I returned to my quarters as if harvesting the darkness, and with a new faculty – or so it seemed – of perceiving myself from without. I could see myself gradually transformed into a figure of mourning, the shadows, soft as bat’s down, adhering to me as I passed … I was going to confront something, someone, and I understood that I was to choose it or choose for it to die.
A feminine presence wafts past. Zama raises a candle to the being’s face. It is she! But who is she? His senses reel. A fog seems to invade the room. He staggers into bed, wakes up to find the woman from the window watching over him, ‘compassionate affection, an amorous and self-abnegating pity in her eyes … [a woman] without mystery.’ Bitterly she observes how in thrall he is to the enchantments of ‘that other glimpsed figure,’ and delivers a homily on the perils of fantasy.
Rising at last from his sickbed, Zama decides that the entire episode of ‘harvesting the darkness’ is to be explained – and explained away – as the product of a fever. He backtracks from the obscurer regions into which hallucination has been leading him, falters in his hesitant self-exploration, reinstates the dichotomy of fantasy (fever) and reality that he was in the process of breaking down.
To grasp what is at stake at this moment, we need to hark back to Kafka, the writer who did the most to shape Di Benedetto’s art, both directly and through the mediation of Borges. As part of his project of rehabilitating the fantastic as a literary genre, Borges had in the mid-1930s published a series of articles on Kafka in which, crucially, he distinguished between dreams, which characteristically lay themselves open to interpretation, and the nightmares of Kafka (the long nightmare of Josef K. in The Trial is the best example), which come to us as if in an indecipherable language. The unique horror of the Kafkan nightmare, says Borges, is that we know (in some sense of the word ‘know’) that what we are undergoing is not real, but, in the grip of the hallucinatory proceso (process, trial), we are unable to escape.
At the end of Part 2, Zama, a character in what amounts to a historical fantasy, dismisses as insignificant because unreal the hallucinatory fantasy he has just undergone. His prejudice in favour of the real continues to hold him back from self-knowledge.
*
After a gap of five years, the story resumes. Zama’s efforts to secure a transfer have failed; his amours seem to be a thing of the past.
A contingent of soldiers is being sent out to scour the wilds for Vicuña Porto, a bandit of mythical status – no-one is even sure what he looks like – on whom all the colony’s woes are blamed.
From the time he spent as corregidor, Zama recalls a Vicuña Porto who fomented rebellion among the Indians. Though the troops are to be led by the incompetent, pig-headed Capitán Parrilla, Zama joins them, hoping that a spectacular success will advance his cause.
One dark night on the trail, a nondescript soldier takes Zama aside. It is Vicuña Porto himself, masquerading as one of Parrilla’s men and thus in effect hunting himself. He confides that he wishes to quit banditry and rejoin society.
Should Zama betray Porto’s confidence? The code of honour says no, but the freedom to obey no code, to follow impulse, to be perverse, says yes. So Zama denounces Porto to Parrilla and at once feels ‘clean in every fiber of [his] being’.
Without compunction Parrilla arrests both Zama and Porto. Hands bound, face swollen with fly bites, Zama contemplates being paraded back in the town: ‘Vicuña Porto, the bandit, would be no more defeated, repugnant, and wretched than Zama, his accessory.’
But the bandit turns the tables. Murdering Parrilla in cold blood, he invites Zama to join his band. Zama refuses, whereupon Porto hacks off his fingers and abandons him, mutilated, in the wilds.
At this desperate juncture salvation appears in the form of the barefoot boy who has haunted Zama for the past decade. ‘He was me, myself from before … Smiling like a father, I said, “You haven’t grown …” With irreducible sadness he replied, “Neither have you.”’
Thus ends the third and last part of Zama. In the somewhat too facile lesson that its hero-narrator invites us to draw, searching for oneself, as Vicuña Porto has been pretending to do, is much like the search for freedom, ‘which is not out there but within each one.’ What we most truly seek lies within: our self as we were before we lost our natural innocence.
