The projected images of characters from Morel’s past repeat pre-recorded conversations. In one of these (overheard by the narrator), Morel proposes as a subject the theme of immortality. A false clue, since immortality is not merely persistence. I’m reminded of the clinical nomenclature of the inability to forget: “perseverance of memory.”
Proust: “Everything must return, as it is written on the dome of Saint Mark’s, and as it is proclaimed, while they drink from the marble and jasper urns on the Byzantine pillar capitals, by the birds that signify both death and the Resurrection.”
I had a discussion with Stan Persky on immortality. He argues against the alarms of dystopians that scientific advances will lend us, if not eternal life, at least the possibility of a lengthy enjoyment of the present. I’m not sure; I don’t know if I want to go on for a very long time, a time beyond eighty or ninety years (already a small eternity). As I begin to glimpse the certainty of an end, I enjoy all the more the things I’ve grown accustomed to—my favourite books, voices, presences, tastes, surroundings—partly because I know I won’t be here forever. Stan says that, given a sound body and mind, he happily wants this life to continue.
In his journals, Bioy recounts the funeral of the novelist Maria Luisa Levinson. Her body was displayed in a covered coffin with a small window. Someone remarked that there seemed to be sheets of newsprint covering her face. Her daughter explained that they had put pages from several newspapers inside, “so that if, in the future, the coffin was opened, people would know by the obituaries who was there.”
LATER
I find it difficult to understand how, living in the Buenos Aires of my childhood, I saw nothing of what was to come later. Swedenborg says that the answers to our questions are all laid out for us, but that we don’t recognize them as such because we have in mind other answers. We only see what we expect to see. What then was I expecting when I was eight, ten, thirteen?
I remember the long conversations in cafés, in someone’s room after school, walking down so many streets. A peculiar humour permeated all that talking: irony tinged with sadness, absurdity with gravitas. The people of Buenos Aires seemed to possess the capability of enjoying the smallest casual offering, and feeling the most subtle moments of misery. They had a passionate sense of curiosity, a keen eye for the revealing notion and respect for the intelligent mind, for the generous act, for the enlightened observation. They knew who they were in the world and felt proud of that imagined identity. Most important, there was in all this the possibility of a blossoming, a ripening. Economic constraints and their attendant politics, imposed from abroad by foreign companies not yet multinational, dictated many of the codes of society, and yet the questioning spirit of Argentinians, their particular wit, their melancholic bravery, held for their society something greater and better, beyond what seemed like passing spells of fraudulent governments. If misfortune struck, as it does sometimes anywhere on earth, then (Argentinians believed) it wouldn’t last long; our country was too rich, too strong, too full of promise to imagine an endlessly bleak future.
Leopoldo Lugones, writing in 1916: “Politics! That is the national scourge. Everything in this country that stands for regression, poverty, iniquity, either stems from it or is exploited by it.”
Today, at breakfast, my brother tells me that “only” ten percent of the judiciary system is corrupt. “Of course,” he adds, “excluding the Supreme Court, where every single member is venal.”
WEDNESDAY
Perhaps out of modesty, Bioy, ardently Argentinian, lends his hero a Venezuelan nationality. The Invention of Morel ends with a nostalgic recapitulation of what his homeland means to the narrator. It is an enumeration of places, people, objects, moments, actions, snatches of an anthem. … I could do the same to remember Buenos Aires.
Things I remember:
the scarlet of the ten-peso bill
different kinds of rolls sold at the baker’s: pebete (sweetish, brioche-like dough), fugaza (flat, crusty), miñón (smaller and crustier)
the scent of the eau de cologne the barber patted onto my father’s face at the shop in Harrods
a comic radio show on Sunday midday: La Revista Dislocada
the sepia-coloured girlie magazines sold under the arches of Puente Saavedra
the tiny turkey sandwiches at the Petit Café
a strong smell of ammonia around the huge rubber trees of Barrancas de Belgrano
the sound of the soda cart over the cobblestones outside my window
the soda siphon and the bottle of wine on the dinner table
the smell of chicken broth before lunch
the large steamers moored at the port, reeking of smoke, ready to cross the Atlantic
jacaranda trees in the early spring mornings
One of the earliest poems I learned by heart was Heine’s “Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland” (“Once I had a lovely homeland”).
THURSDAY
Memory as nightmare: the narrator of The Invention of Morel dreams of a brothel of blind women which (he says) he once visited in Calcutta. In the dream, the brothel becomes a rich, stuccoed Florentine palazzo. Here in Buenos Aires, I dream in Spanish of people who never speak and can’t hear me, and always of the city I knew, never as it is now. In my dreams, the Avenida 9 de Julio ends at Avenida Santa Fe.
Bioy’s narrator has the impression that he is merely playing a game, not fighting for his life.
The day after tomorrow, I leave. I have lunch with my nephew Tomás. We talk about the betrayal of Argentina’s history, and of his need to keep believing in the possibility of doing something positive. He is thrilled by a line he has read in Simone de Beauvoir: “I discovered with scorn the ephemeral nature of glory.”
Perhaps, in order for a book to attract us, it must establish between our experience and that of the fiction—between the two imaginations, ours and that on the page—a link of coincidences.
