Published Originally in Spanish in LA GRAN ALDEA
Luis A. Pacheco
The sharp and intelligent voice of Ibsen Martínez fell silent last night, September 11, in the city of his affections, Caracas. After years of painful and anguishing exile in Bogotá, he returned to the capital city to straighten out his health and embark on a journey to Spain, where his son waited. It was not to be.
This is not the place, nor am I the right person to write about Ibsen's contribution to Venezuelan letters, both as a journalist and playwright and his pending task of writing The Novel about the oil adventure. His last novel “Oil Story” was a great attempt, but I believe he considered it a necessary compromise to publish. I trust that history will recognize his contribution.
It can be said that Ibsen was what the ancients called a polymath. He had studied mathematics at UCV, a career he abandoned to write. He wrote about economics, after having studied it. Not only that, but he dissected politics with a clinical eye and recounted Venezuelan history like few others. He wanted to write a script about the American writer Hemingway, and he read all of his work. An unrepentant music lover, he could discourse on Mahler, Fania All-Stars, or the Rolling Stones with equal gusto. His knowledge of baseball was encyclopedic, although I very much doubt, he could hit a well-pitched ball. He was a bookworm and used the libraries in Bogotá with passion.
I met Ibsen through my brother, Emilio, who was his friend and eventually, his editor for the columns he wrote in English for an American publication. I only knew then that he had been the scriptwriter for the political soap opera "Por estas Calles" in the 90s.
I met him again in Bogotá, where we had both ended up after having to leave Venezuela. I got to know him better, with his lights and shadows. The life of an exile was not easy for him; it never is. I wonder if he had any novel in the works to exorcise these hard years with his pen.
Ibsen, when he lit up, was the best conversation one could have, polite, intelligent, incisive, very entertaining; there was no topic where he didn't have something interesting to say. When he darkened, he was merciless with his adversary, intolerant, quarrelsome. His personal and family life was tinged with that darkness. It reminds me of the phrase with which Tolstoy begins his Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
In his later years, his past came to haunt him, and he was accused of gender violence, and the sentence of the social media court was lapidary. I think there's nothing to add to what Milagros Socorro wrote regarding his death:
"Is it true that Ibsen Martínez beat women and that he often set himself up as a judge of others? A great truth. The first, he acknowledged in the interview in El País, December 2023, and the second, he conceded in an interview in October 2023, regarding his novel “Oil Story,” where he said: “Now I take others' positions with more compassion, they no longer move me to satire…” But it is also true that he took the Spanish of Venezuela to very high levels and that he maintained a brave civic conduct, which, by the way, earned him exile…”
Ibsen, the son of an oil worker in eastern Venezuela and a teacher, understood like few others the role of oil in the development of contemporary Venezuela. However, he always had a complicated relationship with oil and post-nationalization oil workers. What motivated that ambiguity towards our main industry? His relationship with his father? Perhaps his adventures in leftist politics? It's something I never fully understood, nor wanted to ask him, but that tension is reflected in much of his written work: “La Hora Texaco”, “Petroleros Suicidas”, Oil Story, and many of his essays.
Few Venezuelans have heard of the oil pioneer Ralph Arnold, and even fewer have read his book with the interest that Ibsen did — in fact, that book and Arnold's figure are a central part of his novel Oil Story. Once, in a radio conversation he had with the author Leonardo Padrón, he said he would have liked to live in Venezuela from 1910 to 1920, as one of Arnold's geologists.
His play "Petroleros Suicidas" (2011), which was staged in Caracas, was very successful with the public. However, the title of the play and Ibsen's scandalous statements to promote it caused an uproar among former PDVSA workers. They considered it offensive and embarked on a campaign of angry complaints to the author, which, as we can imagine, Ibsen responded to with virulence.
As I couldn't go to Caracas to see the play, and I was curious about the scandal surrounding it, I asked Ibsen to give me a copy of the script to read. Generously, he sent me a digital copy with the promise that I wouldn't circulate it or reveal its provenance.
The text I attach here is something I wrote after having read the script, and which I circulated only among my acquaintances as fiction. I had not seen the play, although I had seen and read Ibsen's interviews about it. I publish it here as a tribute to Ibsen, and because I believe the text reflects not only of Ibsen's personality and his obsession with oil. It is also written from my respect for him, despite his undisguised animosity towards us oil workers. I shared the text with him at the time, but he never told me if he had read it, perhaps it was better that way.
Ibsen, the Suicides, Cabrujas and Meneses
Luis A. Pacheco, Bogotá, 2011
“The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.” Oscar Wilde.
SCENE 1. Somewhere in Bogotá, on any night, raining, of course, a laptop, a black seal on the rocks - Carlos Vives playing on the radio.
When one lives outside their homeland, whether by choice or obligation, one of the most difficult things to maintain is a realistic contact with the life that unfolds in the land we left behind. Even in this era of Twitter, BBM, SMS, and YouTube, there is no adequate substitute for the context given by the colors, sounds, and above all, the smells of being on-site, being an actor on the stage of events.
