Gringos Confused : Latin World Fact, Fiction Tend to Blur

BUENOS AIRES — Hearing that a former provincial governor named Luis Cruz had died, the Argentine Senate rose to praise him.

Senator followed senator in flowery procession until all the major parties had paid tribute to Cruz. A steadfast “workman of democracy,” one grieving legislator called him.

Two hours later, a message arrived from Cruz. Thanks for the memories, he told the senators from a hospital bed, but it might be best to wait a bit.

Doubtless there are places on this inconstant Earth where death and taxes may be counted as certainties. Latin America is not one of them. Only the flat-footed pay up, and even death can be a relative thing through the Latin American looking glass.

Reality Is Unreal

As successive generations of North Americans learn, to their amazement and often to their chagrin, reality south of the Rio Grande rarely matches an outsider’s conception of what is real.

Reality and fiction, fact and fantasy whirl in kaleidoscopic tumult until at times they become indistinguishable. The startling is commonplace; the bizarre, routine. Latin America seems to be trapped in a quixotic dimension, a wonderland where the skies are filled with planes that do not fly, the air shrieks with the ringing of phones that do not work, and everybody understands but the gringos.

In the last two years, four Latin American countries--Peru, Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia--have changed their currencies. One--Haiti--has changed its flag. Argentina and Peru have announced that they will move their capital cities to provincial backwaters.

In Bolivia, one night last July, dinner for three cost 43,050,000 pesos, including tax and tip--about $22. In Ecuador, where a bygone dictator wore a bemedaled uniform to his own wake, at which he was seated on the presidential throne, the incumbent president calls his pistol “my best friend” and never leaves home without it.

Squash-Playing Convict

In Argentina, a few months after being sentenced to life in prison for human rights abuses, a former member of a governing junta was pictured in a magazine nattily dressed in gym shorts on his way to the squash court at the military garrison where he was being held.

In Cuba, when President Fidel Castro goes skin diving, the navy provides not only rocket-armed patrol boats to watch over him but sometimes a submarine as well.

In El Salvador, where a dictator once draped street lamps with red paper to ward off an epidemic of scarlet fever, a 1980s reporter newly arrived to cover a war saw clowns from a fly-blown traveling circus washing an elephant named Bambi on a downtown street before he ever encountered a soldier, much less a guerrilla.

While American critics applaud the “magical realism” that so distinguishes modern Latin American literature, some of its practitioners argue that surrealism is not just an important facet of Latin America, but its underpinning.

Accepting the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature with a lecture entitled “The Solitude of Latin America,” Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez noted the impact on foreigners of “the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend.”

Such “outsized reality,” Garcia Marquez cautioned, is not a literary convention “but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty. . . .”

“Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels all being creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This is the crux of our solitude.”

Colombia’s master of fantastical fiction was only saying what Latin Americans are born knowing: that anything is believable, that life is one big surprise, unsurprisingly.

Who’s Crazy Around Here?

In Peru, for example, where beating is the historic means of extracting criminal confessions, the Lima police unexpectedly turned over a suspected serial murderer to a psychologist who had lectured on the criminal mind at the police academy. The psychologist examined the suspect, became convinced of his guilt and strangled him in an interrogation room at police headquarters.

As the ranting killer was led away by his nonplussed former students, the local association of psychologists hurriedly pointed out that he was not really a psychologist. A few days after his funeral, new evidence conclusively demonstrated the strangled suspect’s innocence.

The story is told in northern Argentina of a company pilot, preoccupied with plans for his wife’s birthday party, who forgot to lower his landing gear and totaled the plane. He walked away without a scratch, but on his way to the party his car was struck by a train. The pilot escaped with minor cuts and bruises, but friends took him to a hospital anyway. There the staff marveled at his good luck and gave him a precautionary tetanus shot. He died a few minutes later in reaction to the shot.

Seers and Witches

In Latin America, the eerie is everyday. Seers, healers, witch doctors, fortune tellers, mediums, soothsayers, witches and warlocks far outnumber Roman Catholic priests. Often, an important if quiet part of their business comes from the educated and well-to-do, people others might think should know better.

When Mae Menininha do Gantois, leader of an African spiritualist cult called candomble, died recently at the age of 92, it saddened the entire Brazilian Northeast, which knew her as mae de santo, or high priestess.

In the words of Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado, a mae de santo “is like a chief of state for her community, a queen who has power not even a dictator possesses, a mother in the complete sense of (the) term.” Amado’s own spiritualist beliefs survived a long flirtation with communism and flourish alongside his current affection for social democracy.

Mayors, governors, senators and would-be politicians of every persuasion, candomble believers all, lined up to make the sign of the cross over Mae Menininha’s coffin at her Catholic funeral.

