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The following
are excerpts of recently published stories by Sergio Ortiz
ON A QUEST FOR THE QUETZAL -- Published in Americas Magazine, the house organ of the Organization of American States GENOA -- Published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Globe web page & distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate VENICE -- Published in "Reform Judaism Magazine" A TRAIN JOURNEY THROUGH MALAYSIA -- Published in the Boston Globe web page and distributed through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate GRANADA, SPAIN -- Published in the Los Angeles Times, the CCN web page & distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate
It's raining in Paris, a rain so gentle it feels like silk and the temperature has dropped so drastically that Parisians look dazed. Like them, I seek warmth in a café, the Café Mondrian on the Boulevard St. Germain, where a bunch of Mondrian's prints -- cheerful acrylic squares and lines -- add a bright counterpoint to the frosty gun-metal clouds threatening the city. It's too cold to do anything but drink coffee and watch the kaleidoscope
of umbrellas and raincoats through steamed up windows. The hotel cat, a pushy black and white fellow named Sputnik, scratches my door. He's still carrying a catnip mouse I brought him from California and he hops on the bed to nibble on his mouse and purr. I doze off next to him only to awake later in the darkness when the ghost of Ernest Hemingway comes knocking on my door. I've been rereading Hemingway since I found a box of his works in one of the many used bookstores near the intersection of the boulevards St. Germain and St. Michel. All that terse prose that reads forced these days, but which revolutionized the language, was dancing inside my head and awakened me the night of the cat and the rain in Paris. I'm staying in Hemingway's old stomping grounds -- and for the past several days I've been walking along the same streets where he trod in the 1920's when he played the role of a starving artist while hoarding his first wife's trust fund so he could travel in the summers to Spain. According to most accounts, parsimony and self promotion came to him naturally. Writing, however, was another thing. That was a struggle to learn. And learn it he did. In this city. In this neighborhood. Whatever faults he had -- self-centered impudence, alcoholism, malice, egomania and ingratitude -- he bought his ticket into heaven with the wonderful way he made us see things and with the precision of style he chiseled to instill modernism into the English language. The next morning, with the sun making tentative runs at the dark clouds, and armed with a copy of Michael Reynold's "Hemingway: The Paris Years," Noel Riley Fitch's "Walks Through Hemingway's Paris" and the master's own "A Moveable Feast," I set off to find what's left of his Parisian haunts. Of the three books, it's "Feast" that's the least reliable. He wrote it while in his fifties, when very little he said was to be believed and it's full of outrageous lies such as his earning money as a sparring partner for professional boxers, trapping pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens for dinner, etc. What he left out mostly was how he learned the phenomenal discipline he mastered to write as he did. Most importantly, he failed to mention that without the huge help from his fellow expatriates he would most likely have remained an obscure journalist hacking out features from Europe. His literary legacy is a testimony to the help he received. He was fortunate for being well-connected at the right place at the right time: Paris in the '20's. It was this Paris -- in a very expensive Paris of the '90's -- that I set out to find. I dug under the dusty layers of three-quarters of a century and saw the buildings and talked to people and came out convinced that parts of Hemingway's Paris endure, but the magic is gone. Ironically, three cups of coffee at the Café Mondrian set me back $18 -- exactly what the 23-year old Hemingway paid for one month's rent in his first Paris apartment in the 5th Arrondissement's Latin Quarter, at 74 rue de Cardinal Lemoine, where he lived with his first wife Hadley in 1922. Hemingway's building is a six-floor, gray stone building unchanged since his time. As in the old days, the residence is in a working class neighborhood in the shadow of the Pantheon, the colossal, dank monument built by Louis XV and the resting place of Rosseau, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and other French luminaries. On the street level you'll find a modest travel agency aptly called Under Hemingway's and a boarded-up discotheque called Le Rayon Vert covered with graffiti. In the '20's, the place was called Bal du Printemps, a dime-a-dance club full of workingmen, hookers and sailors. Hemingway, who complained about the accordion music and the late-night laughter coming from there, often brought writers like Ford Maddox Ford to watch the action....
