The Immortals

WRITERS

Mo Yan / China

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012 for his work as a writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.”

Language: Chinese
His books have been translated into more than 20 languages, including Vietnamese, Dutch, Korean, Norwegian and Japanese.

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Chapter 5, Part 9

Sima Ting cried out, his voice filled with sadness and anger, rousing Sima Ku from his anguished thoughts. What he saw was a squad of militiamen dragging his elder brother up to the crowd of onlookers. “I’m innocent – innocent! I’ve rendered great service, and I broke off relations with my brother a long time ago!” No one paid any attention to Sima Ting’s tearful pleas. Sima Ku sighed, as threads of guilt filtered into his heart. When the chips were down, the man was a good and loyal brother, even if you couldn’t trust some of the things he said.

Sima Ting’s legs were so rubbery he couldn’t stand. A village official demanded, “Tell me, Sima Ting, where’s the Felicity Manor treasure vault? If you don’t tell me, you can walk down the same road as him!” “There’s no treasure vault. During land reform, they dug down three feet and didn’t find anything,” Sima Ku’s wretched brother pled his case. Sima Ku grinned and said, “Quit your bitching, Elder Brother!” “It’s all your fault, you bastard!” Sima Ting complained. Sima Ku just shook his head with a wry smile. “Stop this nonsense!” a security bureau officer rebuked the village officials, resting his hand on the butt of his holstered pistol. “Take that man away! Don’t you give a damn about policy?” As they dragged Sima Ting away, the village official said, “We figured this might be a good opportunity to get something out of him.”

The man in charge of the execution raised a little red flag and announced in a loud voice, “Ready –”

The firing squad raised their weapons, waiting for the command. An icy grin spread across Sima Ku’s face as he stared down the black muzzles of the rifles aimed at him. A red glare rose above the dike, and the smell of women blanketed heaven and earth. Sima Ku shouted:

“Women are wonderful things –”

The dull crack of rifle fire split Sima Ku’s head like a ripe melon, sending blood and brain in all directions. His body stiffened for a brief moment, and then toppled forward. At that moment, like the climactic scene in a play, just before the curtain drops, the widow Cui Fengxian from Sandy Mouth Village, wearing a red satin jacket over green satin pants, a spray of golden-yellow silk flowers in her hair, flew down from the top of the dike and lay on the ground beside Sima Ku. I assumed she would begin to wail over the corpse, but she didn’t. Maybe the sight of Sima Ku’s shattered skull drove the courage out of her. She took a pair of scissors from her waistband, which I thought she was going to plunge into her breast to accompany Sima Ku in death. But she didn’t. In the midst of all those staring eyes, she plunged the scissors into Sima Ku’s dead chest. Then she covered her face, shattered the stillness with shrieks of grief, and staggered off as fast as her feet would take her.

The crowd of onlookers stood there like wooden stakes. Sima Ku’s decidedly inelegant last words had bored their way into their hearts, tickling them as they crawled around mischievously. Are women really wonderful things? Maybe they are. Yes, women definitely are wonderful things, but when all is said and done, they aren’t really ‘things.’

Mario Vargas Llosa / Peru

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”

Language: Spanish.
His books have been translated into more than 40 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, French and Swedish.

***

IX

During the eighteen months in Germany he often had wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake. But no, facts had confirmed all his theses when the German government made public a statement – written for the most part by him – declaring solidarity with the idea of Irish sovereignty and a desire to help the Irish recover the independence seized by the British Empire. But later, after long waits on Unter den Linden to be received by the authorities in Berlin, broken promises, his ailments, and his failures with the Irish Brigade, he had begun to doubt.

He felt his heart pounding, as it did each time he recalled those icy days of whirling snow storms when at last, after so many negotiations, he finally could speak to the 2,200 Irish prisoners in the Limburg camp. He explained, carefully repeating a speech he had rehearsed in his mind over months, that this wasn’t a question of “going over to the enemy camp” or anything like that. The Irish Brigade would not be part of the German army. It would be an independent military force with its own officers and would fight for the independence of Ireland from its colonizer and oppressor “alongside, but not inside” the German armed forces. What hurt him most, an acid that corroded his spirit unendingly, was not that of 2,200 prisoners only some 50 had joined the Brigade. It was the hostility his proposal encountered, the shouts and muttering when he clearly heard the words traitor, yellow, sold, cockroach, used by many prisoners to show him their contempt, and finally, the spittle and attempts at aggression directed at him the third time he tried to speak to them (tried, because he could say only a phrase or two before he was silenced by whistles and insults). And the humiliation he felt when he was rescued from a possible attack, perhaps a lynching, by his escort of German soldiers, who ran out of the camp with him.

