For Whom the Bell Tolls

In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

-Pastor Martin Niemöller

Maybe I’m going crazy with this weather or something, but I finished this book absolutely furious with all the characters in it.

Like our buddy Angel-Face, for example.  With all of the confidences and plotting that he shared with the president over the years, did he really think he was going to get away with marrying the general’s daughter?  Wouldn’t you grab your wife and your savings and run, maybe start a political newspaper in a country with no extradition laws, sip espresso in a cafe with other ex-pats and plot a revolution?

Or the lawyer’s wife, who’s so surprised when they take her husband away:

“Miedo, frío, asco, se sobrepuso a todo por estrecharse a la muralla que repetiría el eco de la descarga…  Después de todo, ya estando allí, se le hacía que fusilaran a su marido, así como así, así de una descarda, con balas, con armas, hombres como él…”

Does this woman not pass the jail every single day, with the crying women outside?  Did she not hear about the general’s flight from the uncharacteristic accusations against him?  Why does she expect her fate to be any different?

These people live in a society where a mother is force-fed lime so that she cannot feed her newborn.  Where a wife cannot find out where her husband is buried, and family bar family from their homes for fear gossip.   The jails are overflowing with students and priests, and the streets amok with a secret police that is more criminals than law enforcement.  How long are you going to keep your head down in a society like this?  You have to know that one day soon they’ll come for you too.  And if you realize that there’s no hope, that your life and the lives of your family are worth nothing, what would you do?  I’d be fighting alligators, and trying to get across the frontier, not sit there until the whim of the president gets me in front of a firing squad.  Or if I was going down I'd at least try to take a few of them with me.

1967: Miguel Angel Asturias

1899-1974-Guatamala



El Señor Presidente tiene lugar en una ciudad sin nombre, que podría ser situado en cualquiera parte de América Sur.  Hay la Plaza de Armas y el Portal de Señor, donde duermen las personas sin hogar.  Hay el bazar de los turcos, el Callejón de Judío, y el Callejón del Rey, “el preferido de los jugadores”.  Hay una escuela de párvulos, un matadero (¿Echevarría, alguien?), el cuartel de ejército y “los suburbios, donde la ciudad sala allá fuera”.  Estéticamente esta ciudad es perfectamente normal, hasta pintoresca; pero hay un sentimiento intranquilo, como si está embrujado, o silencioso.

                A prima vista, la gente de la ciudad parecen que ser habitantes ordinarios, siguiendo con sus vidas: Cónyuges se pelean el uno a la otra, el panadero reparte el pan, y todos en el barrio están invitados al bautizo del bebé nuevo.  Pero nadie habla de los cárceles atestados, que están llenos de los testigos de crimines que necesitan que cambiar sus cuentos,  hombres que han sido declarado culpables de traición.   Fuera, sus mujeres descalzas “se contaban sus penas en voz baja”.

                Es una ciudad donde unos son “obligados a trabajar para ganarse el pan, y otros con lo superfluo en la privilegiada industria del ocio: amigos de Señor Presidente, propietarios de casas”.

                Mucho así en Alemania Oriental o en Big Brother por George Orwell, esta comunidad tiene por todas partes una Policía Secreta: Una organización de paisanos, cuyo trabajo es espiar a sus vecinos y realizar asesinatos por contracto en nombre del Presidente.  Es una posición moralmente reprensible, pero una que paga dinero en una época con un desempleo alto; por lo tanto es un empleo codiciado.

                Lucio Vásquez, o “Sucio Bascas”, “al que le dicen Teriopelo” es un miembro de la Policía Secreta.  Es un borracho; frecuenta muchos de los barros de la ciudad, donde cuenta los secretos del estado a sus amigos.  “La voz de Vásquez era desagradable, hablaba como mujer con una vocecita tierna, atiplada, falsa” .  A pesar de su voz femenina, es un depredador sexual, que constantemente hostiga la fondera de la Masacuate.  Participa en la tortura y el asesinato de Mosquito, el sólo hombre que no mentiría para enviar Eusebio Canales a su muerte.  También Terciopelo asesina el Pelelele sin hesitación, y está deseando para planear el secuestro de una mujer y el pillaje de su casa:

                “¡María Santísima si uno se pone que no cabe del gusto cuando se pepena algo o se roba una jallina, que será cuando se birla a una hembre!”

