Reasons of State (2 page)

This was a period when heresy became a profession, a religion, an ideology that worked for pursuing an updated Never Never Land; rebellion had become a reduced kitsch, resulting from a starvation diet of loud and shallow entertainment, what Kundera describes thusly: “the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection.”

So there was plenty of darkness to go around, and plenty of muddy water to swim through, no shortage of hollow logs to sleep a mind inside.

Decisively as a burst of sustained wind or light or water, Enrique told me about
Reasons of State
and recommended getting with Carpentier. This man was, he said, the most formidable writer since Borges. This was uttered with a startling confidence that did not condescend to any others from wherever in the Latin World they grew up or moved. Carpentier was beyond the Latin or Spanish-speaking universe. Rendering his range and ability, Enrique made sure that the Cuban writer I had never heard of was introduced as a world force.

I was told he seemed a mythological figure in his sense of order, where everyone had to be evaluated by a couple of things—all that had been done and was known—as well as by what was
most
important—how much an original creator could make anew when he stepped into the heavyweight boxing ring of the literary world, in which one did not defeat
other careers while pummeling to the top. At the very best place, one established what all writers sought, recognition distinguished by the fire, the subtlety, and the grace of the individual talent. Lord help us.

I was intrigued because I had never heard of this Cuban. García Márquez was the one considered above all others, so I wondered. But I had to step up because I was now in New York and trying to make my way through new information and newer circumstances. For too many years, I had been longing for Manhattan, its filth, its overcrowding, its sublime intelligence, its buried and hidden soul.

Back in Los Angeles, my hometown, I’d spent some time, after graduating from high school, as an outsider teaching English for the Poverty Program in East L.A. There I wandered and wondered how all of that American Latin world went together, so much of it a penetrable synthesis that made life seem a bit bigger, part of it from here and part of it from somewhere
over there
, as Carpentier loves to say, pulling a popular song’s lyric into the narrative of
Reasons of State. Over there
could be in Southern Europe or the Caribbean or South America. It could also be Africa, the Dark Continent, or the City of Light, where the deposed dictator with a smutty soul dies a pariah at the end of the novel, disgraced for shouting the downstairs blues so recognizably upstairs and showing no class at all.

After moving up as a teacher and serving seven years in the academy, I left Los Angeles and moved to New York at almost thirty years old in the fall of 1975.

I soon found myself writing for
The Village Voice
, for which I penned reviews of music, theater, and film, believing I had made it to the
big time
. But I discovered I had to travel either in or out of the country in order to learn what I had
to say about a subject. Subjects were perhaps serial murders and the attendant inner complexities of ethnic politics in Atlanta, Georgia; or a jazz festival superbly backdropped by the vibrancy of Perugia, Italy, and hovered over by Rome itself.

As far removed as those faces and places were, one by one they became essential to understanding or comprehending the massive girth of Carpentier’s talent. His work was beyond everything popular in American literary trends. Synthesis and the grand
allusion
were his goals, and he paraded them as completely in
Reasons of State
as he ever did, except, perhaps, for the feeling and music delivered in his late novel
Baroque Concerto
.

Almost exactly like Borges, the unconvinced blind man in the porno house, Carpentier had not been duped into a limited sense of personal identity or irresistible appetites. He too could smell something more rotten than anything that had flipped out the great Dane. The Cuban did not step into and break the legs of his literary imagination with reductive nationalism, or let a ring be ideologically inserted into his nose and pretend to sing sorrow songs as it was pulled and forced him into motion, with the wondrous horror of great pain radiating from a tender part of the head.

INEBRIATED BY THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE

Around those early 1980s, I became an acquaintance of Enrique at the big office of the paper on Thirteenth Street and Broadway, where an unknown man once wheeled a cart with an old phonograph onto the cold and barren first floor downstairs. He played both sides of Caruso singing, then continued down Broadway going from place to place, never insulted for making noise because the tenor sound did certain things
it might have done in
Reasons of State
. That horned phonograph player melted all hostility with the beautiful made audible from the hissing surfaces of frail shellac discs. One could understand why Louis Armstrong, the titan who had risen on the banks of the Mississippi, remembered being moved by Caruso recordings floating from windows in the New Orleans slum where he grew up.

