Sastera Amerika Latin

Lying prone, Recabarren half-opened his eyes and saw the slanting rattan ceiling. The thrumming of a guitar reached him from the other room; the invisible instrument was a kind of meager labyrinth infinitely winding and unwinding . . . Little by little he returned to reality, to the daily details which now would never change. He gazed without sorrow at his great useless body, at the poncho of coarse wool wrapped around his legs. Outside, beyond the barred windows, stretched the plain and the afternoon. He had been sleeping, but the sky was still filled with light. Groping about with his left arm, he finally touched a bronze cowbell hanging at the foot of the cot. He banged on it two or three times; from the other side of the door the humble chords continued to reach him. The guitarist was a Negro who had shown up one night to display his pretensions as a singer: he had challenged another stranger to a drawn out contest of singing to guitar accompaniment. Bested, he nevertheless continued to haunt the general store, as if waiting for someone. He passed the hours playing on his guitar, but he no longer ventured to sing. Perhaps his defeat had embittered him. The other customers had grown accustomed to this inoffensive player. Recabarren, the shopowner, would never forget the songs of the guitar contest: the next day, as he adjusted a load of mate upon a mule's back, his right side had suddenly died and he had lost his power of speech. By dint of taking pity on the misfortunes of the heroes of novels we come to take too much pity on our own misfortunes; not so the enduring Recabarren, who accepted his paralysis as he had previously accepted the rude solitude of America. Habituated to living in the present, like the animals, he gazed now at the sky and considered how the crimson circle around the moon presaged rain.

A boy with Indian features (one of his sons, perhaps) half-opened the door. Recabarren asked him with his eyes if there were anyone in the shop. The boy, taciturn, indicated by terse signs that there was no one. (The Negro, of course, did not count.) The prostrate man was left alone. One hand played briefly with the cowbell, as if he were wielding some power.

Beneath the final sun of the day, the plain seemed almost abstract, as if seen in a dream. A point shimmered on the horizon, and then grew until it became a horseman, who came, or seemed to come, toward the building. Recabarren saw the wide-brimmed hat, the long dark poncho, the dappled horse, but not the man's face; at length the rider tightened the reins and cut down the gallop, approaching at a trot. Some two hundred yards away, he turned sharply. Recabarren could no longer see him, but he heard him speak, dismount, tie the horse to the paling, and enter the shop with a firm step.

Without raising his eyes from his instrument, where he seemed to be searching for something, the Negro said gently:

"I was sure, senor, that I could count on you."

The other man replied with a harsh voice:

"And I on you, colored man. I made you wait a pack of days, but here I am."

There was a silence. At length the Negro responded:

"I'm getting used to waiting. I've waited seven years."

Without haste the other explained:

"I went longer than seven years without seeing my children. I saw them that day, but I didn't want to seem like a man always fighting."

"I realize that. I understand what you say," said the Negro. "I trust you left them in good health."

The stranger, who had taken a seat at the bar, laughed a deep laugh. He asked for a rum. He drank with relish, but did not drain it down.

"I gave them some good advice," he declared. "That's never amiss, and it doesn't cost anything. I told them, among other things, that one man should not shed another man's blood."

A slow chord preceded the Negro's reply:

"You did well. That way they won't be like us."

"At least they won't be like me," said the stranger. And then he added, as if he were ruminating aloud: "Destiny has made me kill, and now, once more, it has put a knife in my hand."

The Negro, as if he had not heard, observed:

"Autumn is making the days grow shorter."

"The light that's left is enough for me," replied the stranger, getting to his feet.

He stood in front of the Negro and said, with weariness:

"Leave off the guitar. Today there's another kind of counterpoint waiting for you."

The two men walked toward the door. As he went out, the Negro murmured:

"Perhaps this time it will go as hard on me as the first time."

The other answered seriously:

"It didn't go hard on you the first time. What happened was that you were anxious for the second try."

They moved away from the houses for a good bit, walking together. One point on the plain was as good as another, and the moon was shining. Suddenly they looked at each other, halted, and the stranger began taking off his spurs; They already had their ponchos wound around their forearms when the Negro said:

"I want to ask you a favor before we tangle. I want you to put all your guts into this meeting, just as you did seven years ago, when you killed my brother."

Perhaps for the first time in the dialogue, Martin Fierro heard the sound of hate. He felt his blood like a goad. They clashed, and the sharp-edged steel marked the Negro's face.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says it, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is as untranslatable From his cot, Recabarren saw the end. A charge, and the Negro fell back; he lost his footing, feinted toward the other's face, and reached out in a great stab, which penetrated the stranger's chest. Then there was another stab, which the shopowner did not clearly see, and Fierro did not get up. Immobile, the Negro seemed to watch over his enemy's laboring death agony. He wiped his bloodstained knife on the turf and walked back toward the knot of houses slowly, without looking back. His righteous task accomplished, he was nobody. More accurately, he became the stranger: he had no further mission on earth, but he had killed a man.

MARIA DEL CARMEN PAIVA -
-----------------
Before the Final Splendour

Love flashes in this dusk of shadows,
covering itself beneath the veil of your eyes
like a butterfly at the point of dying.
A lightning flash appears
in the horizon of memory.
You return and you leave,
and I am here
in this space
solitary and alone
like a guardian angel
of what was.

MARIA DEL CARMEN PAIVA
--------------
SADNESS

It is sufficient.
ItOs already fainted --
that accidental word
that usually sketches itself out in farewells,
and that you bring since who knows when;
or perhaps
it came close
one day
and started the bad habit of nurturing it.

Time wears out things,
and although you keep on under those separate stars
and the sun, with its overflowing wings of sulphur,
you keep on living in spite of all this
and what has already happened.
You deserve the name that life gives you
with its unforeseen and unknown impulse.

