Requiem with Yellow Butterflies

by James Halford

  Coetzee shaped his speech to the place where he was standing. He presented himself as a writer who had lived most of his life in two regions of the South, now visiting a third.4 Like many contemporary academic critics, Coetzee spoke of literature as a worldwide system in which power is unevenly distributed. But the novelist focused squarely upon the consequences of this dynamic for the least powerful literatures. The politics of translation and publishing in the Southern Hemisphere was a key theme:

  By and large, Australian writers reach Australian readers via publishing houses based in Europe; I believe the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of Argentine writers and the Argentine public. For writers from the South, being published in the North before they are re-exported to the South can mean that they need to follow norms and conform to standards set in the North.5

  South–South publishing ventures set out, on a small scale, to challenge that arrangement.

  Unlike Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee stuck strictly to script. His speech discussed the problems and potential of a South– South framework for comparative literary studies. Since the end of the Cold War, he noted, North–South terminology has replaced the older frameworks of centre and periphery, or First, Second and Third worlds, in the sociological literature. All of these terms describe a pattern of inequality in power, wealth and cultural influence that grew historically out of first European and later North American imperialism. Australia, a wealthy peripheral nation of the Southern Hemisphere, in some ways unsettles the North–South binary, revealing its basis in economics not geography. Yet Australian literature, no less than those of Argentina and South Africa, has struggled to free itself from a sense of cultural dependency and inferiority, on the one hand, and from nationalist exceptionalism on the other. All three countries feel the weight of what Coetzee, in his UNSAM address, termed ‘the Northern Gaze’. Drawing on the ideas of the Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell, he has used the ‘Literatures of the South’ seminars to call for a comparative literary studies of the South less concerned with ‘writing back’ to the old imperial centres than with learning to ‘ignore the gaze of the North’ and ‘to see the South as home’.6

  The speech concluded with the novelist’s own ‘heterodox’ perspective on the South. It was the view, he stressed, not of a theorist, but of a practising writer:

  In my view ‘South’ will in due course suffer the fate of ‘periphery’, of ‘Third World’, and of other specialist terms of the social sciences…What is left is the real South, the South of this real world, where most of those present in this room were born and most of us will die. It is a unique world – there is only one South – with its unique skies and its unique heavenly constellations. In this South the winds blow in a certain way and the leaves fall in a certain way and the sun beats down in a certain way that is instantly recognisable from one part of the South to another. In the South, as in the North, there are cities, but the cities of the South all have a somewhat phantasmatic quality. The peoples of the South are all, in one way or another, rough and a bit lazy. We have troubled histories behind us, which sometimes haunt us. It is nothing like this in the North. I can go on endlessly with my list. And the literatures of the South do indeed go on endlessly as they try to pin down in words their intuitions of what a life in the South consists in.7

  I suspect what Coetzee means by the ‘real South’ may come more clearly into focus when counterposed with its opposite, ‘the mythic South’, which he employed in an earlier speech at the UNSAM to refer to the South as it has been imagined by the North. The huge body of literature by the North about the South stretches from the near present back into antiquity: the South Sea tales of Poe, Swift, Defoe and More; European narratives of exploration and conquest; the opposition of the Boreal and Mediterranean moods in the work of Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and Nietzsche; the cosmogonies of Augustine and Ptolemy; Boreas and Notos, the Greek Gods of the North and South winds. This mythic South, an ‘imagined geography’ constructed through metropolitan discourse, is beginning to be studied in the same way Edward Said examined Western mythologies of the Orient. It is the locus onto which the North projects its fantasies, the North’s Other.

