FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY

They all needed a night out. His ever-worsening mental state was weighing heavily on his wife, Mary. His friends were mostly trying to ignore it, pretend it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. He was a tough old bird. He was just going through a rough patch. That’s what they thought.

His buddy Hotch, who was twenty years the old man’s junior, had become a good friend over the years and the old man seemed more at ease with him than with a lot of other people. He could talk straight to Hotch. This was a guy who could chronicle the old days, when life was grand, so that they read like a fine novel.

Truth be told, though, Hotch was putting on a brave face and trying to act like the old days were coming back again, that everything was going to be okay. But things weren’t okay. This old man, who now was looking his age and more, was going fast and it was sad to see. He’d made a name for himself as a hunter and adventurer—a huge name, in fact, bigger than life. And now he was so messed up that even a little wing shooting in a farmer’s field had him spooked.

Hotch had thought a little hunting would buck him up and had assembled a party of four other old buddies for the occasion.  They were out in some large, open fields, land where one of the guys had been told by the owner that he could hunt anytime. But after somebody pulled down on a couple of woodcocks that fluttered up out of the cornstalks, and  missed, the old man started dawdling and fretting. Wanted to wait, he said, to see if the shots brought anybody scrambling out to tell them to get off the land. The assurances of the others that everything was okay didn’t help. Far from the often boastful big game hunter of yesteryear, the old man looked hunted himself now, prey to his own unreasonable fears.

He finally got one of them to knock on the door of the farmhouse and ask for permission right there in front of him, so he’d know everything was okay. The farmer’s wife said, sure, no problem. The fields were harvested and nobody minded that they were hunting there. It was all right.

But back out in the field again, after a pheasant broke from the stubble and another of the hunters picked it off as it flew over, the old man stood looking pale, staring down at the ground where the bird lay dead and started saying maybe they’d better get the hell out of there. So what if they had the farmer’s wife’s okay? What if the farmer himself came home and saw a bunch of guys tramping around shooting up the game in his fields? What if he just pulled a shotgun out of the truck and took a potshot at them? This didn’t feel right. It was trespassing. He wanted to go.

So that night Hotch and the old man and the old man’s wife went out to eat. At first it was fun. Mary needed a night out in a nice restaurant. Things were not good. He was getting to be a handful and she was exhausted.

The old man, who had a well-earned reputation for being able to just about hold his weight in liquor, was lately sticking to a regimen that bordered on the abstemious. Of course, it had always been a hard reputation to keep up and sometimes made him do some pretty stupid things. Like the time he tried out a new pistol by firing it into the toilet bowl at the Ritz in Paris and flooded the room. Or that other time, also in Paris, when he’d thought he was pulling the toilet chain and ended up pulling a rickety skylight down on his head. That caused a pretty severe head injury. And then there were other head injuries in those two different plane crashes he was in down in Africa. It was uncanny how accident prone he was. But also how lucky. He’d always been lucky. He’d always survived. He was a tough guy.

That night, however, he was being careful. Everything worried him lately and he was taking care of himself. He ordered a single cocktail before dinner and had a single glass of wine with the meal. But still, the alcohol seemed to cheer him, warm him, brighten his mood. After a while he started talking about old times and laughing about things he and Hotch had done together  and things he’d done alone. And for a fleeting moment, he was kind of acting like his old self. It was nice to see him like that, and Hotch and Mary would have done anything to keep that mood alive.

But then, suddenly, he froze, dropped his eyes and muttered something about “the two guys at the bar”. What about them? They were Feds…FBI…G-men. And they were there because of him. They were tailing him wherever he went. How did he know? Just by looking at them. Didn’t Hotch and Mary think he knew a damned Fed when he saw one?

At the clinic the doctors decided electroshock treatment was in order. Nobody’d wanted to put him through that, but the doctors thought it was necessary.

Desperate times required desperate measures. Mary was scared. It frightened her that he kept talking about killing himself all the time. She was scared he might do it. She told Hotch that sometimes she’d find him just standing staring out the window while holding one of his guns in both hands. It was unnerving. She was afraid to leave him alone. She showed Hotch a letter that the old man had tried to write to his bank. It looked like gibberish. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t write any more, though he kept trying. So maybe the shock treatments would work.

They gave him more than ten in a month, December. The old man spent Christmas at the clinic, Mary in a nearby hotel. When Hotch went to visit him at the hospital he was shocked by the old man’s appearance. He’d always been an imposing figure. Always carried well over two hundred pounds on his big frame. But now he didn’t weigh one-seventy-five. He looked terrible.

But when they began to talk, he kind of seemed like his old self. There was something, though. Something Hotch couldn’t quite lay his finger on. Something exaggerated, not quite right. The old man got Hotch to ask if they could take a walk. The nurse said no problem and brought the old man his clothes.

Hotch made small talk, said it seemed the shock doctors were really helping him. Everything was okay until the old man indicated, very confidentially, that the walls in his room had ears. He hadn’t wanted to talk there. He said he’d tried to turn himself in to the local authorities, but that the Feds evidently hadn’t told them about the rap. He wanted to turn himself in. He was afraid of hurting innocent people around him who didn’t have anything to do with his problem with the FBI, people who’d covered for him.

Hotch was astonished. None of this was working. The old man had them fooled.