He had been deluded and naïve to think the Irish prisoners would enlist in a brigade equipped, dressed – though the uniform had been designed by Roger – fed, and advised by the German army they had just fought, which had gassed them in the Belgian trenches, killed, maimed, and wounded so many of their companions, and had them now behind barbed wire. One had to understand the circumstances, be flexible, remember what the Irish prisoners had suffered and lost, and not feel rancor toward them. But that brutal collision with a reality he had not expected was very difficult for Roger. It had repercussions in his body as well as his spirit, for having lost almost all hope, he was struck down with the fevers that kept him in bed for so long.

During those months, the solicitous loyalty and affection of Captain Robert Monteith were a balm without which he probably would not have survived. The difficulties and frustrations found everywhere had no effect – not, at least, a visible one – on his conviction that the Irish Brigade conceived of by Roger would eventually become a reality and recruit into its ranks the majority of Irish prisoners, and Captain Monteith devoted himself enthusiastically to directing the training of the fifty volunteers to whom the German government had granted a small camp in Zossen, near Berlin. He even succeeded in recruiting a few more. All of them wore the Brigade uniform designed by Roger, including Monteith. They lived in field tents, had marches, maneuvers, and firing practice with rifles and pistols, but with blank bullets. Discipline was strict, and in addition to exercises, military drills, and sports, Monteith insisted that Roger continually give talks to members of the Brigade on the history of Ireland, its culture, its singularity, and the opportunities that would open for Ireland once its independence had been achieved.

Orhan Pamuk / Turkey

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 for his work as a writer “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”

Language: Turkish.
His books have been translated into 60 languages, including Armenian, Basque, Chinese, Estonian, Hindi and Vietnamese.

***

63. The Gossip Column

As the country slid toward civil war, the exploding bombs and the pitched street battles resulted in fewer people going to the cinema, which absence had devastated the film industry. The Pelür Bar and other industry watering holes were as crowded as ever, but by now, with families no longer even venturing out into the streets in the evening, the film people were all struggling to get by doing commercials or skin flicks and fight films now flooding the market. In just the past two years, big producers had stopped investing in the sorts of films we’d enjoyed over the summer, a development that suddenly elevated me among the habitués of the Pelür Bar, in whose eyes I was the wealthy backer of Lemon Films, and potentially an investor in their ventures. Though I was managing for the most part to stay away from the Pelür, one evening, at Feridun’s insistence, I went and saw that the crowd was larger than ever, a fact explained later when I heard from the drunks that unemployment had been a boon to the bars and that “all of Yeşilçam” was “hitting the bottle.”

That evening I, too, drank until morning with the miserable film crowd. I even recall chatting amiably with Tahir Tan, the man who had once pursued Füsun all the way to the Huzur Restaurant. By the end of the same evening, Papatya, one of the most charming of the new generation of young actresses, had claimed me as a “friend.” Only a few years earlier Papatya had been starring in family films as the innocent girl who sold simits and looked after her blind mother, or continually dissolved into tears as her stepmother, played by Conniving Sühendan, plotted her ruination; now she, like the others, was out of work and forced to take on dubbing domestic porn films; but there was a screenplay that Feridun had also found interesting, and she was hoping for my backing to produce it. Drunk as I was, I could see that Feridun found Papatya interesting, too – there was what film magazines called a “certain intimacy” between them – and yet I was rather amazed by his annoyance at the attention I paid her. Toward morning, when the three of us left the Pelür, I remember walking together through the dark backstreets, past walls on which drunks had relieved themselves and leftists had scrawled radical slogans, making our way to Cihangir, where Papatya lived with her mother, who worked as a singer in low-rent nightclubs. As menacing packs of dogs followed us down the cold streets, I left it to Feridun to see Papatya home and returned to Nişantaşı, where I lived peacefully with my mother.

After drunken evenings like this, as I drifted in and out of sleep, I was beset by painful thoughts: that my youth was well and truly over; that (as was the case for all Turkish men) my life was taking its ultimate shape before I had even reached the age of thirty-five; that I would-could-never again know great happiness. At times, remembering the love and longing that filled my heart, I would console myself thinking that if my future seemed darker with each passing day, this could only be an illusion induced by the political assassinations, the never-ending street battles, the spiraling prices, and the bankruptcies that filled the news.

But if I had been to Çukurcuma to see Füsun, if we had looked into each other’s eyes and spoken, if I had stolen from the Keskins’ house a few objects that would remind me of her later, and if back at home I had a chance to play with them, it would seem to me as if I could never feel unhappy again. There were times when I would survey the knives and forks that Füsun had used, and that I had secreted away from the Keskins’ dinner table, as if they formed a single picture, in themselves a complete memory.

