“The fire in the sky first blesses the sap, the loves of insects and birds, the euphoria of the herds, the darting quickness of tadpoles in the ponds… Then the fire in the sky turns to a burning hardness, as though the gods were reminding creation that no euphoria can last and that existence is not just the exultation of being; existence is also ordeal, courage, blind tenacity, hidden resourcefulness. The heavens’ severity becomes an outburst of angry luminescence, a vast fierce rapture insensible to being, destructive of beings, sufficient to itself, blazing, mindless, and superb.
“The herds graze the last yellowed grasses, which rasp their throats… Here at the plantation, the perennial problem is water. I drilled a well. The streams dry up… When all else fails I have to get water from the lake, an exhausting job for my peons. You see, the earth is dying of thirst at the water’s edge. And yet we’ve accomplished the miracle of rescuing this small piece of it. After the coffee is picked, I climb into my old Ford and go into town. I make just enough to live on and to order a few books from New York… I could easily get rich, like others do, lending to the poor against the next harvest and stockpiling maize and sugarcane against the inevitable rise in prices. The idea made me ashamed, and I chose instead to pass for a fool. Living among wolves, it would be reasonable to learn how to howl and bite like the wolves, but I preferred another fate, a more dangerous one I suppose because here as everywhere, a kind of sentence weighs upon the man who tries to be a bit more human than the general lot… I won’t pretend I wasn’t tempted to overcome this repugnance and make money so as to return to Europe when Europe is once again the continent of the most amazing germinations. These must come after the desert seasons. We shall see ideas, forces, men, and works sprouting up from the graveyards, no matter the rot and decay… Well, either I’ll never go back, or I’ll go back penniless and old, which is worse, to end in the midst of beginnings.
“Tropical countries are full of aging men who still remember having followed dreams, wanting to become artists, scientists, discoverers, revolutionaries, reformers, sages! But one day they said to themselves: Let’s make some money first, otherwise we’re powerless. And it was all the easier because it was diving into another powerlessness. They became wealthy; disillusioned with themselves and hence with everything, they frittered their lives away in gilding their cages, while a cynical bitterness grew within them. The best of them keep up subscriptions to high-minded journals of literature or theosophy, as a reminder of extinguished passions… They play bridge and continue to speculate in real estate and commodity values, largely out of habit… I know some of these men. We’ve smoked sad cigars together in good restaurants, pontificating about the war — not without flashes of insight. I’ve stopped seeing them, because some of them stupidly admire a dead revolution. They depend on it like an injection to prolong their final breathing.
“I work my peons and pay them well; they steal from me well too, but within reason; they’re aware that I know about it, but not that I judge them to be in the right. If I paid them any more, they’d lose motivation and the local powers would brand me a public menace… I’m up at sunrise, the dawns here are as fresh as the first day of creation. I supervise all the work… In the evening I lie in my hammock with a few books and newspapers, the papers several days old but it makes no difference, filled as they are with layers of lies and nonsense… In books, though, you may still encounter living men. I don’t much care for the literary fabrications in vogue today: they too often feed on baseness, cultivating a false despair. Genuine despair would disdain royalties. Why write, why read, if not to offer, to find, a larger image of life, an image of man as deep as the problems that make up his greatness? I prefer reading scientific works, they have more imagination, they induce in me a sense of dizzying precision.
“I miss everything and that’s another form of captivity, the only one I consent to, the only one that is a healthy part of our nature. I am the owner of this plantation, lush and overgrown as a patch of jungle, and despite this, sterile for me. I tend it with a kind of love. And thus I fulfill an instinctive duty toward the earth, the dead, and the defeats which are great temporary deaths… Thanks to this, I don’t have much time for conscious regret; the other is always present. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the enchantment of plants, but animals are for me more eloquent. I see a big amber scorpion go by, and I think of him as a sort of ancestor to so many creatures in this world, a survivor of Paleozoic ages. The wild ducks come down in droves; as they skid onto the lake, I see an Indio marksman hiding behind the calabash stalks; the birds take off as soon as they see him — a war of ruses between them and the hunter; but they don’t mind me, they know I’m unarmed. I fling a stone at them, they laugh at men: Learn that men are bad!… Or perhaps I’m reading, and a rattlesnake slips over for a look. He rears his fine stylized head, flicks a tongue like a living black needle, shakes his tail, which rings agreeably, decides that I’m a creature like him, a solitary, no worse than he is, sketches a little dance, and goes coolly on his way. He is very beautiful, the rattlesnake… I know the hours when the hummingbird comes flitting among the flowers like a butterfly. The frailest of birds, tiny, dark, and iridescent, with a life experience limited to searching for pollen, making love, and fleeing before huge, incomprehensible dangers from which its tininess protects it; this tiny spark of intelligence has enabled it to weather more than one geological upheaval… I watch for the ungainly flight of the pelican, a bird which seems to me ugly because it belongs to an aesthetic of nature from very ancient times… Such are my daily encounters, full of meaning.
“People are somewhat more dangerous. Crescenciano, the blacksmith, has taken a few shots at me — from a safe distance it must be said, and with no intent to harm. We are on cordial terms, so I assume he was high at the time, maybe on something other than alcohol. It’s so tempting to hold someone else’s life at the end of a barrel, to play with it a bit, it makes you feel powerful, you might even feel good. Crescenciano is a good man, because I’m still alive. A mournful man and a contemplative one — if contemplating is what he’s doing when he squats under the moonlight in his sarape and doesn’t budge for hours. Then he resembles the small black vultures you see all over like perpetually famished monks. His wife assures me he meant no offense and was in fact distressed at the possibility of hitting me, unless it happened to be God’s will (and how to know whether it is His will or not except by pulling the trigger?). All he wanted was to play a good joke on me, shoot a hole in my hat brim. I went over to Crescenciano one night during fiesta; we hung our best hats on stakes in the ground and shot at them, laughing uproariously (that is to say sound-lessly). It was one of my ideas; after that, I felt a little safer… I treat the children’s illnesses. Pancho’s have amoebas, Isidro’s suffer from glands. I administer light doses of sulfa and so am reckoned to be a bit of a sorcerer, even if nothing prevents them from buying the stuff themselves at Don Gamelindo’s… The real sorceress, Doña Luz, knows I haven’t a clue about the secret arts; just as the friendly rattlesnake knows that I have no venom whereas he does. I treat young Ponce when he falls down dead drunk. He also gets epileptic fits, which Doña Luz cures better than me — by letting them run their course, not without burning herbs and powdered bone… Her medicine beats mine by a few centuries, for she is the repository of a knowledge that goes back to Neolithic cultures. Doña Luz has cured me of fevers I couldn’t even identify. She is very good for Noémi.