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	The Ordinary Seaman Francisco Goldman Paperback - $9.60 Published February, 1998 Grove Press

Francisco Goldman's short fiction and journalism have been published in Harper's, Esquire, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The New Yorker, Outside, Playboy, Buzz, and Mas. His first novel The Long Night of White Chickens won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. The Ordinary Seaman was a finalist for the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Prize and was named one of the Hungry Mind One Hundred Books of the Century. Both novels were PEN/Faulkner finalists. He spoke via email from Mexico City.

Whit Coppedge: You are known as both a journalist and a fiction writer. Did one spring the other or have you always been drawn to both?

Francisco Goldman: Well, I really don't consider myself anything but a very occasional journalist. In twenty years I've written maybe 12 pieces of journalism, and only about 2 pieces in the last decade. But because most of these were written from inside a war setting, and a very controversial and divisive one — the war in Central America in the '80s — this tag has sort of stuck to me in the United States. In other countries, there is nothing at all remarkable about a fiction writer working as a journalist. This is especially true of Latin America, where Garcia Marquez (who even owns a newsmagazine), Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortazar among others have written, or wrote, important political journalism.

WC: How did you come to write journalism in the first place?

FG: I was living in NYC and intending to go to MFA school. This was about 1979. I hadn't been back to Guatemala since 1975, when I was in college, and drove down from Ann Arbor with a bunch of friends. When I arrived in Guatemala my Tio Hugo said, "Are you crazy? Don't you know there's a war on? The police station in that pueblo (where our cottage was) was over-run by guerrillas two weeks ago." So I moved into my Uncle's house, living in my cousin's room - he was away at college. While there, I worked at my stories. These were - as were all my stories at that time - ethnically neutral, somewhat urban and surreal. I wanted a fictional world utterly free of national, ethnic, realist sign-posts or specific identity of any kind.

I sent my stories up to MFA programs, and got in, but from Guatemala I'd also sent a story to Rust Hills at Esquire. He published one, and then another, and before I knew it, an editor there was asking me if I wanted to try my hand at non-fiction. I wanted to go back to Guatemala and write a piece about what was happening there. I was in my twenties, and the two parts of the world I am from —the US and Central America — were essentially at war with each other. I wasn't going to miss that — if only for the adventure of it. But of course there was much more than that behind it. Writerly ambition was the real motive.

Throughout those years I did journalism. Mainly for Harper's. I'd stopped writing short-stories. I knew I could survive on as few as two journalistic pieces a year.

WC: Have you seen a change in your non-fiction since the early days?

FG: I was a pretty mediocre journalist then. I think only in the last few years have I written a couple of decent pieces — especially the one I did on the Bishop Gerardi murder for the New Yorker last year. Why is that piece better? Because I cared so much about it, and worked so hard at it, and maybe I'm a little smarter, and I think because my narrative techniques, at least, are surer now. Garcia Marquez is always saying that journalism - he means narrative journalism - is just another branch of literature, and he's completely right of course.

WC: Even journalism in the States?

FG:Journalism deserves its horrible reputation in the US because of the big media. Anyone who worked as a journalist in Central America in the '80s saw up close how dishonest and craven the big media places, print and visual, could be. For example, the Times and the news magazines had some decent people, but they often caved to editorial pressure and censorship. (Mark danner documents much of this in his book El Mozote.) No one in the mainstream media would acknowledge or fully report the army's campaign of genocide in Guatemala until finally the war was over, nobody cared anymore, and the UN-sponsored truth commision documented it (and officially charged genocide). It was a real, a huge education in certain sorry truths about what passes for information in the USA. Journalists in such situations can rarely claim to really have the "truth," but it's a crime, when so much life and death is on the line, not to give everything you have in the attempt to be fully honest.

WC: Your fiction and journalism appear to have been, so far, closely tied. Are there stories you feel you can only tell through fiction? Are there itches that non-fiction can't scratch?

FG: Well again, I don't agree with that characterization of what I do. Central America is an essential place to me. In the 1980s and earlier, the area found itself plunged into a cataclysmic war and a human moral disaster. Needless to say, there can hardly be any Central American whose life wasn't affected by that war. "Journalism" tends to imply something visited, exotic — distanced by the role of "objective reporter" — and a "home" community that gets reported back to. Guatemala is not an exotic place to me; it is one of my homes. So what happened there does not belong to "journalism" but to my sense of life and the history of what I myself and all Guatemalans have lived through.

My first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, was an interrogation, through story-telling, of all the ways we try to figure out and express "the truth" — about nation, family, self, identity, love, politics, etc. In the wars in Central America, journalism provided a central example, or metaphor. I realized the war wasn't just over bodies and bullets but over words, over which description of the events and the reasons for those events would carry the day, not just locally but abroad in the US and elsewhere.

