| My Roots |
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Life and theater in Guatemala: Chat with Manuel Corleto | |
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by Edward Waters Hood | |
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Manuel Corleto and his personal contribution to the Guatemalan Contemporary Theater | |
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Corleto's interview to Otel Roc (With Every Drop of Blood from the Wound, Literary Award Rogelio Sinán, Panamá) | |
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Sitting: Gabriela, Manuel, Manuela.
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Life and theater in Guatemala: | |
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Chat with Manuel Corleto | |
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Manuel Corleto, recipient of the Premio Centroamericano de Literatura Rogelio Sinán in 1996, has a long literary trajectory in Guatemala. The mayority of his plays had been published in collections -El canto de Gregorio, Algo más de treinta años después, El animal vertical, Los Dogo$, (Guatemala: Volumen 1, Dirección General de Cultura y Bellas Artes); ¿Quién va a morderse los codos?, Lluvia de vincapervincas, Vade retro, El día que a mí me maten (Guatemala: Volumen 2, Dirección General de Cultura y Bellas Artes, 1979); El tren, Opus uno, Opus dos, Dios es zurdo, Ellos y... Judas (Guatemala: Volumen 3, Dirección General de Cultura y Bellas Artes, 1994); La Profecía, Edición del Autor, 1989)- and he has five edited novels -Bajo la fuente (Guatemala: Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, 1a. edición1987 y 2a. edición 1994); Se acabó el tiempo (Guatemala: Artemis Edinter, 1992); Malasuerte murió en Pavón (Guatemala Artemis Edinter, 1992); A fuerza de llorar tanto (Guatemala: Oscar de León Palacios, 1994); y Con cada gota de sangre de la herida (Panamá: Universidad Tecnológica)-. This interview was done in Panamá City, March of 1998, by Edward Waters Hood, during the VI Congreso Internacional de Literatura Centroamericana. | |
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Manuel, can we talk about your home town and youth experiences? | |
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I was born in the southern coast of Guatemala, in Escuintla. This city is very close to the sea and the whole region is hot and dry most of the year. My father worked drilling wells. I lived in the coast my first seven years of age, in completely arid places because his job was justly to find the water. That, in some way, defined my life in the sense that my first memories are from the ocean, the beach, the sun, the heat, making me love the cities close to the sea and the sand. So I was seven years old when we moved to Guatemala City. And from then now I am city person. | |
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At first I studied in a private school called the Colegio Suiza. In charge were the mother and the three daughters, a very strict kind of teachers, martial like, who usually used he wooden ruler to make a point. It was very difficult for me, but for financial reasons I was transferred to a public school. I really liked it because the level in public education was fairly good. The private schools were for wealthy people. Consequently it was a very sharp division and we, the middle classes, went to public elementary schools and later to the public institutes. At the time there was only the State University. | |
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Since I was very little I had an inclination for painting and literature. And I developed the two things side to side. The Academia de la Universidad Popular (Popular University Academy) occupied the second and third floors of the building. In the first stage there was the auditorium. And one day, when I was fourteen years old, I heard strange noises and I stepped down the spiral steps, got to the entrance curtains and discovered the theater. Usually I would go up stairs to my painting classes and down stairs to my house without looking at anything else. But this time I remember myself inhibited, watching what they were doing there. And what they were doing there was an Argentinian play. I can't forget it because of the gaucho costumes. It was a drama about the mother and the two sons, one of them a bastard, who were in love with the same girl. It was a very conventional kind of play but I liked it. | |
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I was so touched that I wanted to know what the theater was about. But I was so shy, probably for having lived in the country side for so long, because of the loneliness in those places, because of the aridity itself. So I asked a good friend to go and find out if I could study acting and that was all. At the very moment that I became registered in the Academy, the painter inside me died and the actor was born instead. | |
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When at seven years old I arrived to Guatemala City with my mother and my two younger sisters (my parents were separated at the moment), we lived in my grandaunt's house. It was a big colonial type house with a fountain it the first patio, a walkway for the horses from the street to the second patio with a fig tree, a not very common one. And not everybody had fig trees in their patio and an attic totally destroyed full with doves. | |
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There was also an incredible library. My grandaunt was a very avid reader and my family inclined to the books. And when I was able to read, I got immersed in this wonderful world. At that time it was believed that the best age to learn to read was seven years. So I learned at that age and from then on I passed much of my free time with the classics, encyclopedias, even the hand painted Bible and, of course, the most important Hispanic writers of the first decades of the twentieth century. It was my first contact with that type of books. | |
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I'm talking about this, because in my early teens I wrote my first and only detective story. Later on, when I was a theater student, I began to write drama. The Universidad Popular wasn't a formal theater school, but there were special courses, workshops and plenty of diverse activities. And I was working as an actor, and making my practices as director at sixteen, and designing and constructing decorates. And very often we used to go to other towns of the country with all types of plays. | |
