Jesus del Campo, A History of the World for Rebels and Somnambulists, Trans. by Catherine Mansfield (Telegram Books, 2008)"So, you’re in search of a new, manly cult novel... you just need something fresh. Enter the Spanish philologist Jesus del Campo and his slim, crazy, funny, History of the World for Rebels and Somnambulists, which is exactly what it says it is. It’s a roughly - very roughly - chronological account of world history, marked by the bravado and befuddlement of presidents, biblical figures, scientists, poets, magicians and God alike.
“On the first day God created light,” it begins, “and he saw that he missed darkness. So he bought himself some black-framed Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses and went out into the street, where he came across humans who, not having yet been officially created, were covering their bodies with paramilitary rags, not realizing they were already dressed. He saw them drinking cold beer out of plastic cups and feeling each other’s ribs and whispering about the fearfulness of life under the neon signs for Nokia and Kawasaki and General Electric and Holiday Inn. And God went home feeling dejected, wondering what to create next.”
You can probably imagine some of the things God dreams up. (Hint: the book ends with a man on a TV talk show discussing how he was attacked and sodomized by a penguin.) If del Campo’s history is sometimes too chaotic, too reality TV-obsessed and too carnivalesque, he makes up for it with his soothing answers to a number of age-old questions. In “Spain’s Pain,” we learn why Spain is called Spain. In “Tuscan Confidences,” we (finally) learn what Leonardo said to make Mona Lisa smile like that. We learn the secrets of war (“It’s all very well talking about the strategic intelligence of Egmont and Coligny and a hundred other captains of one religion or another,” says a crow pecking at the face of a dead man, “but at the hour of truth each man has to fight for his own skin, and ends up buried under a chaotic avalanche of oblivion. There’s no cure for human folly, that’s for sure.”), but not the secrets of peace, which is only fitting. We learn why writers dress in black these days (“to hide the burden of their horribly ordinary features, and say that they feel persecuted by their characters, and other things like that”), and the true story of Bob Dylan’s shadow, and the fact that the emperor knows he’s naked. In my favorite piece, “Some Words of Warning,” a disquieting version of the story of the Pied Piper, we learn the limits of freedom.
There’s a great scene in “With No Left Hand” when Miguel de Cervantes confronts an editor, who (leading with, “Look, Miguel, it’s nothing personal”) calls him a “dead weight” and demands that he cut 300 pages out of his novel and get shy little Dulcinea topless before page fifty. “I don’t like the world much either,” says the editor, “But at least I try to enjoy what’s left of it while it lasts. When China becomes a global superpower we’ll cover our heads in ash and go begging forgiveness at the American embassy, and look for hamburger dealers under manhole covers, and watch with Christian resignation as the high altar at the Almudena cathedral is turned into a stand selling spring rolls… Do what I say, come back and see me, and then we’ll see whether we can squeeze anything out of the town councils of the villages you mention in the book. Hey, why are you looking at me like that? Do I look like some kind of a monster?” Miguel smiles. “No,” he says, “No. You look like a windmill.”
A History of the World for Rebels and Somnambulists is not a work of fiction or history - it’s a work of philology, actually, at a moment when rare, good philologists are more essential than they might first appear. Why are you looking for a new, manly cult novel, after all? It’s not really because you want to challenge yourself, to slink around smoking Gauloises and being a sexy literary badass. It’s because you need to be secretly comforted, so that you can survive. “Please, I want to go home,” Eve says to God, “…I suppose I’m allowed to make mistakes, aren’t I?” “Yes,” God answers, “yes, you are. For now.”" - Elizabeth Bachner
Jesus del Campo: Immortality has nothing on the Roma–Lazio derby
They started arriving slowly, with cautious steps, as if unsure of themselves, as if worried that they might be struck down at any moment by a sudden feeling of reverence, and little by little they spread across the square until they had covered it completely.
Once they found themselves all squeezed in there together the mood changed and they started looking at one another with an almost rude curiosity. There were desert nomads proudly holding the reins of their camels and occasionally beating their drums out of fear of losing their companions in the crush of the crowd. There were Chinese torturers with painstakingly curled black hair who were fanning themselves with peacock-feather fans and struggling to breathe under the oppressive Mao collars on their nylon jackets, and astronomers from Cape Verde waving maps of Saturn in the air, and anarchists from Minnesota studying books on phonetics, and deliverymen from Cuzco handing out free painkillers "because today's a special day," they said, "and we're all brothers". And of course there were Romans too: women with plucked eyebrows and men holding their heads up high as if posing for their picture on a coin.
