Antonio Pigafetta, the Florentine navigator who accompanied Magellan
on the first circumnavigation of the world, kept a meticulous log on his
journey through our Southern American continent, which, nevertheless, also
seems to be an adventure onto the imagination. He related that he
had seen pigs with their umbilicus on their backs and birds without feet,
the females of the species of which would brood their eggs on the backs
of the males, as well as others like gannets without tongues whose beaks
looked like a spoon. He wrote that he had seen a monstrosity
of an animal with the head and ears of a mule, the body of a camel, the
hooves of a deer and the neigh of a horse. He related that they put
a mirror in front of the first native they met in Patagonia and how that
overexcited giant lost the use of his reason out of fear of his own image.
This short and fascinating book, in which we can perceive the
germs of our contemporary novels, is not, by any means, the most surprising
testimony of our reality at that time. The Chroniclers of the Indies
have left us innumerable others. Eldorado, our illusory land which
was much sought after, figured on many maps over a long period, changing
in situation and extent according to the whim of the cartographer.
The mythical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, in search of the
fount of Eternal Youth, spent eight years exploring the north of Mexico
in a crazy expedition whose members ate one another; only five of the six
hundred who set out returned home. One of the many mysteries which
was never unraveled is that of the eleven thousand mules, each loaded with
one hundred pounds weight of gold, which left Cuzco one day to pay the
ransom of Atahualpa and which never arrived at their destination.
Later on, during the colonial period, they used to sell in Cartagena de
Indias chickens raised on alluvial soils in whose gizzards were found gold
nuggets. This delirium for gold among our founding fathers has been
a bane upon us until very recent times. Why, only in the last century
the German missions appointed to study the construction of a railway line
between the oceans across the Panamanian isthmus concluded that the project
was a viable one on the condition that the rails should be not of iron,
a scarce metal in the region, but of gold.
The independence from Spanish domination did not save us from
their madness. General Antonio López de Santana, thrice dictator
of Mexico, had the right leg he lost in the so-called War of the Cakes
buried with all funereal pomp. General García Moreno governed
Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch and his dead body, dressed
in full-dress uniform and his cuirass with its medals, sat in state upon
the presidential throne. General Maximilian Hernández Martínez,
the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants
exterminated in a savage orgy of killing, invented a pendulum to discover
whether food was poisoned and had the street lamps covered with red paper
to combat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The monument to General Francisco
Morazán, raised up in the main square of Tegucigalpa is, in reality,
a statue of Marshall Ney which was bought in a repository of second-hand
statues in Paris.
Eleven years ago, one of the astounding poets of our time, Pablo
Neruda from Chile, brought light to this very chamber with his words.
In the European mind, in those of good--and often those of bad--consciences,
we witness, on a forceful scale never seen before, the eruption of an awareness
of the phantoms of Latin America, that great homeland of deluded men and
historic women, whose infinite stubbornness is confused with legend.
We have never had a moment of serenity. A Promethean president embattled
in a palace in flames died fighting single-handed against an army, and
two air disasters which occurred under suspicious circumstances, circumstances
which were never clarified, cut off the life of another of generous nature
and that of a democratic soldier who had restored the dignity of his nation.
There have been five wars and seventeen coup d’état and the rise
of a devilish dictator who, in the name of God, accomplished the first
genocide in Latin America in our time. Meanwhile, twenty million
Latin American children have died before their second birthday, which is
more than all those born in Europe since 1970. Nearly one hundred
and twenty-thousand have disappeared as a consequence of repression, which
is as if, today, no one knew where all the inhabitants of Uppsala were.
Many women arrested during pregnancy gave birth in Argentinean prisons,
but, still, where and who their children are is not known; either they
were passed on into secret adoption or interned in orphanages by the military
authorities. So that things should not continue thus, two thousand
men and women have given up their lives over the continent in Central America:
Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Were this to happen in the
United States the proportional ratio would be one million six hundred violent
deaths in four years. A million people have fled from Chile, a country
noted for its tradition of hospitality: that is, ten percent of the population.
Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants, a nation
which considered itself one of the most civilized countries of the continent,
has lost one in five of its citizens into exile. The civil war in
El Salvador has created, since 1979, virtually one refugee every twenty
minutes. A country created from all these Latin Americans either
in exile or in enforced emigration would have a larger population than
Norway.