  The real South, one presumes, is the opposite: the South seen through Southern eyes. For the time being this elusive entity can probably only be glimpsed. Coetzee’s two fascinating speeches delivered in Argentina formulate the opposition of the mythic and real Souths as an imaginative stimulus, not a theory. We should know better than to expect further explanation. Just as the narrative framing of Elizabeth Costello’s lessons suggests a mistrust of universalising theories, Coetzee’s recent fiction, as James Ley has noted, ‘displays a neo-romantic suspicion that reason is an enclosed and self-validating system’.8 The first two ‘Jesus’ novels (rumour has it a third is coming) were written across the period that Coetzee was visiting Argentina regularly, and are set in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country. The country is not Argentina or any other Latin American republic ‘in this real world’, but it is clearly located in the South. These recent fictions – focused on the relationship between the stolidly rational Simón and his wildly imaginative adopted son David – more fully elaborate Coetzee’s richly suggestive ideas about the interplay of North and South.

  Afterwards, I shared a cab back to town with a couple of administrative staff from the university and a Chilean translator who told me he had worked with the writer on Spanish versions of two further lessons of Elizabeth Costello. The Belle Époque facades and neon billboards of downtown Buenos Aires came back into view: bars, steakhouses and all-night bookstores, a mural of Eva Perón overlooking a huge homeless encampment, hundreds of posters of the recently ousted Peronist President Cristina Kirchner, graffiti protesting the austerity measures imposed by her successor, Mauricio Macri, a stray dog drinking from a puddle outside a shuttered HSBC. Candles flickered beneath an underpass in the ruins of an old torture chamber. We were back in the centre: the place that is neither North nor South, but somehow both at once.

  A year later, I returned to the UNSAM to present an academic paper at a conference about Coetzee. The presenters came from as far afield as the Netherlands and Austria, but most were from the region: Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Chile and Argentina. It must have been strange for Coetzee to sit through two days of talks about his own work, delivered in a foreign language. This time, he listened to most of the presentations without simultaneous translation, suggesting his Spanish had come along in the intervening year. His presence created a frisson in the room: even the full professors were slightly overawed. One nervous young Colombian postgraduate student forgot the name of a secondary character in the novel Disgrace.

  ‘You know…the African neighbour…’ he stammered.

  ‘Petrus,’ chorused half the room, eager to help.

  I thought I saw Coetzee laugh along with the rest of us. We spoke briefly after my paper, which was about several Australian writers who have imitated Borges and Coetzee’s habit of inventing imaginary authors.

  ‘I have a good Borgesian story for you,’ he said. ‘An academic friend was in the US recently, teaching a course on Australian literature. Apparently, they all kept asking him what he knew about the novelist Elizabeth Costello.’ A wry smile played across his face as he turned away to attend to an autograph seeker. ‘Send my best to R,’ he added.

  In the evenings, after Coetzee retired to his hotel, a dozen of us went for dinner downtown. Buenos Aires worked its familiar magic on us: one minute it was half past ten, the next it was one in the morning and, though we had only shared two bottles of wine between us, we were drunk on good company and literary gossip. Naturally, everyone had a Coetzee anecdote:

  ‘He flew all the way from Adelaide to Mexico for a symposium I organised. He’s nearly eighty. It was a huge effort.’

  ‘After he visited us in Brazil, he gave me access to his letters for a research paper I was writing. People think he’s fearsome, but he’s the gentlest man.’

  ‘He agreed to
be a referee for me when I was desperate for a job.’

  The next day, the conference concluded with a stage adaption of Coetzee’s classic 1986 novel Foe, in which the female castaway, Susan Barton, gives readers an alternative perspective on Robinson Crusoe and Friday’s famous island. ‘The true story is buried within Friday, who is mute,’ she concludes. ‘The true story will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday.’9 I thought that my critical faculties might have been dulled by my sentimental attachment to Argentine Spanish, but everyone agreed afterwards that the production was very good. Live musicians played a moody score for cello and electronic percussion; Crusoe and Friday were represented by huge shadow puppets projected onto a screen; the female lead chanted her lines like a porteña poetess at a salon. Coetzee, normally undemonstrative, was visibly moved. After the curtain fell and the cast returned to acknowledge the crowd, he leapt from his front row seat and stormed onstage to embrace the actors in turn. Buenos Aires had got to him, too.

