The Soccer War

HIGH TIME I STARTED WRITING THE NEXT UNWRITTEN BOOK …

… or rather its plan, or even disjointed fragments of a plan, because if it were a complete and finished work it would not fit into an existing book to which I have already added one non-existent book.

1

After returning from Central Asia, I stayed only briefly in Warsaw. In the autumn of that same year, 1967, I left for five years in Latin America. My first stop was Santiago de Chile, a bizarre architectural concoction built like a floating miniature Manhattan, a sea of town houses done in the perverse and capricious style of the Spanish secession — the luxurious and exclusive districts like Los Leones, Apoquindo and Vitacura — and then, on the outskirts, the endless wooden lean-tos known as callampas, full of the proletariat, the poor and all sorts of riff-raff. I had always taken the Chileans for peaceful people, easygoing and even effete (the city contains a multitude of cosmetics parlours for men, where gentlemen are given pedicures and have their nails painted), until suddenly, the day after the death of Salvador Allende, many of those nails turned out to be claws. Upon arriving in Santiago I went to a rental bureau where they gave me a map of the city and a list of suitable addresses. Then I began hunting down the houses and inspecting vacant lodgings. In this way I discovered a world I had never known existed. The owners of these furnished apartments were aged ladies, widows, divorcées and old maids in slippers, bonnets and furs. After greeting me, they would lead me around improbably cluttered rooms, then name some fantastic sum of money to be paid as rent, and finally bring out the lease which included not only the terms of the agreement but also a list of the contents of the apartment. This list was a book, a volume, which could serve as a fascinating psychological document about the madness to which people can be led by their avarice and the impulse to possess unneeded objects. The lists specified hundreds, no, thousands, of meaningless gadgets, figurines, kitties, coasters, wall hangings, pictures, vases, candleholders, birds made of glass, plush, brass, felt, plastic, marble, artificial silk, bark, wax, satin, lacquer, paper, nutshells, wicker, seashells, whalebone, of gee-gaws, thingamajigs, doodads and whatchamacallits. Every one of these apartments was carefully filled to the ceiling with an inventory of this junk, kneaded together, jammed into a vortex of knick-knacks and fiddle-faddle of which the ladies would say the most insignificant bauble was touching, beautiful and priceless. Later I figured out that there was an unceasing circulation of things of no use to anyone in these middle-class neighbourhoods, that on every occasion some thing of no use to anyone is given as a gift and custom enjoins that the gift be reciprocated in the form of some other thing of no use to anyone, which is then placed (laid, hung) beside the other things of no use to anyone. After years of giving and receiving (buying, winning) gifts each apartment thus turns into a great warehouse of things of no use to anyone. Later still it dawned on me that half the shops in these neighbourhoods deal exclusively in all sorts of trinkets, mascots and bric-à-brac, and that this is an excellent trade that brings in heaps of profits. After years among Africans whose only property is (in many cases) a wooden hoe and whose only food is a banana plucked off the branch, this absurd avalanche of possessions that came tumbling down upon me every time I opened a door crushed and discouraged me. I saved myself with the thought that this was all a false introduction to the world of Latin America, which had to be — I told myself — different.

2

In reality, however, the residences of these old ladies were simply a pathological and kitschy manifestation of Latin America — that is, the universal prevalence of the baroque: baroque not only as a style of aesthetics and thought, but also as a general commitment to excess and eclecticism. There is a lot of everything here and everything is exaggerated; everything wants to impose itself, shock, knock the beholder sideways. It is as if we had poor vision, weak hearing and an imperfect sense of smell; as if we would simply be incapable of noticing anything that presented itself in a moderate or modest form. If there is a jungle, it has to be enormous (the Amazon); if there are mountains, they have to be gigantic (the Andes); if there is a plain, it has to be endless (the Pampas); if there is a river, it has to be the biggest (the Amazon). People of every possible race and cast of complexion: white, red, black, yellow, metys, mulatto. All cultures: Indian, Anglo-Saxon, Spanish, Lusitanian, French, Hindu, Italian and African. Every possible and impossible political orientation and party. An excess of wealth and an excess of poverty. Gestures full of pathos and a flowery language with a multitude of adjectives. Market-places, bazaars, booths and displays piled high and straining under the weight of fruit, vegetables, flowers, clothes, cooking vessels, tools — all of it constantly multiplying itself, propagating under the ground, on the stones, on counters, in hands, in a hundred colours, its brightness and contrasts striking, exploding. This is not a world you can walk through with a calm head and an indifferent heart. You force your way through with difficulty, powerless and feeling as lost as when you look at a Diego Rivera fresco or read the prose of Lezama Lima. Fact is mixed with fantasy here, truth with myth, realism with rhetoric.

