Camilo Jose Cela: Journey to the Alcarria

"As always, the traveler doesn't realize he has put his foot in it until he's in belly deep" (63).  Referring in the second person to his own tendency to say the wrong thing and offend his listeners, Cela was rather more prophetic than he could have realized at the time.

Such a shame too.  If he were not such an engaging storyteller, a traveler seemingly after my own heart who believed as I do that "it's much more pleasant to come upon things as it were by chance than to go look at them in a  place where you know they'll be set up to perfection", if he were not so carefully offhanded with his reflections and descriptions on the journey, then perhaps I would not have been engaged enough to find out what sort of man he really was. 

And so it seems to always be with those who rise to grace in general, or our graces in particular.  The bigger they are, so to speak.  And what are we to do when a writer who we were fully prepared to follow through the Alcarria, retracing his steps, says something so grotesque of our precious and sacred Federico Garcia Lorca as "ni a favor ni en contra . . . Me limito a no tomar por el culo"? The same thing as when Kevin Spacey, 고은, or any other revered figure is revealed to be terrible and predatory.  We look at him with new eyes.  They are not changed; we are.  We grow weary and skeptical, but also clear and cautious.  Our perspective is broadened, and we see more that the scene with Elena and Maria, framed by the writer as a simple misunderstanding of artless peasant girls, was likely to have been something entirely different (103), or that the unnamed town where they threw him into jail, through no fault of his own, might actually have not had the wrong idea about him (5). 

At any rate, Cela turns out to have been a man, and a cautionary tale at that--not against traveling alone, but against expecting those whose art we enjoy to be any better humans than the rest of us donkeys.  As Pedro González Zerolo observed of Cela, "Que tenga en cuenta que un Premio Nobel de Literatura sólo acredita un buen hacer literario, no supone calidad persona".