All Men Are Liars

by Alberto Manguel

  My father’s voice resounds, now, in my head. I don’t hear it, in the silence that surrounds me, I don’t hear anything, but I still have the impression of someone talking to me. It’s a hoarse voice, malicious, sarcastic, accustomed to being obeyed. His military training lent him a certainty absent from other voices in my village, even the priest’s. Our prestige depended on that voice.

  I touch (but my fingers don’t feel it) something metallic, something cold and embossed. His saber’s sheath. My skin remembers it.

  The other boys showed off their lead toy soldiers, their bicycles. We showed my father’s saber, which we took down secretly in the dark sitting room among the furniture covered in dust sheets. Compared to his saber, the security guard’s machete was a mere penknife. This (my unfeeling hand slides over the surface, divested of weight and consistency) was our town’s most precious emblem. Colonel Gorostiza’s saber, say the voices I cannot hear. Has he ever cut a man’s throat? asks one. He must have done, of course, answers another. They say that, under a special light, you can see the bloodstains on the blade. At night, we children told each other, the blood on the saber cries out in a very sharp, high-pitched shriek that only the bitches can hear.

  My leg brushes against the shaggy coat of one of my father’s bitches—all of them are a mix of German shepherd and Russian wolfhound and of something else indefinable, like those great prehistoric wolves that I found once in a magazine. With the right hand that I can’t see, I try to stroke one of them, but it is like stroking the wind. I call them: Annunciation! Visitation! Nativity! Presentation! Discovery! None of them replies.

  My father was a mason and an ardent anticleric. He used to say that the notion of a god demanding constant praise filled him with contempt. Your god needs more pampering than a French whore, he lambasted the poor priest. What sort of an Almighty can he be, if he needs people to tell him day and night: You’re mighty! You’re strong! You’re awesome! What crap!

  My mother had tearfully begged him not to name his puppies after the Five Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. He didn’t deign to reply. My mother never dared to call them by these sacred names. Fearful of blaspheming, she would say, here, here, when she wanted them to come. Now I feel that it is her voice echoing mine.

  Come along with us! bark the bitches through this cotton-wool air. They must be running the way they used to run then, in a long-haired pack, raising red dust. Only my father’s voice restrained them.

  My father liked to put on his uniform in the morning, the boots shining like ebony bowls, the belt pulled tight under his stomach, and then to go and sit at the door onto the street, drinking maté, the dogs sprawled at his feet. A smell of corn chowder filled the house (I am smelling it now), and my siblings and I, in starched smocks, took our leave of him with a brief reverence as we set off for school. The red dust clung to every part of us, even when there was no wind. But not to him, as though out of respect. Not even one grain dared to touch him.

  As a young man, he had worked for an Irish landowner, who had wanted him to rid her land of Indians. A black plait, a memento of this work, hung in the dining room next to the saber and a flag. Apparently, before I was born, a pair of Indian ears hung there, too, but my mother refused to enter the house until he took them down. She had shown such uncharacteristic resolve in this matter that my father shrugged his shoulders and threw the ears out of the window. The plait’s staying, was all he said.

  The bitches keep howling. They want me to go with them; they demand it with their shrill yapping. Within this dream (which isn’t mine), I sense them run toward something that they are going to tear to shreds. When they were lying at my father’s feet (he would stroke their bellies with one hand while the other held on to the maté), I used to look at their terrible teeth, exposed by the black lips, and imagine them sinking into flesh, grinding bones. The bitches’ soft, brown eyes gazed at my father. How can they belong to the same face, those eyes and those teeth? I wondered. Then my father smiled, his brow softened, and a gold tooth showed between his lips, beneath the mustache.

  The owner of my nightmare shivers.

  Now I know that the bitches have reached their prize. They’re not my bitches anymore, or rather they are, but they are also different, wilder, with enormous alabaster fangs. I can see them now, on the other side of a vast dump, pouncing on a boy who falls facedown in the filth. Someone shouts at them to stop, but it’s too late. The boy tries to stand up, his shirt is torn to shreds, part of his left cheek is missing. For fuck’s sake! says the colonel (another one, not my father—this happens years later, I’m a man now). Let’s see if next time someone can control these animals! A group of soldiers scares the hounds away. Next time, an echo repeats in my head, across the unfathomable depths of time. That experience at the dump ought to have taught me something. Perhaps I would have been able to endure all this better.