WC: Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet wrote an essay for Salon about two years ago, describing his experiences feeling stereotyped in the United States as a Latino writer, especially in the negative reactions to his work ostensibly brought about by the lack of magical realism. Have you had any similar experiences where you thought your work was being viewed with a checklist, either from a Latino or a Jewish standpoint?

FG: I've been happy with the way critics and readers have received my books. There really hasn't been much of a problem; much more to feel grateful and relieved about. When there has been a "checklist" problem, as you say, it has more to do with political correctness and ethnic-stereotyping of that sort. People who think that because there are Central Americans in my book the book must be more about "being Latino" or "politics" rather than about all the things the novel is really about, including its manner of telling itself (style, form, genres, etc). Every time I publish a book in the US — ha ha, well, I've only done it twice — I end up inwardly chanting: Thank God for female reviewers and readers! Not that male reviewers and readers haven't often been exceptionally kind or perceptive, but on the whole, it's been women who really seem to get close to the emotional heart of my fiction. Sometimes, and this is probably due to the overheated political-ethnic atmosphere in some US university literary circles, male reviewers come at you with a suffocated defensiveness — blind-folded, wearing ear-plugs, their fists up. Like this one reviewer who, thinking himself able to divine my single-minded "intention," declared my . The Ordinary Seaman's sole purpose to be that of exposing injustice in the maritime trade. He threw idiotic and trendy academic terms like "victimology" at me and accused me of making all brown characters good and white ones bad. This was a pernicious lie, in that of only three white characters, one, the Ship Visitor, was undoubtedly the only unequivocally "good" character in the whole book, and some of the "brown" characters were not nice muchachos. Besides, looking at the novel in that way — good characters versus bad ones — is completely puerile anyway. But this is boring. I just mention him to show you the kind of person that is out there.

But prescriptions are the worst: writers and critics or groups of these who insist at any given time that there is only one right or "hot" way to write a novel. (Garcia Marquez's "magic realism" was in fact a defiant response to all the people telling him that he had to write socially responsible and denunciatory realism.)

WC: You split your time between Mexico City and New York. Apart from the pragmatic reasons for living in both places, do you see a distinct effect on your writing done in each city? Do you have other favorite places to write?

FG: I so recently wrote an essay (for a Latin American Internet site called viajo.com) on this same subject — living in Mexico City and NYC. Everybody knows New York can be a crushingly hard place to live. Sometimes I wonder why I try at all. Its expensive, tiring, lonely, alienating, and if you're a writer you have all the nattering of the publishing and media worlds right there in your face all the time. Of course, there's lots I love about it, things I can't imagine foregoing forever — most of all the language(s) and the stories, there all around you. Over the last decade especially NYC has become a great Latin American city too (and a Pakistani one, and an Indian one, and an everything else one). Like anyone I have my own private New York City. (I especially wrote about that city in The Ordinary Seaman, and I'm sure I will again.)

But NYC is an incredibly difficult place to begin a novel; it is impossible for me to establish that focus and quiet inside myself there. So I am lucky to have a country house — which just happens to be in the middle of one of the most over-populated, polluted and crime-riddled, most incomprehensible cities on earth. My "country house" is the vast, roomy, practically unfurnished apartment I have rented for the last three years in la Colonia Condesa, in Mexico's Distrito Federal. Last April I packed up a suitcase and several thousand versions of page one of my novel, and took off for Mexico, and mostly I've been here since.

Mexico City is made up of countless neighborhoods, most so different from one another that you almost feel like you should have to go through customs when you cross into one. And the day-time traffic can make a trip from Condesa to Coyoacan last longer than a flight from LaGuardia to Manitoba anyway. My neighborhood is beautiful. It is full of parks and trees and brittle century-old mansions and outdoor cafes and restaurants and bookstores, and though the neighborhood has become kind of obnoxiously trendy, there are still plenty of great old-fashioned cantinas and so on. I hardly ever leave this neighborhood in the day (except on Sundays). A typical work day here is 10 to 2 then 5 to 8. If I don't indulge in the local habit of three-hour highly social lunches before heading back to work, my work day feels like two. At eight, when everyone is getting out from their second work session and ready to go out, so am I. Sometimes I just take a book or some notes to the local cantina and am perfectly happy if I don't run into anyone at all. So days just last longer here.

WC: Tell me more about Mexico City.

