Pants on Fire

                                                             

Reading My Colombian War for an English unit called It’s All a Lie is simply perfect.

In her memoir, Silvana Paternosto does nothing but lie. For the most part its ok, they usually come as small lies about details that help readers get the big picture. However, I think she may have overdone it when speaking about a small town called El Carmen, a very important and lengthy part of the book.

She starts of by introducing her genealogical roots in the region. “I think about El Carmen, the place my family calls la finca, a farm that makes my mother and everyone with her surname an enemy of the people – at least the enemy of FARC… El Carmen is as large as Shelter Island, large enough for my grandfather to be called a terrateniente.” (p.31).

A cold shiver runs down my spine. El Carmen? ,“la finca”?, what on earth is this woman saying? I am from El Carmen. I know who the landowners are and, being a small town, I also know who they have been for the past decades. I feel kind of insulted that she calls my hometown her “farm”, but I kept reading, I gave her the benefit of the doubt: maybe she was just making yet another oversimplification, simply wanting to say that her family has a lot of land in El Carmen and they are therefore targeted by the FARC.

Some pages later I find this: “I was born and baptized Silvana Maria Paternostro Montblanc...I plan to drive from Barranquilla to the family farm, to finally go on the road, and if I have my full name anywhere in sight, my odds of getting there without being kidnapped or threatened are slim. My uncle had warned me about the dangers of my second last name.” (p.42).

No way.

Does she expect people to believe that Montblanc is a traditional last name from a Colombian pueblo called El Carmen? At that point, I was 99% sure that her story was garbage, but not wanting to risk falsely calling her out, I start phoning people from El Carmen. All the answers I receive sum up to this: apart from chocolates and pens, Montblanc is completely unheard of. If her last name had maybe been Frieri, a family who owned an estate in El Carmen so large that it was called Medio Mundo (Half World), then it wouldn’t be that bad of a leap to say that she owned the whole thing. Montblanc, that is quite ridiculous.

Feeling a bit like Sherlock Holmes, I Google “Montblanc, El Carmen”. I do get many hits, all of them connected to the book and none to the region. Her lies are like an iceberg. There are dozens of writers quoting her like the Bible and ranting about Montblanc and El Carmen. This is William Grimes from The New York Times*:

“The maternal surname Montblanc on her Colombian identity card immediately links her with El Carmen, a vast agricultural estate created by her grandfather in the mountains near her hometown, Barranquilla, a port on the Caribbean coast. Nearly 40 Montblancs have been abducted and held for ransom.”(Grimes, 2007)

I laugh. This is delicious. Such serious people. Such a serious magazine. So incredibly false. After this, I don’t think I will ever believe things said by the Media.

                                                                         Works Cited

* Grimes, William. "BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Back to Barranquilla, Seeking Sense of Place." The New York Times. The New York Times, 16 Nov. 2007. Web. 02 Sept. 2012. .