DIRMA PARDO CARUGATI
---------------
At Seven in the Evening


"Little green leaf, little green leaf, if you don't have a set you lose."

(Popular Paraguayan round)

It is seven o'clock. The girl doesn't need a watch to know it. The bells of the nearby church are already ringing for mass, and since it is summer, the sun takes its time in setting, creating fragments of stunning clarity.

Alejandra, just bathed and perfumed, like every afternoon, is seated in her large chair in the garden in the front yard. Her starched dress rustles lightly when she smooths her skirt. Her hair is arranged in double braids held back by two bands of silk which rub against her cheeks.

It's seven o'clock. She knows it because the hot wind carries the voices from the round in the plaza. "I've lost a little girl, cataplin, cataplin, cataplero..."

Suddenly, everything vibrates because the sharp, cutting chirp of the cicada has begun from a neighboring tree. Quickly, it there is no delay, they will hear the whistle of the suburban arriving at the central station.

Dionisio greets her and begins to water the garden. Following the directions of his employer, he has waited until sunset to water the plants. The first hit of water rings over the leaves and immediately the smell of wet dirt rises up.

Cleo flees from the intrusive sprinkler that soaks the jasmine bush and takes refuge on the chair next to Alejandra. With a light mewing sound it rubs its soft fur against the legs of its owner. Only a movement from her is sufficient to make the cat leap with its delicate agility to coil up in her lap.

The girl embraces her little pampered cat; she caresses its back with its stiff fur and later her fingers curl in the warm fur of its throat where a grateful purring is boiling.

The gardener is whistling, as is his custom. Dionisio speaks very little, but he's a great whistler. His ability in "executing" comes forth in the flourishes with which he embellishes his interpretations, and in the form that keeps the beat and changes of tone, as if an entire symphony were issuing forth from his lips. He knows quite a few polkas, gallops and marches, cheerful and vibrant, but also sometimes, like today he also whistles sad melodies.

It is seven o'clock in the evening. Alejandra knows that Se-orita Perla will come by soon, coming back from her position in the post office. She has organized a little set of greetings and she has to have an idea of when sheOs coming so she can take advantage of this perfect opportunity.

Yes. Perla is approaching the house. She can already hear the little heels of her light footwear, clattering down the bare stretches of the sidewalk.

"Good-bye, Alejandra! Little green leaf!" she says in greeting to her friend, rustling a branch of an orange tree on the side of the street.

"Little green leaf!" responds the girl, showing she can snatch up the closest plant.

Perla stammers for an instant. She's about the say that that's an alcalipha leaf and it's red, not green. But, something very tender urges her to stop and shout with false cheer.

"It's a tie!"

Triumphant, the blind girl smiles.

MARIA EUGENIA GARAY
---------------
Personal Choice

That's why I decided
to walk at your side.
One day, perhaps a month
or maybe a certain indeterminate
number of years.
I have no valid excuses
for your confusion.
I don't wear myself out
and neither do I have any desire
to return again to begin again.
Romantic relations
always have
a chain reaction
that sooner or later
leads to funeral rites.

For the pleasure of seeing ourselves
we can burn
firewood in winter.

To feel alive
we can walk
to the edge of the afternoon
patiently enduring
the torrid summer.


Sometimes, without intending to,
we meet ourselves again --
We spoil our hurry
and seat ourselves, elbow to elbow,
to drink coffee

while the commitments
fall like leaves
or like blue flowers,
there outside in the patio.

We have to learn
if we go on walking
to accept absences
like something necessary.

To stay or to leave
without any shock:
the gates are there
without keys or padlocks.

To discover the silences
to have one's own space.

And to look for each other later
with surprise in our hands
urgency in our blood:
without asking questions
without giving an accounting
without new projects and announcements
of long tediums.


It was a personal choice,
and that's how I decided
to walk
at your side.

MAYBELL LEBRON
---------------
WITHOUT EVER HAVING SEEN EACH OTHER

Without ever having seen each other we recognized each other;
and our fingerprints made a pair,
and our blood forged children,
we wept together through our sadnesses,
and together we knew about fresh suns,
and today, seated face to face,
we look at each other,
without knowing what to say.

MAYBELL LEBRON
-----------------
MEMORIES

When you no longer have
my head on your chest
I don't want you to think of me
with tears or frowns.
Leave behind the cold tombstone
lying in the ground,
and go back to the house
to go on living.

The rub of the sugar cane
in its smooth purring
will revive in your ear
with my tremulous accent
the possibility of being together
(lost in time)
there where life
converses with the dead.

Although you won't see me
perhaps you'll be able to do it.

NEIDA DE MENDONCA
---------------
The Explanation

No, sir. You're wrong. It's not my fault. Who could possibly think of punishing a person because he defended his mother? Who? Tell me -- who? Do you know what it's like to battle from morning to night to get something to eat for your nine children? Do you know how much we have left or how much we need out of three karaku that we boil with a handful of porotos? Sure, you're a man and you look a lot like the fathers of my eight brothers and sisters, "Yes, I've seen you, but I don't remember..." That's why you don't understand me.

Where's my dad? I don't know. I never heard a single word mentioned about him. More than one time I thought I was like Jesus Christ and my mother's another Virgin Mary. On top of that, you're about to crucify me without a reason why, just like the first time it was done. Now I'm asking you, Who will protect my mother and my brothers and sisters while you've got me stuck here?

Some are lucky, like Benita, the godmother of Pastor. She and her five kids lived worse than us, all shriveled up with hunger and privation until Louis, the live-in boyfriend who never contributed a single thing to the pot, was killed. They stabbed him one night over some sort of woman question. He barely lived an hour because they cut his gut, said the doctor at the hospital. Poor Benita was desperate, and she didn't know what to do with his dead body -- she didn't have even one peso for a coffin. But then, there was a miracle. The medical students offered to buy the body to cut it open and study his death. That's they way they learn to heal. Lord, look at the way luck works! With the money they paid her, the widow put up a candy stand near the school. Now Benita's kids are fat and they've even started learning how to read. The little business is going full sail ahead. She calls the little stand, "Lucho" because Lucho's what she called Luis when he was alive. Lord, you see, some fathers are good for something after they're dead, like Luis.

