After a very very long time, Mario Vargas Llosa has written a novel that reminds us what a great writer he once was.

“Harsh Times” plays with time, simultaneous and disjointed at once through a collage of episodic narratives to recall the coup that overthrew the Guatemalan October Revolution in 1954. Both in form and content, Llosa makes a comeback with this novel that intersperses factual history and imaginative fiction to expose the role of the CIA and the United States in destabilizing democratically elected governments and in propping up dictators to serve the cause of US corporations in Latin America (The United Fruit Company in this case). The last La Dictadura novel that Llosa wrote was The Feast of the Goat (2000) and there are some characters from that work that show up in this novel too, most prominently Rafael Leónidas Trujillo and his henchman Johny Abbes García.

A lot has changed in Latin America over the last couple of decades- the long reigning dictators are gone, army coups have become a rarity, as democratic processes seem to been stabilizing though “democratic coups” are not unknown and even less the threat of US sanctions and embargoes. Even as I was reading the novel, Gabriel Boric, the new centre Left president in Chile prepares to upturn the half a century long legacy of US dictated neo- liberalism in Chile, the currency has plummeted and the fears of US economic threats have gripped the air. The saga between Latin America and the United States and its local supporters continues to be as sharp as it was. The multiplicity of voices in the novel captures the complexity of the ground reality very well as does the frequent dives into historical facts.

Even more significant than the interplay of facts and imagination, of truths and lies are the novel’s prologue and the afterword.The prologue in particular addresses the power of propaganda that in 1954, for example, the US was able to create around the purported threat of the Soviet Union in Guatemala, even though President Arbenz was not just opposed to the communists but wanted to replicate the US model where land could be distributed to generate demand and corporations like the United Fruit Company could be taxed to benefit the country. The power of propaganda has only increased exponentially since then and boosted the revived of far right and extreme regimes all over the world.

The afterword is interesting too, as Llosa recounts his actual meeting with a central character in the novel “Miss Guatemala” and where her recollections mingle and collide with the novel’s narrative.

The novel is not without it’s faults- some of the lengthy digressions into historical details are unnecessary and slow down the pace of the story in its first half. As a layman, one wonders too if Llosa’s reading of the Guatemalan history of that era is accurate- his political stances are not exactly non- controversial and one fears if they colour his reading of the events. One cannot but notice that Arbenz ‘s politics resembles that of Llosa’s current advocacy of American style capitalism.

In the epilogue Llosa has added his own political conjectures on the wider impact and fallout of the coup elsewhere in Latin America. One does not have to agree with those views to enjoy this novel. Even if in a much paler reflection, this novel shows us elements of the Llosa of his younger days as a novelist par excellence and a campaigner for social justice.

This is the seventh and the last in a series of short stories I have translated from Spanish. Read the introductory post on Julio Ribeyro and this series.

The wardrobe in my father’s room was not just another piece of furniture; it was undoubtedly a house within the house. Inherited from his grandparents, it had followed us from place to place, gigantic, embarrassing, until it found a permanent place in my parent’s bedroom. 

It occupied almost half of the room and arrived practically touching the ceiling. When my father was not there, I and my siblings entered it. It was indeed a baroque palace, full of doorknobs, molds, cornices, medallions and columns, carved into the deepest crevices by a demented 19^th-century carpenter. It had three sections, each one with its own distinctive appearance. On the left was a heavy door, like in an entrance hall where an enormous key hung from its lock. The key itself was like a protective toy that we could use without distinction as a pistol, machete or a club. My father kept his three-piece and English suits that he never wore there. One had to go through it to enter the universe that smelled of cedar and naphthalene. The central section, which we loved the most because of its variety, had four large drawers below. When my father died, each one of us inherited one of the drawers and established our rights as possessively as he had over the clothes.   Above the drawers was an arched niche with some thirty selected books. The central section ended in a tall and rectangular door, always with the key. We never knew what it contained; maybe some papers and photographs held on from younger days and not destroyed because of the fear of losing a part of one’s life that in reality was already lost. Finally, on the section on the right was another door, covered with an inclined mirror. Inside, it had drawers below for shorts and white clothes and above, a space without shelves, where a standing person could fit. 

The section on the left was connected with the one on the right through a tall passage, situated inside the arch. One of our favorite games was to penetrate the wardrobe by the wooden door and appear a while later by the glass door. The tall passage was an ideal refuge for playing hide and seek. When we selected it, none of our friends could find us. They knew we were inside the wardrobe but they could not imagine that we had scaled the height and  lay extending above the middle section, like in a coffin. 

My father’s bed was situated just in front of the section on the right, so when he straightened out on his pillows to read a magazine, he could see  the mirror. So he looked at it, but more than looking at his own reflection, he saw those who were looking at him. Then he would say, “There was seen Don Juan Antonio Ribeyro and Estrada and he tying the knot of his tie before going to the Council of Ministers,” or, “There one saw Don Ramon Ribeyro and Alvarez of Villar, getting ready to go to a lecture at the University of San Marcos,” or, “Many times I see looking there at my father, Don Julio Ribeyro and Benites, there, in front of the mirror, when they were preparing to go to the Congress to make a speech.” His ancestors were captive, there, in front of the mirror. He saw them and he saw his own image superimposed on them in this unreal space, as if once again, together, they lived together by some miracle at the same time. My father penetrated through that mirror the world of the dead, but his grandparents also made it to the world of the living.     

We admired the intelligence he expressed that summer; his days always clear and open to enjoyment, play and the happiness. My father, since he had married, gave up smoking, drinking and going out with friends. He looked very complacent and, like the fruits of his little vegetable garden, had doubts about his best gifts, inviting admiration. He finally succeeded in acquiring a decent service set and decided to receive, from time to time, some of his old married friends. 

The first of these friends was Alberto Rikets. He was a version of my father, but in a much condensed form. Nature had put in the work to edit this copy, by way of precaution. He had the same paleness, the same skinniness, the same mannerisms and even the same expressions. All of it came from the same school they studied in; they had read the same books, spent the same bad nights and suffered the same painful and long sickness. In the ten or twelve years that they did not see each other, Rikets had made a fortune working tenaciously in his pharmacy that was already his, in contrast to my father, who had only managed to buy a house in Miraflores with great effort. 

As the children of friends rarely get to be friends among themselves, we received Albertito with trepidation. We found him stunted, slow-witted and at times, frankly, an idiot. Meanwhile, my father took Albertito to the vegetable garden, showing him the orange and fig trees, the apple trees and vines. We took Albertito to our playroom. As Albertito did not have siblings, he was very ignorant of our home and collective games; he looked clumsy by playing the role of an Indian and allowing himself be stitched by a series of bullets by the sheriff. He had a form convenient to falling dead on the ground and was unable to understand that an umbrella could also be a machine gun. Because of this, we stopped sharing our favorite game with him, of the wardrobe, and rather concentrated on smaller and mechanical ones that left everyone to their own luck, like making roll carts on the floor or building castles with wooden cubes. 

While we played, waiting for lunch, we saw by the window my father and his friend going around the garden. Perhaps they had arrived at the turn to admire the magnolia, the cardinal, the dahlias, the carnations and the wallflowers. It had been years since my father had discovered the joys of gardening and the profound truth that arrived in the form of a sunflower or in the bloom of a rose. His free time, far from being spent, as before, in tiring lectures that saw him meditate about the meaning of our existence, was now occupied in simple tasks like watering the plants, pruning, grafting or weeding, but in all of that, he put a true intellectual passion. His love for books had gravitated towards plants and flowers. The entire garden was his work and like a character from Voltaire, he had arrived at the conclusion that true happiness resided in cultivation. 

“Someday, I am going to buy in Tarma not a plot like this one, but a true farm, and then you will see, Alberto, then you will see what I can do,” we hear my father saying to him.  

“My dear Perico, for Tarma, Chaclacayo,” responded his friend, alluding to the magnificent house he was constructing in the said place, “Almost the same climate and barely forty kilometers from Lima.” 

“Yes, but my grandfather did not live in Chaclacayo but in Tarma.” 

Again, his ancestors! And the friends from his youth who called him Perico. 

Albertito had rolled his cart under the bed; afterwards when he went to look for it, we heard him launch into a victorious scream. He had discovered a football under the bed. Until now we ignored, we who thought to entertain him, that if he had a secret mania, a vice of a deprived and solitary child it was to kick the leather ball. 

He had already lifted the ball and prepared to kick it, but we contained him. To play in the room was crazy, to do so in the garden was expressly forbidden, so the only solution was to go out to the street. 

That street had been the dramatic scene of that we would play out many years before against the Gomez brothers, games that lasted for four to five hours and ended only when it was almost dark, when one could see neither the goalpost nor the rival players. They became games in a spectral contention, in a ferocious and blind battle that fitted all types of traps, abuses and offences. Never had any professional team put, like we did in those infantile encounters, so much hate and so much vanity. So much so that when the Gomez brothers relocated, we abandoned football forever. Nothing could be compared to those brawls, and we had put away the football under the bed. Until Albertito found it. If he wanted a football, we would give it to him in any way we could. 

We made an arc together with the wall of the house so that the ball bounced off it and we placed Albertito as the goalkeeper. 

Our initial kicks were valiantly attacked. But then we bombarded him with a series of low shots to give ourselves the pleasure of seeing him stiffened, thrown completely off balance (with his legs all over the place) and vanquished. 