I had many conversations with Enrique about Latin American literature and Spanish writing in general. He was more than ready to teach me. Bilingual, he became an important influence on me and a guide who introduced me to the depths of Borges. Fernandez possessed the calm common to many so gifted with large, well-informed minds. They do not become too activated when explaining things they had concluded were either profound
already
or on the way there. He did not think that all of Borges or Carpentier was great, but he was firm in seeing all their material, failures or not, as creation that never slumped under the trivial, or drew an academic chalk line around a version of bragging on having absorbed so much gargantuan data it was hard to keep in check, too hard and valuable to lose itself in the simple ways of the dregs. He chose not to be one of the slick, self-assured academic rodents running from the belly of a dead horse that had rotted in the street, turned into an instrument of percussion as it was beaten by the newest regime. When I first read
Reasons of State
, I was in the midst of many independent studies, undertaken because I was impatient with the academy and had little respect for degrees. This was why it became one of my favorite novels from the moment I finished it and sat happily furled by a state of wonderment that occupied my loft apartment on the derelict-ridden Bowery.

Reasons of State
proves that vast knowledge is cold comfort in a time of preferred hogwash, particularly if the living
presence exits in smoke; we can see it leaving the bucket as flaming swords are dipped by blacksmiths wanting razor smoothness. Carpentier constructed a double-edged tool as broad as a sword on one side, as slim and shining as a shaver ready for all wet soap or mayonnaise on the other. He decided to make a style or approach that was direct and simple-seeming, because all his variations were based on popular art, clichéd stances, and stories that were so familiar they might result in being a version of the aesthetic and mythic fact that
Moby-Dick
, after all the huffing and puffing, is no more than a fish story; but one told like those tales Jack Johnson used to befuddle reporters, because he lived in a dream world where freedom could be realized only if the dreamer was as big as the dream.

The magnum dream drunk by Carpentier was the New World, sensibly in need of new ways to match new forms, sights, and the distance of deep thoughts, safe in the mind, if not in the air or on the earth. Fuentes writes that Carpentier called it “ ‘the marvelous reality’ of a land where ‘the unusual is a daily occurrence’ … The men and women said, America
is
, and the world has to be ceaselessly re-imagined from now on. Carpentier in his fiction made this marvelously explicit.”

MODERN FREEDOMWAYS

Carpentier was, in other words, alienated from nothing, having taken seriously the modern freedom of utilizing all things that could be connected to one another. Choosing that route makes him a descendent of the first great and internationally effective writer from the Americas, Walt Whitman, who swallowed all the fish in the bowl of life and spat them out as fire and brimstone, ready for war against separation, garbed
in the audible mufti of celebration, that commonplace lyric sung with open arms in the graveyard, its strongest song. The man Carlos Fuentes says is the father of a vision abandoned all religion or nationalism or ideology, stationary in air-tight dictates, instead favoring recurring myth, tweaked, as they say, by the specifics—time and period, geography, the animal kingdom, tradition, and functional intelligence, none completely devoid of poetic explanation, terror, ambivalence, or affirmation.

We know no freedom is that big, but in the universe of what seems true, or accurate, it is not at all hard to believe in extensive perception. This was Carpentier’s take on the freedom that came with and through world exploration and straight-up conquest, all inevitably destined to submission through miscegenation one way or another. Missionaries, sailors, conquistadors, naturalists, and villainous roustabouts, each type giving the close listener access to something close to thematic infinity in every direction given prelude by fanciful tales. But in this case, the Carpentier Case, much more unifies, since this writer’s knowledge, interests, and imagination were apparently liberated by masterful creation itself, juices brought through characters always contrapuntal in their relationships to one another. This foamed into the great getting-up morning of the New World. A varied bush where colonized women learned what all princesses knew the world over: they possessed lush boxes as magnetic as any opened by Pandora, come one, come all.

