This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

Friendship

What we do not have, we find in our friends. I believe in this gift and have cultivated it since childhood. In this sense, I am no different from most other human beings. Friendship is the first great link connecting the home to the outside world. Whether a happy or unhappy place, the home is the classroom where we learn basic wisdom, and friendship is the test of this wisdom. What we receive from our family, we confirm in friendship. The variations, differences, or similarities between our family and our friends will determine the contradictory paths our lives will take. And while we may love our home, we all inevitably reach for that unstable, restless moment of departure (even if we love it, even if we still remain in it). This departure from home can only be compensated by friendship. But it is more than that: without outside friendship, our internal foundations would crumble. Friendship does not challenge the family’s domain that rules the early years of life; on the contrary, friendship confirms it, supports it, makes it last. Friendship plants the seed for feelings that can only grow outside the home. Locked up inside the family domain, these feelings will dry up like plants without water. When we open the doors of the home, we discover forms of love that bring the home and the outside world together. These are called friendships.

Precisely because I believe in the value of friendship as a kind of initiation into life, as well as for the wisdom it imparts, I am struck by the philosophical cynicism that hovers over it like a dark cloud. Oscar Wilde uses his fearsome talent for paradox to declare that Bernard Shaw has not a single enemy in the world, but none of his friends like him either. For Byron, sadly, friendship is love without wings. And while friendship may blossom into love, love rarely blossoms into friendship. Friends, as conventional wisdom goes, should be welcomed with joy and dispatched with haste. And if the friend is a guest, after three days, like a dead fish, he will begin to emit a most foul stench.

I think there is more pain in lost friendships than in cynicism. The emotions confessed and shared. The illusion, confirmed by our friends, that we possess a shared wisdom. The strong backbone of hope that can only grow out of a childhood lived among friends. The joy of the gang, the posse, the brotherhood, la banda, l’équipe, la patocha. The bonds of unity. The complicity of childhood friendship, the pride of being young and, if one is young and already wise, the admonishing voice of youth when the friendship is an old one. We learn to govern the pride of youth. The day will come when we are no longer young, and when it does we will need our friends more than ever.

The era of youth opens the experience of friendship, and my “disk” remembers the names, the faces, the words, and the actions of my schoolmates. But the things I remember do not win out against those I have forgotten. How can I not celebrate the fact that, sixty years later, I am still in contact with my very first childhood friends. I had the kind of nomadic childhood that comes from being born into a family of diplomats whose constant pilgrimage resists any kind of sustained affection. Yet I still write to Hans Berliner, a German-Jewish boy who arrived at my elementary school in Washington after fleeing the Nazi terror and became the object of childish cruelty that lashes out against all that is different. He was dark-skinned and tall for his age, and like all European children in those days, wore short trousers. To the American children, he wasn’t “regular”—or, in other words, he wasn’t indistinguishable from them. For my part, I lost hold of my initial popularity when President Cárdenas nationalized Mexico’s oil wealth in 1938. For the first but not the only time in my life, I was suddenly suspected of being a Communist. Exclusion united us, Hans and myself, and we remain close to this day. Geography would soon separate us, but as an adolescent in Santiago de Chile I soon found my gang, my team, my chorcha, my patocha among the boys who preferred reading and debate to the rough, mud-caked sports of the Grange, our English school in the foothills of the Andes, governed by English captains convinced that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. I still remember all the names, all the faces — Page, Saavedra, Quesnay, Marín Stipec — but most of all I remember Roberto Torretti, my intellectual and literary companion. We wrote our first novel together. It ended up getting lost in one of Roberto’s mother’s old trunks, but to this day Torretti and I continue to write letters, meeting and talking in Oaxaca and Puerto Rico, as well as corresponding between Mexico and Santiago. He is an extraordinary philosopher, and our friendship always takes me back to those early years in that English school, to the play-acted adventures of two musketeers in the Mexican embassy palazzo, and it brings back other memories as well, some more distant and others more painful. That was where I met José Donoso, older than me, the future crowning glory of Chilean letters. I don’t know if he knew me. And in a previous school, I discovered the pain of having a close friend die at the age of twelve; it was my first experience of facing the death of someone my own age, and it left me shattered. I was equally devastated, however, by the fate of another little boy who was the object of ridicule and abuse because of his physical deformities. I dared to defend him, and came to discover another dimension of friendship: solidarity. After the coup staged by the atrocious Pinochet, that boy, who had since become a man, was tortured in the death camps in southern Chile, and while that fact intensifies the horror I feel when confronted with such human cruelty, it also intensifies the tenderness and compassion I feel for the true reality of friendship.

