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The story goes that while working for an English newspaper, Bruce Chatwin interviewed the designer Eileen Gray. They discovered a mutual fascination with Patagonia, and the 93 year old Gray told Chatwin to go there for her. Two years later he arrived in South America, quitting his newspaper job with a telegram; “Have gone to Patagonia”.
Chatwin makes no mention of this story in In Patagonia, the book spawned by the trip. Instead he chooses for his mythic start a piece of Brontosaurus skin (which actually came from a Mylodon, some sort of prehistoric giant sloth) in a cabinet in his grandmother’s dining room. The skin was from Patagonia, and among other things he was going to Patagonia to claim his own scrap of Brontosaurus.
These multiple origin myths are pretty characteristic of Chatwin’s storytelling. He doesn’t try to resolve his narrative into a series of certain events; he’s not too concerned with definite facts (which is probably why he has been accused of distorting and fabricating details of the book). Instead he explores possibilities, gathering local myth and opinion and adding his own theories. He traces, for example, the path of Butch Cassidy through Patagonia, visiting the cabin he lived in, talking with people with hazy memories of the outlaw. Eventually the path starts bifurcating; perhaps Cassidy died in Bolivia (the official line), perhaps he survived, perhaps he returned to the US, perhaps the whole fatal shoot-out was fabricated. The possibilities multiply and Chatwin explores them all, leaving them side by side, a whole Patagonian mythology.
There is an immense amount of research and reading behind the novel. Chatwin very rarely speaks of himself (somewhat ironic given the personal mythology he built for himself), but it’s clear that he is a tireless explorer and investigator. Aside from knowing of virtually every book, poem and journal ever to mention Patagonia, he chases down a wealth of extra colour and detail for every one of his stories and characters. Even the most minor figures, mere asides within the stories, are fastidiously researched: “The rest of Harry’s career was predictable. He went to the war, joined a fast set, married three times and ended up in England, the secretary of a golf club”.
Chatwin apparently adored Jorge Luis Borges (more mythology), and although Borges gets no mention in In Patagonia, his influence is thick within Chatwin’s style, particularly within some of the stories. Like Borges, Chatwin explores an idea and then begins to twist it, taking it to extremes, probing the possibilities. Writing of a a secret cabal of male witches in Chile, he finishes with “No one can recall the memory of a time when the Central Committee did not exist. Some have suggested that the Sect was in embryo even before the emergence of Man. It is equally plausible that Man himself became Man through fierce opposition to the Sect. We know for a fact that the Challanco is the Evil Eye. Perhaps the ‘Central Committee’ is a synonym for Beast”. Borges would have been proud of such a paragraph.
In between the witches and the mylodons, Chatwin manages to weave interpretation of Shakespeare (“into the mouth of Caliban, Shakespeare packed all the bitterness of the New World”), a Patagonian genealogy for Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, political intrigue, isolated Welsh communities, plenty of murders, noble savages, an El Dorado myth, Charles Darwin, water tigers, a Patagonian unicorn, Francis Drake and Ferdinand Magellan; the whole Patagonian pantheon.
In another of his books (Utz), Chatwin writes about collecting and obsession. Certainly with In Patagonia he is collecting the stories of Patagonia, going to great lengths to uncover them, studying and pursuing them obsessively. This is not your standard travel writing, Chatwin is telling other stories instead of his own. Perhaps he is stealing them too, or at least re-appropriating them. Still, his fascination with Patagonia makes for brilliant reading. Chatwin lived a vibrant life, full of adventure and controversy, but he knew enough to know that he didn’t have to create his own stories in order to write a great book. There are enough myths and stories preserved like that scrap of brontosaurus, that just need to be unearthed in order to enchant again and again.
Chatwin eventually tracks down his Mylodon cave, finds a site still littered with perfectly preserved evidence of the ancient beast. The cave is, like all of Chatwin’s subjects, and perhaps like all of Patagonia, a strange place where reality and myth overlap. Chatwin pilfers a few impossible Mylodon or Brontosaurus hairs and it is hard to know whether this is myth or history or possibility or fancy, but that is the whole point. Whatever the Mylodon was, it exists today as many possibilities, as a series of forking paths. Wandering these paths doesn’t bring much resolution, but that doesn’t really matter. It is in the possibilities that the fascination lies.