Then it was his turn to kick, and I went to the arch. For a sickly person, he had the kick of a mule. I managed to stop his first kick, though I had bruised my hands. His second kick, directed at an angle, was a perfect goal, but the third was truly prodigious –the : the ball crossed through my arms, passed above the wall, sneaked through the branches of the climbing jasmine, saved the cypress fence, bounced on the trunk of an acacia and disappeared into the depths of the house. 

While we waited outside on the street for the servant to bring the ball as was usually the case, no one appeared. When we were all set to go looking for it, the side door of the house opened and my father came out with the football under his arm. He was very pale as usual and said nothing, but we saw him resolutely going towards a worker who was whistling on the street. He placed the ball in his hands and returned to the house without even looking at us. The worker took a while to figure out why the ball had ended up with him as a gift and when we noticed him taking to the road, we could not catch up with him. 

By the sad expression on my mama’s face, who waited for us at the door to call us to the table, we knew something very serious had occurred. With an emphatic gesture of her hands, she ordered us to enter the house. 

“How have they done it!” was all she said when we passed by her side. 

But as we noticed that of all the windows of my father’s bedroom, the only one that did have the grills was ajar, we suspected what had happened – Albertito, with a master stroke, which neither he nor anyone could repeat even if they passed the rest of their life rehearsing it, had succeeding in sending the ball on a senseless trajectory, which, disregarding the walls, the trees and the iron grills, had hit the mirror of the wardrobe right in its heart. 

The lunch was painful. My father, unable to reprimand us in front of the guests, gulped his anger in silence that no one dared to interrupt. Only when desserts were served did he look assuredly condescending and recounted a number of funny anecdotes that regaled the audience. Alberto imitated him and the lunch ended amidst loud laughter. But it did not erase the impression that this lunch, this invitation, those good wishes of my father to revive old friendships – something that was never repeated – had been a complete fiasco. 

The Rikets left thereafter, to our terror, since we feared that now our father would castigate us. But the get-together had exhausted him and he retired for a nap without saying anything. 

When he woke up, we congregated in his room. He was relaxed and placid, reclining on his armchair. He had opened the window fully so that the full afternoon light came in. 

“See,” he said, signaling towards the wardrobe. 

It was indeed in a lamentable state. By losing the mirror, the wardrobe seemed to have lost its life. Where there had been the mirror, there remained only a dark wooden rectangle, a shaded space that reflected nothing and said nothing. It was like a radiant lagoon whose water had suddenly evaporated. 

“The mirror where one could see my grandparents!” he sighed and waved at us to leave. 

Since then, we never heard him refer any more to his ancestors. The disappearance of the mirror had made them disappear automatically. His past stopped tormenting him and he was more inclined to be curious about his future. Perhaps it was because he knew that he would die soon and it was not necessary for the mirror to unite him with his grandparents, not in another life, because he was a non- believer, but in this world that had already subjugated him, as before the books and the flowers did: of nothing. 

Read more stories by Julio Ribeyro on this blog

This is the sixth in a series of short stories I have translated from Spanish. Read the introductory post on Julio Ribeyro and this series.

For the last ten years, I’ve preserved the letter from Barbara. For a long time, it was in my wallet, while I hoped to find someone who could translate it for me. Later it was left in a folder along with other papers. Finally, one afternoon, it fell prey to one of those sudden acts of destruction, in which one puts in that special type of ferocity to annihilate all traces of one’s past –I destroyed it, along with all that one destroys in such cases – train tickets of long voyages, bills of a hotel where we were full of joy, theatre programs of some forgotten production/ opera. Of Barbara, there remained nothing of consequence, and I will never know what she said to me in that letter written in Polish. 

I was in Warsaw in the years following the end of the war. On its ruins, the Polish had built a new but rather ugly capital, plagued by cement buildings that an architect once described as perhaps totalitarian. I was one of the 30,000 young people who attended one of those Youth Congresses. We were full of illusions and optimism back then. We believed it was enough to meet with the young people of the world in one city, dance, eat and drink together for peace to be established in the world. We knew nothing about mankind, or of history. 

I saw her in one of those visits of friendship – they called them encounters – young Polish made to the foreign delegates. She had a perfectly round head and was blonde and small, agile, elegant and her profile was decidedly so designed that one was afraid to contemplate it for too long, so as not to risk using it to demolish that profile with one’s gaze.  We became friends using signs. During the encounter that took place at the same time as a folkloric meeting and a cultural exchange program, one of us danced and Barbara sang an enigmatic and wild song that left us spellbound. 

She worked in a laboratory where I sometimes went looking for her. In the Plaza Lenin, in front of the Cultural Palace, we danced into the night along with thousands of other young people, to the sound of various orchestras that had mixed up their rhythms. After the dance, we all went to a nearby park, where in the name of universal solidarity, we kissed in the dark. It was first time I grabbed her with such brutality that she got out of breath and remained bent between my arms.  

But our relationship was different from that of other boys who had rapidly declared their love to their girlfriends. At night, while returning to our lodgings, they lit their cigarettes and recounted their escapades of vile and violent fornication. My relations with Barbara were rather ambiguous and slow to develop. Largely it was because we did not understand each other. Barbara spoke only in Polish and Russian and I in Spanish and French. Reduced to gestures and signs, our friendship was obstructed more so as there was no love involved that invents everything. It was only a wish on my part, but a wish that need words to open the way, words that in this case were impossible.  

One night, we drank beer, an abominable liquid in a bar that pretended to be occidental, and noted that Barbara wanted to communicate something to me. Already on other occasions I had seen making the same gesture, but now it was more explicit – she lifted the end of her dress, caressed the fabric, and pulled it up to her knees and got up to carelessly show me a part of her divine thighs. What did Barbara want? Had she finally succeeded in understanding what I desired? I smiled to see her so disposed and so disarmed to convey what she thought.  

After much fuss, I understood what she wanted to tell. That she lived outside the city and we’d take the train one day to go to her house.  

Finally, the beautiful Barbara had ceded and understood! One night, I arrived to our lodgings, lit a cigarette and recounted my escapade, of the macho Latino, taking a good piece of the central European garden, a story good just for a laugh, nostalgia and boasting, until life reduced the incident to a paltry one at best. 

The travel was finally realized on a hot afternoon. It had been postponed many times because of some supposed obstacle for us to meet alone in her house. I had left the strategy for the countryside rendezvous entirely in the hands of Barbara, fearing that the Congress would end without a success.  

But on that hot afternoon, Barbara gave me to understand that the moment had arrived and we were to walk far from the Plaza Lenin to a train station. There were barely three wagons that serviced regularly between one of the stations in Warsaw and the suburbs in the South, where the proletarians lived. To get on the train, I had to account for a unique problem of a foreigner who had dared to cross over the more or less official itinerary that we were restricted to. The journey thus became, apart from a flight of love, a prohibited act. 

The train crossed the suburbs and sowed fields, and after twenty minutes, stopped in a village, where Barbara asked me to get down. In a room at the station, we got on to two bicycles owned by the community and we continued our travel by this mode that started for me with a strain of unreality.   

We went over the tracks around garden walls and trees, passed in front of ancestral houses and vegetable and flower gardens, went by farmhands who stopped to look at us, disturbed the rural dogs who jumped barking behind fences as we rapidly, Barbara in front of me, pedaling energetically and I behind, fascinated by her round head and a ponytail of golden hair. 

Finally, we stopped in front of a very small house with a wooden door that opened on to the street. I followed her and together, laughing, happy, disembarking from our bicycles, sweaty, we entered the front garden. Barbara held my hand and running, climbed the wooden stairs and that led us to the main door. From her bag she took out a key and opened the door. We entered a dark foyer and then a room that I quickly inspected – old furniture, country style – searching for the sofa where we would soon relax, preparing the ambience, speaking anyway; not caring for the words for my hands would be eloquent. I felt so sure that I paid no attention to the whistle of the man with a grey beard who observed me from a frame of crafted wood and to Barbara saying pum pum, gesturing with her hands that his legs were amputated, and then making a tac-tac-tac-tac sound. She explained that he was her father, an invalid from war and employed in the railways.    

But we did not stay in the room. Barbara’s haste was unstoppable; she was already once more dragging me through a passage, pushing a door and into a bedroom, where the first thing I saw was a somewhat stretched bed with a bedspread of cretonne fabric. A bed. How long had the journey to our first meeting in this small space been, as simple as a tomb, but so sufficient, a place where finally our bodies would speak a common language! 

Barbara took off her dress and advanced towards the bed. But instead of lying down on it, she went around it towards an enormous closet, speaking to me in Polish, not caring if I understood anything and abruptly opened its doors. 

On its hangers I saw hung half a dozen skirts. Barbara brought them out and began trying them on one by one, showing their printed designs, inviting me to feel the fabric, explaining to me their cut, their function and their model, in her possessed language that now I understood without comprehending, until finally, without taking off the last one, she remained quiet in front of the heap of clothes on the bed, looking at me with fixed, anxious eyes.  

“A lot of skirts,” I said finally.  

But she appeared to be waiting for something more and continued to interrogate me with her eyes.  

“Beautiful skirts,” I added, “beautiful, molto bellas, bonitas, so many skirts, beautiful skirts.” 

She understood me and smiled. Sighing, she stood observing her garments for a moment and then slowly began folding them back to hang them in the closet. From there she took out a blouse and put it on. While closing the doors of the closet, she continued to smile and gave me to understand that we should leave.  

