Of course we very soon caught on to the stratagems, ruses, wiles, or charm that had to be used, not to obtain special privileges, but merely to do a more or less decent job of what we were being paid to do. We were not above such tricks ourselves, but all of them had the disadvantage of taking up precious time that we ought to have devoted to purely creative work. Since I’ve been through this experience, my admiration is boundless whenever I happen to see a program on television that is well edited and recorded, lively and original. For I know that behind it there is much more than talent and determination: there is witchcraft, miracle. Some weeks, after viewing the program on the monitor one last time, looking for the perfect finishing touch, we would say to each other: “Good, it came out exactly right in the end.” But despite that, on the television screen that Sunday, the sound would fade away altogether, the image leap out of focus, and completely blank frames appear…What had “fucked up” this time? The technician on duty was drunk or asleep, he’d pressed the wrong button or run the film backward…Television is a risky business for perfectionists; it is responsible for countless cases of insomnia, tachycardia, ulcers, heart attacks…
In spite of all this, and by and large, those six months were exciting and intense. I remember how moved I was interviewing Borges in his apartment in downtown Buenos Aires, where his mother’s room was kept exactly the way she left it the day she died (an old lady’s purple dress laid out on the bed); he apparently never forgave me for having said that his home was a modest one, with a leaky roof. I remember being moved, too, by the portraits of writers painted by Ernesto Sábato, which he allowed us to film in his little house in Santos Lugares, where we went to visit him. Ever since I’d lived in Spain in the early seventies, I had wanted to interview Corín Tellado, whose sentimental Románces, radio soap operas, photo-novels, and television melodramas are devoured by countless thousands in Spain and Hispano-America. She agreed to appear on the Tower of Babel and I spent an afternoon with her, on the outskirts of Gijón, in Asturias — she showed me the basement of the house she was occupying, with thousands of novelettes stowed away on bookshelves: she finishes one every two days, each exactly a hundred pages long. She was living there in seclusion because at the time she had been the victim of attempted extortion, though whether a political group or common criminals were behind it was not clear.
From the houses of writers we took our cameras to the stadiums — we did a program on one of the best Brazilian soccer clubs, the Flamengo, and interviewed Zico, the star of the moment, in Rio de Janeiro. We went to Panama, where we visited amateur and professional boxing rings, trying to discover how and why this small Central American country had been the cradle of so many Latin American and world champions in nearly every weight class. In Brazil, we managed to get our cameras into the exclusive clinic of trim, athletic Dr. Pitanguí, whose scalpels made all the women in the world who could pay for his services young and beautiful; and in Santiago de Chili we spoke with Pinochet’s Chicago Boys and with his Christian Democratic opponents, who, in the midst of extreme repression, were resisting dictatorship.
We went to Nicaragua on the second anniversary of the revolution, to report on the Sandinistas and their adversaries; and to the University of California at Berkeley, where the great poet, Czeslaw Milosz, a recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, worked in a tiny office in the Department of Slavonic Languages. We went to Coclecito, Panama, where we visited General Omar Torrijos at his home there; though theoretically no longer active in government, he was still the lord and master of the country. We spent the entire day with him, and although he was most affable with me, I was not left as agreeably impressed by him as were other writers who had been his guests. He struck me as the typical Latin American caudillo of unhappy memory, the providential “strongman,” authoritative and macho, adulated by civil and military courtiers, who filed through the place all day, flattering him with sickening servility. The most exciting person in the general’s Coclecito house was one of his mistresses, a curvaceous blonde we came upon reclining in a hammock. She was just another piece of furniture, for the general neither spoke to her nor introduced her to the guests who came and went…
Two days after our return to Lima from Panama, Lucho Llosa, Alejandro Pérez, and I felt a cold shiver run down our spines. Torrijos had just died in a fatal crash of the little plane in which he had sent us back to Panama City from Coclecito. The pilot was the same one we had flown with.
I fainted in Puerto Rico, just a day after recording a short program on the marvelous restoration of old San Juan, guided by Ricardo Alegría, who had been the moving spirit of the project. I was suffering from dehydration as a result of stomach poisoning, contracted in the chicha bars of a north Peruvian village, Catacaos, where we had gone to do a program on straw-hat weaving, a craft the inhabitants have been practicing for centuries; on the secrets of the tondero, a regional dance; and on its picanterías, where fine chicha and highly spiced stews are served (these latter responsible, naturally, for my case of poisoning). Words cannot express my thanks to all the Puerto Rican friends who virtually terrorized the kind doctors of San Jorge Hospital into curing me in time for the Tower of Babel to appear on the air at the usual hour that Sunday.
The program ran regularly every week, and considering the conditions under which we worked, this was quite a feat. I wrote the scripts in vans or planes, went from airport to sound studio to cutting room, and from there to catch another plane to travel hundreds of miles to be in another town or country, often for less time than it had taken me to get there. During those six months, I skipped sleeping, eating, reading, and, naturally, writing. As the channel’s budget was limited, I arranged for several of my trips abroad to coincide with invitations to attend literary congresses or give lectures, thus relieving the channel of having to pay my travel and per-diem expenses. The trouble with this arrangement was that it forced me to become a psychic quick-change artist, shifting within seconds from a lecturer to a journalist, from an author with a microphone placed before him to an interviewer who took his revenge by interviewing his interviewers.
Though we did a fair number of programs on the current scene in other countries, most of them dealt with Peruvian subjects. Popular dances and fiestas, university problems, pre-Hispanic archaeological sites, an old ice-cream vendor whose tricycle had cruised the streets of Miraflores for half a century, the story of a Piura bordello, the sub-world of prisons. We discovered how wide an audience the Tower of Babel was reaching when we started getting requests and considerable pressure from various personalities and institutions who wanted us to take notice of them. The most unexpected was perhaps the PIP, the Peruvian Secret Police. A colonel appeared in my office one day, suggesting that I devote a Tower of Babel broadcast to the PIP to celebrate some anniversary or other; to make the program more exciting, the PIP would stage a mock arrest of cocaine smugglers, complete with a shoot-out…
One of the calls I received, when the six-month period I had agreed to work for the channel was nearly over, came from a friend I hadn’t seen for ages: Rosita Corpancho. There was her warm voice with its drawling Loretano accent, just as in my university years. There, too, intact or perhaps even increased, was her enthusiastic devotion to the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Surely I remembered the Institute? Of course, Rosita…Well, the Institute was about to celebrate its I-don’t-know-how-many-years in Peru, and what was more, it would soon be packing its bags, having decided that its mission in Amazonia had ended. Would it be possible, perhaps, for the Tower of Babel…? I interrupted her to say that, yes, I would be pleased to do a documentary on the work of the linguist-missionaries. And would take advantage of the trip to the jungle to do a program on some of the lesser-known tribes, something we’d had in mind from the beginning. Rosita was delighted and told me she would coordinate everything with the Institute so that we could get about readily in the jungle. Had I any particular tribe in mind? Without hesitation I answered: “The Machiguengas.”