But, ... my mother? How on earth was she getting along, with so much childrearing to do, alone? When I'm there, I try to come up with a few little things in the market, and I search through the spoiled goods, that with the occasional idiot and washing clothes gives us a way to make it by. We're pretty bad off, but we manage to eat. What do you think happened to us when Tomasita, my sister, got hit with a bad case of diarrhea? Dona Bienvenida, the witch doctor / midwife, rubbed the base of his spine, prayed over him, put a bandage of carpincho-grease on his belly, all for nothing. Mother was crying, and we all were crying because Tomasita -- the littlest one -- would die, said Auntie Bien. Do you know what I did, out of pure desperation? I took off running through the neighborhood until I got up the ravine; I turned, slowly, through the streets that bordered the Cathedral, and right there appeared a white Mercedes, parked. I didn't even have time to think. I grabbed the mirrors and a blink of the eye and I sold them. The person who has to get money is the man, and if I'm the only man in the family, then what other choice do I have? I hope you forgive me... Try me. Then, after you have the results, pardon me. Let's get all the fathers together and I'll bet that not even one of them will come out well. Don't count Inocencia (may he rest in peace). He was worse than an animal! Those kinds bring shame on us. And what shame!

Being poor isn't too serious if someone gives you a hand -- some bread, a shirt, or, in this case, a little rearview mirror for looking out for some Volvo or something. And, if you've got the feet for it, you can even sell oranges on the streetcorners where they have stoplights. That's how I managed to see a porno movie and, upon leaving the theater, smoke a cigarette. Depending on the type of cigarette you smoke, things happen. If it's a Benson, a young blonde will come up to you, with green eyes bigger than mint candies, and she'll stretch out her lovely colored lips to blow out the flame from your match. Then she'll come up even closer and her heat will burn your entire body. On the other hand, if you smoke a Marlboro you can cover the whole world on a wild horse galloping against the wind. Try one, and it will start to rain big-titted girls. If you prefer nudes, watch videos in the Korean bars. You like porn? You'll go crazy with the crazy bitches and you'll learn a lot about filthy whores.

The truth is, it would be a lot easier to live if there weren't any diseases. That's especially true for mothers. My mom didn't know what to do when we started to get sick. Desperation takes over and even I get it, but like I was telling you, true hell came in the form of that guy, and my mom was stuck with another *****, this one worse than the others. Inocencio was the worst of all the guys I had ever met. He was a true devil. Curupi, the jungle monster, and Luison, the werewolf, were nothing compared to Inocencia! To make things worse, he was a good-for-nothing and bossy. I know that all bossy *****s are lazy good-for-nothings, that's why people try to run them off. With that guy in the house, no one could relax even for one minute; he was always lounging about, barking orders: "Where's my mate, goddammit! I want some meat stew -- lots of meat and no bone! I'm missing a white shirt!"

Mama was going along with his ridiculous demands more and more. The stuff I got off the street and in the market weren't enough. Wait... wait a minute, sir, and I'll tell you what the jerk did to us each night after he finished getting all dolled up. He dug through all our furniture in our only little bedroom to haul off every last little dime and dollar that only San Cayetano knows who we scrounged up. He was stealing from us!!! Why? So he could go out on the prowl, and later leave behind children for the girls he met. Children thrown off to the side, just like us. I swear it's the truth, sir!

Tell me, sir. Do you do it, too? Do you go out and have kids, then disappear? The truth is that even that wouldn't be so terrible any more. What's serious is when he beats up our mom. It's bad. You try to disappear like smoke so as not to hear or to see. You put anything you can over yourself while you hear smacks and blows. The dog comes in and I clench together my trembling knees and I cover my head with the first thing I can lay my hands on because it's filled with noise. My mother screams and screams and I start thinking of the pig my neighbors killed for the festival of San Blas. Then I scrub down my entire body, piece by piece, trying to clean myself of the blows and the pain. Sometimes I feel wet, and I don't know if it's from tears or from sweat. And that's the way it is, night after night, and every night. And the ***** falls asleep like nothing happened, like he's the only man in the house, like anything is cool. That was the way it went until one day I said to myself, "This is the last time this happens."

Tell me, Commissar, do you beat your wife? I'd like to know if you're capable of blaming your son because he stands up for his mother. I've been here seven days and I don't know why. There's no way I could explain it any more clearly. I couldn't go on hiding like a cowardly piece of shit, dying of shame, without moving a single finger to help her.

It's true. That morning I waited for Inocencio, and I was hiding behind the door. Yes, sir, I hit him again and again and again, with the full force of my rage. I had to gut him like an animal!! Yes, sir. It's true. I'm eleven years old and my name is Manuel. Just Manuel.

LOURDES ESPINOLA
--------------
LIFE IS A transitory evil

Today all my demons came to visit,
disorganized but firm....
fatal in the appointment:
my youth, my yesterday and my tomorrow.
Today I'm afraid of the telephone
and the doorbell,
I don't want find myself in my lonely house
face-to-face
with my shadow.

LOURDES ESPINOLA
--------------
LIFE IS A transitory evil

Today all my demons came to visit,
disorganized but firm....
fatal in the appointment:
my youth, my yesterday and my tomorrow.
Today I'm afraid of the telephone
and the doorbell,
I don't want find myself in my lonely house
face-to-face
with my shadow.

