Until I was invited to take part in that jury at the Berlin festival, I was convinced that the best thing that could happen to anyone in life was to be a member of a film jury. I had been one in Cannes, in San Sebastián and in Barcelona, and on all these occasions I knew for certain that happiness was not just a dream. I love cinema and seeing four or five films a day, even if they are bad, is something that I can manage perfectly well. The best hotels, the best seats, invitations to all the press conferences, exhibitions, parties and the opportunity, between films, to contemplate the celluloid stars, sometimes in monokinis or au naturel: what more could one ask for?
But at the Berlin festival, I discovered that being a jury member could also be an exhausting task, with unsuspected ethical dimensions. Our president was Liv Ullmann who, in flesh and blood, turned out to be as beautiful and intelligent as in the films of Ingmar Bergman. But she was also possessed by an almost monstrous sense of responsibility, and had decided that the jury in her charge would deliver in their verdict nothing less than absolute justice. She was convinced that this was possible if we would only bring to our task a superhuman dedication to analysis, comparison and evaluation, virtually memorising all the films in competition (24 features and 14 shorts).
In San Sebastián, we had discussed gastronomy above all else (the Basque Country has the best cuisine in Spain), and only late in the day, in the course of our tour around the restaurants and bars of the city, would we discuss the merits of the films. In Cannes, the president of the jury was Tennessee Williams. At the outset he had made it clear to us that the level of violence in the cinema was intolerable (this from a man who had crammed the theatre with brutalities, imaginative perversions and even cannibalism) and therefore he would not see any film or attend meetings of the jury over which he was presiding. We rarely saw him, a mythical figure in the distance, surrounded by a varied entourage of secretaries of both sexes, chauffeurs and a maid to carry the caniches.
But from our first moment in Berlin, we knew that our incorruptible president would not be satisfied with an "I vote for this film for the Grand Prize, for so and so as best director and so on." Each film, director, actor, cameraman, cinematographer, script writer, composer, editor, mixer—to say nothing of each soundman, make-up artist, dresser, extra—would have to pass through the filter of our critical intelligence—be scrutinised, weighed up, compared and balanced against the tally and marks of our colleagues, in sessions that consumed all free time between films, reduced our meals to a sandwich and caused us to slump exhausted into our cinema seats.
So as not to be struck dumb or stammer when faced by Liv Ullmann's questions, I had no alternative but to go to the screenings laden with file cards and fill them with notes, recording my impressions of each film. The result was that the films were no longer a source of pleasure but became a problem—a struggle against time, the darkness, and my own aesthetic emotions, which had become confused by these autopsies. Since I had to spend so much time worrying about rating each film, my scale of values went into shock and I very soon discovered that I could not easily make out what I liked and disliked and why. I was in this delicate psychological state when my younger son came to spend a week with me in Berlin: Gonzalo Gabriel, the nepheloid.
*****
He was almost sixteen. He was at boarding school in England and I hadn't seen him for a term. The Berlin festival coincided with a few days' school holiday and I invited him to spend it with me. The organisers had a bed for him in my room and gave me passes so that he could attend the functions and activities of the festival the days he was in Berlin.
Unlike his brother and sister who talk all the time and are temperamental and obsessive, Gonzalo Gabriel was always extremely reserved and a dreamer. When he was six, he fired a difficult question at me: "Daddy, does God exist?" I tried to get out of that one by explaining to him that, for many people, God existed and that, for others, He did not, and that there were some of us who could not say whether He existed or not. He listened attentively and went off to bed. But a few days later, early one morning, he woke me up, kicking open the bedroom door and bellowing at me from the shadows: "God exists and I love him!" It was the only time that I heard him raise his voice. His mother and I always thought that he had his head in the clouds and it was difficult for us to judge if he was happy, sad, bored, or enjoying himself, and what he thought, felt or wanted.
My children spent their childhood changing countries, languages, houses and schools. This nomadic life did not much affect the eldest and the youngest, but it did affect Gonzalo Gabriel. We realised this in Barcelona, when we noticed that he was inseparable from a small bag full of knick-knacks—matchboxes, stones and butterflies—which he had collected in the garden of the house in London where he had spent his first years. In the dizzying whirl of cities that made up his childhood—London, Washington, San Juan, Lima, Paris, Barcelona—that bag must have been the only permanent thing in his life, a sort of amulet against the devil of moving house. He slept clutching the bag and, if we tried to take it away from him, he sobbed his eyes out.
