Felipe Müller, Bar Céntrico, Calle Tallers, Barcelona, September 1995. This is an airport story. Arturo told it to me in the Barcelona airport. It's the story of two writers. Nebulous, in the end. Stories told in airports are soon forgotten, unless they're love stories, and this one isn't. I think we'd met the writers. At least he had. In Barcelona, Paris, Mexico? That I don't know. One of the writers was from Peru, the other was Cuban, although I'm not one hundred percent sure of that either. When he told me the story, Arturo not only knew where they were from, he also told me their names. But I wasn't paying much attention. I think, at least I'd guess, that they were of our generation, which means they were born in the 1950s. Their fates, according to Arturo, and this I do remember clearly, were instructive. The Peruvian was a Marxist, or at least his reading followed those lines: he was acquainted with Gramsci, Lukacs, Althusser. But he had also read Hegel, Kant, some of the Greeks. The Cuban was a happy storyteller. That should be capitalized: a Happy Storyteller. Instead of theory, he read novelists, poets, short story writers. Both of them, the Peruvian and the Cuban, were born into poor families, working-class in the one case, peasants in the other. Both grew up happy, with a talent for happiness. Each had the will to be happy. Arturo said that they must both have been beautiful children. Well, I think all children are beautiful. They discovered their literary callings early on, of course: the Peruvian wrote poems and the Cuban wrote stories. Both believed in the revolution and freedom, like pretty much every Latin American writer born in the fifties. Then they grew up and experienced the full flush of success: their books were published, all the critics unanimously praised them, they were hailed as the continent's top young writers, one in poetry and the other in fiction, and although it was never spoken everyone began to await their definitive works. But then the same thing happened to them that almost always happens to the best Latin American writers or the best of the writers born in the fifties: the trinity of youth, love, and death was revealed to them, like an epiphany. How did this vision affect their works? At first, in a scarcely perceptible way: as if a sheet of glass lying on top of another sheet of glass were shifted slightly. Only a few friends noticed. Then, inescapably, they headed for catastrophe or the abyss. The Peruvian received a grant and left Lima. For a while he traveled through Latin America, but he soon set off for Barcelona and then Paris. Arturo met him in Mexico, I think, but it was in Barcelona that they became close. In those days everything seemed to point to a meteoric career, and yet with very few exceptions, Spanish editors and writers showed no interest in his work. Who can say why? Then he left for Paris, where he made contact with a student group of Peruvian Maoists. According to Arturo, the Peruvian had always been a Maoist, a playful and irresponsible Maoist, a salon Maoist, but in Paris he let himself be convinced, one way or another, that he was the reincarnation of Mariátegui, the hammer or the anvil, I don't remember which, scourge of the paper tigers roaming in Latin America. Why did Belano think it was all just a game for his Peruvian friend? Well, he had reason enough: one day the Peruvian might write pages of revolting propaganda and the next day an almost illegible essay on Octavio Paz full of flattery and praise of the Mexican poet. For a Maoist, that showed a certain lack of seriousness. It wasn't consistent. Actually, the Peruvian had always been hopeless as an essayist, it didn't matter if he was playing spokesman of the dispossessed or extolling Paz's poetry. And yet he was still a good poet, occasionally very good. Daring, innovative. One day, the Peruvian decided to return to Peru. Maybe he thought the moment had come for the new Mariátegui to return to his native soil, or maybe he just wanted to use what was left of his grant to live somewhere cheaper and set to work on his new projects without interruption. But he was unlucky. He had hardly set foot in the Lima airport when the Shining Path rose up as if it had been waiting for him. Here, suddenly, was a force to be reckoned with, a force that threatened to spread all over Peru. Clearly, the Peruvian couldn't retreat to a little town in the mountains to write. That was when everything started to go wrong. The bright hope of Peruvian letters disappeared and was replaced by someone who was increasingly afraid, increasingly unbalanced, someone who couldn't get over having traded Barcelona and Paris for Lima, where the only people who didn't despise his poetry loathed him as a revisionist or a traitorous dog, and where, in the eyes of the police, he had been one of the ideologues of the millenarian guerrilla movement (which, in a certain way, was true). In other words, the Peruvian suddenly found himself stranded in a country where he might just as easily be assassinated by the police as by the Shining Path. Both groups had more than sufficient cause; both felt affronted by what he had written. From that moment on, everything he did to save himself brought him irrevocably closer to destruction. To make a long story short: the Peruvian came unglued. The former admirer of the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution was transformed into a believer in the theories of Madame Blavatsky. He returned to the Catholic church. He became a fervent follower of John Paul II and a bitter enemy of liberation theology. And yet the police refused to believe in this metamorphosis and he remained on file as a potential threat. His poet friends, on the other hand, those who expected something of him, did believe him and stopped speaking to him. It wasn't long before his wife left him too. But the Peruvian persisted in his madness and stood his ground, digging in his heels. He wasn't making any money, of course. He went to live with his father, who supported him. When his father died, his mother supported him. And of course, he never stopped writing or turning out huge, uneven books punctuated by occasional moments of brilliant, shaky humor. Years later, he would sometimes boast that he'd been chaste since 1985. Also: he lost any hint of shame, composure, or discretion. He went over the top (notably over the top, that is, since this is Latin American writers we're talking about) in his praise of others and he completely lost his sense of the ridiculous in complimenting himself. And yet, every once in a while he wrote beautiful poems. According to Arturo, the Peruvian believed that the two greatest American poets were Whitman and himself. A strange case. The Cuban was a different story. He was gay and the revolutionary authorities weren't prepared to tolerate homosexuals, so after a brief moment of glory during which he wrote two excellent novels (also brief), it wasn't long before he was dragged through the shit and madness that passes for a revolution. Gradually, they began to take away what little he had. He lost his job, no one would publish him, he was pressured to become a police informer, he was followed, his mail was intercepted, in the end they threw him in jail. It seems the revolutionaries had two aims: to cure the Cuban of his homosexuality and, once he was cured, to persuade him to work for his country. Both were a joke. The Cuban held out. Like all good (or bad) Latin Americans, he wasn't afraid of the police or poverty or not being published. He had countless adventures on the island. He survived it all and kept his wits about him. One day he escaped. He made it to the United States. His books began to be published. He started to work even harder than before, if possible, but he and Miami weren't made for each other. He headed to New York. He had lovers. He got AIDS. In Cuba they went so far as to say: you see, if he'd stayed here, he wouldn't have died. For a while he was in Spain. His last days were hard: he wanted to finish the book he was writing and he could barely type. Still, he finished it. Sometimes he would sit at the window of his New York apartment and think about what he could have done and what, in the end, he did. His last days were days of loneliness, suffering, and rage at what he had lost forever. He didn't want to die in a hospital. That's what Arturo told me as we were waiting for the plane that would carry him away from Spain forever. The dream of Revolution, a hot nightmare. You and I are Chilean, I told him, and none of this is our fault. He looked at me and didn't answer. Then he laughed. He gave me a kiss on each cheek and left. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren't laughing anymore.