This time too we did not stay in the room. From the corner of my eyes, I could tell that the look of the mustached man appeared surly and ferocious. Presently, we found ourselves in the garden, back on our bicycles. I was bewildered, foolhardy, followed her like a puppet, mounted the bicycle and soon I saw myself pedaling by the flower track, towards the station, next to a round head and the ponytail of flamboyant hair.   

We left the bicycles in the same place at the station, and minutes later, we returned to Warsaw in the same suburban train. Barbara did not speak, but I didn’t notice in her silence either disgust or pain, but something like relief, happy and a pleasant serenity. Each time she looked at me, she smiled as one does at an endearing buddy, one who shared her secrets and had the right to examine, much more than her nakedness, her personal belongings.  

The following day, we set off for Paris. The train wagons were full of drunken young men, singing and bidding goodbyes from the window to their loving partners. I searched for Barbara among the people on the platform. In vain.  

Many months later, I received her letter. 

Read more stories by Julio Ribeyro on this blog

This is the fifth in a series of short stories I have translated from Spanish. Read the introductory post on Julio Ribeyro and this series.

Between my house and the sea, there was an open land twenty years ago. One just had to follow the aqueduct along the Dos de Mayo Street, cross the pasture area and the vacant piece of land, to arrive at the ravine’s border. A concrete tunnel through the hills led to the La Pampilla, a mostly deserted beach, frequented only by the fishermen. 

We went there on Saturdays, accompanied by the housemaid and the dogs. The beach was narrow and rocky – there was barely a thin band between the ravine and the sea. We spent long hours exhuming dead ducks, picking up sea shells and snails. The dogs ran around the beach, happily barking at the sea. Moss and wild weeds climbed over the side of the cliff, and we drank the fine water that fell down in the cove of our palms. 

Matilde, our maid, always led our group. Despite her young age, she knew many strange things as folks who grow up in the countryside do. She prepared traps for the sparrows, distinguished between the nettle bush and the brushwood, or the wasp combs between the crevices of a wall. On the way, she picked up watercress flowers to gift to Benito, the fisherman. Together they retired by the narrow mountain side into a filthy area where they buried themselves in the sand. Sometimes, we followed to spy on them or prowled around them, throwing stones into the abyss. 

Much later, when we knew the huaca Juliana, we forgot about the sea. The huaca was for us, full of mystery. It was a dead city, a city for the dead.  We never dared to stay there after dusk. It was warm under the light of the sun and we knew the memories of its slopes and the smell of its earth, where pieces of pottery had been found. At twilight, indeed, it was covered with sadness, for it appeared sick and we ran away, terrified by the mountain slope. It was said that there was a hidden treasure, a ball that lit up the moon. There were, moreover, somber legends of dead men whose mouths were full of froth. 

The townspeople called our neighborhood Matagente. Back then, it did not have street lights. At night, the streets were gloomy and we went around with lanterns. Sometimes we went as far as the Mar del Plata, an old abandoned house, just above the Avenida Pardo. Through the wooden gate, we observed the garden where the wild growth invaded the streets and the stone steps. Lost among the foliage, one could see plaster statues with lost arms, without noses, dirty with dust and the excrements gathered from the street. Some of the statues had fallen from their pedestal and lay semi-buried among the dead leaves. We never knew who the house belonged to and what happened inside. Its blinds were always closed. Pigeons nested around the building. 

Besides the rubber trees on the Avenida Pardo, the laurels of Costanera, the mulberries on the intersecting streets of our neighborhood were the eucalyptus trees. The house of the millionaire, Gutierrez, was encircled by around fifty of these enormous trees that had grown for over a century before, maybe since the war with Chile. Not even the old residents of Santa Cruz knew who had planted them. Their strong roots were outgrown and lined up streets, cracking up the ground. Their branches rustled with the wind, and occasionally, they gave off and fell on the street with a cataclysmic sound. In less than ten minutes, they disappeared. People from all the timber yards came with axes, machetes, knives and attacked the fallen branches to extract firewood with the vengeance of cutting meat. 

Those trees were like the guardian genies of the place. They gave our neighborhood a peaceful appearance in a corner of the countryside. Their thick leaves protected us from the sun in the summer; they guarded us from the dust when the winds blew. We climbed up their trunks like monkeys. We knew its thick bark from which a fragrant gum gushed out. Their leaves were replenished throughout the year and they fell down – red , yellow and silvery, in the garden.  From its tops, the cuculis doves sang and one could see them from the huaca, from the sea, because our trees stood out more arrogantly than the entire seaside resort. Only in the park there was a magnificent pine of which we were jealous. 

Under the eucalyptus trees, the all-colorful people of Santa Cruz used to parade. When we saw the mad Saavedra with his sickle in hand and a sack of grass on his back, we climbed its trunk, and from that height, immune to his anger, we made fun of his condition.  He would speak to himself, singing, and the moment he spotted us, he threatened us with his sickle and attacked us by throwing lumps of mud that got dispersed in the air. Then he rang the doorbells of the houses, asking for food. Sometimes the dogs barked, at other times, neighbours gave him copper coins that he bought alcohol with. 

The mad Saavedra provided one service to the community. With his sickle, he cleaned the aqueducts, unscrewed the locks and allowed the water from the aqueduct to circulate. Noone ever figured out if he did that work out of selfishness or obligation. He was always without his shoes, wet, dirty with mud till his knees. His only elegance was by way of his hats. Each week, he brought a different one, the broad-rimmed soft chambergos  hats, sailor’s caps, schoolboy berets.  Finally, he went around without a shirt but always with a beautiful top hat. 

Sometimes weeks passed before we saw him appear. The water overflowed and invaded the private gardens. They said he was dead. But when least expected, he reappeared, paler, dirtier, more deranged than ever. His resurrection filled us with dread because we always believed his presence was cast by his spirit. With time, we saw less and less of him. Matilde said that he was where the Japanese Maria drank strong rum in beer glasses. Finally, he disappeared for good. One afternoon, we saw a truck carrying a coffin and a bouquet of flowers, followed by a troop of barking dogs.  They carried the mad man to the cemetery of Surquillio. 

Much later, when a number of new houses were built and more neighbours appeared in our midst, we boys formed a real gang. Since we were big in number, we dared to go beyond the area of the eucalyptus trees and ventured as far as the calle Enrique Palacios, where many families of the town lived. There was another gang there that we called the gang of the cholo Indians. They called us the gang of the gringos and threw stones at us with their slings. Our fights followed. More than once, we returned home with broken heads. Our neighborhood was in reality like a small village where the class rivalries were notorious. There were the people with the large yards, those of the streets, those with a country house, those with a villa and those with little palaces. Each class had its own group, unique customs and manner of dressing. They strictly kept distance from each other, and even during festivals, they never lost their sense of hierarchies. We were furious when the blacks threw balloons filled with colored water and wet our sisters, like the children who wore socks and went to the mass in an automobile; they went pale with anger when we threw balloons with aniline. 

In one of the streets of Enrique Palacios lived Don Santos, an enigmatic man. It was said he was the richest cholo in the neighborhood, the proprietor of shops and plots. No one ever saw him working. He spent the day leaning on Maria’s counter, drinking cheap pisco. As dusk approached, he would reach the eucalyptus trees and urinate his drunkenness on their trunks. When he saw us pass, he called us to his side to tell us the story of his life. He spoke of Paris, of the Latin Quarter. He said he had lived there for twenty years, had his paletot overcoat and styled a Valentino haircut. He spoke of his minister friends, of his current account, of a banquet to to which he was invited that very night. Seeing our skeptical faces, he remained quiet, looked pained and begged us with a pitiful voice to get him a job. 

With time, our barrio was transforming. It was enough that they put up electric lights and  regularized the supply of potable water, so houses started to sprout on the land like seasonal weeds. All over the place, one could see workers digging foundation pits for the cement, putting up walls and reinforcing the frameworks. The timber yards were demolished and cleared of the dirt. The townspeople fled to the outer skirts of the city, carrying beams and adobe bricks to set up their tenements. The grand aqueducts were canalized and we could no longer race our paper boats over their running currents. The Santa Cruz hacienda was ceding its pasture land where they were drawing streets and planting lamp posts. Finally, the huaca Juliana was cut down and reduced to a ridiculous burial ground without grandeur, without mystery. 

Soon, houses surrounded us from all sides.  They were made in a variety of styles – the Limeño imagination doesn’t have any limits. One could see chalets designed like ships with ox eyes and metal railings, Californian houses with enormous roofs to support the timid drizzle, small neo-classical palaces with strong Doric columns and cement friezes representing invented shields; there was never a lack of these strange Baroque constructions that united simultaneously – the medieval warhead, the balcony of the Colonial times, the Arabesque minarets and the romantic cavern, where a virgin chaposa smiled from its plaster at the passersby. To arrive at the alley, we had to cross street after street, go around the plazas, take care of the omnibus and bring our dogs on leashes. A railing separated us from the sea. Earlier, getting there meant a travel through the countryside, an expedition that was only undertaken by adventurers and fishermen. Now the city folk routinely frequented it on Sundays along with their families and cats. 

The colorful people dissolved in the mass of neighbors. All around, one saw the mediocrity, the indifference. Don Santos disappeared, just like Saavedra. Our policeman changed. Our dogs were run over. You could no longer see the man who, with his basket and lantern, proclaimed on winter nights “hot revolution” or the cows of the Santa Cruz hacienda that moaned and sounded their bells. The old man who sold shoes reemployed the donkey on a tricycle. The first cinema house was the symbol of our progress, as was the first church, the price of our devolution. We only lacked a mayor and a cabaret. 

