Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The man died yesterday and has been today's news. I am no going to write much about it but I need to acknowledge that he was a rather poor politician, a maybe not so great human being, but one of the most stupendous writers ever. I have already written in 2007 a homage to Cien Años de Soledad, mentioning Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold, three essential books, to which if you are Latino American you should also add El General en su Laberinto.

One thing I have noticed it is the attacks made against him for his friendship for Fidel Castro. I want to make two comments on that.

Chavismo caught in its contradictions and lies

This week has been really hard on poor chavistas.

It all started last Sunday when their beloved leader blew up a few of his fuses and ranted furiously in front of less than half filled Avenida Bolivar. His speech that day will deserve a footnote in "Historia Universal de la Infamia".

But good soldiers they are (though many of them are just mercenaries) and they got ready to obey the orders of Chavez, just in case he actually meant his words, but hoping that they would not have to do so. As bad luck had it, they had to...

Tuesday "mi general" Baduel came out against the constitutional reform in the most stinging of criticism to the fraudulent project. Chavez himself that night had to go on line to the Vanessa Davies "show" to call Baduel a traitor and to say that Bolivar was murdered and that he personally would set this matter clear. Chavez as a star of "Cold Case: CSI Caracas" the new hit show. Obviously for the rest of the week we saw boatloads of chavistas who spent recent years ass kissing Baduel bending backward past breaking point to call him a traitor. Clearly chavismo is ready for Stalin show trials. The new constitution will allow finally for their official set up.

Still, that week would strain chavismo ability to recant the obvious. Wednesday the world press, not Globovision nor any Venezuelan junket, showed how a returning group from the huge and pacific student march was met at the UCV by chavista gunmen. Now, in normal circumstances chavismo would have been able to muddle things well enough to confuse its followers, easily duped. But this time all the documentary evidence comes from international news agency pictures who had a field day in shots that went around the world. A few of these camera men added quite a few points towards their year end bonus. Heck, even the French news had Venezuela in the nightly news two days in a row! And not with a pro Chavez coverage.

This very sad event will leave us with what seems to have become the symbol of the Constitutional Reform, a picture so telling about the conviction power of chavismo these days. Vote SI or be dead.



Since Wednesday the government has been trying to sell the version that a few nice chavista students were savagely entrapped in the Social Sciences building of campus by hordes of anti Chavez students trying to smoke them out. Yet, I think that even the attorney general said that "one of the pro Chavez student might have had a gun". I do not know whether Isaias Rodriguez said that, with those words or not, because the web of tales has become so dense, and interchangeable among chavismo, that one gets dizzy. Unfortunately in all videos available the guns, and the escape motorbikes, and the people shooting from motorbikes have all been tied with pro Chavez sectors. Including the cops at the entry of campus that let the bikers go in and out without any trouble, even on bikes belonging to the police.

Thus this week is ending with all chavistadom out in force using the last reply tool they have left once arguments are voided: insult and smearing. We saw that a lot in the National Assembly where chavismo was calling for the closing of Globovision for promoting terror and accusing CNN of supporting every single item uttered by Globovision. I suppose that soon chavismo will provide us a video of CNN's Viotto giving guns to chavistas.....

But chavismo tales certainly cannot explain while Simon Romero of the New York Times had to track down Yon Goicoechea , one of the student leaders who has been so threatened that even though we supposedly live in a land of liberty and absolute freedom of expression has started sleeping in different places. And he has to change cell phones every few days. From the Romero article we can see that chavismo explanations are not flying overseas. Well, they seem to be crash landing at home too. The student protest are slowly but surely becoming the good guys side, the heroes. After all, who can believe that a revolution is made AGAINST the bulk of the student body of a country? Who can take seriously the pro chavez students, all but one unelected from any campus group, most on some form of governmental payroll.

In a curious turn of events we also got the news yesterday that Tascon of the infamous list was expelled from the PSUV, the socialist party which is the cryptic organization that will act soon as the traditional commie parties of the Soviet era. Apparently Tascon had the misfortune to say that how come Baduel was treated as a traitor if Arias Cardenas who said much worse things about Chavez in 2000 was now his ambassador to the UN. A closed door short meeting was enough to expel Tascon. This one, we must stress once again, had a role akin to an evil Baduel of the Recall Election process in that his actions helped greatly Chavez secure a fraudulent victory. The homonym list he set up then from the names of those who signed is still used today extensively as an active political discrimination tool, pure McCarthyism of the XXI century. At least we know that in the purge department the chavismo that will emerge after December 2 will be highly efficient. Bringing us milk to our tables will be another story.