  I advance.

  There are things one doesn’t learn from, only remembers.

  Who’s asking me something? What does she want?

  What, stuck in the house again? You’re going to make yourself ill, Titito, with so much reading. Let me bring you a better light. My mother comes and goes, anxious. I read everything: the poems of Capdevila. Billiken. The Sopena dictionary. An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians. My mother always looks worried. She has my brothers and sisters to look after. There are seven of us. No, eight. Santiago was born so much later than the rest of us that we forget to count him. My father never mentions him.

  My father was clear about hierarchies. Friends first, then country, and family last of all, he would say. And to us: pissing and making you lot—it all came out of the same hole.

  My mother’s voice is joined by my father’s. Tell that poofter son of yours that I don’t want to see him indoors until the afternoon. He can go where he likes so long as it’s out in the sun. The sun only shines for a few hours during these winter months. I take the opportunity to practice the poems I’ve written, but find myself reciting others, the ones I know by heart, thanks to the books that Señorita Amalia, my teacher, lends me. Joaquín V. González, Rubén Darío, Espronceda. “Sail on, sailing boat, without fear.” That “without fear” implies that he is, in fact, afraid, I write in my notebook. I’m learning to read poetry.

  But writing’s shit. My father always knew that, and I didn’t believe him.

  A brief bio-bibliographic interlude. I studied literature in Río Gallegos, I enrolled in a course on European literature, but it was useless—one boring class after another. I tried to make friends with other students. Yes, me, too! Of course—where do I sign? United we stand, unto victory or death. We’d protest against any old thing, demanding our right to be heard. Never a step backward. (But to what end? I asked myself, though I did not dare say so aloud). And at night I wrote. Let me sing of my land, things I imagined I loved. But now I was composing jingles. Exalting armed combat, against enemy tigers. Songs, hymns, marches. Before leaving for Buenos Aires, I published a little book at the local press. I paid for the printing myself. A thousand copies. Red March. My childhood as I wanted it to be, and a eulogy to the revolution that I had never seen and which mattered little to me. The owner of the press, an anarchist from Asturias, gave me a hug and a discount. Poetry is also politics, he told me, of the best and strongest kind. I took away my books wrapped up in brown paper and secured with twine. In Buenos Aires I left little piles of them in bookshops, when no one was looking. Thieving, in reverse. Then I started working at an insurance company.

  I confess that I never had a single reader, let alone a review. The world failed to register the presence, the existence, of my verses. One day I saw, at the entrance to a bookshop, beside the discarded cardboard and packaging, half a dozen copies of my book waiting for the rubbish collectors. I gave them a wide berth as I passed, denying them, like a traitor. Never again, I told myself, never again. I made a mistake. I dared to do something improper. How could I have been so presumptuous as to think I might be read? I kep
t a few copies at the back of my closet, like someone hoarding the pornographic magazines of his adolescence.

  I stop.

  In this fog, names keep coming at me. Of the places where I’ve worked. Of the places where I’ve lived. Of friends who have died. Of half-read books. Of anonymous faces. Of cities that I do not remember having visited. Of train stations. Of publicity posters. Like a great invisible parade of names, a mob of fanatics brandishing flags. Colonia Mariana. Gerstein Insurance Company. Elsa. Villa Plácida. Songs of Life and Hope. School friends. Juan Ignacio Santander. Ovidio Goldenberg. Boedo. Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered. Cela Mondacelli. El Sordo. El Cronista Comercial. Los Gatos restaurant in Madrid. Blanca. Goytisolo’s Campos de Níjar. Bilbao.

  The letters dance around, dissolve, coalesce. I am overwhelmed by a cacophony of words I don’t understand. More barking.

  Who’s calling me?

  I wish I could tear off this unfeeling skin in order to feel again.

  I move forward.

