Augusto Monterroso - Complete Works and Other Stories

But the situation must be examined more thoroughly.

If in the next general census we manage to come up with two hundred first-rate brains in Latin America, meritorious brains willing to be seduced by the vain temptations of foreign money, we should consider ourselves fortunate, for the time has come to view matters objectively and recognize that our economies will remain in their present deplorable state as long as we continue to export only tin or agave.

The brain is a raw material like any other. It either has to be sent abroad to be refined so that it can return to us one day as a finished product, or we have to transform it ourselves; but unfortunately, as in so many other areas, our equipment is either obsolete, or second-rate, or simply nonexistent.

Since someone might assume that everything said so far has been said in jest, it is worth offering a few examples.

For each cluster of bananas that Guatemala exports, she earns one and a half cents, paid in taxes by the United Fruit Company, and especially useful to the government in maintaining the social stability and police-imposed order that make it possible to produce another cluster of bananas without interference. True, thousands of clusters are exported every year, but it must also be recognized that aside from order, and not taking into account the depletion of the soil on which this crop is raised, the benefits have been fairly meager. What a difference when a brain is exported! It is evident that exporting the brain of Miguel Angel Asturias has brought notable benefits to Guatemala, including a Nobel Prize. Although many other brains have left the country, as far as anyone can tell they have not made a single crack in the nation’s structure; on the contrary, the country seems better off without them and is making more progress than ever.

Where, then, should we direct our energies? To producing bananas or brains? For anyone with even minimal use of his own, the answer is obvious.

Let us consider another example.

During the Second World War, and in the years following that conflict, Mexico exported considerable numbers of manual laborers. Although there were some at the time who challenged, on humanitarian grounds, the advantages of this export, or arm drain, the truth is that each one of these laborers contributed an average of three hundred dollars a year to the country by sending money home to their families. Today no one can deny that these remittances were a significant factor in solving the hard currency problems that Mexico faced in recent years, making possible the impressive economic development she enjoys today. If this was achieved through the contributions of simple, humble, generally illiterate campesinos, imagine what the annual export of 26,000 brains would mean. The salary differential between the two groups is close to astronomical. Again we must pose the question: Which is the better export, an arm or a brain?

Let us define the problem, or the false problem, with absolute clarity.

1. No one is taking our brains away; if they are, it is on a very small scale. Whenever they can, our brains simply leave, in most cases because consumption in Latin America is still far from significant.

2. On the whole, our history proves that a fleeing brain is generally more beneficial to the nation than one that remains at home. Joyce did more for Irish literature in Switzerland than he did in Dublin; Marx was more useful to German workers in London than he was in his own country; it is very likely that if Martí had not lived in the United States and in other countries, the Cuban Revolution would not have had so great an ideologue; Andrés Bello transformed Spanish grammar in England; Rubén Darío did the same for Spanish poetry in France; and I would prefer not to mention Einstein and the atomic bomb. Isolated cases? Perhaps, but what cases they are. If Latin America thinks it currently has twenty brains like these, and does not permit them to escape, it will be taking foolish risks with its future.

3. Then there are the exiles. The only positive contribution that the dictatorial governments of Latin America have made to the region is their expulsion of brains. At times they err in good faith and expel many that do not deserve it; but when they get it right and exile a good brain, they do more for their country than the Benefactors of Culture who turn local talents into national monuments incapable of saying more than one or two sentences that do not bear a dangerous resemblance to clichés, or, at best, to the kind of braying that never offends anyone and sometimes can even make twilight more beautiful.

Finally, if it is true that this concern is well founded, then, as so often happens, the solution lies at hand and no one can see it, perhaps because it conflicts with our economic preconceptions: Let us import two brains for each one we export.

