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. Fulfilled and appreciated. As he thanks Prince Felipe, he finds it hard to hide his emotion. In justification of its choice, the jury wrote that he embodied the independence of the reporter; and that for half a century, at risk of life and health, he monitored wars and conflicts on several continents. Nor did the jury fail to acknowledge that he was on the side of the disadvantaged.
Kapuściński was filled with pride at receiving the award jointly with the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, father of liberation theology, defender of the excluded and critic of social inequality. As a thirty-something correspondent working in Latin America for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuściński had been fascinated by the rebel movement. But he never met Father Gutiérrez at the time. For a reporter from poor, socialist Poland, with limited funds, gaining access to an intellectual star such as Gutiérrez would have been difficult. More than three decades later, he stood next to his hero as joint winner of a coveted award.
And here are some photographs with great writers, including a series with the Nobel Prize–winner Gabriel García Márquez during journalism workshops in Mexico City. García Márquez invited Kapuściński, as a master of the craft, to run workshops for reporters from Latin America. I remember his being adamant that Gazeta Wyborcza use one of these photos to illustrate an interview with him about the transformations in Latin America, and that he almost withdrew the text shortly before the deadline, when it turned out that the picture wouldn’t fit on the page. (‘This interview is worthless! It should go in the bin if no one knows the reason I was in Mexico!’ he cried in boyish pique. He calmed down when I told him that alongside our conversation would be a short piece about his workshops with García Márquez and a picture of them together.)
Another photo shows him having dinner with Salman Rushdie in the 1980s, in New York or perhaps London. After reading Kapuściński’s book about the war in Angola, and fascinated by his descriptions of the wooden city floating away, Rushdie wrote that numerous reporters had seen the wooden city, but Kapuściński was the only one to have noticed it. He called him a ‘codebreaker’ of the encrypted dark century.
One photograph attracts my attention, not because of what it depicts, but because of something written later in connection with the moment immortalized in it. It shows an open air café in San Sebastian in 1996. Here is Kapuściński with the Polish philosopher Father Józef Tischner, the Polish editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza Adam Michnik and Jorge Ruiz, Warsaw correspondent for the Spanish news agency, EFE. All four were taking part in seminars at a summer university in the Basque country. After Kapuściński’s death, Michnik wrote that he had asked him that summer when he’d stopped believing in communism. Kapuściński had replied that 1956 was decisive, though he had remained permanently