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It was fun. And I quit my formal education and became a full time actor, playwright and director. | |
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There are many Central American novelists that begin their careers writing poetry. | |
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That wasn't my case. I wrote some poetry to my girlfriends and to life. I think it is a normal process when you're in love. It's nice, creates the atmosphere and it's worth it, as it happens in the movie El cartero (The Mailman) where a guy borrows Neruda's poems to gain his amorous conquest. And when Neruda itself asks the man why he took them without permission, the man answers that that's what the poetry is for, that it belongs to anybody who wants to obtain his goals in love. I didn't become a poet but a playwright. And more strange yet, after twenty years writing plays I didn't want to write anything else. To me it was like a mortal sin even to think in the possibility of writing a novel, for instance. And the word writer didn't really like me. I was a playwright and I wanted to stay as a playwright all my life. I was completely identified with the scene and the fact that a man from the theater was able to write for the theater. | |
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Everything was connected, simultaneous. I think that was very important for my formation as a playwright to know the theater from inside and the fact that I studied painting, sculpture, engraving, etc. That made it easy for me to get into the technical field in designing costumes, decorates, make-up. I did all this at the same time. | |
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In Guatemala who were your friends that were writing and doing theater? | |
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That was a kind of strong brotherhood, and it happened to be that I was standing within two generations. Everybody talked about “the such” generation, “the such” group and it happened to me be alone due to my age. There where the old, the masters, and the very young promises. That made me get close to the old who became my mentors (Manuel José Arce, Carlos Menkos-Deká, Hugo Carrillo and his brother Raúl Carrillo, a very good story teller and novelist translated to the German). | |
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My family had financial problems. They lost some properties after the war. And one of my granduncles was a politician. And to be a politician in Central America at that time is saying that he was in a very bad relationship with the government, and that he was in dismay and with a great possibility of going to jail or the exile. | |
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It was another passage that influenced me at the time. My grandaunt, virgin and martyr, had a fiancé who was a cadet of the military school involved in the attempt of assassination of the tyrant, who got caught and was executed by the shooting squad. My grandaunt never married and I remember a photograph or her beloved in the clothes cabinet. | |
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To this house used to go the personalities of the literature of the epoch. Of course, it was before I was born and when I was little. My grandaunt was well known in that circle and they would chat and drink coffee. I was told that Miguel Angel Asturias (Nobel Prize of Literature in 1967) went several times. And that Mario Monteforte Toledo was in love with one of my aunts. Many years later, when I was an adult, I met Monteforte Toledo and we established a good relationship. I asked him about my aunt and he told me that it was true. I asked my aunt and she got a little nervous. I concerted a date for them, but I don't remember why they didn't meet. | |
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I won several awards in theater. As a playwright every year, for a while, I had a prize. It was a kind of tradition to participate and win in Quetzaltenango, the prestigious Juegos Florales. And there I met the greats as Roberto Sosa y Manlio Argueta, Manuel José Arce, and all the others. I'm talking about the late sixties and early seventies when we all coincided in Xela for the September fiestas. | |
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When I published my first novel, Francisco Morales Santos was surprised that a playwright were writing a novel, when it generally is that a novelist writes a play. Anyway, my training as actor and director was giving a characteristic treatment in my novel, particularly in the dialogues. It's the Waterloo for the majority who intend to write a novel. When you start to write narrative you ask yourself: How can I make my characters talk in a credible and natural form? This is very difficult, but I'm sure that in my case the theater was an important training. | |
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I'm writing professionally since the sixties. I consider I'm a serious writer that prefers work rather than going to parties and cocktails. And being a lonely the writers who congregate in groups, associations and inner circles try to margin me. This is the sixtieth international literature congress, and only because I won the Rogelio Sinán Prize I was invited to assist. If not, as before I should be forgotten. But I know that kind of events are very important, because the public realize that you exist and begin to pay attention to your work. They suddenly discover you are a playwright, a novelist, an actor and director. For me it's like getting into a new dimension. I am aware that someone is going to know more about me, about mi job, and eventually could be interested in doing a translation or a study of my books. | |
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I'm very happy and motivated for the Rogelio Sinán award, especially because there were three women (Alina Camacho-Gingerich, Alondra Badano e Itzel Velásquez) the ones who choose my book. They are women of quality, intelligence, very professional, well prepared and each one in her field incapable of making concessions. That made me really proud. | |
