After the Hurricane(72)
He began having fun. Education had always been about survival, improving his existence, a platform to good jobs, a better future. This was joy, this was argument for the sake of itself, this was academic rabbit holes he could fall into and climb out of. He and his fellow students smoked pot and talked about Russian intelligence and Greek philosophy, they talked about the war, they talked about the very concept of peace.
Santiago’s confidence didn’t just get him noticed by women. In the second semester of his second year of college, he met the second teacher he would have who would change his life forever. His Spanish teacher, Javier Rojas, a man in his late sixties from La Paz who wore half-moon spectacles and was forever mocking Santiago’s sloppy noun endings, pulled him aside after class one day and handed him a novel whose cover was in Spanish.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude?” Santiago translated. “What is this?”
“I went home this winter for Christmas. First time I’ve been back for five years.” Professor Rojas had a roundabout way of addressing things, and he liked to wax eloquently before getting to any real point. His Spanish was flawless—every other Spanish professor, all natives to the language, commented on it—his accent impeccable and cleansed of all Bolivian lilt, so Santiago didn’t mind waiting.
“That sounds nice,” Santiago said, patiently.
“This book is everywhere. I picked up a copy, it’s the first by a new author.”
“I thought you only read things from the Golden Age?” Santiago said, pushing his luck with a joke. Professor Rojas was a humorless man, who didn’t respond well to teasing. He looked Santiago up and down, his mustache twitching like the whiskers on an irritated cat.
“Normally I do. But I was curious. My niece liked it, and she hates everything.”
“I guess you didn’t enjoy it much, if you are giving it to me,” Santiago said, carefully enunciating each noun and adjective ending.
“It is because I loved it so much that I am giving it to you.” Santiago looked up, stunned. He had not thought Professor Rojas liked him at all, let alone enough to give him a present. “You are the only student in this class who is Hispanic. Have you noticed that?” Santiago nodded. Of course he had. “I would imagine, growing up in this country, that you have never read anything by a Latin American author, much less a current one.” Santiago nodded again, thinking. It was true. He had read the words of French and English and American writers, mostly men. He had read Russians and Canadians, and endless parades of Greeks. He had read more work from before the twentieth century than during it.
“This is worth reading. And there is a lot more worth reading, as well. And not just from Spain. There are writers from every Spanish-speaking country and they are good, great, even. Writing about real things, things that matter to us today. Not chivalric ideas from five hundred years ago,” Professor Rojas said, sternly. Then he leaned in, and touched Santiago on the shoulder. “When I was growing up, they gave us Dickens, and Shakespeare, and Balzac, all translated into Spanish, and they told us this was what was great. Well, it is great. But the mistake is thinking, believing, that it is all that is great. That greatness only lives in one place. That we have not also achieved some greatness. They will make you as small as they can. They will use books and history to do so. They will make you feel like you do not belong here, that you come from people who have done nothing of note. You must remember, son, that you come from people who have done great things, with their hands tied behind their backs, and their eyes burned out of their skulls. We have done great things despite the harm done to us, then and now. And we will keep doing them, keep writing great stories. But how can we expect anyone else to read them, to respect them, if we ourselves do not?”
“Professor?” Santiago was stunned. The man looked like he was about to cry. Professor Rojas wiped his eyes, looking self-conscious. Santiago looked away, giving him all the privacy he could.
“Read the book. If you like it, I will bring you more. You won’t know all the terms he uses, even I didn’t know them. But you will learn. He’s something else, this Márquez. Mark my words.”
Santiago devoured the novel. It made complete sense to him, even though the professor had been right, he did not know all the vocabulary, but he understood it. It showed life the way Santiago had lived it, as absurd, but also as honest; it was the truest thing he had ever read in his life. And Professor Rojas did bring him more: he brought him Borges and Neruda, Alejo Carpentier and Carlos Fuentes. These novels set his brain on fire, they electrified him. He saw the way economic and social injustice rolled through Latin American life like it had haunted his own. He read Castro’s speeches and shook at the brutalities of Trujillo, he traced the path of Bolívar’s armies on a map with his index finger and studied the writings of José de San Martín. He decided that the world changed under the leadership of two kinds of men, soldiers and lawyers. He had no interest in the army. It would have to be law.
By the fall of his third year of college, Santiago felt that he had become the person he would be for the rest of his life. He did not go home the summer before, but instead he worked in San Francisco. His mother had had another incident in the spring of 1970. Esperanza had stopped taking her pills, hiding them in her cheek, and once she shook off the lingering sedative effects, she escaped her mother’s housing project, had gotten lost for four days, and was found in Battery Park screaming at the river for its betrayal of its mother, the sea. No one in his family had a way to contact Santiago, and so he only found out that she had been admitted to Bellevue once again when he’d called, several weeks later, to wish her a happy birthday. She had been put on a treatment program of electroshock therapy and heavy antipsychotics, and he had been informed by his grandmother that the doctor was doubtful Esperanza would ever be able to live outside of the asylum again, she simply could not function in the real world. Esperanza had told her own mother that the medicine made her blind to everything she wanted to see, and it had to be forced down her throat in order for her to swallow it. She was thirty-nine years old. He knew then that he would not be returning to New York, not ever. He would not admit it until years later, would tell people he planned to go back, but he knew in his heart that the city had died for him, that it was over. New York would be the place of his childhood, the place where his mother lived. There was nothing left for him there. He could leave it behind, and had, he thought. It did not need to touch him, to pull at him, anymore.