ON A QUEST FOR THE QUETZAL -- (Published in Americas Magazine, the house organ of the Organization of American States) In the half-light of dawn when the wakeup call in the gunmetal darkness of the Guatemalan cloud forests is a sweet recital of contralto bird songs with the wind in the trees providing the bass notes, a presence is felt. Some describe it as mystical. Others say that it’s merely the feeling that comes from being an intruder in such a desolate, wet, humid greenhouse where humans instinctively feel like trespassers being assessed by unseen creatures. Whatever the reason, these Guatemalan high forests are eerie, a green belt of dense jungle crowning the Maya Forest — a region shared by Mexico, Guatemala and Belize — that along with Brazil’s Matto Grosso is considered one of the “lungs of the Americas” because their lushness provides a large and essential portion of the Western Hemisphere’s oxygen.
The name Guatemala derives from “Goathemala,” “Land of Many Trees” in the Maya-Toltec dialect, and only a few minutes in one of its lush forests makes clear why the name is appropriate. These cloud forests are ageless. Great civilizations flourished and collapsed in their foothills, but they lingered unsullied until modern demands began to drastically slash their vastness. And it’s here, usually at daybreak, when one of the most remarkable, enigmatic and elusive birds in the world — the resplendent quetzal — makes a fleeting appearance to dispel one of the countless myths surrounding it: This avian Guatemalan treasure sings. There is a belief, especially among Guatemalan Mayas, most who have never seen a quetzal, that the bird their ancestors held sacred abruptly stopped singing when the first Spaniards set foot in the New World. But its song is a plaintive spurt of short whistles, much like humans use when calling a dog. When in flight, it sounds like a squawking parrot overdosed on amphetamines. The song is unmistakable and unforgettable and in order to hear it one must trek up to the cloud forests of Guatemala, a country so steeped in quetzal lore that the bird is the national symbol and its visage graces the flag. Guatemalan currency takes its name, and even the map of the country — if you use your imagination — resembles a quetzal in profile. The bird, a member of the trogon family, is endemic and exclusive to the cloud forests of Mesoamerica, the region reaching from the Mexican highlands of Chiapas and Oaxaca to the Panamanian Isthmus. Some ornithologists consider it the most beautiful bird in the world and because it is elusive, reclusive, temperamental, delicate and shy with a strong distaste for captivity, it’s in acute danger of extinction due to encroaching farmlands and to the slash-and-burn farming methods used in Latin America. Quetzal watching calls for fortitude and patience. To reach the dense forest canopy that’s their home requires hours of tortuous uphill climbing through thick growth swarming with mosquitoes. Adding to the ordeal, the birds have a propensity to keeping motionless for long periods and are so well concealed by their natural camouflage that one is fortunate to catch even the most fleeting glimpse of this feathered jewel. On top of that, the quetzal seems to delight in its inscrutability, fluttering about in dark, moist woodlands that are dwindling by the day. Although measures are being taken to improve its chances of survival, the bird’s timidity, its need for wide-open spaces and... GENOA -- (Published
in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Globe web page
& distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate)
I'd been hanging around the Italian Riviera checking out Camogli's
fish festival, hiking in the Cinque Terre and trying to soak up a little
culture by reading Ezra Pound's "Cantos" in the sidewalk cafe in front
of the waterfront apartment where he lived in Rapallo.
Do you know what it's like to be in a town so beautiful that it makes
you daydream about what it would be like to win the lottery or a pile
of money in Vegas, enough to allow you to live there?
Rapallo is such a place. It has moved poets. It's the "little town
by river or seashore" described by Keats in "Ode On a Grecian Urn" and
Yeats called its coastline "Rapallo's thin line of broken mother-of-pearl."
Now it was time to close the books, hop on a train and head for home.
At the station in Genoa, still basking in Rapallo's afterglow or perhaps
subconsciously trying to avoid my return, I counted my resources. There
were some lira left, so I bought a city map and studied it.
