However, this is just an appearance. What happened on 11 September is an ominous silent presence that hovers behind all my conversations with friends in New York and, from time to time, crops up in conversation and in everyday life in most unexpected ways. In the studio of the painter and sculptor Manolo Valdés, on 16th Street, I discover some heads wearing impressive hats made out of waste materials, and my reaction, and that of the person with me, are identical: ‘A homage to New York wounded by 11 September!’ In fact, the artist had made these sculptures some time back, but this fact does not change one iota the effect that they have on a spectator after that event: they have been imbued with a symbolism and a dramatic quality that their creator could not have imagined. Without the cataclysm, they would have just been daring experiments in transforming materials found by chance into aesthetic objects that express the fantasy and skill of an artist; now they also manifest their rage and their solidarity in the face of the violence inflicted on a city that Manolo Valdés is a part of.
In the residence of the Spanish Ambassador to the UN, Inocencio Arias, I discover an oil painting that I have seen before, but which now has become another painting. On the canvas, the artist himself, with his back to us, is contemplating a New York of radiant skyscrapers, in which, in the foreground, the Twin Towers of Wall Street stand out. It is a very beautiful painting, with very vivid colours, which, in my memory, communicated a cheerful and playful image, full of joy and life. The 11 September changed that canvas; it imbued it with a sense of apocalyptic prophecy, so that now, although it is still beautiful, it is a picture without a trace of humour, a tragic work that evokes nostalgia, mute rage and sadness.
But I found the most dramatic homage to the victims of the most lethal terrorist attack in history not in New York, but in the Arts Institute in Chicago, where I went to see an extraordinary exhibition dedicated to the nine weeks that Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin lived together in Arles in 1888. This difficult period of coexistence, that caused traumas and deep wounds in both artists, also produced a flowering of master works which leave the viewer astonished, dumbstruck. In the Arts Institute there is also, in a secluded and shaded room, among imposing columns that seem funereal, a collection of large photographs in which the Twin Towers are depicted at different times of the day and night, in different seasons and climates. These images are a selection from a vast artistic undertaking, which lasted almost three years, and seems to have been born out of a mysterious premonition. The photographer, Joel Meyerowitz, whom I had occasion to meet, told me this with a certain anxiety, as if he had yet to comprehend fully the strange mixture of chance, coincidence and working on a hunch that induced him, without really knowing why, over these last three years, to photograph hundreds, thousands of times, from the window of his New York studio, the towers of the World Trade Center, those giants of steel, mortar and glass that exerted such a fascination over him. In his photos, the Twin Towers are one and many at the same time, as they float half blurred in the mist of dawn, illuminate the night with their thousands of fireflies, or burn like torches in the splendour of the midday sun. Ostentatious or furtive, explicit or half enveloped by shadows, these constructions that were captured by the enquiring lens of Joel Meyerowitz, and are now viewed from a point of absence, have acquired the nature of icons, symbols, totems, gravestones to a civilisation brutally faced with a threat of extinction. The danger comes not just from the bombs or the biological weapons that terrorist obscurantism can use to attack civilisation; it also comes from the panic and rage that might lead that civilisation to limit its most precious attribute, freedom, in the name of security. I have rarely seen a photographic exhibition as intense and provocative as the one that has turned the basement of the Arts Institute into a funeral chamber.
The terrorist act that, on 11 September, blew up the Twin Towers and killed almost five thousand office workers, employees, workers, firemen and policemen, was diabolically planned to cause not just a human tragedy and enormous material damage, but also a psychological effect that will, perhaps, be more difficult to overcome than the grief or the physical destruction: a sense of insecurity, instability and uncertainty that US society had not known before now. If a band of fanatics could bring down those towers that challenged the heavens, what even worse atrocities might they commit? Suddenly, as an effect of 11 September, the entertaining horrors of science fiction and blockbuster cinema have lost that sense of unreality that made them innocuous and enjoyable; they seem realist and prophetic. Now, the idea that a gang of demented fundamentalists, with ample economic resources, might explode a nuclear device in Fifth Avenue – or in Piccadilly Circus or the Champs-Elysées – or poison the air, the water or the food of a city, or infect it with killer bacteria, is no longer an entertaining amusement and has become a sinister reality of our time. From now on, that nightmare will haunt us.