The doctors didn’t seem that worried. If he was still clinging to a delusion or two, that’d probably go away when he started working and his recovery was such, they seemed to think, that the old man now couldn’t wait to get back to his writing. Did they realize, Hotch wondered, that they were working with someone extraordinary, a remarkable man who was perfectly capable of outsmarting the smartest shrink around? They knew. Not to worry.

So they sent the old man home. He tried to work, but it was no good. The electroshocks had knocked the hell out of his memory. He was confused, couldn’t pull it all together again, couldn’t write. He was depressed, though he tried to pretend he was doing okay. But then one day Mary came home and found him standing in the vestibule with a shotgun with the breach broken open in one hand and two shells in the other and she knew he wasn’t going hunting.

Back he went to the clinic. He fought it. Tried to kill himself again before they took him back and was saved from himself by an obviously strong friend who managed to wrestle a gun away from him.  This time the doctors told Mary to stay away. They were going to keep him isolated from the outside world. Trying to concentrate the treatment, focus on a cure.

More drugs. More electric shock treatments. More bitterness and confusion.

Then, he started seeming better. He quit talking about suicide, started talking about going home. Mary wanted to make sure he was well. She didn’t think she could take three more months like the ones she’d had with him the last time they’d declared him well and sent him home.

They started letting her see him again. He was irritable, furious about what the treatment was doing to his memory. He was a writer, goddamnit. He needed his memory. But at least he wasn’t talking about suicide.

When Hotch finally was able to visit him again, he and the old man took a walk, like the other time. While on the walk, he gave Hotch a horse chestnut, a lucky piece he’d been carrying around for years. Hotch didn’t know what to make of this, or of the old man’s telling him that if anything happened, he, Hotch, should take care of Mary. He also talked about how fighters could retire, how people understood when a fighter lost his legs or the power of his punch. But if you were a writer, everybody wanted to know what you were working on.

The conversation left Hotch ill at ease. He absentmindedly picked up a pebble from the beach, but the old man stopped him. Leave it, the old man told him. Nothing good could come from this place.

Mary wanted to go to their place in the mountains for the summer that year. Should she? The doctors thought so, even thought maybe the old man should go too. He was doing much better they thought. He too seemed to want to. Maybe there he could get back down to work. She wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t sure at all.

But eventually that’s what happened. They drove from the clinic, the old man, Mary and an old friend who acted as driver. It was a three-day trip and the old man seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. It was good, it seemed, to be out of the clinic, to be going home to a place he loved, where he could be in the great outdoors.

On the night of his first full day back in that mountain home that he’d loved so well, the old man enjoyed a pleasant dinner and seemed at ease and happy to be home and free of the clinic.

Early the next morning, July 2^nd, 1961, Ernest Miller Hemingway, shoved the barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun into his mouth and ended one of the most formidable lives in modern American letters. This inimitable writer, considered, by then, the old man of American letters, this popular American superhero, known since he was in his late thirties as ‘Papa’, was still a few weeks shy of his sixty-second birthday.

It happened fifty years ago today.

This piece is a tribute to Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest writers of our time and is dedicated to A.E. Hotchner, the greatest of his biographers.

LIVING WITH PUYEHUE



Puyehue's 6-mile-high plume of ash. (Chilean Air Force photo)  



Although to us it seems much longer, it has only been ten days since we here in this region of Patagonia had what might be described as a “biblical” experience—one of those phenomena that can cause you to cower and whimper and cover your eyes in sheer fright, or for lack of anything more logical to do. It is one of those experiences that revives the true meaning of that overused adjective, awesome. This isn’t the “awesome” of, “Hey, that’s an awesome shirt!” Or even of, “Honey, I think you’re really awesome!” No, no. This is glassy-eyed, dry-mouthed, quaking in your boots, crapping your pants, falling to your knees with hands clasped awesome—burning bush, parting of seas awesome. I’m talking about the eruption of the Mount Puyehue volcano.

  The day of the eruption, my wife Virginia and I went to town—the ski resort of Bariloche,12 miles away—as we usually do on Saturdays, to do the weekly shopping. We left early because there were several other things we needed to do. It was a gorgeous autumn day in Patagonia, sunny and clear. We had lunch out, as we also often do, at our favorite family restaurant in town. We talked, as usual, with our favorite waiter, Fabián, chatting about this and that, nothing of consequence. Everybody was going about his or her business as usual and no one seemed to suspect that anything untoward was afoot.

We arrived back home a little before three, and after putting away our groceries, decided to have a nap. The sky was a little cloudy at home and there was a light haze over the mountains in the distance across Lake Moreno, but nothing out of the ordinary. Bariloche is in a transitional area, on a major lake, between the mountains and the steppes and its weather is often different from ours, since we are smack up against the mountains and in the midst of the forest, where it is often cloudy or rainy when the sun is simultaneously shining in town.

However, at four, we awakened to the sound of thunder so powerful and constant that it rattled the windowpanes. It was pitch black in the room and I awoke totally disoriented. So much so that I switched on the bedside lamp, looked at the clock and wasn’t at all sure whether it was four in the afternoon or four in the morning.

Both of us sprang out of bed, dressed hastily and ran to look out the window. It was dark as a moonless night and we could hear precipitation pounding the galvanized roofing overhead in what sounded like a torrential downpour, but louder than any we’d ever heard before. The constantly roaring thunder was disconcerting. In areas like ours, the surrounding mountains tend to attract thunderbolts like lightning rods, so it is very seldom that we hear thunder, a time or two each summer and never at this time of the year—late South American autumn—when temperatures are low.

