NOWHERE-NOW HERE, HECTOR CASTELLS TRAVEL JOURNAL – DEATH OF A HERO
Now Here: Kathmandu and Varadero, May 13th 2025
On the first day of Life without Pepe Mujica in it, I’m downtown Kathmandu oblivious to the news, wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh that my metaphorical twin, the insatiable Ada, gifted me with as a farewell present.
I’m looking for a SIM card through potholes and holy trees, hairy stray dogs and red dotted foreheads. The air is as dusty as in Mad Max: it coats your lips, drains the corners of your mouth, and turns them into a graveyard of petrified saliva. Not even the keffiyeh can save you.
The Voice
Everyone is selling something or inventing crosswalks, including the stray dogs, and I elude a number of stoners from other heavens juggling torches, apples and hashtags, before I hear the distant voice chanting a familiar, chilling lyric.
“La milonga es hija del candombe así como el tango es hijo de la milonga.” —Milonga is the daughter of candombe just as tango is the son of milonga.
I walk towards the voice and find a derelict counter where a woman dressed in a red silk robe says: “SIM card?”
I wonder if I’m that predictable or if she has a superpower. Then she starts singing in perfect Spanish. She is the voice. And now it definitely hits me: “A mi que sembré en sus campos mi pobreza y mi sudor.” —To me who sowed in his fields my poverty and my sweat.”
“Were you singing Alfredo Zitarrosa?” I ask.
“No tip for the artist?”
I follow the sequence of questions and unrelated answers: I quote Seneca.
“Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more.”
She stares at me mystified, makes a circle with her thumb and index, closes her eyes, and levitates: “Vamo’ Arriba con el Pepe, bo—Let’s go up with Pepe, dude,” she says while installing the SIM.
I give her the money and a tip for the music, and she is already floating above me. The pigeons bring flowers to her head and draw rainbows with them.
“Is this enlightenment?” I wonder.
“It is the death of a hero,” she replies, and hands me the phone.
My WhatsApp is flooded. La Maga, my favourite Uruguayan, claims most of them.
She is in Cuba writing what she didn’t want to write. I’m in Nepal reading what I didn’t want to read.
Unmissed
“I was walking down the Malecón when my sister rang and… She didn’t even need to say it. There is a very specific silence to death communications, don’t you think? My sister sighed and I knew it was our Uncle. Since it happened, all the Cubans have been hugging and kissing me. You wouldn’t believe it: my Uncle is a total hero here. I couldn’t be in a better foreign place to mourn him. God bless the Tupamaros!
Now Here, Dublin, September 2007
It is the first morning of my life in Dublin. The house is lovely and freezing, and Selby, my current housemate and future partner, is quiet and unreadable. Before leaving for work he says that I can borrow his fancy bicycle. I say thank you, see you later.
I leave the house, jump on the bike, and immediately after the door of a parked car opens. The front wheel crashes against it. I fly over it, and perform an unexpectedly neat Mae Ukemi, AKA aikido front roll. Sadly, the asphalt is no tatami and I’m lying on the road bruised and scratched like a 90s hip-hop record.
The AudiNazi
The driver gets out. He is massive and looks much worse than the car —and the car is not looking great.
He is flailing his arms and shouting. I’m groggy, my head pounding.
“Have you seen what you have done? This is going to cost you so much money.”
“I thought I was in Ireland, not in Israel,” I deliberately say after spotting the gold star in his necklace.
Cabbage Call
The line works instantly. His head becomes an explosive cabbage, and he starts kicking me all over. I don’t feel anything since 1995, except, perhaps, for the two freshly cracked ribs.
Next thing, I see a Gucci loafer coming to my face and a giant coming from behind the shoe. The giant tackles him and says that the cameras of his shop are recording everything.
“Get the fuck out of here if you don’t want to get in serious trouble.”
“You don’t know who I am,” Mr. Shiny Loafers says.
“Yes, you are a piece of shit. Everybody knows who you are and nobody wants you around. Get lost.”
I look ahead and I see the shop: it is called Lilliput.
I ask the giant if he wants to marry me, I’m an accomplished Lilliputian: there is so much shortage of me.
He smiles and suggests getting inside and cleaning the wounds first.
The Silver Indian AKA La Maga
She is instantly greater than dignity.
She looks up, sees my bloody face and smiles from behind the counter. She’ll forever be smiling, which is probably why a stolid amount of customers are looking at her motionless and transposed.
She is stuffing olives and green pesto into plastic containers with a wooden spoon. It amounts to the most biblically sensual thing you can see on a Sunday morning in the most catholic country in the world.
