“Amirbaaar, Amirbaaar,” called the wind. And Amirbar calls a reader to join Maqroll the Gaviero on an adventure that takes him down into the labyrinth of an abandoned gold mine; no, make that more than one gold mine. But beware – there’s delirium and madness afoot with echoes of “Tis the wind and nothing more!”
Amirbar as spell; Amirbar as charm; Amirbar as incantation. Like a powerful, irresistible drug - Amirbar. The Gaviero says he spent the strangest days of his life in Amirbar.
For us as readers, it all starts when the tale’s narrator, a friend of Maqroll, finds him in a dumpy Los Angeles model room run by the Gaviero’s longtime acquaintances, Yosip and Jalina, an Arab couple. The globetrotting adventurer is violently ill, trembling, staring in agony and desperation with wild-looking eyes. After finally winning Maqroll’s reluctant consent, the narrator arranges for him to be taken to a hospital to receive treatment and thereafter to his brother Leopoldo’s house for some needed rest.
It's on the patio of his brother's in Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles, at night, relaxing, over bourbon and port, that Maqroll the Gaviero relates his tale.
For such a story that acts like a secretive drug comparable to Maqroll’s describing the gold mines as secretive drug, a linerar synopsis of events seems hardly appropriate. Thus, as if holding up gold nuggets for inspection, I’ll share several happenings and leave it to a reader to judge what can be considered dream, intoxication, hallucination or sheer madness.
Maqroll’s first contact with an alien world, a world of fantasy, is with a gold mine by the name of The Hummer, first excavated by Germans (the dark romanticism of E. T. A. Hoffmann and the tragic dreams of Heinrich von Kleist come to mind). The Gaviero is told by an old-timer who’s done lots of prospecting that what is needed when looking for gold is a cool head since any man who looks for gold always ends up half-crazy. He persists and Dora Estela, a kindly waitress, offers some advice: her brother Eulogio, an honest man who doesn’t talk much, can serve as a guide.
So Maqroll and Eulogio set out. Maqroll sees a mine as similar to a ship in that each holds dark mysteries and corpses. Maqroll the sea wolf, seeking escape from the monotony of land and the ambushes of fate, first by setting out on the seas and then by descending down to the underworld of a gold mine. Oh, Maqroll, do you wish to weigh life’s mysteries the way one weighs gold?
A discovery in The Hummer: “Eulogio brought the light close to the walls, revealing human skeletons in improbable positions. Ochre-colored rags, impossible to identity, hung from the bones. It was easy to distinguish the women because of the shreds of skirt clinging to their legs. Skeletons of children lay at the feet of the women.” And some days later, while Eulogio is off to the city to sell gold, he is brutally beaten and tortured by soldiers. So much senseless violence perpetrated against peasants and poor people – and many times committed by the police and military, the so called “protectors.” Another type of madness.
There’s a second gold mine – Maqroll and Eulogio give it a name: Amirbar. “Gradually I came to realize that I lived only in the mine, where the walls seep moisture from another world, where the deceptive gleam of the most worthless fragment of mica could carry me to the heights of delirium.”
Our Gaviero is told by Dora Estela that the gold curse is lifted if he’s with a woman and does it with love. Enter Antonia, the young exotic beauty with vaguely Indian features. Maqroll and Antonia, side by side, work the gold mine. Maqroll merges with Antonia in a way not entirely natural: Maqroll merges with Amirbar in a way not entirely natural. Wherein lies the difference? Where will it all lead when a head loses its cool? Again, each reader can judge where the madness ends and sanity begins, if it begins at all.
The narrator returns and concludes with: Appendix: The Gaviero’s Reading. He relays some of Maqroll’s favorite authors and books, including how the Gaviero considered Céline the best writer in France since Chateaubriand but the best novelist in France - definitely Georges Simenon. And just so happens Maqroll was carrying a Simenon novel at the time, Lock No. 1. Well, that’s a fresh breath of clearheaded thinking! Being a big Georges Simenon fan myself, I very much enjoyed this ending to Amirbar.
Columbian author Álvaro Mutis, 1923-2013
“A strange fever began to take hold of me, coming in waves during the day and staying at night to fill my dreams with a procession of recurrent, obsessive imagines. The poisonous delirium of the mines was manifesting its first symptoms.” - Álvaro Mutis, Amirbar
Comments
Post a Comment