Yes, milk. There are reports also of people fighting for a pound of powder milk; or of the armed forces battling the "buhoneros" to force them to sell milk at the regulated prices. these ones preferred to spill milk on the side walk. As the shelves of Venezuela are slowly lacking more and more items we learned that through the dismal inefficiency of the Venezuelan public administration 1660 cows died in a ship at Puerto Cabello. In a tale worthy of Garcia Marquez tug boats had to push the boat at sea to throw overboard the putrescent meat. No word form the sharks yet though we are sure that the land sharks will keep whatever commission they pocketed to bring missing meat to Venezuela even if that one will never reach the shelves.

And then, perhaps to make sure that people for a few hours stopped talking about missing milk, sugar and what not, Chavez decided to fight with the King of Spain. This one told Chavez to shut up while a puffed Chavez did not seem to realize on the spot the gravity of what had happened. The room at the Ibero-American summit applauded loudly in support of Zapatero at the end of his angry but amazingly still polite reply to Chavez (the King had left in disgust).

I must say that we are in awe this week as to how chavismo committed so many errors and displayed so consistently its true totalitarian inner child. I was looking for some symbol to convey that idea to the readers of this blog and I found it this morning while reading Friday's Tal Cual. Wednesday night there was an interesting TV moment. Vanessa Davies, one of the anchors of the state TV, VTV, was in full spin action for the UCV shooting. She was interviewing some of the "victims" who escaped at great risk the "encircled building" where the "lynch mob" was going at work.

Unfortunately at the very same moment Globovision was able to split the screen image and show side by side that the spokesperson of the "victim group" interviewed by Vanessa was in fact one of the leaders of the chavista group at the UCV where he was carrying a heavy weapon with all the intentions of using it. I have these pictures below from Tal Cual. I think chavismo will be well advised to take a deep breath before hitting the stages of VTV because now almost anyone has a video camera on hand to film all the abuses that these mercenaries are committing.

Then again I suppose that the intention of Vanessa Davies was to shore up the faith of the truly faithful who seem to be deserting fast the "SI" voting ranks of the coming referendum if we are to believe the polls. It looks that chavismo is now more concerned about stopping the hemorrhage than gaining new supporters.

The legend for the pictures: Thus the cynicism of the XXI century. Not only do the chavista shooters act without any restraint or any consequences for them, kidnap students, go through police barriers and rescue themselves but they have at their service the communication apparatus of the state. Last Wednesday night the social studies student José Félix Valera appeared on VTV the network which allegedly belongs to all, all Venezuelans, presenting himself as an innocent victim of the "violent oppositionists" [inexistent term in either Spanish of English but coined as a pejorative by chavismo] when in fact he was one of the main characters of the armed aggression of the fascist chavismo at the UCV [sic]. This in VTV is what they call "Contacto con la realidad" [contact with reality], the distortion of news to satisfy an alleged political and revolutionary engagement and a permissive journalism.



Note: this post is heavy on links to my previous posts. Not a question of narcissism but these posts contain many links with their explanations to the original info.

-The end-

Cien Años de Soledad

This week caught me by surprise learning that it is the 40 th anniversary of the publication of Cien Años de Soledad, and the 80th birthday of his author.

It is easy to go bonkers on what is one of the essential books, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yet the first time I tried to read it I did not like it much, I did not even finish it. These days I was in high school, molded in the Cartesian way while Zola was making slowly a socialist of me. Socialist in the good sense, not the XXI century hogwash which is refried communism cum militarism. Reading the definitely non Cartesian work of Garcia Marquez was not my cup of tea then.

Years went by. Once at home over some holiday I found the unfinished book. The same edition, by the way, on Garcia Marquez head. Then I had the strange ability, and vice I suppose, of being able to read more than one book at once and thus to leave a given book for months or even years. These days, I could just go back to the last read page and keep going on as if nothing, not even reading back a few pages. Today at the end of a newspaper article I catch myself sometimes trying to remember what was at the beginning. After picking up the book again, I got where I had left it, two thirds of the way and I finished it in a single sitting, and then went back to read the start again, though the next day I think.

I have read it twice since, and once in English. The time in English I did not read it completely I must confess, I was just checking out the quality of the translation and I was not impressed, but I still was caught enough, even in English, that I read more than half of it, jumping from highlight to highlight.

And I know that I will read it again, at least once again. It probably will be one luxurious edition, hard back, large print. I will read it sitting on a wooden rocking chair if possible, or laying in a hammock, with the window open, to let the tropical evening breeze in, to hear the deafening rainy season, or smell the dusty dry season. I will read mostly at night, a couple of pages at a time, aloud to myself. I will read it all aloud since I discovered on my last reading that it was better read aloud, like children learning. I always learn in Solitude. It is the Spanish of my childhood, it is the Spanish that took me away from my Cartesian French education and made me a Latin-American.