Sometimes, convinced of the possibility of a better life elsewhere, beyond the circumscribed world of my obsession, I would struggle to dwell on other things. But if by chance I’d seen Zaim, his report on all the latest society gossip was enough to remind me that I was not missing much by avoiding the company of rich friends, whose lives seemed increasingly boring.

Though they had been seeing each other for three years by now, Mehmet and Nurcihan had (according to Zaim) still not made love, and were telling people that they planned to marry. This was the biggest piece of news. Even though everyone, Mehmet included, knew of Nurcihan’s love affairs with French men during her years in Paris, she was determined not to make love with him before marriage, and she made light of this decision, saying that in Muslim countries, the foundation of a true and long-lasting, happy and peaceful marriage was not wealth but premarital abstinence. Mehmet seemed to appreciate this joke; it was part of the tapestry of their common outlook, which they articulated in one voice, telling stories illustrating the wisdom of our ancestors, and the beauty of our old music, and the contentment of the old masters, with their dervish temperaments. Neither the jokes they liked to make, nor their interest in our Ottoman ancestors, had led to their being branded in society as devout or reactionary. Zaim believed that one reason for this was the amount they both drank at parties, which, however excessive, never compromised their manners or their elegance. When he’d had some wine to drink, Mehmet would proclaim with some excitement that the wines mentioned in Divan poetry were not metaphorical but real libations, and he would recite lines from Nedim and Fuzuli – the accuracy of which no one could judge – and looking carefully into Nurcihan’s eyes, he would lift his glass to toast the love of God. There was a reason that society had not been put off by such an exhibition and indeed had even accepted it respectfully: There were far worse things, a lesson that could be traced to the panic among young girls following the dissolution of my engagement to Sibel. This episode had served as potent warning to girls of our generation in Istanbul society not to put too much trust in men before marriage, and, if the rumors were to be believed, inspired terrified mothers with marriageable daughters to urge extreme caution. But lest one attach too much importance to my own experiences, I beg the reader to remember that Istanbul society was such a small and fragile circle that the deep shame of any member was no less universally felt than in a small family.

J. M. Coetzee / South Africa

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 for his work as a writer “who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider.”

Language: English.
His books have been translated into 49 languages including French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Slovenian.

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13. On the body

We speak of the dog with the sore foot or the bird with the broken wing. But the dog does not think of itself in those terms, or the bird. To the dog, when it tries to walk, there is simply I am pain, to the bird, when it launches itself into flight, simply I cannot.

With us it seems to be different. The fact that such common locutions as ‘my leg,’ ‘my eye,’ ‘my brain,’ and even ‘my body’ exist suggests that we believe there is some non-material, perhaps fictive, entity that stands in the relation of possessor to possessed to the body’s ‘parts’ and even to the whole body. Or else the existence of such locutions shows that language cannot get purchase, cannot get going, until it has split up the unity of experience.

Last night I had a bad dream, which I afterwards wrote down, about dying and being guided to the gateway to oblivion by a young woman. What I did not record is the question that occurred to me in the act of writing: Is she the one?

Why would I want to sue him?

Wake up. He can’t just do what he likes with you. He can’t pick on you and have obscene fantasies about you and then sell them to the public for profit. Also, he can’t take down your words and publish them without your permission. That is plagiarism. It is worse than plagiarism. You have an identity, which belongs to you alone. It is your most valuable possession, from a certain point of view, which you are entitled to protect. Vigorously.

All parts of the body are not cathected to the same degree. If a tumour were cut out of my body and displayed to me on a surgical tray as “your tumour,” I would feel revulsion at an object that is in a sense ‘of’ me but that I disown, and indeed rejoice at the elimination of; whereas if one of my hands were cut off and displayed to me, I would no doubt feel the keenest grief.

About hair, fingernail clippings, and so forth one has no feelings, since their loss belongs to a cycle of renewal.

Teeth are more mysterious. The teeth in ‘my’ mouth are ‘my’ teeth, part of ‘me,’ but my feeling for them is less intimate than my feeling for, say, my lips. They feel neither more nor less ‘mine’ than the metal or porcelain prostheses in my mouth, the handiwork of dentists whose very names I have forgotten. I feel myself to be owner or custodian of my teeth rather than feeling my teeth to be part of me. If a rotten tooth were to be extracted and displayed to me, I would feel no great sorrow, even though my body (‘I’) will never regenerate it.