Having seen in parts 1 and 2 a bad Zama, a Zama misled by vain dreams and confused by lust, we find in Part 3 that a good Zama is still recoverable. Zama’s last act before losing his fingers is to write a letter to his infinitely patient wife, seal it in a bottle, and consign it to the river: ‘Marta, I haven’t gone under.’ ‘The message was not destined for Marta or anyone out there,’ he confides. ‘I had written it for myself.’
The dream of recovering Eden, of making a new start, animated European conquest of the New World from the time of Columbus. Into the independent nation of Argentina, born in 1816, poured wave after wave of immigrants in quest of a utopia that turned out not to exist. It is not surprising that frustrated hope is one of the great subterranean themes of Argentine literature. Like Zama in his river port in the wilds, the immigrant finds himself dumped in an anything but Edenic site from which there is no obvious escape. Zama the book is dedicated to ‘the victims of expectation’.
Zama’s adventures in wild Indian territory are related in the rapid, clipped style Di Benedetto learned by writing for the cinema. Part 3 of the novel has been given great weight by some of his critics. In the light of Part 3, Zama is read as the story of how an americano comes to cast off the myths of the Old World and commit himself not to an imaginary Eden but to the New World in all its amazing reality. This reading is supported by the rich textual embedding that Di Benedetto supplies: exotic flora and fauna, fabulous mineral deposits, strange foodstuffs, savage tribes and their customs. It is as though for the first time in his life Zama is opening his eyes to the plenitude of the continent. That all this lore came to Di Benedetto not from personal experience – he had not set foot in Paraguay – but from old books, among them a biography of one Miguel Gregorio de Zamalloa, born 1753, corregidor during the rebellion of Túpac Amaru, last of the Inca monarchs, is an irony that need not trouble us.
*
Antonio Di Benedetto was born in 1922 into a middle-class family. In 1945 he abandoned his legal studies to join Los Andes, the most prestigious newspaper in Mendoza. In due course he would become, in all but name, editor-in-chief. The owners of the newspaper dictated a conservative line, which he felt as a constraint. Until his arrest in 1976 – for violating that constraint – he thought of himself as a professional journalist who wrote fiction in his spare time.
Zama (1956) was his first full-length novel. It received appropriate critical attention. Not unnaturally in a country that saw itself as a cultural outlier of Europe, attempts were made to supply it with a European parentage. Its author was identified first as a Latin American existentialist, then a Latin American nouveau romancier. During the 1960s the novel was translated into a number of European languages, English not included. In Argentina Zama has remained a cult classic.
Di Benedetto’s own contribution to this debate on paternity was to point out that if his fiction, particularly his short fiction, might sometimes seem blank, lacking in commentary, as if recorded by a camera eye, that might be not because he was imitating the practice of Alain Robbe-Grillet but because both of them were actively involved in cinema.
Zama was followed by two further novels and several collections of short fiction. The most interesting of these works is El silenciero (The Silencer), the story of a man (never named) who is trying to write a book but cannot hear himself think in the noise of the city. His obsession with noise consumes him, eventually driving him mad.
First published in 1964, the novel was substantially revised in 1975 so as to give its reflections on noise greater philosophical depth (Schopenhauer comes to figure prominently) and to forestall any simple, sociological reading of it. In the revised edition noise acquires
a metaphysical dimension: the protagonist is caught up in a hopeless quest for the primordial silence preceding the divine logos that brought the world into being.
El silenciero goes further than Zama in its use of the associative logic of dream and fantasy to propel its narrative. As a novel of ideas that includes ideas about how a novel can be put together, as well as in its mystical streak, El silenciero very likely pointed the direction Di Benedetto would have followed as a writer, had history not intervened.