Virginia switched on the patio lights, stepped over our three worried and whimpering “indoor” dogs and peered out into the darkness that the lights outside barely pierced.

"Oh, it's snowing!" she said.

"Hmmm, thunder and snow?” I said. “How odd, and it  doesn't seem cold enough.”

“But weird snow,” she added, “like little round things.” She sounded dubious.

"Like snow...but weird snow."

“Sleet maybe,” I said, as I too took position at the window. But even as I said this, I was unconvinced.

 There was nothing for it but to step out and do a skin test. When I did, the reality suddenly became clear. My shoes grated on the abrasive surface and I was immediately pelted with a dry stinging shower of grit that stuffed my ears, peppered by hair and seeped down my collar to chafe the skin on my back and chest. The air was close and stifling despite the low temperature. So much so that I instinctively cupped my hand over my mouth and nose to breathe. And immediately I knew: What was showering down on us—as if from a cosmic dump truck being unloaded from on high—wasn’t rain, snow or sleet, but a deluge of volcanic sand and ash.



Crushed structures and knee-deep ash and sand

at the Samoré Pass border crossing.

(Photo by Diego Puente) 



As soon as I gave Virginia the bad news, she switched on the local radio station and we heard the familiar voice of Bariloche commentator Carlos Calvo calling on the population to remain calm, stay indoors and stay tuned for further information and instructions. Neighboring Mount Puyehue, across the border in Chile had decided, he said, to wake up after a fifty-year slumber and when it had begun spewing its guts, the wind had brought all of its ashy, noxious breath our way.

For my part I was already putting on my rain jacket and cap (something to shed some sand and ash) and tying a bandana over my mouth and nose to brave the elements. As often happens to me in limit situations, my military training of forty years before was kicking in. Panic wasn’t an option. Practicality and survival demanded priority thinking. My instincts seemed to be in order since my first thought was to protect our only source of water—the three one-thousand-liter tanks fed by a spring-head waterhole located sixty yards uphill to the east.

On the way to the tanks, I stopped to coax the three “outside dogs” into my tool shed from their houses, where the thunder and sandstorm had driven them. Their doghouses, arranged so, there in the patio, resembled a tiny Alpine village like the ones portrayed in those glass ball souvenir paperweights, the ones you shake to make it snow. But this one looked as if some giant couple’s malicious toddler had shaken the daylights out of it, since from one end of the patio I could hardly make out the lines of the doghouses at the other, awash, as they were, in a blizzard of gray ash and sand. 

The surface of the waterhole was certain to be

laden with ash and the water in it with suspended sand.

These were our veterans, our aging Patagonian canines, who live outdoors the year round and are hardened to harsh conditions. But today, it was no mean feat getting them out of their shelters. Once I did, however, they were so terrified that they gladly accompanied me to the unaccustomed interior of the shed, where I barricaded them in. By the light of my flashlight, I saw that the water in their drinking buckets in the patio was choked with ash and sand. I made a mental note to take them fresh water as soon as I had taken care of ensuring that our own water source—and theirs—wasn’t contaminated.  Like the dogs’ buckets, the surface of the waterhole was certain to be laden with ash and the water in it with suspended sand.

I made my way across a growing carpet of ashy gray sand to the big double main gate. The bolt was so “breaded” with ash that it was hard to slide open and I stood there training my flashlight on it with one hand and jiggling it with the other while I felt the wind-borne sand biting into the back of my neck. As the main thrust of the volcanic storm passed over, I reached the three tanks, just on the other side of our fence under some beech saplings. I was still being assailed by a dense, stinging shower of grit, as if it were being thrown by the shovelful through a huge fan at my back, to the accompaniment of almost ceaseless thunder and distant blue flashes of lightning. Now, however, this was happening not in complete darkness but in an eerie burnt-orange twilight that ensued following the initial pitch dark blast of gas-belched weather.

Using my body to shield the tank containing the entry valve from the spring, so as to keep out as much ash as possible, I slid open the lid and peered inside with my flashlight. I was delighted to see that this tank (and therefore the other two as well) was full to the brim with clear, clean water, so that the float was holding the entry valve shut. Fortunately, since we had been away all day, the water level hadn’t dropped enough to require the valve to open. Now, with the wire and wire-cutters I had fetched from the tool shed when I herded the dogs in there, I fashioned a crude fastener to keep the float from dropping with the water level, thus preventing the tanks from taking on new water from the waterhole until things cleared up and I could assess the state of the source. I figured even if worse came to worst, we had a ten-day supply of water if we were careful.

Back at the house, so dust-powdered that I looked as if I’d been riding the range all day, I got food and water to the three dogs in the shed and shook off the ashes before going back inside and shutting us in with the rest of our pets. Other than switching their tails a little at the loudest claps of thunder, our six cats seemed oblivious to the external phenomenon. They seemed to think, “Okay, so there’s stuff raining down outside and its scary out there. But, who cares? We live indoors and in here, everything’s hunky-dory.”



Oblivious.



I thought, “Why can’t I be more like a cat and worry when there’s something to worry about?”

The three “inside dogs” were easier to identify with. They continued to whimper and fret over the constant thunder until they finally decided to surrender to fate and went to sleep. (I learned later that the continuous thunder is the result of the extremely hot masses of gas and debris released by the volcano clashing with the cold mountain air outside, which causes an electrical discharge).