MONDAY
I’m back in France. On the plane, I read an article on the so-called Argentine ants. Vicious fighters in their homeland, in Europe these insects have stopped fighting (for some undetermined reason) and with that surplus energy have managed to build a tunnel, six thousand kilometres long, from northern Spain to southern Italy.
Today I start setting up my library.
The shelves are ready, waxed and clean. I realize that before I can put the books in place, I have to open all the boxes, since the subjects are mixed up and I won’t otherwise know how much space I need for, say, detective novels or the works of Bioy. In one of the first boxes I find a copy of Bioy’s La otra aventura, a collection of essays I edited when I worked for the publisher Galerna in Buenos Aires. I was twenty years old, and we were three in the company: the editor, his wife and I. The book is small, 8½ by 17½ centimetres, with a black line drawing on a red background. I remember going to Bioy’s house to pick up the manuscript, a bundle of carbon copies, and reading them on the bus back home.
That was in the early months of 1968. Just over thirty years later I saw Bioy again, weeks before his death. He had shrivelled into a frail, bony man who mumbled his words, but his eyes were still extraordinarily bright. He told me that he had thought of the plot for a new novel, a fantastic novel. “There will be an island in it,” he said. And then, with a smile, “Again.”
I have a photo of Bioy aged seventeen, in profile, bearded, classically handsome. I also have one of him at that last meeting, shoulders hunched, cheeks caved in. It isn’t certain that Morel would have chosen to preserve the young man rather than the dying one, the image of what was over the image of what would be. Morel says to the image of his beloved Faustine (with whom the narrator also has fallen in love), “The influence of the future on the past.” Exactly.
What others see as our finest achievements are often not what we ourselves see. Edith Sorel once interviewed Marc Chagall in his house in St-Paul-de-Vence. The painter was in his mid-eighties and was living with his second wife, Vava, whom he had
married a decade earlier. Edith was asking Chagall about how it felt to be one of the world’s most famous artists, when Vava excused herself and left the room for a minute. Chagall quickly grabbed Edith’s hand, pointed to his departing wife and, his face glowing with pleasure, whispered, “She’s a Brodsky!” For the poor Jewish boy who had grown up in the shtetl of Vitebsk, more than any artistic fame, what filled him with pride was having married the daughter of a rich merchant family.
Who is Faustine? Who was she in Bioy’s mind? I’ve just read that the Argentinian Inés Schmidt became the model for Rosa Fröhlich, the Marlene Dietrich character in The Blue Angel, after Heinrich Mann met her in Florence in 1905.
TUESDAY
I’m in my library, surrounded by empty shelves and growing columns of books. It occurs to me that I can trace all my memories through these piling-up volumes. Then suddenly everything seems redundant, all this accumulation of printed paper. Unless it is my own experience that isn’t necessary. It is like the double reality that the narrator experiences when he quotes Cicero: “The two suns that, as I heard from my father, were seen during the Consulate of Tuditanus and Aquilius.” Impossibly, the narrator finds in the house an identical copy of the pamphlet he is carrying in his pocket: not two copies of the same pamphlet but twice the same copy. Double reality obliterates itself; that is why meeting our doppelgänger means that we must die.
Title for an essay: “The Library as Doppelgänger.”
The room in which my library is to be lodged seems to me huge, and as the books begin to fill it, even more so. I pick up a collection by the Iraqi poet Bakr Al-Sayyab and read:
My new room
Is vast, vaster indeed
Than my tomb shall be.
For years, for lack of space, I kept most of my books in storage. I used to think I could hear them call out to me at night. Now I stand for a long time among them all, flooded with images, bits of remembered text, quotations in random order, titles and names. I find my early copy of The Invention of Morel: the second edition, published by Sur in 1948, the year I was born.
FRIDAY
Several days of unpacking, and many weeks more to come. Memories and false memories. I think I remember something in a certain way, distinctly. A note on the endpaper pages of a book I open by chance tells me I’m wrong; the event happened somewhere else, with someone else, at a different time. Bioy’s narrator: “Our habits suppose a certain way in which things take place, a vague coherence of the world. Now reality appears to me changed, unreal.”
Papers that have fluttered out of my books as I dust: a Buenos Aires tramway ticket (trams stopped running in the late sixties); a phone number and a name I can’t place; a line, “laudant illa sed ista legunt”; a bookmark from the now defunct Librairie Maspéro in Paris; a ticket stub for Grease; a stub for an Athens-Toronto flight; a bill for books from Thorpe’s in Guildford, still in shillings and pence; a sticker from Mitchell’s Bookstore in Buenos Aires; a drawing of two ducks or two doves done in red crayon; a Spanish playing card, the ten of clubs; the address of Estela Ocampo in Barcelona; a receipt from a store in Milan for a hat I don’t remember ever owning; a passport photo of Severo Sarduy; a brochure from the Huntington Library in Pasadena; an envelope addressed to me on George Street in Toronto.
We don’t choose what remains. In the past moments captured by Morel in his ghostly projections persist two abominable pieces of music: “Valencia” and “Tea for Two.” My mother had an LP with Sara Montiel singing “Valencia.”
