by John Updike
Yet The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci does not feel like a tour de force: it feels simply like a life explored from within, in terms of a mind exposed to certain influences, hardened in certain convictions, subject to certain shocks, and retentive of vast amounts of information now preserved only in libraries. Freed from the restraints of chronology, a life reveals its inner veins, its pattern of threads. The image of the memory palace returns rhythmically, as each ideogram is placed at one of the four corners of the reception hall, which is “suffused in an even light”—the light, it may be, of a Platonic heaven, or of the mind’s delicately impassioned glow. The sense of mentally created spaces stretching extensively is eerie and majestic. The brief concluding chapter has the memory palace, about to be closed, yield a selective inventory of its contents, one vivid item for each of the five senses:
He sees the eunuch Ma Tang, suffused with anger, grasp the cross of carved wood to which the bleeding Christ is nailed. He hears the shouts of warning and the howling of the wind as the boat keels over, flinging both him and João Barrados into the water of the River Gan. He smells the incense that curls up around his triptych as he places it reverently upon a pagan altar in the luxurious garden temple of Juyung. He tastes the homely food prepared for him by the poor farmers in their country dwelling near Zhaoqing. He feels the touch of cheek on cheek as the dying Francesco de Petris throws his arms around his neck.
If this is not quite as moving as the similar coda to Lytton Strachey’s biography of Queen Victoria, perhaps being a queen is more poignant than being a missionary. A queen cannot help being one, but a missionary to some extent chooses his fate, his isolation and loneliness. The cool and evenly lit halls of the memory palace as rebuilt by Mr. Spence do not contain the flame of Ricci’s vocation and will, which drove him to his slightly absurd though courageous pose as a pseudo-mandarin—“a heavy, bearded man, in his robe of purple silk trimmed with blue”—importunate outside the Emperor’s walls in Peking. But perhaps the shadowless atmosphere of the memory palace is the historian’s way of suggesting that China quenched that flame, that Ricci’s intricate mission ended in limbo.
In Dispraise of the Powers That Be
CURFEW, by José Donoso, translated from the Spanish by Alfred Mac Adam. 309 pp. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.
ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH, by Chinua Achebe. 216 pp. Doubleday, 1988.
It is sometimes urged upon American authors that they should write more politically, out of a clearer commitment or engagement or sense of protest. Two foreign novels, one by a Chilean and the other by a Nigerian, demonstrate that having a political subject does not automatically give a novel grandeur, urgency, or coherence. Curfew, by the Chilean José Donoso, takes place in 1985, in a crowded time span of less than twenty-four hours, centering upon the funeral of Pablo Neruda’s widow, Matilde. The occasion collects a number of varied friends and admirers—Mañungo Vera, a folk-singer returned from twelve years in Europe; Judit Torre, a blond, aristocratic revolutionary who looks like the young Virginia Woolf; Fausta Manquileo, a matronly literary figure of distinction; Don Celedonio Villanueva, her husband and a literary figure of perceptibly less distinction; Juan López, called Lopito, a former poet and present drunkard and abrasively obnoxious hanger-on; Lisboa, a Communist Party zealot; Ada Luz, his girlfriend and a docile handmaiden of the late Matilde Neruda; and Federico Fox, a corpulent cousin of Judit Torre’s and the only significant character who actively works with the ruling Pinochet regime instead of hating and resisting it.
Pinochet (who is never mentioned in the novel’s text) came to power in 1973, in a bloody coup that ousted and killed President Salvador Allende; by 1985 the dissidents have had time to go into exile and return, to be imprisoned and released, to grow middle-aged in their youthful fury and frustration, to lose faith and make ironical accommodations and die of natural causes. Lopito says, “All of us have retired from the political scene, even though we keep telling ourselves that the people united will never be defeated when for more than ten years they’ve had us more defeated than I can imagine, Mañungo. This is total defeat.… A bomb here, another there, but they don’t do anything, like swearing by nonviolent protest or violent protest, or the opposition, or the people united, et cetera. They broke our backs, Mañungo.”
Pablo Neruda, the triumphant embodiment of Chilean culture and left-wing conscience, “returned to Chile to die of sadness.” Now his widow, Matilde, whom he had nicknamed “La Chascona, the wild woman … because of her tangled mop of hair”—Matilde, who had been “a young, desirable woman of the people, as juicy as a ripe apricot, who took long, wine-soaked siestas with the poet”—has died in a Houston hospital, after receiving last rites and confiding to Ada Luz that she wants a mass said at her funeral. The suppression of this request—by Lisboa, because the presence of a revolutionary priest at the graveside would detract from Communist domination of the ceremony—is the main political thread wound around the observance. The main cultural thread is Federico Fox’s acquisition of control over Neruda’s valuable papers and letters in exchange for his removal of bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of establishing a Pablo Neruda Foundation. The main romantic thread is the coming together again of Judit Torre and Mañungo Vera, who had first romanced in their student days. The principal moral event, I suppose, is Mañungo’s decision to stay in Chile, with his seven-year-old French-speaking son, after his round-the-clock experience of life under the regime. In his youth, Mañungo was a rock star, a “guerrilla singer … possessed by the potency of his guitar-phallus-machine gun”; his career, pursued since the coup in America and Europe, has been lately bothered by a “softening of his politics” and a chronic tinnitus in his left ear, a subjective sensation of noise that he identifies as “the voice of the old woman”—a certain wheezing sound made by the sea on the coast of Chiloé, his native island, calling him home.
