Daydreaming, with the expression of someone on the moon, he wondered how light would look to a person able to ride on a beam. When he became a man, he found the answer in the theory of relativity, won a, Nobel Prize, and deserved many more for his answers to other questions born in his mind of the mysterious link between Mozart’s sonatas and the theorem of Pythagoras, or of the defiant arabesques that the smoke from his extra-long pipe drew in the air.
Einstein believed that science was a way of revealing the beauty of the universe. The most famous of sages has the saddest eyes in human history.
(150 and 228)
1945: Buenos Aires
Perón
General MacArthur takes charge of the Japanese, and Spruille Braden of the Argentines. To lead Argentina down the good road to Democracy, U.S. ambassador Braden brings together all the parties, Conservative to Communist, in a united front against Juan Domingo Perón. According to the State Department, Colonel Perón, the government’s minister of labor, is the chief of a gang of Nazis. Look magazine calls him a pervert who keeps photos of nude Patagonian Indian women in his desk drawer along with pictures of Hitler and Mussolini.
Nonetheless, Perón flies swiftly along the road to the presidency with Evita, the radio actress with the feverish eyes and enticing voice; and when he gets tired, or doubtful, or scared, it is she who takes the bit in her teeth. Perón now attracts more people than all the parties put together. When they call him “agitator,” he accepts the epithet as an honor. VIPs and the fashionably chic chant the name of Ambassador Braden on the street corners of Buenos Aires, waving hats and handkerchiefs; but in worker barrios, the shirtless shout the name Perón. These laboring people, exiles in their own land, dumb from so much shutting up, find both a fatherland and a voice in this unusual minister who always takes their side.
Perón’s popularity climbs and climbs as he shakes the dust off forgotten social laws or creates new ones. His is the law that compels respect for the rights of those who break their backs on estancias and plantations. The law does not merely remain on paper; thus the country peon, almost a thing, becomes a rural worker complete with a trade union.
(311 and 327)
1945: The Fields of Tucumán
The Familiar
flies into a rage over these novelties that disturb his dominions. Workers’ unions infuriate and scare him more than the hilt of a knife.
On the sugarcane plantations of northern Argentina, the Familiar is responsible for the obedience of the peons. If one answers back or acts impertinently, the Familiar devours him in a single gulp. He moves with a clank of chains and stinks of sulphur, but no one knows if he is the devil in person or just an official. Only his victims have seen him, and no one seems able to add up the accounts. It is rumored that at night the Familiar turns into an enormous snake and patrols the sheds where the peons sleep, or that he crouches in wait on the roads in the form of a dog with flaming eyes, all black, with huge teeth and claws.
(103 and 328)
A Wake for a Little Angel
In the northern provinces of Argentina, they don’t weep for the death of small children. One less mouth on earth, one more angel in heaven. Death is drunk and dances from the first cock-crow, sucking in long draughts of carob-bean liquor and chicha to the rhythm of bass drum and guitar. While the dancers whirl and stomp their feet, the child is passed from arm to arm. Once the child has been well rocked and fully celebrated, everyone breaks into song to start it on its flight to Paradise. There goes the little traveler, clothed in its Sunday best, as the song swells; and they bid it farewell, setting off fireworks, taking great care not to burn its wings.
(104)
1945: The Fields of Tucumán
Yupanqui
He has the stony face of an Indian who stares impassively at the mountain that stares back at him, but he comes from the plains of the south, from the echoless pampa that hides nothing, this gaucho singer of the mysteries of the Argentine north. He comes on a horse, stopping anyplace, with anyone, at the whim of the road. To continue his journey he sings, singing what he has traveled, Atahualpa Yupanqui. And he sings to keep history going, because the history of the poor is either sung or lost as well he knows, he who is left-handed on the guitar and in his thinking about the world.
(202, 270, and 472)
1946: La Paz
The Rosca
At the summit there are three; at the foot of the mountain three million. The mountain is tin and is called Bolivia.