None the less he and his elder brother were very happy at school the year I was a visiting professor at Cambridge. So much so that when Patricia and I went back to Peru, they asked to stay in England as boarders. That is what happened. They were there for five years. They spent their holidays in Lima and we tried to spend at least a term each year near them.
In these reunions, I was generally surprised at the way they had changed. The one who went through the most abrupt changes was the eldest, Alvaro. In the year before that festival in Berlin, for example, he informed us at termly intervals that: first, he was having mystical experiences and that he was thinking of devoting himself to theology; second, he had left the Catholic church for the Anglican faith and that he had been confirmed in the Church of England; and third, religion was the opium of the people and that he had become an atheist. The changes in Gonzalo Gabriel tended to be more discreet, usually involving music (from AC/DC to Kiss) or sport (from ping-pong to athletics). Ever since he had reached the age of reason, I had seen him going into a sort of mystic trance in the theatre and spend a great deal of time in the world of the imaginary, so I thought that he might have the stuff of an actor in him. But Gonzalo Gabriel never showed any sign of being the slightest bit bothered about his future.
*****
Perhaps because of this background I was not prepared for what was in store for me that morning when I slid out between two jury meetings and went to Berlin airport in a limousine put at my disposal by the festival, accompanied by a pleasant, maternal Berliner, to pick up the nepheloid. "Is that your son?" my companion asked me. Yes it was, although it was difficult to recognise him as a hominid. He had appeared at the end of the queue of passengers from London and waved at me through the glass partition. The police won't let him in, I thought. But they did let him in. In three months, he seemed to have grown four inches and lost ten pounds. He looked tall and seemed to have become a kind of fakir—all skin and bones—and what was also new about his face was his fixed, penetrating gaze of a man-boy who knows the deep truth of things.
An enormous head of hair fell in disorder over his face and swept his shoulders. But what was more shocking than its length was its tangle, a jungle never explored by a comb. The long strands ended in knots and little curls. He was wearing a strange bag, with holes for his arms and legs, made of some unrecognisable material like patchwork, with clashing colours, in which red, black and gold predominated. With its amorphous shape, its grotesque bagginess and its buttons like sunflowers, it vaguely resembled the garments that adorn clowns or scarecrows. But in those disguises, there is always a note of humour. The mess that swamped Gonzalo Gabriel was completely joyless. There was something solemn and disturbing about it, like religious habits or military uniforms. (I later found out it was a combination of both.) His shoes were not made of leather or cloth but of oilskin or cartilage and they were all colours of the rainbow. He was carrying a bag of the same viscose material that covered his feet. In it, his only luggage, was a Bible.
He greeted me in his usual laconic way, saying hello and giving me a kiss. (His elder brother, on reaching 15, decided that such familiarities were excessive and replaced the kiss with the manly Iberian clap on the back.) In the limousine on the way to the Hotel Kempinski—where I was sure that they would not let him register—I gave him all the family news and then ventured to ask him about his studies. "The truth is that lately I haven't had time to study." What had been keeping him so busy?
Fighting against animal vivisection, mainly. Demonstrating in front of those "murderers' stores," Harrods, Austin Reed, Aquascutum and so on, which traded in corpses; brandishing protest placards outside fur and shoe shops which displayed their crimes with total impunity in their windows. Furthermore, a lot of "their" time had been taken up finding out which hunts were being planned and organising the campaigns which, he explained, consisted of getting between the guns of the hunters and the skins of the foxes and the feathers of the pheasants or the pigeons. The letters to the Spanish ambassador had also been time consuming for "them." To the Spanish ambassador in London? Yes, they had written him a letter every day for three months. I asked him the reason for this copious correspondence.
"Genocide," he replied impatiently. He wasn't referring just to bullfighting; "they" had a very full catalogue of all the acts of sadism that were perpetrated in the different regions of Spain, in local fiestas, against horses, dogs, pigs, geese, donkeys and so on. I imagined the face of the ambassador, whom I knew, as he received every morning a letter from my son, admonishing him for every drop of animal blood being spilled by human hands in the motherland.
*****
In the hotel Kempinski, despite my fears, they did not object to him checking in and a bell-boy offered to carry the multi-coloured bag to our room (he didn't let him). Patricia had packed him a suitcase with suits, shirts and ties and had enclosed a list of instructions so that he would attend all the festival events, "very well groomed, very elegant and very handsome." I had carried this suitcase across continents and oceans and now, in our elegant Kempinski room, feeling totally ridiculous, I gave it to him.