In April Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez reached out to Barack Obama and gave him a gift. It wasn’t a billion barrels of crude or a letter of resignation, which were no doubt what Obama was hoping for, but rather a very normal and inoffensive-looking book (this was still far better than Evo Morales’ gift, which was another round of accusations that the US was trying to kill him. Sigh).
The book was Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, a tome of some existing fame which became an instant bestseller as it was passed from Chavez to Obama.
The title should give some indication as to what the book is about, but given that the gift was an untranslated Spanish-language edition, it’s safe to say Obama hasn’t spent much time pouring over its pages. To avoid the potentially awkward consequences that could ensue from the next meeting between Chavez and Obama (“how did you like your gift” “oh yeah, it was pretty, um, interesting” “so which bits did you like the best” “well definitely the um, the start was pretty, like, um, hey look, there’s Kevin Rudd!” “Who?”), I thought I’d provide some cheat notes to help Obama. He’s a busy man after all; he has a Peace Prize to earn…
Title: Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Author: Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist and freelance political exile.
Published: 1971, and then again later.
Chapter Summaries
Introduction: 120 Million Children in the Eye of the Hurricane. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 1: Lust for Gold, Lust for Silver. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 2: King Sugar and other Agricultural Monarchs. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 3: The Invisible Sources of Power. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 4: Tales of Premature Death. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 5: The Contemporary Structures of Power. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Seven Years After. Explains how Latin America is still exploited.
Setting
Venezuelan oil fields, Bolivian silver mines, Brazilian favelas, Caribbean sugar plantations, Central American banana plantations, Brazilian coffee plantations, Chilean guano deposits and copper mines, nineteenth century Paraguay, Zapatista Mexico, the Panama Canal, Argentine prisons, leaky slave galleons, denuded rainforests………..
Characters
The Spanish. Outsiders that harvested, mined and plundered Latin America for their own benefit. Villains.
The English, and to a lesser extent the other Europeans. Outsiders that harvested, mined and plundered Latin America for their own benefit. Came after the Spanish (see above). Villains.
The USAmericans. Outsiders that harvested, mined and plundered Latin America for their own benefit. Came after the English (see above). Villains.
The Oligarchy. Insiders that privatised, mortgaged and sold Latin America for their own benefit. Villains.
The International Monetary Fund. See the USAmericans.
Augusto Pinochet. Chilean general who became president/dictator through a violent coup. Friend of the Oligarchy (see above) and the USAmericans (see above). A villain.
Salvador Allende. Chilean socialist president overthrown by Augusto Pinochet (see above). A hero.
Isabel Allende. First cousin once removed of Salvador Allende (see above). Wrote the foreword to Open Veins. Likes it. Fled Augusto Pinochet’s coup (see above) carrying a copy of Open Veins (an early edition, before she had written the foreword).
Old Woman. Lives in a São Paulo hovel. Drinks coffee from small tin can and talks to author. Claims that Brazil is “ours”. An anecdote.
Quotes
“We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity”.
“The massacres of Indians that began with Columbus never stopped”.
“The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret – every year, three Hiroshima bombs”.
“There are less than 1,000 computers in Latin America and 50,000 in the United States”.
“One wonders if those that made us paralytic might offer us a wheelchair”.
“One writes to answer the questions that buzz in one’s head”.
Notes for the President (of the USA)
* Don’t take anything Galeano says too personally, after all you were only 10 years old when this book was published, and not directly complicit in, for example, the CIA’s support of Pinochet.
* Galeano is opposed to slavery, to indentured labour, to serfdom, and to other forms of labour exploitation. By aligning yourself similarly you may be able to reach out to those of the left like Galeano and Hugo Chavez. These people cannot vote for you, but being cordial to them might boost your popularity with certain demographics (most of whom also cannot vote for you).