FG: Mexico City is in many ways an indefensible place, but people fall in love with it. They come here and just can't get themselves to go back home. It has a charisma unique to itself. I like that its a neutral place for me, a place I don't especially intend to write about, a place where I barely follow the news, situated half way between the two essential places for me: Guatemala and USA. Of course, there is much to detest about the place, as there is about any place. But many of the things that a North American newcomer might find offensive are things that I've had to learn to live with to an even more intense degree in other places — Guatemala City, obviously, but even in NYC.

Mexico City/La Gran Tenochtitlan has a very particular energy. Something you can feel coming up from the pavement under your feet and through the walls and which makes it a good place to work on a book. I don't want to be pretentious about this, but partly I mean the famous surrealism or other-worldliness of Mexico City and layered Mexican Time. The surrealism (starting here, I am quoting from my essay) I will describe this way: I used to, as a discipline, take long walks in this city, and I wouldn't turn back until I had seen something that astonished me. A found image of a character particular to Mexico City. I'm sure anyone who has lived here knows what I mean: the Manuel Alvarez Bravo images and moments that still proliferate all around us here. A beauty parlor on Calle Durango at four in the morning, the lights on through the curtains and bolero music coming from inside, and finding a wedge in the curtain to peek through, you see three middle-aged female beauticians, tequila bottles on the floor, getting plastered together.... Those multi-liter bottles that purified drinking water gets delivered in, empty and lined up on a sidewalk next to a delivery truck, and one of the workers picking those bottles up and hurling them up into the air one at a time to the worker crouched atop the back of the truck: the way each bottle, tossed high into the air, fills for a moment with the spectacular bleeding colors of the smog-abetted sunset sky before dropping perfectly into the other's hands.... This one, just the other day: a black Volkswagen bug from a driver's education school circling La Glorieta Citlatlepetl, going around and around, the grim-faced instructor seated on the right, and behind the wheel, the student just leaning to drive, who was a man of about eighty, his silver hair elegantly slicked back, wearing a necktie, starched white shirt and dark suit for the occasion.

WC: How are your thoughts on the state of the novel in Latin America?

FG: It is thrilling to see how many different kinds of novels are being written in Latin America right now. In Mexico alone this year we've had three very celebrated novels that could not be more different from one another. Daniel Sada's Porque Parece Mentira, La Verdad Nunca Se Sabe (Because it seems like a lie, you can never know the truth) is an almost Joycean epic of the Mexican desert north, and a delirious re-invention of several Mexican and Latin American novelistic traditions. Jorge Volpi's En Busca de Klingsor is about Nazi nuclear scientists in World War II — imagine the mood and intellect of The Garden of Forking Paths somehow grown into a beautiful, dark, lively, suspenseful novel — which is becoming an international hit. Also brilliant, and celebrated in Spain, is a novel published this year by a young Cuban living in Mexico, my close friend Jose Manuel Prieto. His novel, titled Livadia in Spanish is so eccentrically wonderful that I won't even try to describe it. (Grove Atlantic brings it out this year as Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire.)

WC: Let's talk about translations. Have you ever been directly involved with any of the Spanish translations of your novels? I've heard complaints of characters in others' novels sounding more European/Castillian than American — something along the lines of all the roughnecks in Blood Meridian spouting Cockney.

FG: Yes, everybody talks like they're from Madrid. They say horrible things like "hilipoyas" (I don't even know how they spell it) and "hostia" and "cago en la leche" instead of pendejo, pinche, chinga tu madre and so on. Still, I was fairly lucky I'm told — though I've never been able to immerse myself in it for more than a few pages without feeling deeply estranged (my words but not my words) — in the translation of Long Night. In part, I was able to control the translation somewhat through the rhythm of my English, meant to capture spoken-Guatemalan rhythms, and the punctuation of Guatemalan colloquialisms — or so I was told. Apparently that translator was sensitive to that. But the Spanish translation for The Ordinary Seaman was a disaster (different translator). In English, I found I had to render many different kinds of spoken Spanish into English "equivalent" — Nicaraguan, Mexican (Chilangan especially), Cuban, Dominican, Honduran — and this was all flattened into Madrid Castillian. Not only that, small editing changes were made to better suit the extremely insecure and strenuously European Spanish-sensibility..

WC: Can you give me an example?

FG: For example, at one point, having walked into a bar filled with types of similar background as himself, the Ship Visitor finds himself fleetingly and ruefully reflecting on the, to him, by now tedious yet provoking term "white boy," its easy disparagements, which he exasperatedly and perhaps self-justifyingly rejects. In Spanish, this was changed to "white collar," as if I meant a fraught relation to just class instead of race. Imagine people walking into a bar full of white faces in totally race-conscious NYC and thinking "white collar!". Perhaps to the Spanish sensibility it seemed completely unbelievable that anyone could feel anything but completely and unambiguously complacent about "white." I can't say for sure why the translator did that, but it showed quite a gap in hemispheric comprehension of each others' vernacular, to say nothing of culture, and a lot of presumption, whether ideological or what.