These thoughts about the body occur not in the abstract but in relation to a specific person, X, unnamed. On the morning of the day he died, X brushed his teeth, taking care of them with the due diligence we learn as children. From his ablutions he emerged to face the day, and before the day had ended he was dead. His spirit departed, leaving behind a body that was good for nothing, worse than good for nothing because it would soon begin to decay and become a threat to public health. Part of that dead body was the full set of teeth he had brushed that morning, teeth that had also died in the sense that blood had ceased to course through their roots, yet that paradoxically ceased to suffer decay as the body cooled and its oral bacteria cooled too, and were extinguished.

If X had been buried in the earth, the parts of ‘his’ body that had lived most intensely, that were most ‘he,’ would have rotted away, while ‘his’ teeth, which he might have felt to have merely been in his care and custody, would have survived long into the future. But of course X was not buried but cremated; and the people who built the oven in which he was consumed ensured that it was hot enough to turn everything to ash, even bones, even teeth. Even teeth.

This young woman who declines to call me by my name, instead calling me Señor or perhaps Senior – is she the one who has been assigned to conduct me to my death? If that is so, how odd a
Don’t be silly, Alan. He is not going to give me his fantasies to type if it is me he is having fantasies about.

Why not? Maybe that is how he gets his kicks: making the woman read his fantasies about her. It is logical, in a back-to-front way. It is a means of exercising power over a woman when you can’t fuck any more. messenger, and how unsuitable! Yet perhaps it is the nature of death that everything about it, every last thing, should strike us as unsuitable.

Come on, Alan! You want me to dress up in convent-school uniform and appear in court as some virginal type who blushes when a man has thoughts about her? I will be thirty in March. Lots of men have had thoughts about me.

Gao Xingjian / China

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000 for “for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama.”

Language: Chinese.
His books have been translated into more than 30 languages, including English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish.

***

Cramp

As the waves rise and fall, he is borne up and then dropped between them. But just floating like this is useless. He has to swim quickly toward shore. Turning, he tries hard to keep his legs pressed together and, by so doing, counteract the wind and the waves to enhance his speed. But his stomach that had gained some slight relief again starts hurting. This time the pain comes faster. He feels his right leg immediately become stiff, and the water go right over his head. He can see only ink green water, so limpid and, moreover, extremely peaceful, except for the rapid string of bubbles he breathes out. His head emerges from the water and he blinks, trying to shake the water from his eyelashes. He still can’t see the coastline. The sun has set, and the sky above the undulating hills glows with the color of roses. Are they still playing volleyball? That woman, it’s all because of that red swimsuit of hers. He’s sinking again, surrendering to the pain. He rapidly strikes out with his arms but, taking in air, swallows a mouthful of water, salty seawater, and coughing feels like a needle being jabbed into his stomach. He has to turn again, to lie flat on his back with his arms and legs apart. This way he can relax and let the pain subside a little. The sky above has turned gray. Are they still playing volleyball? They are important. Did the woman in the red swimsuit notice him entering the water, and will they look out to sea? That dark spot back there in the gray-black sea… is it a small boat? Or is it a pontoon that has broken loose from its mooring, and would anyone be concerned with what has happened to it? At this point, he can rely only upon himself. Even if he calls out, there is only the sound of the surging waves, monotonous, never ending. Listening to the waves has never been so lonely. He sways, but instantly steadies himself. Next, an icy current charges relentlessly by and carries him, helpless, along with it. Turning on his side, with his left arm stroking out, his right hand pressing against his abdomen, and his feet kicking, he massages. It still hurts, but it’s bearable. He knows he can now depend only on the strength of his own kicking to fight his way out of the cold current. Whether or not he can bear it, he’ll just have to, because this is the only way he’ll be able to save himself. Don’t take it too seriously. Serious or not, he has a cramp in the abdomen and he’s one kilometer from shore, out in deep sea. He’s not sure anymore if it’s one kilometer, but senses that he’s been floating in line with the coast. The strength of his kicking barely offsets the thrust of the current. He must struggle to get out of it, or else before too long he’ll be like that dark spot floating on the waves, and vanish into the gray-black sea. He must endure the pain, he must relax, he must kick as hard as he can, he can’t slacken off, and above all he mustn’t panic. With great precision he has to coordinate his kicking, breathing, and massaging. He can’t be distracted by any other thoughts, and he can’t allow any thoughts of fear. The sun has set very quickly, and there is a hazy gray above the sea, but he can’t see any lights on the shore yet. He can’t even see the coast clearly, or the curves of the hills. His feet have kicked something! He panics, and feels a spasm in his stomach – sharp and painful. He gently moves his legs; there are stinging circles on his ankles. He has run into the tentacles of a jellyfish and he sees the gray-white creature, like an open umbrella, with thin floating membranous lips. He is perfectly capable of grabbing it and pulling out its mouth and its tentacles. Over the past few days he has learned from the children living here by the sea how to catch and preserve jellyfish. Below the windowsill of his hostel window, there are seven salted jellyfish with their tentacles and mouths pulled out. Once the water is squeezed out, all that remain are sheets of shriveled skin, and he too will be just a piece of skin, a corpse, no longer able to float to the shore. Let the thing live. But he wants to live even more, and he will never catch jellyfish again – that is, if he can return to shore – and he won’t even go into the sea again. He kicks hard, his right hand pressed against his stomach. He stops thinking about anything else, only about kicking in rhythm, evenly, as he pushes through the water. He can see the stars… they are wonderfully bright… in other words, his head is now pointing in the direction of the coast. The cramp in his abdomen has gone but he keeps rubbing it carefully, even though this slows him down…