Genoa is Italy's neglected city, merely a place to cross to and from
the pastel towns scattered along the craggy coast of the Ligurian Sea.No
one stops here. Guidebooks gloss over it, pointing out its huge commercial
harbor and its grimy appeal and then move on to justifiably fawn over
the postcard towns nearby.
It's never mentioned in the same breath with the great Italian destinations
of Venice, Florence and Rome. Yet it has a milder climate than those
cities because it's shielded by the Ligurian Apennines from the glacial
Alpine winds.
My map showed a hilly city sprawling in the middle of the two Italian
Rivieras, the Levante (sunrise) and the Ponente (sunset), like a referee
breaking up two boxers in a clinch. The ancients knew what they were
doing when they started a settlement in this great natural harbor way
back before there was a Roman Empire.
But all I knew about it was that it once was a predominant city-republic
rivaling Venice and Florence and the birthplace of Christopher Columbus
and Andrea Doria, the admiral who wrestled this part of Italy from French
control in the 16th century.
I figured that my lira could last a few more days, so I walked out
into the street with no destination, reservations, or definite plans
other than to see Genoa.
I was to learn later that this was the family crest of the Dorias and
that the small hotel at the end of the alley where I found a room was
the home of the admiral almost 400 years ago.
Most people are not aware that in Italy you can barter for rooms. Depending
on the circumstances, it's often feasible to cut the posted rate in
half. So I bartered and got a room with a view of the city's steeples
and, oddly enough, a building still showing the scars incurred on it
by Royal Navy bombs during World War II.
I sat at the desk and studied my map again.
My hotel sat on the fringes of the city's Medieval District, a zone
that according to the map's text was full of worthwhile sights. Tourist
maps characteristically grovel shamelessly over banal landmarks and
settings, but mine didn't even come close to doing justice to the charms
of Genoa, a city of San Francisco-style hills and beautiful confusion...
VENICE -- (Published in "Reform
Judaism Magazine")
Picturesque cities, San Francisco comes foremost to mind, suffer from
a bad case of the "cutesies." It's as if they're constantly preening
in front of a mirror, telling themselves that they're the fairest of
them all, brushing off the cruel fact that they don't hold a candle
to Venice, that jewel on the Adriatic Sea -- the place that invented
urban pulchritude.
Just a mere glimpse of its Grand Canal -- the most beautiful "street"
in the world -- should cause all chambers of commerce everywhere to
forget their grandiose posturing and shuck aside all the superlatives
about their respective city's delights and whatnot, because Venice is
the most Serene of all, and that's using the word in its royal context,
not in its general meaning.
Venice has everything: majestic architecture, scrumptious food, breathtaking
palazzos, magnificent churches, timeless art and -- most of all -- an
incredible aura of romance that reaches and permeates to its most remote
corner.
It also gave the world its first ghetto. If you walk east from the train station, the Stazione Ferroviaria Santa
Lucia, down the Lista de Spagna, you'll cross a bridge, the Ponte della
Guglia over the Canale de Cannaregio, just before Lista de Spagna changes
its name to San Leonardo. Turn left on the Via della Pescaria at the
foot of the bridge, go about fifty yards, and you'll see its gate. And
walk you must, since there are no cars or bicycles in Venice.
It's a stone gate -- granite, maybe -- and its posts are timeworn and
chipped.
It's also very old, much older than the United States.
If you look closely, you'll see where huge iron hinges once held massive
doors to the stone posts. The fact that the posts are not fine white
marble, the stone of choice for much of Venice, speaks volumes. For
more than 300 years the doors on this gate restricted the residents
from dusk to dawn, despite the fact that the people within these walls
were an integral part of the city.
Armed guards, whose salary had to be paid for by the confined residents,
began patrolling the gates at dusk.
Go through the gate and you'll find yourself inside a quaint alley.
It's almost claustrophobic, that alley -- dark and narrow, cobblestoned
and mildewed, with the faint brittle and stale smell of an old book.
