd attending his execution and released a terrible “moo.”
They are startling, profound episodes, that cut through us like daggers. For my part, at the end of the readings, opening pages, suddenly closing books, I always return, with delight, with true voluptuousness, to the acerbic, sardonic, incisive, harsh style of the Lord of the Mountain. In one of the essays, a character with an intense, gallant, adventurous life approaches his old age, his retirement, and decides to marry a prostitute who is also on the path to retirement. Once married, Montaigne asserts, they’ll be able to greet each other every morning, with good reason, in the following manner:
Good morning, whore.
Good morning, cuckold.
Translated by Lisa Boscov-Ellen
•
[A NOVEL]
We got into Meléndez’s chocolate-colored Volkswagen, the same car that had taken me off to meet Fidel the night I arrived in Havana. My Alfa, driven by Isidoro, followed.
The Ministry of Foreign Relations was located in a building whose Greek columns and neoclassical sobriety made it resemble every millionaire’s mansion in Latin America—and in fact it had once belonged to a sugar magnate. There were three or four lighted windows in the building that night, and two Alfa Romeos parked beside the entrance. In the shadows I made out the darker figures of several soldiers armed with machine guns.
My aide in the Protocol section, who had often attended me before, led me to the diplomats’ reception room. After that piece of paper that had been handed me in my hotel room, I could well imagine the nature of this untimely summons. I was exhausted, and depressed, but during the three-minutes’ wait for the minister I managed to collect my energies and calm myself. The door opened and the aide showed me into the minister’s office.
Standing in the middle of the room, dressed in olive-green fatigue uniforms and with pistols strapped to their waists, Fidel Castro and Raúl Roa were awaiting me.1 Fidel gestured to a place on the couch and when I was seated took the chair to my left. Roa had always been cordial with me, and we had gotten on well, but now he was extremely tense and serious-looking. According to the notes I made three or four days later, I had entered the Ministry building at exactly 11:25 P.M. I will now try to reproduce that meeting, which though one or another detail may escape me is forever engraved on my memory.
“You recall our conversation that first night that you arrived,” began the Prime Minister.
“Of course!” I replied.
“That night I took quite a liking to you. I enjoyed that conversation, and I was, as you will recall, quite courteous. But now I must tell you that we were mistaken about you. Because you have shown yourself to be a person hostile to the Cuban Revolution! And hostile to the Chilean Revolution as well! From the first day, you allowed yourself to be surrounded by counterrevolutionary elements, enemies of the Revolution, persons whose interest it was that you be given a negative view of the current Cuban situation, so that you might communicate those views to Chile. We learned all this immediately. As you will fully understand, it would have been stupid of us not to have kept you under a degree of surveillance. We have followed every detail of your meetings, your walks, your conversations—we have followed your every step. By the time of the arrival of the Esmeralda, I was already quite well informed about you, and you will have noted that I made my displeasure with you evident when I shook your hand on the deck of the ship. Now, after the warmth I showed you on the day of your arrival, I did not want to let you leave without telling you how deeply displeased and disappointed we have been by your behavior here. We should, no doubt, have declared you persona non grata, but we didn’t want to do that; it would have damaged our relations with Chile. But you should know that we have communicated our opinion of your mission here to Salvador Allende.”
Fidel seemed to want to make his point about his irritation and end the conversation there. He supposed, I imagine, that the news that I had been reported to Salvador Allende would be a mortal blow to me, at least as far as my career was concerned, and that I would be dumbstruck by it. I think that mistaken belief stemmed in the final analysis from his ignorance of Chile and the Chilean way of life. In Chile one can survive even inside the administration in spite of the enmity of the head of state.2
I took advantage of the first pause that offered, and I said:
“Prime Minister, I don’t think I have allowed myself to be surrounded by a group of counterrevolutionaries, as you call them. I am a writer first and a diplomat second, and I have socialized with the Cuban writers who are friends of mine, and who have been my friends since before my diplomatic posting here, from the time I first came to Cuba as a guest of the Casa de las Américas in January 1968—in some cases, since even before that. I am convinced that I have not met with any counterrevolutionary or enemy of the Revolution. It may be that these friends have critical views of the Revolution’s present moment; but there is a very clear difference to me between an intellectual who criticizes a regime and a counterrevolutionary or an agent of the enemy.”