MARGARITA PRIETO YEGROS
--------------
Separation of Books


"The Mayor traveled to the capital to visit his family," with a cynical smile, the attractive secretary of the border city's municipality informed those who asked about her boss or wished an appointment.

The red Blazer, driven at full speed by the young politician, who was accompanied by his chauffeur and a bodyguard, threaded its way down the main avenue of the capital and, after entering a residential neighborhood, it parked in front of an attractive home.

The man rang the doorbell nervously and when his wife opened the door, he asked, "Did you have them change the lock?"

"Yes," she said, looking at him without blinking.

He returned her gaze alternatingly while he said, "I'm here to get all my things."

"Then, come in," she said, letting him by.

The man walked slowly through the luxurious living room-dining room and stopped in front of the library.

In one row of books was written: Susana. In the other: Guillermo.

"I see you've already separated your books from mine."

"That's the way it is. I wanted to save time because you're always in a hurry with all your political activities," she said as she squatted down on the rug.

"Well, once again, you're wrong. I'm not in any hurry; the results of the elections are already in and I won it fair and square."

Later he observed his wife, more beautiful than ever in her sporty outfit, calmly seated, and he asked himself how he could separate from her.

An angora cat entered swishing and waving its tail as he approached his mistress, purring. Susana petted its belly and lifted into her arms.

Guillermo observed the library awhile longer, then suddenly exclaimed, "What are you doing with my books mixed in with yours?"

"Which ones?" she asked, without moving and without stopping petting the cat.

"The Shoes of the Fisherman," he responded.

"You gave it to me during our honeymoon in Rome; don't you remember that we read it together and after getting so excited about Cirilo Lakota, we decided to attend the papal meeting so we'd meet the first Polish pope?"

"Nonsense! Idiocies of a fool in love!"

"It's too late to be sorry. Everything was really beautiful while it lasted."

"You always feel too much, but think too little, just like all women."

Susana let the cat go, and he departed as swishingly as it came in.

"Ah! You're going to keep this book by Willa Cather, too?"

"You gave it to me on our first anniversary."

"Obviously I gave in to you too much."

"Maybe, but later you got rude, even violent."

"I did what I had to do to counteract your spoiled little girl whims."

"How could I make love to a man who everyone thinks is the father of his secretary's child, and who has a bed everywhere?"

Guillermo kicked the bookshelf and shouted:

"You're going to also keep A Leaf in the Storm?"

"Just a minute! You know good and well that I bought that book in the fair in the plaza, after I sold my first painting."

With a sharp gesture, he threw the rest of the books over the rug.

Susana sighed loudly.

Guillermos walked up to the windowsill and, his backed turned to her, he stayed a long while in silence. Suddenly, turned toward his wife, he said in a barely audible voice: "I didn't come to look for my things, but for you and the kids. Let's start over again." She straightened stiffly and responded:

"That's no longer possible. Everything ended when you let your ambition for power dominate you and you turned into a stranger to us."

"Then you consider me a stranger?"

"Yes. A total stranger. The children practically don't know who you are."

He fidgeted with his hands and there was another long silence. Then, he put the key over the piano and said, "When I come to visit you I'll ring the bell like any other stranger."

The way he slammed the door when he left made the glass rattle in the windows.

A very quick and discreet locksmith accompanied by the Mayor's bodyguard disarmed at midnight the lock that Susana had changed. The job finished, both men climbed up the stairs.

The following day, Susana, checked into a hospital due to a brutal blow, heard on the television the judge's decision in the border city.

"The honorable Mayor Guillermo Mujica was awarded custody of his minor children for having encountered his wife, in their very marriage bed, in the arms of a locksmith, according to a reliable source."

MARGARITA PRIETO YEGROS
--------------
Rice Harvest


Did you plant
gold but your harvest yielded nothing?
Plant lilies for me,
for tomorrow.

(M. Ortiz Guerrero)

To Don Alci, my rice farmer friend

On that 7th of March of 1947, the dawn was strangely silent. It was too silent. In there air was the calm similar to that which precedes a storm.

Without pausing in the gray silence, Juan Bogado said goodbye to the accountant in the storage company for national products and went out into the street.

He had travelled from Villarrica to Asuncion to deliver two truckloads of rice, the result of his harvest.

He paid the drivers and the workers, and later, whistling a polka tune, he place his money in a bag made of rag paper.

Although it was still quite early, he bounded up the steps of the shopping area. In the first men's clothing store he found open he bought a pair of shirts and pants, plus shiny shoes.

Walking along Benjamin Constant street, he came across the Post Office. There he stood for a moment to look at the bay and it was then that the full force of his good fortune sunk in. It had been awhile since he had had this much money on him. What could he do? Where would he go?

A rooster crowed from the Chararita river while the murmur of the river mixed with the scent of the water lilies, loaded with flowers and snakes.

Juan Bogado turned to the left and walked toward the Chief of Police. He was going to share his new-found prosperity with Severiano Gonzalez, a compatriot of Villarica who occupied the position of Chief of Personnel.

The clock on the nearby Cathedral sounded, indicating it was seven o'clock. Juan Bogado climbed the wide staircase to the entrance, and at that moment, a voice shouted, "Guard!"

From some site, he felt someone running and a dark young man, beautifully uniformed, appeared.

After responding to the normal questions, Juan Bogado crossed the hallway and, guided by another olive green, arrived at his friend's office.

They greeted each other with exclamations and effusive embraces. "What brings you here, my friend?" asked Severiano Gonzalez.

"I came here to deliver my rice harvest. Since I've got some money on me, I thought I'd invite you to have a beer in the Bar Germania."

"It's still very early for that. Why not take advantage of the fact you're here and say hello to the Chief of Police who appreciates us, since the time he was our Government Delegate?"

"If that's possible, I'm going to put on my new clothes. Where can I get changed?"

