Odd Jobs (94 page)
Authors: John Updike
A Chile both more real and more surreal than Isabel Allende’s is fragmentarily glimpsed in
Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín
. Littín is a filmmaker who, in 1970, was appointed by President
Salvador Allende to be head of the newly nationalized Chile Films. When, on September 13, 1973, the Allende government was toppled in a bloody coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, Littín just barely escaped with his life. Since 1973 he has lived with his family in Mexico and Spain, and his name has remained on the government list of exiles forbidden to return to Chile. In May of 1985, disguised as a Uruguayan businessman, he returned to Chile on a false passport, and for six weeks travelled throughout the country, directing a number of film crews in capturing, on over a hundred thousand feet of film, twenty-five hours of life under the Pinochet dictatorship. This footage was smuggled out and subsequently edited to make a four-hour film for television and a two-hour feature for movie theatres. In 1986, in Madrid, Littín described his feat to Gabriel García Márquez, and the novelist persuaded the filmmaker to undergo “a grueling interrogation, the tape of which ran some eighteen hours.” Out of nearly six hundred pages of transcript García Márquez condensed the ten chapters of this short text, much as, over thirty years ago, as a young journalist in Bogotá, he produced from interviews with Luis Alejandro Velasco
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
. Both narratives come to about a hundred printed pages, and in both cases the story and perhaps the words are another’s but the élan is all Gabriel García Márquez’s.
Just as the shipwrecked sailor, in his extremities of hunger, thirst, and isolation, manifested a fabulous poise and capacity for observation, the clandestine filmmaker, amid the perils and strangeness of his situation, shows a breathtaking insouciance. Coming into Santiago for the first time in twelve years, in a disguise that includes a fake Uruguayan accent, plucked eyebrows, a doctored hairdo, a twenty-pound weight loss, and the fancy, expensive clothes of a
momio
(a conservative bourgeois; literally, a mummy), and further equipped with a fake wife—a Chilean expatriate, called Elena, actively associated with the Chilean resistance—Littín endangered the whole scheme by impulsively hopping from a cab and mingling with the crowds:
Elena tried to dissuade me, but she couldn’t argue with me as vehemently as she would have liked, for fear the driver would overhear. In the grip of uncontrollable emotion, I had the taxi stop and jumped out, slamming the door.… I was weeping when I got back to the hotel a step ahead of curfew. The door had just been locked and the concierge had to let me in. Elena had registered for both of us and was in our room hanging up the
antenna for the portable radio when I entered. She seemed calm, but the moment I was inside she blew up like a proper wife. It was inconceivable to her that I could have run the risk of walking the streets alone until the last minutes before curfew.
Further, while in Chile, he stares at policemen and attracts their attention, ignores the passwords the resistance has set up, takes spur-of-the-moment excursions, neglects to remove his notes from his suitcase and his true identity card from his wallet, and pays an improvised, after-curfew visit to his mother. He stays in the country to the very last minute, after his crews are gone; the police are closing in and the underground is signalling him to “Get out or go under,” but he tries to arrange one more clandestine interview and comes within seconds of missing the plane out. He keeps pushing his luck, in short, like a good director upping the suspense in a movie.
His misadventures generate some gaudy imagery. Told to meet, at a certain street corner, “a blue Renault 12 with a sticker of the Society for the Protection of Animals on the windshield,” he jumps into the first blue Renault that comes along, without checking for the sticker, and finds himself in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven car with a woman “no longer young but still very beautiful, dripping with jewels, provocatively perfumed, wearing a pink mink coat that must have cost two or three times as much as the car itself. She was an unmistakable but rarely encountered example of the Santiago upper crust.” To this startled apparition he gives the password, “Where can I buy an umbrella at this hour?” Recovering her composure, the lady in pink mink obligingly asks her chauffeur to drop Littín off at a department store that is still open. On another confused occasion, a restaurant liaison with a member of the resistance is broken up by a punch-drunk ex-boxer, and, on a third, Littín hides from the police in a theatre where a spotlight suddenly hits him and he is made the butt of a stripteaser’s lewd banter—a scene right out of Hitchcock. Moments of magic realism fringe our hero’s hazardous travels: Pablo Neruda’s house in Isla Negra (“this legendary place is neither an island nor black”) trembles every ten or fifteen minutes throughout the day; and at Littín’s boyhood home, his mother, “carrying a lighted candle in a candlestick, as in a Dickens novel,” leads him to an exact reconstruction, complete with furniture and disordered papers, of his old study in Santiago, just as he had left it when he went into exile twelve years before. Glimmers
of fantasy play, too, about his brave fellow conspirators; one wealthy, elderly woman who hides him talks like an old gangster film:
She could not resign herself to the possibility that she had wasted her time bringing up children to be
momios
, playing canasta with moronic matrons, to end up knitting and watching tearjerkers on TV. At seventy, she had discovered that her true vocation was the armed struggle, conspiracy, and the headiness of audacious action.