Fidel was listening gravely. Suddenly, in fury, he interrupted me and began to openly attack. In spite of this, I insisted that he let me continue, and finally, led perhaps by curiosity to learn my version of things, he did.
“With regard to my alleged hostility to the Cuban Revolution,” I went on, “I can tell you, Prime Minister, that the major difficulties I have experienced in my diplomatic career have been due precisely to my support for the Cuban Revolution. In 1965 and 1966, after relations were broken off, at a time when you were violently attacking the Frei government, I was the only South American diplomat in Paris3 who maintained ties with the Cuban Embassy. The American invasion of the Dominican Republic occurred, and I signed the manifesto published by Cuban intellectuals. My signature appeared in Le Monde, and that, as you may imagine, did not sit very well with my boss, the ambassador from the Frei regime. During those years I accepted an invitation from the Casa de las Américas and I came to Cuba in early 1968 even though relations had been broken off between Chile and Cuba and even though I was a career diplomat for the government of Chile. It is true that Gabriel Valdés, who was at that time our minister of foreign relations, approved my trip, but that didn’t keep the trip from causing no end of headaches for me at the time and later. My immediate superiors very much disapproved of my coming here, and I suffered a setback in my career because of it. And during all those years I was a contributor to the magazine Casa de las Américas and corresponded constantly with its editors. How can you say, given all this, that I have been hostile to the Cuban Revolution?”
I looked at Raúl Roa out of the corner of my eye; he was very serious, watching me, not saying a word. He had always been, as I say, very cordial to me; I felt, therefore, that this scene must be more unpleasant and perhaps more dangerous for him than for anyone else. I never learned, and probably never will learn, what thoughts, what reactions my words provoked in him. Fidel, on the other hand, was following me intently, and his expression hid nothing of what he was thinking and feeling.
“That said, Prime Minister,” I continued, “I must explain to you what happens to a Chilean of good faith, a person who has never skimped on his friendship for the Cuban Revolution, who arrives in Cuba today as the representative of the Unidad Popular. A Chilean reads in the situation of Cuba today one of the possibilities of his own country’s future. To speak with complete frankness, I think it is only natural that this Chilean not particularly enjoy contemplating that future as it may be seen in the situation of Cuba today. Nor would the people of Cuba have much enjoyed contemplating that future if they had been able to anticipate in 1959 what Cuba would be like in 1971—if, for example, twelve years of a revolution had passed in Ecuador or some other country in Latin America and the Cuban people had been able to look at it and find there the situation that I have found in Cuba today. Because I recall very vividly the predictions that were made in Cuba in 1966 and 1967 about the economy of Cuba in 1970. A huge economic boom was predicted, a boom that would banish forever the specter of foreign economic dependency. There was to be a sensational increase in agricultural production, and it was promised that Cuba would export coffee, that no sugar harvest after 1970 would be less than ten million tons.”
Fidel stood up in uncontrollable irritation.
“And you don’t know the problems that Cuba has had to face! You don’t realize that we have been subjected to a merciless blockade, that the most savage imperialist regime in history lies eighty miles off our coast! You seem not to want to recognize that the sole desire of Yankee imperialism is to destroy us, wipe us off the face of the earth, destroy the Cuban Revolution and all it stands for to the nations of the earth, and that this Yankee imperialist government is the richest and most powerful regime that has ever existed!”
“But I do recognize that,” I said. “That is why I wouldn’t want to see Chile go through the same experience.”
“And do you think the Chilean experiment is going to be so easy?” Fidel broke in. “Do you think that the reactionary forces in Chile will fail to organize themselves, with the direct aid and support of the Yankee imperialists? Haven’t you heard of the Djarkata Plan?4 So far Allende has only conquered the government—which means he has only breached the first walls of power. When the inner bastion begins to give, the confrontation will be inevitable.”