  Parque Lezama

  And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it.1

  – Clarice Lispector

  Brasília to Buenos Aires, at well over 3000 kilometres, was the longest leg of all. Having come this far by land, I was determined not to fly. In the chilly air-conditioned interior of the bus, I went into a kind of hibernation. Gone was the euphoria of Roraima and Manaus. I could no longer motivate myself to read or write or even watch a movie. I slept without dreaming through epic stretches of highway. Eating tasteless platefuls of roadhouse feijoada was a joyless chore; so was all interaction with the driver, waiters and other passengers. It was a relief to be back in my seat again, indifferently surveying the changing landscape. Passing through the bleak, industrial outskirts of São Paulo, I felt no inclination to explore further. I was utterly incurious, grateful not to have to negotiate that pulsing, concrete nightmare of a city. Somewhere north of Florianópolis, my mood lifted for a minute at the sight of the Atlantic: beach umbrellas and volleyball nets on a sandy curve of bay, lazy breakers on the hazy silver sea. Then we turned inland again, passing through long tracts of undulating cleared grassland, grazed by reddish-brown Brahman cattle. Further south, I recognised we were entering my home latitudes. The sight of hilly green country and palm trees reminded me of the Sunshine Coast hinterland. My body ached all over. I spent six or seven hours on a bench seat outside an evangelical church in Porto Alegre, waiting for a connecting bus. An Afro-Brazilian woman, dressed all in white, invited me inside, but I could only shrug at her. I was too exhausted to reply. If they had sung better, I might have accepted Christ, but their hymns sounded like advertising jingles, and the gringo preacher’s accent in Portuguese infuriated me. The sun was setting as we drove south. I slept through Uruguay. By the time I woke, all was black outside. For an instant, the headlights shone upon the white trunks of a stand of eucalypts on the bare plain – then they were gone. I could hear the wind ripping through bullrushes and pampas grass. When we disembarked for dinner, it was only nine or ten degrees. I shivered in my one thin sweater. At first light, the bus finally skirted the muddy-brown River Plate, where cargo ships already plied the choppy surface. The sky was streaked with feathery cirrus above the cranes and skyscrapers of restless Buenos Aires.

  I was awoken by two voices, an Australian man and an English woman, whispering urgently on the far side of the darkened hostel dormitory.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ said the English woman. ‘I just want you to hold me.’

  ‘Come on, what did you come back here for?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Checking my watch, I found I’d been asleep for 14 hours.

  ‘You were all over me at the club.’

  ‘But now I feel sick.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  I heard bodies shifting, a creaking mattress, heavy breathing.

  ‘I said I don’t want to.’

  ‘Come on.’

  I coughed once, loudly.

  ‘There’s someone there,’ she said. ‘Let’s just sleep. Let’s just hold each other.’

  ‘Get out of my bed, you silly bitch. I’m serious. Go back to your own hotel. I’m not gonna lie here all night with a pricktease.’

  They rose and left the room, their angry voices receding down the corridor towards reception. A few minutes later, he returned alone.

  ‘Fuckin’ women,’ he said. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘No hablo inglés.’

  Next morning, I checked out before the Australian woke up, and found a private room in a rundown pension in San Telmo. I was done with hostels. But I certainly wasn’t ready to go home.

  I spent June in Buenos Aires looking for a job. In the afternoons, I browsed advertisements online, revamped my CV at the Internet cafes, and made contacts through various expatriate networks. In the mornings, I took a big bag of oranges I’d bought at the Chinese grocery store on the calle Defensa to the Parque Lezama and ate breakfast. The reason my room at the pension was so cheap, it turned out, was that neither the heating nor the hot water were functioning. I had a heavy cold and a cough that I couldn’t shake for weeks, but wouldn’t take any medicine or see a doctor. I was punishing myself for the passport fiasco in Brazil.

  Finding myself with no one to talk to in a city of prodigious and passionate speech, I bought a set of chess pieces and played against myself, rugged up against the wind, at the tables in the amphitheatre at the northern end of the park. There was a Russian Orthodox cathedral across the street, and a statue of the conquistador Pedro de Mendoza nearby. Some historians still argue that this hilltop, with its privileged outlook, is the place where the Spaniards first ‘founded’ the city of the fair winds, in 1536, before it was decimated by hunger and hostile tribes, only to be re-established another 40 years later.

