Odd Jobs (91 page)

T
HE
L
ONG
N
IGHT OF
F
RANCISCO
S
ANCTIS
, by Humberto Costantini, translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. 184 pp. Harper & Row, 1985.

T
HE
I
NVENTION OF
M
OREL
and Other Stories
, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated from the Spanish by Ruth L. C. Simms. 237 pp. University of Texas Press, 1985.

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
, beautifully produced by Knopf and given a bright, smooth-running translation by Randolph Hogan, is not, actually, fiction, but a “real-life” adventure—the account by a twenty-year-old Colombian sailor, Luis Alejandro Velasco, of his ten days adrift in a raft in the Caribbean without food or water. It happened in the winter of 1955, and Velasco briefly became a national hero for his feat of survival. At the time, Gabriel García Márquez was a staff reporter for the Bogotá daily
El Espectador;
interviewing the young sailor in twenty sessions of six hours each, he was pleasantly surprised to find that Velasco had “an exceptional instinct for the art of narrative, an astonishing memory and ability to synthesize, and enough uncultivated dignity to be able to laugh at his own heroism.” Fifteen years later, in an introduction written for the first book publication of the resulting story, García Márquez recalled how he and his interview subject “put together an accurate and concise account of his ten days at sea. It was so detailed and so exciting that my only concern was finding readers who would believe it.” The
story, under the sailor’s by-line, ran in fourteen consecutive installments, and “readers scrambled in front of the [newspaper] building to buy back issues in order to collect the entire series.” The government was less enthusiastic, as Velasco’s narrative revealed that he and seven drowned fellow crew members were swept overboard not due to a storm but because their destroyer, returning from eight months of repairs in Mobile, Alabama, was loaded with contraband American goods—refrigerators, television sets, washing machines—that spilled from the deck in heavy seas on a sunny day. The Rojas dictatorship denied the scandal, and
El Espectador
countered by printing sailors’ on-board snapshots showing the illegal cargo in the background. Within months,
El Espectador
was shut down by government reprisals, and Velasco himself, who refused to change his story, had to leave the Navy. By 1957 the former national hero occupied the obscurity of “a desk at a bus company.”

These unfortunate consequences—which helped precipitate García Márquez into a wandering exile and his eventual fate as a world-class novelist—add a mere footnote to the sorry history of Latin-American censorship and mendacious repression; what matters now is that the shipwrecked sailor told and the youthful journalist conjured into print an enchanting tale, quite thrilling in its lucid, unhistrionic, often comic revelation of human fortitude and ability to absorb hardship. In its exposition of suffering solitude it ranks with Admiral Byrd’s
Alone
and Mungo Park’s
Travels;
along with the stoic heroism, the succession of perils and extreme sensations, there is something rollicking and colorful, an ironic good humor, which we tend to credit to the author more than the narrator. The power of invention, of course, is also the power of discovery, and perhaps García Márquez’s only contribution to the story’s many vivid surreal touches was to hear them and put them down. Velasco’s Alabama girlfriend, for instance, is named Mary Address, and the surname is so unusual it stops us cold and makes her as oddly real as Olive Oyl, or the bar called the Joe Palooka where the Colombian sailors congregate. Oddly real, too, is the fin of a shark as it glides past the little raft: “In fact, nothing appears more innocuous than a shark fin. It doesn’t look like part of an animal, even less part of a savage beast. It’s green and rough, like the bark of a tree. As I watched it edge past the side of the raft, I imagined it might have a fresh flavor, somewhat bitter, like the skin of a vegetable.” The starving sailor, on the fifth day of his ordeal, manages to capture a small gull and to wring its neck; but his attempt to eat the bird raw proves a grisly failure:

What he
can
chew and swallow, and what gives him courage to keep living, is a casually pocketed business card from a clothing store in Mobile: “I could feel a tiny piece of mashed-up cardboard move all the way down to my stomach, and from that moment on I felt I would be saved, that I wouldn’t be destroyed by sharks.” His attempt to disassemble and eat his shoes is less successful and produces, when he is safe in Colombia, his appearance in shoe advertisements—“because his shoes were so sturdy that he hadn’t been able to tear them apart to eat them.” The grinning gods of anticlimax hover above Velasco’s entire adventure: having finally sighted land and swum to where his feet can touch ground, he is almost drowned in the undertow and then is driven nearly crazy by his frustrated attempts to open a coconut on the shore. His return to civilization has many macabre wrinkles: his rescuers feed him only sugar water, and he is escorted to the distant hospital by a parade of six hundred men, plus women, children, and animals—a procession out of one of García Márquez’s thronged novels.

The starved, sun-baked, semi-delirious sailor, at last granted human contact, discovers within himself a primary aesthetic impulse: “When I heard him [the first man he meets] speak I realized that, more than thirst, hunger, and despair, what tormented me most was the need to tell someone what had happened to me.” Throughout Velasco’s narrative we feel the thinness of the difference between life and death—a few feet of heaving ocean separate him from his less lucky shipmates in the confusion after they are swept overboard, and a fragile cork-and-rope raft holds him afloat, through the black night and burning day, in “a dense sea filled with strange creatures.” The closeness of the living and the dead is one of García Márquez’s themes, but in this journalistic narrative it emerges without morbidity, as a fact among many. The factuality of the real sailor’s direct and artless telling bracingly mingles with the beginnings of the writer’s “magic realism.”

• • •

I the Supreme
, by Augusto Roa Bastos, is a deliberately prodigious book, an elaborate and erudite opus saturated in the verbal bravura of classic modernism. Its Paraguayan author, a professor at the University of Toulouse until his retirement last year, has lived in exile since 1947; he found haven in Buenos Aires until 1976, when—to quote an interview he gave the Madrid journal
Leviatán
—“the military dictatorship was beginning to deploy the hecatomb” and “it was necessary to escape the rather sinister climate which was incubating.” A journalist and poet in Paraguay, he began to write fiction in Argentina, most notably a long novel centered upon the Guariní Indians,
Hijo del hombre
(
Son of Man
), and
Yo el supremo
, published in 1974.