In other words, the Chilean Revolution was still to be won. The electoral process, our historical innovation, was but a prelude, an apparently favorable accident, although it could well turn out to be a two-edged sword. If Allende was not to bog down in the quicksand of constitutionality, his only alternative was to radicalize the process, take it to the point of rupture. It must be granted that when the MIR faction cooled before September 1970, Fidel allowed Allende to play his electoral trump, but this didn’t mean that Chile had discovered the formula for a peaceful transition to socialism. Far from it. The Chilean situation had not led Fidel to revise his theories, as some people naïvely thought, but rather to refine them, and to confirm them by another route. I recalled that phrase from our first encounter: “If you Chileans need help, just ask for it. We may not be much good at producing, but we’re great at fighting!”
Later, during his visit to Chile, it was at first believed that Fidel really had changed.
But all it took was the “empty pot” demonstration5 (pots well salted with personal insults against Fidel from the right-wing press), and the Comandante, who theretofore had shown his most conciliatory face in all his public statements, became the Fidel of old. At the end of that day, the protest of the furious housewives, banging their pots and pans in the streets of Santiago, had turned into real street battles between the followers and the enemies of the government. He spent the night of the demonstration beside his machine gun, surrounded by his own armed guards, waiting with exasperated patience, in the internationalist spirit of Latin American revolution, for the Chilean government to ask him for help. But Allende kept his head, and the next morning Fidel discovered, to his rather noisily expressed surprise, that a regular-army general was in charge of the state of emergency. Chile was hopeless! In the National Stadium, while some members of his audience got up and left after the hours of Fidel’s speechifying that they were wholly unused to, Fidel confessed that he was leaving Chile “even more radical” than he’d come, and “more of a revolutionary” than ever. He attempted to demonstrate this renewed revolutionary zeal later by inviting Miguel Henríquez, leader of the MIR party, to Cuba shortly afterward, and going to the airport personally to greet him.
Fidel, in sum, seemed, in spite of certain indications to the contrary, not to believe in the real possibility of success via the evolutionary, constitutional route that Chile had chosen. And the most serious thing about all this was, as one might see from Fidel’s reaction to the “empty pot” episode, that Fidel’s lack of confidence might create further problems for Chile. In a film of a conversation that Fidel had with Allende, one can see Castro acknowledge that his trip to Chile was a “voyage from one world to another.” Yet there was little indication that he had reached all the possible conclusions from that observation. Of course such conclusions would have implied more modesty than Fidel could probably have mustered.
As a Chilean diplomat, and one accused of hostility toward the Cuban Revolution, I did not think it my place to enter into theoretical discussions regarding a country’s choice of political strategy. Instead, I returned to the subject of my relationship with the dissident writers, since that was the most serious charge leveled against me during that singular conversation with the Cuban head of state at midnight on Sunday, March 21, 1971.
“I refused to turn my back on my friends,” I said. “I knew they were expressing opinions critical of the government, and that their relations with the government had become somewhat antagonistic, but they have been my colleagues and my friends for years. I have probably acted more like a writer than a diplomat. It is quite possible that after this experience, and this conversation, which I am certain I will always see as very important to me, I will leave the diplomatic service and devote myself to literature. I’d like nothing better. I recognize that I’ve been a bad diplomat in Cuba. But I have one excuse: The real relations between Chile and Cuba have been carried on in Santiago. My presence here has been only symbolic. I insist, furthermore, that my writer friends, however much they have criticized the current situation, are neither gusanos nor counterrevolutionaries. And I’ve met with writers of every stamp, you know, not just with the most critical ones.”
“That much is true,” Fidel interrupted. “We know that you have been in contact with writers on our side.”
I had noted that in one way or another one would often be reminded of the efficiency of secret-police surveillance. The little book about the case of the Mexican diplomat, the TV program on the “CIA operative” Olive, the speech by the Dominican journalist in which he publicly confessed that he was a double agent, were all manifestations of that reminder. With this last statement, Fidel had not only demonstrated his personal knowledge of my “case” (for incredible as it might seem to a peaceful citizen of Chile, my stay in Havana had become a “case” within a socialist country), but also that the agents of State Security were very efficient at their jobs.