Alejandro Pareja, an Ecuadorian; Julio Alberto Restrepo, a Colombian; Julio Alberto Murena, an Argentinian; Carlos Rodríguez, a Venezuelan, each living outside his respective country for political reasons, and Federico Larrain, a Chilean and a simple, sentimental traveler, met on January 22, 1964, at ten thirty at night in a Panama City bar, or whatever it is called, where they discovered by sheer coincidence that they were all poets, that they all admired Dylan Thomas, and that together they knew and could do practically everything. Inspired by some of the worst beer in the world, they remembered or discovered some other things, namely that the New York World’s Fair was to open in April, that (at about three o’clock) the five of them had enough money to buy a used car, and (close to dawn), for reasons that will be seen later, they should at all costs be in that city on the day of the opening. Then they went to sleep. A week later they had the car, and despite their clouded political records and the fact that they were poets — better or worse than most is not at issue — they also had the tourist permits they needed to head for what would later be called the Iron Babel by the Nicaraguan officer who detained them. They spent little time in Costa Rica because of the ashes erupting from the volcano Irazu; in Nicaragua, logically enough, they were entertained noisily by friends of the poet Ernesto Cardenal and, with more reserve, by General Chamorro Lugo, director of one of the police units, who, after four and a half hours of dialogue, when he was worn out by cleverly quarreling with them about various subjects relating to his Metapensan countryman and, one might say, protected by his father Rubén Darío whose works he proved he knew by heart, sent them with sufficient brutality and escorts to the Honduran border, not without first confessing that as the great man’s compatriot he would always think of himself as a friend of Plato and of poetry, but would think even more of his difficult duty; something similar happened to them in Honduras, but Restrepo cleverly softened and even saved the situation by declaring himself a close relative and of course an admirer of the poet Porfirio Barba Jacob, of beloved memory in that country, and by vigorously praising the pines, to which extremes the police chiefs always respond with enthusiasm and sensitivity; in El Salvador, miraculously enough, they were not bothered by any kind of police, but they did receive a surprise visit from a strange man whom the authorities and most of the writers still at liberty persecuted with enthusiasm after those same authorities and writers had awarded him a prize for one of the best short-story collections produced in the country after Salarrué’s, but even though they sympathized with him, they never found out whether or not their strange visitor was crazy, since all he did was to laugh at his persecutors; in Guatemala, of course, they were also detained by the police, although to tell the truth it was only because guerrillas had just shot and killed some blood-stained policeman or other as he was driving down a street in the capital, except that here the Chief of the Guards or whoever he was, after the necessary interrogations and with the refined hypocrisy of those people, said that they could continue their trip, that he was a great friend of poetry and of Plato, and that he hated with all his soul this cross (his job, you understand) with which God and the government wanted to punish him; in Mexico they attended a continental conference of poets where there were fewer declarations of friendship for Plato and poetry and none at all for their colleagues (which did not seem very surprising to them) but where they nevertheless had a wonderful time talking in the sumptuous Journalists’ Club and reading their poems to each other in the most beautiful park in the city. Once in New York, where they joyously arrived on April 21, the opening day of the Fair, they wasted no time in going to Greenwich Village — more precisely to 557 Hudson Street, the location of the White Horse Tavern where the aforementioned Dylan Thomas was in the habit of getting drunk day after day (a tavern that certainly should not be confused with Woody’s Bar and Grill, where Thomas drank the desolation of the eighteen straight and final whiskies that took him directly to delirium tremens and from there to St. Vincent’s Hospital at Eleventh Street and Seventh Avenue, and from there to the grave — a bar, incidentally, that has since been torn down but in its glory days stood at the corner of Sixth Avenue, also known as Avenue of the Americas, and Ninth Street — and, prior to their ceremonial libation in memory of the poet, they asked permission of the bartender, who turned out to be a friend of Plato, poetry, and of course, poor Dylan, to place in some corner of the establishment a small leather plaque commemorating this simple act of homage to the poet, which was agreed to and effected, and then they paid for their drinks with good cheer and began their trip out of the city, not without first declaring unequivocably to the reporter1 and photographer2 who invariably happen to be in the right place at the right time that their homage would consist not only of this, but of leaving the city and the country immediately, refusing in particular to set foot in anything that might possibly resemble any world’s fair anywhere in the world, but especially one in New York, a city that surely deserved better luck, all of which, illustrated with two photographs, can be read in greater detail in the literary magazine Endymion, no. 32, May — June, 1964, 14ff., which Walter Alcott and Louis Uppermeyer, friends not only of Plato and poetry but also of the truth, published with great difficulty eight years ago in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.