He glanced with quiet disdain at the suits, ties and suggestions and told me that I could have saved myself the trouble since he would never again wear "bourgeois clothes." His principles did not allow it. Since I was not up to engaging in a philosophical discussion at that moment, I could only manage a pragmatic objection. "If you go dressed like that, they might not let you in to see the films."
His smile told me that, at this stage of his life, there was no sacrifice that he would not be prepared to make in the name of the religion to which he was a new convert. What religion exactly? I didn't dare ask. My obligations as a jury member were calling me away. I told him that there was the official opening of the festival that night, with the screening of James L Brooks' Terms of Endearment and that it would be a pity if, for a few clothes here or there, he might miss the show... and I fled. Liv Ullmann opened the jury meeting with a detailed report on the way the animal sequences had been shot in a Japanese film—Antarctica by Koreyoshi Kurahara—which we had seen the previous evening and now had to dissect. Anticipating our anxieties that the dogs, wolves, seals and walruses in the line-up of Antarctica might have suffered rough handling in the course of the filming, Liv had enquired and discovered that the director Kurahara had filmed Antarctica under the supervision of two vets and an observer from the Japanese Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Along with my fellow jurors, I gave the necessary sighs of relief that showed us to be worthy of the delicate sensibility that our president attributed to us, (while thinking that perhaps after all Gonzalo Gabriel had not gone off the rails and that his ideas were not as strange as I had thought).
When I got back to the hotel, I found the room full of smoke and a terrible smell. The nepheloid assured me that burning incense created an atmosphere for meditation and relieved tensions. It also purified the lungs and assured a better flow of blood to the brain.
Hadn't he had problems at school dressing that way? No: he had given his reasons and the teachers respected them. He told me that he would always wear clothes like this because—and he said this as if he was reassuring me about something—they had all been made with skins of animals which had died a natural death. He assured me that he did not have on his body a single thread that was the result of sadism to cows, sheep, lambs or other animals. As for his stocking shoes, they were from Ethiopia. They could be worn with a clear conscience because, despite the difficult conditions in which they lived, the Ethiopian people had a religious respect for animals. Looking him straight in the eyes, I asked him if he believed what he was telling me, or if he took me for an idiot. He returned my gaze with the tranquil meekness of one who possessed the truth: he believed it all.
Changing tactics, I asked him if he might consider the hypothesis that the shop owner in London or Cambridge where he had purchased these articles may have deceived him, passing off as untainted clothes rags and leathers whose origins were as bloody as the ones I was wearing. His ghost of a smile cut me dead before I had finished. "Of course not. He is one of us. One of the twelve tribes of Israel. A Rastaman!" It was the first time that I had heard that strange word. So as not to appear too ignorant in front of him, I didn't ask what it meant.
I assumed that he was now a vegetarian. "Of course. If you're against the crime, you have to take it all the way." But a shadow crossed his face. "The truth is that I do have some doubts about food. Perhaps you can advise me." Was there a way of bringing him back, through gastronomy, to the world of the sadists? Some hope!
"Many people think that it is not right to eat vegetables either," he explained, and, for a few seconds his face, or what could be seen of it through the dense undergrowth, was not that of a fanatic, but rather of a bewildered adolescent. Aren't green beans, lettuces, tomatoes, peas all born, and don't they grow? Aren't they also living beings?
Dazed, I asked what these scrupulous perfectionists ate. "Fruit," he told me. "Fruit matures and falls on its own. No one kills it. And the seeds reproduce and continue the strain. So it is not cruel or unnatural to eat fruit. Some people only eat fruit. Just a few. They are considered the purest. They feed themselves without harming anyone, without destroying nature. What do you think of that?"
The call that it was time to leave for the opening of the festival found me arguing, with all the scientific references that I could muster (which were few), in favour of vegetarianism, denying that rice, gherkins and peas had a "soul" or could feel pain. Gonzalo Gabriel listened to me with the aloof condescension that pagans inspire in the believer.
*****
The ushers at the festival theatre did not stop him going into the opening function and there he was, dressed like a marionette, with his sorcerer's locks, in the VIP row alongside Jack Nicholson, Jules Dassin, Liv Ullmann, Debra Winger and other stars who did not seem disturbed by their grotesque neighbour. They did not deny him entry to the party laid on by the mayor of Berlin, where most of the guests were in evening dress. When it came to the official presentation, the mayor committed the friendly faux pas of asking him if he was an actor. He replied, with laconic brutality: "No." But he refused to eat, afraid that the buffet might contain corpses and that the canapés might have been the result of some ill-treatment to the infinite variety of beings that populated the air, the land and the waters of the world.