I dare to believe that it is this highly unusual state of affairs,
and not only its literary expression, which, this year, has merited the
attention of the Swedish Literary Academy: a reality which is not one on
paper but which lives in us and determines each moment of our countless
daily deaths, one which constantly replenishes an insatiable fount of creation,
full of unhappiness and beauty, of which this wandering and nostalgic Colombian
is merely another number singled out by fate. Poets and beggars,
musicians and prophets, soldiers and scoundrels, all we creatures of that
disorderly reality have needed to ask little of the imagination, for the
major challenge before us has been the want of conventional resources to
make our life credible. This, my friends, is the nub of our solitude.
For, if these setbacks benumb us, we who are of its essence,
it is not difficult to understand that the mental talents of this side
of the world, in an ecstasy of contemplation of their own cultures, have
found themselves without a proper means to interpret us. One realizes
this when they insist on measuring us with the same yardstick with which
they measure themselves, without recalling that the ravages of life are
not the same for all, and that the search for one’s own identity is as
arduous and as bloody for us as it was for them. To interpret our
reality through schemas which are alien to us only has the effect of making
us even more unknown, even less free, even more solitary. Perhaps
venerable old Europe would be more sympathetic if it tried to see us in
its own past; if it remembered that London needed three hundred years to
build her first defensive wall and another three hundred before her first
bishop; that Rome debated in the darkness of uncertainty for twenty centuries
before an Etruscan king rooted her in history, and that even in the sixteenth
century the pacifist Swiss of today, who so delight us with their mild
cheeses and their cheeky clocks, made Europe bloody as soldiers of fortune.
Even in the culminating phase of the Renaissance, twelve thousand mercenary
lansquenets of the Imperial armies sacked and razed Rome, cutting down
eight thousand of its inhabitants.
I have no desire to give shape to the ideals of Tonio Kröger,
whose dream of a union between the chaste North and a passionate South
excited Thomas Mann in this place fifty three years ago. But I believe
that those clear-sighted Europeans who also struggle here for a wider homeland,
more humane and just, could help us more if they were to revise fundamentally
their way of seeing us. Their solidarity with our aspirations does
not make us feel any less alone so long as it is not made real by acts
of genuine support to people who desire to have their own life while sharing
the good things in the world.
Latin America has no desire to be, nor should it be, a pawn without
will, neither is it a mere shadow of a dream that its designs for independence
and originality should become an aspiration of the western hemisphere.
Nevertheless, advances in methods of travel which have reduced the huge
distances between our Americas and Europe seem to have increased our cultural
distance. Why are we granted unreservedly a recognition of our originality
in literature when our attempts, in the face of enormous difficulties,
to bring about social change are denied us with all sorts of mistrust?
Why must they think that the system of social justice imposed by advanced
European nations upon their peoples cannot also be an objective for us
Latin Americans but with different methods in different conditions?
No: the violence and disproportionate misery of our history are the result
of secular injustice and infinite bitterness and not a plot hatched three
thousand leagues distance from home. But many European leaders and
thinkers have thought so, with all the childlike regression of grandfathers
who have forgotten the life-giving madness of youth, as if it were not
possible to live a destiny other than one at the mercy of the two great
leaders and masters of the world.
Nevertheless, in the face of oppression, pillage and abandonment,
our reply is life. Neither floods nor plagues, nor famine nor cataclysms,
nor even eternal war century after century have managed to reduce the tenacious
advantage that life has over death. It is an advantage which is on
the increase and quickens apace: every year there are seventy-four million
more births than deaths, a sufficient number of new living souls to populate
New York every year seven times over. The majority of them are born
in countries with few resources, and among these, naturally, the countries
of Latin America. On the other hand, the more prosperous nations
have succeeded in accumulating sufficient destructive power to annihilate
one hundred times over not only every human being who has ever existed
but every living creature ever to have graced this planet of misfortune.
On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said in this
very place, “I refuse to admit the end of mankind.” I should not
feel myself worthy of standing where he once stood were I not fully conscious
that, for the first time in the history of humanity, the colossal disaster
which he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now simply a scientific
possibility. Face to face with a reality that overwhelms us, one
which over man’s perceptions of time must have seemed a utopia, tellers
of tales who, like me, are capable of believing anything, feel entitled
to believe that it is not yet too late to undertake the creation of a minor
utopia: a new and limitless utopia for life wherein no one can decide for
others how they are to die, where love really can be true and happiness
possible, where the lineal generations of one hundred years of solitude
will have at last and for ever a second chance on earth.
Translated by Richard Cardwell
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