In the middle of these movements, there remained the same aged but without loss of their strength – the eucalyptus trees. Our lookout, running from the roofs and antennas, found repose in its foliage. Its vision restored the peace and solitude we’d been robbed of. We were growing, we were discovering in those trees a new significance, we gave them new uses… we were neither climbing its branches nor playing hide and seek around their trunks, but we had an age of perversity in that we targeted their tops with slingshots to bring down the doves perched there. Much later, we would have our rendezvous with girlfriends under their shadows. We engraved on their barks, our first hearts. 

One morning a truck stopped in front of our house.  Three black men descended from its cabin carrying saws, machetes and ropes. From their looks, it appeared they were there to execute a sinister task. The news that they were pruners from Chincha circulated around the neighborhood. In no time at all, they climbed the eucalyptus trees and started cutting off their branches. Their work was so quick that we had no time to think anything. It took them just a week to cut down all the fifty trees. It was truly a massacre. The traffic had to be suspended. We, who had over fifteen years, grown up under the shade of those trees watched the work sadly. We saw those tree trunks falling one by one; the ones where the spiders wove their webs, others where we hid the paper soldiers, the thick one, the one in the corner, the one that shook its mane when it was windy and filled the air with its heady perfume. When the saws had cut them into equal lengths, we realized something profound had happened, that they had died like trees, to be reborn as things. On the trucks, only a profusion of rigid beams awaiting a gloomy fate remained. 

The town progressed. But our street had lost its shade, its peace, its poetry. Our eyes took a long time to get accustomed to this new piece of bare sky, to the long white wall that skirted the entire street like a cemetery wall. New children came with their toys to the gloomy street. They were happy because they were ignorant of the past. They could not understand why we occasionally stood at the door of the house, burnt a cigarette and remained looking at the air, pensively.

 Read more stories by Julio Ribeyro on this blog

This is the fourth in a series of short stories I have translated from Spanish. Read the introductory post on Julio Ribeyro and this series.

At the age of ten, I was the monarch of the rooftops and peacefully governed my kingdom of destroyed objects. 

The rooftops were airy enclosures where a number of people sent things that were no longer of any use – one could find chairs with missing legs, crushed mattresses, cracked flowerpots, coal stoves, and more such items that had arrived at this life of purgatory, midway between posthumous use and oblivion. Among these junk objects, I was omnipotent, exercising an authority that was denied to me in the house downstairs. I could now paint a moustache on a portrait of the grandfather, wear old paternal boots, or brandish a broom that had lost its straws, like a javelin. Nothing was outside my private preserve – I could build and destroy and with the same freedom of the insufferable life of a punctured ball, presided over the capital execution of the mannequins. 

My kingdom, at first was limited to the rooftop of my house, but little by little, thanks to my valorous conquests, was extending its frontiers to the neighborhood rooftops. On these long campaigns, which were not without danger, I had to cross fences or jump over abysmal corridors always returning with some object to add to my treasure or some scratch that added to my heroism. The sporadic presence of a servant hanging out the laundry or someone repairing the chimney didn’t cause me any trouble; I was firmly entrenched as the sovereign of a land in which all others were either nomads or temporary migrants. 

On the borders of my kingdom, no doubt, there was an unexplored zone that awakened my greed.  Many a time I approached its vicinity, but a fence with pointed wooden planks stopped me from crossing over. I could not resign myself to this natural impediment that limited my expansion plans. 

At the start of summer, I decided to launch an assault on this unconquered land. Dragging an unhinged nightstand and an old coat rack from roof to roof, I arrived at the fence and constructed a tall tower next to it. Perched atop my tower, I managed to raise my head above the fence. At first, I could only distinguish a quadrangular rooftop with a lamppost in the middle. Just as I was about to jump over to this new territory, I noticed a man seated on an armchair. The man appeared to be asleep. His head lay fallen on his shoulder and his eyes, shaded by a large straw hat, were closed. His face had a neglected beard, grown almost to distraction, like the beard of a shipwrecked man. 

I must have made some sound as the man straightened his head and gave a perplexed look. Interpreting the gesture he made with his hand as a command to evict, I scampered back. 

Over the next few days, I passed the time on my rooftop, fortifying my defenses and keeping my treasures in a safe place, preparing for what I imagined would be a bloody battle. I could already see an invasion by the barbaric man, plundering and expelling me to an underworld, where obedience was everything, white tablecloths, scrutinizing aunts hidden by heartless curtains that prevented one from looking at the outside world. But on the rooftops reigned a calm silence, and entrenched in my fortifications, I kept vigil, like the slow trot of the cats, on the occasional paper kite that fell on the rooftops. 

I decided to go back to size up the enemy I was up against, to see if he really was a usurper or a mere fugitive asking for the right to an asylum. Armed to my teeth, I ventured outside my fort, and little by little, advanced towards the fence. Instead of climbing over the tower, I lurked around the wooden fence, searching for an opening. I looked through the gap between two planks and observed – the man was still in the armchair, contemplating his long transparent hands, or occasionally casting a gaze at the sky, as if to follow the journey of the passing clouds. 

I would have passed the entire morning there, engaged in the delights of espionage, had not that man, with his head turned, not been staring intently at the viewing hole. 

“Stop,” he said, making a signal with his hand, “I already know you are here. We need to talk.” 

This invitation, if not the same as  an unconditional surrender, revealed at least a willingness to negotiate. Assured that I was well armed, I climbed the clothes rack and jumped over to the other side. The man looked at me smilingly. He took out a white handkerchief. Was that a sign of peace? He wiped his forehead. 

“It’s been a while since you were here,” he said, “I have a fine ear. Nothing escapes me…it’s hot!” 

“Who are you?” he asked me. 

“I am the ruler of the rooftops,” I replied. 

“You can’t be!” he responded, “I am the ruler of the rooftops. All these belong to me. Since my vacations started, I spend all my time here. If you haven’t seen me here before, that’s because I was busy at my other site.” 

“Don’t worry,” he continued, “You will be the ruler during the day and I during the night.” 

“No,” I replied, “I will also rule during the night. I have a lantern. When everyone falls asleep, I will walk around the rooftops.” 

“That’s fine,” he said, “You will also rule during the night! I gift you these rooftops, but let me at least be the king of the cats.” 

His proposal seemed to be acceptable. Mentally, I had already converted him into a shepherd or a tamer of my wild flock. 

“Well, I’ll let you have the cats. And the hens of the house next door, if you want. But all the rest is mine.” 

“Agreed,” he told me, “Come closer now. I am going to tell you a story. You have the face of a person who likes stories. Isn’t that right? Listen now. Once upon a time there was a man who knew everything. For that reason, he was put on a pulpit. Then he was put inside a jail. Then he was interned in a lunatic asylum. Then he was sent to a hospital. Then he was put on an altar. Then he was hanged on the gallows. Tired, the man said that he knew nothing. Then only he was left alone in peace.” 

After saying this, the man laughed out so loud that he drowned in it. When he found me looking at him blankly,  he became serious. 

“You didn’t like my story,” he said, “I am going to tell you another one, a much easier one. Once upon a time, there was a famous impersonator called Max in a travelling circus. He put on a set of false wings and a cardboard beak, entered the ring and started jumping and chirping. An ostrich! Cried the audience pointing towards him and they laughed till they died. His imitation of the ostrich was famous all over the world. He repeated this act for many years, providing entertainment to both children and grown-ups. But as time went on, he became very sad, and at his deathbed, he called his friends and told them, I am going to reveal a secret to you. I never wanted to imitate an ostrich; I always wanted to imitate a canary.” 

This time the man did not smile but remained thoughtful, looking at me with questioning eyes. 

“Who are you?” I asked back, “Are you trying to trick me? Why are you sitting here all the day? Why are you growing a beard? You don’t work? Are you lazy?” 

“So many questions!” he said, stretching his arms, with the palms facing me, “I will answer you some other day. Now you leave, please go. Why don’t you return tomorrow? Look, the sun, is like an eye. Do you see it? Like an irritated eye. The eye of an inferno.” 

I looked up above and saw a furious disc that that blinded me. I walked away, hesitating, until I was at a safe distance and noticed that the man was now leaning on his knees and had covered his face with his straw hat. 

I returned the next day. 

 “I was waiting for you,” the man said to me, “I was getting bored, I have already read all my books and have no more to read.” 

Instead of me approaching him, he extended his hand in a friendly gesture, casting a greedy eye on the objects that were stacked up on the other side of the lamppost. 

“Ah, I know already,” said the man, “You have returned only for the junk.  You can take whatever you want. Whatever is there on the roof,” he added, “they are of no use.” 

“I haven’t come back for the junk,” I responded, “I have garbage; I have more than the entire world.” 

“Then listen to what I have to tell you, summer is not when the gods like me. I like the cold cities, the ones that have a floodgate up there and let their waters down. But in Lima, it never rains; even the dew is so little that it barely settles the dust. Why don’t we invent something to protect us from the sun?” 

“A sunshade,” he said “a sunshade so enormous that it would cover the entire city.” 

 “That is, a sunshade that has a grand mast, like that of a carp fish at a circus that can unfurl from the ground, with a rope, like the hoisting of a flag. So we’ll always be in shade. And we shall not suffer.” 

When he said this, I realized he was soaking with the sweat that fell on his beard and wet his hands. 

“Do you know why the helpers in offices are so happy? Because they have been given a new uniform with stripes. They believe it has changed their destiny, when they have only turned out in a suit.” 

“Do we make it with fabric or paper,” I asked. 

The man kept staring at me as if he didn’t understand what I meant.  

