Empty Words
Empty Words
Mario Levrero
Translated by Annie McDermott
Minneapolis
2019
First English-language edition published 2019
Copyright © 1996 by the heirs of Mario Levrero
Translation © 2019 by Annie McDermott
Book design by Rachel Holscher
First published in 1996 as El discurso vacío by Ediciones Trilce.
Translation rights arranged by Agencia Literaria CBQ SL,
[email protected].
All rights reserved.
Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Levrero, Mario, author. | McDermott, Annie, translator.
Title: Empty words / Mario Levrero ; translated by Annie McDermott.
Other titles: Discurso vacío. English
Description: First English-language edition. | [Minneapolis, Minnesota] : Coffee House Press, 2019. | “First published in 1996 as El discurso vacío by Ediciones Trilce.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2018040460 (print) | LCCN 2018051264 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566895545 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566895460 (trade paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Authors—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ8520.22.E9 (ebook) | LCC PQ8520.22.E9 D513 2019 (print) | DDC 863/.64—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040460
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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This book and its contents exist in relation to my wife, Alicia, and her world. Although it goes without saying, I should emphasize that this novel is dedicated to Alicia, Juan Ignacio, and Pongo the dog—in other words, to my family.
M. L., MONTEVIDEO, OCTOBER 1996
Contents
Translator’s Note
The Text
Prologue
Part One: Exercises
Part Two: The Empty Discourse
Part Three: Exercises
Epilogue: The Empty Discourse
Translator’s Note
When asked by one interviewer to name his influences, Mario Levrero listed Mandrake the Magician, a comic-strip hero who hypnotized his enemies, along with Lewis Carroll, tango music from the 1940s, detective novels, the Beatles, and the early days of Tía Vicenta, a satirical Argentinian current affairs magazine. “It’s a mistake to expect literature to come only from literary sources,” he said, “like expecting a cheesemaker to eat nothing but cheese.” The Levrero archive in Uruguay’s University of the Republic is similarly heterogeneous, containing records of homeopathic treatment, a guide to yoga exercises, graphs showing how much time he spent on the computer each day, drawings of the students in his creative writing workshops, and a personal set of homemade tarot cards.
In Latin America, it’s said that Chile produces poets, Argentina produces short story writers, Mexico produces novelists, and Uruguay produces “los raros”—the strange ones. Levrero was a raro of the highest order, though he rejected the label, complaining that it meant journalists and critics were forever wanting him to do new strange things. “It would be far more interesting for them if, instead of writing, I committed a murder,” he grumbled in a famous “imaginary interview” he conducted with himself. Still, it’s hard to think of a more fitting category for this uncategorizable writer who refused to be bound by rules or conventions and for whom the “only thing that matters in literature is writing with as much freedom as you possibly can.”
Levrero made his first departure from the conventions of ordinary life at the age of fourteen, when a heart murmur (combined, perhaps, with a dislike of going to lessons) obliged him to stay home from school and spend his days in bed, reading and listening to the tango station Radio Clarín—which, thanks to a system he’d devised involving pieces of string, he could turn on and off without having to get up. He didn’t finish high school and has said that the Guardia Nueva tango club in Montevideo served as his university. It was there, for example, that he first heard about James Joyce, and it also gave him the name for the Guardia Nueva secondhand bookshop he ran with a friend throughout his twenties. Though staunchly apolitical in later life, Levrero was briefly a member of the youth wing of the Uruguayan Communist Party and was one of the protesters who ended up with diarrhea after fascists poisoned some chorizo donated to a march in support of Cuba in 1962. (José Mujica, later the president of Uruguay, was on the same march).1
In 1966, at the age of twenty-six, Levrero wrote his first novel, La ciudad (The City). It was inspired by the work of Kafka: until reading him, Levrero said, he “didn’t realize it was possible to tell the truth,” and La ciudad was “almost an attempt to translate Kafka into Uruguayan.” From this point on, Levrero wrote some twenty books, among them the dreamlike “involuntary trilogy” of La ciudad, París (Paris), and El lugar (The Place); the rollicking detective-novel parody Nick Carter se divierte mientras el lector es asesinado y yo agonizo (Nick Carter Enjoys Himself While the Reader Is Murdered and I Expire), and the autobiographical El discurso vacío (Empty Words) and La novela luminosa (The Luminous Novel, forthcoming from Coffee House Press and And Other Stories)—this last, a book with a 450-page prologue explaining why it was impossible to write the book itself, being widely recognized as his masterpiece. It is astonishing, considering the wildly varied nature of his literary output, that it should all form a coherent whole, and yet it does: everything Levrero wrote is instantly recognizable as his.