* The CIA, the IMF, the green berets and the oil companies are for the large part unpopular within Latin America. This may be because every time they become involved in Latin America people start dying (according to Galeano). Finding less polarising cultural ambassadors to send to the region may prove worthwhile.
* Galeano wrote Open Veins in the years after Che Guevara was assassinated. Neither this event nor the ongoing embargo seem to have ended the Communist threat in the region. Cuba may be the country that has changed the least from the time of the book’s publication to today. It might be time to consider a new Cuba strategy.
* Five hundred years of exploitation has not caused Latin America to love unreservedly the Spanish (see above) or the English (see above) or the USAmericans (see above). For the USAmericans at least it is not to late to rethink this approach. It might be time to call off the conquest.
I thought Hemingway was supposed to write short, frank fiction. His name gets attached to flash fiction (whatever the unprintable that is), and The Old Man and the Sea is a quick afternoon’s read. I wasn’t prepared for how long For Whom the Bell Tolls would be. Part of the reason for this might be that his characters spend so much sitting around their camp, bickering and obscenitying in each other’s milk.
For such a surprisingly thick book (500 pages to narrate three days; I suppose this isn’t as bad as unprintable Ulysses though. And I suppose I should finish reading that eventually too. Obscenity), FWTBT passes quickly, and that is pretty impressive considering that from the moment you read the title and the opening John Donne quote (“No man is an Iland… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”), you can be pretty certain of how the book is going to end. Having said that Hemingway still gave a twist to the final page of the book which had me thinking that he really did know his obscenity.
Being here and supposedly brushing up on my unprintably bad Spanish had me enjoying immensely Hemingway’s near direct transliteration of Spanish parlance into English. All those odd turns of phrase, all those awkward thous that get slipped in give the characters a very Spanish voice. Hemingway didn’t need to put them in there; they might even disrupt his style, but they work unprintably well.
So too do Hemingway’s transliteration of all the 1930s Spanish potty-mouth spouted by the partisans around their camp. It was a common topic of conversation with other gringos when I was living in Spain; the foulness of the mouths of even the youngest Spanish kids. Bolivia was different, and very clean; to learn dirty words in Bolivia I had to follow anti-Evo processions and listen to the unprintables that were being appended to the president’s name. Now in Mexico I find that in conversations and films there are times when all I can pick out are the streams of expletives. That’s not because I don’t understand what’s being said; it’s because every sentence is composed of more unprintables than printables.
So Hemingway is capturing well the voice of his subjects when he introduces long trains of unprintability. I suppose there was still some prudishness in the late 30s, which would be why instead of printing the naughty words he interchanges them for obscenity, unprintable, or rhymes (in English; he could get away with printing Spanish cussing in the book). When protagonist Robert Jordan is despairing of completing his mission he declares “Oh, muck my grandfather and muck this whole treacherous muck-faced mucking country and every mucking Spaniard in it on either side and to hell forever. Muck them to hell together…” (this goes on for almost a page).
It takes a while to figure out what the muck is going on when Hemingway first starts slipping these codewords into the novel. Then they just roll on and on, and become a part of the author’s brilliant craft. And never more so than when characters start obscenitying in each others milk. This is Hemingway’s translation of the Spanish expression of frustration me cago en la leche! (I shit in the milk). The characters don’t just obscenity in the milk though; they obscenity in the milk of each other, of each other’s fathers and mothers. In the heat of battle as the partisans try to blow up a bridge Pilar the camp matriarch declares “I obscenity in the milk of science!”. Not only is this one unprintably big obscenity, it expresses something of the whole war. The Republicans are badly out-gunned; the fascists have bombers and tanks, the Republicans have guerillas living in a cave and obscenitying in each other’s milk.