SATURDAY
The fantastic must survive a series of logical or absurd explanations. (Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”) Bioy’s narrator proposes five hypotheses for the strange things he sees: that he is sick with the plague; that he has become invisible through bad air and lack of food; that the people he sees are creatures from another planet, incapable of hearing; that he has gone mad; that the phantoms are his dead friends and the island is a form of purgatory or heaven. The true solution is presumed to be “scientific.”
Bioy (Bioy’s own sarcastic voice) intrudes into the narrative: “The possibility of several heavens has been stated; if there were only one and all were forced to go there and a charming couple awaited us with all their literary Wednesdays, many of us would have stopped dying long ago.” Also this: “Man and mating can’t bear long and intense moments.” (Borges must have been thinking of this line when he attributed to Bioy the famous quotation in “Tlön, Uqbar”: “Mirrors and mating are abominable, because they multiply the number of men.” The two friends, Borges and Bioy, mirrored features of one another in their writings. Both The Invention of Morel and “Tlön, Uqbar” were written in the same year, 1940.)
SUNDAY
Unlike Huxley’s “feelies” (films that you can touch or “finger”) in Brave New World, Morel’s projected images can be perceived through the sense of smell as well as by touch (a procedure he says was easily achieved), and through the perception of heat. “No witness will admit that these are images,” he boasts to the narrator. He is also certain that his “imitations of people” lack consciousness—“like the characters in a film,” he adds. (Like books, I think. Like friends remembered.)
The friends I remember are caught in time, as if captured on film. They (many of them are now dead, disappeared) are still the age at which I last saw them; I doubt if they would recognize me now. They are what I know of the past.
“Who would not distrust someone who said, ‘I and my friends are apparitions, a new type of photography’?” As I walked around the Buenos Aires I thought I remembered, the ghosts seemed to ask that same ironic question. In my adolescence, I never had the sense of being in a “remembered” place.
MONDAY
Foreseeably, reality co-opts fiction. On Morel’s island, the walls of the villa are film projections that coincide with the walls built out of brick and plaster and cover up any cracks or holes in the real thing. In Bioy’s later novel Plan of Escape, which takes place on another of his fantasy islands, he imagines a prison in which painted walls create for the inmates the illusion of freedom. History bettered both notions. José Milicúa, a Spanish art historian, has revealed that, during the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans (!) built cells with disturbing murals in the style of Modernist and Surrealist paintings: six feet high, three feet wide and six feet long, hot and airless, and with the cots so angled that the prisoner would fall onto the floor whenever he tried to lie down. An endless loop of the eye-slicing scene in Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou was projected onto one of the walls. The architect of this nightmare was an Austrian-born Frenchman, Alfonso Laurencic, who called his creations “psychotechnic torture.”
LATE AFTERNOON
I will sleep one night in the library to make the space truly mine. C. says that this is equivalent to a dog peeing in the corners.
Morel’s first idea is to construct an anthology of images exhibited as mementoes; that is why the villa is called a museum. He suggests that our technology is constantly inventing machines “to counterbalance absence.” Absence, he argues, is merely spatial, and he imagines that every voice, every image produced by those no longer alive is preserved somewhere, forever. One day, he hopes, there will be a machine capable of rebuilding everything, like an alphabet that allows us to understand and compose any possible word. Then, he says, “life will be a storage-room for death.” One single advantage for Morel’s people-images: they have no memory of the repetition; they relive the moment as if it were always the first time.
It is said that those who don’t visit the Chapel of San Andrés de Teixido in Galicia during their lifetime must do so after death. “A San Andrés de Teixido vai de morto quen non foi de vivo.”
A definition of hell: every one of our acts, our utterances, our thoughts preserved since the beginning of time, increasing infinity by an infinite number of infinities, a repetition from which there is no escape.
THU
RSDAY
I see (I hadn’t remembered) that the narrator hears Faustine speak of Canada, my Canada. Since I became a Canadian citizen in 1985, I’ve enjoyed finding references to Canada in unexpected places and I’ve become attentive to capital Cs on the page. I’m aware that, for Bioy, Canada was equivalent to Shangri-La without the exoticism: mere distance, the archetypal faraway place. It is curious how readers form their own text by remarking on certain words, certain names that have a private meaning, that echo for them alone and are unnoticed by any other. This reminds me of the anonymous reviewer of Lady Chatterley’s Lover who, in the English magazine Horse & Hound, remarked that Lawrence’s book contained fine descriptions of the British countryside, unfortunately marred by certain sentimental or erotic digressions.
Hubert Nyssen asks me if I’ve ever thought that the brain is like a folded codex of almost limitless memory: the mind as book.
FRIDAY
I’ve finished The Invention of Morel, again. Bioy’s voice echoes in the room. I pick up his diary to read this evening, before I fall asleep.
The books I take up to my bed at night and the books I sort out in the library during the day are different books. The former impose on me their time and length, their own rhythm of telling before I fall asleep; the latter are ruled by my own notions of order and categories, and obey me almost blindly (sometimes they rebel and I have to change their place on the shelf).
A Reading Diary Page 2