WC: Any hopes of addressing this disaster of translation?

FG: I've been talking to some Mexico-based publishers who would like to re-translate and re-publish Ordinary Seaman, so we'll see. Translation is still a young art here in Mexico and elsewhere in the Americas. Almost all the publishing money comes from Spain. Slowly, like everything else over here, it is changing — in the case of publishing I think for the better.

Some Spaniards consider themselves the guardians of the purity of the Spanish language, against the transgressions of the Latin Americans and the horrors of "Spanglish." (At a book fair in Miami I once heard Spanish Nobel Laureate J.Camilo Cela haughtily dismiss our Norteamericano Latino innovations with what he considered an exemplary pun: "Deliverando grocerias.") I have some literary friends in Mexico who read the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy for laughs (though I wouldn't be able to say exactly what it is that they find funny about it). Garcia Marquez has picked some amusing and much publicized arguments with them in recent years over all this. Language is alive and ever evolving, of course, and Spanish "literary" language, — see the Nicaraguan Dario and the other modernist poets of the last turning-of-the-century — has continually been revived and replenished by the Latin Americans. One well known writer here recently remarked that Jorge Volpi's book is the kind of novel Spaniards like — urbane, high-concept, very much a story, with a sophisticated European subject (Nazi nuclear scientists, etc) — but that it is the novel's language — surprising, lush, alive, unmannered — that really marks it as a Latin American novel. The language more than redeems the book from seeming (however imaginatively) formulaic.

WC: Could you talk a little about John Sayles and Men With Guns? The film cites The Long Night of White Chickens as its inspiration (the character Dr. Nelson Arrau briefly mentioned), but it seems to be more directly tied to stories of the uncle you mention in your introduction to Matthew in the Pocket Canon series.

FG: Well, yes, you're right — the character in John Sayle's movie was "inspired" by the story of my real life Tio Beto. But I guess Sayles was originally taken enough by the anecdotes about Dr. Arrau in Long Night to begin imagining a whole movie of his own around them. We've known each other a bit for years because my ex-college roommate and his then girlfriend — now wife — (John Tintori and Mary Cybulski) have both worked on many Sayles films as editor, script supervisor, and in other capacities. Over the years they've become very good friends. One day Sayles phoned me up and asked if I minded if he went ahead and developed a movie somewhat based on that character of the doctor in Long Night. I think his exact words were, "Do you mind if I make a movie about the uncle in your book," and I said sure, go ahead. We talked about the real life Dr. Beto, and that was that. I didn't get paid anything of course — it figures that a story of mine would become attached to the lowest budget movie in history — but he was kind enough to credit it. Of course, the tone of the movie, the vision, the way the story is told — all of that is entirely and strongly John's and has very little in common with The Long Night.

WC: Let's end with the future. What are you working on now? What does the near future hold for you?

FG: Though none of these will necessarily play big roles in the final draft of the novel I'm working on now, the idea evolved from two sources: Jose Marti's poem — perhaps the most famous love poem in Latin America — "La Niña de Guatemala," inspired by a love affair he had during his one year in Guatemala. He goes on from Guatemala to spend most of the next two decades in NYC before dying in Cuba in the war against the Spanish. The other source was the enormous rubber balloon factory that I grew up a mere two hundred yards or so from in Massachusetts. It was a huge, brick, towering-smokestack, polluting monstrosity, in whose chemical-wonderland property we used to love to play in. (Ten years ago I learned that it was owned by a man who lived in Guatemala and had his rubber plantations there.) I have been researching this novel for years. I think it grew out of my weariness with the war, with the so-much-death of Guatemala — I found myself retreating for weeks at a time in the city archives, to a point where I began to feel like I knew where every brick was laid in 19th century Guatemala. Granted a seemingly and blissfully useless sort of knowledge — useful for only one thing perhaps, a novel.

My near future changed a lot this week. Just the other day I was figuring I probably couldn't afford to move back to NYC just now, that'd I'd have to hunker down here and maybe even give up my apartment in New York, which would mean having to warehouse all my books, and finding a way to get the books and research notes I'll need in this book somehow shipped down here - and then I was notified that I have been given this sort of dream grant. I think it may be the luckiest thing that's ever happened to me - it comes with good money and an office in Manhattan.

Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com

Whit Coppedge lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His story "Taqueria" appeared in Pif's October Issue.