跟隨麥哲倫一道進行首次環球航行的佛羅倫薩航海家安東尼奧，經過我們南美洲之後，寫了一篇準確的報道，然而它更像一篇虛構出來的曆險記。
沒有爪的鳥，這種鳥的雌鳥在雄鳥背上孵蛋。此外，還有一種酷似鰹鳥卻沒有舌頭的鳥，它們的喙部像把羹匙。他還寫道，還有一種奇怪的動物，它們長著驢頭和驢耳，身體象駱駝，腿象鹿，叫起來卻又象馬。他寫道，當他們把一麵鏡子放到在巴塔哥尼亞遇見的第一個土著居民眼時，那個身材魁梧的巨人，被自己鏡子中的形象嚇得魂不附體。
從這本引人入勝的小冊子裏，已經隱約可見我們現在小說的萌芽.但是，它遠非那個時代的現實中最令人驚奇的證明。西印度群島的史學家們，給我們留下了無數的類似記載。埃爾多拉多這塊為人垂涎，但並不存在的國土，長期以來出現在許多地圖上，並隨著繪圖者的想象而不斷改變其原來的位置和形狀。那位傳奇式阿爾瓦爾為了尋找長生不老的源泉，在墨西哥進行了為期八年的探查。在一次瘋狂的遠征中，他的同伴們之間發生了人吃人的事，以至於出發時的六百人，在到達終點時，僅有五人幸存。在無數個從未被揭開的奧秘中，有這樣一個：一天，有一萬一千頭騾子從庫斯科出發，每頭牲口馱有一百磅黃金，去贖回印加國王阿塔瓦爾帕，可最終並沒有到達目的地，後來在殖民地時期，在西印度群島中的卡塔赫納出售過一些在衝積土壤上飼養的母雞，在它們的雞肫裏發現了金粒。我們開國者的這種黃金狂，直到不久前還在我們中間蔓延。就在上個世紀，研究在巴拿馬地峽修築連結兩大洋鐵路的德國代表團，還做出這樣的結論：隻要鐵軌不用當地稀有的車鐵來製造而是用黃金，那麽方案便是可行的。
因此，如果說這些困難尚且造成我們這些了解困難實質的人感覺遲鈍，那就不難理解，世界這一邊有理智、有才幹的人們，由於醉心於欣賞自己的文化，便不可能正確有效地理解我們拉美了。同樣可以理解的是，他們用衡量自己的尺度來衡量我們，而忘卻了生活給人們帶來的災難並不是平等的；他們忘卻了追求平等對我們---如同他們所經曆過的一樣 --- 是艱巨和殘酷的。用他人的模式來解釋我們的生活現實，隻能使我們顯得更加陌生，隻能使我們越發不自由，隻能使我們越發感以孤獨。
假如可尊敬的歐洲樂於用他們的曆史來對照我們的今天，那麽他們的理解力也許會增加一些。如果歐洲人能夠記得倫敦曾經需要三百年時間才建成它的城牆，又用另外三百年才有了一位大主教；如果他們能夠記得，在埃特魯裏亞，在一位國王確立羅馬在曆史上的地位之前，它曾經在蒙昧的黑暗裏掙紮了兩千年之久；如果他們能夠記得今天用酥香的奶酷和精確的鍾表使我們感到快樂的、熱愛和平的瑞士人，在十六世紀時曾像野蠻的大兵一樣血洗歐洲，那麽他們的理解力也許會提高一些。就是在文藝複興的高潮時期，一萬二千名由東羅馬帝國圈養的德國雇傭軍，還對羅馬燒殺搶掠，用刀子捅死了八千個當地居民。
雖然如此，麵對壓迫、掠奪和歧視，我們的回答是生活下去，任何洪水猛獸、瘟疫、饑餓、動亂，甚至數百年的戰爭，都不能削弱生命戰勝死亡的優勢。這種優勢還在發展，還在加速：每年的出生者要比死亡者多七千四百萬，新出生的人口相當於紐約每年人口增長的七倍，而他們大部分出生在並不富裕的國家裏，其中當然包括拉美。相反地，那些最繁榮的國家卻積蓄了足夠摧毀不僅數百倍於當今存在的人類，而且可以消滅存在於這個倒黴世界上的任何生物的破壞力。
The Solitude of Latin America
Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel's body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image.
This short and fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our reality in that age. The Chronicles of the Indies left us countless others. Eldorado, our so avidly sought and illusory land, appeared on numerous maps for many a long year, shifting its place and form to suit the fantasy of cartographers. In his search for the fountain of eternal youth, the mythical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of Mexico for eight years, in a deluded expedition whose members devoured each other and only five of whom returned, of the six hundred who had undertaken it. One of the many unfathomed mysteries of that age is that of the eleven thousand mules, each loaded with one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day to pay the ransom of Atahualpa and never reached their destination. Subsequently, in colonial times, hens were sold in Cartagena de Indias, that had been raised on alluvial land and whose gizzards contained tiny lumps of gold. One founder's lust for gold beset us until recently. As late as the last century, a German mission appointed to study the construction of an interoceanic railroad across the Isthmus of Panama concluded that the project was feasible on one condition: that the rails not be made of iron, which was scarce in the region, but of gold.
Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio López de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Moraz´n erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures.
Eleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened this audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good will - and sometimes those of bad, as well - have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a moment's rest. A promethean president, entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone; and two suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of another great-hearted president and that of a democratic soldier who had revived the dignity of his people. There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one - more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities. Because they tried to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years.
One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality - that is, ten per cent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes. The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway.
I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.
And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword.
I do not mean to embody the illusions of Tonio Kröger, whose dreams of uniting a chaste north to a passionate south were exalted here, fifty-three years ago, by Thomas Mann. But I do believe that those clear-sighted Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more just and humane homeland, could help us far better if they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world.
Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.
In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death. An advantage that grows and quickens: every year, there are seventy-four million more births than deaths, a sufficient number of new lives to multiply, each year, the population of New York sevenfold. Most of these births occur in the countries of least resources - including, of course, those of Latin America. Conversely, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.
On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man". I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.
