1
For centuries, pirates, privateers, and slave traders made easy prey of us, the docile Motilones of the intellectual Caribbean. The reason is clear: due to our fragile self-esteem, we only accept mistreatment from outsiders. Meanwhile, we not only fail to tolerate abuse from our own people, but we even forget to thank them. No one is a pirate in their own land.
2
Example: the story of Sir Francis Drake. In the 1960s, young people were caught in the crossfire: the police's ballistics and Sir Francis Drake's linguistics. He had discovered, in some entrance exam or other, that a prospective medical student didn't know who Plato was. That was enough for him to disqualify an entire generation. I heard him say to a high school student who asked him for help with a local festival: "I'm not giving you anything because you're asking for money to start a revolution, and that's not something young people will do, but rather the people." For example: young people are not the people. And they are even less capable of changing a system (political and educational) that keeps them in a state of more or less Platonic ignorance.
3
This meanness had ideological, not financial, foundations. Just as director of a Motilona philology institute, Sir Francis Drake pocketed ten thousand doubloons a month at an exchange rate of three and a half (the President of the Republic at the time barely received twelve thousand). Such exorbitant fees were justified by his work: Sir Francis drafted the Universal Declaration of Principles of the Pirate and the Intellectual Buccaneer. It appears in the Introduction to his only published work, where the humble Scourge of the Seas acknowledges (I quote from the parchment, which can withstand anything) that its pages “largely represent a selfless collaboration of students and friends. I must resign myself to keeping their names silent, because I could never give them all.” Obviously. It would go badly for the corsair who confessed the names of those he plundered. But when it came to collecting his pay, Sir Francis Drake had no qualms about signing the “selfless collaboration” of that youth he so disparaged as his own.
4
Meanwhile, his colleague from the Brotherhood of the Seas, Sir Walter Raleigh, was engaged in another, more deadly task: stiffening the speeches of Motilón chieftains or presidents, which is like adding insult to injury. In other words, he was engaged in the common practice among philologists of redundancy. This utopian task was not without its benefits. While Motilón authors had to win an international prize or build a similarly prestigious reputation to publish abroad, Sir Walter Raleigh had the local chieftain—that is to say, the Treasury—pay for the expansion of his estate and the publication of his unknown complete works by Seix Barral! At the same time, he sold his library (surely full of the aforementioned complete works) to the same Treasury for the modest sum of one million doubloons at 4,30 each. Small details lent prestige to this undertaking: the million had to be paid immediately. The Treasury would only possess the library upon the buccaneer's death (and pirates never die). The exorbitant sale was to be recorded on the parchment as a donation, so that God, the Fatherland, and you could be grateful.
5
A ruthless buccaneer when it came to fleecing the Motilonian treasury, Sir Walter Raleigh, on the contrary, was of Saudi-like generosity in granting letters of marque to his fellow brigands. I don't know which institution commissioned Sir Henry Morgan to write a cumbersome Concise Dictionary of Motilonia, geographical, historical, and biographical. Since he, following buccaneer custom, knew nothing of the task entrusted to him, he had it written by slaves. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote the foreword to the supposed work by Henry Morgan and, inevitably, after a "severe examination," considered it "a splendid framework of documentation and bibliography," "which reflects the best technique," by an author "rigorous, demanding of himself," since he possessed "the excellent preparation and experience gained from other zodiacs."
6
But the slave trader proposes, and the slave disposes. On the “splendid framework” of the pirate frigate, the slaves set pearls such as the following: That Teresa de la Parra is a “French novelist living in Venezuela.” That Daniel Mendoza wrote El Llanero (any self-respecting Motilón knows that the true author is Bolívar Coronado). That Guillermo Meneses is the creator of the Harlequin Muse (Meneses is well worth a Mass). That in Mérida there are colossal crops of “rice, cacao, and tobacco.” A veritable encyclopedia of Motilón lore, which had to be hidden in some forgotten cove.
7
With what authority do I speak about such a lucrative profession? I've piloted all kinds of sailboats, from sloops to the monstrous "Alexander von Humboldt" of the Deutsche Stiftung Sailtraining. I repelled pirate attacks with signal pistols. I dived in almost every sea and dodged privateer assaults, both real and imagined. I was shipwrecked many times and sometimes resurrected. I wrote plays that were copied verbatim, and firsthand accounts that were staged without attribution. I drafted a Style Guide for a newspaper with a global circulation, whose "editors" stamped their unforgettable names on the cover (style guides aren't signed). I wrote screenplays that were caught and hidden away until Román Chalbaud rescued them from the depths of abyssal drawers to film them. They plagiarize me, therefore I exist.
8
The pirate is the cradle of every empire, and his wake, the false flag. Gone are the days of the Jolly Roger, the insolent skull of Sovereign Death. The age of dissimulation threatens us. To facilitate or evade plunder, the changing of flags multiplies, not to feign what one is not, but to disguise the fact that one is nothing. The sturdy sails for advancing against wind and tide are supplanted by the weathervane, which never arrives anywhere. Then we must shout, with Dylan Thomas: “And death shall lose her empire/ and the naked dead shall be but one/ with man in the wind and the western moon/ and their bones shall bleach and disappear/ stars shall flash where shoulders and feet once were/ and though they go mad, they shall not lose their reason/ and though they fall into the abyss, they shall rise again/ and though lovers go astray, love shall endure/ and death shall lose her empire.”