“Ah, the sunshade!” he exclaimed, “It would be best if we make it with skin. What do you say? With human skin. With everyone donating an ear or finger. And for those who don’t want to give, we’ll pull out with pincers.” 

I started to laugh. The man imitated me. I laughed at his laughter and not so much at what I had imagined – yanking out my teacher’s ear with a pair of pliers – when the man restrained himself. 

“It’s a good laugh,” he said, “but without forgetting some things, for example, that until the mouths of the children fill with larvae and the house of the teacher is converted into a cabaret by his disciples.” 

After this, I started visiting the man on the armchair every morning. Abandoning my reserve, I started to swamp him with all kinds of lies and invented stories. He heard me with attention; he would interrupt me only to give me credit and passionately encouraged all my fantasies. The sunshade no longer worried us, and now we dreamed up a pair of shoes for walking over the sea and skates to lighten the fatigue of the turtles. 

Despite our long conversations, I knew little or nothing about him. Each time I asked him about himself, he gave me nonsensical or obscure answers such as: 

“I have already told you; I am the ruler of the cats. Have you never come up during the night? If you do, you would often see me grow a tail, sharpen my claws and see how my eyes burn and how all the cats around here come in a procession to pay me their respects.” 

Or he said: 

“I am that, simply, that is nothing more, never forget – junk.” 

Another day, he told me, “I am like that man, who after ten years of his death is revived and returns to his house wrapped in his shroud. Initially, his relatives are scared and run away from him. Then they refused to recognize him. Then they admitted him, but made sure that he was neither seated at the dinner table nor near the bed where he could sleep. Then they expelled him to the garden, then to the street and then to the other side of the town. But as the man would always come back, they decided to kill him.” 

During midsummer, the heat was unbearable. The sun melted the asphalt on the roads, where the grasshoppers were trapped. Everywhere, it breathed brutality and laziness. In the mornings, I went to the beach in the crowded tramcars, I arrived home covered with sand and famished, and after lunch, I climbed up to the rooftops to visit the man in the armchair. 

He had installed an umbrella by the side of his chair and was fanning himself with the page of a magazine. His cheeks were hollow and without. He wasn’t talkative as usual, but silent, throwing angry looks at the sky. 

 “The sun! The sun,” he repeated, “It will stop, or I will. If only we could knock it down with a cork shotgun!” 

One of those afternoons, he received me with a certain disquiet. On one side of his armchair, he had a cardboard box. Barely had he seen me, when he took out a bag full of fruits and a bottle of lemonade from that box. 

“Today is my saint’s day,” he said, “We are going to celebrate it. Do you know that I am thirty-three years old?  It means to know the names of things, of countries on the map. Also, about   insignificant things, so tiny that the nail of my little finger would be a world by their side. 

“But, haven’t you heard a famous author say that the smallest things torment us the most, like, for example, the buttons on a shirt?” 

That day, I spoke until the devilish sun melted the crystals of the streetlights and grew long shadows inside each of the painted church windows.  

When I withdrew, the man said to me, “My vacations are soon coming to an end. From now, you can’t come to see me. But don’t worry, because already the first rains are arriving.” 

In effect, the vacations had ended. We boys passionately lived those final hot days, already feeling a faraway smell of ink, a teacher, new notebooks. I squeezed through the objects on the rooftops, inspecting all the space I had conquered in vain, knowing that my summer and my golden ship of cargoes filled with riches were sinking.  

The man of the armchair appeared worn out. Under his sunshade, I saw his tanned face, observing with anxiety the final assault of the scorching days that made burnt toasts out of the rooftops . 

“It’s still hard!” he said signaling towards the sun, “Does it not appear wicked? Ah, the cold and windy cities. Summer solstice is an ugly word, a word that reminds one of a weapon, of a knife.” 

The following day he gave me a book, saying,  

“You read it when you can’t come up. That way, you’ll remember your friend… this long summer” 

It was a book with blue engravings and had a character called Rogelio. My mother discovered it on the pedestal table. I told her that it was a gift from “the man in the armchair.” She investigated, and lifting the book with paper, was throwing it into the garbage. 

“Why didn’t you tell me that you were speaking with that man? You will see tonight when your papa returns!  Never go up to the rooftop again.” 

That night my father told me,  

“That man is marked. I forbid you from going up to the rooftop.” 

My mother started keeping a vigil on the staircase that led to the rooftop.  I walked scared by the corridors of my house, by the terrible bedrooms, I let myself fall on the chairs, watched with exhaustion the wallpapered dining room – an apple, a banana, repeated to infinity – or leafed through albums full of dead relatives. But my ears were attentive only to the rumors about the rooftop, where the final golden days had awaited me, and my friend who lived there – solitary among the junk. 

The classes started, although the days were still hot. The work at the school distracted me. I spent endless mornings at my desk, learning the numbers of the fourteen Incas and drawing the map of Peru with my wax crayons. The vacations seemed far away and foreign to me already, as if it were old diary. 

One afternoon, a shadow fell on the school playground and a cold breeze swept away the hot air. Soon, the drizzle started to resonate above the palm trees. It was the first rain of the fall. I immediately agreed with my friend; I watched it jubilantly, receiving with my open hands the water falling from the sky that cleansed one’s skin, one’s heart. 

Arriving at the house, I resolved to make a visit. I tricked my mother’s vigil and climbed to the rooftop. At that time, under the grey hours, everything appeared different. On the clothesline, the forgotten clothes swung and breathed in the half light, and against the lamppost, those mannequins appeared like mutilated bodies. Anguished, I crossed my dominions and across the railing and the skylight, I reached the palisade. Raising myself on the coat rack, I looked out to the other side. 

I only saw the wet floor of the quadrilateral. The chair, disassembled, rested against the rusted mattress of a cot. I walked a bit to reduce the cold, trying to find a trace, an indication of his old palpitation. Close to the chair was an earthenware spittoon. For a change, the light went up by the tall lamppost, giving an indication of life. Looking over its crystals, I saw inside my friend’s house, a corridor of floor tiles where people in mourning clothes solemnly moved around. 

It was then that I figured that the rain had arrived a bit too late.

Read more stories by Julio Ribeyro on this blog

This is the third in a series of short stories I have translated from Spanish. Read the introductory post on Julio Ribeyro and this series.

After two months of anticipation, Don Fernando Pasamano had prepared the details for the grand event. First, his house needed to undergo an overall transformation. As one treats an old house, it was necessary to bring down the walls, enlarge the windows, change the wooden staircase and paint the walls afresh.

These alterations brought with it, as with other things – like those people who when they buy a pair of shoes, decide it’s necessary to try them out with a pair of new socks and then with a new shirt and then a new suit and so on until they buy new underwear to go with it – Don Fernando was obliged to renovate all the furniture, from the console in the salons to the last bench in the kitchen. Later came the carpets, the lamps, the curtains and the frames to cover the walls which, since they had been cleaned, appeared much larger than they actually were. Finally, since he planned to have a concert in the garden, it was necessary to construct a garden. Within fifteen days, a squad of Japanese gardeners had built, where before there had been a wildly overgrown vegetable garden, a marvelous rococo garden with carved (or sculpted) cypresses, alleys without exits, a lagoon with red fish, a cavern for the deities and a bridge made of rustic wood that crossed over to an imaginary waterfall.

The most serious task, no doubt, was preparing the menu. Don Fernando and his wife, like most of the gentry in the interior provinces, only had attended provincial feasts where one mixed the maize corn chicha with whisky and finished it up devouring guinea pigs with their fingers. For this reason, as they were planning a feast for the president, they were confused. The extended family, convened for soliciting special advice, had only increased its disconcert. Finally, Don Fernando decided to make an inquiry with the principal hotels and restaurants in the city, which allowed him to find out that there were delicacies fit for presidents and expensive wines that had to be brought by air from the vineyards of the south.

When all those details were finalized, Don Fernando confirmed with a certain anguish that in this banquet, which would be assisted by one hundred and fifty attendants, fifty young assistants, two orchestras, a ballet group and a cinema operator, he had invested his entire fortune. But, in the final account, all this wasteful expenditure appeared small compared to the enormous benefits that would be gained from the reception.

“With an ambassadorship in Europe and a railway line to my lands in the mountains, we shall remake our fortunes in in no time at all,” he told his wife, “I don’t ask for much, I am a modest man.”

“Except to know if the president would come,” replied his wife.

In effect, Don Fernando had until that moment left out sending his invitation out. It was enough for him to know that he was related to the president, in one of those relationships in the mountains so vague as to be indemonstrable and which, in general, no one ever explained for fear of discovering an adulterous origin, so as to be sure that it would be completely acceptable. Indeed, Don Fernando made sure to use his first visit to the presidential palace to take the president to a corner and humbly communicate his invitation.

“I would be delighted,” the president replied. “It appears to be a magnificent idea to me, though at this moment I find myself very busy. I will confirm my acceptance in writing.”

Don Fernando hopefully waited for the confirmation. To combat his impatience, he ordered some more complementary alterations that gave the mansion an aspect of a palace with a somewhat solemn appearance. His latest idea was to commission the portrait of the president, which, after being copied from a photograph by a painter, was placed in the most visible part of the salon.