In the week that he spent in Berlin, feeding him became a much greater source of mortification than the psycho-aesthetic-analytic sessions that Liv Ullmann inflicted on us. Almost everything placed before him inspired either mistrust or horror, because another ingredient of the phobia that he had contracted had to do with salt. It was difficult for me to recognise the timid and silent Gonzalo Gabriel of three months ago in this young man who caused consternation among the waiters in the restaurants, or those in charge of the reception buffets, by demanding to be told if the plates of salad that he deigned to accept had been sprinkled with salt (by asking "do you swear that you haven't put cyanide on it?"). And if, in the first mouthful, he detected any trace of seasoning, he pushed away the plate with the grimace of someone who is afraid of being poisoned. With regard to some foods like milk and eggs, he had devastating doubts. "They," it seemed, had not formed a clear opinion on them and he had not found a precise guide in his Bible (which, at least in theory, he told me that he consulted for everything, and adhered to strictly in matters of dress and diet).
Every conversation that we had at night in the dark, before going to sleep after exhausting days of screenings and meetings, increased my dismay, excited my curiosity and, in general, made my hair stand on end. He informed me that he had decided not to go to university. Once he had finished school, he would go off and work as a volunteer for organisations who looked after children in Ethiopia. Oxfam, for example. He would really like to learn Amharic, the official language of the Ethiopians. I hinted that, with an academic training, he might be better equipped to give more consistent help to the disinherited of Africa and that if he was interested in African languages, then England was full of universities with humanities departments specialising in all languages, living, dead, and even imaginary. He replied that universities crushed the spirit and created intellectual robots at the service of imperialism, colonialism and Babylon. He paused before adding what I had been fearing: "Like public schools in England." I deduced that his flight from school was imminent, if he had not left already.
From these weighty matters he moved on to domestic trivialities, like telling me that we had to convince his mother never to use insecticides. One had to be consistent. If "we" thought it was wrong to murder dogs, cows or horses then why kill flies, mosquitoes, rats and cockroaches? Did the dignity of life depend on the size of the living? In that case, why not exterminate dwarfs? Nature should not be destroyed but learned from, since it was all-wisdom. Was that the reason why he did not cut his finger or toenails, which now seemed like the claws of a beast? Yes. For that same reason he would never again set foot in a hairdresser's or comb his hair. Not only was he following the commandments of Nature, but also those of the Bible. And he recited to me in English, swearing that it was a verse from the Old Testament: "Thou shalt not cut thy beard, nor shave thy head."
One should not alter the course of life. Everything that was "natural" was good; everything artificial, on the other hand, was dangerous, destructive ("Babylon") and had to be opposed. Astrology, for example, was as harmful as pork crackling and ceviche. His holiness the Pope was, horror of horrors, the Antichrist. In the middle of the dilemmas and anxiety into which his statements had plunged me, one night I heard him cursing alcohol and spirits, poisons that, like meat, salt and shellfish, exacerbated the worst instincts, causing wars, exploitation, colonialism, crimes, jealousy, robbery and other human calamities. But these moments of relief were transitory because, that same night, I discovered that the record he listened to most frequently on his portable cassette recorder, with his eyes closed as if in prayer, was called Burnin' and Lootin' and prophesied "burnin' and lootin' tonight."
Wasn't there a certain incoherence between his belligerent pacifism and that apologia for devastation? He replied that Nesta had already illuminated the blind in a Rolling Stone interview: it was about burning and looting Babylon symbolically, and that no just man of flesh and blood would be touched. Trembling, I enquired where drugs stood in that nomenclature of "natural" or benign things (children of Jah) and "artificial" or evil things about which "they," with the help of the Bible and Nesta, seemed to have such detailed knowledge. "We are against them," he said without hesitation. "LSD, heroin, cocaine are contaminated by chemicals. Or rather, profaned. Chemistry is the most artificial thing in the world. Don't you understand? It would be the same as profaning the body by eating processed food. Our body is a temple, man."
In the middle of the anguish that his thinness and principles were causing me, it was a consolation—a ray of light in the shadows—to know that drugs inspired in him the same feelings as chops. I asked him to forgive me because among the pestilential odours permeating our desecrated room in the Hotel Kempinski, I thought that I had detected, mixed with the incense, the aroma of marijuana.
"Dad, Dad! Marijuana isn't a drug. It's ganja, it's kaya. A plant, a bush, a marvellous creation of Nature. It sprouts and grows by itself. Like trees. It doesn't need to be pruned, watered or cultivated. What could be more natural than that?"