The three at the summit form the rosca: Simón Patiño in the center; on one side, Carlos Aramayo; on the other, Mauricio Hochschild. Half a century ago, Patiño was a down-and-out miner, but a fairy touched him with her magic wand and turned him into one of the world’s richest men. Now he wears a vest with a gold chain, and kings and presidents sit at his table. Aramayo comes from the local aristocracy, Hochschild, from the airplane that brought him to Bolivia. Each of them has more money than the state.
All that the tin earns remains outside Bolivia. To avoid taxes, Patiño’s headquarters are in the United States, Aramayo’s in Switzerland, and Hochschild’s in Chile. Patiño pays Bolivia fifty dollars a year in income tax, Aramayo twenty-two, Hochschild nothing. Of every two children born at the rosca’s mines, one doesn’t survive.
Each member of the rosca has at his disposal a newspaper and various ministers and legislators. It is traditional for the foreign minister to receive a monthly salary from Patiño Mines. But now that President Gualberto Villarroel suggests the rosca pay taxes and salaries that are not merely symbolic, what is there to do but hatch a plot?
(97)
1946: La Paz
Villarroel
President Villarroel does not defend himself. He abandons himself to fate—as if it were a matter of fate.
He is attacked by paid gunmen followed by a great motley crowd of godly women and students. Brandishing torches, black flags, and bloody sheets, the insurgents invade the government palace, throw Villarroel off a balcony, then hang what’s left of him, naked, from a lamppost.
Besides defying the rosca, Villarroel had wanted to give equal rights to whites and Indians, wives and lovers, legitimate and illegitimate children.
The world cheers the crime. The leaders of democracy commend the liquidation of a tyrant in the pay of Hitler, who with unpardonable insolence sought to raise the rock-bottom price of tin. And in Bolivia, a country that never stops toiling for its own misfortune, the fall of what is and the restoration of what was is wildly celebrated: happy days for the League of Morality, the Association of Mothers of Priests, the War Widows, the U.S. embassy, every complexion of rightist, nearly all of the left—left of the left of the moon!—and the rosca.
(97)
1946: Hollywood
Carmen Miranda
Sequined and dripping with necklaces, crowned by a tower of bananas, Carmen Miranda undulates against a cardboard tropical backdrop.
Born in Portugal, daughter of a penurious barber who crossed the ocean, Carmen is the chief export of Brazil. Next comes coffee.
This diminutive hussy has little voice, and what she has is out of tune, but she sings with her hands and with her gleaming eyes, and that is more than enough. She is one of the best-paid performers in Hollywood. She has ten houses and eight oil wells.
But Fox refuses to renew her contract. Senator Joseph McCarthy has called her obscene, because at the peak of one of her production numbers, a photographer revealed intolerable glimpses of bare flesh and who knows what else under her flying skirt. And the press has disclosed that in her tenderest infancy Carmen recited lines before King Albert of Belgium, accompanying them with wiggles and winks that scandalized the nuns and gave the king prolonged insomnia.
(401)
1948: Bogotá
On the Eve
In placid Bogotá, home of monks and jurists, General Marshall sits down with the foreign ministers of Latin America.
What gifts does he bring in his saddlebags, this Wise
King of the Occident who irrigates with dollars the European lands devastated by the war? General Marshall, impassive, microphones stuck to his chest, resists the downpour of speeches. Without moving so much as an eyelid, he endures the protracted professions of democratic faith offered by many Latin American delegates anxious to sell themselves for the price of a dead rooster; while John McCloy, head of the World Bank, warns: “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I didn’t bring my checkbook in my suitcase.”
Beyond the salons of the Ninth Pan-American Conference, even more florid speeches shower down throughout the length and breadth of the host country. Learned liberals announce that they will bring peace to Colombia as the goddess Pallas Athena made the olive branch blossom on the hills of Athens, and erudite conservatives promise to draw unknown forces into the sunshine, and light up with the dark fire that is the entrails of the globe the timid votive light of the candelabra that is lit on the eve of treachery in the night of darkness.
