of mystery, that he was hiding a lot of secrets – from his friends, his loved ones and from himself; yes, yes, you can also have secrets from yourself. What sort of secrets did he have? Personal ones, political ones, writer’s ones. Despite his world fame, which should have given him self-confidence and peace of mind, there was something weighing him down. I could see it in his eyes, in his step; that smile, that softness, that way of giving the impression that you like everyone and are listening, even when they’re talking nonsense.’
The secrets of Ryszard Kapuściński. Is that what I should call my book about the man known as the ‘reporter of the twentieth century’, my mentor and special friend, close and not so close, whom – I often find myself thinking – I will come to know better now?
Yes, we did a lot of talking throughout the last ten years of his life, always in the private loft-kingdom of his house on Prokuratorska Street in the Warsaw district of Ochota. I must have been there a hundred times, but as I see with hindsight, I got to know a smaller part of Mr Kapuściński – who with closer acquaintance became Ryszard, then Rysiek – than I thought I had. We talked about recent journeys we had made and ones we were planning; about intelligent books and stupid governments; about what was happening in politics and what we’d read in the papers; about how we should never, ever give up our passions, even if someone tried to beat them out of us. And we talked a lot about people: Maestro Kapuściński loved to gossip.
But I never questioned him about how a career was made in People’s Poland; what strings had to be pulled, to what uses he had put his smile, and what price had to be paid. I sensed that he didn’t like questions about his past, and whenever the conversation headed in that direction, he would deftly change the subject. Sometimes he commented that, democracy or no democracy, conformism and the herd mentality are alike, even though times change. I never asked questions about which side he was on during Poland’s various political turning points of the past half-century, about what he had done and thought. Or what he had been looking for as he eagerly set off for Congo after Lumumba’s assassination, as he drove into the middle of a revolution begun in the name of Allah, or toured a rebellious Poland in the carnival era of 1980–81. His ideas and motivations seemed perfectly clear back then, though now perhaps I understand them better. I never inquired whether he might occasionally have embellished or invented anything, as some foreign critics claimed. Did he feel fulfilled? I think he did.
Now as I spend my time in libraries and other archives, among the books and documents he kept at home, as I travel in his footsteps through Africa and Latin America, and above all as I talk to his close friends, acquaintances, and people who shared episodes in his life, I am discovering a Kapuściński who almost seems a stranger. Would anyone who ever saw, heard, or met him believe that this mild-mannered man with the permanent smile once seized an official by the lapels, pinned him to the wall, and grappled with him, yelling, ‘How dare you, you bastard!’ (I will return to this story later.)
We often discover him through a joint effort, as we swap observations and try to put names to things we can only just discern. To some degree, all my interlocutors are co-authors of this book, even if they do not agree with all of it or with its conclusion.
Some of the people who know some of Kapuściński’s secrets ask, ‘So, will this be a biography or the portrait of a saint?’
A woman who was once in love with him says, ‘I hope you aren’t writing a hagiography. Rysiek was a wonderful, colourful guy: a reporter, traveller, writer, husband, father. And lover. He was a complex man, living in tangled times, in several eras, in various worlds.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I answer. ‘I owe him a great deal, but I won’t take part in the “beatification process”.’
We’re both smiling. Do admiration and friendship have to kill off inquiry?
They probably don’t help. I won’t pretend – I do have a problem with this, and writing this book has been a struggle between competing loyalties.
I’m still looking for a tone for my account, trying to devise its architecture. Will the master’s narrative inventions come to the rescue?
The worst chaos is on the big round table: photos of various sizes, cassettes . . . And more posters and albums, records and books acquired or given by people, the collected remnants of an era just ended . . . Now, at the very thought of trying to put everything in order . . . I am overcome by both aversion and profound fatigue.1
As a way of sorting things out, I have put several cardboard binders on the windowsill and labelled them: ‘Pińsk and the war’, ‘High school, college, first poems’, ‘ZMP (Union of Polish Youth), PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party), Stalinism, revisionism’, ‘African controversies’, ‘Fiction – non-fiction’. Before making my final selection of notes, cuttings and books, I review the photographs – I almost always do this before sitting down to write a major piece. A photograph stirs a chord that words cannot set in motion. (I’m falling into a trap, because I’m sure the photograph of Kapuściński’s smile will seduce me as easily as the original did, leaving me incapable of pursuing a proper investigation.)
I’m sitting alone looking through notes and pictures on the table, listening to taped conversations.2
I’ll try to start like this . . .
1
Daguerreotypes
In one of the last photographs, Kapuściński, smiling of course, is surrounded by a group of young people. These are boys and girls from the Leonardo da Vinci Lycée and the University of Trento, on 17 October 2006 at a mountain inn not far from the city of Bolzano in Italy. One of the participants, Anna, asked if he would be willing to answer a personal question. Kapuściński coyly replied that there was nothing that hadn’t already been written about him, that no secrets remained. (Now, after an almost three-year journey through his life, I know that a great deal has been written about his work, but almost nothing about the man himself.) The girl is well prepared and quotes one of Kapuściński’s own poems to him:
Only those clad in sackcloth
are able to take upon themselves
the suffering of another
to share his pain1
Then she asks why he has devoted his life to writing about poor people. Kapuściński replies that 20 percent of the people in the world are wealthy, and the rest are poor. And that if you belong to the chosen few, you are extremely privileged. You live in a paradise beyond the reach of most people on the planet. He shares some discoveries about life: a man can be impoverished not because he is hungry or has no possessions, but because he is ignored and despised: ‘Poverty is a state of inability to express your opinion.’2 That is why he speaks in their name. Someone has to.
This Promethean manifesto is his last public statement in that vein. By this point, Kapuściński is feeling overwhelmed by pessimism and a presentiment of the approaching end. A few days later, he refuses to meet a friend for coffee. Some interesting, but unfamiliar, people were to be joining them. ‘There comes a moment in life when we can no longer take in new faces,’ he notes afterwards. To meet with strangers he would have to ‘furnish his face’, stick on the smile, but he no longer has the desire or the strength to do so.3
Here’s a picture taken a few years earlier, in Oviedo in 2003, when Kapuściński is still in good shape. He is receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Communications and Humanities, regarded as the Nobel Prize of the Latin American world (and how proud he was of it!). He is stunned.