“Better than dying in bed with your kidneys rotting away,” she said. “I’d prefer to go out in a street fight against the cops with a bellyful of lead.”
Needless to say, both Littín and Isabel Allende see Pinochet as a monster and the Allende years as happy days when land was distributed, industries nationalized, and the masses given a break from centuries of oppression. Dying in the assault that partly destroyed the Moneda Palace, Allende became a holy martyr. Littín tells how the former leader’s photograph was hidden, in one home, behind an image of the Virgin, and how in many homes floral offerings and votive lamps are placed before the small busts of Allende that were sold in the markets during his presidency. Such reported facts tell more of a story than the somewhat abstract romance and sugary socialism of
Of Love and Shadows
. Further, Littín’s random encounters, as mediated through the ghost authorship of a great writer, afford us a politically unfiltered picture of life, a reality wherein the clandestine visitor keeps blundering up out of the underground and can entertain, concerning a beautiful rich woman who tries to help him buy a code-word umbrella, the passing thought, “She was as charming and warm as she was beautiful and one would have wished to linger in the pleasure of her company, forgetting, for just one night, repression, politics, even art.” Without some anarchical openness to possibilities, the Latin-American novelist is in danger of writing whodunits wherein the government, invariably, did it.
*
Wherein a character enters a hotel labelled “hotel macondo.” Also many of the characters—Rebecca, Father Anthony Isabel, Colonel Aureliano Buendía—from
A Hundred Years of Solitude
figure in the story, despite García Márquez’s claim to William Kennedy in 1972 (“The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona, and Other Visions,”
Atlantic Monthly
, January 1973) that “
Leaf Storm
and
Cien Años
are in Macondo, nothing else.”
†
Colombia, the country from which the United States filched the land for the Panama Canal and which now supplies us with cocaine, has suffered two upheavals that impressed García Márquez: the generation of his grandfathers fought in the bloody civil war of 1899–1903, and in his own youth, in 1948, the assassination of the Liberal leader Gaitán brought on riots in which hundreds of thousands died. He told
The Paris Review:
“I was in my pension ready to have lunch when I heard the news. I ran towards the place, but Gaitán had just been put into a taxi and was being taken to a hospital. On my way back to the pension, the people had already taken to the streets and they were demonstrating, looting stores and burning buildings. I joined them. That afternoon and evening, I became aware of the kind of country I was living in, and how little my short stories had to do with any of that.”
‡
The latest Partridge dictionary of slang, I have been told, gives “joeboy” as Canadian Army slang for “someone detailed to perform an unpleasant task” (circa 1940). Still, it is not easy to come up with a better rendering. I can think only of “Joeys,” the capital letter helping us to distinguish the
josefinos
from baby kangaroos.
§
“… I didn’t want to write an historical work. That’s why I took it upon myself to completely distort all historical references, because I don’t believe one can mix the two genres. History as the basic material of a work of fiction is a special matter. What in Latin America we call history, that is, the history of the official historians, has no value whatsoever. On the contrary, it is precisely this false reality which we who write fiction feel obliged to contradict in every possible way” (Roa Bastos, in the
Leviatán
interview, translated from the Spanish by Peggy Boyers in
Salmagundi
).