She has a stunning jaw, muscular and taut like the shock absorbers of the Concorde. She plays tunes, gives change, seals containers, roasts coffee and warms up milk and sandwiches for the sake of the hypnotised witnesses.
“Sisi,” the giant says. “Can you fix him up? I’ll take over the counter.”
Only then the customers turn around and look at the giant with disgust. “We want her not you,” they seem to whisper.
Sisi looks at me, plays Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream,” asks me to follow her, and says: “This song is for you.”
“Seriously? It was the favourite song of my favourite writer,” I say.
“Did you bang your head?”
“What? No. I’m not delusional.”
She turns around and says, “Bolaño was the writer, right? My uncle loves him too.”
ARGENCHINIAN
I’m speechless. Then I talk. Big mistake.
“Argentinian, I presume…”
She turns around. She is not smiling anymore.
“If you wanted to piss me off, that’s the right thing to say. And if you want to piss off the Irish, ask them if they are English.”
“I’m so sorry, you are my first Uruguayan, Sisi.”
She is smirking now.
“Sisi? Jesus: you are great at destroying countries and names.”
Embarrassed emoji face.
She fully smiles again.
“You can call me La Maga although my uncle might kill you if you do.”
“I’ll call you Silver Indian,” I say. Her face looks like it was carved in Eastern Island, so ancient and dignified. She is also sporting a contemporary, better version of Susan Sontag’s lock of grey hair. “You are such an adulator,” she says.
Now Here, Dublin, September 2007
La Maga would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste. (Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar)
La Maga smiles and the streak of silver gushes from her fringe to her earlobe like a fat shooting star.
It is 2007, so the abhorrent MAGA hats haven’t replaced the name of one of the most beloved characters of 20th century literature just yet.
We walk to the back of the shop and La Maga stitches me up.
I’m afraid to ask more questions. She does instead.
“Are you a writer?”
“I would prefer not to.”
“I knew it! I’m only asking because I’m looking for a good one. Are you?”
“It is not for me to say, you know that.”
“Excellent. Right answer. You are hired.”
“What?
I feel like Prince for a second. I want to say “I would die for you,” but I’m already dying. So is she.
“The world needs to know about my Uncle as much as you do, although no one will write about him as much as you will. Shall we start tomorrow?”
“Please.”
Nowhere Sometime in Between
La Maga and I forged our friendship during my alleged research of the book that I was to write about “El Pepe,” her prodigious and insatiable uncle. We used to meet at her amusing flat in Stoneybatter, where we drank mate and reviewed revolution, justice, death, memory and astrology, until we had saliva graveyards in the corner of our lips.
FACK UNDO
She was very clever and unpredictable, what most might call “an unreliable narrator,” therefore my main concern was that the only source of my research was the niece of the hero.
GHASTLY WRITER
I had been a ghost-writer for some of the most illiterate Spaniard celebrities of this century. And my only mandatory condition to impersonate them was to get to know them face-to-face.
If I were to become “El Pepe’s” biographer I needed to talk to him, observe him, listen to him; see the man behind the hero, the murderer, the prisoner, the husband, the neighbour, the farmer, the uncle.
La Maga was well aware and tried her best to work her magic with Facundo, her uncle’s assistant. Over the next two years Fuck Undo allegedly booked me 27 flights to meet “El Pepe,” in Montevideo. He cancelled all of them overnight, therefore his nickname. I blamed him for a while, FUCK UNDO, for fucking up the book that would have retired me. FUCK SAKE FUCK UNDO!
After the last FUCK UNDO YOUR FLIGHT job, I decided that it was time to move on, and gave up the book. La Maga and I kept drinking mate and talking about cinema and revolution and her uncle’s past. We were early into the new century, so inevitably most of our conversations were about the former.
Becoming
Perhaps that is why we never saw it coming. I spent the next nine months writing a book based on the unbelievable life of a farmer and murderer who wakes up in a well and spends 13 years inside it.
This was exactly what had happened to “El Pepe”, his wife and the other seven leaders of the Tupamaros, the guerrilla they all belonged to.
They were punished in an exemplary way with torture, isolation and darkness without toilet from 1973 to 1985. Before the 13 years of solitude, they all had organised and executed the greatest escape from a prison in a long time. Pepe and Lucía masterminded the simultaneous flight of 105 political prisoners, all Tupamaros. They carved a tunnel through the walls of the penitentiary with TEASPOONS!
