Albert Sánchez Piñol: "Since I was little I looked for aliens... and I ended up finding them in the jungle"

BarcelonaYou are right Albert Sanchez Piñol (Barcelona, ​​​​1965) when he says that his latest book is as unclassifiable as many of the characters that appear in it. The darkness of the heart (La Campana, 2025) mixes, with commendable skill, history, biographical essay, anthropology, unlikely anecdotes and the author's own experience. Cold skin, who traveled to the Congo in the late 1990s to write reports for an NGO and ended up discovering a surprise that turned his life upside down.

The darkness of the heart refers, from the title, to one of the most emblematic novels of Joseph Conrad, but the story it tells begins with a misunderstanding that comes from the Iliad, and it has to do with some verses that talk about birds and pygmies.

— The word pygmy comes from pygmaioi, characters from the folklore of ancient Greece that would be the equivalent of our elves, small beings that live in the forest. The verses of the Iliad that speak of these pygmies were the origin of one of the most ridiculous misunderstandings in scientific history.

In the introduction to the book you follow how the pygmies are mentioned by authors such as Ptolemy, Herodotus and Saint Augustine. The first to attack the myth of "shoulders in eternal struggle against little birds" was the biologist Carl von Linné in the 18th century. A century later, things changed.

— It was during the most rationalist century, the 19th, when the medieval depths had been definitively left behind, that the history of the pygmies fell back on all fours.

Your book is divided into two halves: in the first, you delve into the lives of six real people who contributed to expanding the myth of the pygmies; in the second, you recount your personal relationship with them.

— The darkness of the heart This is not a book about the Pygmies, but about some of the people who claim to have seen them and left an important trace behind them, even though many of them are now half-forgotten. At the end I add my experience in Congo during the second half of the 1990s.

The first person who succeeded in getting the scientific community to accept that pygmies exist was the botanist and ethnologist Georg Schweinfurth (1836-1925). You don't like him very much.

— I hate him! When I was in the Faculty of Anthropology, he was still considered the discoverer of the pygmies. Schweinfurth did not discover anything, firstly because pygmies do not exist, but also because the man he took with him to Europe, poor Nsevué, died on the way because of a case of stool.

In any case, when Georg Schweinfurth published The Heart of Africa (In the heart of Africa) in 1874, the scientific community believed him.

— It seems unbelievable, but that's how it was.

A decade earlier, the French explorer Paul du Chaillu (1831-1903) had been caught up in it.

— The stories of Paul du Chaillu and Georg Schweinfurth show that science is a religion like any other. In the case of du Chaillu, nothing he said was believed because of his background: he was a low-class bastard. With Schweinfurth it was the opposite, also because of his background: he came from a good family and had studied at a good university.

Still, he returned from his expedition empty-handed: Nsevué had died, and the boxes containing the plant species he had found had been burned.

— He came back with nothing, but they swallowed everything he said. That is why I say that literature ends up overriding rationality: it is Schweinfurth who related Nsevué to the pygmies mentioned in the Iliad. Since shortly before Schweinfurth published his book, Schliemann had discovered Priam's treasure – and thus confirmed the existence of Troy – the Iliad It came to be considered a book that, in addition to literary value, had historical validity.

The attitude of Georg Schweinfurth and Paul du Chaillu towards the men they met – the Aka and the Obongo, respectively – was very different.

— You only have to look at the photos of the two of them to realise how different their attitude is. Du Chaillu always appeared surrounded by the Obongo because he lived with him. Schweinfurth seems to give them orders. What annoys me most about Schweinfurth is that he ends up encouraging the invention of a myth that speaks of our cultural ineffectiveness.

The book looks at the relationship with the pygmies from many points of view.