What the felines were mostly concerned about was the fact that we had let the fire in the woodstove burn out. Several of them gathered around it and lay there looking at it and then at us with an expression that seemed to ask, “So what’s up with the cold stove?” But until things slackened up outside, we didn’t dare lay a fire, for fear that the heavy Martian weather conditions would prevent the chimney from drawing. Instead, we got out a “new” electric space heater that we’d had stowed away in the closet ever since we’d bought it several years before, mounted it on its feet after practicing our code-breaking skills in order to decipher the Chinese to English how-to instructions, and fired it up.

Incredibly—if you were to judge by its dicey track record even in the mildest of weather—the local electrical cooperative managed to keep the power on throughout the entire night’s storm of sand and ash. So we whiled away the rest of the evening watching TV and pretending nothing was happening outside, until stress turned to exhaustion and we finally went to bed.

Even after torrential rain a thick layer remained.



The next day, a Sunday,  revealed a scene not unlike some of those in disaster films with titles like “The Morning After” or “Aftermath”. A light rain was falling, lending the sand and ash that had precipitated to earth a darker, even more somber tone of gray. A good two inches of it evenly covered everything—the picnic table in the patio, the patio flagstone and tiles, the flagstone steps and paths, the deck, the Michigan chairs still sitting on the lawn, Virginia’s car, my truck, and the roofs of the house and sheds.

From grassy green to sandy gray.

Gone was the green grass strewn with un-raked golden southern beech leaves. In its place was a terrain more akin to the windswept sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina or to the sparse-haired tiger grass and sand knolls near the Sleeping Bear Dunes on Lake Michigan. The bright greenery of the live beeches, laurels and  radal and cypress trees had turned a dusty gray and, every time a breeze stirred, flung light gray dust and sharp grains of sand at passersby. Where the morning drizzle mixed with the ash on the windowpanes the result was the formation of droplets of thickish gray liquid not unlike the runoff from wet concrete.  The water in the lagoon below our house had turned a milky limestone green, which, next to the surrounding reeds that wore a cloak of gray mourning instead of their usual autumnal amber, looked almost festive by comparison. And a hike down to the sprawling Lake Nahuel Huapi revealed that even it had changed its hue from its usual deep blue to a bright watercolor turquoise. Overnight, the ever rough and rocky mountain road down to the lake had been smoothed over with a two-inch carpet of sand. And looking down from the high road to the village-like Barrio Don Bosco and the Carmelite monastery beyond and above it was reminiscent of a Medieval scene, since the little houses all appeared to have identical thatched roofs because of the smooth layer of sand and ash that upholstered them, while the usually green surface of the marshy land around them was now gray sand with some long grass and gray-dusted cane poking through here and there, giving the impression of poor land long overgrazed by “his lordship’s chattel”.

From rocky road to sandy.

That afternoon and the next day, things cleared up for a while and we set to work digging out. Out of our patio alone—a space of less than twenty square meters (215 square feet)—my wife and I swept, shoveled and hauled some thirty wheelbarrow loads of sand and ash, which gives you an idea of the dimensions of the phenomenon. My guesstimate is that the roof of the house alone had a good half-dump-truckload of sand on it, which two neighbors helped me remove. We also set about finding and clearing our storm drains, cleaning the spoutings and getting our vehicles out from under their sandy shrouds. Then there were the roofs of our two free-standing sheds to clear.

Then there were the shed roofs to clear.

Rain and wind cleaned the folliage.

 Nature often appears wise: The sandstorm was followed by several days of torrential rains and then high winds (up to 80 km—50 miles—per hour) that scrubbed the air and folliage and scoured the sandy ash from leaves and branches also helping to break up the dense plume traveling away from the volcano’s crater.    

Since the afternoon of “the big cloud” ten days ago, we’ve been learning to live with Puyehue. Wind direction and weather conditions have come to have new meaning. If we are downwind of the volcano, we can expect the air to hang with ash so thick that it looks like a constant stampede is going on. And if the wind changes, it’s like we’ve been given a reprieve. People who were always praying for a sunny day now pray for rain, because it pulls the ash out of the air and lays the choking dust that rises from the roads with the passing of every car.  On days when it doesn’t rain, we need to take the trouble to check the air filters on our vehicles and clean them with compressed air or change them before they clog up. We’ve learned to live with grit on the floor no matter how hard we try to keep it clean. We’ve also leaned by experience that the mix of rain and volcanic sand makes for an excellent conductor of electricity (who knew?) and therefore is prone to shorting out power transformers and bringing resulting power outages at any moment. And little by little we’re growing used to looking out the window and instead of seeing grassy green, seeing sandy gray.

The usually green forest floor is now choked with sand.

On radio and TV we’ve heard volcanologists, geologists, technicians, engineers, doctors and politicians opine. From some we’ve learned a great deal. From others we’ve learned to beware of disinformation and misinformation. We’ve learned, for instance, that over in Chile and even across the lake in Villa La Angostura, Neuquén Province, the public knew days in advance that this crisis was coming and were better prepared than we were, while locally, nothing was said. Though some local politicians are now trying to save face by blaming others and pretending not to have been informed, live here long enough and you’ll learn that ski resorts don’t like bad news. It’s bad for business. And any local commentator who tries to tell it like it is can expect to be shunned as at least a bad sport, when not a traitor, for saying anything to make people—read: tourists—believe that this could be a less than ideal place to vacation. In this case, such denial has been ostrich-like, with the “feel good” crowd hiding their heads in the sand (literally),  thinking that a phenomenon as big as this one might pass them by. In view of the aftermath, such wishful thinking is ludicrous (and irresponsible), since the ash clouds from Puyehue have not only caused flight cancellations all over the country and temporary closures at the two main airports in Buenos Aires, a thousand miles away, but have also affected air traffic as far west as Australia and as far north and east as Brazil and Uruguay. And there is still no confirmation of when airports in Patagonia will be able to reopen and return to normal operating schedules.