With a passion uncommon in him, he lectured me for a long time, without my being able to rebut him—I was petrified. In marijuana, Nesta had found inspiration to compose his songs, like Peter Tosh and the rest of the Wailers, and to sing them in that divine way. Marijuana was the gateway to meditation and knowledge. It made men peaceful, love their neighbour and all living things, sensible and sensitive. If humanity had consumed more marijuana and fewer corpses, there would never have been wars of conquest or slavery. We would not be perched on this keg of atomic weapons.
Ending his peroration, he began to snore beatifically, in the deep sleep of the young and the just, leaving me in a state of complete demoralisation. Only that night did I finally understand that Nesta was Bob Marley and Marley, whom I had taken for a simple reggae singer was, for Gonzalo Gabriel, for "them," a prophet, a messiah, the incarnation of a metaphysical and political truth, and reggae was something like the gospels in musical form.
This conversation must have occurred halfway through the week. Up to then, in the brief moments when I had time to think, I had decided that Gonzalo Gabriel's transformation was related exclusively to ecology, the anti-vivisectionist movement and the animal defence league which had gained in importance in England in recent years. During that sleepless night I realised that this was merely a further adornment added by my son and his schoolfriends to what was really important. In my ignorance of the subject matter, customs and personalities involved, I had not correctly identified the religion to which Gonzalo Gabriel had converted.
Marijuana raised to sacramental status was, however, an unmistakable clue. Like the desire to learn Amharic, to go off and live in the deserts of Africa and his unbridled love for Ethiopia. A photograph of the by now deposed and dead emperor, Haile Selassie I, in a very formal uniform, plastered with medals, with a cape and flanked by lions, had appeared from the first day on Gonzalo Gabriel's bedside table in our room at the Hotel Kempinski. Without knowing that I was committing a terrible sacrilege, I asked: "What's that odd-looking creature doing here?" My eyes were not opened by his scornful reply, full of indecipherable names. "He's not an odd-looking creature. He's the Lion of Judah, he's Jah, he's the Redeemer." Nor were my eyes immediately opened by the green, gold and red colours that were repeated with obsessive frequency in the paraphernalia of the ex-nepheloid, in particular on a black beret adorned with these colours which he sometimes wore to hide his profuse locks. "They seem like the colours of a flag," I remarked on one occasion. "They are," he replied enigmatically, "the colours of Ethiopia and also of Jamaica." These three colours were repeated in the mysterious tassels that hung from each of Gonzalo's fingers and when I asked him what they were—were they amulets, adornments, provocations?—he always replied evasively.
*****
The key words, Rasta, Rastafari, had appeared on his lips from the first day in Berlin and I had ignored them, thinking that they were perhaps the title of a song or a new slang word of young people in England. When I realised that these words condensed the new faith of Gonzalo Gabriel, there were only two days left before his return to London. In all the remaining minutes that we could spend alone together, I tried to get him to instruct me in his beliefs, like a catechist. I did not get too many things clear, but what I did understand plunged me into such new depths of shock that, in order to get through the remaining films and sessions of the festival, I had to resort to two agents of Babylon, Librium and Valium. I was prepared to accept the extravagances of religious fiction (for which I have always felt curiosity and sympathy). But that God—Jah—had been incarnated in Haile Selassie I (called before his coronation Ras-Tafari-Makonnen) seemed to me a joke in bad taste. It was a fundamental axiom in the Rasta theology. The Negus was the "redeemer" announced by the prophet Marcus Garvey, a black Jamaican leader who in the 1920s had proclaimed that "the day of liberation was at hand" because in Africa "a black king would be crowned." The king of kings, marijuana, Bob Marley, reggae and the Bible represented good. Evil, the devil, exploitation, all the forms of human wickedness were summed up in the formula "Babylon." Born in the shanty towns of Kingston, the Rastafari religion had achieved international status through Bob Marley. The poor immigrants of the Caribbean had taken the Rastafari customs, trappings and slang to the ghettos of London, Liverpool and Manchester.
But how had it spread from there into Albion's public schools? However much I tried to shake it out of him, Gonzalo Gabriel kept silent on this matter. All that he consented to reveal to me was that in his school, the "Rasta brothers" numbered more than ten. I told him that he and his friends were being very frivolous, from their comfortable position as privileged young people, in playing at joining a cult that could only be understood as a savage flowering of spirituality among oppressed people. I added that, outside the ghettos where it had been born and above all in the public schools of England, Rastafarianism became a grotesque sham, like "dressing up as a pauper or a savage." He replied in a way that caused me to beat a retreat. With biblical tenderness he said that we could discuss the authenticity of his beliefs better in the future, not here, in capitalist Berlin, but in Trench Town or St Ann in Jamaica; that is, if I deigned to visit him in those places to see for myself whether or not his life lived up to his faith.