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Can you talk about some of your plays? | |
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Yes. I begin with El animal vertical. This play debut was during a Guatemalan Theater Festival and I won the Direction Prize with it. It was my professional beginning in 1973. The next year, in one of La Antigua Festivals was the opening of Algo más de treinta años después and I won a Direction Prize too with this other play. It's theater of the Absurd and in my novelistic there is that tendency too. If I have to mention another, there is a small piece. I asked myself once if the audience wants the equivalent of the ticket price. If you pay you deserve a two hour show. That's your right. And if somebody touches your holly right you won't be happy. So I decided to do an experiment. Such an experiment never was a fact because the theaters closed their doors in my very face. Let me explain to you the seven minutes of good drama theory (when the play finishes the actors left and the audience, without knowing what is going on, begin to protest and finally break the theater). Well, this is to demonstrate that it is not the size, the audience is not paying for a two hour spectacle, it is paying for a play and if the play lasts seven minutes it doesn't matter. After that the play became of “normal” length with the title Lluvia de vincapervincas. There is another, El día que a mí me maten (The day I get killed). This is the lyrics of a Mexican Corrido that says: El día que a mí me maten que sea de cinco balazos y estar cerquita de ti para morir en tus brazos (The day I get killed has to be with five bullets and very close to you so I can die in your arms), and it adds that fortunately, only one of the five shots was a mortal wound. The main subject in my theater and novels is the critic to the corrupt system in our countries. And it was developed in the worst years of the civil war and repression in my country. What spared me to die was my non participation in the armed fight against the government. Many writers, as Otto Rene Castillo, and Luis de Lión were disappeared and killed. I was very careful in that sense. And I survived because I never militated in the left or in the right wings. When I was living in Mexico, in the early seventies, I received a commission from the Guatemalan guerrilla asking me to participate actively in the movement. They put my back against the wall, asking me about the fact that I write muy bonito (sweet talking) but where was my contribution to the revolutionary fight? And I had a clear idea about it and I answered to them that I was overwhelmed by his decision and spirit but that wasn't my way of doing things and that I believed in the power of the word over the power of the sword. Blah-blah. It was an easy way of making my point and get away from them without any trouble. | |
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Some time after that a man arrived from Africa called Ives Fleurima. Carlos Menkos-Deka, the Teatro Universitario director was a very generous person and permitted him to stay in the theater and live there in exchange for some work as a technician. I was amazed because Ives, as if in the branches of a tree in his native jungle, was sleeping in the highest part of the scenic cube embracing the wooden frame. And I was afraid of a fatal fall. I'm telling you this, because some years later a guerrilla man in jail commented to a music friend that my head had a price, and that if I stayed in Guatemala rather than going to Mexico there were suppose to kill me because I was believed to be a CIA informant (as Fleurima was). It is all I know. That was the left wing. From the right wing, one of my karate students, a soldier, told me that my dossier was big and that the army intelligence was only waiting for a false step from me to get me. | |
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Ten years later I did confirm it with the publication of Bajo La fuente, my first novel. It was in the beginning of the presidency of Vinicio Cerezo from Democracia Cristiana. I won the Premio Froylán Turcios and the Ministerio de Cultura was interested in the first edition. We made the arrangements, the novel was printed and everything was ready for the launching of the book. But it was delayed. Asking why, they told me that the book was a dirty book and that the government won't be able to endorse it. They didn't mention the real reason and everything was intended as a moral issue. Mario Monteforte Toledo knew about it and went directly to speak with the president, telling him that either they present and distribute the book or he is taking the next plane to Mexico and returning to his exile, because he was back to believing in democracy and not the censorship. | |
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The new government was aware of the strength of Mario Monteforte as a political banner. He was offered Secretaries of State and Monteforte said he was not interested in power. Admirable! In some other occasion they gave him financial support for the presentation of one of his plays. And he returned the money he didn't spend. Who in the hell does that? Mario Monteforte Toledo! They gave him twenty thousand dollars and he returned five thousand. Who in the hell would do that in Guatemala? As I say, only Mario Monteforte Toledo. Period. He didn't accept neither the Ministerio de Cultura nor the Ministerio de Educación. He said no thanks, because he wasn't in agreement with the government politics. Who does this? That demonstrates the ideological values of this man. Well. When Mario gave them the ultimatum the book was printed, with a date for the launching. They agreed finally. But the government wasn't present in the act. There was not advertising or promotion of any kind. The edition was consistent in 1000 books. They gave me 500 and I personally distributed my share. As for the 500 books left, nobody knows what happened to them, they just disappeared. Possibly the humidity and the moths finished them at the end. The government accepted Mario's ultimatum but they took revenge destroying the books. Shame on them. | |