All this pasteurised profanity, all this squabbling about the camp and mucking to hell also builds towards the futility of the war. By the time the book was published the fascists ruled Spain. The book is set when the country’s future is in the balance, but the Republican cause is hampered by gossiping socialist socialites, by a revered madman, by the petty lack of discipline and the laziness among the troops. If the characters are obscenitying in the milk of science, Hemingway is obscenitying in the milk of war, or if not of war (given how much he was attracted to war and to bravado) of a noble cause that was mucked up and lost.
Every time I leave home and go a-travelling I am risking a great deal. I am throwing myself upon the mercy of the road, and staking everything on the kindness of strangers, and on the uncertain principal that at all times and in all places I will be able to find something suitably high-brow to read.
Somehow through every trip my luck has held, and I’ve still never had to read anything by Dan Brown. There has always been someone offering to lend a tome, or there has been a hole-in-the-wall used bookstore. In one instance there were the immense vaults of a British Council library.
On every trip or journey natural literary tendencies emerge. From out of that British Council library in Madrid emerged novels I’d never heard of by Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene. Crossing the USofA I couldn’t escape the Kerouac and the beats; I’m still not sure whether or not I want to escape them.
The theme of my time in Bolivia emerged in Coroico. Floundering and forgotten on the bottom shelf of a hotel book exchange was Jose Saramago’s The Stone Raft.
This could only be destiny. In Madrid the treasures of the British Council had enthralled me, but they had all been very… British. A rather important someone had expounded to me the wonders of Jose Saramago, but I had been unable to find him in English. The Stone Raft was the first of Saramago’s books to be recommended to me, and ever since it had been wedged prominently within my consciousness, demanding attention. So, that forgotten book on that forgotten shelf became mine, and I had my literary theme for the trip, and yet another blog topic (care to read the first and second Saramago blogs?).
Whenever I read Saramago I am reminded of Madrid. He is Portuguese, not Spanish, but the same sense of humour and playfulness that I found in Spain is scrawled onto every page penned by Saramago. There are traces of the same all across Bolivia. It must be a Latin thing.
The Stone Raft could be called a celebration of Iberian-ness. It begins with the tearing apart of the Pyrenees, separating Spain and Portugal from continental Europe (Andorra sides with Europe) as the peninsula-turned-island floats off into the Atlantic. While some in Europe are glad to see Iberia cast adrift, others are filled with a longing to follow, and all over the continent graffiti appears declaring Nous aussi, nous sommes ibériques; Auch wir sind iberisch; Nos quoque iberi sumus; We are Iberians too.
Successive waves of panic and awe wash over the population of the once-peninsula. Gibraltar recedes away behind them, still anchored at the mouth of the Mediterranean. The Azores approach and it looks as though a collision is imminent. Within the severed peninsula, the population first surges towards the coast, to occupy the hotels left hollow by the exodus of the wealthy and the tourists, and then sweeps back inland to avoid the impending islands.
There is brutality as the authorities seek to maintain a sense of law and order; there is farce as the governments bicker and posture and concur; there is caricature as the North Americans ponder the possible strategic value of Iberia as an annex of Newfoundland. Out of all this emerges another narrative, as a group of strangers who have experienced personal miracles and anomalies to parallel the rending of the Pyrenees band together and take to the roads of Iberia.
Their journey takes them through the remote parts of Iberia, the barren, archaeological deserts of Andalucia, the Portuguese coastline, the mountains and wild coast of Galicia, the lonely Pyrenees and the terrifying drop into oblivion where once there had been only stone and border crossings. They do not visit Madrid or Barcelona, they flit by Sevilla and Porto, keeping largely to the villages, country roads and farmhouses. As they travel Saramago wanders and digresses, detailing the myths, histories and curiosities of the peninsula. He celebrates Iberia, its majesty and foibles.
As with Saramago’s other novels, he seems to skim over the surface of his own narratives, leaving much unsaid and unexplored. The tensions and ecstasies of the travellers are never explicated in full, but they are there between the lines, unspoken between the characters. There are no resolutions, and when the novel ends the peninsula is still inexplicably adrift in the ocean, though whether it will continue its voyage or not is unclear.