  Anyone who has ever set words down on a page never loses the habit of writing, even when not writing. The calligraphy persists, like an army of ants that can’t be stopped. Behind closed eyelids, the words gather, call one another, pair off. An anthill of letters bursts forth and pursues me, black and red battalions which attack one another, get mixed up in the sand, climb up the bitches’ legs, burrowing into their fur. They bite, advance, devour. The bitches howl. A dictionary has launched itself into this inconceivable space in which I am walking.

  Visitation. Presentation. La Perla. Don Felipe Pereira. Colonel Aníbal Chartier. Carrasco. Consider the lilies of the field. Liliana Fresno. La Resistente. Señorita Amalia. Cáceres. Hendaya. Belem and Sons. Angélica Feierstein. Quilmes Beer.

  That’s enough.

  After I started working at the insurance company, I never wrote again, or scarcely.

  Only once, years later, reading that long-forgotten writer Manuel J. Castilla in an anthology that was prohibited at the time, did I once more feel the urge to make something out of words. Castilla had written:

  He who goes through the dead house,

  and who along the corridor at night

  remembers the afternoon of leaden rain

  as he pushes open the heavy door.

  But no, it was impossible now.

  Before, as an adolescent, everything moved me. The flat landscapes of my village. The red hills on the horizon. Winter and the feeling of cold in poor people’s houses. The misery of those who worked on the large plantations. The suffering of others, which I tried to imagine as my own. To sing of the mason’s hands, of the widow’s eyes, of Tolstoy’s and Ciro Alegría’s redeemed heroes. To be their poet.

  But no, you fool. You should never have tried it. I still feel ashamed of it.

  I told myself never to try again, although, at night, in half-waking moments, I would still string words together to the rhythm of certain melodies. What would the colonel have thought, I wonder, of that double treachery, writing instead of doing, talking instead of writing? It disgusted him that any son of his should be a poet rather than a soldier, but also that I should not have continued in the career that I myself had chosen. It would surely have disgusted him even more to know of my Judas vocation for, although he did not believe in Christ, he still regarded him as a good lad, albeit a bit off the rails. Doubtless it was the father who convinced him that he was a god; in my view a stint in the Roman army would have done him a world of good.

  I advance like an intruder in someone else’s garden, at night, in the dark, feeling my way. I imagine the owner of this garden, in the distance, at the mercy of this troubling nightmare, my suffering dreamer. It’s me, I want to tell him, don’t be scared, whoever you are. It’s only me, whoever I am. Keep sleeping, I won’t hurt you, I won’t do anything, good or bad. I only want to talk to you, just talk.

  Somniloquist: one who talks in his sleep (Sopena’s New Illustrated Spanish Dictionary).

  Even after I stopped writing, I continued to read the dictionary feverishly. A present from my mother. Parallelepiped. Paremiology (which means the study of proverbs). Prosaic. Prostate. Prostitution. The words flit past, daring me to catch one. Presbytery. Presidence. Prodigious. Profound. Progeny.

  I don’t want to do this. That linguistic cosmography has no longer anything to do with me. I wish I could lock all those philological abortions up in a great library and set fire to it. Reduce the universe to illiterate ashes. Find something else to occupy me.

  Over the white skeletons of the slaughtered dogs run words which I no longer try to follow with my eyes. Let’s allow them to keep running, with their thousand feet, their fibrous wings, their antennae probing the air: there is nothing left to eat. Once, on that dump, I picked up the skull of a boy who had been thrown into a lime pit. Don’t ask how. The colonel doesn’t like to be asked questions. An adolescent’s skull is the same size as an old man’s. Like an imbecile, I said to myself: And what about experience, accumulated memories? How do they fit into a little box like that? Mark this, master of my nightmare: I once had feelings.

  Now I understand more. Now that I have no flesh or bones, I believe that none of that is contained: it comes in and goes out through pores in the rock, like a stream, like air, like this constant cloud of sand, no beginning or end.

  First recollection or last memory. Who knows. It’s impossible to be sure.

  Let’s count them. One, two, three, twenty-five, six hundred thousand memories.

  The army of letters is joined now by figures. An alphabet of numbers.

  Everything is in code.

  I feel exhausted.