I changed tactics and asked him if he had problems, as a white man, in joining a religion whose followers and leaders, all black, were against racial integration and against any white cultural influence that might pervert the "roots" and whose leitmotif and only political preoccupation seemed to be the return to Africa of the blacks of the two Americas. Despite his best efforts, a tiny cloud crossed his face for a second and I realised that I had got in a low blow.
He spoke at great length, at first in a rather confused way, reminding me that Bob Marley was not a pure black but a mulatto since his father had been an Englishman resident in Jamaica. He threw in my face that, from childhood, he had always heard me say that all Peruvians, even those of us who seemed white, had traces of Indian or black blood. Did I believe it or not? Yes, I believed it. Well then, he might be, although it didn't show much, a mulatto like Nesta. Beside, wasn't all this stuff about race relative? In the years he had spent studying in England, he had known many English people who were convinced that the "darkies" began on the other side of the Channel and that, for example, Spaniards or Italians (not to mention Peruvians) were as black as Zulus and Jamaicans.
But, by the way he spoke, I realised that the arguments he was using to try to convince me did not convince him. He ended up admitting, in a voice racked with grief, that among the brothers there were some racists and that he had been thrown out of a few clubs in Notting Hill Gate or Brixton "for being white." Full of sympathy for these racists and ever more astonished by his frankness, I asked him how, as a boarder at a school in a country legendary for the severity of its educational discipline (the country of the cane), he managed to spend his time protesting against furriers and shoe shops or trying to get into Rastafarian parties. He reminded me that I had written a novel, The Time of the Hero, in which I described how boarders in a military school in Lima flouted the vigilance of their teachers by going to parties and brothels. The English were no less daring or skilful than the Peruvians when it came to escaping from school.
The day he left, half in jest and half seriously—anything to get him out of what he had got himself into—I flashed before his eyes, exaggerating their merits, the rich diversity of superstition, witchcraft, fetishism and barbarism that adorned the religious panorama of his own country. Why complicate his life by becoming a Rastafarian, a sect into which he would never be completely accepted, when he could, for example, join the recently founded Church of the Israelites of the New Universal Pact, which was all the rage in the central Andes of Peru, or any one of the Amazonian cults where he would find all the primitivism that he wanted including, if he looked around a bit, delicacies such as cannibalism and head shrinking. He was not amused. (Another result of the Rasta faith seemed to be the extinction of his sense of humour.) He simply replied that he was not interested in the exotic or the picturesque in religion, but only in the truth. And he had found it.
I could not take him to the airport because I had a jury meeting. We said goodbye at the door of the Kempinski. In a last ditch attempt at emotional blackmail, I told him that his mother would die of grief when I got back to Lima and told her the state he was in. It was the only time in the week that I had seen him really laugh. "Die of grief," he scoffed. "She'll have a fit, you mean. And she'll want to kill me. Irie, Dad! Jah live! Ciao!"
*****
The final jury session, at which we awarded the prizes (Love Streams by John Cassavetes won the Golden Bear), lasted for 14 hours. Weakened by excesses, both cinematic and analytic, strong emotions and the Berlin winter, I had gone down with a bad cold and I spent the day sneezing and feverish. My calamitous physical and psychological state did not soften one iota Liv Ullmann’s rigorous quest for justice. The third time—it must have been about hour nine—that I warned her that if she didn’t put an end to the discussions and let us vote she would have a Peruvian corpse on her hands that she would have to account for to history and to Jah, Liv (who was as serious as Gonzalo Gabriel would have been in her place) went out of the meeting room and returned with a saucer of vitamins and decongestants which she placed under my nose. But she did not call for a vote until (leaving us hoarse and half cataleptic with tiredness) she had wrung from all ten jurors the last drop of cinematographic discernment left in us.
