跟随麦哲伦一道进行首次环球航行的佛罗伦萨航海家安东尼奥，经过我们南美洲之后，写了一篇准确的报道，然而它更像一篇虚构出来的历险记。
没有爪的鸟，这种鸟的雌鸟在雄鸟背上孵蛋。此外，还有一种酷似鲣鸟却没有舌头的鸟，它们的喙部像把羹匙。他还写道，还有一种奇怪的动物，它们长着驴头和驴耳，身体象骆驼，腿象鹿，叫起来却又象马。他写道，当他们把一面镜子放到在巴塔哥尼亚遇见的第一个土著居民眼时，那个身材魁梧的巨人，被自己镜子中的形象吓得魂不附体。
从这本引人入胜的小册子里，已经隐约可见我们现在小说的萌芽.但是，它远非那个时代的现实中最令人惊奇的证明。西印度群岛的史学家们，给我们留下了无数的类似记载。埃尔多拉多这块为人垂涎，但并不存在的国土，长期以来出现在许多地图上，并随着绘图者的想象而不断改变其原来的位置和形状。那位传奇式阿尔瓦尔为了寻找长生不老的源泉，在墨西哥进行了为期八年的探查。在一次疯狂的远征中，他的同伴们之间发生了人吃人的事，以至于出发时的六百人，在到达终点时，仅有五人幸存。在无数个从未被揭开的奥秘中，有这样一个：一天，有一万一千头骡子从库斯科出发，每头牲口驮有一百磅黄金，去赎回印加国王阿塔瓦尔帕，可最终并没有到达目的地，后来在殖民地时期，在西印度群岛中的卡塔赫纳出售过一些在冲积土壤上饲养的母鸡，在它们的鸡肫里发现了金粒。我们开国者的这种黄金狂，直到不久前还在我们中间蔓延。就在上个世纪，研究在巴拿马地峡修筑连结两大洋铁路的德国代表团，还做出这样的结论：只要铁轨不用当地稀有的车铁来制造而是用黄金，那么方案便是可行的。
因此，如果说这些困难尚且造成我们这些了解困难实质的人感觉迟钝，那就不难理解，世界这一边有理智、有才干的人们，由于醉心于欣赏自己的文化，便不可能正确有效地理解我们拉美了。同样可以理解的是，他们用衡量自己的尺度来衡量我们，而忘却了生活给人们带来的灾难并不是平等的；他们忘却了追求平等对我们---如同他们所经历过的一样 --- 是艰巨和残酷的。用他人的模式来解释我们的生活现实，只能使我们显得更加陌生，只能使我们越发不自由，只能使我们越发感以孤独。
假如可尊敬的欧洲乐于用他们的历史来对照我们的今天，那么他们的理解力也许会增加一些。如果欧洲人能够记得伦敦曾经需要三百年时间才建成它的城墙，又用另外三百年才有了一位大主教；如果他们能够记得，在埃特鲁里亚，在一位国王确立罗马在历史上的地位之前，它曾经在蒙昧的黑暗里挣扎了两千年之久；如果他们能够记得今天用酥香的奶酷和精确的钟表使我们感到快乐的、热爱和平的瑞士人，在十六世纪时曾像野蛮的大兵一样血洗欧洲，那么他们的理解力也许会提高一些。就是在文艺复兴的高潮时期，一万二千名由东罗马帝国圈养的德国雇佣军，还对罗马烧杀抢掠，用刀子捅死了八千个当地居民。
虽然如此，面对压迫、掠夺和歧视，我们的回答是生活下去，任何洪水猛兽、瘟疫、饥饿、动乱，甚至数百年的战争，都不能削弱生命战胜死亡的优势。这种优势还在发展，还在加速：每年的出生者要比死亡者多七千四百万，新出生的人口相当于纽约每年人口增长的七倍，而他们大部分出生在并不富裕的国家里，其中当然包括拉美。相反地，那些最繁荣的国家却积蓄了足够摧毁不仅数百倍于当今存在的人类，而且可以消灭存在于这个倒霉世界上的任何生物的破坏力。
The Solitude of Latin America
Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel's body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image.
This short and fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our reality in that age. The Chronicles of the Indies left us countless others. Eldorado, our so avidly sought and illusory land, appeared on numerous maps for many a long year, shifting its place and form to suit the fantasy of cartographers. In his search for the fountain of eternal youth, the mythical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of Mexico for eight years, in a deluded expedition whose members devoured each other and only five of whom returned, of the six hundred who had undertaken it. One of the many unfathomed mysteries of that age is that of the eleven thousand mules, each loaded with one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day to pay the ransom of Atahualpa and never reached their destination. Subsequently, in colonial times, hens were sold in Cartagena de Indias, that had been raised on alluvial land and whose gizzards contained tiny lumps of gold. One founder's lust for gold beset us until recently. As late as the last century, a German mission appointed to study the construction of an interoceanic railroad across the Isthmus of Panama concluded that the project was feasible on one condition: that the rails not be made of iron, which was scarce in the region, but of gold.
Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio López de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Moraz´n erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures.
Eleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened this audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good will - and sometimes those of bad, as well - have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a moment's rest. A promethean president, entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone; and two suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of another great-hearted president and that of a democratic soldier who had revived the dignity of his people. There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one - more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities. Because they tried to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years.
One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality - that is, ten per cent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes. The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway.
I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.
And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword.
I do not mean to embody the illusions of Tonio Kröger, whose dreams of uniting a chaste north to a passionate south were exalted here, fifty-three years ago, by Thomas Mann. But I do believe that those clear-sighted Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more just and humane homeland, could help us far better if they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world.
Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.
In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death. An advantage that grows and quickens: every year, there are seventy-four million more births than deaths, a sufficient number of new lives to multiply, each year, the population of New York sevenfold. Most of these births occur in the countries of least resources - including, of course, those of Latin America. Conversely, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.
On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man". I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.