*
On 24 March 1976, the military seized power in Argentina, with the collusion of the civilian government and to the relief of a large segment of the population, sick and tired of political violence and social chaos. The generals at once put into effect their master plan, or ‘Process for National Reorganisation’. General Ibérico Saint-Jean, installed as governor of Buenos Aires, spelled out what El Proceso would entail: ‘First we will kill all the subversives, then we will kill their collaborators, then their sympathisers, then those who remained indifferent, and finally we will kill the timid.’
Among the many so-called subversives detained on the first day of the coup was Di Benedetto. Later he would (like Josef K.) claim not to know why he was arrested, but it is plain that it was in retaliation for his activities as editor of Los Andes, where he had authorised the publication of reports on the activities of right-wing death squads. (After his arrest, the proprietors of the newspaper wasted no time in washing their hands of him.)
Detention routinely began with a bout of ‘tactical interrogation’, the euphemism for torture, intended to extract information but also to make it plain to the detainee that he or she had entered a new world with new rules. In many cases, writes Eduardo Duhalde, the trauma of the first torture, reinforced by having to watch or listen to the torture of other prisoners, marked the prisoner for the rest of his or her life. The favoured instrument of torture was the electric prod, which induced acute convulsions. After-effects of the prod ranged from intense muscular pain and paralysis to neurological damage manifested in disrhythmia, chronic headaches and memory loss.
Di Benedetto spent eighteen months in prison, mostly in the notorious Unit 9 of the Penitentiary Services of La Plata. His release came after appeals to the regime by Heinrich Böll, Ernesto Sabato and Jorge Luis Borges, backed by PEN International. Soon afterwards he went into exile.
A friend who saw him after his release was distressed by how he had aged: his hair had turned white, his hands trembled, his voice faltered, he walked with a shuffle. Although Di Benedetto never wrote directly about his prison experience – he preferred to practise what he called the therapy of forgetting – press interviews allude to vicious blows to the head (‘Since that day my capacity to think has been affected’); to a session with the cattle prod (the shock was so intense that it felt as if his inner organs were collapsing); and to a mock execution before a firing squad when the one thought in his mind was: what if they shoot me in the face?
Fellow inmates, most of them younger than he, recalled that he seemed bewildered by the brutal prison regime, trying to make sense of the random assaults he suffered from guards when the essence of these assaults was that they should be unpredictable and – like a Kafkan nightmare – make no sense.
Exile took Di Benedetto to France, to Germany, and eventually to Spain, where he joined tens of thousands of other refugees from Latin America. Though he had a contract for a weekly column in a Buenos Aires newspaper and enjoyed a residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, he recalled his exile as a time when he lived like a beggar, stricken with shame whenever he saw himself in the mirror.
In 1984, after civilian rule had been reinstalled, Di Benedetto returned to an Argentina ready to see in him an embodiment of the nation’s desire to purge itself of its recent past and make a fresh start. But it was a role he was too aged, too beaten down, too bitter to fulfil. The creative energy that prison and exile had taken away from him was irrecoverable. ‘He began dying … on the day of his arrest,’ remarked a Spanish friend. ‘He continued to die here in Spain … and when he decided to return to his own country it was only in search of a more or less decent ending.’ His last years were marred by recriminations. Having first been welcomed back, he said, he had then been abandoned to even greater poverty than in Spain. He died in 1986 at the age of sixty-three.
During his exile in Spain, Di Benedetto published two collections of short fiction, Absurdos (1978) and Cuentos del exilio (1983). Some of the pieces in Absurdos had been written in prison and smuggled out. The recurring theme of these late stories is guilt and punishment, usually self-punishment, often for a transgression one cannot remember. The best known, a masterpiece in its own right, is ‘Aballay’, made into a film in 2011, about a gaucho who decides to pay for his sins in the manner of the Christian saint Simeon Stylites. Since the pampas have no marble columns, Aballay is reduced to doing penitence on horseback, never dismounting.
These sad, often heartbreaking late stories, some no more than a page in length – images, broken memories – make it clear that Di Benedetto experienced exile not just as an enforced absence from his homeland but as a profoundly internalised sentence that had somehow been pronounced upon him, an expulsion from the real world into a shadowy afterlife.