While foreign ministers clamor, proclaim, and declaim, reality persists. In the Colombian countryside the war between conservatives and liberals is fought with guns. Politicians provide the words, campesinos provide the corpses. And already the violence is filtering into Bogotá, knocking at the capital’s doors and threatening its time-honored routines—always the same sins, always the same metaphors. At the bullfights last Sunday, the desperate crowd poured into the arena and tore to pieces a wretched bull that refused to fight.
(7)
1948: Bogotá
Gaitán
The political country, says Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, has nothing to do with the national country. Gaitán, head of the Liberal Party, is also its black sheep. Poor people of all persuasions adore him. What is the difference between liberal hunger and conservative hunger? Malaria is neither conservative nor liberal!
Gaitán’s voice unbinds the poor who cry out through his mouth. He turns fear on its back. They come from everywhere to hear him—to hear themselves—the ragged ones, trekking through the jungle, spurring their horses down the roads. They say that when Gaitán speaks the fog splits in Bogotá; and that even in heaven Saint Peter listens and forbids the rain to fall on the gigantic crowds gathered by torchlight.
This dignified leader, with the austere face of a statue, does not hesitate to denounce the oligarchy and the imperial ventriloquist on whose knee the oligarchs sit without life of their own or words of their own. He calls for agrarian reform and articulates other truths to put an end to the long lie.
If they don’t kill him, Gaitán will be Colombia’s next president. He cannot be bought. To what temptation would he succumb, this man who scorns pleasure, sleeps alone, eats little, drinks nothing, and even refuses anesthesia when he has a tooth pulled?
(7)
1948: Bogotá
The Bogotazo
At 2:00 P.M. of this ninth of April, Gaitán has a date with one of the Latin American students who are gathering in Bogotá on the fringes of General Marshall’s Pan-American ceremony.
At half past one, the student leaves his hotel, intending to stroll to Gaitán’s office. But after a few steps a noise like an earthquake stops him, a human avalanche engulfs him. The people, pouring out of the barrios, streaming down from the hills, are rushing madly past him, a hurricane of pain and anger flooding the city, smashing store windows, overturning streetcars, setting buildings afire.
They’ve killed him! They’ve killed him!
It was done in the streets, with three bullets. Gaitán’s watch stopped at 1:05 P.M.
The student, a corpulent Cuban named Fidel Castro, shoves his cap on his head and lets himself be blown along by the wind of people.
(7)
1948: Bogotá
Flames
Indian ponchos and workers’ sandals invade the center of Bogotá, hands toughened by earth or stone, hands stained with machine oil or shoe polish, a tornado of porters, students, and waiters, washerwomen and market women, Jills of all beds and Jacks of all trades, ambulance chasers and fortune hunters. From the tornado a woman detaches herself, wearing four fur coats, clumsy and happy as a bear in love; running like a rabbit is a man with several pearl necklaces around his throat; walking like a tortoise, another with a refrigerator on his back.
At street corners, ragged kids direct traffic. Prisoners burst the bars of their cells. Someone cuts the fire hoses with a machete. Bogotá is an immense bonfire, the sky a vault of red; from the balconies of burning ministries typewriters plummet; from burning belltowers bullets rain. The police hide themselves or cross their arms before the fury.
At the presidential palace, a river of people is seen approaching. Machineguns have already repelled two of these attacks, although the crowd did succeed in hurling against the palace doors the disemboweled body of the puppet who killed Gaitán.
Doña Bertha, the first lady, sticks a revolver in her waistband and calls her confessor on the telephone: “Father, be so good as to take my son to the American embassy.”
On another phone the president, Mariano Ospina Pérez, sees to the protection of General Marshall’s house and dictates orders against the rebellious rabble. Then he sits and waits. The tumult grows in the streets.
