truth-telling in a world of lies
by Douglas Messerli
Juan Goytisolo The
Garden of Secrets, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush (London:
Serpent’s Tail, 2001)
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In part, Goytisolo’s literary warfare with Spain has much to do with the
general Castilian oppression of the Catalan minority. As a recent interview
with Goytisolo revealed, his Catalan mother’s parents were not permitted to
speak to the family in their own language. His father, a chemical company
executive, supported Franco and was later imprisoned by the Republicans; his
mother was killed by Franco’s bombs in Barcelona, the Catalonian capital,
which, until 1939, remained the Loyalist center of the Spanish Civil War and was
accordingly severely punished by Franco and his forces. The young Goytisolo was
forced into exile. Over the years, living in Paris, Morocco and elsewhere,
Goytisolo came to be a passionate supporter of Arab culture, and in his novels
and other writings he argues for the Spain of Moorish and Jewish roots. His
struggles against fascism are not directed merely at the Franco past of his country
but also at the Serbian nationalism of Slbodan Milosevic, the Russian treatment
of the Chechens and Israeli relations with the Palestinians (his book El País, Landscape of War: From Sarajevo to
Chechnya” was published by City Lights Books last year). Once a supporter
of Cuban Communism, he later disavowed his support after visits to that country
in which he witnessed the oppression of the African and Asian cultures as well
as of homosexuals. Moreover, Goytisolo’s own bisexuality, which he discusses in
his two-volume autobiography, Forbidden
Territory and Realm of Strife,
has led him to strong moral statements against sexual tyranny as well. He
claims his true mentor to be Jean Genet.
All of these issues merge in The
Garden of Secrets, which tells the fictional life of a Spanish poet named
Eusebio—a homosexual friend of the great authors Federico García Lorca and Luis
Cernuda—who is arrested by Franco’s forces and imprisoned in the military
psychiatric center in Melilla at the beginning of the 1936 rebellion. But this
is not an ordinary fictional biography, told in the third person. Like Orson
Welles’ exploration of the life of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane, Goytisolo’s is a Rashomon-like tale, with 28 tellers,
one for each letter of the Arabic alphabet. Sitting in their garden, which one
of the figures describes as “make-believe,” the Readers’ Circle meets for three
weeks, each member telling his or her own version of stories about the
mysterious poet, his arrest, escape and later life. Obviously, they are
attracted by the rumors and myths surrounding Eusebio just as American readers
have been attracted to figures like Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac and—in a
previous generation—William Randolph Hearst.
Unlike Citizen Kane, however,
Goytisolo supplies no Rosebud to draw his themes—his multifaceted version of
reality—together. As in all the works of this great experimental writer, there
is no single truth. Part of the joy of reading the novel, in fact, is in the
various styles, from high poetic diction to the ribald language of sex films,
as well as in the methods and genres that the members of the group employ. Some
are highly factual, recounting Eusebio’s surprise arrest, his imprisonment and
tortures; one teller extracts the supposed interrogation of the prisoner with
regard to an inquiry into the sexual proclivities of the military leaders who
imprisoned him. Some members of the group are of the belief that Eusebio,
dressed as a woman, escaped to Morocco; others argue that he escaped through
the intervention of his brother-in-law, an officer in the fascist army. The
story, popular with many members of the group, is that he fell under the sway
of the Falange leaders Veremundo and Basilio, who engaged in all-male orgies in
the army camp, and that he escaped through their help; one member of the
“secret garden” even presents a film proposal—the manner of Luchino Visconti’s The Damned—of these sexual events.
One reader proposes that, after Eusebio’s escape, he lived with the
everyday citizens of Marrakech as a servant to a woodcutter. Another suggests
he became a religious man and is still seen as the holy man by some. Several
argue that he involved himself with the wealthy Madame S., and one reader—in
complete abandonment of the character—tells the story of Madame S.’s cook.
Taking the subject in yet another direction, one woman reader, “just wild about
novels and stories seething with colorful characters and awesome incident,”
ends her investigation of Eusebio and tells a magical-realist tale of a man who
transforms himself into a stork in order to spy on his wife and her lover.
Later in the novel, others conflate Eusebio with bizarre figures such as
Alphonse von Worden, a Polish aristocrat who lives with a Filipino lover,
watches old movies night and day and dresses in drag. In bringing that name
into his narrative, Goytisolo opens up a Chinese box-like association that is
remarkably similar to the Polish count Jan Potocki’s The Saragossa Manuscript, and
Arabian Nights-like fiction in
which the hero, similarly named Alfonso von Worden, a young officer in the
Spanish Walloon Guards, undergoes a number of tests to prove his courage and,
at a castle of a mysterious magician, is told a series of sometimes
contradictory stories not unlike those in Goytisolo’s own novel.
Several antithetical stories are told surrounding Goytisolo’s von Worden
figure, whose outrageous behavior ends in his murder at his own doorstep. One
of the members of the garden group gets booed off the floor for his academic
rendering of his own arrival in Marrakech, which absolutely overflows with
obscure Arab words and numerous scholarly footnotes.
The penultimate story is told, from the grave, by Eusebio himself, who
pleads not so much for a reconsideration of his own portrayals—although he
describes the Readers’ Circle as “a monster with repulsive heads”—but for
better portraitures of his beloved sister and Madame S. But his arguments shed
no more light on the matters than any of the other fictions the group has
created. In their final act, the group creates the author himself, toying with
several names (“Goitisolo,” “Goitizolo”) until they come upon the one they
choose: “Goytisolo…Juan…Lackland, Landless, the Baptist, the Apostle”—all
references to phrases and titles in Goytisolo’s other works.
Goytisolo’s tale is not just about a fictitious poet but also about the
nature of storytelling and concerns the whole milieu of a culture that destroys
men and women “in a climate of fanatic hysteria and persecution.” It is about a
world that perceives homosexuality, for example, as “odious to God and his
angels, responsible moreover, as in other years, for the fatal decadence of the
nation, the ruination of Spain,” about a world that describes poems that do not
praise God and the fatherland as the writing of “the perverts’ perineal muse,
coarse sand-swept desert songs, demagogic hot air without the pulse of poetry,
oozing plebeian pores, unnatural thrills, forbidden pleasures.”
Such a milieu is, quite obviously, something endured not just by Spain and
Goytisolo’s Eusebio, but suffered by those under any fascist or dictatorial
rule throughout the centuries. And in this context, in which everything is
turned on its head, there can be no truth. One cannot lay A beside B (or, in
this novel’s case, “alif” beside “baa”) in order to create a synthesis if both
realities begin in madness and are founded on the insanity of those seeking
control over others’ lives. In Goytisolo’s world all the tales are true—or none.
In The Garden of Secrets
Goytisolo has given us a beautifully written metaphor for what it means to seek
out the truth in a world often dominated by lies.
Los Angeles, April 2001
Reprinted from Los
Angeles Times Book Review, Sunday, April 22, 2001
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