I say ‘us’, because although I am not a New Yorker and do not live in New York, I have never felt a foreigner in Manhattan and, like many millions of beings from around the world who have spent time in this city of skyscrapers, or visited as tourists, I also felt, on 11 September, that this apocalyptic event had also inflicted personal damage on me, destroying and obliterating something that, it’s difficult to explain, also belonged to me.
I have only once spent several months at a stretch in New York – teaching for a semester at Columbia University – but, since 1966, when I went for the first time, I have visited the city on innumerable occasions, usually for a few days. However, on each of these visits, I always felt that I was living much more intensely there for this handful of days, doing more things, getting more enthusiastic and tired than I could have done in any other city. I have always felt in New York that I was in the centre of the world, in modern Babylon, a sort of Borgesian aleph, containing all the languages, races, religions and cultures of the planet, a place that, like a giant heart, sends out to the furthest corners of the globe fashions, vices, values, trivia, ways of behaving, music and images that have been formed by the incredible mixture of people in the city. The feeling of being a tiny grain of sand in an Arabian Nights cosmopolis might be somewhat depressing; but, paradoxically, it is at the same time very energising, as Julio Cortázar once remarked about Paris: ‘It is infinitely preferable to be nothing in a city that is everything than to be everything in a city that is nothing.’ I never felt what he felt about the capital of France; but in New York, yes, every time.
New York belongs to nobody and everybody, from the Afghan taxi driver who can barely mutter a word of English, to the turbaned and long-bearded Sikh, to the Asians cooking up mysterious concoctions in China Town, to the Neapolitan who sings tarantellas to customers in a restaurant in Little Italy (but who was born in Manhattan and has never set foot in Italy). It belongs to the Puerto Ricans and the Dominicans who drown out the streets of the barrio with plena and salsa and merengue music, and to the Russians, Ukrainians, Kosovars, Andalucians, Greeks, Nigerians, Irish, Pakistanis, Ethiopians and citizens from dozens of countries, from the most exotic and even imaginary places, who, as soon as they set foot on this soil, through the integrating magic of the city, became New Yorkers.
Cosmopolitanism is diametrically opposed to fanaticism. A fanatic is a fanatic because he sees himself as the absolute master of a single truth, incompatible with any other, and for that reason he has the right to use any means to abolish differences, all the beliefs and convictions that do not coincide identically with his own. For that reason it would be impossible for fanatics of whatever shape or hue, with their obtuse tunnel-vision mentality, not to hate the mixed, plural diversity, that cannot be reduced to a single way of believing, enjoying, thinking and acting, of this Babelic, multiracial and multi-cultural city, this refraction on a small scale of the infinite variety of humanity. For those who dream of unifying, integrating and levelling the planet inside a straitjacket of a single dogma, a single god or a single religion, New York is without doubt the first enemy to be defeated.
But, for that same reason, all those of us the world over, who might disagree on some things, but who believe that accepting the diversity of beliefs, traditions and cultures within a system of pacific coexistence is the basic foundation of civilisation, have been affected by the blowing-up of the Twin Towers on 11 September. This assault came to remind us that the old obscurantist enemy is still there, obstinate, always trying, despite all its defeats, to obstruct in the name of a single inhuman truth, the advance of a humanity without dogmas, made up of relative truths, in permanent dialogue and interaction. The struggle against the ever renewing Hydra’s heads will never end.