  I know that the true invasion has yet to begin.

  Perhaps it will never begin.

  The nights before are always the most frightening.

  I carry on. I continue.

  A writer denounces reality as he sees it.

  Imagination filters it.

  Inspiration feeds it.

  But he has to know when to stop.

  To know when what is written is shameful, as I knew my writing to be.

  Not this.

  Throw it out.

  Scratch it out, tear it up.

  Then, what remains?

  I don’t mean this as an excuse, let me make that clear. To give another use to the words. To tell what others do. Because every chronicle is also a file.

  My father used to say that the army’s strength is in its secrets. Yes, Colonel, sir. I’ll tell you about it. This is what I saw. This is what I heard. Tom said this to Dick. Harry’s lying: I heard him saying this thing and that thing. The difference between gossip and betrayal is the seriousness with which one operates. A gossipmonger writes novels; I drafted reports. Which is the more honorable craft?

  Onward.

  Buenos Aires devours everything. For a poor boy from the south, it was like a giant chessboard, with massive, granite pieces, full of sinister nooks, obscene crannies. I went there. I took a room on the third floor of a house on Calle Alsina, friendly landlady, doling out maté and cake. In the neighboring rooms, young couples from the north, El Chaco and Córdoba, bank employees, two single sisters. In the morning, at lunchtime, and in the evening, the barrio filled with youngsters on their way to and from school. At thirtysomething, I’m old now and working for Belem Importers. Now and then, I jot down some verse I’ve composed, to rid myself of it, to get it off my chest.

  I was solitary. Anyone who’s had too many brothers and sisters quickly gets used to having none. It was easy, at that time, to put on masks. Nothing had any substance, nothing seemed real. Not even our merchandise, not even the bread or the wine. In the shops no one bothered putting price tags on anything anymore. This morning it cost ten thousand pesos, this afternoon fifteen thousand. You had to spend your monthly salary in the first week, or lose half its worth.

  I receive a letter from my father. Things are hard. If you need work, go and see my friend Colonel Chartier, my brother- in-arms. I’ll let
him know you’ll be going to see him. Look your best, get a haircut.

  It’s true that I didn’t know how much longer I would last in that job. What job? Keep putting on zeros—nothing really has a price anymore. It was impossible to import anything, or to export anything either. It’s not even worth sending them a bill: translate it into dollars and you’ll see that we’re the debtors here. Señor Belem’s children moved to São Paulo. I’ll close the shop the day I die, said the old Belem, as wrinkled as a prune. You’ve got a job here until then. My mother, meanwhile, a prisoner of her own misery, wrote to tell me that nothing at home had changed.

  Now I’m struggling to breathe. The invisible sand enters my mouth and nose, filling my lungs, transforming itself. Sand into air, air into blood, blood into mud. Everything is dragging me back. I’m at the beginning again. In fog again, and darkness. Once more, I advance.

  That’s how it was.

  One afternoon, coming out of the Lorraine Cinema, I bumped into a girl with straight, black hair, a smooth brow, very white. We started talking about something or other and she invited me to go for a drink. I’ve never found it easy dealing with women. I can still hear my father’s advice: The world is divided like this: first, dogs; second, comrades; third, friends; fourth, personal stuff; fifth, women.

  I saw out my adolescence as a virgin. My first encounter was at twenty, with the older sister of a classmate, in Río Gallegos. Liliana Fresno. One night, waiting for my friend on the sofa of their house, Liliana started playing around with me. She sat down beside me, unbuttoned my shirt, then took me to her room. I thought: There it is, that’s it, that’s enough.

  At the insurance company there was a girl, Mirta, who used to smile at me. I wrote her a poem. One afternoon, I saw that she and her friends were laughing and looking at me. I realized that I had been foolish, that my verses had amused her. I didn’t speak to her anymore after that. I saw her, years later, in Buenos Aires. I pretended not to recognize her.

  The girl at the Lorraine laughed a lot, but she didn’t mock me. She would have seen me, I suppose, as an older man, given that she was twenty-eight and I was thirty-five. In those days, thirty-five was a considerable age. Now I could be twice as old and still be younger than I was then.