‖
“Holy shit” in the proof version. “
Jijunagrandísimas
,” in the original.
a
The author herself, in a charming essay, “A Few Words About Latin America” (translated by Jo Anne Engelbert), claims that in Latin America “everything is so disproportionate that it borders on falsehood. The truth—when it exists—is found hidden in this tangle of multicolor threads with which we embroider reality, as if we were victims of a perpetual, collective hallucination.” She claims a continental tendency “to walk along the borderline of fantasy, to incorporate the subjective into daily life,” and traces it back to the first Spanish explorers: “Excited by what they saw, they tried to describe that new land, but the words of the Spanish language were not sufficient; they began to flounder desperately to express their ideas, inventing, exaggerating, creating fables. They thought they had seen cities of pure gold where children played jacks with diamonds, and human beings with a single huge eye in their foreheads and one leg in the middle of their bodies provided with a toe so big that at siesta time they raised it up and it gave them shade, like a parasol. The fantastic realism of Latin American literature began with the Chronicles of the Indies.” The Guatemalen novelist Miguel Angel Asturias, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, traced magic realism back to the Popol Vuh, a compilation of ancient Mayan legends set down shortly after the Spanish Conquest. The phrase itself was coined by a German art critic, Franz Roh, in his book of 1925,
Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus
, which was published in Madrid in 1927 under the title
Realismo mágico
. The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier may have had this phrase in the back of his mind when, in 1949, he wrote of “
lo real maravilloso
.”
THE EVIL EMPIREHow the Other Half Lives
M
OSCOW
C
IRCLES
, by Benedict Erofeev, translated from the Russian by J. R. Dorrell. 188 pp. Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative and Norton, 1982.
T
HE
J
OKE
, by Milan Kundera, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim. 267 pp. Harper & Row, 1982.
T
HE
P
OLISH
C
OMPLEX
, by Tadeusz Konwicki, translated from the Polish by Richard Lourie. 211 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982.
Wouldn’t it be nice to forget about the dreary old Iron Curtain and to read fiction from the Communist countries purely for its aesthetic and informational charms? In a few instances—Stanislaw Lem, for one, and the late Yuri Trifonov—political side-thoughts can be pretty well suppressed; we read a Pole’s science fiction and a Russian’s novellas of domestic distress much as if an Italian or a Canadian had written them. But this cannot be the case with the three novels at hand—the first published in samizdat in Russia; the second legally published in Czechoslovakia in 1967, to great success, but banned two years later, and the author eventually expatriated; and the third written by a well-established Polish author and filmmaker but denied official publication in Poland. All contain political grief. If fiction from Communist countries is to be read as prisoners’ outcries, the first is a bellow, the second a complicated groan, and the third a lively shriek.
The bellow, or yelp, is Benedict Erofeev’s
Moscow Circles
.
*
A strange stark photograph of “Erofeev” which might do for the face of a million young Russians appears on the jacket’s back flap; a biography on the front flap gives some plausible information (born in 1939 in the region of Vladimir, Erofeev was expelled from the University of Moscow for “exaggerated ideas,” and worked for many years as an underground-cable layer) together with some that seems fanciful: “Written in one go in the autumn of 1969, this work was the result of a wager for two bottles of liquor. The loser forfeited not only the two bottles, but had to read the manuscript as well.… Animated by [his] success, Erofeev embarked on his
Dimitri Shostakovitch
. Unfortunately this manuscript was stolen on the Pavlovo-Moscow line—along with two bottles of vermouth, the object of the theft.” The author’s preface continues this jocular-bibulous tone, alleging that one chapter originally consisted of the words “And then I had a drink” followed by a page and a half of obscenities, which have been now deleted because “all readers, and especially young ladies,” turned immediately to this chapter and skipped everything else.
Moscow Circles
describes the inner monologue and external encounters of Benny Erofeev, a hard-drinking cable layer, as he travels by train from Moscow to Petushki, a town in the Vladimir region where his white-eyed sweetheart and his three-year-old son, unknown to each other, reside. He is carrying chocolates for the one and walnuts for the other, but by the time his train gets there—a distance of about seventy miles—Petushki has become a nightmare Moscow, and the transcendentally drunken Erofeev is pursued by four ominous men whom the translator in a footnote identifies as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. One of them carries an awl. Stalin’s father was a cobbler. God, not infrequently invoked in the course of Benny’s delirium, is silent. Angels who have been intermittently talking to Benny cruelly laugh. The book ends with the unconscious narrator’s assurance “I have not come to since and I never shall.”