3

I spent a long time forcing my way through that underbrush, the exuberance, the façades and the repetitions, the ornamentation and the demagogy, before I reached the person, before I could feel at home among these people and recognize their dramas, their defeats, moods, romanticism, their honour and treason, their loneliness.

4

Describe the old Indian in the Mexican desert. I was driving along in a car and far off I spotted something that looked like an Indian hat lying on the sand. I stopped and walked towards it. Under the hat sat an Indian in a shallow hole that he had dug in the sand to protect himself from the wind. In front of him stood a wooden gramophone with a shabby, bashed-in megaphone. The old man was turning the crank the whole time (the wind-up spring was obviously long gone) and playing one record — he had only one record — which was so worn out that the grooves were barely there. From the tube issued a hoarse roar, crackling and the disordered tatters of a Latin American song: Rio Manzanares déjame pasar (Rio Manzanares, let me cross). Even though I had greeted him and stood in front of him for a long time, the old man paid no attention to me. ‘Papa,’ I finally shouted, ‘there is no river here.’

He kept quiet. Then, after a while, he replied, ‘Son, I am the river and I can’t cross myself.’ He said nothing more, but kept turning the crank and listening to the record.

5

Describe the story of the Bolivian army sergeant, Mario Terana, who shot the wounded Che Guevara dead. Two days later, he began to feel afraid. He stopped answering orders or questions. The army discharged him. To disguise himself he went around in dark glasses. Then he began to be afraid of the dark glasses, because he thought they would serve as a mark of recognition for the avengers of Guevara. He locked himself in his house and did not go outside for a long time. But then he began to fear his house, since it was like a trap where the partisans hunting him could easily lay hold of him. He stopped drinking, afraid that every liquid contained poison. He wandered off in an unknown direction for two days. On the evening of the second day he shot himself in the neighbourhood of the small, poor village of Madre de Dios.

6

About what happened to my friend Pedro Morote, a Peruvian. As a young boy Pedro declared war on the upper classes and fought in a partisan unit led by his friend, the poet Javier Heraud. In May 1963, they walked into an ambush in Puerto Maldonado and Heraud, then twenty-one, tried to escape across a river when he was shot dead by the police. Pedro managed to get away and went into hiding. When the army later seized power, times changed, and Pedro re-emerged in the struggle against the upper classes as an agricultural reform activist. We drove together to the most out-of-the-way Indian villages, where Pedro was distributing land to the poverty-stricken and benighted peasants. One day, on his return from one of these expeditions, Pedro learned that a friend of his had died and left him a considerable sum of money. In an instant everything changed. The partisan and reformer opened one of the most expensive and elegant nightspots in Lima, aimed at the upper-class market. Whoever turned up there — it was called La Palisada—could see a thick-set, stocky brown-haired man in a dinner jacket circulating among the tables, alert, contented (business was good) and accommodating. This was Pedro. He had put on a lot of weight, but he was brisk and strong. As he drifted through the room he was humming something under his breath. It is doubtful that any of the elegant clients knew that Pedro was singing the verses of his friend and leader Javier Heraud, who had died in an ambush so long ago.

7

Describe the market-place in the little town of Quetzaltepec (north of Oaxaca in Mexico). In the morning Indians of the Mixes tribe come in from the surrounding mountains. They arrive at the market carrying their wares on their backs, in bundles, in baskets. They spread everything out on the ground in the shade of the acacias planted around the large square. A kilogram of corn costs 1.25 pesos; beans 1.75 pesos; one hundred oranges two pesos; one hundred avocados three pesos. It is a silent market; nobody cries out his goods; transactions take place without words in an atmosphere characterized by the complete indifference of the buyer to the seller and the seller to the buyer. Around noon the heat sets in, the trading slows to a halt, then dies out and everybody gathers in the dark Indian bars (puestos de mescal) around the market-place. A litre of mescal costs four pesos. The business ends in the complete drunkenness of everybody who took part in the market. Afterwards the drunks — men, women and children — return to their villages running into each other, falling down in the sand or on the stones and picking themselves up, returning home without a centavo, fuddled and destitute.

8

Describe the soccer war.