Meanwhile, long-distance bus companies are making hay while the sun doesn’t shine. The Chevalier bus line, for instance, had the uncommon promotional privilege of taking UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on a 500-mile trip in one of its executive coches, when the world government chief’s domestic flight between two major Argentine cities was canceled indefinitely.

We’ve also learned not to believe everything we hear and we’ve learned too that being provided with a microphone is enough to make some people feel like experts even when they don’t know their proverbial ass from their proverbial elbow. Like the “experts” who claimed the volcanic ash was toxic—testing by real experts has proven it’s innocuous and in my own case I can attest that, once settled, it has left the water in our spring-fed waterhole more crystalline than ever, by dragging any suspended algae to the bottom.  Or, take the physician who went on national TV to tell people that if fallout from the volcano had contaminated their water, all they needed to do was put four drops of bleach in each ten liters to make it safe. Fortunately, the first “experts” were wrong about the toxicity of the ashes, or the advice of the second “expert” might have been tantamount to mass murder.

Satellite image of the Puyehue eruption. (NASA photo).

 In the end, the fact is that, despite all of the knowledge gathered with regard to volcanoes, much of their behavior remains unknown and highly unpredictable. Those of us camped in Puyehue’s backyard can only hope that it has gotten most of this latest fit of anger out of its system and that the worst is over for us. No matter what happens, we’ll just have to get used to living with Puyehue for some time to come.

DON ERNESTO

Don Ernesto in a file photo from the early 1970s.

On the eve of his receiving the Cervantes Prize—the most prestigious award in Spanish letters—world renowned novelist Ernesto Sabato told me, “They start giving you prizes and medals when they think you’re going to die.” But if that’s what “they” thought, they were in for a surprise. Don Ernesto was 76 when I ventured that getting the Cervantes was a great honor and he gave me that wry answer. He was to live, however, for another 23 years. He died last Saturday, less than two months shy of his hundredth birthday. With his death, Argentina lost its most renowned living literary figure, an informal title that Don Ernesto had held since the death of Jorge Luis Borges in 1986.

That meeting with Sabato a quarter-century ago was an interesting one. I was at a turning point in my writing career. I had gone as far as I could go in the newspaper where I was working. When I landed the job of managing editor of the Buenos Aires Herald in 1986, after a prior decade-long career in that paper, I felt as though I had “arrived”. My loosely envisioned plan for the future was to continue to head up the paper’s editorial department for another twenty years or so while pursuing a parallel career as a free-lance writer and novelist. I couldn’t have guessed then that, within a year and a half, my increasingly hostile relationship with the chairman of the local board of directors and his general administrator over editorial and commercial policy—and the mixing of the two—would have reached such a pitch that I would feel obliged to resign. But by the time I met Don Ernesto, I could have already described myself as less than content with my job. The chance to interview this famous writer was directly linked to a conscious effort to expand my free-lance horizons in new directions.

In this case, I had been contracted by Insight Cityguides to be one of the lead writers for the first Cityguide to Buenos Aires. As such, Project Manager Kathleen Wheaton, left it pretty much up to me what I would write about. I chose to do a couple of light-hearted color pieces—one about the then-disastrous telephone system and another about the city’s multi-faceted kiosks (where you could buy anything from cigarettes and half-pints of liquor to stationery, condoms and ice-cream). But I also set out some serious tasks for myself: a concise history of Argentine politics from Juan Perón to the then-incumbent President Raúl Alfonsín, and two interviews. One of these I did with film director Luis Puenzo, who had just won Hollywood’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (his The Official Story) and the other with Argentina’s by then most famous living writer—Borges had died the year before—Ernesto Sabato.

My first contact with Don Ernesto was iffy. He said that he wasn’t really giving interviews any longer, and anyway, he hardly had the time for such nonsense since he was flying to Spain that very week to receive his Cervantes Prize. But I kept him on the line, talking about his outstanding work in the field of human rights, and reminding him of the parallel human rights track record of the paper I worked for, although making sure he understood that the interview was for the Cityguide, not for the Herald. Finally, reluctantly, he acquiesced.

“Look,” he said, “I’m only going to consent to the interview because of the great respect I have for the Herald. But we’ll do it this way: Write your questions out and I’ll meet with you at my home for ten minutes or so, just so we get to meet each other, then I’ll answer your query in writing and get back to you when I’m done.”

I was thoroughly disappointed, but said, “All right, Don Ernesto, just as you like,” because by the tone of the conversation up to then, I realized that any other answer would probably cause him to hang up on me and I was surprised I’d been able to get him on the telephone in the first place.

I arrived bright and early the next morning, questions in hand, at the large old house in the middle-class western suburb of Santos Lugares where he had lived for almost four decades by that time. When I stepped up to the iron gate beyond the tree-lined door yard and rang the bell, I was immediately accosted by a neighbor, who had been watching me ever since I’d gotten out of my car.

