a plaintive cry drifted up from somewhere far south and was quickly drowned out by a ringing of cash registers. I think it was Panama, meekly protesting its treatment by John le Carri, whose latest novel, “The Tailor of Panama,” has just poked its nose into the best-seller list.
The novel portrays bumbling British spies making a mess of things in an already messy Panama. The Tailor himself is a British ex-jailbird, who emerges from stir to con Panama’s elite into believing he is a perfectly respectable sort — an upstanding merchant of Savile Row bringing British refinement to the tropics. But, having been out-conned, first by a piggish Panamanian banker, then by an overzealous British spy, he finds himself forced to sell the imagined secrets of his adopted country to the Home Office to get himself out of debt, and his homeland into trouble.
Le Carri’s rousing portrait of tropical skullduggery has caused quiet fury in Panama, where many of those who can afford the imported English-language edition (and the bilingual education to read it) served as social guides to the author during his research visits. Now they are dismayed to find that “The Tailor” is stitched together with images of their country as a stereotypical white-suited banana republic, populated by thousand-dollar-hit-men and the grotesquely hypocritical lovers who employ them.
“Panama’s not a country, it’s a casino,” le Carri declares at one point. “Gossip is what Panama has instead of culture,” he exclaims at another. “Great Men in Panama … have paneled, steel-lined bulletproof doors of rain-forest teak with brass handles you can’t turn because the doors are worked on buzzers from within so that Great Men can’t be kidnapped. …” And in this casino of Great Men, money is laundered and idealistic young women are beaten beyond recognition, while a pathetic pack of British diplomats coerce conspiracy theories from those not in the know and trump up a local takeover of the canal.
“Exaggeration” was the careful accusation wielded by a Panamanian gentleman of my acquaintance. “Misconceptions” were diplomatically attributed to Mr. le Carri by the Panamanian Embassy in Washington. “I am aware that novelists live in a world beyond reality,” wrote Ambassador Eduardo Morgan in an unpublished letter to The New York Times. “For that reason I am not surprised to learn … [that le Carri's] keen sense for ‘cloak and dagger’ ambiance should spill over from his fiction on to his perception of the facts.”
Yet Panamanians seem not so much angered as hurt by the book’s transgressions. “It’s sad that le Carri chose Panama for this scenario,” said Fernando Etela, a minister at the Panamanian Embassy, phrasing his discomfort most discreetly. No one has called for public book burnings on the streets of Panama City. Indeed, the controversy hasn’t even made it out of the club rooms and into the local press — although it did merit a story in The New York Times.
The upper echelon of Panamanian society debates its treatment in the novel and plays guessing games to decide which fictional characters might correspond to the nation’s real-life powerbrokers. But so far no one has tried to fundamentally challenge le Carri’s portrait of the country.
“Geographically, Panama is obviously a strategic point for both the legal and illegal world,” concedes Rolando Paredes. The Consul General of Panama in San Francisco has yet to read the engrossing tale. But others have reported their findings to him. “It seems to me that [le Carri] was looking for a sinister setting for his plot … Panama may not be free of sin, but it’s not as bad as all that. …”
Has the Panamanian response been so muted because the novel’s assertions are close to the truth? “Exaggeration,” after all, is not a crime, or not a major one, in any case — and the Panamanian critics know well that the dossier filed by the great spy-storyteller was put together with first-hand reconnaissance and assistance from Panama’s upper crust.
But a more profound explanation for the relative silence may well be that Panama, like its neighbors, has learned to turn the other cheek in the face of the countless embellishments, fallacies and downright lies that have been spread about the Americas since the first Europeans arrived to plunder the continent. The conquistadors sent tall tales back to their kings to ensure their own fame and fortune. And in more recent times, respected writers such as V.S. Naipaul and Bruce Chatwin have been received into the homes of prominent South Americans, only to compose warped depictions of the Latin cultures they had visited, bringing them literary success with distant readers who never knew of the bitter dismay their books (“The Return of Eva Persn,” “In Patagonia”) had left behind.
Perhaps Panamanians recognize that “The Tailor” is close enough to the truth that raising a noisier protest would only make the country the object of still greater ridicule — especially given the international propensity to see Latin America as preposterous and inferior.