New York, November 2001
Iraq Diary
1. Savage Freedom
Iraq is the freest country in the world, but since freedom without order and without law is tantamount to chaos, it is also the most dangerous. There are no customs houses or officers, and the CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority, presided over by Paul Bremer, has abolished until 31 December of this year all tariffs and duties on imports, so the borders of Iraq are like sieves through which every product imaginable, except arms, can enter the country without difficulty and at no cost. On the border with Jordan, an American officer on guard told me that this week an average of three thousand vehicles a day had entered Iraq, laden with goods of all kinds.
For that reason the two long highways, Karrada In and Karrada Out, that zigzag through Baghdad, are full of countless shops that have spilled out onto the street and turned the pavements into an exuberant bazaar, offering an enormous variety of industrial goods, food and clothing. It is also a paradise for pirate records, compact discs and videos. But what the inhabitants of Baghdad are buying most eagerly are satellite dishes, to pick up stations from all over the world, something that they could never do before, and which angers the conservative clerics who see television as an invasion of corrupt Western pornography. Iraqis can now surf the Internet freely, which was a crime under Saddam Hussein, and it is interesting to see in the Internet cafés, which have spread like mushrooms throughout Baghdad, the passion with which people in that city, especially the young, are embracing this new technology that links them to the world. But the commerce on the street is more akin to primitive barter than to modern buying and selling. Since there are no banks, cheques or credit cards, everything is paid for in cash, and, because of the freefall of the dinar (there were 1,500 dinars to a dollar the day I left), to make any purchase buyers must take along great bundles of notes – suitcases sometimes – which can be snatched from them at any moment by the current plague of ubiquitous Ali Babas. For, if there are no customs officials, there are also no policemen or judges or police stations where one can report a robbery or an assault. The Ministries are not working, nor are the public services, the post or the telephones, and there are no laws or regulations to control what a citizen can and cannot do. Everything is left to the intuition, the resourcefulness or the prudence of each individual. The result is an uncurbed freedom that leaves people feeling abandoned and terrified.
The only authority is represented by the tanks, the armoured personnel carriers, the trucks, the armed jeeps, and by the foot patrols of the US soldiers who are everywhere, crossing and re-crossing the streets, armed with rifles and machine guns, shaking the buildings with the power of their armoured vehicles, but, up close, looking as lost and terrified as the people of Baghdad. Since I arrived, attacks against them have been increasing systematically, with some thirty killed and about three hundred wounded. It is not surprising, therefore, that they seem apprehensive and finger their weapons nervously as they patrol these streets full of people with whom they cannot communicate. The heat is stifling, and the soldiers, laden with helmets, bulletproof vests and military paraphernalia, must suffer from it even worse than everyone else. The four times I tried to speak to them – many are very young – I got only the briefest of replies. They were all sweating profusely and their eyes were darting everywhere, like nervous grasshoppers. But my daughter Morgana had a more personal conversation with a soldier of Mexican origin, who, from up high in his tank, suddenly opened his heart to her: ‘I can’t stand it any more. I’ve been three months here and I can’t bear it. Everyday I ask myself what the hell I am doing here. This morning they killed two of my friends. I don’t know when I’ll get back to my wife and son, damn it.’
There are lots of stories about the Americans who are patrolling Baghdad, most of them doubtless exaggerated or apocryphal. For example, that in desperation at the mounting attacks, they burst into houses and ransack them under the pretext of looking for arms. I tried to confirm some of these charges and they were invariably unfounded. But the truth is that no one knows what to believe, about this or anything else. For the first time in its history, there is complete freedom of press in Iraq – anyone can bring out a newspaper or a magazine without needing permission – and there are more than fifty newspapers in Baghdad alone (where, since April, some seventy political parties have emerged, some comprising just one person), but the reports that they print are so contradictory and fantastical that everyone complains that they have no idea what is happening.