NOTES OF THE GHOSTS

Walt Whitman, along with Herman Melville, is a father of free form in American and world literature, developed along
with what Rousseau, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the European gang threw into the boxing ring of art; both the wandering poet and the novelist seem to foreshadow the ambition at the crux of Carpentier’s fiction. The sloppily made huts, some rather neat caves, the indignant whirlpools, and his magnificent cathedrals of intellect, his branches and crevices of feeling, and all that is there, living, dead, or ghostly, appears in the introduction to the 1855 edition of
Leaves Of Grass
, Whitman coming right out of the box and leaving the stadium with the stains of new paint on his breeches: “Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses corroborate themselves, but this is removed from any proof but its own and foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single glance of it mocks all the investigations of man and books of the earth and all reasoning.”

Carpentier’s Cuban-born art was prefigured in his youth by an obsession and scholarly leap into Afro-Cuban music, which he was one of the first to study seriously. A sincere grasp of music actually pulls him away from most writers who are tone-deaf enough to write either telephone lists of names and numbers or advertising copy. But the Cuban work came to loom over its time because Carpentier’s inner strength increased until it was aged wisdom, a condition known everywhere but perhaps most significant in the aesthetic context, and always aided by a sense of human recognition that escapes all of those snares, the intricate heaps of holes made by academics and meant for the capturing of imagination, its wind and breath, itself an Edenic force like the line in geometry that has no beginning and no end. Carpentier knew we have access to the part of the line that we pretend, together, has a start and a finish. Nothing not only comes from nothing, as the Greek said, but life emerges from and continues into oblivion, moving from mist to mist, impenetrably.

The relationship between time and space always follows the rules of quicksilver on a board beneath feet that is also a floor through which we see moments disappear—now you see it; now you don’t.

Bessie Jones speculated to a college audience that the only meaning clearly said by life was this:
Being born meant that one was going to die
. A perfect grasp of existentialism by a Georgia Sea Island singer at an age carved into later space by wisdom. Whitman, Melville, Twain, and Joyce were open to such a scope of communication between the learned and the not-too-literate, since the poetic was always available to take the giant steps necessitated by democracy and its central thoughts, with recognition of the grand mystery of personal importance or group significance seeming to rise from nowhere and going somewhere on engines of vitality.

That is the roller coaster of international mulatto life, an inevitable that all human closeness brands as invincible. Alejo Carpentier believed and lived and danced and sang by it, if not to it. Happiness, sadness, or any variations on either are secondary to the vitality, the affirmation, of the breath itself, and to the wind that blows along or reveals the prints and footprints of the past.

… BUT I’VE ONLY JUST GONE TO BED. AND THE alarm has gone off already. Half past six. It’s impossible. Quarter past seven, perhaps. More likely. Quarter past eight. This alarm clock would be a marvel of Swiss watchmaking, but its hands are so slim that one can hardly see them. Quarter past nine. That’s not right, either. My spectacles. Quarter past ten. That’s it. Besides, daylight is already shining through the yellow curtains with morning brilliance. And it’s always the same when I come back to this house: I open my eyes with the feeling of being
there
, because this same hammock accompanies me everywhere—house, hotel, English castle, our palace—because I’ve never been able to sleep in a rigid bed with a mattress and bolster. I have to curl up inside a rocking hammock, to be cradled in its corded network. Another swing and a yawn, and with another swing I get my legs out and hunt about with my feet for my slippers, which I have lost in the pattern of the Persian carpet. (
There
, always thoughtful for my moments of waking, the Mayorala Elmira, my housekeeper, would already have put on my shoes for me; she must be asleep in her camp bed—she has her fads too—with her breasts uncovered and petticoats over her thighs, in the darkness of the other hemisphere.)