The Nobel Prize in
Literature 1982
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
(Translation)
The Solitude of Latin
America
Antonio Pigafetta, a
Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the
world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a
strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy. In
it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless
birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still,
resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen
a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel's body, the
legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native
encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that
impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image.
This short and fascinating
book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day novels, is by no
means the most staggering account of our reality in that age. The Chronicles of
the Indies left us countless others. Eldorado, our so avidly sought and
illusory land, appeared on numerous maps for many a long year, shifting its
place and form to suit the fantasy of cartographers. In his search for the
fountain of eternal youth, the mythical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the
north of Mexico for eight years, in a deluded expedition whose members devoured
each other and only five of whom returned, of the six hundred who had
undertaken it. One of the many unfathomed mysteries of that age is that of the
eleven thousand mules, each loaded with one hundred pounds of gold, that left
Cuzco one day to pay the ransom of Atahualpa and never reached their
destination. Subsequently, in colonial times, hens were sold in Cartagena de
Indias, that had been raised on alluvial land and whose gizzards contained tiny
lumps of gold. One founder's lust for gold beset us until recently. As late as
the last century, a German mission appointed to study the construction of an
interoceanic railroad across the Isthmus of Panama concluded that the project
was feasible on one condition: that the rails not be made of iron, which was
scarce in the region, but of gold.
Our independence from
Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio
López de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral
for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel
García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his
wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress
uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernández
Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand
peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison
in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of
scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Moraz´n erected in the main
square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris
warehouse of second-hand sculptures.
Eleven years ago, the
Chilean Pablo
Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened this audience
with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good will - and sometimes those of
bad, as well - have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly
tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic
women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a moment's
rest. A promethean president, entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting
an entire army, alone; and two suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be
explained, cut short the life of another great-hearted president and that of a
democratic soldier who had revived the dignity of his people. There have been
five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who
is carrying out, in God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time.
In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of
one - more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of
repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one
could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while
pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the
whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent
to an orphanage by order of the military authorities. Because they tried to
change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand men and women have
died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their
lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El
Salvador and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding
figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four
years.
One million people have fled
Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality - that is, ten per cent of its
population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which
considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one
out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has
produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes. The country that could be formed
of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population
larger than that of Norway.
I dare to think that it is
this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved
the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one
that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths,
and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and
beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more,
singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and
scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but
little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional
means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our
solitude.
And if these difficulties,
whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational
talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own
cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It
is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they
use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for
all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for
us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not
our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more
solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see
us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to
build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop;
that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an
Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who
feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as
soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of
the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies
sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the
sword.
I do not mean to embody the
illusions of Tonio Kröger, whose dreams of uniting a chaste north to a
passionate south were exalted here, fifty-three years ago, by Thomas
Mann. But I do believe that those clear-sighted Europeans who struggle,
here as well, for a more just and humane homeland, could help us far better if
they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not
make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of
legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a
life of their own in the distribution of the world.
Latin America neither wants,
nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely
wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become
a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed
such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have
accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted
us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social
change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for
their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different
methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of
our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not
a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European
leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who
have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to
find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the
world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.
In spite of this, to
oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods
nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon
century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death.
An advantage that grows and quickens: every year, there are seventy-four
million more births than deaths, a sufficient number of new lives to multiply,
each year, the population of New York sevenfold. Most of these births occur in
the countries of least resources - including, of course, those of Latin
America. Conversely, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in
accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over,
not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the
totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of
misfortune.
On a day like today, my
master William
Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man". I would
fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware
that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now,
for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple
scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a
mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will
believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to
engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of
life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love
will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one
hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity
on earth.
From Nobel
Lectures, Literature 1981-1990, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor
Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993
