There is no truth or lie

Herodotus has gone down in posterity as the first of the historians, but in reality he was much more than that.

Or that, and also a literary narrator and journalist, three fundamental virtues that in his

Nine Books of History

become one;

and when I say journalist I am talking about his qualities as a reporter and chronicler, professions that were far from being recognized as such at that time;

and, if that were not enough, explorer, geographer, archaeologist, ethnologist and paleontologist, because when entering into then unknown territories, he meticulously and methodically recorded everything he saw and heard.

History, novel and mythology are then the same thing because the borders of the world are diffuse and distant, and that mist of unknown distance creates doubt, wonder and mystery, but also curiosity.

Faced with the darkness that then represents the unexplored, since what is known is still a small territory, objective truth becomes a duty of the chronicler, although the imagination does not stop showing its extravagant clothes in the story.

How to elucidate in that darkness what is on the side of reality and what is on the side of imagination?

Scrupulous rigor when narrating facts is a procedure that inventive literature has come to copy from the chronicle that seeks to narrate truths.

The novel

Diary of the Plague Year,

by Daniel Defoe, which was published in 1722, pretends to be a true and accurate report on the cholera plague that devastated London in 1665. The novelist's intention is to establish the veracity of what he tells, disguising the imagination with an apparatus of false facts in which there are official documents, statistical tables and fabricated testimonies.

And today even less can we affirm that facts have gained a verifiable quality, when we live in a world of instant truths, disposable truths and alternative truths.

Whenever we relate the lives of human beings, those of today and those of the past, we cannot strip ourselves, nor strip them, of that subjective veil that changes images, disrupts criteria, rewards and punishes, exalts and diminishes, and contrasts good intentions and malice;

or because that veil is extended by the hand of political, ideological, corporate or religious interests.

For a long time history was written for or against someone, and not infrequently by commission of the interested party;

If not, let us remember López de Gómara composing his

Chronicle of the Conquest of New Spain

in Valladolid under the commission of Hernán Cortés, who sought to recover his privileges in Mexico, and for that he needed to be exalted as the sole hero of the conquest of Tenochtitlan.

This pretension moved Bernal Díaz del Castillo, an old soldier of Cortés, who lives retired in Guatemala, to react. When reading López de Gómara's book, he is amazed at the way in which someone who has never crossed the sea tells the events and He was, therefore, far from them.

He sees it as a hoax.

Then he decides to write his own story,

True History of the Conquest of New Spain.

But it is, in any case, his view of the facts.

No two visions will ever be the same.

Memory is both invention.

What is remembered is altered.

What is remembered one way one day will be different later.

And two people who remember the same events remember them differently.

The conquerors allow themselves to be guided by the happy outrages of their imagination, illuminated by amazement at the new, a cast of adventurers, goat herders from Castile, swineherds from Extremadura, sailors from the Andalusian coasts, noblemen without fortune and ruined nobles, missionaries and chaplains, cheaters, fraudsters and hustlers, like Don Pablos, “mirror of vagabonds and example of stingy people” whom Quevedo ships to the Indies, to see if his luck improves, although we never hear from him again.

An incandescent flow of facts that border on epic, and iniquities, cruelties and abuses of power, and we will not be able to know how much is true and how much is a lie in the occurrences of history, which is preparing to be a prelude to the novel, or to be the novel itself.

Independence will dissolve in the smoke of battles and hostility, and discord will show its dropsy heads and its circus-like humps, and the projects of new democratic republics will fail in caudillism and in dictatorships, first enlightened and then stupid, and not a few of the heroes will end up in ostracism, or in front of the wall.

They were granted, nothing more, one last favor: give the order to fire themselves, or be shot sitting in an armchair that was brought from a neighboring house.

Abnormality is imposed as the norm, which is born from the ever-present mismatch between the ideal and reality, between the proposal for society that is established in the dead letter of the constitutions and the society of oppression and misery that truly exists;

Just laws become lies, and the discretion of power without checks becomes reality.

When power becomes abnormal, and therefore acquires an excessive weight on individuals, it acts like a fatal deity that violates the course of lives and, by disrupting them, makes possible the loneliness of prisons and the helplessness of exile, corrupts and It debases, creates fear and silence, engenders submission and ridicule, and feeds adulation;

and ends up also creating rebellion.

That is why the story can be read as a novel.

And these three crafts that narrate, history, novel, journalistic story, borrow from each other, or are capable of coming together in a hybrid genre.

The novel invented by Cervantes, which disjoins time and space and makes room for the implausible.

The novel that becomes the meeting place where everything fits, autobiography and biography, historical documentation, scientific pamphlets, statistical reports, and newspaper newsletters.

And a novel also becomes the story of real events told with the techniques of a novel, that is, its traps and tricks.

Today's chronicle, like the novel, has to do with abnormality.

The new messianic dictatorships.

Populism and its fair boasts.

Organized crime with its sinister flow of extravagances.

The social power of gangs, based on terror and ruthless crime, and which produces leaders, as in Haiti;

the kings of drug trafficking, who dispute immense territories, where they exercise the role that corresponds to the State;

the Central American emigrants persecuted, kidnapped, murdered, along the entire route through Mexico, or who end up drowned in the Rio Grande or leaving their bones in the Arizona desert;

corruption, like that purulent skin that dresses political power, whatever its ideological sign.

The story that seems to be written by novelists, and the chronicle that seems to copy the novel, because the facts it tells seem incredible;

and the novel itself, which seeks to resemble reality, imitating it, and to be even more dazzling than reality itself.

Sergio Ramírez

is a writer and Cervantes winner.

His last published book is

The Golden Horse

(Alfaguara).

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