When he emerges from the sea and comes onto the shore, the beach is completely deserted. The tide is coming in again and he thinks he was helped by the tide. The wind blowing on his bare body is colder than it had been in the seawater, and he shivers. He collapses onto the beach, but the sand is no longer warm. Getting to his feet, he immediately starts running. He’s in a hurry to tell people he’s just escaped death. In the front hall of the hostel the same group is playing poker. They are all looking intently at the faces or at the cards of their opponents, and no one bothers to look up at him. He goes back to his own room, but his roommate, who is probably still chatting in the room next door, isn’t there. He takes a towel from the windowsill, aware that the jellyfish, with a coat of salt on them and squashed under a rock outside his window, are still full of water. Afterward, he puts on fresh clothes and shoes and, feeling warm, returns alone to the beach.

Nadine Gordimer / South Africa

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991 for her work as a writer “who through her magnificent epic writing has been of very great benefit to humanity.”

Language: English.
Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages, including Italian, German, Finnish, French and Romanian.

***

The Ultimate Safari

To get there we had to go through the Kruger Park. We knew about the Kruger Park. A kind of whole country of animals – elephants, lions, jackals, hyenas, hippos, crocodiles, all kinds of animals. We had some of them in our own country, before the war (our grandfather remembers; we children weren’t born yet) but the bandits kill the elephants and sell their tusks, and the bandits and our soldiers have eaten all the buck. There was a man in our village without legs – a crocodile took them off, in our river; but all the same our country is a country of people, not animals. We knew about the Kruger Park because some of our men used to leave home to work there in the places where white people come to stay and look at the animals.

So we started to go away again. There were women and other children like me who had to carry the small ones on their backs when the women got tired. A man led us into the Kruger Park; are we there yet, are we there yet, I kept asking our grandmother. Not yet, the man said, when she asked him for me. He told us we had to take a long way to get round the fence, which he explained would kill you, roast off your skin the moment you touched it, like the wires high up on poles that give electric light in our towns. I’ve seen that sign of a head without eyes or skin or hair on an iron box at the mission hospital we used to have before it was blown up.

When I asked the next time, they said we’d been walking in the Kruger Park for an hour. But it looked just like the bush we’d been walking through all day, and we hadn’t seen any animals except the monkeys and birds which live around us at home, and a tortoise that, of course, couldn’t get away from us. My first-born brother and the other boys brought it to the man so it could be killed and we could cook and eat it. He let it go because he told us we could not make a fire; all the time we were in the Park we must not make a fire because the smoke would show we were there. Police, wardens, would come and send us back where we came from. He said we must move like animals among the animals, away from the roads, away from the white people’s camps.

And at that moment I heard – I’m sure I was the first to hear – cracking branches and the sound of something parting grasses and I almost squealed because I thought it was the police, wardens – the people he was telling us to look out for – who had found us already. And it was an elephant, and another elephant, and more elephants, big blots of dark moved wherever you looked between the trees. They were curling their trunks round the red leaves of the Mopane trees and stuffing them into their mouths. The babies leant against their mothers. The almost grown-up ones wrestled like my first-born brother with his friends – only they used trunks instead of arms. I was so interested I forgot to be afraid. The man said we should just stand still and be quiet while the elephants passed. They passed very slowly because elephants are too big to need to run from anyone.

The buck ran from us. They jumped so high they seemed to fly. The warthogs stopped dead, when they heard us, and swerved off the way a boy in our village used to zigzag on the bicycle his father had brought back from the mines. We followed the animals to where they drank. When they had gone, we went to their water-holes. We were never thirsty without finding water, but the animals ate, ate all the time. Whenever you saw them they were eating, grass, trees, roots. And there was nothing for us. The mealies were finished. The only food we could eat was what the baboons ate, dry little figs full of ants that grow along the branches of the trees at the rivers. It was hard to be like the animals.