"Here in the bathroom," said Severiano Gonzalez.

Juan Bogado placed his bag of money over a chair in the office and entered the bathroom with his packet of clothes.

He had just taken off his old pants when he heard a gunshot, later another and another and another ... and then gunshots from a machine gun.

With trembling hands, he managed to dress himself again, and with extreme caution he opened the door.

He couldn't believe what he saw. Between fallen-down chairs, lay Severiano Gonzalez, and next two him, were lying two wounded soldiers, groaning in pain.

Outside the room, through the corridors and patio, the uproar was enormous. Soldiers were running, sergeants giving orders. Suddenly one of them gave him a gun, signaling him to follow.

Juan Bogado took the gun but he did not leave the room. Placing the gun over the desk, he sank to his knees next to his friend.

Severiano G., unaware of his presence, gave absolutely no sign of recognition, even though his eyes were half-open. Juan Bogado sensed that something permanent had happened and, approaching him even further, he confirmed that his friend was indeed dead. With all the gentleness his rough hands would permit, he closed his eyes, covering them with the two silver coins that he fortunately had come across in the pocket of his wornout shirt. He stayed there for quite a long while, on his knees, trying to recite a prayer.

Later, he arose and headed toward the hallway. A stain of blood slid from the Police Chief's office toward the street.

Isolated gunshots could be heard still outside the building.

A soldier who entered to look for missiles or projectiles asked him, "What happened?"

"Some unknown people attacked the office of the Chief."

Juan Bogado didn't want to know anything more. With his eyes filled with tears, could do nothing else but look at his dead friend. He didn't want to believe this had happened and he tried to imagine that it had been a terrible nightmare.

Very slowly he arose and, staggering, he left the room with empty hands, without his rag-paper bag, without his packet of new clothes, almost without breath.

Slowly measuring his steps, he walked toward the exit, then down the bloody hallway which looked like a slaughterhouse floor.

The afternoon was coming to an end and the sun was already setting when Juan Bogado arrived at his rancho, "Culata Yobai." Upon seeing him, his children ran up to greet him; also the family dog ran up behind them, wagging his tail.

The children, between laughter and exclamations, asked him: "Papa! Did you get me the ball? And my tricycle? And the doll?"

Reeling, he walked toward them, and upon seeing himself reflected in the eyes of his children, he realized that he resembled an "animal in pain" and that his rice harvest and all the profits and dreams had disappeared with his friend, Severiano, burned by the fratricidal fire.

Wiped out by his lack of breath and feeling his strength fade away, he barely managed to fall into the hammock which was hanging between the orange trees on the patio. There he wept until he fell asleep.

What finally awoke him were the cries of the teruteros and the song of the calandrias which always announced the dawn.

Juan Bogado, accustomed to arising at dawn, washed his face, and, before sitting down for mate, he went to the place where his rice field had been.

"Everything gone to waste, and no reason at all!" he thought, pausing at the edge of an irrigation ditch. He remained quiet and overwhelmed until, bit by bit, his spirit started coming back to life with the light that advanced from the horizon, illuminating the sunflower color of the "ynambu seboi" lilies which flowered by the thousand in the pasture. The sun rose, converted into a screen of gold and the nearby mountain offered its freshness cheered up by the parrots and cotorras, when Juan Bogado, raising his head, said in a loud voice: "Tomorrow! Tomorrow I'll plant the same thing all over again!"

MILIA GAYOSO
--------------
IN PIECES


Herminia waited her turn. There were three women ahead of her, three women in an identical situation, here to do the same thing. Two were talking to each other, and one said to the other that it was almost three months and that she was afraid of dying. The third was quiet, crestfallen, lost in herself. It was three in the afternoon and she had been there since one. She hadn't wanted to arrive before because she didn't want to have to wait so long and suffer while she waited her turn.

She didn't want to touch her belly, and she didn't want to think that there within something minuscule was beating that formed a part of herself -- something tiny that, given time, could get to be a small person with an outgoing expression and a contagious smile. The two women were talking animatedly, "it's the fourth time I've done it," said one and the other answered that it was her second time, but that this time too much time had passed because she couldn't come up with the money. "Hepy eterei coanga," she said in Guarani. "It's pretty expensive now," she said, and turned back to counting the money she had within her purse.

"How will they kill it?" thought Herminia. She had very little knowledge about these things. She had heard her friends talking about this many times but no one had ever gone into details. They just said it was "over" and that was it.

The third woman had a sad expression, was young - around 20 years old -- and was well-dressed. "She could work in an office," she thought. She compared her cheap skirt with that of the girl, compared her worn-out red sandals with the other's white pumps. The other women were simply dressed and they didn't appear to be street women, but ordinary and normal like her.

The door opened. The woman who had entered earlier exited. She was pale, emaciated, with sunken, half-shut eyes. The doctor smiled at the four and invited one of them to come back. She touched the sad girl. The girl looked at the others and entered with the expression of an animal entering a slaughterhouse. The other two kept talking and they commented that the poor woman was terrified. It's probably the first time, or perhaps she didn't really want to kill the baby, they said.

Herminia looked at them. It was hard for her to believe that both of them had already done this many times and that they were calm. They weren't thinking at all of the little thing they were going to eliminate. One of them said she was afraid of dying, but she didn't mention that she didn't want to kill it. Herminia didn't want to kill the baby and had spent many nights thinking over the situation -- in the possibility of having it, of facing up to everyone so it would live. But, in the end, she couldn't deal with the insecurity about being alone, being afraid she would lose her job, not having any way to support it, not knowing what to say to her family -- everything.

She only talked about her problem with two friends, and both had the same thing to say -- the solution was that one, and there was no other way.