                Teriopelo, como un representante del gobierno, es una metáfora por el Presidente él mismo: Sin remordimientos, sin corazón, sin piedad, sin vergüenza.

Neruda is from Mars, Mistral is from Venus



“I believe in prophetic speech… still.  I believe in Cassandra, I believe in Elektra and the charming Antigone… for me they’re more alive than the intellectual co-operation and its choice group of old men.”

 –Mistral.

Although as a rule I try my best to avoid gender issues, I think that the identity of women is a huge theme in both of the authors’ works, and it needs to be discussed.

Mistral was a successful woman living in a male-controlled literary and political culture, and because of this had trouble with her own identity as well as the role of women in society.  Raised in poverty in a rural setting, she somehow broke free from the traditional fate of marriage and housekeeping and rose to the public life of poet, ambassador, and Nobel Prize winner.   Mistral was a paradox- maternal yet bore no children, an unwavering spirituality but deranged though grief and suffering, she loved her homeland deeply and yet she always lived abroad-and her issues with self-identity are evident in her work.   She wrote about women in history considered outsiders and related to them.  The characters she created-Through Hebrew Scriptures and Greek tragedies- are self-portraits, or spiritual states through which she was passing, and contain hallucination, prophecy, raving, and altered physic states.  Through these traits of “locura”, Mistral questions the possibility that a woman is not crazy in the face of extreme conditions, but merely conflicted as she attempts to break the gender molds in which she in encased.

Neruda-also a poet, ambassador and Nobel Prize winner- didn’t seem to have an issue with being a man.  He is very up-front in his poetry about his needs and feelings, and expresses love and lust and the manly emotions that come with it.  Although he idolizes the women in his poems, he also refers to them as possessions, a doll without a voice, an object.   His description of women is mainly physical: body parts compared to mountains or fruit, with lots of nudity.   Love is repeatedly described as a violent thing with negative condemnations, and the women in the poems are constantly subject to his scorn, desire, and despair.  There is little intellect in 20 poemas (one will not hear of Orestes from Elektra, for example) however the feelings are so vivid that the reader feels physically there with Neruda as he embarks on his erotic and sensual adventures with beautiful Chilean women.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.







Hell hath no fury...

Yes, we all know that love is grand, and after reading his 20 love poems it is safe to say that Neruda is a lover.  Exhaustively so.  So after over-dosing on the beauty of woman and unbridled passion for the last two weeks I was ticked pink to read The Song of Despair, a poem rich with resentment about the end of a love affair.

The relationship is a classic one that we've seen throughout the ages:  Boy is an island until he meets girl.  Boy and girl engage in a passionate, short-lived affair.  Girl distances herself from boy, the relationship dies.  Boy is super jaded, and defames girl all over Facebook.  This is essentially the plot of the poem, although it is not in chronological order.

There was the black solitude of the islands,

and there, woman of love, your arms took me in. 

In the beginning of their union, the narrator is enamored with the woman, describing her as fruit that nourished him, a miracle, his own flesh, a possession.  He describes his feelings for her with words like hunger, thirst, and the turbulent drunkenness of love, that blazed like a lighthouse. 

Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,

oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.

But, alas, the passionate was short lived, and the narrator implies that the relationship was tempestuous, to say the least.

How terrible and brief my was my desire of you!

How difficult and drunken, how tense and avid.

 Here's where the bad feeling start.  While the narrator is trying to make it work,

I made the wall of shadow draw back,

beyond desire and act, I walked on.

it seems that his sweetheart is just not that into him anymore, which results  in an barrage of insults.  Now his miracle is an open and bitter well, a pit of debris, an empty jar that is shattered by infinite oblivion (burn!).  He is furious at her girdled sorrow, which I decipher as her ability to hide her emotions.

The beginning of the poem is actually well after the break-up time-wise, and the narrator uses delicious comparisons to a shipwreck (debris, deserted etc) as he looks back at the relationship.

You swallowed everything, like distance.

Like the sea, like time.  In you everything sank.

Ouch.  Hell hath no fury like Neruda scorned.