I have read most books of Garcia Marquez. I think that Love in the Time of Cholera might be his best work. The General in his Labyrinth was perhaps his most interesting for me, how Bolivar shaped us through his legend for better or for worse, even if it is not implicit when you read it. But all of us who know of Bolivar have him on the back of our mind as we read the book.

Saying that Cien Años is my favorite book would be silly: I have read and loved too many books to have a favorite. But One Hundred Years has something that gets to me. It is indeed so rich, one can discover so many new things each time one reads it. But that is not why it hits me. The thing about Cien Años is that it speaks to every moment of one’s life; it changes language as you get older, so it can keep talking to you. It says to us all what we need to know about our countries and our people, and how we change over time. There is probably no better introduction to Venezuela and the Chavez phenomenon than to read One Hundred Years of Solitude and follow it with Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Read these two books carefully, with an open mind, and you will realize that Garcia Marquez has said it all, has invented nothing, and just as Melquiades did in one Hundred Years he wrote his own Chronicle to foretell all what will happen in Latin America. Macondo might be Aracataca, but it is also Choroni, it is Chivacoa, it is Caracas when it was a small town, and it is Miraflores which has become a small town inside Caracas where a group of lunatics explore ideological incest.

But there is also something about Cien Años de Soledad. It has one of the best opening lines of any book I have ever read, as good, if longer, than perhaps the best opening line of all times from the Quijote:

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.

Even if you have never read the Quijote, as is shamefully my case, you cannot help but think that this opening sentence cannot be matched in any language. Garcia Marquez almost matches it, or matches it in my very humble opinion. It could only have been matched in Spanish I suppose:

Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. Macondo era entonces una aldea de veinte casas de barro y cañabrava construidas a la orilla de un río de aguas diáfanas que se precipitaban por un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos. El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo.

I do not know about you, but I am unable to read this without reading it again aloud.

But what is perhaps the most unique feature of this book is the ending. Because Cien Años has a memorable beginning but perhaps an even more memorable ending. I confess that after having read this last paragraph of the book dozens of times, I still get goose bumps each and every time I read it.

Entonces empezó el viento, tibio, incipiente, lleno de voces del pasado, de murmullos de geranios antiguos, de suspiros de desengaños anteriores a las nostalgias más tenaces. No lo advirtió porque en aquel momento estaba descubriendo los primeros indicios de su ser, en un abuelo concupiscente que se dejaba arrastrar por la frivolidad a través de un páramo alucinado, en busca de una mujer hermosa a quien no haría feliz. Aureliano lo reconoció, persiguió los caminos ocultos de su descendencia, y encontró el instante de su propia concepción entre los alacranes y las mariposas amarillas de un baño crepuscular, donde un menestral saciaba su lujuria con una mujer que se le entregaba por rebeldía. Estaba tan absorto, que no sintió tampoco la segunda arremetida del viento, cuya potencia ciclónica arrancó de los quicios las puertas y las ventanas, descuajó el techo de la galería oriental y desarraigó los cimientos. Sólo entonces descubrió que Amaranta Úrsula no era su hermana, sino su tía, y que Francis Drake había asaltado a Riohacha solamente para que ellos pudieran buscarse por los laberintos más intrincados de la sangre, hasta engendrar el animal mitológico que había de poner término a la estirpe. Macondo era ya un pavoroso remolino de polvo y escombros centrifugado por la cólera del huracán bíblico, cuando Aureliano saltó once páginas para no perder el tiempo en hechos demasiado conocidos, y empezó a descifrar el instante que estaba viviendo, descifrándolo a medida que lo vivía, profetizándose a sí mismo en el acto de descifrar la última página de los pergaminos, como si se estuviera viendo en un espejo hablado Entonces dio otro salto para anticiparse a las predicciones y averiguar la fecha y las circunstancias de su muerte. Sin embargo, antes de llegar al verso final ya había comprendido que no saldría jamás de ese cuarto, pues estaba previsto que la ciudad de los espejos (o los espejismos) sería arrasada por el viento y desterrada de la memoria de los hombres en el instante en que Aureliano Babilonia acabara de descifrar los pergaminos, y que todo lo escrito en ellos era irrepetible desde siempre y para siempre porque las estirpes condenadas a cien años de soledad no tenían una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra.

I cannot think of anything better to write to give homage but to quote one of the most important books in my life.

-The end-