Odd Jobs (90 page)

Even here, the reader can’t ignore the novelist-reporter, a more volatile and accessible character than do-gooding, pedantic, flat-footed (literally) Alejandro Mayta. We are invited to admire, as spontaneously as we admire the handsome, pin-striped hidalgo on the back of the book jacket, the imagination that can conjure up, say, the comic fussiness of a tiny left-wing splinter group in solemn session, or the nauseated feelings of a young wife who discovers that her husband is a homosexual, or the numb exaltation of a citified idealist engaging, while beset with altitude sickness, in a gun battle in the Andes. All wonderfully done, though we are disconcertingly reminded that it might have been done quite otherwise, that art is as arbitrary as truth is relative. The last chapter, like one of those Nabokovian endings in which the scenery falls away and the cocky puppetmaster faces the audience directly, piles twist upon twist and should be left its provocative surprises. The author, all but naming himself Mario Vargas Llosa, engagingly confesses to his character, “This conversation is my final chapter. You can’t refuse me now, it would be like taking a cake out of the oven too soon.”

The question keeps arising, in the reader’s mind and on the printed
page, why did our hero, the author, take as his subject this obscure and defeated revolutionary, Alejandro Mayta? Because, the answer suggests itself, the subject is political, and it is the proper and inevitable task of the South American novelist to write politically. As the Vargas Llosa persona explains to an interview subject, “I think the only way to write stories is to start with History—with a capital H.” Lima, the city founded by Pizarro, from which Spain administered a continent of gold and slaves, certainly has History; the riddle of Latin-American poverty and unrest and crisis has its answer here if anywhere. The physical degradation of the city is far advanced; ubiquitous garbage begins and ends the novel. The proliferating slums and even the horrors of the dreadfully overcrowded jail are remorselessly described. Nor is there a rural idyll to offer contrast or relief; the Indians still flock to the wretched shack cities, from Andean towns like Quero:

Some reviewers in the United States have taken
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
to be a satire on left-wing commitment. It is true, comedy and even farce are found in the ineffectuality of the seven-man Trotskyite cell—utterly isolated, with its strenuous jargon, from the masses it seeks to educate and liberate—and in the inadequacies of Mayta’s uprising, whose main troops consist of seven schoolboys who, failing to learn “The Internationale,” instead sing a school song and the national anthem as they bounce along in the revolution’s solitary truck. But, Vargas Llosa seems to say, a revolutionary seed
is
planted that day, amid all the absurdity; and in any case the need for a change shouts out on all sides, in the circumambient misery and disorder. His is a model of the most that political fiction can be: a description of actual social conditions and a delineation of personalities motivated by political concerns. Such motivation, of course, comes mixed with sexual and other intimate, clouded motives; yet it exists. All of the political-minded interviewees are left-wingers;
there are no junta spokesmen, no intransigent landowners, no fresh-faced
norte-americanos
insidiously urging the virtues of free enterprise. But in his shrewd and lively portraits of Peruvian lawyers and barbers and storekeepers Vargas Llosa catches well enough the tone of the cagey, improvising citizenry that makes do with a system and, having made do, resists sweeping change. The conservative inertia of a society is suggested, while its agitators are dramatized. The dozens of little anticlimactic careers sketched in the margins of Alejandro’s own anticlimactic career persuasively imply the limits of human aspiration and the defeat that awaits each dreaming, idealistic organism. If the novel has a moral, it might be, as a Peruvian bureaucrat tells the narrator, “When you start looking for purity in politics, you eventually get to unreality.”

The intelligence of Mario Vargas Llosa plays above the sad realities and unrealities with a coolness that should be distinguished from Nabokov’s hermetically aesthetic ardor and Gabriel García Márquez’s surreal fever. These two write prose that crests in poetic passages; whereas Vargas Llosa, to judge from this translation, writes in a way that is always adequately evocative but never spectacular. In the three hundred pages there is scarcely a simile. We are told that Mayta’s splayed feet “looked like clock hands permanently set at ten minutes to two,” and the sound of rats in the ceiling stirs the prose to this flourish: “Just then, they heard above their heads tiny sounds: light, multiple, invisible, repugnant, shapeless. For a few seconds it seemed like an earthquake.” Vargas Llosa is a great noter of the undermining sensation, the private crosscurrent: Mayta all through his day of violent revolution struggles against the dizzying, thumping symptoms of mountain sickness, and during his crucial hearing within his Trotskyite cell he “felt that the pile of
Workers Voice
he was sitting on had begun to tip over and he thought how ridiculous it would be if he slipped and took a fall.” This is one of the few novels I have read where the characters, in the midst of fighting for their lives, catch colds, realistically. As to the translation, I wish that Mr. Mac Adam [
sic
] had suppressed the rhyme in this rendering: “Yes, the small man in his vest and hat, surrounded by guerillas, ducking bullets being fired by guards from up in the mountains, begins to sneeze. Trying to put the squeeze on him, I ask …” And he disturbingly translates
josefinos
—the small boys from the Colegio San José who are meant to run errands for Mayta’s revolution and who end by carrying its rifles—as “joeboys,” a word I found in no dictionary but one of American slang, where it is
defined as “the male counterpart of a flapper,” and ascribed to “subdeb use” circa 1941.
^‡

