Métodos similares

En general, los métodos de justicia utilizados con intención de venganza, no solamente son poco efectivos, sino que también son usados bilateralmente en muchas ocasiones. En el caso de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, estos métodos son utilizados por ambos bandos- la Gestapo y los fifis- después de la liberación.

Estos son descritos por Juan Manuel de Prada en “El Séptimo Velo.”

En esta novela, la hermana del protagonista, Jules Tillon, es llevada al Velódromo de Invierno después de liberación en Francia. El ambiente de celebración después de que Francia es liberada de los Nazis, se ve opacado después de que los fifis comienzan a tomar la justicia en sus propias manos, cobrando venganza contra las personas que ayudaron a los Nazis durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. A Therese Tillon, la llevan presa junto con otras mujeres del barrio al ser acusadas de “colaboración horizontal.” Luego son llevadas a Drancy donde:

Se interrogaba a los prisioneros sin ahorro de brutalidades; muchos de los carceleros eran comunistas españoles, curtidos durante la Guerra Civil en las checas, aquellas sucursales del infierno ante cuyo umbral se detenía la legalidad republicana. (p. 119)

 En este escenario, de Prada describe una escena que marco a Tillon. Al buscar a su hermana entre las mujeres, se encuentran con “las putas de Henri Lafont”

Habían sido violadas, marcadas como reses con hierros al rojo, sometidas a descargas eléctricas y termocauterios; a alguien, incluso, le habían arrancado los pezones y de sus senos brotaba una sangre exhausta, como el residuo de una lactancia carnívora. (p. 122)

Este escenario se refleja en “The Black Book,” una película Holandesa que narra la historia de una mujer judía apoyando la Resistencia. La Gestapo la apresa y ella también es torturada en una situación similar. Ella también es levada a un centro de interrogación y su tortura es similar a aquella de los fifis en Drancy.

Pienso que estos métodos son poco efectivos ya que son impulsados por un sentimiento de venganza. No es correcto pagarle a aquellos que torturan con mas tortura. Lucia, la protagonista de “El Séptimo Velo” demuestra su carácter noble cuando le preguntan si las “putas de Lafont” merecen esa tortura, ya que ella responde que nadie merece tanto mal.   

Obsessed with Paris

Mario Vargas Llosa finished writing “The Time of the Hero” in Paris in 1961. At that point, he was obsessed with the quintessential Parisian writer, Jean Paul Sartre. Reading his first novel made me think of the last novel I read  of Vargas Llosa, which is also his most recent, “The Bad Girl.” It seems that 40 years later, Vargas Llosa is still obsessed with Paris.

When I read the novel, I had just returned from Paris and reminiscing the Carrefour d’Odeon was my own obsession. I missed Paris terribly and reading about a man obsessed with the city and a beautiful woman really kept my imagination going.

The New York Times review of the book sums up some of my thoughts about “The Bad Girl:”

In each case, the author revisits the time and geography of his own youth in a work poised, minutely balanced, between the psychic and corporeal lives of its characters.

Also, Vargas Llosa seems very inclined to remember his youth in the district of Miraflores in Lima, Peru. In both novels, his first one and his latest one, he starts in the district where he spent his formative years. It seems that he likes to revisit certain places on his books and that everything has a point of origin on his homeland, as it is the case with many other Latin American writers.

But coming back to Paris, in “The Bad Girl” the protagonist, Ricardo, achieves all of his goals in Paris by the age of 25, and he becomes a translators for the UNESCO. The New York Times review also makes an interesting point about Ricardo’s place in time:

Paris of the 1960s, the culture in which Vargas Llosa came of intellectual age, witnessed the popularization of existential philosophy, and Ricardo judges himself not only deracinated, a perpetual foreigner, but also lacking in substance. He’s trapped in the moment of translating one person’s language into another’s, “of being present without being present, of existing but not existing.”

The fabric holding everything together in the book is Lily, the bad girl, who he met in his childhood in Miraflores.  In any case, I love that Vargas Llosa captures my attention by not shifting so far away from his origins during his more than 40 years as a novelist.

Federico García Lorca’s body to be exhumed

Whenever I read about corpses being taken out and re-buried again I get chills down my spine. But when I heard that Federico García Lorca was going to be exhumed from the common burial ground were he lays with three other corpses, I wanted to cry.

García Lorca was a literary genius and his life was cut short by one of the most barbaric forms of punishment of the old Spain– namely the wall of fusillade.