Once again I found myself pondering the why of a Saramago novel. The idea of the departure of Iberia is wonderful, and Saramago obviously enjoys dancing over the established political shape of Europe, but is there some deeper, obscure point here? I don’t think so, and more and more I like Saramago’s representations of life without conclusions and clever climaxes. There is nothing here but the reality and unreality of life.
My favourite image from the book is of a Europe daubed in graffiti, expressing both wanderlust and old existential angst. We are Iberians too, adrift on a mysterious raft in a cruel sea. Or we are Iberians too, yearning to be forcibly severed from the mainland, to have adventure thrust upon us. Or we are Iberians too, let us explore the lands we call home, and see them from a new perspective, and rediscover their hidden quirks and sublimities. What deeper point need a novel make?
Thanks to the wonderful resident gringos of Sucre, and to their personal libraries, I’ve somehow managed – in a city where the bookstores only sell stationery and in which the only people who read in the plazas or the cafes or on buses are foreigners – to keep myself entrenched in the realm of the highbrow and the literary. I’ve even been able to choose the direction my readings have taken, which is how I have returned to the world of Jose Saramago.
Please note, I’m about to completely spoil the plot for anyone who hasn’t read this book.
All the Names bears a number of similarities to The Double, which I’ve already blogged about. Both narratives see a very bored and single man becoming fixated on the search for another person whom he has never met. Both men delve into phone books and other types of catalogues, though in The Double the catalogue is a video store, while in All the Names it is – among other places – a cemetery.
All the Namesis a meditation on death and memory. At the centre of the novel is the question of what we do with the dead, and of where we go when we die. Saramago’s approach is humanist, though; there is no suggestion of afterlives here. At the most basic level, when we die we go to the cemetery and become a grave, and we go into the Central Registry and become a death certificate.
The protagonist, Senhor Jose, works in the Central Registry, where the all the names of the living are separated from those of the dead by an archaic filing system. Every life and every name is, in the Central Registry, reduced to dates of birth, marriage, divorce and death, and to the names of spouses and direct family. It is a reductive way of remembering the dead. It is also a way of forgetting them, of shelving them away in the dust and gloom of the registry.
Senhor Jose spends almost the entire novel searching for a woman he will never meet. In doing so he is trying to give detail to her life, to make it more than just the recorded dates of birth, death, etc. This is no easy task; the woman disappears and leaves few clues about her life or death. Before he reaches the end of his quest Senhor Jose knows he is approaching an impassable wall, a cul-de-sac which is the obscurity death casts over life.
A building sense of melancholy hangs over the narrative; Saramago is not seeking to cheat the simple, hard facts of death and of the cemetery and the registry. As a result the book is poignantly, hauntingly sad at times, and leaves an unnerving sense of loss which brought itching tears to my eyes. This is as much because of the loneliness that Senhor Jose never escapes as because of his musings on death.
Still, with Senhor Jose’s quest, Saramago depicts some of the small, dedicated efforts we make to ensure that we keep the dead in more than just the catalogues of cemetery and registry. A concern of the book is the keeping or intrusion of the dead among the living. The walls of the registry and cemetery are continually knocked down and expanded to make room for and contain all of the dead. Eventually the cemetery grows too big for walls, and the graves of the dead begin to overlap with the land of living.
The final act of Senhor Jose, aided by the authoritarian Registrar who provides a wonderful sub-plot, is to de-register the death of the woman, to destroy any recorded signs of her death, to place her file back amongst the living. It is a gesture that changes nothing, but which is about as much as can be done to give dignity to the dead, to ensure they never become just file and headstone. Even human memory is fickle, Saramago notes; there is much about a person that is irretrievably lost when they die; the the cul-de-sac that we, like Senhor Jose, arrive at in our remembering.
This is a sad book for one as vivacious as Saramago. He does nothing to try to evade or deny the cold inevitability of death, but his idea that the names of the dead belong alongside the names of the living, and not off in the dark repositories where lives are diminished and then forgotten has a sweet note to it. Life and death are, after all, close companions that one way or another belong side by side.