“What do you need, friend?” he asked in a less than amiable tone.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Sabato,” I said.

He nodded, but waited there, vigilant, until I had not only been buzzed through the gate, but also until he was certain that I was expected. Don Ernesto was such a respected figure in Santos Lugares that this was standard operating procedure, I later learned. His neighbors took care of him and his wife, Doña Matilde, in a way that has since been all but lost elsewhere in an ever more cosmopolitan, yet violent and introverted city. Except for his trips abroad, Santos Lugares was Don Ernesto’s everyday world, right down to the neighborhood Club Social across the way, where he was a regular in the table games that the older men of the area played there while they had their coffee or other drinks and swapped stories.

Don Ernesto himself ushered me into a small, sparsely furnished but pleasant room adjoining his large studio. The little room was obviously for just such occasions, a little place in which to receive strangers and get rid of them quickly. He was quite apparently jittery and on edge. He asked me a few questions about my years at the Herald. I asked him a few preliminary questions about the presidential commission he had headed at the behest of President Alfonsín to document the disappearances of thousands of people during the dictatorship that had preceded Dr. Alfonsín’s democratic administration. I had it on good authority that much of that commission’s final report (called Never Again) had been authored by Sabato himself. But he was quite self-effacing about it, taking little of the credit, though it had been he who had delivered it personally into the hands of the President. Then, we talked a little about the Cervantes Prize, but this rendered him even more ill at ease, since that’s where he was headed right now and he was supposed to be in the international airport at Ezeiza by sometime around noon to catch his flight to Madrid.

All in all, even when he invited me to take a seat and took one himself, with a coffee table separating us, I got the distinct feeling that he was saying, “Nice to meet you, no need to be in a hurry, here’s your hat!” After a few more pleasantries, he pursed his lips, pushed his iconic horn-rimmed spectacles further up onto the bridge of his nose, gave his brush of a moustache a tweak and said, “Well, let’s see your questions, shall we?” I retrieved my dozen carefully worded, and even more carefully thought-out questions from my briefcase and handed them to him.

“I’ll just have a quick look in case there’s something I don’t understand,” he said. He started to impatiently scan the page I had handed him, but then, I saw him pause, go back, reread, heard him say under his breath, “Oh…oh yes…well…ah yes…” Then he looked up from the page and said, “So you’re a writer!”

I felt myself flush and then hastened to say, “Uh, no, Don Ernesto, I’m a journalist.”

“Nonsense,” he responded with a dismissive wave of his hand. “You may work as a journalist, but you’re a writer. Otherwise you could never ask such intimate questions about writing.” Then, after a pause, he said, “Well, I think we need to talk.”

I stood up and said, “Fine, Don Ernesto, but another day, then. You have a plane to catch.”

“Nonsense,” he said, “sit down, sit down!”

So I sat down.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“No, don’t bother…”

But he was already calling out to his wife, “Matilde, could we have some coffee, please!”

Seizing the opportunity, I immediately started asking him about topics that weren’t included in my list of questions. I asked him about his days as a nuclear physicist. After receiving a PhD in physics from the National University of La Plata in 1938, he was hand-picked by Argentine Nobel Prize-winner Bernardo Houssay to take a research fellowship at the Curie Institute in Paris. Of this period of his life, he  once wrote, “During that time of antagonisms, I buried myself in electrometers and graduated cylinders during the morning and spent nights in bars with the delirious surrealists. At the Dome and the Deux Magot, drunk with those heralds of chaos and excess, we used to spend long hours creating exquisite cadavers.” He is also quoted as saying, “At the Curie Institute, one of the highest goals to which a physicist can aspire, I found myself empty. Battered by disbelief, I kept going on an inertia that my soul rejected.” In 1943, he gave up science entirely to become a fulltime writer and painter.

I asked him too about his checkered political leanings. Early on, he had been an outspoken supporter of communist and anarchist causes, “but today,” I reminded him, “you are an iconic figure in one of the country’s two most traditional political parties,” (referring to his more recent support for Dr. Alfonsín’s center-left Radical Party).

“Any young man who isn’t a staunch leftist or an anarchist is an idiot,” he quipped, “and any old man who’s a leftist or an anarchist is equally an idiot.”

His wife came with coffee and cookies and he presented me to her. Doña Matilde was a pleasant, polite woman, but her only concern was her husband. “Ernesto,” she said raising her eyebrows, “your plane.”

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, “I have plenty of time.”

So on we went. He had, he said, devoted nearly forty years exclusively to his writing. If you wanted to be exceptional at something, he said, you had to focus all of your attention on it.

“The thing is,” I said, “despite the decades you spent at it and in spite of your much deserved fame, your total output as a novelist has been just three books. Outstanding, admittedly, Don Ernesto, but just three.” (The first published in 1948, the second in 1961 and the third in 1974).

A grin broke beneath his moustache and he said, “I’m self-destructive. I’ve burned almost everything I’ve ever written.”

“Why?” I asked in alarm.

“I guess maybe I’m an arsonist at heart,” he laughed.

“So, is there anything that’s been spared from the flames lately?” I ventured to ask.

He shook his head. “No, I don’t write any more. My eyes won’t take the strain…so I paint.”

I gazed at him in surprise. “Your eyes won’t take writing so you paint?”

