The Lonely Voice was sorry to hear of the passing of the great Alvaro Mutis who died last month in Mexico City.
Seems the world only has room for one great Colombian author at a time, as is too often the case with writers from smaller countries. But Marquez says himself that Mutis is one of the true, rare greats. Here’s a piece that the Rumpus ran back in 2008 about Mutis who remains one of my favorite writers of all time. Mutis has a way of just sitting you down and telling you a story. I vividly remember when I first read him. I was staying in a kind of hippie flop-house in Chiapas (I was down there looking into the Zapatistas, a whole other story) when I spied a big, pink New York Review of Books volume on a shelf. The spine was so faded from the sun I couldn’t make who the writer was. Needless to say, I stole the book. Glad I did. Sometimes you just have to grab a book and check it out later. You know what I mean? I’ve carried it around with me every since. The big pink book was The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll and it includes “The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call.”
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There is a line of James Wright I have always loved:
“Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest?”
Re-reading “The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call,” by Alvaro Mutis, I thought of this line of Wright’s. As if loneliness were a problem to be solved. And yet this is the ultimate truth isn’t it? Aren’t we perpetually trying to solve this problem?
“The Tramp Steamer” is a sea story. It’s about a dilapidated wandering boat that the narrator – an oil company executive who travels around the world – coincidentally sees limping into various harbors at different times in his life. Helsinki, Costa Rica, Kingston, Jamaica. The executive becomes, for years, haunted by the image of this tramp steamer. “This nomadic piece of sea trash bore a kind of witness to our destiny on earth….” A sea story, but also, like all great stories, a love story. Years after his last encounter with that strange, memorable boat, the narrator (again coincidentally, but as Mutis suggests, our lives are made up of these sorts of coincidences) meets the captain of it and becomes privy to the story behind the image.
“Life often renders its accounts,” Mutis writes. “And it is advisable not to ignore them.”
The story within the story is about a middle-aged Basque ship-captain-man named Jon Iturri who falls for a beautiful young Lebanese woman named Warda. As the captain begins to talk – on the deck of a different boat, long after the love affair that has come to characterize his life has ended – he says:
This is the first and last time I’m talking about this. You can repeat it to anyone you like later on. That isn’t important; it doesn’t concern me. Jon Iturri has really ceased to exist. Nothing can affect the shadow that walks the world now and bears his name.
And he proceeds to recount what happened with Warda. A simple story really. In the course of wandering from port to port, love is found, love is lost. But is anything more calamitous?
