Patriarch

In 1967, Gabriel García Márquez and several other Latin American writers concocted a plan for a volume in which each participant would undertake a literary treatment of one of the larger-than-life political figures — dictator, caudillo, or what have you — from the annals of his or her respective native country. Despite a good deal of initial enthusiasm, the volume never came off, but García Márquez (Colombia) had already decided who he wanted to write about, and described his choice in a letter to Carlos Fuentes:

My candidate is General Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, aristocrat, former officer under Bolívar, who assumed the presidency four times. To be sure, he had much in common with your Santa Anna. Don Tomás was completely crazy, and nevertheless he was a great man: the first liberal to intercede against the dictatorial fever of the Liberator, and, of course, he ended up a dictator in his turn. He had his entire jaw reconstructed from silver, he dressed, in his second period, like the kings of France, and he was cruel, arbitrary, truly progressive, and a very fine writer. He expelled the Jesuits from the country, headed by his own brother, who was archbishop primate of Bogotá. In his full decadence, crazy and alcoholic, he walked around with his old cutlass chasing the boys who made fun of him through the streets. He complained to the president, and as the latter paid no attention to him, he kicked him out of the palace and proclaimed himself commander-in-chief for the third time. In short, he belongs to the great line of the fathers of the country.

García Márquez, who was living in Mexico City at the time, may have misremembered some of the details. Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera did have a brother, Manuel José Mosquera, who was an archbishop, but the latter was already dead when Tomás expelled the Jesuits (in 1863 or 1864), and had left the country in 1852, under pressure, in an earlier wave of anticlericalism. But whether true or not, the image of the old soldier with his prosthetic jaw brandishing his sword to chase away impertinent boys, and taking the government into his hands when he couldn't get satisfaction, must have been too garciamarquesco to pass up.

Image: Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, looking a little jaundiced, portrait from the Museo Nacional de Colombia. The text of the letter from García Márquez to Carlos Fuentes is from Las cartas del Boom (translation mine).

The Drowned Circus

Maritime disasters have long served as inspiration for popular songs and ballads, especially when the drama of the incident is multiplied by the presence among the victims of those whom we identify as "innocents," as opposed to professional or military sailors who are presumed, perhaps, to accept the risks as a condition of their service. Among others, there's Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," Woody Guthrie's "Reuben James" (about a warship), Toumani Diabaté's instrumental "Lampedusa" (memorializing the deaths of some 360 migrants off the shores of the island of that name), and several songs about the sinking of the RMS Titanic, including Blind Willie Johnson's haunting "God Moves on the Water" and the ditty variously known as "It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down" or "The Titanic," the lyrics of which prompted the parody containing these immortal lines, indelibly engraved in my childhood years:

Uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants,
It was great when the sad ship went down.

Outside the English-speaking world I can think of Zachary Richard's "Le ballade du Irving Whale," about the sinking of an oil barge in which no human lives were lost (as far as I know) but great environmental damage was done. The example below, a bolero written by the Cuban musicians Julio Gutierrez and Bobby Collazo (here performed by the Trio La Rosa) relates an incident of unusual pathos that has a surprising connection with an apprentice journalist who went on to become a Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

The Euskera or Euzkera was a cargo ship that had been first commissioned as a private yacht in 1891, then recommissioned as the USS Hawk during the Spanish-American War. The ship remained on reserve duty until 1940, when, according to Wikipedia, it was sold for scrap. Several years later, however, it was plying the waters of the Caribbean, and on September 1, 1948, en route from Havana to Cartagena in Colombia, it capsized and sank. Only a handful of the passengers survived (sources conflict as to whether there were six or twelve), and among the victims were most of the members of the renowned Razzore family of circus performers along with 59 circus animals. (Wrecksite has the most information, as well as a contemporary newspaper account.)

One member of the circus troupe who was not on board was its director and paterfamilias, Emilio Razzore, who had already arrived in Colombia to serve as advance man. Before the news of the sinking came through, he had appeared in the offices of the newspaper El Universal, where he peeled off his shirt to display the impressive scars he had received from the animals in his lion-taming act. There he met a twenty-one year old cub reporter named Gabriel García Márquez, who, according to the latter's memoirs, shared a meal with Razzore in a local restaurant and asked him, probably not too seriously, whether he could join the circus. Not long after that, the fate of the Euskera (the spelling García Márquez uses) became known, and the young writer remained with the devastated lion-tamer for several days, eventually accompanying him to Baranquilla, from where Razzore flew to Miami to try to rebuild his life. In Edith Grossman's translation García Márquez ends the account by saying "I never heard from him again," although the original is the more impersonal "Nada más se supo de él" (Nothing more was known of him).

The sinking was newsworthy enough that the New Yorker published a poem by an American writer, Walker Gibson, entitled "To the Memory of the Circus Ship Euzkera, Lost in the Caribbean Sea, 1 September 1948" (available behind paywall).

I haven't been able to find a transcription of the lyrics of "La tragedía del circo," only parts of which I can make out.

Oblivion

Nunca acepté resignado la muerte de mi hermana, ni nunca podré aceptar con tranquilidad el asesinato de mi padre. Es cierto que él, de alguna manera, estaba ya satisfecho con su via, y preparado para morir, dispuesto a morir si era necesario, pero abominaba esa muerte violente que evidentemente le estaban preparando. Eso es lo más doloroso y lo más inaceptable. Este libro es el intento de dejar un testimonio de ese dolor, un testimonio al mismo tiempo inútil y necesario. Inútil porque el tiempo no se devuelve ni los hechos se modifican, pero necesario al menos para mí, porque mi vida y mi oficio carecían de sentido si no escribiera esto que siento que tengo que escribir, y que en casi veinte años de intentos no había sido capaz de escribir, hasta ahora.

I'm not going to say much about Héctor Abad Faciolince's extraordinary memoir El olvido que seremos except to say that you should read it, and if you need more reason than that (which naturally you do, unless you are in the habit of taking recommendations from perfect strangers without further explanation), I invite you to read Jorge Volpi's long and thoughtful review in the Nation. The English-language translation, which I haven't examined, is entitled Oblivion; it was published in the US earlier this year by Farrrar, Straus & Giroux.