At the end of four weeks, the confirmation arrived. Don Fernando, who had started to worry because of the delay, experienced the greatest happiness of his life. That was a day of celebration, a kind of anticipation of the festivity that was approaching. Before it arrived, he took his wife to the balcony to muse on his illuminated garden and close the memorable day with a bucolic dream. The landscape, no doubt, appeared to have lost its sensible properties; wherever he cast his eyes, Don Fernando saw only himself, wearing a coat, a mug in hand, smoking cigars with a background decoration where, like in certain tourist posters, one confuses the monuments of the four most important cities in Europe. Even farther, in a corner of his made-up world, he saw a train returning to the forests with wagons full of gold. And everywhere, moving and transparent like an allegory of sensuality, he saw the figure of a woman who had legs like a cocotte, the hat of a marquisa, the eyes of a Tahitian and looked absolutely nothing like his wife.

On the day of the banquet, the snitches were the first to arrive. From five pm, they were positioned in a corner, trying to make themselves unnoticeable but starkly betrayed by their hats, their exaggerated manners, and above all, their terrible air of delinquency that gave them the appearance of investigators, secret agents and, in general, everything that redeemed clandestine officials.

Then the automobiles started arriving. From them descended the ministers, parliamentarians, diplomats, businessmen, intelligent men. A porter opened the iron gates, an usher announced the guest, a valet took their coats and Don Fernando, at the center of the lobby, stretched his hand, murmuring short phrases as he shook hands.

After all the local bourgeois had crowded around inside the mansion and the residents of the tenements had a pompous unexpected celebration, the president arrived. Escorted by his aide-de-camp, he entered the house, and Don Fernando, forgetting the niceties of etiquette, moved by an impulse of camaraderie, embraced the president with such a show of affection that one of his epaulettes fell off.

Dividing themselves in salons, corridors, the terrace and the garden, the guests drank discreetly, between jokes and clever epigrams, the forty pegs of whisky. Afterwards, they accommodated themselves on the tables that had been reserved for them – the biggest – decorated with orchids was occupied by the president and exemplary men. They started to eat and chat noisily while the orchestra, at an angle of the salon, vainly tried to impose a Viennese air.

In the middle of the banquet, when the white wines of the Rhine had been honored and the reds of the Mediterranean started to fill their glasses, they started a round of discussions. The arrival of the pheasant interrupted it, and in the end, champagne was served, they returned to their eloquence and panegyrics that continued until the coffee, to drown finally in glasses of cognac.

Don Fernando, meanwhile, saw with disquiet that the banquet healthily followed its own laws, except that he did not have the occasion to take the president into confidence. Even though he sat down, in violation of the protocol, to the left of the guest, he did not find the right moment to speak. To top it off, the services ended, the diners got up to form drowsy and quiet groups to digest the meals and he, as the host, saw himself obligated to run from one group to another to keep them going with cups of mint, pats, cigars and polite chatting.

Finally, close to midnight, when the minister, inebriated, had seen himself forced to retire catastrophically, Don Fernando succeeded in conducting the president to the music room and there, seated on one of those canopies that in the court of Versailles had served to propose to a princess, or to thwart a coalition, he slipped a whisper of his modest demand.

“But there are none anymore,” replied the president, “There is an ambassadorship to Rome coming up soon. Tomorrow morning, on the advice of the ministers, I will propose your name, that is to say, impose your name. And as for the railway track, I know that there are the deputies of a commission that have been discussing this project for a few months. The day after tomorrow, I will cite in my dispatch to its members and yourself, to resolve this matter in an agreeable manner.”

An hour later, the president retired after reiterating his promises. His ministers, the congressmen and others followed as per the convention decreed by practice and custom. At two in the morning, there remained on the prowl at the bar only some courtiers who had no title to boast about and waited so they could uncork another bottle or stealthily bring another silver ashtray. At three in the morning, there remained only Don Fernando and his wife. Exchanging their impressions, making auspicious projections, they remained amid the ruins of their grand party until pre-dawn hours. Finally, they went to sleep, convinced that no gentleman in Lima had partied with more glory and ostentation in their home nor had anyone increased their fortune with such sagacity.

At ten in the morning, Don Fernando was awakened by the screams of his wife. When he opened his eyes, he saw her entering the room with an open newspaper in her hands. Snatching it away, he read the headlines and barely uttering an exclamation, he fainted on the bed. At dawn, taking advantage of the reception, a minister had carried out a coup and the president had been forced to relinquish his office.

Read more stories by Julio Ribeyro on this blog

This is the second in a series of short stories I have translated from Spanish. Read the introductory post on Julio Ribeyro and this series.

Ramon left the office with the dossier under his arm and walked towards the Avenida Abancay. While he was waiting for the omnibus to Lince, he was contemplating the demolition of the old houses in Lima. Not a day passed without the demolition of a colonial-era house, a balcony of carved wood or simply one of the gentile republican villas, where in the years past, more than one revolution had been forged. At each site, haughty impersonal buildings, identical to the ones in hundreds of cities all over the world, rose up. Lima, the adorable Lima of adobe and wood, was becoming a kind of a barrack of reinforced concrete. The little poetry that remained sought refuge in the abandoned little plaza, a church and in the windows of the princely mansions, where old families languished between parchments and yellowing daguerreotype. 

These reflections evidently had nothing to do with Ramon’s firm: a detector of hardened debtors. That very morning, his boss had ordered Ramon to undertake a thorough investigation in Lince to find Fausto Lopez, a dubious client who had signed a forged paper for 40 million soles. 

When the omnibus dropped him in Lince, he felt depressed, like he did every time he went around such neighborhoods where the common people, without a history lived. These places were born 20 years ago through some speculative art, dead after filling the pockets of some ministers, poorly buried between the grand metropolis and the luxurious spas of the south. One could see the bedpan-like one storey houses, dirt roads, dusty tracks, straight misty streets where no tree grew, not even weed. Life in these lively neighborhoods throbbed inside the corner stores that were frequented by regular customers and drunkards. 

Consulting his dossier, Ramon headed towards the house in the neighborhood and wandered around a long corridor dotted with doors and windows, until he arrived at one of the last houses. He knocked the door for a few minutes. Finally, it opened and a sleepy man, wearing a ragged shirt, showed his torso. 

“Does Senor Fausto Lopez live here?” 

“No, I live here, Juan Limayta, plumber” 

“These invoices list this address”, Ramon claimed, stretching out his dossier. 

“And what is it to me? I live here. Ask on the other side.” he said, shutting the door. 

Ramon left the street. He wandered around some other houses, making random inquiries. No one appeared to know Fausto Lopez. So much ignorance made Ramon think that  a vast conspiracy had been hatched at the district level to hide one of its residents. Only one person seemed to recollect him. 

“Fausto Lopez? He lived here but it’s been a while that I haven’t seen him. Maybe he’s dead.” 

Disheartened, Ramon entered a corner shop to get a cold drink. With his elbow on the counter, standing close to the putrid smell of urine, he slowly drank a Coca Cola. As he was getting ready to return to his office, he saw a little boy entering the shop, holding film listings in his hands. The association was instantaneous. He figured it out just in that one act. 

“Where did you get those pamphlets from?” 

“From my house. Which one do you want?” 

“Is your dad a printer?” 

“Yes” 

“What is your dad’s name?” 

“Fausto Lopez” 

Ramon breathed a sigh of relief. 

“Let’s go there. I need to speak with him” 

They talked on the way. Ramon learned that Fausto Lopez had a hand printing machine that he had shifted a few months ago from a few streets away and that he lived off by printing cinema pamphlets. 

“Does he pay you to distribute these?” 

“My Papa? Not a dime! The cinema owners let me enter free to watch the movies” 

These poor neighborhoods had their own hierarchy. Ramon felt he was now in a suburb within a suburb. Those little houses had disappeared. One could only see small alleys, tall walls with their big wooden doors surrounding vacant land. The street lights diminished in number and the first aqueducts emerged, plagued with filth. 

The boy stopped near the railway tracks. 

“Here it is,” he said, pointing to a dark alley, “The third door.  I have to go as I need to distribute all these pamphlets on Avenue Arenales.” 

Ramon let go of the boy even as he wavered in his decision.  A few boys were entertaining themselves by throwing pebbles into the aqueduct. A man emerged from an alley, whistling, and threw into the water the dubious contents of a chamber pot. 

Ramon walked over to the third door and banged many times it with his fist. As he waited, he remembered the wise words of his boss: never threaten, show gentlemanly courtesies, a spirit of reconciliation and a contagious confidence. All this so as not to intimidate the debtor, so you could return later to the same address and initiate a judicial recovery. 

The door did not open but, instead, a wooden window – tiny as a portrait frame, opened to reveal the face of a woman. Ramon was so unprepared to be suddenly faced with this apparition that he barely had any time to hide the dossier behind his back. 

“What is it that you want?  What’s it?” the woman asked insistently. 

Ramon was unable to take his eyes off the woman’s face. There was something fascinating about it. Maybe the fact that it was framed in the little window, as if her head was inside a guillotine. 

“What do you want?” continued the woman, “Who are you looking for?” 

Ramon hesitated. He could not let go of the woman’s eyes. They were so close to his that for the first time, he was involuntarily introduced to a secret world of a stranger, as if he had inadvertently opened a letter meant for someone else. 

“My husband’s not here.” insisted the woman. He is travelling, come back another day, I beg you.” 

Their eyes remained fixed to each other’s. Ramon continued exploring this special world, pressed by a sudden curiosity but not as one contemplating the objects that were inside  a glass window, but rather as one trying to reconstruct the dark mysteries hidden inside a number. Only when the woman continued with her protests, her voice getting fainter each time, did Ramon realize that this was a deserted world – of pain,a story marked by terror. 

