This is the first of three posts on writers whose work has influenced the course of my own life. The writers are Graham Greene, Julio Cortázar and Roberto Bolaño. In these writers I have seen myself in futures, presents, and pasts.
Travels with My Aunt
It started when I saw glimpses of the film, Travels with My Aunt, late at night on television. I was doing homework or something. What I noted then, and what I remember now, is the face of a very young Cindy Williams on a train with Alec McGowen as Henry Pulling.
I was in college already, but still living at home with my parents. I had these vague ideas of wanting to explore the world, do something exciting, see places no one in my family ever had seen. Later, I noticed the book on a shelf in the house and read it. What I remember best from the book is Pulling’s trip by boat up the Rio Paraguay, from Buenos Aires to Asunción. I knew then what I wanted to do with my life.
My mother, it turned out, was quite fond of Graham Greene. She was fluent in Spanish for reasons she never told me, though I cannot recall whether she declined to say or I simply failed to ask. As a college student in Pennsylvania, she had gone to Mexico City one summer to study abroad, a trip that led her to New Orleans and Loyola University, where she met my father in 1960. At Loyola, she paid her bills in college by teaching Spanish at Mercy Academy, a Catholic girls’ prep school next to the campus. She told me Travels with My Aunt was a frivolous book and that the really good Green was in The Power and the Glory, his novel of a “whiskey priest” trying to escape persecution during the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. I read the book and though I agreed with my mother, I never stopped thinking about Asunción.
Mexico City
In the summer of 1984 it was my turn, and I went off to Mexico City in the very same program my mother had gone on 25 years earlier. My Dutch friend was on the Mexico trip the year before, and he gave me the names of two girls, R and E, and told me to look them up. He’d had a crush on E, who worked in the big bus station and lived in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Mexico City, where 2-room cinder block houses crept up the hillsides surrounding the city. E was indeed the prettier of the two, but I fell in love with R.
She was older than I was by about seven years, which at the time seemed like a lot. She took me to Coyoacan, where we sat on park benches until three in the morning kissing and talking under the stars, which we could not see but knew were there above the constant soup of Mexico City smog. We talked about Frida Kahlo and listened to jazz. We drank tequila over art and philosophy and revolution with her friends. During the days, in between classes in US-Mexican Diplomatic History and Spanish, I took Graham Greene novels from the library and devoured them. The End of the Affair, The Comedians, The Human Factor, and others. I marveled at the stories he told, so strong and bold and confident. I read Greene and knew what I wanted to do with my life.
Rio de Janeiro and Asunción
I imagined I was reading biographies of the lives I wanted to lead, perhaps without the Russian Roulette but nonetheless in that Greenean world of strained romance and moral decay. By the time I was 23 I was on my way to Asunción, albeit over land by bus from Rio de Janeiro, where I had just spent 6 weeks interviewing people in favelas during the day. Favelas were the infamous slums that clung to the mountainsides of Rio and lined the bottoms of its swamps. In the favelas, marginal people lived on the extremes of the most spectacular scenery on earth. By night I played music with my friend Rogerio do Maranhão, who had standing gigs at Maria Maria in Bota Fogo and a pasta house in Copacabana. We sang for food, beer and women.
... portrait of the author as a young musician
In Asunción, I stayed with the family Weiss, who were hosting Brother Alexis Gonzales, a theatre director from Loyola, mom’s and my old alma mater. One night, after hanging out with the actors past curfew—these were Stroessner’s last days—I came home to find everyone on the street in their night clothes. Minutes earlier, some Colorados drove by and shot up the house. They didn’t like Alexis’s production of Princípios, a play about censorship in Latin America. We pulled bullets from the walls and kept them as souvenirs.
Along the way, Greene stayed with me. He wrote at a disciplined clip of five hundred words per day and produced almost a novel a year for forty years. His stories played on the compromised decisions of flawed men in decadent contexts. With le Carré, Greene was the ultimate Cold War novelist, the two of them forming bookends around the era’s great struggles and grand themes, le Carré in Europe and its near environs, Greene everywhere else, across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. They were our literary secret agents, searching for (and finding) the same themes every where they looked, morphing effortlessly into the same man with a different name everywhere they went.
Greene wrote about people and places that were not his native contexts, though when he did touch his own world, as in The End of the Affair, the results were breathtaking. I was drawn most to his wanderlust and his ability to create compelling stories in so many different places. Still I wondered—why did Greene make such sense to me? Was it because I, too, was an outsider, a privileged white thrill-seeker in worlds brown and black and poor and altogether far away from the places I knew?
Yet critical post-colonial narrative was not something I could sustain for very long. I was too good-humored and guileless. This was a chicken and egg story that after a while could be anything and nothing at all. Like all narratives it was mostly about justification and never really got to the heart of the matter. Disciplined writing in an inevitably tainted world of compromised good and stilted vengeance was, on the other hand, a narrative I could understand.
Notes and Credits
I was inspired to go up the hills by my advisor at Tulane and by a book called The Myth of Marginality by Janice Perlman. Perlman went to the favelas and lived there and worked with the residents even as the military government at the time was razing their neighborhoods and resettling the residents in modern slums further from the center of town. I called Perlman from S’s dorm room at Louisiana State University one Sunday morning as the fog of a hangover left me, to ask Perlman about doing this kind of work. “Go, do it,” she said, without specifying anything more specific about how to do it or whom to ask for help. I didn’t speak to her again until 2006, almost 20 years later, and in 2007 I was able to contract her to evaluate the program I ran at the New York Academy of Medicine. In 2010, she published a sequel to Myth of Marginality called Favela, in which she revisits the favelas and favelados she wrote about n the early 1970s. She was able to find the children and grandchildren of her original subjects and the new book is a compelling story of coming full circle, as all narratives eventually do.
Cover photograph of Travels with My Aunt from the Wikipedia article about the novel, found here and used under fair use principles. The photograph of Greene’s gravesite is also from Wikimedia and is used under the Creative Commons license.
Photograph of the author from his personal collection, no doubt to be sold one day for millions (in Monopoly money?) on E-Bay. I cannot recall the name of the restaurant in Copacabana where we used to play, but here’s another of my friend Rogerio, from the same time.
Rogerio do Maranhão
truth and rocket science 