This is because all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, have betrayed or been betrayed by friendship. Gangs break up and close childhood friends can become the most indifferent, alienated ghosts in adulthood. And there is nothing quite so easily betrayed as friendship. If we were to make a list of all our lost friends, the footnotes would speak of indifference, hatred, rivalry, but also different epochs and epic distances. They would speak of deaths. Why did we abandon friends? Why did they abandon us? When you really think about it, there is very little friendship in the world. Most especially among equals. William Blake expressed it in these incomparable words: “Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache: Do be my enemy for friendship’s sake.” Because while friendship, at its core, is a matter of disposition, generosity, willingness to spend time with others, it is also, at the very same time, a secret and insinuating rejection of that same intimacy when it is felt as dependency. Wordsworth speaks of the vernal hours of life during which we live in a kind of paradox that flings us down the path of fate yet at the same time shelters us from its accidents. Accidents, at times, of humor. Sargent went so far as to say that each time he painted a portrait he lost a friend. And George Canning, the legendary British foreign secretary, added a diplomatic twist to friendship—“Save me from the Candid Friend,” he implored. This is true: in both diplomacy and politics, to trust friendship is to take a great risk. In power, we find a concentration of laws that have the most definitive ability to destroy friendship. Betrayal. Remorse. Desertion. The field of dead bodies left behind by the use of abuse. The abandoned trenches left behind by the indifference of force. And always, the temptation of cruel humor. Malraux to Genet: “Que pensez-vous vraiment de moi?” (“What do you really think of me?”) Genet to Malraux: “Je ne vous aime assez pour vous le dire.” (“I don’t like you enough to tell you.”)

These are not useless lessons. The most barren of lands blossom forth suddenly to show us that, insofar as friendship is concerned, one must occasionally allow room for the wisdom of the Proverbs and admit that the wounds of a friend can be faithful ones. And with a friend we can dare to tell him why we do not love him. The enemy, on the other hand, should never be given that satisfaction. But the terrible thing about the loss of friendship is abandoning all those days to which the friend gave meaning. To lose a friend, then, is quite literally to lose time. Excessive expectations, jealousy of someone else’s victories. It is time for a return to friendship but with the knowledge that friendship demands cultivation on a daily basis if it is to bear its marvelous fruits. To establish bonds and enjoy shared affinities. To give each other the gift of serenity. To call for a joyous mutual discipline so as to maintain the friendship. To discover with friends the power of the world and the joy of spending time together. To laugh with friends. To experience friendship as a permanent invitation to accept and to be accepted. And to challenge oneself to try to achieve perfection in friendship and protect it from anything that may attempt to undermine it. To live in the company of friends in such a way that there is never an occasion to feel shame the day after, or to speak ill of those not present. To defend friendship against jealousy, envy, fear. And to agree to disagree: differences should enhance friendship and mutual respect. In an intelligent relationship between friends, there is no place for ambition, intolerance, pettiness. Friendship is dignified modesty, it is imagination and it is generosity. And sometimes — why not? — it is also the exact opposite. Pride. Passivity. Emotional avarice.

