Lookout of poetic passage: in imaginative novellas and stories, award-winning Colombian writer Alvaro Mutis captures the inner turmoil of a universal wanderer.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

His study is a small workroom as Snug as a captain's cabin; oil an adjoining door an Art Deco-style poster celebrates the heyday of transatlantic crossings by steamship; and a model tugboat perches upon andirons of a fire-place rarely used in temperate Mexico City, where this Colombian author has lived for nearly fifty years. Even a bar off a nearby passageway resembles a galley. But wine these nautical touches doubtless have inspired Alvaro Mutis as he has pounded out his salty yams on an old Smith Corona, this hideaway is also the author's quiet library, where he spends endless hours devouring the books he loves.

Now eighty, Mutis was walking gingerly when we met, recovering from a fall a couple days earlier that had left him with bruised ribs, a broken nose, and dark patches beneath his eyes. Nonetheless, over the objections of his wife, Carmen, he insisted upon navigating many stairs down to the main gate to receive me with the gracious hospitality for which he is famous.

"Ay, ay, ay, si!" he laughs in response when I say he reminds me of Maqroll the Gaviero, down on his luck and licking his wounds at a rundown motel on La Brea Boulevard in Los Angeles in the opening pages of the Mutis novella, Amirbar.

Maqroll, the protagonist in most of Mutis's poems and stories, may share some traits with his creator, but this pessimistic loner who knows mostly failure seems more alter ego to the gregarious Mutis, who embraces life with enthusiasm and has enjoyed frequent success. Mutis has said that he invented the Gaviero (the lookout) out of necessity during his late teenage years when a mentor accused him of writing verse in the voice of an older, more experienced man. In response, the young poet gradually brought into being the grizzled merchant marine to speak in his stead. "He would visit me sporadically" is the way Mutis puts it, and to this day he still refers to him as a living, breathing seafarer who has a mind of his own and with whom he remains in contact through correspondence, updates from mutual friends, and infrequent face-to-face encounters. Only teasingly has the author let slip tiny hints as to Maqroll's background: that he speaks Flemish, carries a Cypriot passport (possibly false), and knows well a landscape similar to the central highlands of Colombia where the author spent time in his youth. But because Mutis never provides a physical description of Maqroll, to readers he becomes a universal wanderer, one with the billions of souls adrift in the world. (Garcia Marquez has said, "We are all Maqroll!") Mutis admits he opted for the unusual spelling to suggest several possible nationalities (maybe a Scot, perhaps someone from the Middle East). As to the nickname, the Gaviero, he confesses to a certain metaphorical intent: "For me, a lookout at sea embodies the image of the poet. He is the one who sees farther. After all, what is poetry? It is that hidden part of man that the poet reveals to the reader. I believe that each poet who completely surrenders to his work is a lookout. The (Gaviero has been with me since my first verses. You know the story."

Aware of the unconventional trajectory of his literary career, I nonetheless nudged Mutis: "You were something of a Late bloomer, no?" to which this man, with his easy laugh, nods hi agreement. "Yes, for nearly forty years I worked in Colombia as public relations director for Esso (Standard Oil) and Lansa, the predecessor of Avianca, and then in Mexico as sales manager for Twentieth Century Fox and Columbia Pictures. But I never saw myself as a businessman. What happened is that I married very young, just eighteen years old. My mother, Carolina ,Jaramillo Angel--she was from a prosperous family that owned several coffee and sugar plantations--blessed our marriage, but said you have to get a job! ... So, from the very beginning I would say I was a salaried employee who preferred to write poetry, read a great deal, and spend time in the pool hall. I never lived as an intellectual. I just lived life. I often wrote under the most absurd circumstances--hotels, airports, bars.... But then at age sixty, I retired on a pension from Columbia Pictures. One day I was editing a text, the prose poem called La nieve del almirante, in a French-language version about to be published, and suddenly I said to myself: 'What are you doing? What a fool you are! Who are these people? Where did they come from? This is no poem. It is part of a novel!' So I sat down and finished it and sent it off Carmen Balcells, the literary agent in Barcelona, to get her opinion. A few days later she called me and said the novel would be out in a few weeks. I said, 'What novel?' She said, 'What you sent me is a novel' and hung up. That's the way she is with us. She works...