And finally the Pope took the advice of the canticles and stepped out onto the balcony.
"What do you want?" he asked them.
"We're here to protest against mortality!" they shouted back at him in an avalanche of different languages. A group of Eskimos waved a banner in Danish demanding immortality for those who work for it.
An Englishwoman turned to her husband and whispered, "I have to say that the Archbishop of Canterbury, when you see him in person, looks far more majestic than the papists' infallible guru."
"We have to respect the views of the majority, as we agreed," said her husband diplomatically, without looking up from his copy of News of the World.
Then a spokesman stepped forward to speak on behalf of the demonstrators and read a manifesto in Latin.
"After deep discussions," he said, "we have decided to put aside our differences of creed, which at this moment seem of secondary importance, and have agreed to come here, to the centre of world religion, to express our shared conviction that what we have to go through and suffer is simply not fair. No, Your Holiness. It's not fair that we should be weighed down with uncertainty about our final destiny for all our lives, on top of all the other hardships which keep us in a permanent state of discomfort, as well as being blackmailed to do the right thing left, right and centre under the threat of eternal punishment. We have realized that we are all united by the same anxiety, and because of this we want Your Holiness to communicate our protest to He who has appointed you as His representative on earth. We will not move from here until we've had an answer to our request, which is the following: we want Him to declare a 'time out' in the life of the earth, during which not a single creature on this miserable planet will be struck down by death's crushing blow so that, when we've received this guarantee, we will all be able to feel safe at last, and breathe as freely as if we'd never read stories about Original Sin. In short, we want to vent our frustration, Your Holiness, because where there's death, nobody can live."
And the Pope thought in silence for a few moments, and scratched his chin.
"Look, all of you," he said, "I'm an old man and I share your concerns, believe me, I understand it well, but I fear your demands are beyond my powers. I can ask Him for you, of course, and I might even be able to negotiate a little more excitement and less tedium in your view of the world's landscapes: you will have emerald-green skies, sand as blue as sapphires for your beaches, snow as red as leopard's blood for your mountains and water as transparent as Bohemian crystal for your rivers, which furthermore will run full of nymphs and sirens with an open, liberal attitude with whom, if it's any consolation, you will have the chance to live out your most primitive fantasies of entertainment. I might even be able to get you a reduction in the hole in the ozone layer; but oh, my friends, I can't get you the thing you ask for."
"We won't move from here," the spokesman repeated, and his phrase was echoed in a storm of defiant applause, and the first torches began to glimmer in the night amid shouted threats to set fire to Rome.
"But not the taxi stand in the Piazza del Popolo," someone protested;
"Not the Trevi Fountain," shouted someone else;
"Not the statue of Giordano Bruno," somebody else begged from the crowd.
"What time is the Roma–Lazio match?" asked a Spanish demonstrator holding a transistor radio to his ear. And a sharp, sickle-shaped silence spread over the square and trembled in the air like an old-aged acrobat.
"It's already started," answered an Italian, who understood the question. "I'm from Milan and a big Inter fan, what team do you support?"
The Spaniard answered but nobody heard him because suddenly a tumult of voices arose declaring: "I'm a Glasgow Rangers fan," "I support Dynamo Kiev," "I support Ethiopian Coffee from Addis Ababa," "I'm with Yokohama Marinos," and "I'm an Alianza de Panama fan."
And then, above all this noise, they began to hear a dull roar which they hadn't noticed until now coming from the Stadio Olimpico with the swelling force of a sea stirred up by a stormy wind and, little by little, larger and larger groups of dejected demonstrators started leaving the square, speeding up the further away they got. And the Swiss Guards stopped frowning and pointing their halberds at people and let a group of South Koreans take their photographs in exchange for half a dozen CDs of music for Zen meditation.
The Pope improvised a good-natured, routine blessing with the confidence of someone who knows his job inside out, then turned away from the dispersing crowd and glanced surreptitiously at his secretary.
"Please," he whispered to him, "can you find out the score?"
(Translated from Spanish by Catherine Mansfield. )
http://www.thedrawbridge.org.uk/issue_9/immortality_has_nothing_on_the/
