Latin America was Europe’s mental asylum just as North America was its factory. The foremen have taken over the factory now and the labor force is made up of escapees from the asylum. For over sixty years, the asylum has been burning in its own oil, its own fat.
Today I read an interview with a famous and shrewd Latin American author. They ask him to name three people he admires. He replies: Nelson Mandela, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. With that answer as a starting point, you could write a whole thesis about the current state of Latin American literature. The casual reader might wonder what links those three figures. There is something that links two of them: the Nobel Prize. And there is something more that links all three: years ago they were all left wing. They probably all admire the voice of Miriam Makeba. All three have probably danced to her catchy hit song “Pata-pata,” García Márquez and Vargas Llosa in colorful Latin American apartments, Mandela in the solitude of his prison cell. All three have made way for deplorable heirs: the clear and entertaining epigones of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, and, in the case of Mandela, the indescribable Thabo Mbeki, the current president of South Africa, who denies the existence of AIDS. How could anyone name those three, without batting an eyelid, as the figures he most admires? Why not Bush, Putin and Castro? Why not Mullah Omar, Haider and Berlusconi? Why not Sánchez Dragó, Sánchez Dragó and Sánchez Dragó, disguised as the Holy Trinity?
Declarations like that are a sign of the times. Of course, I’m prepared to do whatever’s necessary (though that sounds unnecessarily melodramatic) to ensure that the shrewd writer in question remains free to make that declaration or any other, according to his taste and inclinations — to ensure that everyone can say what they want to say and write what they want to write and publish it as well. I’m against censorship and self-censorship. But on one condition, as Alcaeus of Mytilene said: if you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.
The fact is, Latin American literature isn’t Borges or Macedonio Fernández or Onetti or Bioy or Cortázar or Rulfo or Revueltas or even that pair of old bucks García Márquez and Vargas Llosa. Latin American literature is Isabel Allende, Luís Sepúlveda, Ángeles Mastretta, Sergio Ramírez, Tomás Eloy Martínez, a certain Aguilar Camín or Comín and many other illustrious names that escape me for the moment.
The work of Reinaldo Arenas is already lost. And the work of Puig, Copi, Roberto Arlt. No one reads Ibargüengoitia any more. Monterroso, who might well have included Mandela, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa in his list of unforgettable figures (though maybe he would have replaced Vargas Llosa with Bryce Echenique), will soon be swallowed up by the mechanism of oblivion. This is the age of the writer as civil servant, the writer as thug, the writer as gym rat, the writer who goes to Houston or the Mayo Clinic in New York for medical treatment. Vargas Llosa never gave a better lesson in literature than when he went jogging at the crack of dawn. And García Márquez never taught us more than when he welcomed the Pope in Havana, wearing patent leather boots — García, not the Pope, who I guess would have been wearing sandals — along with Castro, who was booted too. I can still remember the smile that García Márquez was not quite able to contain on that grand occasion. Half-closed eyes, taut skin as if he’d just had a face-lift, slightly puckered lips, Saracen lips, as Amado Nervo would have said, green with envy.
What can Sergio Pitol, Fernando Vallejo, and Ricardo Piglia do to counter the avalanche of glamour? Not much. They can write. But writing and literature are worthless if they aren’t accompanied by something more imposing than mere survival. Literature, especially in Latin America, and I suspect in Spain as well, means success, by which, of course, I mean social success: massive print runs; translations into more than thirty languages (I can name twenty languages, but beyond twenty-five I run into trouble, not because I doubt that language number twenty-six exists, but because it’s hard for me to imagine the Burmese publishing industry or Burmese readers quivering with emotion at the magical-realist escapades of Eva Luna); a house in New York or Los Angeles; dinners with the rich and famous (as a result of which we learn that Bill Clinton can recite whole paragraphs of Huckleberry Finn by heart, or that President Aznar reads Cernuda); making the cover of Newsweek and landing six-figure advances.
Writers today, as Pere Gimferrer would be quick to point out, are no longer young men of means unafraid to inveigh against the norms of respectable society, much less a bunch of misfits, but products of the middle and working classes determined to scale the Everest of respectability, hungry for respectability. Blond- and dark-haired children of Madrid, born into the lower-middle class and hoping to end their days on the next rung up. They don’t reject respectability. They pursue it desperately. And in order to attain it they really have to sweat. They have to sign books, smile, travel to unfamiliar places, smile, make fools of themselves on celebrity talk shows, keep on smiling, never, never bite the hand that feeds them, participate in literary festivals and reply good-humoredly to the most moronic questions, smile in the most appalling situations, look intelligent, control population growth, and always say thank you.