Sombras, nada más … (1985), his last work, can most charitably be looked on as the trace of an experiment not carried all the way through. Finding one’s way through Sombras is no easy task. Narrators and characters merge one into another, as do dream and represented reality; the work as a whole tries doggedly but fails to locate its own raison d’être. A mark of its failure is that Di Benedetto felt compelled to provide a key explaining how the book was put together and offering guidance on how to read it.
Zama ends with its hero mutilated, unable to write, waiting in effect for the coming of the man who a century and a half later will tell his story. Like Manuel Fernández burying his manuscript, Di Benedetto – in a brief testament penned shortly before his death – affirmed that his books were written for future generations. How prophetic this modest boast will be, only time will tell.
Zama remains the most attractive of Di Benedetto’s books, if only because of the crazy energy of Zama himself, which is vividly conveyed in Esther Allen’s excellent translation. A selection of Di Benedetto’s short fiction (his Cuentos completos runs to 700 pages), in translations by Adrian West and Martina Broner, has been announced for 2017 by Archipelago Books. It is to be hoped that some enterprising publisher will soon pick up El silenciero.
Art Walks a Tightrope
Sebastian Smee
I remember the day that I first fell in love with Bill Henson’s work almost thirty years ago. Of course, I have no diary entry to prove it. Such experiences are like the shadows cast by passing clouds – they can’t be substantiated or verified. But I know I stood in a small, darkened room at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, surrounded on four sides by blurred black-and-white photographs of pedestrians in crowded city streets. I say ‘crowded’ and ‘city’ and ‘streets’, but the location and nature of these ghostly human congregations were unclear, as was everything else about them. The people, all of different ages, were shown in various aspects of isolation and tender attachment. They were enveloped in shifting accretions of darkness, their hands and faces picked out by pooling, smoky light.
I was suddenly in a new reality, which was also (and this was the breathtaking thing) my own, but made deeper, more enduring. It was as if the skin-tight pocket of time I occupied had suddenly become immensely elastic, and I was intimately connected not just to these anonymous, faraway faces but to something much, much older. I honestly ascribe the beginning of my love of art to this moment, above all others.
Much, of course, has happened since. In 1995, Henson represented Australia at the Venice Biennale, where he exhibited a series of large spliced-up photo-collages showing naked youths in a penumbral landscape littered with abandoned cars. Ten years later, a critically acclaimed re
trospective of his work opened in Sydney before travelling to his hometown of Melbourne. It attracted record numbers for an exhibition of contemporary art.
Three years after that, in 2008, a scandal erupted over the image used on an invitation for Henson’s upcoming show at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. It was a photograph of a pubescent girl with budding breasts, simply standing there, her torso and face carved out of darkness.
The whole country knows what happened next. A newspaper columnist went feral. Police removed Henson’s photographs from the gallery’s walls, and the opening was cancelled. A typhoon of overreaction ensued (on both sides). The offending image was published widely, but with vile black redaction marks covering the model’s face and chest. Politicians frothed and fulminated like the bad actors they are.
Many other, more reasonable people had honest, and complex, responses. Some were alarmed by the image, made anxious by what little they could glean of Henson’s approach to youth, and baffled by yet more evidence of the peculiar tunnel vision of powerful artists – their strange sense of private immunity to the moral rip-tides sweeping over society at any given time.
Others in the art world and beyond were shocked that art’s special dispensation – its right to cherish ambivalence, to speak ancient truths, and to enter the heart in privacy – could be so egregiously violated in a modern, free society.
For many, these apparently contradictory positions proved strangely compatible.
In retrospect, the so-called Henson affair seems eminently foreseeable – though no less lurid and incommensurate for being so. The surprise, perhaps, was only that it hadn’t happened before. Nine years later, an acrid odour still lingers in the air, and, although the hysteria has subsided, Henson’s name will always, you feel, be associated in some people’s minds with creepy weird shit.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 33