The novel Empty Words, first published in 1996, is a perfect introduction to the levreriano, or Levrero-esque. It charts the author’s attempts to turn his life around using “graphological self-therapy”: if he can improve his handwriting, he thinks, he’ll be able to improve his personality, “transforming a whole plethora of bad behaviors into good ones and catapulting [himself] blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, and success.” And yet as he persists with his daily handwriting practice, he comes to realize that the exercises “are becoming less calligraphical and more literary as time goes on.” Another kind of text is trying to break through: “a flow, a rhythm, a seemingly empty form” is guiding his hand, and he finds himself continuing to write without knowing what it is that he’s writing, hoping to uncover the mystery of this “empty” text as he goes.
This is pure Levrero: for him, writing is both a mystery to be solved and a means of solving it, at once a tool for exploring the unconscious and a by-product of those explorations. Also typically levreriano is the way his efforts to understand this mysterious force are discussed in the same breath as his attempts to give up smoking, complaints about the weather, accounts of his dreams, investigations into the inner workings of his computer, and musings about the behavior of his dog. Levrero writes about all these things in the same unmistakable voice, combining an earnestly matter-of-fact desire to make himself clear with a sardonic, deadpan, and fantastically absurd sense of humor. Here he is on his worsening mental state: “I can feel myself getting more anxious by the day, at a rate I can even represent graphically by means of a curve showing my daily intake of cigarettes.” On (short-lived) improvements to his daily routine: “Allow me to record, so it’s known in the centuries to come, that I’m writing this at eight thirty
in the morning.” On trying to program the computer to make sounds: “After a while, I managed to bring about some interesting bird-like cheeping.” And practicing writing the letter r, which he finds particularly troublesome: “rhododendron, rower, sombrero, bra-strap, parricide, reverberate, procrastinate, corduroys (I repeat: corduroys).”
Throughout his literary career, Levrero resolutely denied that he had any such thing. He shied away from publicity, rarely left his house or even answered his doorbell toward the end of his life, and used to boast that he was impossible to interview because his voice didn’t show up on audio recordings—which he made sure of by speaking in an indecipherable murmur as soon as anyone switched on a tape recorder in his vicinity. And yet, despite his best efforts, he became something of a cult figure in Uruguay and Argentina during his lifetime. Enthusiastic readers and friends went to great lengths to get his work published, and his legendary literary workshops, which focused on liberating the imagination, produced hundreds of students who consider themselves his disciples. Ever since the publication of La novela luminosa in 2005, one year after his death, he has been heralded as one of the great Latin American writers of the twentieth century, and it’s been an honor and a joy to translate him.
ANNIE MCDERMOTT
LONDON, SEPTEMBER 2018
1 Much of the information in this paragraph is taken from Jesús Montoya Juárez’s excellent book Mario Levrero para armar: Jorge Varlotta y el libertinaje imaginativo (Ediciones Trilce, 2013).
The Text
Empty Words is a novel formed from two different strands, or groups of texts. One, entitled “Exercises,” is a series of short handwriting exercises, written with no other purpose than that. The other, entitled “The Empty Discourse,” is a single, unified text that’s more “literary” in intention.
The novel in its current form was constructed as a diary. To the “Exercises,” which were ordered chronologically, I added the parts of “The Empty Discourse” that correspond to each date, using headings to separate the two. This solution was suggested by Eduardo Abel Giménez as an alternative to my previous method, which had been based on some fairly unreliable typographical variations.
Later, while editing, I removed a few passages and even entire “Exercises,” at points to protect my own privacy or other people’s, but always with the aim of making the text less boring to read. I also added the odd phrase or paragraph here and there to clarify the meaning of some references. Apart from these minor surgical procedures, this text is faithful to the originals.
M. L., COLONIA, MAY 1993
Empty Words
Prologue
December 22, 1989
Something within me, which is not me, which I search for
Something within me, which I sometimes think is me, but
never find
Something that shows up for no reason, shines for an instant,
and then
vanishes for years
and years.
Something I also forget.
Something
which is close to love but not quite love,
which could be confused with freedom,
with truth,
with the being’s absolute identity—
but which can’t be contained in words,
considered in concepts,
or even recorded just as it is.
It is what it is, and it’s not mine, and sometimes it’s inside me
(but not very often), and when it is,
it remembers itself,
I remember it, I think it and know it.
It’s not worth searching; the more you look
the more distant it seems, the better it hides.
You have to forget it completely,
almost to the point of suicide
(because without it life is worthless)
(because those who’ve never known it think life is worthless)
(which is why the world creaks as it turns).
This is my illness, my reason for living.