When it was very hot during the day we would find lions lying asleep. They were the colour of the grass and we didn’t see them at first but the man did, and he led us back and a long way round where they slept. I wanted to lie down like the lions. My little brother was getting thin but he was very heavy. When our grandmother looked for me, to put him on my back, I tried not to see. My first-born brother stopped talking; and when we rested he had to be shaken to get up again, as if he was just like our grandfather, he couldn’t hear. I saw flies crawling on our grandmother’s face and she didn’t brush them off; I was frightened. I picked a palm leaf and chased them.

We walked at night as well as by day. We could see the fires where the white people were cooking in the camps and we could smell the smoke and the meat. We watched the hyenas with their backs that slope as if they’re ashamed, slipping through the bush after the smell. If one turned its head, you saw it had big brown shining eyes like our own, when we looked at each other in the dark. The wind brought voices in our own language from the compounds where the people who work in the camps live. A woman among us wanted to go to them at night and ask them to help us. They can give us the food from the dustbins, she said, she started wailing and our grandmother had to grab her and put a hand over her mouth. The man who led us had told us that we must keep out of the way of our people who worked at the Kruger Park; if they helped us they would lose their work. If they saw us, all they could do was pretend we were not there; they had seen only animals.

Wole Soyinka / Nigeria

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986 for his work as a writer “who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence.”

Language: English.
His books have been translated into more than 50 languages, including Chinese, German, French, Russian and Swedish.

***

IV

Iyaloja. (with sudden anger) I warned you, if you must leave a seed behind, be sure it is not tainted with the curses of the world. Who are you to open a new life when you dared not open the door to a new existence? I say who are you to make so bold? (The Bride sobs and Iyaloja notices her. Her contempt noticeably increases as she turns back to Elesin.) Oh you selfvaunted stem of the plantain, how hollow it all proves. The pith is gone in the parent stem, so how will it prove with the new shoot? How will it go with that earth that bears it? Who are you to bring this abomination on us!

Elesin. My powers deserted me. My charms, my spells, even my voice lacked strength when I made to summon the powers that would lead me over the last measure of earth into the land of the fleshless. You saw it, Iyaloja. You saw me struggle to retrieve my will from the power of the stranger whose shadow fell across the doorway and left me floundering and blundering in a maze I had never before encountered. My senses were numbed when the touch of cold iron came upon my wrists. I could do nothing to save myself.

Iyaloja. You have betrayed us. We fed you sweetmeats such as we hoped awaited you on the other side. But you said No, I must eat the world’s left-overs. We said you were the hunter who brought the quarry down; to you belonged the vital portions of the game. No, you said, I am the hunter’s dog and I shall eat the entrails of the game and the faeces of the hunter. We said you were the hunter returning home in triumph, a slain buffalo pressing down on his neck; you said Wait, I first must turn up this cricket hole with my toes. We said yours was the doorway at which we first spy the tapper when he comes down from the tree, yours was the blessing of the twilight wine, the purl that brings night spirits out of doors to steal their portion before the light of day. We said yours was the body of wine whose burden shakes the tapper like a sudden gust on his perch. You said, No, I am content to lick the dregs from each calabash when the drinkers are done. We said, the dew on earth’s surface was for you to wash your feet along the slopes of honour. You said No, I shall step in the vomit of cats and the droppings of mice; I shall fight them for the left-overs of the world.

Elesin. Enough Iyaloja, enough.

Iyaloja. We called you leader and oh, how you led us on. What we have no intention of eating should not be held to the nose.

Elesin. Enough, enough. My shame is heavy enough.

Iyaloja. Wait. I came with a burden.

Elesin. You have more than discharged it.

Iyaloja. I wish I could pity you.

Elesin. I need neither pity nor the pity of the world. I need understanding. Even I need to understand. You were present at my defeat. You were part of the beginnings. You brought about the renewal of my tie to earth, you helped in the binding of the cord.

Iyaloja. I gave you warning. The river which fills up before our eyes does not sweep us away in its flood.

Elesin. What were warnings beside the moist contact of living earth between my fingers? What were warnings beside the renewal of famished embers lodged eternally in the heart thousandfold temptations to linger a little while, a man could overcome it. It is when the alien hand pollutes the source of will, when a stranger force of violence shatters the mind’s calm resolution, this is when a man is made to commit the awful treachery of relief, commit in his thought the unspeakable blasphemy of seeing the hand of the gods in this alien rupture of his world. I know it was this thought that killed me, sapped my powers and turned me into an infant in the hands of unnamable strangers. I made to utter my spells anew but my tongue merely rattled in my mouth. I fingered hidden charms and the contact was damp; there was no spark left to sever the life-strings that should stretch from every finger-tip. My will was squelched in the spittle of an alien race, and all because I had committed this blasphemy of thought – that there might be the hand of the gods in a stranger’s intervention.

