La Zona Fantasma: The Unforgivables

The example is simple and, in the end, somewhat insignificant: for its final issue of the year 2004, the literary supplement of the Spanish newspaper El País decided to present a roundup of the year’s best fiction. Out of deference, El País culled its group of judges—that is, those who would vote on or select the winners—from a number of newspapers in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. As such, I was startled to find that in the three categories for Spanish-language literature (narrative, poetry, essay), not a single Spanish writer had been featured. With a parsimony that bordered on tackiness, the editors of these publications appeared to find noteworthy literature only in their own Latin American countries, written by Latin American authors. I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Any Spaniard who has ever traveled to Latin America knows that sooner or later they will come across someone who glowers at them and, quite often, casually tosses out some kind of reproachful comment such as, “Well, after all, you people, the Spanish, you only came here to sack, pillage, and kill.” Or something of that ilk. As many people, including the Spanish writer and philosopher Fernando Savater, have noted, those who indulge in such accusations often have last names like González, Ruiz, or Chávez, if not Bianco or Zanetta—people whose forebears came to the New World long after the Spanish did.

There is a logical, immediate response that has been invoked many times over by my compatriots upon hearing this claim: “Look, if you’re going to be angry, don’t get angry with me—take it out on yourself, because your ancestors were the ones who went to Latin America to sack, pillage and kill (among other, more respectable pursuits, of course). My ancestors never even made it out of Spain.” Now, beyond this particular case in point, I think we would do well to ask ourselves, in a more general sense, why we live in a world so full of old debts that can never be repaid or redressed. And we might also ask ourselves why, generation after generation, certain people continue to ascribe these debts to the very distant descendants of the people who committed the injustices— injustices that are sometimes very real, and other times very much imagined. In general, these “vicarious debtors” are the ones who have decided that such debts are unforgivable—and in this age of demagoguery and spinelessness, it seems that we all spend an inordinate amount of time apologizing for acts we never committed in the first place. The Germans apologize for the Nazi scourge; the Spanish, for the discovery and colonization of the Americas; AngloSaxon Americans, for the...