— It is a book of non-fiction literature. The stories of each of the characters in the first part are fascinating. And they all have very different profiles: Anne Eisner (1911-1967) was a painter, and her husband, Patrick Putnam (1904-1953), embodied the tragedy of the blank page like no one else, because he was unable to write anything about the pygmies and, in fact, his hand was the hand of the latter. Then we have the case of Paul Schebesta (1887-1967), missionary and anthropologist. With the pygmies he sets out to show that God has revealed himself to all of humanity, but none of them believes, they are all atheists. They receive him with great hospitality. They make him realize how important compassion is. He communes with creatures so different from himself... Instead of finding God, he finds something even more important, humanity.

There are stories so unlikely that they seem like fiction. For example, the one in which at the beginning of the 20th century a businessman, Samuel Verner (1873-1943), buys a young man, Ota Benga, for five dollars, and takes him to the United States to participate in a kind of Olympic games called. anthropology days.

— Ota Benga is another false pygmy. You only need to look at a photo of him to see this. The parallel Olympic games of 1904 had an explicitly racist purpose. During those years, a popular rumour had spread that they savages were stronger and more athletic than Westerners. With the competitions of the anthropology days They wanted to dismantle this myth. The conception was purely supremacist. The group that was beneath everything and that had to be ridiculed were the pygmies. The conclusion of those days was that the savages They were not as athletic as they were believed to be.

Perhaps the most impressive story of all is the one we find at the end: yours.

— The experience I had in the jungle was like crossing a dimensional door.

You arrived in the Congo in 1996. You were working with an NGO and you found yourself in a country that you define as the cradle of "magical surrealism."

— Anything could happen there. One day, in a remote town in the interior of the country, I walked into a bank branch and found a hand-width-wide carpet of banknotes lying on the floor. Mobutu had just been overthrown, and the country's currency had lost its value. The bank robbers had taken everything: the furniture, the paintings, the lights... except the money.

You buy a car that you name Ruinous because of its condition.

— It's my Rocinante. In this book I'm a kind of Don Quixote because, without intending to, I end up having visions. I go through that dimensional door I was telling you about.

You talk about that adventure as if it were part of a fantastic story, but at that time you were a graduate in Anthropology who intended to write a doctoral thesis on the Congo.

— Yes. That experience ended up bringing out the novelist that I had inside me without knowing it. Without having gone through the Congo I would not have written. Cold skin. In fact, and I realize this now, in that novel, the contrasting points of view of the lighthouse keeper and the atmospheric officer have elements of the antagonistic view between the missionary and the anthropologist. The former believes he has the truth. The latter pursues it.

Research and the study of the other is fundamental in anthropology. Where does your interest in otherness come from?

— Sparks and motivations are very slight, and it is life that ends up pushing us. At school we were obsessed with Martians. My friends were mostly interested in laser guns. I, on the other hand, was motivated by finding creatures from another planet. Since I was little I searched for aliens... and I ended up finding them in the jungle.

You didn't expect it.

— No way! The most absolute otherness, the Martians, were in the Congo. The first contact, and the most brutal of all, was in a forest in the middle of Kirumba. That man I saw was unlike anything I had seen before. I could only tell his gender. I couldn't deduce his age, or his status, nothing.

You write that it was as if you were seeing "humanity for the first time in your life."

— It is an experience that I have tried to explain in words. The darkness of the heart. I realize that I am short-sighted. That initial encounter cannot be recounted exactly. It is, as I say, passing through a dimensional door. You cannot know what is on the other side.

That man took you to the camp where he lived with about twenty other Mbutis. You lived there, and you kept coming back until Congo became too dangerous a place.

— The place where the Mbuti lived was fascinating. The Mbuti take three hours to build a house: we spend thirty years paying the mortgage. It is a civilisation without doors... My parents spend more time with their children than my mother... The days I lived with them, when I slept I was unable to dream, because I lived the dream while I was awake.

In the jungle you came across a group of Mbuti people who were wearing a tapaculo made of tree bark and carrying spears.

— Yes... That encounter was beyond any plausibility or sense. If I had written this scene in a novel, it would have been thrown into my head. But that's how it was: in the middle of the jungle, those half-naked men appeared with spears, as if we were in prehistoric times. But this was happening at the end of the 20th century. I saw it. And I needed to record it one day.