It’s hardly surprising that they are prone to sudden fatigue. The struggle for respectability is exhausting. But the new writers had and in some cases still have parents (may God preserve them for many years to come), parents who exhausted themselves, who wore themselves out for a manual laborer’s paltry wages, and as a result the new writers know that there are things in life far more exhausting than smiling incessantly and saying yes to the powerful. Of course there are far more exhausting things. And there’s something touching about their efforts to secure a place in the pastures of respectability, although it means elbowing others aside. There are no more heroes like Aldana, who said, Now it is time to die, but there are professional pundits and talk show guests, there are members of the academy and political party animals (on the left and the right), there are cunning plagiarists, seasoned social climbers, Machiavellian cowards, figures who would not be out of place in earlier ages of literary history, and who, in the face of numerous obstacles, play their parts, often with a certain elegance — and they are precisely the writers that we, the readers or the viewers or the public (the public, the public, as Margarita Xirgu whispered into García Lorca’s ear) deserve.
God bless Hernán Rivera Letelier, God bless his schmaltz, his sentimentality, his politically correct opinions, his clumsy formal tricks, since I am partly responsible. God bless the idiot children of García Márquez and the idiot children of Octavio Paz, since I am to blame for them seeing the light. God bless Fidel Castro’s concentration camps for homosexuals and the twenty thousand who disappeared in Argentina and Videla’s puzzled mug and Perón’s old macho grin projected into the sky and the child-killers of Rio de Janeiro and Hugo Chávez’s Spanish which smells of shit and is shit, since I created it.
Everything is folklore in the end. We’re good at fighting and lousy in bed. Or was it the other way round, Maquieira? I can’t remember any more. Fuguet is right: you have to land those fellowships and massive advances. You have to sell yourself before the buyers (whoever they are) lose interest. The last Latin Americans who knew who Jacques Vaché was were Julio Cortázar and Mario Santiago, and both of them are dead. The story of Penelope Cruz in India is worthy of our most illustrious stylists. Pe arrives in India. Since she likes local color or authenticity she goes to eat in one of the worst restaurants in Calcutta or Bombay. Pe’s own words. One of the worst or one of the cheapest or one of the most down-market places. She sees a hungry little boy at the door who stares back at her fixedly. Pe gets up, goes out and asks the boy what’s wrong. The boy asks her for a glass of milk. Which is odd, because Pe isn’t drinking milk. Nevertheless, the actress gets a glass of milk and takes it to the boy, who is waiting patiently at the door. He gulps the glass of milk straight down, under Pe’s benevolent gaze. When the boy finishes the glass, Pe tells us, his grateful happy smile makes her think of all the things she has but doesn’t need, although Pe is wrong there, because in fact she needs everything she has, absolutely everything. A few days later, Pe has a long philosophical but also practical conversation with Mother Teresa of Calcutta. At one point she tells the story of the boy. She talks about the necessary and the superfluous, about being and not-being, about being-in-relation-to and not-being-in-relation-with… what? How does it work? And in the end what does it mean “to be”? To be oneself? Pe gets confused. Meanwhile Mother Teresa keeps moving like a rheumatic weasel around the room or the porch where they’re talking, while the Calcutta sun, the balmy sun, but also the sun of the living dead, scatters its dying rays, as it sinks away in the west. Yes, yes, says Mother Teresa and then she murmurs something that Pe doesn’t understand. What? asks Pe in English. Be yourself. Don’t worry about fixing the world, says Mother Teresa: help, help, help one person, give a glass of milk to one child, and that will be enough, sponsor one child, just one, and that will be enough, says Mother Teresa in Italian, clearly in a bad mood. When night falls, Pe returns to her hotel. She takes a shower, changes her clothes, dabs herself with perfume, all the while unable to forget Mother Teresa’s words. When dessert is served: suddenly — illumination! It’s all a matter of taking a tiny pinch out of your savings. It’s all a matter of not getting distressed. Give an Indian child twelve thousand pesetas a year and you’re already doing something. And don’t get distressed and don’t feel guilty. Don’t smoke, eat dried fruit, and don’t feel guilty. Thrift and goodness are indissolubly linked.