“But let’s take the case of Heberto Padilla,” I then said. “His criticism is always predicated on a standpoint within the Left. He once quoted Enrique Lihn to me, who said that when one leaves Cuba, the Revolution begins to grow larger and more imposing as one looks at it from a greater distance. Heberto talked to me about a period of volunteer labor he had done on a citrus farm, about a year ago. The leader of the project was, according to Heberto, the perfect example of the revolutionary. He wanted the best for his group, he wanted it to thrive and prosper and to live in the best possible material circumstances, and he had even designed the furniture in the project’s living rooms and bedrooms. He made sure there was fresh orange juice every morning for breakfast. And at the same time he was a theorist, a great reader. Padilla cited that case in contrast to others who think that discomfort, carelessness of details, can be remedied with high-sounding phrases.”
“Excellent!” said Fidel, for whom the mention of Heberto Padilla produced frank displeasure. “Excellent! But I feel I must tell you that Padilla is a liar. And a turncoat! And, and,” said Fidel, raising his eyebrows and his index finger, and looking me straight in the eye, “he is ambitious.”
He fell silent after this last phrase, as though giving me time to draw all the appropriate conclusions. It was true that Padilla was given to suggesting the existence of certain mysterious links between himself and secret higher powers. He had given me to understand on more than one occasion that he stayed afloat relatively successfully thanks to the power struggles between factions within the government. Whenever he made these suggestions, he would laugh uproariously and look very self-satisfied.
I always thought, and continue to think, that Heberto’s ravings were no more than a game of vanity he played, mostly with himself. Fidel’s last phrase, though, intrigued me. It confirmed, of course, that in early 1971 there actually was an underground factional power struggle going on. Had Heberto taken part in this struggle somehow? What fantastic version of things had been reported to Fidel? And how had my own actions, Heberto’s contacts with me, been used?—for one had to wonder whether those contacts had intentionally, and with some mysterious plan, been made easier by that hidden hand which had sufficient power to assign people rooms in the Habana Riviera. The list of mysteries in this book, mysteries for which I can only give the most hypothetical sort of explanations, is already long. The fact is that I had learned no more than a few hours ago that Heberto had been arrested, and I was trying, out of conviction and out of simple friendship, but without much real hope, to help him.
“I insist on one thing, Prime Minister,” I said. “I am convinced that Heberto Padilla is not an agent for anybody. He is a difficult man, I’ll grant you—he is willful, and capricious, and he has a sharp critical bite. But he has never been anything but a man of the Left, and his criticism has come from the Left. And the relationship between the state and the writer has never been anything but troubled, anyway. It can’t help but be. The raison d’être of the State and the raison d’être of poetry contradict one another. Plato said that one should listen to the beautiful words of poets, one should crown poets, anoint them, and then carry them outside the republic’s walls the next day. He knew that if they stayed inside they’d cause nothing but trouble! But Plato intended his words ironically, too, since he was not only a philosopher but something of a poet as well. And socialism will just have to learn to live with its writers. That is important for the writers, but it is even more important for socialism.”
“And you think that there are real poets in Cuba?” the prime minister asked.
He seemed to have serious doubts about that, but he did not consider himself the best person to decide the issue—not because he did not trust his own critical judgment (I suspect, on the contrary, that his was the only critical judgment he did trust) but because he didn’t want to run the risk that an over-generalized and relatively negative pronouncement from him as to the quality of Cuban literature should later be quoted by me.
“We recognize that it has now become quite fashionable in Europe,” he said, “among those that call themselves leftist intellectuals, to attack us. We don’t care about that! Those attacks mean absolutely nothing to us! Until now we’ve had no time in Cuba, faced as we’ve been by the immense amount of revolutionary work to be done—and that needed our immediate attention—to worry about the problems of culture. Now we will begin to work at creating a popular culture, a culture for the people and by the people. The little group of bourgeois writers and artists that has been so active, or at least talked so much, up till now, without creating anything that’s been of any real worth, will no longer have anything to do in Cuba. Look—every socialist country has come at some point in its development to the stage that we have come to now. The Soviet Union first and China not long ago, with the Cultural Revolution. There’s no socialist country that hasn’t passed through a stage like this, a stage in which the old bourgeois culture, which managed to hang on after the Revolution, is supplanted by the new culture of socialism. The transition is hard, but as I say, the bourgeois intellectuals are no longer of any interest to us. None! I’d a thousand times rather Allende had sent us a miner than a writer, I’ll tell you.”