He laughed aloud and said, “I can tell you’ve never seen any of my paintings!” He explained that as a youth he had been torn between painting and writing and that for those forty years after he quit being a physicist, writing had willed out. So now, he was indulging himself as a painter.

By the end of the interview, I felt a surprising closeness to the aging writer and, for days, couldn’t stop thinking about a lot of the things we had discussed.

It was only a matter of months after that—after yet another major run-in with the Chairman of the Board—before I decided that my career at the Buenos Aires Herald was at an end and tendered my resignation. It was at about that time too that I received author copies of the Insight Cityguide to Buenos Aires, one of which I earmarked for Ernesto Sabato. I sent it with a letter in which I explained to him that I had resigned from the newspaper and now was devoting my time to free-lancing, while also exploring my worth as a fiction writer. I added that my interview with him had given me the self-confidence I needed to become an independent writer—no matter what it was that I ended up writing. Writing was my calling and while running a newspaper had been good while it lasted, I was no longer willing to compromise my own goals and ideals to fit someone else’s.

By return post, I received a copy of Don Ernesto’s first published novel, El Tunel. He had dedicated it, “To Dan, with affection always, E. Sabato”. Just inside the cover, there was a small piece of memo paper and, on it, the writer had typed:

Dear Dan,

How glad I am for you.

E. Sabato

        

Leaf Storm: Magical Misery

I’ve just finished reading La hojarasca (usually translated into English as Leaf Storm), by Colombia’s famous Nobel Prize-winning writer, Gabriel García Márquez (now 84).

Gabriel García Márquez - Random House
publicity photo by Patrick Curry 

I should start by saying that I’ve never been a very orderly reader. That is to say, I’ve very seldom read all of an author’s works in a row—with the possible exceptions of J.D. Salinger and Truman Capote, some works of both of whom I’ve read several times—and, much less, in chronological order. So it is not at all strange that I should just now be getting to Leaf Storm, García Márquez’s earliest novella, which was first published in 1955. I read it in a recent Spanish-language edition (La hojarasca, Buenos Aires, Debolsillo, sixth edition, 2007 – Contemporánea – 176 pages, ©1954 by Gabriel García Márquez and ©2003 Random House Mondadori SA, Barcelona, under license to Editorial Sudamericana SA). But it was also first published in English in 1972 by Harper & Row and there have been several other English editions since, usually with this novella as the title for anthologies of the author’s shorter works. Any translated quotes included in this article are my own translations from the original Spanish, not those appearing in any of the English-language editions of this work.

Despite the Colombian writer’s well deserved fame, he was anything but an overnight success. He was making his living as a journalist while studying law when he wrote Leaf Storm, but it took him seven years to interest anyone in publishing this story. Nor was it to lead to a sudden string of successes: He wrote No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba) from 1956 through 1957, but didn’t find a publisher for it until 1961. That same year he won the Esso Literary Prize for La mala hora (In Evil Hour), his first published novel, but didn’t publish another book for five years—in this last case, his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad). García Márquez has indicated that he was writing “Solitude” in his head from the time he was eighteen, but never could find the way to get the story—which, like Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel before it, was based on his own family’s history—down on paper. But when it finally came to him, he wrote obsessively for eighteen months straight, to such an extent that he had to sell the family car to keep the wolf from the door and his wife had to talk  grocers into giving her credit in order to keep food on the table.

Leaf Storm was where all of this process began, a simple sketch of characters, ideas and artistic concepts that García Márquez would later employ in other works. It also carried hints of the magical realism movement of which he would later be recognized as a major exponent. Nearly two decades after he wrote this novella, García Márquez was quoted as saying that of all the things he had written, La hojarasca was his favorite, because he felt it was “the most sincere and spontaneous.”

There is nothing complicated about the plot, but it does indeed have elements that are unique. It bears the starkness of some of the most ruthless of American Westerns and of similar tales of remoteness and isolation, a largely understated harshness and brutality that rival stories such as Steinbeck’s The Harness or Hemingway’s An Alpine Idyll. But the longer format of the novella gives García Márquez room in which to infect the reader to an even greater degree with the stifling, lugubrious atmosphere that he weaves from the first page to the last.

We have come to the house where the dead man is.

The heat is suffocating in the closed room. You can hear the buzz of the heat in the streets, but nothing else. The air is stagnant, concrete; you get the feeling that you could twist it like a piece of sheet steel. In the room where they’ve placed the cadaver, there is a smell of wardrobe trunks, but I don’t see any anywhere. There’s a hammock in a corner hung from a ring at one of its ends. There’s a smell of rubbish. I think that the ruined and near ruined things that surround us look like things that should smell of rubbish, although they actually have another smell.

I always thought that dead men should have a hat. Now I see that they don’t. I see that they have a steely head and a kerchief tied under the jaw. I see that they have their mouth a little bit open and that you can see, behind the purple lips, the stained and irregular teeth. I see that they have the bitten tongue to one side, thick and pasty, a little darker than the color of the face, which is like that of one’s fingers when they are squeezed by a hemp rope. I see that they have their eyes open, a lot wider than a man’s, anxious and bulging, and that the skin is like pressed and damp earth. I thought that a dead man looked like a person still and asleep and now I see that  it’s just the opposite. I see that he looks like a person wide awake and furious after a fight…I don’t know why they’ve brought me. I had never entered this house before and I even thought that it was abandoned…          

In this way, García Márquez allows his most impressionable character—a young boy for whom the very concept of death is as yet unfathomable, drafted to accompany his mother and grandfather to the house of a man who has died alone and rejected by his town—to describe the breathless environment in which the entire story will take place. It is, in fact, the boy’s descriptions and thoughts that give this story its near magical feeling and its mysterious nuances in what otherwise could be merely a dark, sordid tale of lust, rejection, isolation, vengeance and suicide.