A few yards to the left, on the side of a building, there's a plaque
made of white stone.
No one pays it much mind now, but if you have a keen eyesight and are
able to read Italian, you'll decipher much of what it says. It was put
there in 1704, the 20th of September to be exact. It proclaims in the
archaic legalese of the day that it is strictly forbidden -- under the
pain of hanging, imprisonment, whipping or pillory -- for any converted
Jew, man or woman, to enter or practice any activity, under any pretext
whatsoever, beyond this point.
The ordinance was enacted to pacify both Christians and Jews in Venice
who resented "Christians of Convenience" from re-entering the ghetto.
According to Venetian history, the Christians of Convenience were Jews
who embraced Christianity solely for economic reasons. They were resented
by the Christians because they competed for businesses outside the ghetto;
and although they secretly attended synagogue on the Sabbath, fellow
Jews scorned them for selling out their faith.
It's easy to miss the slab because almost 300 years of the damp Venetian
weather have taken their toll on it. But once you pass it, there's no
doubt that you've entered the ancient Jewish section of Venice, the
city that gave the world the word "ghetto" when it restricted its Jewish
citizens to a zone with specific boundaries because of fears, jealousies,
or whatever madness ran rampant at the time.
At intervals, shafts of bright sunlight resemble pillars of lights
piercing the damp shadows in the alley. As you walk deeper into it,
the shadows will grow long and the feeling of confinement will increase.
Perhaps it's because the buildings -- wonderfully old -- are taller
than in other parts of Venice...
A TRAIN JOURNEY THROUGH MALAYSIA --
(Published in the Boston Globe web page and distributed through
the Los Angeles Times Syndicate)
I thought about Singapore at the railroad station in Johor Bahur. It's
just a skip and a hop away, Singapore. Its skyscrapers were probably
glittering in the India ink predawn that very instant, but they might
as well have been on the dark side of the moon, as far as I was concerned.
It's not that Johor Bahur's depot is grim or dirty. Quite the contrary.
It's just that they changed boarding platforms on me at the last minute
and I had to make a mad dash to catch my train. That wouldn't happen
in Singapore, the city that hums in the key of efficiency.
I got stuck between a gaggle of women in colorful chadors herding children
and mountains of luggage at the same time, their stern-looking husbands
A few days in antiseptic Singapore will do that to you.
I had come to ride the train that skirts the western part of the Malay
Peninsula and to keep going as long as time and finances permitted.
With luck, I would get as far as Bangkok. Maybe I'd only reach Kuala
Lumpur. Who knows?
All I knew was that my first tentative stop was Malacca and that it
would be daylight when I got there to see where it all began.
Malacca is a strange town with a sordid past. That's where the west
first came to plunder the east and where the east learned to hustle
the west and the twain became inexorably entwined -- no matter what
Kipling's elegant prose says.
But my first task was to find my car and settle for the four-hour ride.
The Malaysian railroad, Keritapi Kanai Malaysia, is an impressive operation.
The cars are clean, comfortable and air-conditioned. In about four minutes
we began moving and a steward handed me a bottled of chilled water and
a slice of pound cake, and my cares disappeared with every metallic
click of the wheels.
The last time I rode a train in Southeast Asia was under different
circumstances. I was photographing a platoon of Marines riding shotgun
on the run between Danang and Hue in Vietnam and it wasn't a pleasant
journey.
This is more like it, I thought, as I sipped water and waited for the
conductor to come by to punch tickets.
Dawn doesn't break slowly in these latitudes. It is a rampage of colors
and I watched the light show as the jungle blurred by. This is a humid
greenhouse where orchids grow like weeds.
Right on schedule, I got off at the station in Tampin, 12 miles from
Malacca.
There's no station in the old city and I was considering between taking
a taxi or a bus to the coast when a hustling cab driver decided for
me. He told me in broken English that, should I opt for the bus, I would
miss the ancient wooden palace in Paya Rumput. Why not ride with him
and he'd show it to me?