All this comes to mind due to the uproar that has arisen around the staging of the play "Petroleros Suicidas" (Suicidal Oil Workers) by Ibsen Martinez, and the impossibility, at least in the short term, of satisfying my curiosity. I wanted to contrast the noise generated in social media with reality. The title of the play alone, of questionable taste but undoubtedly memorable, has generated more controversy than any other work by Ibsen, except for the character of the “Man with the Label” from his well known soap opera "Por Estas Calles." Undoubtedly evoking the same scabrousness.
It is not my intention to either mediate or take sides in what has become a public exchange of insults between Ibsen Martínez and his detractors (mostly ex-workers from the former PDVSA, my colleagues, and friends). It's a duel of venomous darts that, although they don't kill, contribute to reinforcing old prejudices and creating new resentments, which is the last thing we need to build a new and better country. Besides, if one wants to engage in verbal fencing, Ibsen is the last of the adversaries I would choose. The probability of coming out badly wounded is too high.
The subject of disagreement, in addition to the title of the work, is the criticism that Ibsen Martínez has made in various media about the so-called “Oil Strike”. It is assumed that the play in question is meant to criticize the oil workers who took part in those events of 2002 and 2003. A presumption that Ibsen Martínez, ambiguously (skillfully?), does not try to deny. His most common response to the attacks, and the least belligerent, is cryptic: “See the play.”
SCENE 2. At a bar in Altamira, Caracas, a memory stick with the draft of the script is forgotten on the bar counter, a figure in the shadows takes it, and “Wikileaks” it — salsa music is heard in the background.
I opened the file with great expectation. Imagine the reader's disappointment when I start reading the script and realize that the play is not at all about the “General Strike” of 2002-2003; that will have to wait for another play or another author. I felt deceived and disillusioned. I was ready to fight on behalf of my professional class. The play, which takes place in different timelines, uses the circumstances of the strike to establish a backdrop for the characters. At the outset, it allows the author to announce, through one of the characters, his critical position about the “Strike” and oil workers in general.
But that moment passes quickly, and without much meandering, the text takes us, along with the protagonist couple and the other two characters, into the dark alleys of Venezuela and its psychological relationship with oil. There are other characters, but they are invisible and mute, only alluded to as if they were an absent relative.
Martínez unloads on the audience all the dramatic and melodramatic arsenal acquired in his long career as a writer: failed loves, homicides, adulteries, corruption, cowardice, all this within the framework of the state oil company, but without alluding to the latter with great interest, yet with excessive harshness.
The play "Petroleros Suicidas" is about many things. For me, it's about the only female character: Natalia. Natalia represents Venezuela: feminine, brave, in an eternal search for a love that she never quite finds. Natalia is the voice that Martínez uses, perhaps unconsciously, to represent “Gente del Petróleo”: idealistic, disenchanted with the result of their actions, yet convinced that at every moment they have done the right thing. Natalia reminds us that oil has also made us aspire and conquer, regardless of what wise analysts, or authors think, yesterday or today. This is despite the recognizable darkness of the other characters that Martínez puts on stage, whom I recognize but choose to ignore.
SCENE 3 — Television Studio. Props that look taken from a second-hand furniture store. The host, a journalist with luminous eyes, presents the fashionable author with a long and convoluted monologue. The writer sits on a sofa. He looks uncomfortable and forces a smile.
Martínez, now more relaxed, tells María Elena Lavaud anecdotes about his beginnings as a scriptwriter working alongside the great José Ignacio Cabrujas. His favorite anecdote is one in which Cabrujas tricks the executives of the TV channel where they work. He convinces them to make a script based on the novel “Campeones” by Guillermo Meneses, a novel that neither Martinez nor Cabrujas have ever read. It was fashionable to make soap operas based on Venezuelan works.
Cabrujas ends up discarding the novel and only preserves the title and main characters, writing along with Martínez a whole new narrative, without the poorly read television executives realizing the deception. Martínez ends the story with a voice of admiration, calling Cabrujas the “true trickster” (verdadero malandro).
Years later, Martínez has become a true trickster himself. The title "Petroleros Suicidas," the allusion to the general strike, and the PDVSA characters are, like the Meneses' novel, just a provocative screen. The story Martínez tells in the play is about us Venezuelans and the effect that oil has come to have on our psyche and social values. Martínez seems to subscribe to Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso's “black legend” and his vision of oil as the devil's excrement” (oil as a perverse influence).
Call me naïve about the play, but ultimately, there's the character of Natalia, in whom Ibsen Martínez still finds reasons to move forward. Is it just a coincidence that “Natalia de 8 a 9,” a groundbreaking soap opera by his admired Cabrujas, also represents rebirth after destruction?
The light dims softly. There's no Yordano song, but there should be...
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