I'm Not Here to Give a Speech Read online

  I accept the Order of the Aztec Eagle with two emotions that don’t usually go together: pride and gratitude. In this way, the deeply affectionate bond that my wife and I established with this country, where we chose to live more than twenty years ago, has been formalized. Here is where my children grew up, here is where I wrote my books, here is where I planted my trees.

  In the sixties, when I was no longer happy but was still undocumented, Mexican friends offered me their support and filled me with the temerity to continue writing in circumstances I evoke today like a chapter in One Hundred Years of Solitude that I forgot about. In the past decade, when success and too much publicity were trying to disturb my private life, the discretion and legendary tact of the Mexicans allowed me to find the inner calm and inviolable time to tirelessly pursue with no rest my difficult carpenter’s trade. It isn’t, then, a second homeland but another, different homeland, given to me without conditions, not competing with my own homeland for the love and fidelity I profess for it and the nostalgia with which it unceasingly claims them.

  But the honour granted my person moves me not only because this is the country where I live and have lived. I feel, Mr President, that this distinction from your government also honours all the exiles who have found refuge in the sanctuary of Mexico. I know I have no standing at all, and that my case is anything but typical. I also know that the current conditions of my residence in Mexico are not the same for the immense majority of the persecuted who in this past decade have found in Mexico a providential haven. Unfortunately, there still exist on our continent distant tyrannies and nearby massacres that compel an exile much less voluntary and pleasant than mine. I speak in my own name, but I know that many will recognize themselves in my words.

  Thank you, sir, for these open doors. May they never close, please, under any circumstances.

  THE SOLITUDE OF LATIN AMERICA

  Stockholm, Sweden, December 8, 1982

  Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who accompanied Magellan on his first voyage around the world, wrote about his passage through our southern America in a rigorous chronicle that still seems to be an imagined adventure. He said he had seen pigs whose navels were on their backs, legless birds whose females hatched their eggs on the shoulders of the males, and others, such as tongueless pelicans whose beaks resembled a spoon. He said he had seen a monstrous animal with the head and ears of a mule, the body of a camel, the feet of a deer, and the whinny of a horse. He said they placed the first native they came across in Patagonia before a mirror and the maddened giant lost the use of his reason because he was terrified by his own image.

  This brief, fascinating book, in which there are already glimpses of the beginnings of our novels today, is by no means the most astonishing testimony from that time to our reality. The chroniclers of the Indies left us countless others. El Dorado — our illusory country, so intensely longed for — appeared on numerous maps for many long years, changing location and shape according to the cartographers’ fantasy. Searching for the Fountain of Youth, the legendary Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of Mexico for eight years on an extraordinary expedition whose members ate one another, and only five survived of the six hundred who started out. One of many unsolved mysteries involves the eleven thousand mules, each carrying one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day to pay Atahualpa’s ransom and never reached their destination. Later, during the colonial period, hens raised on alluvial plains, their gizzards containing small nuggets of gold, were sold in Cartagena de Indias. This gold fever of our founders pursued us until very recently. Just in the last century, the German mission responsible for studying the construction of an interoceanic railroad on the Isthmus of Panama concluded that the project was viable only if the rails were made not of iron, which was a scarce metal in the region, but of gold.

  Independence from Spanish rule did not save us from madness. General Antonio López de Santa Anna, three times the dictator of Mexico, had a magnificent funeral for his right leg, lost in what was called the Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno governed Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch, and a vigil was held for his corpse, which wore his dress uniform and a breastplate of medals and sat on the presidential chair. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who exterminated thirty thousand peasants in a barbaric slaughter, invented a pendulum to determine whether food was poisoned and had the streetlights covered in red paper to combat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The monument to General Francisco Morazán, erected on the main square of Tegucigalpa, is in reality a statue of Marshal Ney purchased at a warehouse of second-hand sculptures.

  Eleven years ago, one of the celebrated poets of our time, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, enlightened this setting with his words. Since then, in the good consciences of Europe, and at times in the bad as well, spectral news of Latin America, that immense homeland of deluded men and historic women whose endless intractability is confused with legend, has erupted with more force than ever. We have not had a moment’s peace. A Promethean president entrenched in his burning palace died fighting alone against an entire army, and two suspicious and never clarified aerial disasters cut short the lives of another president with a generous heart and a democratic military man who had restored the dignity of his people.

  There have been five wars and seventeen coups, and a Luciferian dictator appeared who in the name of God carried out the first ethnocide in Latin America in our time. Meanwhile, 20 million Latin American children died before their second birthday, more than all the children born in Europe since 1970. Those who have disappeared for reasons of tyranny number almost 120,000, which is as if we did not know today the whereabouts of all the residents of the city of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested when they were pregnant gave birth in Argentine prisons, but the whereabouts and identities of their children, given up for clandestine adoption or placed in orphanages by the military authorities, are still unknown. Because they did not want matters to continue in this way, approximately 200,000 women and men have died throughout the continent, and more than 100,000 perished in three small, intransigent countries in Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. If this had occurred in the United States, the proportional figure would be 1,000,600 violent deaths in four years.