Still, it’s troubling how easily Americans and Europeans give in to the temptation to see the vast Spanish-speaking South as a continuous strip of corruption and hypocrisy, with few distinguishing features or subtleties. Despite the hundreds of distinct languages and cultures, the dozens of religions, the distinct responses to colonization, dictatorship, and now democracy, our picture of Latin America is generally reduced to a hot and greasy politician ordering assassinations over a lunch of chile peppers, before indulging in a steamy siesta with his tainted business partners. Given its lack of political muscle — and the proverbial kernel of truth in such a depiction — Latin America has made little headway in dispelling this lurid image.
Surely there is more to Panama than the sticky, perfume-drenched, polluted Central American country we conjure up with each news story we read about drug-dealing General Manuel Noriega or the mismanagement of the Canal. It’s just that it can’t be found in “The Tailor of Panama.”
This, I think, is what that almost unheard cry is all about. We know that le Carri’s boisterous image of a naive but egotistical country is fiction, and that writers of fiction (as the Ambassador says) “live in a world beyond reality,” but we can’t help but confuse the storyteller’s mythical Panama with the real one. It becomes our Panama. The Panamanians, it seems, are upset not with le Carri’s failure to tell the truth, but with his failure to tell the whole truth — and with the rest of us, who never stop to question the veracity of our picture of our neighbors to the South.
EXTRA! Bork you, America!
The last we heard from Robert Bork (see the Media Circus for November 15), he was denouncing the Supreme Court and planning to possibly secede from the Union. In the cover story of the December 30th issue of The New Republic, Jacob Heilbrunn examines in detail the controversy we reported on: the growing rift between (mostly Jewish) neocons and (mostly Catholic) “theocons” — including Bork — who seem to believe that the country should return to its roots as a “Christian nation.”
Horacio Verbitsky, Argentina’s famously unflappable investigative journalist, doesn’t flinch as he pulls the bloody skeletons from his country’s closet in “The Flight,” his account of the atrocities committed during the “Dirty War” of the 1970s and early ’80s. But he relates the story with such indignation and vigor that you may have a hard time fighting the urge to flinch yourself. Be strong, as this is important and engrossing political history.
Verbitisky combines his own reporting with the confessions of a retired Argentine navy officer, Adolfo Scilingo. The result is an account of how 10,000 to 30,000 people were “disappeared” (read: kidnapped, tortured, murdered) by the Argentine armed forces, including chilling reports about torture by cattle prod, by toe-nail pulling, by the introduction of live mice into a woman’s vagina.
Scilingo’s story alone is compelling. Guilt overtook the officer 18 years after he obeyed orders to throw planeloads of prisoners, alive but drugged unconscious, to their death in the Atlantic Ocean. Plagued by nightmares that began when he almost fell out along with one of his victims, Scilingo grew outraged when, years later, the navy refused to admit that these actions had been ordered during the undeclared “war against subversives.” Steadied by sedatives and whiskey, Scilingo admitted his fears to Verbitsky: “If you carry out orders and enough time goes by that they are no longer secret for operative reasons and they are still being hidden or even directly lied about … this is lying in a treacherous way. And, in the context of that lie, I say we were transformed into criminals.”
These taped confessions are the record of one man’s impossible struggle to reconcile having unquestioningly followed orders to kill, with the realization (far too late) that those giving the orders were heinous murderers, not upright soldiers. The story of “the flights” was one Verbitsky had heard many times before, but only from the mouths of victims. When he published Scilingo’s confession in Buenos Aires in March of 1995, he opened the biggest can of worms to wriggle through the fashionable tango capital since democracy was reinstated in 1983. Scilingo’s revelations led to a historic mea culpa by the chief of the army, a demand (still stuck in the country’s Supreme Court) for the armed forces to provide lists of the “desaparecidos,” and — perhaps most significantly — to a society’s painful examination of the past.
This American edition of “The Flight” summarizes these post-publication developments and offers a brilliant chronology of Argentine political history since 1930. A glossary of key figures serves as a who’s-who refresher and guide through the maze-like text. As a primer to the Dirty War, “The Flight” is a volume of bloodcurdling horror that packs an astonishing moral punch. And it profoundly illustrates Verbitsky’s statement that “often in human history, great secrets are revealed by a solitary conscience.”
It’s as big as a horse, and not much smarter, swollen with he-man stories, preposterously sporty photo spreads and endless ads for booze, booze, Trojans, and booze. “It” is the premiere issue of Unlimited magazine, brought to us by none other than that cowboy-hatted icon of masculinity, Marlboro. It was all I could do to keep from sucking on pens and blowing air-rings in my neighborhood smoke-free cafe as the sweaty scent of male bonding wafted up from its glossy pages.