Three tanks head the attack on the presidential palace. The tanks are swarming with people waving flags and yelling Gaitán’s name, and behind them surges a multitude bristling with machetes, axes, and clubs. When they reach the palace the tanks halt. Their turrets turn slowly, aim to the rear, and commence mowing people down.
(7)
1948: Bogotá
Ashes
Someone wanders in search of a shoe. A woman howls, a dead child in her arms. The city smolders. Walk carefully or you’ll step on bodies. A dismembered mannequin hangs on the streetcar cables. From the stairway of a burned monastery a naked, blackened Christ gazes skyward, arms outstretched. At the foot of that stairway, a beggar sits and drinks. The archbishop’s mitre covers his head and a purple velvet curtain envelops his body. He further defends himself from the cold by sipping French cognac from a gold chalice, and offers drinks to passersby in a silver goblet. An army bullet ends the party.
The last shots ring out. The city, devastated by fire, regains order. After three days of vengeance and madness, a disarmed people returns to the old purgatory of work and woe.
General Marshall has no doubts. The bogotazo was the work of Moscow. The government of Colombia breaks relations with the Soviet Union.
(7)
1948: Upar Valley
The Vallenato
“I want to let out a yell and they won’t let me …”
The government of Colombia prohibits the “Vagabond Yell.” Whoever sings it risks jail or a bullet. Along the Magdalena River, though, they keep singing.
The people of the Colombian coast defend themselves by making music. The “Vagabond Yell” is a vallenato rhythm, one of the cowboy songs that tell the story of the region and, incidentally, fill the air with joy.
Accordion to breast, the troubadours prance and navigate. Accordion on thigh, they receive the first drinks at all parties and challenge each other to a duel of couplets.
The vallenato verses born of accordions thrust back and forth like knives, like fusillades in daring musical battles that last for days and nights in markets and cockfight rings. The singers’ most fearsome rival is Lucifer, that great musician, who gets bored in hell and comes to America at the drop of a hat, disguised, looking for fun.
(359)
1948: Wroclaw
Picasso
This painter embodies the best painters of all times. They cohabit in him, if rather uncomfortably. It is no easy task to assimilate such intractable folk, ancient and modern, who spend so much time in conflict with one another that the painter hasn’t a free moment to listen to speeches, much less make them.
But for the first and only time in his life, Pablo Picasso makes a speech. This unheard-of event occurs in the Polish city of Wroclaw, at a world congress of intellectuals for peace
: “I have a friend who ought to be here …”
Picasso pays homage to the greatest poet of the Spanish language and one of the greatest poets on earth, who has always taken the side of the unfortunate: Pablo Neruda, persecuted by the police in Chile, cornered like a dog …
(442)
1948: Somewhere in Chile
Neruda
The main headline in the daily El Imparcial reads: Neruda Sought Throughout the Country; and below: Investigators locating his whereabouts will be rewarded.
The poet goes from hideout to hideout, traveling by night. Neruda is one of many suffering persecution for being red or for being decent or for just being, and he doesn’t complain of this fate, which he has chosen. Nor does he regret the solitude: He enjoys and celebrates this fighting passion, whatever trouble it brings him, as he enjoys and celebrates church bells, wine, eel broth, and flying comets with wings spreads wide.
(313 and 442)
1948: San José de Costa Rica
Figueres
After six weeks of civil war, and two thousand dead, the rural middle class comes to power in Costa Rica.
The head of the new government, José Figueres, outlaws the Communist Party and promises unconditional support to the struggle of the free world against Russian imperialism. But in an undertone he also promises to continue to expand the social reforms the Communists have promoted in recent years.
Under the protection of President Rafael Calderón, friend of the Communists, unions and cooperatives have multiplied in Costa Rica; small landowners have won land from the great estates; health has been improved and education extended.
The anticommunist Figueres does not touch the lands of the United Fruit Company, that most powerful mistress, but nationalizes the banks and dissolves the army, so that money will not speculate, nor arms conspire. Costa Rica wants out of the ferocious turbulence of Central America.