NOBLE SHAME
The embarrassment and shame of the dictatorship was proportional to the inhuman sentence.
It is difficult to imagine anyone surviving inside a well for 13 years. Not a single Tupamaro died.
One of them, Henry Engler, became shortlisted for the Medicine Nobel Prize in 2004 for his ground-breaking research on Alzheimer, a disease any person who has spent 13 years jailed in a well might not entirely disagree with.
Another one, Mauricio Rosencor, became the most remarkable poet of his generation; again, his years NOWHERE proved to be the key to demolish all the walls of fear, panic, love, struggle and mental health, the driven force of a language that has found itself in the deepest well of the soul, far away from any of his contemporaries consciousness.
A third one was called Lucia. During her years as the brains of the Tupamaros they called her the Tough one. She once said: “I’m ALWAYS the most committed hardworking person in the room.”
She made “ALWAYS” sound equally loyal and scary.
Lucía became the Senator and spokesperson that took the oath of the fourth Tupamaro, her husband, El Pepe, who became president of Uruguay in 2010.
In the blink of an eye, the unknown farmer I was struggling to find information about became a social phenomenon, a very much-deserved global hero famously labelled as “The Poorest President in the World.”
The Invisible Abundance
Except, he was anything but poor. He gave 90 percent of his salary to charity, and refused to live in the presidential palace because he knew what is to be locked against your will in a place you’d rather not sleep in.
Instead, Mujica stayed in his lovely, quiet house in the outskirts of Montevideo, where he wasn’t poor but free —and where I would meet him right before his death
La Maga became an actress, director and professor of Creative Militias, a degree that she had coined after the many staged operations that his uncle and auntie had written as if they were plays, and executed as organised terrorism. Sometimes is what it takes to be free.
THE FARM
El Pepe had a farm in the alleged shack where he lived.
It was a beautiful humble house with a garden, a greenhouse and many trees. No presidential palace could have been better than his olive tree and his three-leg dog, Manuela, running around.
Let alone the flowers that Lucía grew and he picked, the same flowers they both sell for a dollar apiece, cleaned and cut in the courtyard while drinking mate, beside the tractor. It was a very lucrative business.
The measure of their freedom was perfectly proportional to the 13 years they had both spent confined underground, thirteen years of torture, darkness and very random toilets.
Inside the well, el Pepe became a very fine observer of what freedom really is. He found ways to inhabit a version of the “now” and “here” that had never been inhabited by any president in the world: he had found out what NOWHERE truly is and he was determined to deliver the message.
SOMEWHERE FOREVER
Inside the well AKA nowhere, Pepe found somewhere.
He grew compassionate and curious about the ants around him, the same insects he used to eat during his early confinement. After many nameless days and countless nights he devised a language to communicate with the ants and also the frogs.
They would have long conversations under the full moon over the next decade, a passionate, sleepless dialogue that ended up bringing the laws of the future to his country, where abortion, same-sex marriage and weed became legalised by the same revolutionary, the body of an 80 year-old man who had discussed the forward-thinking new laws with the insects and the amphibious thirty years ago.
Nowhere, Pokhara, 13th of May 2025
After getting the SIM card from the Voice I have a flight to Pokhara. My lips are white and my face is broken. I’m wearing the keffiyeh to cover my dishevelled hair and I buy a pair of cheap Ray Bans to disguise the tears.
My seat is next to a young Mediterranean. She looks at me in utter panic and immediately asks if she can sit somewhere else. I wonder if I have stepped into dog shit. Before she leaves she says:
“Sorry, I hate to fly. It gives me panic attacks. Just like Arafat.”
I get where she comes from, but I’m no Arafat, although I’m also mourning. And fighting. And flying.
Sometimes it takes the life of a man to understand the life of others.
Pepe and Lucía had to be locked in darkness to gain the dream of a future. Love and Solidarity was their answer, an answer that anyone could use.
Upon checking into my new undisclosed location, I get another message from La Maga. She is outside a lush green garden under a dark, raining sky, and there are two weeping trees and many crows flapping their wings and bitching away.
It is exactly the same landscape I have checked into, only 20K apart. Our landscapes are mirroring each other, our lands become one.
It is beautiful and weird. We turn the cameras on and we see our faces after the years. We could be them. Pepe and Lucía, although probably not.
The silver streak has gone viral and her smile is intact and permanent. She is half whispering, slightly crying:
“To be free is to have time to do what you love to do. And I love working the land, giving everything to the land.”
t was her uncle’s favourite quote.
We look up and the rain falls and the ravens rave.