Running the Gamut

Roberto Da Matta, an urban anthropologist at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, said: “Latin Americans are an inclusive people. In Sao Paulo, there are modern, dynamic business executives who are practicing Catholics and practice African spiritualism. They have psychoanalysts and astrologers. There is no contradiction.”

A Chilean matron said on learning that her husband’s longtime mistress had developed cancer: “Good, that must have been from when I was going to the witch doctor. I must go back.”

Latin America abounds with questions that should not be asked:

Why is the cow painted on the roof of a chapel at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Buenos Aires reading a Bible? Why must the passports of dogs leaving Uruguay include a noseprint?

And it abounds with truths that must not be told:

After the armed forces used heavy explosives to quell a riot by Maoist guerrilla prisoners in a Lima prison, the state television showed the resulting devastation to the strains of Anton Dvorak’s “New World Symphony.” Six months and any number of investigations later, there is still no official death toll.

Geographic Oddities

Latin America dwells unabashedly with dazzling geographic eccentricity:

Chile’s Easter Island, in the South Pacific, is on New York time, although it is closer to Honolulu than to Manhattan.

The Argentine Communist Party shares its downtown headquarters building here with Pierre Cardin.

When the foreign ministers and finance ministers of Latin America’s most-indebted nations met to complain that they could not pay, they chose as a venue the most exclusive hotel in South America’s best seaside resort.

Latin America echoes with the impact of events that have not occurred:

In its coverage of municipal elections last month, a Peruvian television station announced that Enrique Zileri, a prominent magazine editor, was en route to the studio to analyze the results.

“It’s amazing how many people called this morning to say they agreed with what I said on TV,” Zileri marveled the next day.

“Sorry I missed it,” a friend murmured politely.

“You didn’t. I never went,” Zileri replied.

Latin America is often an actor in a drama no writer would dare to contrive:

Last year, as Brazil ended two decades of military dictatorship, President-elect Tancredo Neves fell mortally ill on the eve of his inauguration. Jose Sarney, a long-time supporter of military government who was a compromise choice for vice president and who everybody, including himself, expected to drift anonymously in Neves’ shadow, was informed at 3 a.m. that he would take the oath as president six hours later.

Hypochondriac Poet

Sarney is not only a shrewd politician and a prolific poet but, as everybody in Brazil knows, he is also a distinguished hypochondriac who doses himself daily with a rainbow selection of pills and asks every passing doctor to take his blood pressure.

The president of Latin America’s largest country is so superstitious that he will leave a room only through the door by which he enters it. He says his guardian angel waits for him at the threshold. Sarney also refuses to have stuffed animals or Indian artifacts in the house and will not wear brown suits.

Sarney’s quirks, routinely reported by the Brazilian press, might destroy the career of an American politician if they were publicly known, but in Brazil they have only beneficial impact.

‘He’s Like Everybody Else’

“There is no reason for him to hide any of his eccentricities,” anthropologist Da Matta said. “They simply show that he’s like everybody else in Brazil.”

As Garcia Marquez and other students of “outsized reality” point out, life in Latin America has been ever thus.

A giant Patagonian Indian, shown a mirror by a member of Magellan’s crew on the first round-the-world journey, lost his senses in terror at his own image.

A Spanish explorer set out with 600 men to find El Dorado in northern Mexico. Eight years later, five tattered survivors came back, having eaten their friends. Four centuries later, Uruguayan victims of a plane wreck survived a winter in the high Andes by eating their friends.

Mysteries wrapped in the icy heights of the Andes and the steamy depths of the Amazon invite South American fantasy.

On a chill morning in 16th-Century Peru, 11,000 mules, each loaded with 100 pounds of gold, set off from Cuzco to ransom an Inca king. They were never seen again.

Dead or Alive?

In those same mountains today, guerrilla descendants of the Incas--Maoists--kill for a renegade middle-class university professor who believes he is the world’s only living Marxist. Sendero Luminoso founder Abimael Guzman is Peru’s most wanted man, but he vanished eight years ago as totally as the Inca treasure. No one knows for sure if he is dead or alive.

In Latin America, even immortality can be illusory. Earlier in this century, city fathers in Cuzco, once the capital of the Inca Empire, ordered the statue of an Inca from a factory in the United States, which knew Indians but not Incas. For years, the main plaza in Cuzco was dominated by a steely-eyed Apache, or perhaps a Comanche.

The statue described as that of a Central American patriot, Gen. Francisco Morazan, in the main square of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, is actually that of the Napoleonic commander Marshal Michel Ney. Novelist Garcia Marquez says it was bought in a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures.

As for death in the bittersweet Latin American wonderland, where each year more children die before their first birthday than are born in Europe, the former governor Cruz may have laughed when he learned of the legislators’ premature elegies, but two weeks later he was dead in fact. The Argentine Senate had no comment.