“I am a radio salesman,” he said rapidly, “Don’t you want to buy one? We are giving them away very cheap at this time.” 

“No, no radios, we already have one, we don’t need any more,” sighed the woman, now almost suffocating. With that she violently closed the shutter. 

For a moment, Ramon remained standing in front of the door. He felt an unbearable headache. Collecting the dossier under his arm, he left the alley and took the road back towards Lince, looking for a taxi. When he arrived at the corner, he took out the notebook, contemplated for a moment and under Fausto Lopez’s name, wrote: “Wrong address.” By doing so, however, he suspected he was not doing the right thing not so much for that suspicious virtue called charity, but only because that woman was somewhat pretty.

Read more stories by Julio Ribeyro on this blog

Julio Ramón Ribeyro  (1929-1994), a Peruvian short story writer of the El Boom era, has been less known outside the Spanish speaking world as he was not translated into English till recently.

As one trying to learn Spanish, I attempted a translation of a few of his stories, including five that I believe have not been  translated before. These will appear on this blog over the next one week.   

This is how Mario Vargas Llosa, his contemporary and friend summarizes Ribeyro’s writings :

All his stories and novels are fragments of a single allegory about the fundamental frustration of being Peruvian: a frustration that is social, individual, cultural, psychological, and sexual.

History of a Friendship: Julio Ramón Ribeyro and Mario Vargas Llosa by Jorge Coaguila

All the stories are taken from: La insignia y otros relatos geniales by Julio Ramón Ribeyro

(Thanks to Carlos D, my friend and guide in learning Spanish and who patiently helped with the translations over many weeks).

The Meringues 

Barely had his mother closed the door, when Perico jumped from the mattress and listened, with his ear to the door, the steps fading away in the long corridor. When they had completely disappeared, he pounced towards the kerosene stove and rummaged through one of the burners that was no longer functioning. There it was! Pulling out a leather bag, he counted the coins one by one – he had learned to count while playing marbles – and to his astonishment, discovered that he had forty soles. He put back twenty soles in his pocket and returned the rest into their place. It had not been in vain, when during the night, he had pretended to sleep to spy on his mama. Now he had sufficient money to achieve his grand project. He had no excuse now. In those alleys of Santa Cruz, the doors were always ajar so the neighbours could poke their nose around. Putting on his shoes, he scampered off towards the street.

On the way, he pondered on whether to invest all his capital or just a part of it. And he remembered the meringues – white , pure, steaming fresh. He decided to spend all of it. How long had he gazed at them through the window pane until he could feel the bitter taste of saliva in his throat? For how many months had he been coming to the bakery and been content to just look at them? The attendant already knew him and whenever he saw him entering, he seemed to be momentarily permissive, before giving a knock on his head and saying:

“Get out of here, kiddo, you’re troubling the customers!”

The clients, fat men in suspenders or old women with bags, crushed and stepped on him, noisily buying everything in sight.

He remembered, no doubt, some happy events too. A gentleman, noticing the anxiety on his face, asked his name, age, if he attended school, if he had a father and finally gifted him a spongy doughnut. He would have preferred a meringue but he realized that one did not have a choice when bestowed with a favor. On another day the cook’s daughter gave him an egg-yolk bread that was a bit hard to chew on.

“Catch!”, she said, throwing it over the counter.

He had to make a great effort but nevertheless the bread fell to the ground and he suddenly remembered his puppy at which he threw morsels of meat, enjoying the spectacle as it jumped to catch it in its canines.

But it was neither the egg-yolk bread, nor the alfajores nor the piononos that attracted him, he only loved the meringues. Even though he had never tasted them, he always remembered the images of the boys who brought them to their mouth as if they were snowflakes dusting their collars. From that day, the meringues became his obsession.

When he arrived at the bakery, there were already many customers crowding at the counter. He waited for the space to clear a bit, but when he could no longer remain patient, he started to push his way through. Now he did not feel any embarrassment and the money that he clutched in his hands bequeathed him a certain authority and the right to rub shoulders with the men in suspenders. After much effort, his head appeared at the same level as the counter before the astonished attendant.

“You are here again! Get out of the shop!”

Perico, far from obeying, raised his head, and with an expression of triumph, responded: “Give me meringues for twenty soles!” His loud voice rose over the hubbub of the bakery as it fell into a curious silence. Many looked at him, intrigued, as it was certainly surprising to see someone greedily buy such sickly-sweet candies in such a large quantity. The attendant ignored him and soon the ruckus resumed. Perico remained somewhat disconcerted, but encouraged by a feeling of power, repeated, in a tone of urgency, “Meringues for twenty soles!”

The attendant looked at him, this time with a certain perplexity but continued to attend to the other customers.

“Did you not hear?” Perico insisted excitedly, “I want meringues for twenty soles!”

The attendant came closer and pulled him by the ear.

“Are you kidding me, you prick?”

Perico crouched.

“Show me the money!”

Without concealing his pride, Perico put a handful of coins on the counter. The attendant counted the money.

“And you want to buy meringues for all this money?”

“Yes”, replied Perico with a conviction that brought smiles to the onlookers.

“You will get indigestion if you are going to have them all,” someone commented.

Perico turned around. Noting that he was being observed with pitiful benevolence, he felt embarrassed. As if the attendant had forgotten, he repeated, “Give me the meringues.” But this time his voice had lost its vitality, and Perico understood that for reasons he could not explain, he was asking a favor.

“Are you leaving or not?” rebuked the attendant

“Attend to me first.”

“Who has asked you to buy this?”

“My mom.”

“You must have heard her incorrectly. Twenty soles? Go and ask her again or ask her to write it on a piece of paper.”

Perico remained thoughtful for a moment. He extended his hand towards the money and started to slowly withdraw it. But seeing the meringues through the glass, his desire was rekindled, and he no longer demanded as if he was robbing but with a pleading voice asked, “Give me meringues for only ten soles!”

Watching the attendant approaching him angrily, before he could throw him out, he repeated, whining, “Just ten soles, nothing more!”

The attendant bent over the counter and gave him the usual punch on the ear, though to Perico it appeared to carry an unusual force this time.

“Get out of here! Are you crazy? Go and crack such jokes elsewhere!”

Perico left the shop, furious. With the money clenched between his fingers and eyes wet, he wandered around.

He soon arrived in an alley. Seating himself on a high cliff, he contemplated the beach. It appeared difficult to restore the money to its original location, and he mechanically threw the coins one by one, making a tinkling sound on the stones below. While doing so, he was thinking that these coins were worthless in his hands and soon, on this very day that was both grand and terrible, he would cut the heads of all those men and of all the workers at the cake shop, while the pelicans quacked indifferently around him.

Los Merengues by Julio Ramon Ribeyro, La insignia y otros relatos geniales

Read more stories by Julio Ribeyro on this blog

There are a few places, known to us through literature, that let themselves be re-discovered. One of them is the Caribbean coast of Colombia, the site of some of the greatest literary works of the 20th century- the   novels of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

It is easy to fall into the trap of missing the actual place when visiting a place that one has known through literature. This is not true, however, when in Colombia, which Gabriel Garcia Marquez made immortal through his works, as a re-fabricator of its facts. Some of his greatest works, particularly his best known book, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ as well as ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ and ‘Of Love and other Demons’, derived much from two places that he lived and grew up in- the mofussil, and a rather nondescript town of Aracataca and the colonial city of Cartagena in Caribbean Colombia.

If Latin America found its literary voice in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ it is ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ in which Latin America found its hope and destiny. It was also the book and Macondo, the fictional place inspired by Aracataca, that encapsulated the whole of Latin America. Macondo became a byword for the school of writing that Garcia Marquez came to be associated with- that of magical realism. While his knowledge of Aracataca was deeply personal, that of Cartagena was based on his knowledge that he gained while working as a journalist in that city from 1948 to 1955.

Like most readers of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, I was bewitched by the place he created his little universe in the fictitious land of Macondo. Almost three decades after I discovered ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ on a samosa wrapper made from the previous week`s newspaper  drenched in oil, I had the opportunity to visit the town that has renamed itself Macondo, and where reality seems to aspire to its literary image.

In Search of Macondo

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point”

 – One Hundred Years of Solitude

The two of us travelled to Cartagena and Aracataca in March of 2019 to discover some of the places where Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s works are based. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, affectionately called Gabo in his native country Colombia, shot to worldwide fame with the publication of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ in 1967, winning the Nobel Prize for literature fifteen years later.

Though credited with expounding Magical Realism, Gabo stated that all his works were based on reality and facts. How true that is, one discovers while walking through the streets of Aracataca in Colombia, the remote village where Gabo was born and which is the basis for the mythical Macondo.

Aracataca

It was born as a Chimila Indian settlement and entered history on its left foot as a remote district without God or law in the municipality of Ciénaga, more debased than enriched by the banana fever. It bears the name not of a town but of a river: Ara in the Chimila language, and Cataca, the word with which the community recognized its leader. Therefore we natives do not call it Aracataca but use its correct name: Cataca.

– Living to Tell the Tale, Gabo’s autobiography

Aracataca, today a small town of about 40,000 residents, is about 250 kilometers from Cartagena. Though well connected with the rest of the country because of newly built highways, it is tedious to travel there because one needs to change buses and then take a taxi ride from Santa Marta, the nearest town on the Caribbean coast. Colombia has been considered unsafe because of drugs related violence for the past few decades, but it was quite a pleasant surprise to discover that its highways are not only safe but a pleasure to drive on.