Suddenly she felt a bit more energetic. "How does the doctor kill it and take it out of there?" she asked the two women. "Simple," said one. "They take it out in pieces after killing it with the injection." She froze. "In pieces," she thought. She could barely picture a little bundle, but wounded and defenseless, without any possibility of having its heart beat when the needle punctures its vein. She imagined it as a little boy with a great deal of mischief in its small little self -- mischief that would transform as time passed.

"In pieces," thought Herminia, and a fat tear slid slowly down the space between her nose and cheek. She looked at the other two women who observed her silently. "Don't you want to do it?" asked the fat one, who had already done it several times. "You're not going to feel anything because they give you anaesthesia," she said. But Herminia no longer heard anything because she got up and left, leaving her turn open for the next one.

Octavio Paz

Hispanic eccentricity is reproduced and multiplied in America, especially in those countries such as Mexico and Peru, where ancient and splendid civilizations had existed. In Mexico, the Spaniards encountered history as well as geography. That history is still alive: it is a present rather than a past. The temples and gods of pre-Columbian Mexico are a pile of ruins, but the spirit that breathed life into that world has not disappeared; it speaks to us in the hermetic language of myth, legend, forms of social coexistence, popular art, customs. Being a Mexican writer means listening to the voice of that present, that presence. Listening to it, speaking with it, deciphering it: expressing it ... After this brief digression we may be able to perceive the peculiar relation that simultaneously binds us to and separates us from the European tradition.

This consciousness of being separate is a constant feature of our spiritual history. Separation is sometimes experienced as a wound that marks an internal division, an anguished awareness that invites self-examination; at other times it appears as a challenge, a spur that incites us to action, to go forth and encounter others and the outside world. It is true that the feeling of separation is universal and not peculiar to Spanish Americans. It is born at the very moment of our birth: as we are wrenched from the Whole we fall into an alien land. This experience becomes a wound that never heals. It is the unfathomable depth of every man; all our ventures and exploits, all our acts and dreams, are bridges designed to overcome the separation and reunite us with the world and our fellow-beings. Each man's life and the collective history of mankind can thus be seen as attempts to reconstruct the original situation. An unfinished and endless cure for our divided condition. But it is not my intention to provide yet another description of this feeling. I am simply stressing the fact that for us this existential condition expresses itself in historical terms. It thus becomes an awareness of our history. How and when does this feeling appear and how is it transformed into consciousness? The reply to this double-edged question can be given in the form of a theory or a personal testimony. I prefer the latter: there are many theories and none is entirely convincing.

The feeling of separation is bound up with the oldest and vaguest of my memories: the first cry, the first scare. Like every child I built emotional bridges in the imagination to link me to the world and to other people. I lived in a town on the outskirts of Mexico City, in an old dilapidated house that had a jungle-like garden and a great room full of books. First games and first lessons. The garden soon became the centre of my world; the library, an enchanted cave. I used to read and play with my cousins and schoolmates. There was a fig tree, temple of vegetation, four pine trees, three ash trees, a nightshade, a pomegranate tree, wild grass and prickly plants that produced purple grazes. Adobe walls. Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through, supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sindbad and with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present.

When was the spell broken? Gradually rather than suddenly. It is hard to accept being betrayed by a friend, deceived by the woman we love, or that the idea of freedom is the mask of a tyrant. What we call "finding out" is a slow and tricky process because we ourselves are the accomplices of our errors and deceptions. Nevertheless, I can remember fairly clearly an incident that was the first sign, although it was quickly forgotten. I must have been about six when one of my cousins who was a little older showed me a North American magazine with a photograph of soldiers marching along a huge avenue, probably in New York. "They've returned from the war" she said. This handful of words disturbed me, as if they foreshadowed the end of the world or the Second Coming of Christ. I vaguely knew that somewhere far away a war had ended a few years earlier and that the soldiers were marching to celebrate their victory. For me, that war had taken place in another time, not here and now. The photo refuted me. I felt literally dislodged from the present.

From that moment time began to fracture more and more. And there was a plurality of spaces. The experience repeated itself more and more frequently. Any piece of news, a harmless phrase, the headline in a newspaper: everything proved the outside world's existence and my own unreality. I felt that the world was splitting and that I did not inhabit the present. My present was disintegrating: real time was somewhere else. My time, the time of the garden, the fig tree, the games with friends, the drowsiness among the plants at three in the afternoon under the sun, a fig torn open (black and red like a live coal but one that is sweet and fresh): this was a fictitious time. In spite of what my senses told me, the time from over there, belonging to the others, was the real one, the time of the real present. I accepted the inevitable: I became an adult. That was how my expulsion from the present began.

It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality. For us, as Spanish Americans, the real present was not in our own countries: it was the time lived by others, by the English, the French and the Germans. It was the time of New York, Paris, London. We had to go and look for it and bring it back home. These years were also the years of my discovery of literature. I began writing poems. I did not know what made me write them: I was moved by an inner need that is difficult to define. Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.

What is modernity? First of all it is an ambiguous term: there are as many types of modernity as there are societies. Each has its own. The word's meaning is uncertain and arbitrary, like the name of the period that precedes it, the Middle Ages. If we are modern when compared to medieval times, are we perhaps the Middle Ages of a future modernity? Is a name that changes with time a real name? Modernity is a word in search of its meaning. Is it an idea, a mirage or a moment of history? Are we the children of modernity or its creators? Nobody knows for sure. It doesn't matter much: we follow it, we pursue it. For me at that time modernity was fused with the present or rather produced it: the present was its last supreme flower. My case is neither unique nor exceptional: from the Symbolist period, all modern poets have chased after that magnetic and elusive figure that fascinates them. Baudelaire was the first. He was also the first to touch her and discover that she is nothing but time that crumbles in one's hands. I am not going to relate my adventures in pursuit of modernity: they are not very different from those of other 20th-Century poets. Modernity has been a universal passion. Since 1850 she has been our goddess and our demoness. In recent years, there has been an attempt to exorcise her and there has been much talk of "postmodernism". But what is postmodernism if not an even more modern modernity