Jules Dassin was a gratifying and restorative presence, a balm in the claustrophobic nightmare of the jury. In all the previous sessions, the director of Rififi and Never on Sunday had displayed his exuberant warmth, his good humour and the elegant modesty with which he bore the obligations of fame (“the fame of Melina Mercouri, my wife,” he would say). In this final session Jules Dassin revealed himself to be not only a genial American who had successfully assimilated the rationalist subtleties of his first country of adoption (France) but also a man whose second country of adoption (Greece) had turned him into a consummate master of the Machiavellian arts of manipulation. Calling on one or other of the arms of his tricontinental panoply, prolonging the discussion with innocent questions when the feeling in the room did not coincide with his preferences, winning over doubters to his cause with a snake charmer’s wiles or destroying the arguments of his opponents with lethal erudition, Jules Dassin managed to get prizes for almost all his nominees. His devilish enchantment over us was such that he even asked us, with a disarming smile, if, before the real vote, we could have a straw poll so that he could plan his own votes in accordance with ours. We liked him so much that we gave in to him.
I spent the final 24 hours in Berlin in bed, befuddled by my cold, the antihistamines and the shocks of paternity. I had the only surrealist dream of my life in which Bob Marley, Haile Selassie I and Gonzalo Gabriel discussed cinema to the accompaniment of reggae drums and guitars while Liv Ullmann—her blonde hair transformed into the seething locks of the Gorgon—stalked around them, whipping them with a cane every time they fell silent.
*****
From Berlin I had to travel to central America to write an article on the election campaign in El Salvador for Time magazine. The journey was timed to the minute and it was difficult for me to cancel it, so I could not do what I was really tempted to do: visit Gonzalo Gabriel’s teachers and find out what they thought of his metamorphosis. I had to settle for a telephone call from Paris. My conversation with his housemaster was an animated dialogue of the deaf. In an attempt to respect the parabolical system of English conversations, I asked him if “all was well.” He said that it had rained at the weekend and that there had been very strong winds; apart from that, the winter was “quite all right.” Being more specific, I said to him that I had been alarmed to find my son so much thinner. Really? He hadn’t noticed. He offered a few observations about the stage of development when adolescents grow and lose weight. He promised to take steps to make sure that Gonzalo Gabriel was given extra portions of meat and milk. “But he has become a vegetarian,” I said. “Didn’t you know?” He coughed and thought it over. “Frankly, no,” he replied. And, after another pause, “it’s supposed to be healthy.” I asked him if he hadn’t noticed recently anything worrying about his way of thinking, acting or dressing. No, he hadn’t noticed anything inappropriate. What about his studies? Good, good. In the last few months, the young man even seemed to have become interested in reading the Bible. Was the housemaster a moron or was he an accomplice? Had the plague been transmitted to the students from the academic staff?
In the few hours of my stopover in Paris, I went round the bookstalls buying up everything that I could find on the Rastafarian cult and on Bob Marley (I even bought his records). This reading was my spiritual sustenance for the ten days I spent in El Salvador, interviewing politicians and travelling the country devastated by the revolutionary war.
Ten days later, when I returned to Lima at the end of my El Salvador mission, I was a specialist on the subject. I am not exaggerating. One of the advantages of Rastafarianism—doubtless its only advantage—is that the whole corpus of its doctrine fills half a page, since it consists of four or five simple ideas buried in extravagant rhetoric. Knowledge of the theology of the Rastas increased my unease to a dizzying degree. Why, out of all the cults on the earth, had Gonzalo Gabriel opted for the one which combined, in abundant measure, bodily filth, historical nonsense, ethical misunderstandings and theological gibberish?
In Lima, my immediate problem was to break the bad news to Patricia. I decided not to spare her any of the details in the hope that, by sharing it with her, my own trauma would be lessened. I told her that Gonzalo Gabriel had lost a few pounds and that he no longer wanted to be an arbitrum elegantiorum. That he had become a vegetarian (and might become a fruitarian), a defender of animal and vegetable life and a militant in favour of the return of all blacks in the Americas to Africa. That he was a novice in the Rastafarian cult which, in terms of dress, meant putting on rags and berets illuminated with the colours of the Ethiopian flag, having the word “Jah” tattooed on his arm and having tassels hanging from his fingers. That among the precepts of this faith was the conviction that the Pope personified Babylon (the Antichrist) and that to smoke marijuana was to receive a sacrament that made men good and peaceful. That Gonzalo Gabriel had decided not to go to university but to emigrate to Africa to help the needy, although there was still the possibility that he would end up in some ghetto in Jamaica, playing the drums.
My wife went straight to the essentials. “How long is his hair?” Shoulder length, I said, but what would surprise her most was not its length but rather its tangle and its texture. Because among the decrees of the new religion there figured, alongside the belief that the deceased emperor Haile Selassie (whom “they” believed was still alive) was God, the biblical abomination of the comb, the brush and the razor. I told her, with a precision taken to sadistic lengths, of the kinds of ablutions that I had seen Gonzalo Gabriel perpetrate on his hair so that it could erupt into those plaits called dreadlocks which had adorned the head of Bob Marley when he was alive: soaping the locks daily and then letting the soap dry on them without rinsing. To illustrate my description, I threw on the bed all the photos and posters of Bob Marley reproduced in my Rastafarian books.