We rented a car from Cartagena airport and the journey from Cartagena to Aracataca, via Baranquilla and Cienaga turned into an adventurous experience that lets one observe the Caribbean Colombia from close quarters. Highway 90 along the Caribbean coast is newly laid and in excellent condition. The only hassle one experiences are the frequent toll collection points. Highway traffic is sparse between Cartagena and the biggest city on the coast, Barranquilla which is also the cultural center of Caribbean Colombia.

Cienaga, a decrepit town where the highway is surrounded by slums and small roadside eateries much like roadside dhabas in India. Cienaga is the town where the infamous killing of workers at the banana tree plantations of the United Fruit Company is recounted in ‘One Hundred Years.’

Turning off from highway 90 near Santa Marta is highway 45 that goes all the way to the capital Bogota. Lined with banana trees, this stretch is resplendently green, reminding one of Kerala. Following the GPS, a turn took us to Aracataca, precariously crossing the Aracataca river over an iron bridge.

The train stopped at a station that had no town, and a short while later it passed the only banana plantation along the route that had its name written over the gate: Macondo. This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I never heard anyone say it and did not even ask myself what it meant. I had already used it in three books as the name of an imaginary town when I happened to read in an encyclopedia that it is a tropical tree resembling the ceiba, that it produces no flowers or fruit, and that its light, porous wood is used for making canoes and carving cooking implements. Later, I discovered in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that in Tanganyika there is a nomadic people called the Makonde, and I thought this might be the origin of the name.

– Living to Tell the Tale

The roads turned dusty and the houses slightly better than the sheds in Cienaga as we got closer to Aracataca. The place where we stayed, La Casa Magico Realisimo is run by Fernando and his wife and is a tribute to Gabo`s works. The walls are covered with the family tree and the famous mariposas (butterflies) from ‘One Hundred Years’ while the backyard has a hammock and furniture decorated with pillow covers with patterns from the covers of Gabo`s books. Tourists are few – around 10 during this tourist season, Fernando informs us, but they come from all over the world- Russia, France, Latin America, the United States, Fernando tells us in colloquial Spanish in an accent that my unaccustomed ears struggle to understand.

We are a few hundred feet away from the site where Gabo lived with his grandparents till the age of 8. We excitedly walk over there as soon as we arrive after a tiring 6 hour drive. There are very few houses with more than two storeys. The streets are in a reasonably good condition, typically with small corner grocery stores and eateries. There is only one good restaurant, close to where we are staying. Gabo’s house, now a museum, is closed, and the guard asks us to come the next day, adding a bit about the grocery store right across the street- it has been there since the days of the United Fruit Company, he tells us animatedly.

We spent the rest of the afternoon, until the return train arrived, collecting nostalgic memories in the spectral house. All of it was ours, but only the rented portion that faced the street, where my grandfather’s offices had been, was in use. The rest was a shell of decaying walls and rusted tin roofs at the mercy of lizards.

In the course of my childhood it was described in so many different ways that there were at least three houses that changed shape and direction according to the person who was speaking. 

– Living to Tell the Tale

This house is a re-creation at the site of Gabo’s original house where he lived with his grandparents. Today it is a museum that attracts Gabo’s die-hard fans who take the trouble of going to this still remote little town – indeed the two of us are the only visitors at the museum that day. Those familiar with his works will be able to relate to the place and for those who aren’t, there are helpful descriptions and quotes from his works. One can see the table that his grandma always kept ready for any unexpected visitors, the room where he witnessed a childbirth and the bedroom where his grandfather slept with a gun under his pillows. There are sample copies of the Spanish dictionary that was the first book that Gabo read (“The fundamental book in my destiny as a writer”) as well as ‘One Thousand Nights’, the collection of Arabian stories that he was told when he was a child and whose fable like atmosphere permeates ‘One Hundred Years.’

A representation of Gabo’s grandfather’s office, one of the two rooms that the women of the house were forbidden to enter.

The colonel had learned his father’s trade, who in turn had learned it from his, and in spite of the celebrity of his little gold fish that were seen everywhere, it was not a profitable business.

– Living to Tell the Tale

In one of the interior rooms is a table similar to the one where Gabo’s grandfather created the ‘gold fishes’ that Colonel Aureliano Buendia in ‘One Hundred Years’ crafts after his retirement.

The Kitchen

“The women in the kitchen would tell the stories to the strangers arriving on the train, who in turn brought other stories to be told, and all of it was incorporated into the torrent of oral tradition.”

This was the realm of the women who lived or served in the house, and they sang in a chorus with my grandmother as they helped her in her many tasks. Another voice was that of Lorenzo el Magnífico, the hundred-year-old parrot inherited from my great-grandparents, who would shout anti-Spanish slogans and sing songs from the War for Independence. He was so shortsighted that he had fallen into a pot of stew and was saved by a miracle because the water had only just begun to heat. One July 20, at three in the afternoon, he roused the house with shrieks of panic: “The bull, the bull! The bull’s coming!” Only the women were in the house, for the men had gone to the local bullfight held on the national holiday, and they thought the parrot’s screams were no more than a delirium of his senile dementia. The women of the house, who knew how to talk to him, understood what he was shouting only when a wild bull that had escaped the bull pens on the square burst into the kitchen, bellowing like a steamship and in a blind rage charging the equipment in the bakery and the pots on the stoves.

– Living to Tell the Tale

Aracataca is so small that we more or less covered all the places of interest in less than an hour. As we stepped out in the morning, we ran into a father taking his daughter and son to school, singing all the way as the son (younger of the two siblings) did not seem very keen to go to school. Most people, though, came across as grumpy, possibly because of the heat and the mundaneness of a small place, where nothing seemingly happens.

Half an hour later, while returning from the Tomb of Malquiades, we ran into the father him again, this time alone, and he smiled at us ear to ear with an air of a long time familiarity.

In front of the Iglesia de San Juan, the cathedral where Gabo was baptized, is the Plaza de Simon Bolivar, where we come across a young white girl, perhaps sixteen or thereabouts, chaperoned by an Indian- looking older woman. The girl in a red dress with white polka dots, could have been Fermina Daza straight out of ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’, protectively accompanied by her aunt.

Some things have, of course, changed, like the famous Street of the Turks that still exists though it has been renamed as Colombia switched to a standardized naming convention throughout the county some years ago.

The Aracataca River

“Incredible things are happening in the world,” he said to Úrsula. “Right there across the river there are all kinds of magical instruments while we keep on living like donkeys”

– One Hundred Years of Solitude

The Aracataca Railway Station

The railroad depots in cowboy movies looked like our stations. Later, when I began to read Faulkner, the small towns in his novels seemed like ours, too. And it was not surprising, for they had been built under the messianic inspiration of the United Fruit Company and in the same provisional style of a temporary camp.”

– Living to Tell the Tale

“We have to bring in the railroad,’ he said.

That was the first time the word had ever been heard in Macondo. Looking at the sketch that Aureliano Triste drew on the table and that was a direct descendant of the plans that Jose Arcadio Buendia had illustrated his project for solar warfare, Ursula confirmed her impression that time was going in a circle.” 

― One Hundred Years of Solitude

There are a few things that strike about the town as it stands today. There are a number of schools in the town, seemingly disproportionate to the size of the town. At the same time, there are no bookshops at all, though there is a decent public library headed by a chatty librarian.

The only place where we came across books by Gabo for sale was the Casa del Telegrafista, the telegraph office where Gabo’s father had worked and made famous in ‘Love in the Time of Cholera.’ Young women driving motorcycles is a common sight. The town’s streets are lined with almond and mango trees.

There is a Tomb of Malquiades which is a real tomb of the fictional gypsy character of that name in ‘One Hundred Years’, whose mother tongue was Sanskrit. Malquiades may or may not have been of Indian origin, but the mango trees certainly connect the two countries, the mango being an import from India.

The next day it was time to leave and start our long drive back to Cartagena. As we part, Fernando asks how we liked our trip to Aracataca. In the spirit of the exaggeration that characterizes Gabo’s writings, I blurt out: “Puedo ahora morir en paz” (I can now die in peace). Fernando’s usually stoic Indian face for once betrays an emotion of incredulity.

Perhaps there is something in the air of Aracataca that makes one susceptible to the fantastic.

***

We drive back to Cartagena, passing through Barranquilla, the biggest city on the Caribbean coast and its cultural centre. Gabo worked here for a while too, and we make a brief stopover at La Cueva, the café where the famous Barranquilla Group is said to have rendezvoused. Another site on the pilgrimage checked off, we resume our journey on the mostly deserted highway. All appears to be calm as the sun sets and we make a lonely trip back. Ten kilometres outside Cartagena, we stop at a gas station to fill the tank. Tank filled, I walk out of the car to stretch my legs and pay the operator. He recoils back, fearful. A lone gunman whom I had not noticed before, steps forward quickly, fear written on his face and relaxing only when they make out that I am an extrajero (foreigner), with looks that could pass for a Colombian but speaking in broken Spanish.

That is the closest that we come to experience the dark recent history of Colombia. Flooded with tourists, the Caribbean coast is one of the safest regions in Colombia, unlike for example, Medellin and Bogota that bore the brunt of the violence in the 1980s and 1990s. Gabo’s writings belong to the Caribbean coast. To understand the Colombia of Medellin and Bogota, one has to turn to more contemporary writers like Juan Gabriel Vasquez and the debutante novelist, Ingrid Rojas Contreras.

As for Gabo’s world, while the people he wrote about have long gone, the physical world they inhabited continues to exist in Aracataca that is now Macondo.