The story published in El Universal, one of Mexico’s daily newspapers in Spanish, really made me think of how cruel this punishment is and how it is a common them throughout the modern history of Spain and the conquest.

The story says that the exhumation is guaranteed to be private, and that the National Audience of Spain authorized the opening of 19 common burial grounds, which include the one where García Lorca is buried with the bodies of three other people who were killed with him during the Spanish Civil War.

García Lorca, who is one of the best-known poets of Spain, was killed near Granada, Spain, by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish Civil War for his outspokenness, which was not an uncommon occurrence in Spain (and even in Latin America).

Francisco de Goya’s “The Third of May” is a very good visual example of this barbaric tradition. Another good story recounting the accounts of a fusillade wall in Cuba was written by Richard Harding Davis. “The Death of Rodriguez” also tells the story of a Cuban youth who was being killed by the Spanish soldiers. In Harding Davis’ story he describes how the condemned walked to his death in the wall:

…but I confess to have felt a thrill of satisfaction when I saw, as the Cuban passed me, that he held a cigarette between his lips, not arrogantly nor with bravado, but with nonchalance of a man who meets his punishment fearlessly, and who will let his enemies see that they can kill but cannot frighten him.

García Lorca was not the first one to be silenced for his ideals and for thinking differently, nor was he the last one. As history continued to confirmate — and literature and art documented — fusillade was a big part of Spanish history, and it was unfortunately brought over to America.

Mexico claims its relics from Austria

Last week, I felt very inspired because my Mexican art history professor talked about the intentions of a group of Mexicans who want to recover the feathered headdress of Moctezuma II from Austria, and I knew about this because I read it in “The Sum of Our Days” by Isabel Allende.

In the book, she mentions Alfredo Lopez Lagarto Emplumado, who in the book is one of Tabra’s (Allende’s friend) boyfriends, and is part of the group of people soliciting the government to recover the Aztec relic from the Austrian government. Allende writes about his quest to recover the feathered headdress from the European empire.

Since Allende published the book earlier this year, the headdress has yet to return to its rightful owners — the descendants of the Aztecs.

However, the efforts to recover it have not stopped. I found an article about some of the efforts of the Mexican people to recover the crown in a Mexican newspaper called El Sol de Puebla. The article talks about a manifestation in Vienna, Austria, to reclaim the prehispanic crown. It also mentions that in May 2005, the former Mexican President Vicente Fox asked the Austrian government for the return of the crown.

In the article, which was published over a year ago, it says that the dancers and activists think that the crown could return to Mexico in the next three years.

If it is ever returned, the crown will be displayed in the Anthropological National Museum of Mexico City, which is built over the remains of Moctezuma’s residence.

Julio Cortázar’s lecture to Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes.

I can’t believe that three of the greatest literary geniuses of Latin America have fear of flights as a common denominator. It is just so simple.  El Universal, a Mexican newspaper, published a story about how they were all at the same place and the same time, riding a train from Paris to Prague, and talking about life and their works. An “unrepeatable journey,” as Gabriel García Márquez describes it, was what he spent with  Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes in 1968. The reason behind the unveiling of this journey, is the publishing of a book about Cortázar that includes letters, interviews and an introduction by García Márquez.

Picturing this three writers together for hours during a trip in Central Europe makes me really wonder how a lecture from Cortázar would play out. According to García Márquez, there was a point in which the three of them had talked about everything. This, to me, is simply inconceivable. How is it that this three fascinating people could run out of things to talk about?

A simple question was what triggered the conversation lasting the rest of the journey, breaking the silence of the previous lecture that Cortázar had given. Fuentes then asked him how the piano was introduced into the jazz orchestra and went in-depth with another lecture explaining it. To me that sounds just like Cortázar. When I read “Hopscotch,” it was really hard to follow the plot in between the lectures of Oliveira, the main character, and his destructive relationship with La Maga, his love interest.

La Jornada manages to summarize the book for me (this is a translation from the text in Spanish):

What is truly important about “Hopscotch” is that it reveals another reality, different from that serving as a scenario to what happens, which are revealed as the book advances and jumps in the chapters composing the book, making us share the certainty of the true life, the genuine reality, which is hidden underneath the one we live consciously.

I think this really summarizes “Hopscotch” to me. It wasn’t a story, but more of an account of true life and how it unfolds in front of our eyes without us really having control over me. The factor of inevitability is what really captured me from the book and thinking about destiny playing to bring García Márquez, Cortázar and Fuentes together, really makes me think that the disorderly life of Oliveira is not far from reality at all. Chance encounters are part of life in ways no one can control.