For us, as Latin Americans, the search for poetic modernity runs historically parallel to the repeated attempts to modernize our countries. This tendency begins at the end of the 18th Century and includes Spain herself. The United States was born into modernity and by 1830 was already, as de Tocqueville observed, the womb of the future; we were born at a moment when Spain and Portugal were moving away from modernity. This is why there was frequent talk of "Europeanizing" our countries: the modern was outside and had to be imported. In Mexican history this process begins just before the War of Independence. Later it became a great ideological and political debate that passionately divided Mexican society during the 19th Century. One event was to call into question not the legitimacy of the reform movement but the way in which it had been implemented: the Mexican Revolution. Unlike its 20th-Century counterparts, the Mexican Revolution was not really the expression of a vaguely utopian ideology but rather the explosion of a reality that had been historically and psychologically repressed. It was not the work of a group of ideologists intent on introducing principles derived from a political theory; it was a popular uprising that unmasked what was hidden. For this very reason it was more of a revelation than a revolution. Mexico was searching for the present outside only to find it within, buried but alive. The search for modernity led us to discover our antiquity, the hidden face of the nation. I am not sure whether this unexpected historical lesson has been learnt by all: between tradition and modernity there is a bridge. When they are mutually isolated, tradition stagnates and modernity vaporizes; when in conjunction, modernity breathes life into tradition, while the latter replies with depth and gravity.

The search for poetic modernity was a Quest, in the allegorical and chivalric sense this word had in the 12th Century. I did not find any Grail although I did cross several waste lands visiting castles of mirrors and camping among ghostly tribes. But I did discover the modern tradition. For modernity is not a poetic school but a lineage, a family dispersed over several continents and which for two centuries has survived many sudden changes and misfortunes: public indifference, isolation, and tribunals in the name of religious, political, academic and sexual orthodoxy. Because it is a tradition and not a doctrine, it has been able to persist and to change at the same time. This is also why it is so diverse: each poetic adventure is distinct and each poet has sown a different plant in the miraculous forest of speaking trees. Yet if the works are diverse and each route is distinct, what is it that unites all these poets? Not an aesthetic but a search. My search was not fanciful, even though the idea of modernity is a mirage, a bundle of reflections. One day I discovered I was going back to the starting point instead of advancing: the search for modernity was a descent to the origins. Modernity led me to the source of my beginning, to my antiquity. Separation had now become reconciliation. I thus found out that the poet is a pulse in the rhythmic flow of generations.


*

The idea of modernity is a by-product of our conception of history as a unique and linear process of succession. Although its origins are in Judaeo-Christianity, it breaks with Christian doctrine. In Christianity, the cyclical time of pagan cultures is supplanted by unrepeatable history, something that has a beginning and will have an end. Sequential time was the profane time of history, an arena for the actions of fallen men, yet still governed by a sacred time which had neither beginning nor end. After Judgement Day there will be no future either in heaven or in hell. In the realm of eternity there is no succession because everything is. Being triumphs over becoming. The now time, our concept of time, is linear like that of Christianity but open to infinity with no reference to Eternity. Ours is the time of profane history, an irreversible and perpetually unfinished time that marches towards the future and not towards its end. History's sun is the future and Progress is the name of this movement towards the future.

Christians see the world, or what used to be called the si鑓le or worldly life, as a place of trial: souls can be either lost or saved in this world. In the new conception the historical subject is not the individual soul but the human race, sometimes viewed as a whole and sometimes through a chosen group that represents it: the developed nations of the West, the proletariat, the white race, or some other entity. The pagan and Christian philosophical tradition had exalted Being as changeless perfection overflowing with plenitude; we adore Change, the motor of progress and the model for our societies. Change articulates itself in two privileged ways: as evolution and as revolution. The trot and the leap. Modernity is the spearhead of historical movement, the incarnation of evolution or revolution, the two faces of progress. Finally, progress takes place thanks to the dual action of science and technology, applied to the realm of nature and to the use of her immense resources.

Modern man has defined himself as a historical being. Other societies chose to define themselves in terms of values and ideas different from change: the Greeks venerated the polis and the circle yet were unaware of progress; like all the Stoics, Seneca was much concerned about the eternal return; Saint Augustine believed that the end of the world was imminent; Saint Thomas constructed a scale of the degrees of being, linking the smallest creature to the Creator, and so on. One after the other these ideas and beliefs were abandoned. It seems to me that the same decline is beginning to affect our idea of Progress and, as a result, our vision of time, of history and of ourselves. We are witnessing the twilight of the future. The decline of the idea of modernity and the popularity of a notion as dubious as that of "postmodernism" are phenomena that affect not only literature and the arts: we are experiencing the crisis of the essential ideas and beliefs that have guided mankind for over two centuries. I have dealt with this matter at length elsewhere. Here I can only offer a brief summary.

In the first place, the concept of a process open to infinity and synonymous with endless progress has been called into question. I need hardly mention what everybody knows: natural resources are finite and will run out one day. In addition, we have inflicted what may be irreparable damage on the natural environment and our own species is endangered. Finally, science and technology, the instruments of progress, have shown with alarming clarity that they can easily become destructive forces. The existence of nuclear weapons is a refutation of the idea that progress is inherent in history. This refutation, I add, can only be called devastating.

In the second place, we have the fate of the historical subject, mankind, in the 20th Century. Seldom have nations or individuals suffered so much: two world wars, tyrannies spread over five continents, the atomic bomb and the proliferation of one of the cruellest and most lethal institutions known by man: the concentration camp. Modern technology has provided countless benefits, but it is impossible to close our eyes when confronted by slaughter, torture, humiliation, degradation, and other wrongs inflicted on millions of innocent people in our century.