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Of course I had trouble with the thematic of my plays and novels. Even though I didn't run and kept working in the more difficult years of the repression without doing any concessions and knowing the risks. But, as I told you before, my logic of survival was based in the fact that I'm a writer, I'm working, I have my ideology, I'm a rebel but nobody can say I am a subversive. | |
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Is there, for you, any kind of non political, non social literature? | |
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There are not any dividing lines, everything is connected. But we are talking about the price of your head in countries like mine, some real and evident fact if we count the dead and disappeared. I don't believe in a division. Maybe it's the measurement for the concessions you can do. I don't know. Once a guy got close to me and asked me: “Do you want to stay alive in this country? Use your auto censorship. Don't ever touch this people and you are going to be fine”. To me it sounded terrible. I think there is not a line, that everything is connected. The people in position of power are afraid of the word. Mario Monteforte said so in an analysis of my theater and first novels. He said that in me there was not anger, that the things I write have a sense of purity, but he added that in me the word is sharper and more destructive than a bullet. | |
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If somebody is acquiring knowledge about certain themes, among the knowledge there is the capacity of debate. Knowing your rights and obligations, you can draw a schema and question the system. That's why the dictatorships traditionally try to maintain the people in a total state of ignorance, because they can gain more control. And who has collaborated with that the most? The religion, the dogmatic part: This is a sin, that you cannot do it, the power of God, etcetera. That drives you to say amen and accept everything as an unquestionable fact. Education in our country is for them opposition. And they don't like it. If I know the law, if I know my rights, I can question you. | |
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You can't eat the letters, can you? | |
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Some times yes, like a letters soup. For the majority of writers, writing is something you do by stealing time to your job and rest. You can eat the letters, but just a few can live out of them. | |
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When I encountered the theater, or the theater had the close encounter with me, it was love at first sight. As I told you, I was a student at the Painting School, and the only possible way of making money and a living was in an advertising agency. I learned about marketing, promotion, commercial production. And I landed in the only possible place that fitted me: an art department. I worked for many years in the media, playing all the bases, as a designer, artistic director, creative director and, finally, manager assistant. In the seventies, before I went to Mexico, the owner of the agency were I was working made me a proposition: “I'm about to buy a bankrupt advertising agency. I want you to be the manager and my partner”. Can you imagine? I was twenty five years old, aggressive, ambitious, willing to make a career in that field. But on the other hand there was the opportunity in Mexico to experiment in theater, television, in the movies. | |
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You bet. I rejected my boss' offer. And when I came back from Mexico, three years later, I returned to my late job, until I was fed up with the advertising contents. It was the last shock I could bear. We, the agency people, were sent to Costa Rica for a wax survey. We were hidden in a small room all day long listening to the housewives talking about the non sliding wax in the other side of the window glass (a mirror for them). The housewives were asked about the wax. And we reached the conclusion that the non sliding wax wasn't non-sliding at all but quite dangerous on the floors. So I said to the account executives that we couldn't endorse the non sliding campaign. They saw me as a rare animal and launched the campaign anyway. I did quit not only from the agency but from the advertising world. | |
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That was the drop that filled the glass. It was beyond the limits of my patience. So I had the good fortune of being hired by a very important editorial in Guatemala, specialized in scholar books and all kinds of educational publications. This editorial made a fortune up to one cent charts of geographical, scientific, technical contents. They invented, more than fifty years ago, that wonderful aid to teachers and students. | |
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When I began working with them, they were already twenty years in the market and it was the exact moment when the editorial was suffering the transformation from a family business to a very competitive enterprise. I was the one who organized the editorial production department, in the graphic field, getting more and more involved in books. So, paradoxically, not the theater or the literature but the book production is what have made possible my financial survival. | |
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On the other hand, karate was introduced in Guatemala in 1952 by Jorge Sosa García, a man who listened about ju-jitsu after the II World War when martial arts were totally unknown in the western hemisphere. In the beginning he trained alone with the help of a book bought in the United States. By the time he opened a small karate studio, he met accidentally a Japanese electronics technician. They became friends and the Japanese was, coincidentally, a karate teacher. I began my karate training in 1967. I was looking for a contact sport and tried boxing first, but my long nose was bleeding all the time. Next, wrestling, but my physical consistency was weak. Judo sounded interesting to me, but as in wrestling my weight didn't help me and I'm not that kind of strong man. Finally I found karate and it fitted me because you keep the distance with the opponent and you don't really need much pounds or muscles. I did take it seriously as a philosophy and a discipline and I'm still sticking to it. I don't know if karate helped in some way for my literature or if it was the other way around, but it has been a great experience in my life. The last ten years I've been an instructor, licensed by the Japanese Karate Federation with the grade sensei (teacher). Karate to me is not for making money. I have a very modest dojo (studio) and I like to teach young people and women. | |