Almost the only rich character alluded to in the tangled history of Alejandro Mayta is called Fuentes. It may be a coincidence, but the real Carlos Fuentes is indeed rich in acclaim and honors, on both sides of the border; he is Mexico’s best-known novelist. His commendable determination to comprehend both his native land and the United States (where he now lives, in Boston) and his generous desire to explain one to the other make me regret my opinion that his new novel,
The Old Gringo
, is a very stilted effort, static and wordy, a series of tableaux costumed in fustian and tinted a kind of sepia I had not thought commercially available since the passing of Stephen Vincent Benét:

Some spell. We are asked to believe that Ambrose Bierce—perhaps the least appealing figure of enduring worth in American literature—joined up with Pancho Villa in 1914; this has been often rumored, but the verifiable facts show only that he disappeared into Mexico in 1913. Bierce, in Fuentes’s fantasy, crosses the Chihuahua desert and becomes an instant father-figure both to Tomás Arroyo, a young rebel general who has returned to destroy the Miranda hacienda where he, the illegitimate son of the owner, was raised as a peasant, and to Harriet Winslow, a thirty-year-old schoolteacher from Fourteenth Street in
Washington, D.C., who has arrived to give English lessons to the Miranda children, not knowing that the entire family has suddenly and shrewdly departed. Harriet’s biological father, we are often reminded, was an Army captain who supposedly died in Cuba but by another interpretation surreptitiously lived right over on Sixteenth Street, sleeping with a black woman in the basement of a derelict mansion. Bierce, meanwhile, the old gringo, just wants to die, if only to get away from William Randolph Hearst, who has been employing him off and on for forty years. He marches straight into enemy fire but it doesn’t touch him; finally he has to court death by burning the precious papers—“papers as brittle as old silk,” a grant from the Spanish Crown—that prove to Tomás Arroyo his legitimate claim to the hacienda and its acreage. While waiting for their sour spiritual father to rig this roundabout suicide, General Arroyo and Miss Winslow take note of each other, and she is not too much the embodiment of interfering North American Puritanism (“Look at them, what these people need is education, not rifles. A good scrubbing, followed by a few lessons on how we do things in the United States, and you’d see an end to this chaos”) to do some fancy rutting in the general’s railway carriage, while thinking sweet nothings like “damn him, damn the brown fucker, damn the ugly greaser.” From these earthy moments (the lowest point comes when “he kissed her again, entombed in her mouth as in a cellar of menacing dogs”) the prose beats upward to such flights as “If it is necessary, our atomized consciousness invents love, imagines it or feigns it, but does not live without it, since in the midst of infinite dispersion, love, even if as a pretext, gives us the measure of our loss.” There is much similar rumination, leavened by a smattering of overheard Hemingway (“Harriet looked at the old gringo exactly as he wanted to be looked at before he died”), a neat trick or two (“Each closed his fists over the other’s”; “From the middle of the silent throng of sombreros and rebozos emerged those gray eyes fighting to retain a sense of their own identity, of personal dignity and courage in the midst of the vertiginous terror of the unexpected”), lots of phlegm and ochre dust, and dialogue of the fruitiest wood:

The Greek chorus of talk about the central figure (“The old gringo came to Mexico to die”; “Yes sir, you could see ‘farewell’ in his eyes”) doesn’t bring Ambrose Bierce to life, nor does the occasional paraphrase of one of his stories. He doesn’t even have a sense of humor, this writer of a thousand sardonic jokes. He remains a fist clenched upon nothing, upon the announced intention to die, as Harriet Winslow and Tomás Arroyo remain clenched around a few stylized, heavily insistent memories. The most vivid and least programmatic pages of
The Old Gringo
portray a middle-class Mexican woman’s reaction to a sudden rebel onslaught; this passage kindles an unforced interest, as if taking by surprise Fuentes’s stiff army of symbols. But generally the only thing moving in this dead landscape is the author’s mind as it spiders among his checkpoints, thickening the web of mirrors and keys and Oedipal fixations.

On the back of the book jacket the author states, “I have lived with this story for a long time.” He conceived it forty years ago, wrote the first ten pages in 1964, and took it up again for a month in 1970. He held the inspiration and its emblematic figures too long in his head, perhaps; they became petrified. Although the novel goes through the motions of establishing geographical and historical authenticity, we learn little about Mexico we didn’t know after seeing
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
and
Viva Zapata!
The glimpses of Washington, and Harriet’s life there, seem more animated, more exciting to the writer, than the horde of rebel Mexicans, with their slit eyes and terse mutterings. Revolution, which in Vargas Llosa’s book figures as a refracted complexity of mini-events and psychological shadows, has become in
The Old Gringo
a stock phantasmagoria the writer has sought to enrich with portentous Freudianism. Apropos of international as well as personal relations, Fuentes makes a point—“Did you know we are all the object of another’s imagination?”—not far from the point of Vargas Llosa’s ambiguous mock-researches. But in the Peruvian novel, the details are seen in a constantly changing light, by a restless intelligence. Though Fuentes is certainly intelligent, his novel lacks intelligence, in the sense of a speaking mind responsively interacting with recognizable particulars. Its dreamlike and betranced glaze, its brittle grotesquerie do not feel intrinsic or natural; its surrealism has not been earned by any concentration on the real. Latin-American surrealism has enchanted the globe, but its freedoms cannot be claimed as a matter of course. Mere mannerism results.

T
HE
S
TORY OF
A S
HIPWRECKED
S
AILOR
, by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Randolph Hogan. 106 pp. Knopf, 1986.

I
THE
S
UPREME
, by Augusto Roa Bastos, translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane. 438 pp. Knopf, 1986.

A F
UNNY
D
IRTY
L
ITTLE
W
AR
, by Osvaldo Soriano, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor. 108 pp. Readers International, 1986.