Iyaloja. Explain it how you will, I hope it brings you peace of mind. The bush-rat fled his rightful cause, reached the market and set up a lamentation. ‘Please save me!’ – are these fitting words to hear from an ancestral mask? ‘There’s a wild beast at my heels’ is not becoming language from a hunter.

Elesin. May the world forgive me.

Gabriel García Márquez / Colombia

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.”

Language: Spanish.
His books have been translated into more than 30 languages, including Chinese, German, French, Persian and Japanese.

***

I live without dogs or birds or servants, except for the faithful Damiana who has rescued me from the most unexpected difficulties, and who still comes once a week to take care of whatever there is to do, even in the state she is in, losing her sight and her acumen. My mother on her deathbed asked me to marry a fair-skinned woman while I was young and have at least three children, one of them a girl with her name, which had also been her mother’s and grandmother’s. I intended to comply with her request, but my notion of youth was so flexible I never thought it was too late. Until one hot afternoon when I opened the wrong door in the house of the Palomar de Castro family in Pradomar and saw Ximena Ortiz, the youngest of the daughters, naked as she took her siesta in the adjoining bedroom. She was lying with her back to the door, and she turned to look at me over her shoulder with a gesture so rapid it didn’t give me time to escape. Oh, excuse me, I managed to say, my heart in my mouth. She smiled, turned toward me with a grace of a gazelle, and showed me her entire body. The whole room felt saturated with her intimacy. Her nakedness was not absolute, for like Manet’s Olympia, behind her ear she had a poisonous flower with orange petals, and she wore a gold bangle on her right wrist and a necklace of tiny pearls. I imagined I would never see anything more exciting for as long as I lived, and today I can confirm that I was right.

I slammed the door shut, embarrassed by my blundering and determined to forget her. But Ximena Ortiz prevented that. She sent me messages with mutual friends, provocative notes, brutal threats, while she spread the rumor that we were mad with love for each other though we hadn’t exchanged a word. She was impossible to resist. She had the eyes of a wildcat, a body provocative with clothes as without, and luxuriant hair of uproarious gold whose woman’s smell made me weep with rage into my pillow. I knew it would never turn into love, but the satanic attraction she held for me was so fiery that I attempted to find relief with every green-eyed tart I came across. I never could put out the flame of her memory in the bed at Pradomar, and so I surrendered my weapons to her with a formal request for her hand, an exchange of rings, and the announcement of a large wedding before Pentecost.

The news exploded with greater impact in Barrio Chino than in the social clubs. At first it was met with derision, but this changed into absolute vexation on the part of those erudite women who viewed my marriage as a condition more ridiculous than sacred. My engagement satisfied all the rituals of Christian morality on the terrace, with its Amazonian orchids and hanging ferns, of my fiancée’s house. I would arrive at seven in the evening dressed all in white linen, with a gift of handcrafted beads or Swiss chocolates, and we would talk, half in code and half in seriousness, until ten, watched over by Aunt Argenida, who fell asleep in the blink of an eye, like chaperones in the novels of the day.

Ximena became more voracious the better we got to know each other, she would loosen her bodices and petticoats as the sultry heat of June increased, and it was easy to imagine the devastating power she would have in the dark. After two months of being engaged we had nothing left to talk about, and without saying anything she brought up the subject of children by crocheting little boots for newborns from raw wool. I, the agreeable fiancé, learned to crochet with her, and in this way we passed the useless hours until the wedding. I crocheted little blue booties for boys and she crocheted pink ones for girls, we’d see who guessed right, until there were enough for more than fifty babies. Before the clock struck ten, I would climb into a horse-drawn carriage and go to the Barrio Chino to live my night in the peace of God.

The tempestuous farewells to bachelorhood that they gave me in the Barrio Chino were the opposite of the oppressive evenings at the Social Club. A contrast that helped me find out which of the two worlds in reality was mine, and I hoped that both were, each at its proper time, because from either one I would watch the other moving away with the heartrending sighs of two ships passing at sea. On the night before the wedding, the dance at El Poder de Dios included a final ceremony that could have occurred only to a Galician priest foundering in concupiscence, who dressed the entire female staff in veils and orange blossoms so that all of them would marry me in universal sacrament. It was a night of great sacrileges in which twenty-two women promised love and obedience and I reciprocated with fidelity and support for as long as we lived.

