The adventures and misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis

Author:Alvaro Mutis
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

AMIRBAR

To the memory of my grandfather

JERONIMO JARAMILLO URIBE,

who once prospected for gold along the Coello River in El Tolima

La vie n’est qu’une succession de defaites. Il y a de belles fagades—il en a de pires. Mais derriere les belles, presque autant que derriere les pires, la defaite, toujours la defaite et encore la defaite— ce qui n’empeche pas de chanter victoire, car au fond I’homme n’est reellement vaincu que par la mort—mais encore, uniquement parce qu’elle lui ote tout moyen de proclamer contre 1’evidence qu’il ne 1’est pas. Alors, il s’est fait meme un allie de la mort et il compte beaucoup sur elle pour lui donner toute la gloire que lui a refuse la vie.

Pierre Reverdy,

LE LIVRE DE MON BORD

... because women in the mines seem to be the work of the devil and because it has been proven that there is no profit in having them work there. On the contrary, the jealousy and violence which occur on their account are a great danger to everyone.

Shamuel de Corcega,

A TRUE HISTORY OF THE MINES WHERE THE JEWS TOILED TO NO AVAIL IN THE MOUNTAINS OF AXARTEL

(Seller, Mallorca: Imprenta Capmany, 1776) 1 SPENT the strangest days of my life in Amirbar. In Amirbar I left shreds of my soul and most of the energy that fired my youth. Perhaps I came down from there more serene, I don’t know, but I was everlastingly weary too. What happened to me since then has been a matter of simply surviving each day’s difficulties. Trivialities. Not even the ocean could give back to me my vocation for dreaming with my eyes open; I used that up in Amirbar and received nothing in return. ”

I was bemused by Maqroll the Gaviero’s words. He had never been a man given to confidences of this kind. On the contrary, he always had favored the direct narration of his wanderings, drawing no conclusions and deriving no moral, and this evocation of his days in Amirbar awakened unusual curiosity in me. Debilitated and exhausted by the long treatment he had been obliged to undergo in order to control the malaria that was killing him, the Gaviero had allowed these words to escape, creating an opening that revealed a hidden world of defeats over which he normally exercised inflexible vigilance. We were sitting in the sun on the patio of my brother Leopoldo’s house in Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley, at the height of the transparent, interminable California summer. His words obviously signaled a desire to open the floodgates of memories that for some reason he had jealously guarded until now. In the course of our friendship, he had often enjoyed narrating episodes of his life, but he had never mentioned Amirbar, and at the time I did not know what the name referred to.

In the weeks that followed, as he regained enough strength to travel to the Peruvian coast, he told us about his experiences as a

gold prospector in the cordillera, and the wreckage of his glorious plans in the intricate galleries of Amirbar.

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