Why not indeed?...
GRANADA, SPAIN -- (Published in the
Los Angeles Times, the CCN web page & distributed by the
Los Angeles Times Syndicate)
"The Guadalquivir skips from orange trees to olive groves, but the
rivers in Granada flow from snow to wheat."
He's a gypsy and looks like Willie Nelson, if Willie had jet-black
hair and coal eyes, and he's reciting the poem in that melodious Spanish
gypsy measure that sounds more like Arabic than Castilian. Three German
girls -- students no doubt -- are all aflutter at hearing the deep voice
of the gypsy sending the words of Federico García Lorca echoing off
the walls of this city where the poet lived.
This is García Lorca country. He was born in a village on the
outskirts and 38 years later was stood against a wall outside the city
and shot during the Spanish Civil War, along with two bullfighters and
countless others considered subversives by Franco's Loyalists.
The gypsy Willie Nelson is reciting García Lorca's "The Ballad
of the Three Rivers." The girls are throwing pesetas in a box at his
feet.
"I just adore Lorca," one of the girls says in halting Spanish, her
eyes twinkling.
"Well, honey, he wouldn't adore you," the gypsy tells her. "He would
love your brother or your father, but he wouldn't adore you."
Some passersby laugh at the street minstrel's way of pointing out the
great poet's sexual orientation. The girls seem flustered and walk away.
It's so typically Spanish, the gypsy's circumlocution, I think as I
continue my walk to Albaicín Hill.
It's a long, steep haul.
In a few minutes I'm hopelessly lost in the perplexing streets in the
oldest quarter of this ancient city.
The confusing web of narrow, cobblestoned streets seem eerily deserted
and the whitewashed houses are all locked. Flowers spill from window
boxes and once in a while the faint smell of rosemary and myrtle drifts
from small well-tended gardens. The whole place looks like an heirloom.
And it is.
Granada has been proclaimed a national treasure in a nation full of
treasures by the Spanish Crown, as it should be. The city is in the
heart of Andalucia, the province where everything you think of as Spanish
began: bullfights, flamenco music -- even the guitar was given its modern
shape here.
Walking up Albaicín Hill from San Juan de los Reyes, the wide
avenue where I stopped to watch the gypsy minstrel banter with German
students, I found it difficult to pinpoint why I like Granada so much.
It's not pretty. As a matter of fact, the city sprawls amid the Vega,
a dusty plain that could easily be transported to Southern California's
Imperial Valley and not seem out of place. It's old, very old, and there
isn't much to do, except walk around the remnants of a culture that
disappeared centuries ago. But there's something about it that makes
you suspect that there might be a grain of truth behind the old Spanish
proverb that holds that there's no greater sadness than to be blind
in Granada.
Take the Albaicín, for example. It's a quaint district where
antiquity stuns the senses. For centuries it's been home to a long list
of cultures and races. Romans, Visigoths, Jews, Arabs, all lived here
at one time or another.
The Romans set up a fortress on the crest way back when Spain was Iberia.
Then came the Jews, followed by the Moors who stayed six centuries before
being driven out by Ferdinand and Isabella, whose bodies are down there
in the cathedral, near where the poetry-loving gypsy hangs out...
RUSSIA'S GOLDEN RING -- (Published in Morning Calm, in-flight magazine for Korean Airlines.) In Russia, natives of St. Petersburg show their scorn for Moscow by dismissing it, among other things, as so lacking in sophistication that they call it "an overgrown village."
Today, 300 years after Peter laid the foundation for St. Petersburg his city remains a dazzler on the Gulf of Finland. Its stunning palaces, churches, bridges and canals mirror the splendor of its imperial past. Moscow, meanwhile, has mutated into an overwhelming beehive with a personality problem. After all this time, it still doesn't know if it wants to be European or Asian, ancient or modern, and it seems ill at ease in the 21st century. Its suburbs rush like a rising tide into the storied Russian expanse, while its Red Square - which isn't named after anything communist, since "red" means "beautiful" in Russian - has morphed into a Slavic Disneyland complete with costumed characters, beggars and hustlers, all within earshot of Lenin's mummified corpse. Both cities are legitimate world-class destinations, but neither Moscow nor St. Petersburg presents an accurate image of Russia. Fortunately, the fabled Mother Russia of Tolstoy and Turgenev, Gogol and Pasternak, lives on northeast from Moscow in a chain of medieval towns set in a 500-mile loop known as zolotoe koltso - the Golden Ring - the cradle of modern Russia and one of the country's most alluring areas. During a 3-week Russian trip, I spent a week exploring those once-unapproachable places I only had read about. The Golden Ring is a puzzling blend of the timeworn and the intriguing. I was accompanied by a guide-translator and a driver, two prerequisites when venturing into the Russian hinterlands because of the baffling driving laws, the complex nuances of the Cyrillic alphabet and - despite what guidebooks proclaim- the impenetrable language barrier that comes with it. We left Moscow one morning with its gridlock traffic spewing fumes and its high-rise tenements exuding all the charm of a Stalinist prison. The minute the city disappeared in the rearview mirror, the timeless Russian countryside emerged and the gap between the frenzied and booming capital and the more lethargic and destitute provinces became evident, reflecting how the majority of Russians live - in izbas (small wooden houses with ornately carved windows) with a small patch of land for vegetables and flowers.
Farmers sell crops from stands along the highway while commuters wait at dilapidated bus stops going who knows where. The place has the semblance of a bleak, underdeveloped nation. About 120 miles northeast of Moscow lies Vladimir, a town that might have been Russia's capital, had it not been for the Mongols who sacked it in the 11th century. It is a sprawling industrial center that wouldn't rate a visit, except for its stunning cathedrals built long before there was a Moscow. It's older than Russia itself, Vladimir, having been founded in 1188 by a prince of the same name. His son, Yuri Dolgoruki, founded Moscow, and Yuri's son, Andrei, was a great warrior-prince who transformed Vladimir from a medieval village into a sparkling city gleaming with golden-domed cathedrals. The best, the Cathedral of the Assumption, still stands on a hill. Today it is a veritable assembly line for weddings. While one is being performed inside, bridal parties await their turn outside, photographing one another and laughing nervously…
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| © 2008, Sergio Ortiz | ||||||||||||||
After
a while, the rain slackens and I leave, skirting the Luxembourg Gardens
back to my hotel where I open the curtain to watch the rain now pelting
the rooftops in the half light of evening.
This is home to more than 350 bird species and almost 1,000 different mammals including jaguars, pumas, tapirs and monkeys, all thriving in a primeval wilderness overflowing with more than 1,600 plant varieties. 
Outside
the station there's a rather massive and tacky monument to Columbus.
He's surrounded by a bunch of angelic looking Indians, nothing like
the fierce Caribs with a penchant for cannibalism that he stumbled upon
in the New World. The marble explorer gazes determinedly toward a large
avenue called Via Balbi, so I headed down that street and within a few
blocks came upon a cobblestone alley embellished with a marble depiction
of the Golden Fleece.
alongside,
clasping briefcases to their chests. Just up ahead a couple of backpacked,
sandal-clad westerners, flotsam from the 60's, had already reached the
car. And there I was, noticing the odd wrapper on the ground and the
chipped tile on the floor.
Sure,
Granada lacks the sangfroid of Seville, the bustle of Madrid and the
cosmopolitan panache of Barcelona, but it is the undisputable soul of
Spain.
That
might be the kindest barb fired at Moscow from the city built from scratch
by Peter the Great, the mercurial autocrat who envisioned for Russia
a new capital consisting of a thoroughly European city emulating Amsterdam,
with touches of Paris and Venice thrown in for good measure.
This
is a daunting, vast landscape crisscrossed by rivers and embellished
with birch forests. In places, it has an uncanny resemblance to the
American Midwest.