* * *
I’ve seen God
flash by in the eyes of a whore,
give me signs with an ant’s antennae,
turn to wine in a bunch of grapes in the dust,
appear before me in a dream as a disgusting giant slug;
I’ve seen God in a sunbeam, giving slanted life to the
afternoon,
in my lover’s purple jacket after a storm,
in a red traffic light,
in a stubborn bee sucking at a slight, wilted flower,
trampled and sad in the Plaza Congreso.
I have even seen God in a church.
March 11, 1990
I dreamed I was a photographer, running to and fro enthusiastically with a camera. I was somewhere very large, a kind of warehouse or depot, though it could also have been the lobby of a big hotel, and I was trying to find the right angle from which to photograph two lesbians so that, although they were located fairly far apart in the huge space and even at different heights (maybe one was up some stairs), their mouths met in a way that suggested a kiss. They both had their lips painted a deep red. The one closest to the camera was in profile; the other, who was higher up, was facing me.
Later I find myself aboard an enormous double-decker bus—on the roof, or in an open-top area on the upper level. I’m photographing or filming scenes from a big city. All of a sudden there’s a commotion, something happening in the distance, like waves crashing over skyscrapers. People tell me it’s the end of the world. I photograph the chaos, which is far away and difficult to make out, and feel excited and strangely elated. I wake up with tachycardia.
When I go back to sleep, someone’s telling a story (and I see the story taking place), or I’m watching a film, although somehow I’m also part of the action. There’s a brown rabbit buried in the snow, and he’s burrowing to and fro under the surface, moving quickly from place to place. I start to worry he’s going to hit something, a tree or a rock, because suddenly he seems hesitant, but then I find that he’s learned to communicate with a dove by means of a system that, in the dream, was explained in great detail. The dove was flying above the rabbit’s head, above the snow, and guiding his movements.
Part One: Exercises
September 10, 1990
My graphological self-therapy begins today. This method (suggested a while ago by a crazy friend) stems from the notion—which is central to graphology—that there’s a profound connection between a person’s handwriting and his or her character, and from the behaviorist tenet that changes in behavior can lead to changes on a psychological level. The idea, then, is that by changing the behavior observed in a person’s handwriting, it may be possible to change other things about that person.
My aims at this stage of the therapeutic endeavor are fairly modest. At first, I’m going to practice writing by hand. I won’t be attempting calligraphy, but I’ll at least try to manage a script that anyone could read—myself included, because these days my writing’s often so bad that not even I can decipher it.
Another of my immediate aims is to develop large, expansive handwriting in contrast to my microscopic scrawl of recent years. A further, more ambitious aim is to make my writing more uniform, since at the moment I mix cursive script and printed letters quite arbitrarily. I’ll try to remember how each letter is written by hand, more or less the way I learned in school. The idea is to achieve a kind of continuous writing, “without lifting the pen” in the middle of words. I think this will help me improve my concentration and the continuity of my thoughts, which are currently all over the place.
September 11
Day two of handwriting therapy. I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when I gave the page I’d written to Alicia and she found it easy to read. Now I’m trying to do three things: (1) keep the letters to a suitable size, (2) get back to real handwriting, without printed letters creeping in all the time, and (3) not lift my pen—that is, only dotting the i’s and crossi
ng the t’s once I’ve finished writing the whole word. This last point might be the most difficult, though the “real” handwriting isn’t exactly a walk in the park.
At first, looking at what I’ve written so far and comparing it to what I wrote yesterday, there seems to be some progress. Today’s writing, however—though larger and more legible—reveals a certain nervousness; I’m writing more quickly now than I was yesterday. But I also notice that the letters are more “separate,” more spaced-out within each word, less bunched together than before. As if each one had recovered its individuality. All in all, I’m happy with today’s work and the improvements from yesterday. I know I’m still a long way from achieving my goals, even the most basic ones; I know I still can’t remember how to write some capital letters and some lowercase ones. But everything will come with time.
September 24
I’m returning to my handwriting therapy after an extended interruption, since my mother’s stroke took me away from home. During that time I really missed this daily discipline: though I haven’t been doing these exercises long, they’ve already started to seem like an entirely positive—and enjoyable—habit, and a big help when it comes to centering my inner self and preparing for a more orderly, purposeful, and balanced day ahead.
Now there’s an interruption from the outside world, in the form of a small, flustered woman calling to me in an angry voice, revealing unmistakable signs of impatience. However, I try not to lose the slow, deliberate, meditative rhythm of my writing, because I know these daily exercises will do wonders for my health and character, transforming a whole plethora of bad behaviors into good ones and catapulting me blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, and success with women and in other games of chance. And now, without further ado, I bid myself farewell until the same time tomorrow, or earlier if possible.
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