The Good Terrorists

I was reading Góngora's Las soledades when every channel in sunny Miami broke into its news broadcast with word of the daring raid in Lima by the MRTA (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru), which had seized the Japanese Embassy with more than 400 hostages inside, including diplomats, cabinet ministers, businesspeople, military officers, senior officials, and the usual cocktail-party regulars, gathered there to celebrate the Emperor's birthday. The first thing that came to mind was an entirely frivolous observation: the extraordinary coincidence of having returned now, as this terrorist feat occurred, to a book I had read eagerly in every free moment during the Peruvian electoral campaign of 1989–1990, when the MRTA carried out its most headline-grabbing operations. Since then, the cold and perfect beauty of Gongorean poetry has been indelibly associated in my memory with the blood and thundering of terrorist violence that marked that campaign. And, as it seems, in the future that mysterious kinship between the most skilled maker of metaphors in the Spanish language and political savagery in my country will continue, with no hope whatsoever that death (the deaths) will separate them. Published December 26, 1996.