There were four of us who got out the Tower of Babel programs: Luis Llosa, the producer and director of photography; Moshé dan Furgang, the editor; Alejandro Pérez, the cameraman; and myself. I had brought Lucho and Moshé to the channel. They both had film experience — they had each made shorts — but neither they nor I had worked in television before. The title of the program was indicative of its intent: to show something of everything, to create a kaleidoscope of subjects. We naïvely hoped to prove that a cultural program need not be soporific, esoteric, or pedantic, but could be entertaining and not over any viewer’s head, since “culture” was not synonymous with science, literature, or any other specialized field, but a way of looking at things, an approach capable of tackling anything of human interest. The idea was that during our hour-long program each week — which often stretched to an hour and a half — we would touch on two or three themes as different as possible, so that the audience would see that a cultural program had as much to offer as, let us say, soccer or boxing, or salsa and humor, and that political reporting or a documentary on the Indian tribes of Amazonia could be entertaining as well as instructive.
When Lucho and Moshé and I drew up lists of subjects, people, and locales that the Tower of Babel could use and planned the most lively way of presenting them, everything went like a charm. We were full of ideas and eager to discover the creative possibilities of the most popular medium of communication of our time.
What we discovered in practice, however, was our dependence on material factors in an underdeveloped country, the subtle way in which they subvert the best intentions and thwart the most diligent efforts. I can say, without exaggeration, that most of the time that Lucho, Moshé, and I put in on the Tower of Babel was spent not on creative work, on trying to improve the program intellectually and artistically, but was wasted in an attempt to solve problems that at first sight seemed trivial and unworthy of our notice. What to do, for instance, to get the channel’s vans to pick us up at the agreed time so as not to miss appointments, planes, interviews? The answer was for us to go personally to the drivers’ homes and wake them up, go with them to the channel’s offices to collect the recording equipment and from there to the airport or wherever. But as a solution it cost us hours of sleep and didn’t always work. It could turn out that, on top of everything else, the blessed van’s battery had gone dead, or higher-ups had neglected to authorize the replacement of an oil pan, an exhaust pipe, a tire ripped to shreds the day before on the murderous potholes along the Avenida Arequipa.
From the very first program, I noticed that the images on the screen were marred by strange smudges. What were those dirty half-moons anyway? Alejandro Pérez explained that they were due to defective camera filters. They were worn out and needed replacing. Okay then, replace them. But how to go about getting this done? We tried everything short of murder, and nothing worked. We sent memos to Maintenance, we begged, we got on the phone, we argued face-to-face with engineers, technicians, department heads, and I believe we even took the problem to the owner-director of the channel. They all agreed with us, they were all indignant, they all issued strict orders that the filters be replaced. They may well have been. But the grayish half-moons disfigured all our programs, from first to last. Sometimes, when I tune in on a television program, I can still see those intrusive shadows and think — with a touch of melancholy: Ah, Alejandro’s camera.
I don’t know who it was who decided that Alejandro Pérez would work with us. It turned out to be a good idea, for when allowances have been made for the “underdevelopment handicap”—which he accepted philosophically, never turning a hair — Alejandro is a very skillful cameraman. His talent is purely intuitive, an innate sense of composition, movement, angle, distance. Alejandro became a cameraman by accident. He’d started out as a house painter, come to Lima from Huánuco, and someone had given him the idea that he might earn himself a little extra money by helping to load the cameras in the stadium on days when a soccer match was being televised. From having to load them so often he learned how to handle them. One day he stood in for an absent cameraman, then another day for another, and almost before he knew it, he turned out to be the channel’s star cameraman.
At first his habitual silence made me nervous. Lucho was the only one who managed to talk to him. Or, at any rate, they understood each other subliminally, for in all those six months I can’t remember ever hearing Alejandro utter a complete sentence, with subject, verb, and predicate. Only short grunts of approval or dismay, and an exclamation that I feared like the plague, because it meant that, once again, we had been defeated by all-powerful, omnipresent imponderables: “It’s fucked up again!” How many times did the sound equipment, the film, the reflector, the monitor “fuck up”? Everything could “fuck up” innumerable times: every one of the things we worked with possessed that fundamental property, perhaps the only one toward which all of them, always, gave proof of a dog-like loyalty. How often did minutely planned projects, interviews obtained after exhausting negotiations, go all to hell because close-mouthed Alejandro came out with his fateful grunt: “It’s fucked up again!”
I remember especially well what happened to us in Puerto Maldonado, a town in Amazonia where we had gone to make a documentary short on the death of the poet and guerrilla fighter Javier Heraud. Alaín Elías, Heraud’s comrade and the leader of the guerrilla detachment that had been scattered or captured the day Heraud was killed, had agreed to recount, in front of the camera, everything that had happened on that occasion. His testimony was interesting and moving — Alaín had been in the canoe with Javier Heraud when the latter had been shot to death, and he himself had been wounded in the shoot-out. We had decided to round the documentary out with views of the locale where the incident had taken place and, if possible, with accounts from the inhabitants of Puerto Maldonado who could recall the events of twenty years before.
Even Moshé—who ordinarily stayed behind in Lima to keep up with the editing of the programs — went off to the jungle with Lucho, Alejandro Pérez, and me. In Puerto Maldonado several witnesses agreed to be interviewed. Our great find was a member of the police force who had participated, first off, in the initial incident in the center of town that had revealed the presence of the guerrilleros in Puerto Maldonado to the authorities — an encounter in which a civil guard had been killed — and then later, in the manhunt for Javier Heraud and the shoot-out. The man had since retired from the police force and was working on a farm. Persuading the ex-policeman to allow himself to be interviewed had been extremely difficult, since he was filled with apprehension and reluctant to talk. We finally convinced him and even managed to get permission to interview him in the police station from which the patrols had set out on that day long ago.
At the very moment we started interviewing the ex-policeman, Alejandro’s reflectors began to burst like carnival balloons. And when they had all exploded — so that there would be no doubt that the household gods of Amazonia were against the Tower of Babel — the battery of our portable generator quit and the recording equipment went dead. Fucked up again. And one of the first fruits of the program as well. We returned to Lima empty-handed.
Am I exaggerating things so that they stand out more clearly? Perhaps. But I don’t think I’m stretching things much. I could tell dozens of stories like this one. And many others to illustrate what is perhaps the very symbol of underdevelopment: the divorce between theory and practice, decisions and facts. During those six months we suffered from this irreducible distance at every stage of our work. There were schedules that gave each of the various producers their fair share of time in the cutting rooms and the sound studios. But in point of fact it was not the schedules but the cunning and the clever maneuvering of each producer or technician that determined who would have more or less time for editing and recording, and who could count on the best equipment.