  One million people, 10 per cent of its population, have fled Chile, a country with traditions of hospitality. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million residents, considered the most civilized country on the continent, has lost one out of five citizens to exile. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced a refugee almost every twenty minutes. The country that could be formed with all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway.

  I presume to think that it is this singular reality, and not only its literary expression, that has deserved the attention this year of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not made of paper but one that lives with us and determines every instant of our countless daily deaths, and that sustains a constant surge of insatiable creation, filled with misfortune and beauty, of which this errant, nostalgic Colombian is simply another number marked by good fortune. Poets and beggars, warriors and scoundrels, all of us who are creatures of that disordered reality have had to ask very little of our imaginations, because the greatest challenge for us has been the insufficiency of conventional devices to make our lives believable. This, friends, is the core of our solitude.

  If these difficulties hamper us, who are of its essence, it is not difficult to understand that the rational prodigies on this side of the world, enraptured by the contemplation of their own culture, have been left without a valid method for interpreting us. It is understandable that they insist on measuring us with the same yardstick they use to measure themselves, not remembering that the ravages of life are not the same for everyone, and that the search for identity is as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The inter
pretation of our reality using foreign systems only contributes to making us more and more unknown, less and less free, more and more solitary. Perhaps venerable Europe would be more understanding if it tried to see us in its own past. If it remembered that London needed three hundred years to construct its first wall and another three hundred to have a bishop; that Rome struggled for twenty centuries in the darkness of uncertainty before an Etruscan king established it in history; and that even in the sixteenth century, the peaceful Swiss of today, who delight us with their mild cheeses and intrepid clocks, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand German mercenaries in the pay of imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its residents to the knife.

  I do not claim to embody the illusions of Tonio Kröger, whose dreams of union between a chaste north and a passionate south Thomas Mann exalted here fifty-three years ago, but I do believe that Europeans with an enlightening spirit — those who struggle here as well for a larger homeland that is more humane and more just — could be more helpful to us if they thoroughly revised their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone until it is concretized into acts of legitimate support for peoples who take on the dream of having their own life in the ordering of the world.

  Latin America does not want to be, nor is there any reason for it to be, a pawn with no will of its own, and there is nothing chimerical about its plans for independence and originality becoming a Western aspiration. And yet the advances in navigation that have reduced so many distances between our Americas and Europe seem to have increased our cultural distance. Why is the originality granted to us without reservation in literature denied us with every kind of suspicion when we make our extremely difficult attempts at social change? Why think that social justice, which advanced Europeans strive to establish in their own countries, cannot also be a Latin American objective using distinct methods under different conditions? No: the inordinate violence and pain of our history are the result of countless secular injustices and animosities, not a conspiracy hatched three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have believed this, with the childishness of grandparents who have forgotten the fruitful madness of their youth, as if no other destiny were possible than living at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, friends, is the size of our solitude. And yet, in the face of oppression, pillage, and abandonment, our response is life. Neither floods nor plagues nor famines nor cataclysms, not even eternal wars lasting centuries and centuries, have succeeded in reducing the tenacious advantage of life over death.

  An advantage that grows and accelerates: each year there are 74 million more births than deaths, a number of new lives that could increase the population of New York by a factor of seven every year. Most are born in the countries with fewest resources and, among them, of course, are those of Latin America. On the other hand, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating sufficient destructive power to annihilate a hundred times over not only all the human beings who have existed until now, but the totality of living creatures that have spent time on this planet of misfortunes.

  On a day like today, my teacher William Faulkner said in this place: ‘I decline to accept the end of man.’ I wouldn’t feel worthy of occupying this spot that was his if I weren’t fully aware that, for the first time since the origin of humankind, the colossal catastrophe that he declined to accept thirty-two years ago is now nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this terrifying reality that throughout all of human time must have seemed a fantasy, the inventors of fables we all believe feel we have the right to believe that it still isn’t too late to undertake the creation of a contrary utopia. A new, overwhelming utopia of life, where no one can decide for others even how they’ll die, where love is really true and happiness possible, and where the peoples condemned to one hundred years of solitude at last and forever have a second chance on earth.