Unlimited is the demon spawn of Marlboro and Hachette Filipachi Magazines –the publisher of such virile rags as Car and Driver and Road & Track. Subtitled “Action, Adventure, Good Times,” the mag is designed to be “a sort of handbook for regular guys.” You know, those “regular” cliff climbing dudes who grace the mag’s “Let’s Rock” cover story — the ones who can skeddadle up 10,000 feet of Yosemite granite formations while puffing on a fag, clearly undaunted by the Surgeon General’s Warning about complications caused by smoking during pregnancy. But not just any regular guy can read this magazine: you’ve got to sign a pledge certifying your status as a smoker to qualify for an Unlimited subscription.
A complimentary issue arrived unsolicited at my doorstep nonetheless, carelessly misdirected to a reformed smoker — and a chick to boot. I wondered if I could kick my clean lung habit just long enough for a good read. I wasn’t hopeful. I’d heard too many tobacco lies already this year, and here was Philip Morris trying to convince me that these buff boys I saw kayaking and windsurfing in sporty feature stories were just waiting to get out of the wet and take a drag on a cancer stick.
Unlimited makes no boners about its limited interests: guys, guys’ sports, guys’ gear, guy bonding, and, well, chicks — as in “How to Take Your Girlfriend Camping,” a disparaging guide to help guys in guiding their make-up-addicted babes in the woods. The rest of the articles are similarly illuminating–consider “Major Stud,” (no, no, it’s about poker) and “Hog Wild,” a paean to Harley envy.
Has the PC anti-smoker movement made smoking so retro that only “regular guys” who live in a ’50s time warp will pick up a pack? Or has a lifetime of corporate tobacco fibbery simply twisted the collective Marlboro mind? What have they been smoking, anyway?
I hate to tell them, but We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. I seem to know a lot of chicks who chomp on cigars too. (Now if that’s not biting off the apotheosis of masculinity I don’t know what is.) So why doesn’t Marlboro want the girlie business? Our cash ain’t hard enough?
Actually, I’m not even sure how Marlboro’s babe-bashing, faux fitness zine is supposed to addict a new generation of men to the old cowboy vices. There’s not a cigarette to be found anywhere in the mag, except in the mouth of the quintessential Marlboro man on the back cover. And while I’m sure there’s some subtle between-the-lines persuasion going on here, what could it be? “Get physical with the boys, trash your woman and have a fag?” I guess someone finally told the M-man that kissing up to a smoker is like licking an ashtray. You’ve got to get dirty to get what you want.
Clearly, Marlboro realized that real men don’t wear Stetsons, and that an image update was overdue. But couldn’t the company have gone for cachet with the cafe society instead of the frat pack? After all, the literary world was built on an eternity of romantics drawing on stogies while burning the poetry out of their souls. Now the tortured black-clad artists among us — unable to contend with their cool image being desecrated by yuppie poster boys on snowboards– may simply go up in smoke. If Marlboro has its way, an all-male jock club will be hacking its way up Half Dome, littering Tuolumne Meadows with dead butts, while the rest of us sit grumbling in smokeless cafes.
I guess it’s a guy thing. Even after my big-daddy Unlimited hormone injection, I guess I’m just not manly enough to get the equation of studliness and cigs, or to see why women are a threat to the nicotine bond. But as far as I’m concerned, if the dudes that dig the editorial line that Marlboro is pushing want to queue up now for the cancer ward, I’m not going to stop ‘em.
Inspired by the glamorous South American queen bee she plays in “Evita,” Madonna has launched a media blitz to beat the Versace pantsuits right off our own wannabe First Ladies this election season. Without even bothering to diss their lavender apparel,
she’s thrown her cloche in the ring for the Grande Dame title.
While Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Dole dutifully spend their moments in the spotlight convincing us they represent American stateswomanliness, Madonna-as-Evita is the real First Lady to contend with working
the covergirl electorate at Vanity Fair, Vogue, People and front pages nationwide. Decked out in faux Dior, she dominates the press without even resorting to the censorship whip cracked by the First Ladyship of her aspirations, Argentina’s Eva Duarte Peron.
I’m as tired as the next glassy-eyed consumer of the “Evita” movie hype, but I was still curious about the appeal of Madonna’s platform and I’m not talking about the one under her Prada shoe leather.
