Guanacolía: Excerpt 1
A Package from Havana
After several years in Latin America as French Cultural Attaché, Marianne Tell retreats to a reclusive life at the Ministry of Culture in Paris. She remains haunted by the sudden disappearance of a Salvadorian poet she had met and loved during her time abroad. An unexpected package from Havana containing a miscellany of the poet’s writings rekindles her anguish and propels her to seek out the Salvadorian community in exile. In this excerpt, Marianne has just received the package.
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Odd how coming back in the metro, she had been dying to open it, to yank at the string and tear off the paper, yet now that she had it in front of her, she feared what it might reveal. She had worked so hard over the past few years to quell her emotions. She had been a fool to believe she had any kind of future possible with the poet; he was married, politically engaged, and had no room in his life for someone like her. Yet he had always been the one to contact her, to set up their meetings. Except for the last time.
When he disappeared that last time, when he failed to turn up, she felt abandoned as never before. That had been the only time she had sought him out. She had waited for him the whole weekend and then a few days more until she’d run out of excuses to offer at work and had had to return to the DF, the Distrito Federal, Mexico City. Ever since then, he’d remained silent and Marianne had never again contacted him, never enquired about his whereabouts. She felt that since he had left her, she should leave him, too, let him drift into the fog of memory.
The package sat in front of her on the table. She looked again at the return address: no name, no personal initials, simply “Casa de las Américas, Havana, Cuba.” She shook her head; maybe it had nothing to do with the poet. After all, during her years in Mexico, she had received regular notices from the Casa de las Américas; perhaps this was just another one of their informational briefings. She squared her shoulders and reached out, running her fingers along the coarse string. Now she couldn't imagine tearing off the paper; she clipped the string and unwrapped the package. The first thing she saw was a typewritten letter.
"Compañera,
I thought that, given the circumstances, these papers belonged to you and would certainly be safer in your care. You will see that one is a letter, addressed to you, started—but left unfinished—on May 1, 1975, just ten days before the poet’s death.
She took a gulp of scotch.
"There are some poems, bits of dialogue, lines of verse, and scribbles. There are also a handful of photographs. And then, there is the essay—or rather a draft of an essay—a forceful work that remains in manuscript form: unedited, unpublished, indeed, unknown by anyone except for me and now you. He had asked that, should he disappear, it be sent to you. After making several requests, I obtained this address from the French Embassy in Mexico. I hope, Compañera, that this reaches you.
I trust that you will know how best to handle this. We who knew him know that he is a man to be honored, as is his writing.
It is my faith—not in God, but in the future, in the importance of history—that allows me to pack these pages in an envelope, write your name, affix some stamps, and send them off. Like a message in a bottle that is tossed off a shore. May this message reach its destination and land in your hands."
She read the letter several times before she began sorting through the papers. About midway through the pile, she came across some black and white photographs, grainy, blurred. But she recognized him, and herself, and the two of them together on the beach, at a café, clowning in front of a bus—one of those wonderful Mexican buses—loaded with decorations, gaudy paper flowers, kitsch of all sorts dangling about, and, let’s not forget, pictures of the Virgin in all shapes and sizes. She held the photos up to the light, staring intently as if by doing so she could get a better definition, a crisper picture, a clearer memory. She sifted through a flurry of papers, even napkins and bus tickets, all with words scribbled on them; words, rushed and tumbling that formed fragile memories; words that drew her back in time; words that she could hear him say. She shuffled through the papers, desperate to find a memory complete enough to hang onto. Then she read:
"Mi preciosa,
I received your letter, and although I cannot get back to Mexico anytime soon, I wanted to tell you how happy your news made me. If the child can have half your beauty and half your soul, we shall have made a truly extraordinary being.
I am back in the country where things are very difficult, indeed. Although I’m glad to be back, to be out of exile—that living death. Glad to finally be where I belong. But I also feel torn.
At times, I wish I did not feel such responsibility. At times, I wish I could just leave it all and let the others take care of it. Leave it all and return, incognito, to you and to our new …”
It was dated May 1, 1975, a date she recalled only too painfully. She shut her eyes tight; she felt she was being pulled down, engulfed by an unbearable pain; she pummeled the sofa. “God, no!” When her tears subsided, she got up, filled her glass, and came back to her spot on the sofa; she picked up the remaining papers, and found the essay the man who sent the package had mentioned in his letter.
It was entitled Hablando de la Guerra--Speaking of War. As she read the text, she could hear the poet’s voice. He had talked at length about the civil war that brewed in El Salvador; about the people--los Guanacos—with their buoyancy, age-old, miraculous. Yet he sensed that a change was in the air; that the persistent, deep-rooted wrongs they had suffered had pushed them to the brink, to the point where there was no turning back, no choice but to rise up in arms.
The struggle would be bloody, unequal; pitching machetes against machine guns. But that was not the worst of it. The coup de grâce would come from within. It would be the internal struggles amongst factions that would finally drain both their strength and their enthusiasm and in essence, cause them to hemorrhage. The only way to avoid this self-inflicted defeat would be to negotiate a common purpose and stand united. If unity failed, he had insisted, the rebels could offer only anemic, dispersed resistance. In this way, they would ensure a slow, drawn-out conflict that would deflate the people’s buoyancy, dashing them into a state of perpetual loss—a state of melancholia.
“Of Guanacolía?” she had offered.
“Yes.” He had nodded. “I like that.”
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