  A TOAST TO POETRY

  Stockholm, Sweden, December 10, 1982

  I thank the Swedish Academy of Letters for favouring me with a prize that places me next to many of those who conditioned and enriched my years as a reader and daily participant in the irremediable delirium of the writing trade. Their names and works appear to me today as tutelary shades, but also as the commitment, often overwhelming, that is acquired with this honour. A difficult honour that seemed like simple justice in them but in me I understand as another of those lessons with which destiny tends to surprise us and which makes even more obvious our condition as the playthings of an indecipherable chance whose only devastating recompense is, most of the time, incomprehension and oblivion.

  It is, therefore, only natural, against the secret backdrop where we usually rummage through the most essential truths that shape our identity, that I should ask myself what has been the constant foundation of my work, what could have attracted the attention of this tribunal of extremely severe judges in so compromising a way. I confess with no false modesty that it has not been easy for me to find the reason, but I want to believe it is for the reason I would have desired. I want to believe, my friends, that this is, once again, a tribute paid to poetry. Poetry by whose virtue the prodigious inventory of ships enumerated by old Homer in his Iliad are visited by a wind that pushes them to sail with unearthly, dazzling speed. Poetry that sustains, in the slender scaffolding of Dante’s tercets, the entire dense, colossal structure of the Middle Ages. Poetry that with such miraculous totality rescues our America in ‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu’ by Pablo Neruda, the great, the greatest, and where our best dead-end dreams distil their millenarian sorrow. Poetry, in short, the secret energy of daily life that cooks garbanzos in the kitchen and spreads love like a contagion and repeats images in mirrors.

  In every line I write I always try, with greater or lesser success, to invoke the elusive spirits of poetry and leave in each word a testimony to my devotion because of its powers of divination and its permanent victory over the muffled powers of death. The prize I have just received I understand, in all humility, as the consoling revelation that my effort has not been in vain. For that reason I invite all of you to toast what a great poet of our Americas, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, has defined as the only concrete proof of the existence of man: poetry. Thank you very much.

  WORDS FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM

  Havana, Cuba, November 29, 1985

  I’ve always wondered what meetings of intellectuals were good for. Aside from the very few that have had real historical significance in our time, like the one held in Valencia, Spain, in 1937, most of them are no more than simple salon entertainments. Still, it’s surprising that so many take place, more and more of them, more crowded and expensive the more the world crisis deepens. A Nobel Prize in Literature assures one of receiving in the following year almost two thousand invitations to writers’ conferences, art festivals, colloquia, seminars of all kinds: more than three a day in sites scattered around the world. There’s an institutional conference going on constantly, all expenses paid, whose meetings are held each year in thirty-one different places, some as attractive as Rome or Adelaide, or as surprising as Stavanger or Yverdon, or in some that seem like crossword challenges, like Polyphénix or Knokke. There are so many, in short, about so many different and varied subjects, that during the past year, in Muiden Castle, in Amsterdam, an international conference of organizers of poetry conferences was held. It’s not unimaginable: a complaisant intellectual could be born at one conference and continue growing and maturing at successive conferences, with no more respites than those needed to move from one to the other, until he died at a ripe old age at his last conference.

  And yet it may be too late to try to break this habit that we artisans of culture have been dragging through history ever since Pindar celebrated the Olympic Games. Those were times when body and spirit were on better terms with each other than they are today, and so th
e voices of bards were appreciated in stadiums as much as the feats of athletes. The Romans, ever since 508 BCE, must have suspected that abuse of the games was their greatest danger. For at about that time they inaugurated the Secular Games, and then the Terentini Games, celebrated at intervals that are exemplary for today: every one hundred or one hundred and ten years.

  Cultural conferences in the Middle Ages were also debates and tourneys of minstrels, then troubadours, and then minstrels and troubadours at the same time, beginning a tradition that we still often suffer from: they started as games and ended as disputes. But they also reached such splendour that, during the reign of Louis XIV, they opened with a colossal banquet whose evocation here — I swear — is no attempt at a veiled hint: nineteen bullocks were served, three thousand pies, and more than two hundred casks of wine.

  The culmination of this performance by minstrels and troubadours was the Floral Games of Toulouse, the oldest and most persistent of poetic competitions, inaugurated 660 years ago — a model of continuity. Its founder, Clemencia Isaura, was an intelligent, enterprising, and beautiful woman, whose only fault seems to have been that she never existed: perhaps she was purely an invention of seven troubadours who created the competition in an effort to prevent the extinction of Provençal poetry. But her very lack of existence is one more proof of the creative power of poetry, for in Toulouse there is a tomb of Clemencia Isaura in the Church of La Dorada, and a street that bears her name, and a monument to her memory.

  This being said, we have the right to ask ourselves: what are we doing here? And, above all: what am I doing up on this perch of honour, I who have always considered speeches the most terrifying of human predicaments? I don’t have the courage to suggest an answer, but I can offer a proposal: we are here to try to hold a meeting of intellectuals that has what the immense majority of them haven’t had — practical utility and continuity.