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Can we talk about your prized novel Con cada gota de sangre de la herida (With Every Drop of Blood from the Wound)? | |
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I wrote a first novel of about three hundred pages in the early eighties. I was working in the editorial, so it was easy to make the final montage and get the book ready for press. But something was bothering me and I had my doubts. So with the book finished in my hands I decided not to print it. I never published it and I never will. This decision was most celebrated by Mario Monteforte. He said: “So many little writers have the good sense and fortune of never publishing their first novel, because the first novel is full of imperfections, because it is an experiment that drives them to an unknown world. That's why the ending is not too happy”. He celebrated my decision and I agree because that first novel was a rehash of great part of my plays. I'm glad I disposed it. | |
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That was when I wrote the one I consider my first novel Bajo la fuente and I won the Premio Froylán Turcios in Honduras in 1985. Afterwards it liked me. I continued working in the genre with Se acabó el tiempo and A fuerza de llorar tanto. Both novels were awarded with the Premio Guatemalteco de Novela in 1991 and 1993. In 1991 I published another novel, this time it was requested by a very famous delinquent called Malasuerte (Bad luck). He offered me money for writing his story. And he didn't tell me the same thing twice because it wasn't common to gain money writing so I accepted. With some reserves because it is well known that many criminals sell their copywrights just minutes before being executed. But I imposed my conditions and he accepted. If he wanted his story, I will tell it. The story of a criminal, that in a stage of his terrible life, decided to change and dies in jail as a criminal for the rebirth as a man of good. | |
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Marc Zimmerman criticizes my novel. He didn't like it and I agree. But it is a job as any other (I already had three awarded novels). And as the Bible says “There is a time for everything in life”, don't you think so? | |
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I was in a moment that I wanted to talk about myself, my childhood, my neighborhood; all that I had lived and experienced in my adolescence. I remembered something I had written a long time ago about my grandaunt's house. I found it and it became part of the description in my novel Con cada gota de sangre de la herida (With Every Drop of Blood from the Wound). I took the old elements and reinvented the story in the event of a horrendous crime perpetrated against a homosexual in the old barrio de Gerona. He was a clockmaker by profession and a doll repairer by avocation. In his workshop he has doll parts hanging all over the place. And it is true. I mean when I was a child I saw this very workshop and I felt terrified looking at the arms, heads, legs, torsos, eyes everywhere. This was the shooter in my novel. The two friends split after that man is found in pieces hanging among his dolls parts. Nobody knows what happened but some possibilities are suggested. The watchmaker raped the small brother of one of the protagonists. After many years, the friends are reunited again and they make a blood pact that takes part in the end of the novel. | |
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The University Theater presented my play El tren based in a narrative text. The characters are the chief of the train station in a country town, his son and a school teacher. The son is working in the city but is now visiting his father. And the teacher, she is going back to the city in the same train with the son and the tyrant. This is the moment were the action develops. And in the very end a bomb explodes. I'm telling you this because when I saw the montage I was amazed. The director decided that the son was gay. And it gave the play a different dimension, something I didn't even think about and with gusto in the presentation. | |
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What is happening to me today is that I'm ahead one novel and a half. And come back to the events that motivated Con cada gota de sangre de la herida (With Every Drop of Blood from the Wound) is painful and strange, because I mix characters and stories from other works. I fill a great distance between me and the novel. | |
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Anyway a passage that I consider interesting in that novel is the chess game that link the events related with the crime. I like it very much. It is short. In a half dozen of moves there is a chess mate and everything is said. It was not my intention to inscribe the novel in the crime story genre. There is a crime, an existential problem, the story of the neighborhood, the politics of the moment, the real events that marked this people lives. As I told you before, it is very autobiographic, about my personal experiences in my beloved barrio de Gerona. | |
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How was your narrative received? | |
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There are two things about my critics. They want to know why I am abusing the theatrical resources and including some dramatic material in my novels. And they ask why it is so autobiographical. Another thing that bothers some readers is the absolute license I take with the language, with grammar. I think that these aspects, precisely, are the success of my work, a matter of style. | |
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With Maximón | |
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Manuel Corleto and his personal contribution | |
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to the Guatemalan Contemporary Theater | |
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Corleto's interview to Otel Roc | |
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Literary Award Rogelio Sinán, Panamá) | |