I could not sleep because of a presentiment of something irremediable. In the middle of the night I began to count the passage of the hours on the cathedral clock, until the seven dreadful bells when I was supposed to be at the church. The telephone began to ring at eight, long, tenacious, unpredictable rings for more than an hour. Not only did I not answer: I did not breathe. A little before ten someone knocked at the door, first a fist pounding and then the shouting of voices I knew and despised. I was afraid they would push down the door in some serious mishap, but by eleven the house was left in the bristling silence that follows great catastrophes. Then I wept for her and for me, and I prayed with all my heart never to see her again in all my days. Some saint half-heard me, because Ximena Ortiz left the country that same night and did not return until twenty years later, married and with seven children who could have been mine.

***

ARCHITECTS

Wang Shu / China

According to the 2012 Pritzker Prize jury, the architecture of laureate Wang Shu “opens new horizons [and] resonates with place and memory. His buildings have the unique ability to evoke the past, without making direct references to history.”

Ningbo Museum, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, eastern China

Paulo Mendes da Rocha / Brazil

Awarding him the Pritzker Prize in 2006, the judges said that Paulo Mendes da Rocha, “inspired by the principles and language of modernism, as well as through his bold use of simple materials, has over the past six decades produced buildings with a deep understanding of the poetics of space. He modifies the landscape and space with his architecture, striving to meet both social and aesthetic human needs.”

Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, Brazil

Zaha Hadid / Iraq

The jury citation for the 2004 Pritzker Prize says of winner Zaha Hadid’s architecture: “Each new project is more audacious than the last and the sources of her originality seem endless.”

Zaha Hadid Architects has created more than 950 projects in 44 countries, including Azerbaijan, China, Italy, Morocco, Singapore, the UAE, the UK and the USA.

MAXXI — Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, Italy

Galaxy Soho complex, Beijing, China

***

DIRECTORS

Asghar Farhadi / Iran

Farhadi won an Oscar in 2012 for A Separation (‘Jodái-e Náder az Simin’ in Persian). International box office takings were $24.4 million, and it was released in 51 countries, including Argentina, China, Poland, Russia, Spain and the USA.

The film won 60 other awards, including the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, César Award for Best Foreign Film, and two Asian Film Awards for Best Film and Best Director, all in 2012.

Juan José Campanella / Argentina

Campanella’s The Secret in Their Eyes (‘El secreto de sus ojos’ in Spanish) won an Oscar in 2010, and took $34 million at the international box office. The film was released in 41 countries, including Brazil, France, Spain, Russia and the USA.

It won 49 awards in total, including a Goya Award in 2010 for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film, two Awards of the Argentinean Academy in 2009 for Best Film and Best Director, and the Cinema Brazil Grand Prize in 2011 for Best Foreign-Language Film.

Gavin Hood / South Africa

Gavin Hood took home an Oscar in 2006 for Tsotsi, which was released in 33 countries, including Austria, Poland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and the UK. International box office takings totalled
$7.9 million.

Tsotsi won 14 other awards, including the 2005 AFI Fest Audience Award for Best Feature Film.

Danis Tanovic´ / Bosnia and Herzegovina

Tanovic´’s No Man’s Land (‘Nicˇija zemlja’ in Bosnian) won an Oscar in 2002, grossing $4.86 million at the international box office. It was screened in 35 countries, including France, Poland, Slovenia, Spain and Turkey.

The film won 32 awards, including the 2002 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and a César Award for Best First Work of Fiction in the same year.

Ang Lee / Taiwan

Ang Lee was awarded an Oscar in 2001 for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (‘Wòhuˇ Cánglóng’ in Mandarin). It was released in 46 countries, including Argentina, Estonia, Greece, Spain and Turkey, and grossed $213.5 million internationally.

The film won 92 awards in total, including two Golden Globes in 2001 for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Director, a BAFTA Film Award the same year for Best Film not in the English Language, and the 2001 David Lean Award for Direction.

Nikita Mikhalkov / Russia

Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun (‘Utomlyonnye solntsem’ in Russian) won an Oscar in 1995.
It took $2.3 million in the USA, but was also released in 20 other countries, including France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Spain.

The film won 4 awards, including the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix du Jury in 1994.

Luis Puenzo / Argentina

Luis Puenzo took home an Oscar in 1986 for The Official Story (‘La historia oficial’ in Spanish), which made $29,426 at the US box office. It was released in 11 other countries, including Argentina, France and Turkey.

The Official Story won 4 awards, including the 1986 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, and a Berlin International Film Festival Interfilm Award (Otto Dibelius Film Award).

Vladimir Menshov / USSR

Vladimir Menshov’s Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (‘Moskva slezam ne verit’
in Russian) won an Oscar in 1981. It was released in 16 countries, including
Australia, Japan, Turkey and the USA.

The film recently won another prize: the 2009 MTV Movie Award for Best Soviet Movie.