(11)
1980: New York
The Statue of Liberty Seems Pitted with Smallpox
because of the poisonous gases so many factories throw into the sky, and which rain and snow bring back to earth. One hundred and seventy lakes have been murdered by this acid rain in New York State alone, but the director of the Federal Office of Management and Budget says it’s not worth bothering about. After all, those lakes are only four percent of the state total.
The world is a racetrack. Nature, an obstacle. The deadly breath of the smokestacks has left four thousand lakes without fish or plants in Ontario, Canada.
“We’d better ask God to start over,” says a fisherman.
1980: New York
Lennon
A shirt hung out on a roof flaps its arms. The wind complains. The roaring and screaming of city life is joined by the shriek of a siren rushing through the streets. On this dirty day in Manhattan, John Lennon, musical innovator, has been murdered.
He didn’t want to win or kill. He didn’t agree that the world should be a stock market or a barracks. Lennon was on the sidelines of the track. Singing or whistling with a distracted look, he watched the wheels of others turn in the perpetual vertigo that comes and goes between madhouse and slaughterhouse.
1981: Surahammar
Exile
What is the distance that separates a Bolivian mining camp from a city in Sweden? How many miles, how many centuries, how many worlds?
Domitila, one of the five women who overthrew a military dictatorship, has been sentenced to exile by another military dictatorship and has ended up, with her miner husband and her many children, in the snows of northern Europe.
From where there’s too little anything to where there’s too much everything, from lowest poverty to highest opulence. Eyes full of wonder in these faces of clay: Here in Sweden they throw in the garbage nearly new TVs, hardly used clothing and furniture, and refrigerators and dishwashers that work perfectly. To the junkyard goes last year’s automobile.
Domitila is grateful for the support of the Swedes and admires them for their liberty, but the waste offends her and the loneliness troubles her. These poor rich folk live all alone before the television, drinking alone, eating alone, talking to themselves:
“Over there in Bolivia,” says — recommends — Domitila, “even if it’s for a fight, we get together.”
(1)
1981: Celica Canton
“Bad Luck, Human Error, Bad Weather”
A plane crashes at the end of May, and so ends the life of Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador. Some campesinos hear the explosion and see the plane in flames before it crashes.
Doctors are not permitted to examine the body. No autopsy is attempted. The black box never turns up; they say the plane had none. Tractors smooth over the scene of the disaster. Tapes from the Quito, Guayaquil, and Loja control towers are erased. Various witnesses die in accidents. The Air Force’s report discounts in advance any crime.
Bad luck, human error, bad weather. But President Roldós was defending Ecuador’s coveted oil, had restored relations with prohibited Cuba, and backed accursed revolutions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Palestine.
Two months later another plane crashes, in Panama. Bad luck, human error, bad weather. Two campesinos who heard the plane explode in the air disappear. Omar Torrijos, guilty of rescuing the Panama Canal, knew he wasn’t going to die in bed of old age.
Almost simultaneously, a helicopter crashes in Peru. Bad luck, human error, bad weather. This time the victim is the head of the Peruvian army, General Rafael Hoyos Rubio, an old enemy of Standard Oil and other benevolent multinational corporations.
(154 and 175)
1982: South Georgia Islands
Portrait of a Brave Fellow
The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo called him the Angel, because of his pink baby face. He had spent some months working with them, always smiling, always ready to lend a hand, when, one evening, the soldiers pick up several of the movement’s most active militants as they leave a meeting. These mothers disappear, like their sons and daughters, and nothing more is heard of them.
The kidnapped mothers have been fingered by the Angel; that is, Frigate Lieutenant Alfredo Astiz, member of Task Force 3-3-2 of the Navy’s Mechanics School, who has a long and brilliant record in the torture chambers.
This spy and torturer, now a lieutenant on a warship, is the first to surrender to the English in the Malvinas war. He surrenders without firing a shot.
(107, 134, 143, and 388)
1982: Malvinas Islands
The Malvinas War,
patriotic war that for a moment united trampled and tramplers, ends with the victory of Great Britain’s colonial army.
The Argentine generals and colonels who promised to shed their last drops of blood have not so much as cut a finger. Those who declared war haven’t even put in a guest appearance. So that the Argentine flag might fly over these ice cubes, a just cause in unjust hands, the high command sent to the slaughterhouse youngsters roped into compulsory service, who died more of cold than of bullets.
Their pulses do not flicker. With firm hands, these rapers of bound women, hangmen of disarmed workers, sign the surrender.
(185)
1982: The Roads of La Mancha
Master Globetrotter
completes his first half century of life far from where he was born. In a Castilian village, in front of one of the windmills that challenged Don Quixote, Javier Villafañe, patriarch of America’s puppeteers, celebrates the birthday of his favorite son. To be worthy of this great date, Javier decides to marry a pretty gypsy he has just met; and Master Globetrotter presides over the ceremony and banquet with his characteristic melancholy dignity.
They’ve gone through life together, these two, puppeteering along the roads of the world, sweetness and mischief, Master Globetrotter and the pilgrim Javier. Whenever Master Globetrotter gets sick, a victim of worms or moths, Javier heals his wounds with infinite patience and afterward watches over his sleep.
At the start of each performance, before an expectant crowd of children, the two tremble as if at their first show.
1982: Stockholm
Novelist García Márquez Receives the Nobel Prize and Speaks of our Lands Condemned to One Hundred Years of Solitude
I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of our imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude …