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🦋 Sigifredo López
Saramago's blog entry today quotes one of my favorite passages from The Cave.
We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there's a will, there's a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life. I just love to read this sentence! It is the Alpha and the Omega of Saramago's beautiful voice.... Anyway I was meaning to post a translation of this entry of Saramago's, from a few days ago, because I found it touching:
Sigifredo López is the name of a Colombian lawmaker held captive for seven years by the FARC and who managed to recover his liberty thanks, among others, to the valor and persistence of senator Piedad Córdoba, principal director of the social and humanitarian movement, "Colombians for peace". Thanks to a set of circumstances which seemed impossible, Sigifredo López, who formed part of a group of eleven hostage lawmakers, of whom ten were not long ago assassinated by the terrorists, was able to escape the massacre. He is now free. In the press conference held in Cali after his escape, he believed he needed to express his gratitude to Piedad Córdoba in terms which would shake the world. Here we come to these words and these frightful images. I have never been able to brag of emotional fastness. I cry easily, and not because I am old. But this time I was obliged to break out in sobs when Sigifredo, to express his infinite gratitude to Piedad Córdoba, compared her to the doctor's wife in Blindness. Put yourself in my place, thousands of kilometers separate me from these images and these words, and poor me, melting away in tears, I had no other remedy but to take refuge in Pilar's shoulder and to let them run. My entire existence, as a person and as a writer, has been justified by this moment. Thank you, Sigifredo.
There is video of López' press conference at the link. The AP carried a brief story about his release. Democracy Now! has an interview (from last summer) with Piedad Córdoba, where she discusses negotiations with FARC.
posted evening of Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
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