Casting aside the fearful and loathsome on-the-campaign-trail coverage of Hillary and Elizabeth, I reached for Julie Salamon’s Vogue interview to catch Madonna’s pro-Evita pitch. That made-for-Hollywood despot, deified by the poor who sanctified her handouts and demonized by the aristocracy whose fortunes went to quench her Cartier thirst, incited a brand of mudslinging
our Washington matrons can’t match.
Clearly,
America’s foremost powerblonde no stranger to mudslinging herself feels a kinship with the South American ice queen. Madonna admits that while campaigning for the movie role, she scribbled eight pages of impassioned beggary in a letter to director Alan Parker. I was dying to see how
and why she would rescue Evita from the bitchy version presented in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical.
Defending a vengeful witch who bankrupted a wealthy nation while stuffing her closets with haute couture couldn’t be easy. But maybe those things aren’t criminal in Madonna’s eyes. What about Evita’s blacklists and brutal tortures? And how would America’s puritanical voters, appalled by extramarital kissyface, react to a gal who groped her way to the top?
Working the Peronist lobby like a true politico, Madonna evokes Evita in vague, romanticized terms, speaking abstractly of the struggles she and Evita shared as “women with success and power.” (No need to remind us that Evita achieved Hillary’s dream: she ruled Argentina without the tiresome formality of being elected to office.)
But Madonna’s Evita apology is cut short to make way for all the Evita frou-frou #0151; the ’40s suits, the chignon, the veiled hats. After all, fashion, as Jackie taught us, is what makes a First Lady.
I turned to Madonna’s “personal diaries” all 14 Vanity Fair pages. Unfortunately, they reveal little more than the bra strap President Carlos Menem ogled as Ms. Ciccone worked him over to get permission to shoot “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” from a balcony at the
presidential palace. (Like the real Evita, her combination of feminine wiles and unconquerable will got her what she wanted. Perhaps, like the real Evita’s, her diary was penned by a ghostwriter?)
Frustrated, I flipped through the freak show photos of Madonna in People, In Style, the Star, National Enquirer and Globe, only to find contraction-by-contraction accounts of her daughter’s Caesarean birth.
Try as I might to understand why the holy mother of pop is so keen on getting a fair shake for her despotic idol, I found the Madonna diaries about as illuminating as a Bob Dole speech on why a huge tax cut suddenly makes sense. Read my painted lips: No new nastiness. When it comes to badmouthing Eva, “Just don’t do it.”
Dole’s only hope was that Republicans would confuse him with Reagan or Bush. Does Madonna want to be confused with Evita? That First Lady did get an audience with the Pope, which Madonna would surely enjoy but her European
tour was at Franco’s invitation, saluting fascism. Evita married a pedophile dictator, was ostracized by those whose acceptance she craved, and had the life beaten out of her by uterine cancer at 33 not someone I’d like to trade places with ….
Yet Madonna confesses she dreamed of being Evita, felt the long-dead megalomaniac “enter my body like a heat missile” and anguished over how misunderstood Evita was.
I guess a candid explanation of this “misunderstanding” goes against the political grain. Madonna offers only a partial Evita, her unsightly Marie Antoinette aspects discreetly liposuctioned away. I know I shouldn’t have expected more from the Material Girl, but after all her breast-beating insistence about “understanding,” I had hoped.
Instead, there were only endless spreads of period costuming.
I admit I was baffled
until Bloomingdale’s announced the opening of its “Evita” boutiques featuring Mad Eva-inspired clothing, including a “coronation dress” for would-be queens. Estie Lauder has developed a special “Evita” cosmetics collection for would-be sluts, would-be saints or just young dictators in the making?
The Disneyfication of the dictatress is hard to swallow, but it’ll probably make the best-selling toys in babeland. Who wouldn’t take a First Lady Barbie swathed in an ermine cape over one styling a suit? We’re still slobbering over Jacqueline’s pillbox and playing by her rules: First Ladies should be seen (in Chanel) and not heard (lobbying for health care). Let us now become an army of off-the-rack Evitas.
By sucking up photo ops and skirting issues, Madonna’s given us the candidate we’ve been waiting for. Dripping with designers, Mad Eva not only has a ballot box advantage over the hopelessly unhip candidates’ wives, but she’s elicited enough free-advertising campaign contributions for the “Evita” box office to guarantee a big-budget inaugural wardrobe.
As usual, Madonna had it figured out all along. Her platform couldn’t be simpler, or more appropriate for the times: Forget the dead bodies, may the coolest dress win.