  ‘Hard to believe Buenos Aires had any beginning,’ Jorge Luis Borges once wrote. ‘I feel it to be as eternal as air and water.’2 And it is hard to imagine this place without buildings or roads when you stand on that hilltop in the city’s south and listen to the tidal roar of traffic on the Avenida Colón.

  One day in the park, a woman sat beside me and stared at the side of my face. I chewed my empanada. Six months on the road had trained me to avoid eye contact with strangers. But there she was, only centimetres away. She was pale, gaunt, and wore a grey tracksuit. She seemed much older than me, though I suppose she was only in her thirties. Her hacking cough matched mine. I don’t remember the colour of her eyes, but I remember the whites looked huge. She had an addict’s twitchiness, but I never saw her take anything.

  ‘Are you hungry? Here, have one.’

  Three more empanadas were wrapped in newspaper on the tabletop, grease leaking through yesterday’s headlines. Steam rose from the bundle when I opened it. It smelled inviting.

  ‘Go ahead, take one. There’s chicken, beef and corn.’

  Cautiously, she accepted. She nibbled at the pastry for a moment, then wolfed it down in a couple of bites.

  ‘You live around here?’

  ‘In the shelter.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Corina.’

  ‘Like the song?’ I cleared my throat and croaked out the tune for her: ‘Corina, Corina, where you been so long?’

  ‘I don’t know it,’ she said, helping herself to a second empanada. Then a little smile. ‘But it sounds like shit.’

  One night in the pension’s shared kitchen, I found a beautiful dark-haired girl my own age squatting before the oven, weeping.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I can’t get it to light.’

  ‘It’s easy, let me show you.’

  She passed me the matches.

  I cooked her gnocchi that night and we shared my 6-peso bottle of merlot in the lounge by the lobby, the only room where the heating worked. Margarita was majoring in pure maths in Bogotá, but was taking a semester off to visit friends in Buenos Aires. Her English was g
ood, delivered with a thick American accent because she often holidayed in Miami, where her father kept a house. He was mayor of a town I’d never heard of. Her mother had died when she was three. That was why she couldn’t cook: in her household, the servants had done everything.

  ‘This is the first time I’ve been away without Papá. I’m discovering that I’m basically a useless person.’

  Colombia, as it happened, was playing Argentina in the soccer that night, which presented her with a dilemma.

  ‘If I support my country, people here will want to kill me and if I support Argentina, I’ll be a traitor. Let’s support Australia.’

  ‘You can’t support Australia in a match between Argentina and Colombia.’

  ‘Of course you can. Have some more wine.’

  Corina and I ate breakfast together most mornings for a month. Sometimes we would have fruit with yoghurt, or bread and jam, but steaming hot empanadas from the family-run restaurant on the calle Defensa were our favourite. Corina’s company and her help with my Spanish were worth their weight in empanadas. She told me she was looking for a job, too. She’d been a maid for seven years in her hometown of Rosario, up north. Her boss had fired her, three years ago, for stealing.

  ‘It was a lie. She didn’t like the way her husband looked at me.’

  ‘What about your family?’

  She looked away, spat a lump of yellowish sputum in the dirt.

  When she was feeling well, we would often play chess. It only took her a week to learn the rules. Her smile, the first time she beat me, was spectacular – better than Iguazu Falls. On bad days, her mood plunged. She cursed me, coughed uncontrollably and swore she was dying of lung cancer. Once, she begged me to take her back to the pension.

  ‘I want to be fucked one last time before I die.’

  ‘Not in my bedroom you don’t. It’s as cold and dark as a tomb.’

  One day, Margarita and I decided to have a late lunch in Chinatown – she’d never tried Chinese. It had to be mid-afternoon, I explained, so I could keep my daily appointment with Corina.