“El Supremo” was the popular nickname for the founder of independent Paraguay, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who, after the bloodless coup against Spanish colonial rule in 1811, went from being secretary of the ruling junta to being Supreme Dictator; he ruled the country possessively and absolutely from 1814 until his death in 1840. A lawyer and one-time postulate for the priesthood, he held the degrees of master of philosophy and doctor of theology; he never married, and lived austerely, in an isolation akin to that which he imposed on the country he had founded. He forbade immigration and emigration and maintained neither diplomatic nor commercial ties with foreign countries. Within the embattled, landlocked country, his policies were aimed at developing a sense of independence and solidarity; a follower of the French Enlightenment, he curbed the power of the church and the aristocracy, introduced modern methods of agriculture, defended the rights of the Guaraní Indians, and maintained a formidable army. He wore a black suit and red cape and was rumored to be something of a sorceror. Paraguay, known to Americans mostly as the remote domain of the long-lived dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, has had an interesting history. From its capital of Asunción the Spanish ruled a vast area and founded Buenos Aires. Its southeastern region was the site of communistic Jesuit missions—the eighteenth-century
reducciones
, which one writer on Latin America, Carlos Rangel, has described as “the best possible materialization of a
City of God
on earth.” And in the War of the Triple Alliance (1865–70) Paraguay defended itself against its two mighty neighbors, Brazil and Argentina, at the staggering cost of over half its population, including three-quarters of its men.

The founder of this stubborn country, a George Washington with
elements of Huey Long, Enver Hoxha, and Merlin, lies dying and raving, aloud and within his skull, through the over four hundred large pages of
I the Supreme
, whose texture is varied with double-column excerpts from historical works, some of which are imaginary.
^§
The valor and labor and intelligence exerted in this novel and in its faithful translation (including bits from the Guaraní, Portuguese, and Latin) intimidate criticism; suffice it to say that, if a masterpiece, it is the sort one should read for academic credit, and that much of its charm and interest presumably lie bound up in its virtuoso use of the original language. Many books have gone into the making of this book: contemporary and historical accounts of Francia’s Paraguay, government documents and the eighteenth-century sources of the dictator’s own extensive erudition, and the crabbed modern works of Joyce, Borges, and García Márquez, among others—there is even a sharp whiff of contemporary French interest in the elusiveness of texts and the multiplicity of signs.

In books as in dinosaurs, however, largeness asks a strong spine, and
I the Supreme
holds no action as boldly intelligible as Leopold Bloom’s peregrination or the hunt for the Great White Whale. The looming, and virtually only, human relationship exists between the dying Francia and his obsequious secretary, Policarpo Patiño; their dialogues are given not only without quotation marks but without dashes or indentation, so that the secretary and dictator (himself once a secretary) tend to merge, while allusions to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza thicken around them. The central issue of suspense—the authorship of an anti-Francia pasquinade nailed to the door of the cathedral—is never, that this reader noticed, resolved. Nor does the author’s attitude toward his polymorphous, logorrheic hero come into clear view. Repulsion and fascination, clearly, but to what end? A kind of long curse concludes the novel—an enthusiastic descriptive catalogue of the insects and worms that will devour El Supremo’s corpse, and some condemnatory sentences in the author’s (or Patiño’s) voice:

One is led, by this learned book bristling with quaint particulars and amiable puns and verbal tumbles (“Yet the genes of gens engender tenacious traitorous taints”; “the filigreed fleuron in the vergered-perjured paper, the flagellated letters”), into a spiritual dungeon, a miasmal atmosphere of hate and bitter recalcitrance. The fictional Francia is most eloquent in his inveighing against the others—the devilish ecclesiastics, the “Porteños” of Buenos Aires—who threaten his power. He knows no positive connections; all is betrayal and potential assault. The inanimate objects that inspire and console and fortify him—a polished skull, a fallen meteorite, his ivory pen—supplant human faces and voices and whatever humane motives inspired, at the forging of a nation, his polity. The static, circling quality of many modernist masterworks is here overlaid with a political rigidity, an immobilizing rage that seizes both the tyrant and the exiled writer.
I the Supreme
differs from García Márquez’s
Autumn of the Patriarch
in that the dictator-hero of the latter is a coarse ignoramus, whereas Francia, in Roa Bastos’s reconstruction, suffers, amid the trappings of omnipotence, the well-known impotence and isolation of the modern intellectual.

The muddy, murderous atmosphere of Latin-American politics is concentrated alarmingly in Osvaldo Soriano’s short novel,
A Funny Dirty Little War
. “Dirty war” conjures up, a bit misleadingly, Vietnam (“It’s a dirty little war but we have to fight it”—Dwight Eisenhower) and the campaign of domestic oppression carried on by the Argentine junta now on trial; the Spanish title,
No habrá más penas ni olvido
, is a line of a tango, “Mi Buenos Aires querido,” and translates as “There shall be no more sorrow or longing.” Soriano is an Argentinian who went into exile in 1976, when the junta took over, and returned in 1983, in which same year his book, written in 1980, could be published in Buenos Aires, having been previously published in Spain and, translated, in Italy and a number of other European countries. In 1984 it was made into a movie
which won an award in Berlin—an action movie, presumably, since
A Funny Dirty Little War
is an absolute of sorts: it is virtually all action, and the action is virtually all ugly. In little more than a hundred pages, the attempt of one petty official to oust another farcically, inexorably, horribly sweeps a small Argentine town into a local holocaust of violence and murder.