Predictably, Patricia transferred her feelings, in the first instance, on to England in the abstract. She spoke of the decadence and degeneration of the ex-imperial powers whose schools had gone from forming gentlemen to producing Rastafarians. And of the idiots who had become anglophiles and had sent their children to be educated in a country in decline which was returning to paganism. Then she blamed me for everything that had happened—I’d been irresponsible and, instead of giving the necessary advice and clips round the ear which would have sorted out his ideas, I had spent my days in Germany wallowing in the corruptions of Berlin and flirting with Ms Liv Ullmann. Since the inept teachers at Gonzalo Gabriel’s school seemed incapable of dealing with what was happening, she announced to me that she would travel to London at once to cut those dreadlocks personally and to cram the young Rasta with all the steaks necessary to save him from tuberculosis. With that, she began to pack her case.
*****
But it wasn’t that easy. The episode went on for a year. In the course of which, every time Gonzalo Gabriel came to Lima, our house filled up with Ethiopian flags, Caribbean music and live animals (including two rabbits, a hamster, a cockerel and two canaries that we are still not free of).
One day we received a very friendly letter from the headmaster informing us that the school was sorry to have to let Gonzalo Gabriel and some of his friends go, because of an unpleasant matter of cannabis sativa (the technical name with which the naturalist Linnaeus baptised marijuana in 1753).
My curiosity led me to reconstruct, bit by bit, the story of how the Rasta heresy had contaminated the Anglican bastion of the college. Not through the handful of boys from the West Indies who were studying in its halls, but through the unexpected hand of a young Italian, the son of a wealthy industrialist from Milan who had sent his son to that English boarding school hoping to save him from the bad example of his elder brother, a restless youth who, after various musical and drug-related experiences in Europe, had become a Rastafarian and had gone to live in the slums of Jamaica. Not content with subverting the spiritual foundations of the school by disseminating Rasta philosophy, the young Milanese had boldly planted marijuana alongside the well-kept cricket pitches of the institution so that the students converted by his persuasive arts would have a guaranteed supply of the sacramental smoke that would keep them pure and saintly. The young Milanese, an intimate friend of my son, was a true mafioso and irresistibly charming. The last time that we saw him, he came to the house with a bunch of flowers for my wife and shed compassionate tears at the fate of Gonzalo Gabriel and the other boys expelled from school. Because, despite being the high priest of the small Rasta sect, he had avoided expulsion. He was a magnificent actor and had the leading part in an Elizabethan play that was being put on at the end of the year. The headmaster, adopting the doctrine of utilitarianism, was not prepared to lose that histrionic performance.
In Gonzalo Gabriel’s new school, where he was no longer a boarder, he preserved his hieroglyphic locks and his colourful rags, but we managed to make him promise not to take communion again according to the precepts of his religion. He lived in a small rented room which became a zoo for orphaned, wounded or abandoned animals that he found in the streets and looked after with a sense of responsibility that no other person, activity or thing had ever inspired in him before.
Two years have passed. His life since then has gone through at least two further changes similar to his encounter with the Rastafarian cult, though less spectacular from the point of view of attire and theology. Nowadays he cuts his hair in a way that his mother finds too old-fashioned and eats all kinds of corpses with great voracity and without the slightest remorse. He still listens to the subversive records of Bob Marley (which, although we would never admit it in front of him, Patricia and I have grown to like) but, thank God, this dangerous influence seems to have been neutralised by other singers less messianic than the prophetic Jamaican. They merely celebrate incest (Prince, Sister), premature ejaculation (Mötley Crüe, Ten Seconds to Love), fellatio (Judas Priest, Eat Me Alive) or preach the love of animals in the style of W.A.S.P.—Fuck Like a Beast.
He has become a student at the University of London and his political ideas show signs of having changed as much as his spiritual inclinations. I now hear him mention, with the same devotion previously reserved for Emperor Haile Selassie, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, and he spends his holidays working as an interviewer in the shanty towns of Lima for the Institute for Freedom and Democracy which promotes private enterprise and liberal economic theories in Peru. He'll soon be 18. I observe him with curiosity and envy. And I wonder what surprises are in store for him (for us) in the next chapter.