And the author might well have set his mood of stifling incomprehension and mystery by allowing the boy to continue to be the narrator from beginning to end. This in itself would have proven a novel enough approach to a uniquely macabre story. But he has chosen instead to weave a more complex tapestry, to tell the story bit by bit and from three distinct points of view: that of the boy, who is seeing a dead body for the first time in a uniquely brooding and mournful setting, and who is all first impressions of the dead man, the room, the circumstances and the proceedings; that of the boy’s mother, Isabel, who is disgusted by this task and concerned for the impressions her young son is gathering and for what the town of Maconado will think of them for claiming the body of this man whom no one wants to see buried and for whom the town has only contempt, but who out of respect for her father has agreed to accompany him and bring the boy on this charitable mission which her father has taken as his duty; and that of the woman’s father, the boy’s grandfather, “the colonel” as the town knows him, who, though there is no real love lost with this wretched dead man, feels a debt of honor toward him and a need to instill a sense of decency in this town whose people and mayor have vowed—such is their disdain and hatred—that they will not allow this virtual hermit to be buried until they can smell his rotting corpse from the street outside his house.

This is García Márquez at his rawest and yet at his most intimate and meticulously mysterious. The story is a surreal word painting into which the reader is drawn and made to walk the dusty twilit floors of the shuttered room where the true main character—the deceased—has taken his last gasp at the end of a rope after a decade of isolation.

This character too, like the setting, is almost morbidly uncommon. And as unattractive as he is odd. He is known only as “the doctor”—a fallen medical man from an uncertain past, who is as unpopular for his unintentionally unsociable manner as he is for his unabashedly lustful way of observing women. The colonel tells us of how the doctor came to town twenty-five years before and of how he and his family took the stranger in on the strength of a letter of recommendation, datelined Panama, from Colonel Aurelio Buendía (who would reappear in later works by the author) and of  how he ended up overstaying his welcome—and then some—before finally moving into a house two doors down the street. For a time, the doctor makes an effort to appear sociable but seems destined to carry the taint of his unknown past with him wherever he goes and the mystery that surrounds him is enough to make him suspect and to cause the town to shun him. For a time, he maintains a meager practice, but eventually, he shuts it down and shuts himself in…for a decade.

Quoth the colonel:  Although he [the doctor] might have expected the contrary, he was a strange personality in the town, hardly outgoing, despite his obvious efforts to seem sociable and cordial. He lived among the people of Maconado, but distanced from them by the memory of a past against which any attempt at rectification appeared useless. He was looked upon with curiosity, like a sober animal that remained during much of the time in shadows and then reappeared, observing a conduct that the town could only consider assumed and, as such, suspect.

The doctor’s strangeness is enough, of course, for the people of a small town like Maconado—through which the foreign banana company has swept and gone, like the leaf storm of the book’s title—not to accept him. But it doesn’t explain why the people would hate him. And here, García Márquez crafts another turn of the screw in this story of concentric rejection. There comes a day in the civil strife of Colombia’s history, when twelve men are critically injured in the fighting. Maconado’s only other physician is overwhelmed and the townspeople, who previously have done everything to make the now retired doctor feel unwelcome, clamor to his door, pounding and calling on him to lend a hand, to save these wounded men. But the rejected doctor now rejects them, telling them from behind his closed and bolted door, to leave him alone, that he is no longer a medical man. The casualties, bereft of medical attention, succumb to their wounds and from then on, the doctor, whose world is now this room where he will, in the end, take his own life, has become a marked man. Eventually, the townspeople reckon, he will either have to come out or die inside that squalid, shuttered house. Either way, he can expect nothing but revenge from the town of Maconado, not even Christian burial.

Nor is this the first time that the doctor has refused treatment to someone in need. Indeed, he refuses to treat the colonel’s ailing servant, Meme. But that doesn’t stop this lingering house guest from striking his only even semi-intimate relationship with this very same woman. Unbeknownst to the colonel’s family, the doctor eventually seduces the naïve Meme and begins having sexual relations with her even while he is still under the colonel’s roof. When he moves two doors down, Meme goes with him, the only human being with whom the doctor shares his solitude, until finally, weary of his heartlessness and apathy, Meme too abandons him, and takes his unborn child with her. Meme also becomes a mystery for the town, since she disappears without a trace, never to be heard from again, a fact that also raises suspicions among the townspeople.

Aging, crippled and half-blind, the colonel is the stabilizing factor in the anarchy that this story describes. He represents tradition, gentlemanliness, principles and ethical behavior. He never wavers in his purpose of seeking to ensure that this pathetic hermit is given a proper burial and he is willing to risk his own reputation and that of his family to ensure that this happens.

This first major work by Gabriel García Márquez is symbolic of the quality level that he has consistently met and improved upon in his long career as one of Latin America’s—and, indeed, the world’s—finest living writers. And it marks the first steps he took in finally setting to page the history of a family that had been writing itself in his head from the time he was a very young man. Anyone interested in discovering the work of this contemporary Latin American author would do well to start with Leaf Storm.