“Not even the ocean could give back to me my vocation for dreaming with my eyes open; I used that up in Amirbar and received nothing in return.”
Amirbar, a story of obsession, perversity, and murder, is fifth of the seven novellas that comprise The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis. As with most of the stories in the collection, it is a story framed by another. It’s a strong contender with the second novella, Ilona Comes With the Rain, for being the strangest.
The framing story is one where the narrator (Mutis) runs into Maqroll again, this time in California. It is an older Maqroll and one who is being ravaged by some tropical illness. The author finds his friend Maqroll in Le Brea, lying in bed, soaked with sweat and shaking with fever, in a decrepit motel run by friends of the Gaviero.
The narrator rescues him from his broken down state, provides the medical help Maqroll needs, and eventually has him placed in the home of the narrator’s brother to convalesce. The Gaviero recovers and, as he improves, tells the story of Amirbar.
This framed story is of Maqroll’s quest for gold in old, abandoned mines in the Andes and is made up of two parts, reflecting the two mines he works. In the first, there is a local belief that there is a great deal of gold waiting to be found. However, the mine has a dark history, one Maqroll eventually uncovers when he comes upon the bones of victims of a massacre carried out by the army. The discovery is unnerving and there is nothing to be done. Maqroll quickly abandons the mine, fearing what the army will do if they discover their evil work has been uncovered.
After some time passes, a second mine is suggested to Maqroll and he is soon off to explore its possibilities and, later, begins to work it. This mine is Amirbar. The name comes from the sound the wind makes in the mine, something like, “Ahhh-mirrr-bahrrrrr…” Maqroll hears it as “Amirbar”, which he recognizes as Al Emir Bahr (from which the word admiral comes: amīr, or ‘commander’, and baḥr or ‘sea’ — amīr al-baḥr).
What it may mean to the author is anyone’s guess but even without meaning it adds to the story’s sense of strangeness.
Maqroll is looking for gold in these stories and struggles with, and sometimes succumbs to, an obsession with the infamous ore (like the movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). There is the threat of the army always in the background, so he works surreptitiously. He also is assisted in both his mining attempts. In the second, Amirbar , it is by a young, reticent woman named Antonia with whom he sleeps and who falls in love with the itinerant Gaviero. Just as he has an obsession with gold, she develops an obsession with him, triggering the implosion of Maqroll’s latest adventure — as he, and by this time we, had expected. It all ends in disaster.
The frame around which the story is presented is used as a way to emphasize the impact of the mining ventures on Maqroll and to provide some context, or point of reference, for them.
I spent the strangest days of my life in Amirbar. In Amirbar I left shreds of my soul and most of the energy that fired my youth. Perhaps I came down from there more serene, I don’t know, but I was everlasting weary too. What has happened to me since then has been a matter of simply surviving each day’s difficulties. Trivialities. Not even the ocean could give back to me my vocation for dreaming with my eyes open; I used that up in Amirbar and received nothing in return.
As a whole, the story is a meditation on obsession and how it perverts the self, taking our humanity from us and leaving “nothing in return.” This is where the world-weariness of the collection reaches its high water mark. As the story Amirbar concludes, we’re left with a sense that whatever it was that constituted the essence of Maqroll is gone now and whatever days may remain to him will be lived as a ghost.
While melancholy is a persistent thread through all the Maqroll stories, in Amirbar it evolves into sadness. Something valuable has been lost. Fate has won.