Like Cervantes, Álvaro Mutis (1923-2013) wanted poetry to open the doors of Parnassus for him. And, like Cervantes, he too is immortal because of a novel character, the wandering sailor Maqroll el Gaviero. Thus, or simply as the Gaviero (from topsail or top, the highest point of observation of the ships), he appears in all the poems and in the seven novels that he wrote about this disenchanted Alonso Quijano with salt in his veins.
If Don Quixote lived mad and died sane, obsessed by knight-errantry, Gaviero lived sane and died mad, obsessed by the sea and transhumance. Not even that comet of letters called Gabriel García Márquez overshadowed this other Colombian, whose birth is one hundred years old on Friday. The reissue of Companies and Tribulations by Maqroll el Gaviero, the compilation of his novels, is the lightning that does not stop.
The first publisher to publish Maqroll in its entirety was Siruela, in two volumes, in 1993. The last, the hydra from Penguin Random House, in a single volume or again in two through labels such as Alfaguara or Debolsillo. Don Quixote knows himself alone, despite the company of Sancho Panza. The Gaviero also knows what loneliness consists of: “Every day we are different, but we always forget that the same thing happens with our fellow men.”
Almost all of Don Quixote’s adventures end badly, like those of Maqroll, who travels “like a fool”, knowing in advance that he will be defeated, but never giving up on the journey. The bittersweet smiles of Cervantes are in Mutis the smiles of disappointment of the Joker. Pessimistic lucidity. The two authors were in prison for money matters (the Colombian, accused of embezzlement by the Esso oil company, for which he worked).
Maqroll’s windmills and giants are his continuous falls, his companies doomed to failure, his desire for incessant defeat, “his vocation for happiness constantly betrayed.” We know very little about Alonso Quijano before the poison inoculated by Tirant lo Blanc or Amadis de Gaula. We do not know Maqroll’s last name or his nationality (he travels with a false Cypriot passport).
We don’t even know how to pronounce his name, which, according to Mutis, has echoes of “something Scottish, but also Turkish or Iranian.” We do know, of course, that he studied at the Jesuits (perhaps that is why he sometimes feels “suction cups in his soul”) and that he is an irredeemable vagabond, “a sailor and a fluvial”, with long intervals stranded on land, like when he searched for gold in mines. abandoned or sold women’s clothing at a river ford. Oh the women!
He loved and was loved. But he lost them or saw them all die: Flor Estévez, Ilona Grawobska, Amparo María (the maid at Aníbal Álvarez’s hacienda)… he loved them because they were free and indomitable. There were more, but they were lovers in passing (one, spiteful, tried to burn him alive). He spent an unwitting incestuous night with a prostitute who turned out to be his sister (he recognized his own father from a bedside portrait).
Mutis has an astonishing command of language. Paragraphs of him could be carved in marble, as when he speaks of a drunken captain “at the high tide of his drunkenness.” They are more chiselled than written texts, which makes small inaccuracies like “in front of you” even more touching. The god Cervantes also incurred in carelessness such as “he went inside”, “he went outside” or “he withdrew to a part”. And that does not mean that he ceases to be a god.
The Gaviero owes his nickname to the fact that as a young man he exercised that trade on an Icelandic whaler that sailed from the port of Cardiff, the capital of Wales. This character (who ends up being as real and corporeal as his creator) is subject to a single principle, a single law: perpetual displacement. When he is on land he finds himself as Alonso Quijano on his hacienda, without Rocinante, far from the roads. Restless and lost.
The Gaviero’s anxiety, with the air of a “forced-landed sailor”, disappears as soon as he climbs the ship’s ladder. He has known the mangroves of the delta, where he suffered the bite of poisonous flies. He has searched for sawmills in the heights of the Xurandó River. He has been a captain of Tunisian freighters in Antwerp and has frequented the Malacca peninsula, with a thousand trips between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.
His literary father could only be a universal and cosmopolitan Colombian. Mutis winks at Barcelona and Catalonia in his novels (he mentions the Boadas cocktail bar, one of the beacons of the Rambla, and uses expressions like “trabucaire”). Don Quixote is dominated by the fever of chivalric novels. El Gaviero, a voracious reader of books on the history of France, “because of the transhumant fever”. There is no ocean or port that he does not know.
He sailed through the Mediterranean and the North Sea. However, the epicenter of his world map (and that of Mutis) are the waters of the Caribbean and, inland, the highlands and the Colombian mountain range, a country that is omnipresent in his work, although he does not expressly cite it. The writer and his child grew up “in a coffee plantation” (one of the few clues about Gaviero’s childhood) and both admit to feeling nostalgic “for the hot land.”
And the last debacle of the eternal defeated. A defeat that not even Mutis, a multi-award-winning author (among other awards with the Cervantes, of course!) foresaw. Maqroll was only tempted to put down roots in a country where he believed he could “live among those who he felt were, in truth, his brothers.” What country was he speaking of? From Afghanistan before the Taliban, the same one that is now a theocratic prison and cuts the wings of women, the antithesis of everything that Mutis and Maqroll sought and loved.