In the third place, the belief in the necessity of progress has been shaken. For our grandparents and our parents, the ruins of history (corpses, desolate battlefields, devastated cities) did not invalidate the underlying goodness of the historical process. The scaffolds and tyrannies, the conflicts and savage civil wars were the price to be paid for progress, the blood money to be offered to the god of history. A god? Yes, reason itself deified and prodigal in cruel acts of cunning, according to Hegel. The alleged rationality of history has vanished. In the very domain of order, regularity and coherence (in pure sciences like physics) the old notions of accident and catastrophe have reappeared. This disturbing resurrection reminds me of the terrors that marked the advent of the millennium, and the anguish of the Aztecs at the end of each cosmic cycle.

The last element in this hasty enumeration is the collapse of all the philosophical and historical hypotheses that claimed to reveal the laws governing the course of history. The believers, confident that they held the keys to history, erected powerful states over pyramids of corpses. These arrogant constructions, destined in theory to liberate men, were very quickly transformed into gigantic prisons. Today we have seen them fall, overthrown not by their ideological enemies but by the impatience and the desire for freedom of the new generations. Is this the end of all Utopias? It is rather the end of the idea of history as a phenomenon, the outcome of which can be known in advance. Historical determinism has been a costly and bloodstained fantasy. History is unpredictable because its agent, mankind, is the personification of indeterminism.

This short review shows that we are very probably at the end of a historical period and at the beginning of another. The end of the Modern Age or just a mutation? It is diffficult to tell. In any case, the collapse of Utopian schemes has left a great void, not in the countries where this ideology has proved to have failed but in those where many embraced it with enthusiasm and hope. For the first time in history mankind lives in a sort of spiritual wilderness and not, as before, in the shadow of those religious and political systems that consoled us at the same time as they oppressed us. Although all societies are historical, each one has lived under the guidance and inspiration of a set of metahistorical beliefs and ideas. Ours is the first age that is ready to live without a metahistorical doctrine; whether they be religious or philosophical, moral or aesthetic, our absolutes are not collective but private. It is a dangerous experience. It is also impossible to know whether the tensions and conflicts unleashed in this privatization of ideas, practices and beliefs that belonged traditionally to the public domain will not end up by destroying the social fabric. Men could then become possessed once more by ancient religious fury or by fanatical nationalism. It would be terrible if the fall of the abstract idol of ideology were to foreshadow the resurrection of the buried passions of tribes, sects and churches. The signs, unfortunately, are disturbing.

The decline of the ideologies I have called metahistorical, by which I mean those that assign to history a goal and a direction, implies first the tacit abandonment of global solutions. With good sense, we tend more and more towards limited remedies to solve concrete problems. It is prudent to abstain from legislating about the future. Yet the present requires much more than attention to its immediate needs: it demands a more rigorous global reflection. For a long time I have firmly believed that the twilight of the future heralds the advent of the now. To think about the now implies first of all to recover the critical vision. For example, the triumph of the market economy (a triumph due to the adversary's default) cannot be simply a cause for joy. As a mechanism the market is efficient, but like all mechanisms it lacks both conscience and compassion. We must find a way of integrating it into society so that it expresses the social contract and becomes an instrument of justice and fairness. The advanced democratic societies have reached an enviable level of prosperity; at the same time they are islands of abundance in the ocean of universal misery. The topic of the market is intricately related to the deterioration of the environment. Pollution affects not only the air, the rivers and the forests but also our souls. A society possessed by the frantic need to produce more in order to consume more tends to reduce ideas, feelings, art, love, friendship and people themselves to consumer products. Everything becomes a thing to be bought, used and then thrown in the rubbish dump. No other society has produced so much waste as ours has. Material and moral waste.

Reflecting on the now does not imply relinquishing the future or forgetting the past: the present is the meeting place for the three directions of time. Neither can it be confused with facile hedonism. The tree of pleasure does not grow in the past or in the future but at this very moment. Yet death is also a fruit of the present. It cannot be rejected, for it is part of life. Living well implies dying well. We have to learn how to look death in the face. The present is alternatively luminous and sombre, like a sphere that unites the two halves of action and contemplation. Thus, just as we have had philosophies of the past and of the future, of eternity and of the void, tomorrow we shall have a philosophy of the present. The poetic experience could be one of its foundations. What do we know about the present? Nothing or almost nothing. Yet the poets do know one thing: the present is the source of presences.

In this pilgrimage in search of modernity I lost my way at many points only to find myself again. I returned to the source and discovered that modernity is not outside but within us. It is today and the most ancient antiquity; it is tomorrow and the beginning of the world; it is a thousand years old and yet newborn. It speaks in Nahuatl, draws Chinese ideograms from the 9th Century, and appears on the television screen. This intact present, recently unearthed, shakes off the dust of centuries, smiles and suddenly starts to fly, disappearing through the window. A simultaneous plurality of time and presence: modernity breaks with the immediate past only to recover an age-old past and transform a tiny fertility figure from the neolithic into our contemporary. We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.

Translated by Anthony Stanton.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990,

Gabriel Garc韆 M醨quez

One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality - that is, ten per cent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes. The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway.

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword.

I do not mean to embody the illusions of Tonio Kr鰃er, whose dreams of uniting a chaste north to a passionate south were exalted here, fifty-three years ago, by Thomas Mann. But I do believe that those clear-sighted Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more just and humane homeland, could help us far better if they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world.

Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.

In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death. An advantage that grows and quickens: every year, there are seventy-four million more births than deaths, a sufficient number of new lives to multiply, each year, the population of New York sevenfold. Most of these births occur in the countries of least resources - including, of course, those of Latin America. Conversely, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.

On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man". I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possiblity. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990,

Pablo Neruda