I say “passivity” and I am reminded that while dialogue is one of the great joys of friendship, so is silence. This is something I learned through my friendship with Luis Buñuel. At first, whenever he fell silent in the course of our normally animated conversation, I would feel that his lapses were my fault, and I perceived them as reproaches. Eventually I realized that knowing how to be together without saying a word was, ultimately, a superior level of friendship. It was respect. It was reverence. It was reflection as opposed to mere chitchat. We are not, suddenly, parrots. But we will be, if momentarily, philosophers. . After all, weren’t Seneca and the bullfighter Manolete, both from Córdoba, both stoics?

This experience of friendship as reflexive, respectful silence leads me to an inevitable edge in which the borderline between being alone and being with friends is what separates our lives. If friendship is the nexus between the life of community and the life of the self, then the life of the self needs to reclaim solitude from friendship. This is natural: for our inner selves, we demand the passion, intelligence, or love that we recognize in the gaze of a friend. But affection and gestures that invite closeness have a limit: me. I return to myself, to my own despair but also to my own power. I remember with great nostalgia the dawn of childhood, shared among friends. How difficult it is to maintain friendships as adults! I relive the moments of rifts with an inevitable sense of pain. The hours are not the same. The paths have taken odd turns. But I cannot avoid the charity that the self, sooner or later, asks of Fortune. After all, didn’t we already know, from the very beginning of the friendship, that one day it would end? Haven’t we always known that with intimate anxiety, almost with shame, we carried with us an imperfection that we would never be able to share with anyone, not even our closest and most trusted confidant?

And so, paradoxically, we offer the world our imperfection and society our shame — all in the hope that another kind of friendship, that of belonging to life in the community, will redeem us. The artist, by definition, learns very early on to endure solitude for the sake of his artistic creation. But in a broader sense, friendship is what forces us not only to recognize our limits but to realize that we share those limits. We are friends in the community: we need one another. With good reason Thoreau once said that he had but three chairs in his house: one for solitude; the second for friendship; the third for society. Knowing how to be alone is the essential and life-enhancing counterpoint to friendship. So is death. Just as I loyally remember my friends from the remotest reaches of my childhood, I also dedicate an unflinching memory to those old friends, long gone, who were also my teachers at some earlier point in my life. My generation recalls, with Latin verecundia, two great teachers of our youth. Alfonso Reyes of Mexico and Manuel Pedroso of Spain. Two wise men who were also friends. Their intellectual lessons were inseparable from their fraternal ones. They never expected, as false teachers do, idolatry without contradiction. They hoped for and sought the reconquest of youth from old age and in exchange offered us the conquest of fraternal knowledge and experience. With Reyes, small and rotund, and with Pedroso, tall and angular, we discovered over and over again that friendship means enduring through old age — or through time itself. That there is always something else to learn in the world. That friendship is reaped because it is sown. That nobody makes friends without making enemies, but that no enemy can ever attain the transcendence of a friend. That friendship is a form of discretion: it does not admit the cruel speeches that speak so ill of the person who utters them, nor the gossip that turns everything it touches to rubbish. (As La Rochefoucauld said, it is more shameful to mistrust friends than to deceive them.) Friendship, to be intimate, should show us the path of respect and distance, even if it tells us to love and detest the very same things.

In this way, the stages of life come to be measured by the degrees of close affinities we maintain from one age to the next. We forget about friends that are distant in time. We slowly let go of childhood friends who did not grow at the same pace as we did. We court younger friends to acquire the vitality that grows increasingly elusive to us in biological terms. We search for lifelong friends and yet now we have nothing to say to them. We witness the decline of old, beloved friends we no longer recognize or who may no longer recognize us. But when age creates distances, it is only because it is waiting for us. Once again, the bright lights of early youth shine in the twilight hour. In the middle of a distant fog, perhaps, we remember the complicity, we discover together all that exists, we reconquer youth, and become once again banda, cuatiza, chorcha, patocha, barra, posse, gang. Once again we reap passions and vanquish rebellions. And with nostalgia, we look upon the ancient hours of friendship as if they never really existed at all. .