I went to the house of Kahtaw K. Al Ani, in the Sadea neighbourhood, because I’d been told that there had been a violent incident in a house next to his the previous night, with a number of deaths. In fact, it had happened five houses down. A patrol had kicked the door down. ‘This is no good, sir!’ And there was an Iraqi fatality. But did they find arms? He does not know and does not want to know. Mr Al Ani had lived three years in Reading and has good memories of England. He had worked in the Ministry of Agriculture and now, like all civil servants of the deposed regime, he had been sacked by the CPA. Isn’t that most unfair? He and his fellow workers hated Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party that they had been forced to join, and they were happy that the Americans were liberating them from dictatorship. But what sort of liberation is this that has left tens of thousands of families who felt that they were victims of the regime unemployed and facing poverty? ‘This is no good, sir.’ He is an elderly, solemn man, with closely cropped hair, who sweats profusely. His sons mop his sweat with paper napkins and he repeatedly apologises that, because of the lack of electricity, the fan is not working. Before, he had hated Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party, but now he hates the Americans. When he says goodbye to me, he shows me his car: he does not take it onto the road because he does not want it stolen, and he is afraid to leave the house in case it is burgled and burned to the ground. ‘This is no good, sir.’
Anti-Israeli feeling is deeply rooted in the Iraqi people, because they sympathise with the Palestinians, because under the dictatorship there was a remorseless propaganda offensive against Israel, and, also, doubtless, because in 1981 the Israelis blew up the Osirak nuclear station that was under construction with French technical aid. Since the liberation, you hear all kinds of rumours about an invasion of Jewish capital into Iraq, some of them wildly fanciful. As we passed the Hotel Ekal, on Wazig Avenue, two Iraqi friends pointed out the old, grey building that looked closed and assured me: ‘The Jews from Israel have bought it. They are buying the whole city at rock bottom prices.’ In the following days, I would hear, from different sources, that Israel had obtained from the CPA a monopoly control over future tourism in Iraq, a total fabrication, but my informants were convinced it was true. One morning when, after visiting the second-hand book market in Al Mutanabbi Road, I was having a coffee in the Merchants’ Champion café, there was a bit of a commotion when customers noticed in an adjoining street, surrounded by spectacular bodyguards – black waistcoats, designer sunglasses, sub-machine guns – an elegant gentleman with a flowered tie and a multicoloured handkerchief in his jacket pocket (accessories that nobody sports in the heat of Baghdad). Everyone in the café muttered indignantly: ‘That’s the Israeli Ambassador.’ In fact, this flamboyant individual was the Italian Ambassador. But fantasies generate realities, as novelists know very well: a few days after this episode, the S
unni imams in Mosul issued a fatwa, threatening with death any Iraqi found selling houses or land to Jews.
Three wars, twelve years of international embargo and thirty plus years of the Ba’ath Party satraps have turned Baghdad, which in the fifties was known as a very attractive place, into the ugliest city in the world. The strategic centres of power of Saddam Hussein, the Ministries and the state enterprises and many of the tyrant’s residencies, have been gutted by American precision bombing. And everywhere there are the houses, buildings and installations that were looted and burned in the great criminal witches’ sabbath that gripped the city after the American troops moved in, and which has still not yet run its course. The Ali Babas ransacked and stripped half the city bare. But who were these looters? To celebrate his re-election to the presidency with one hundred per cent of the vote on 15 October 2002, Saddam Hussein opened all the prisons in the country and released all the common criminals (while, at the same time, ordering the execution of most of the political prisoners). How many did he let out? I am given different figures, ranging from thirty thousand to one hundred thousand. This does not explain all of the excesses, but certainly a good number of them, Archbishop Fernando Filoni, the papal nuncio, assures me. (He is a specialist in the field of international disaster areas: he began his diplomatic career in Sri Lanka, when the Tamils began their killings, and he represented the Vatican in Tehran during the bombing raids of the war with Iraq, ‘which did not let us sleep’.) ‘The lack of experience of freedom is what causes these disasters. That is why the Holy Father, who knows a great deal, was opposed to this war. Because they were in such a hurry, the Americans were suddenly faced with something that they had not foreseen: generalised vandalism.’