Among these many—too many—threads, the most interesting psychological one traces Judit Torre’s peculiar form of political and erotic deadness, induced by a traumatic episode when she was being held for questioning with some other members of her shadowy little group of anti-regime women. Tied and hooded and naked, she hears in her cell the other women being tortured and raped; but her torturer merely tells her in his nasal voice, while he puts his warm moist hand on her knee, to shout as if she were being raped. She remembers:
I waited for his hand to touch me again, my skin waited to be caressed by that viscous, tepid hand that never went further although the nasal voice whispered, Shout more, as if you were enjoying yourself, as if you wanted more, as if I were hurting you but you wanted more, and I shout my lungs out howling like a bitch because I’m reaching a shameful pleasure I’d never felt before, not even with Ramón [her lover, a slain resistance leader]. Shout, shout, he repeated, and I call for help because his whisper threatens me if I don’t shout, and I shout with terror at myself, because in this totally unerotic situation I shout my shame at my pleasure while in the other cells my friends are howling like me, but because of tortures different from the torture of being exempted from torture.… I didn’t shout because of the tragedy of the other women, I didn’t take part in the feast of that majestic collective form, from which the soft hand excluded me in order to satisfy God knows what fantasies, this impotent monster who demanded I shout with greater and greater conviction without knowing that my shouts of terror and pleasure were real.
This moment of feigned torture evidently constitutes Judit’s supreme orgasm and forms the novel’s most intimate and meaningful vision of the relation between the regime and its enemies. It also warrants revenge. Judit is given a pistol by her women’s group and goes forth in the night to find and slay the impotent torturer whose “complex humanity” robbed her of solidarity and unqualified revolutionary purpose: “Sensitive, the bastard with the nasal voice. His sensitivity tore away my right to hatred and revenge.” This loss is cause, in the murky atmosphere of contemporary Chile, for murder.
Curfew
packs a baggage of Dostoevskian ambition which its action and conversations do not quite carry. Judit seems not so much tormented as whimsical, in the way of well-born beauties. The novel in Spanish was titled La desesperanza (“Despair”)—but the English title refers to a section of the narrative which shows Judit and Mañungo wandering the “green ghetto” of an upper-class Santiago neighborhood during the five hours of curfew, from midnight to five. The curfew, to judge from the number of people they encounter and noisy incidents that take place, isn’t very effectively enforced. With her feminist pistol Judit shoots not her impotent torturer-savior but a skylight and a little white bitch in heat who has attracted a disgusting crowd of nocturnal dogs. This eerie section, called “Night,” in which the hiding, sometimes sleeping couple haunts the empty streets and merges with the vegetation, is the one effortlessly magical passage of the novel. A luxuriant, dreamlike atmosphere is evoked: “On the sidewalk, in their pale clothes, their arms around each other, hidden by plants that were so strong they looked carnivorous, Judit and Mañungo resembled inhabitants of a strange universe which barely needed the flow of love and sleep.” Latin-American writers have a way of seeing their major cities as desolate and powerful, as awesome wastelands—one thinks especially of Borges’s Buenos Aires, but also of Vargas Llosa’s Lima, Cabrera Infante’s pre-Castro Havana, and the Buenos Aires meticulously traversed in Humberto Costantini’s The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis. Donoso here does something like that for Santiago.
Elsewhere, however, his will to significance generates too much sticky, tangled prose. “The only sure way to eliminate his demons was to eliminate himself, to drown in the slow green waters of the Cipresales River that mirrored the vertigo of the air tangled with the vines of madness; waters in which the tops of the oaks and elms sank, and out of whose lazy current emerged trunks of tortured pewter, bearded with moss and covered with a cancer of lichens and fungus.” Just across the gutter of the book, a shorter sentence also numbs the mind: “Five years ago, Bellavista seemed immersed in the anachronistic anorexia of oblivion.” The translator, perhaps, should share the blame for such heavy-handed conjurations as “Sartre, with whose words he had fertilized the Chiloé dirt from which he’d sprung,” and “She gave him only the scrap of her body, which she did not succeed in relating to herself, leaving Mañungo outside the tangle of her feminine failure.” Donoso’s touch has lost lightness and impudent ease since The Obscene Bird of Night, written during the democratic rule of Eduardo Frei and published in 1970, the year Allende took power. In Curfew, the dominant metaphor—a mythical “ ‘ship of art,’ the Caleuche, which was manned by a crew of wizards”—fails to float. The symbols in the background of the book—Carlitos, the toothless lion in the Santiago zoo; Schumann and his attempted suicide in the Rhine; the floods and fogs and witchcraft of Chiloé—have more life than the foreground. The links between history and the novel’s character disorders seem forced: “Nadja’s coldness was gratuitous, an aesthetic, an experiment with her own limits and the limits of others, while in Judit it was a vertiginous destiny that someone else, or perhaps history, had established.” Woolf-like Judit and Mañungo with his “rabbitlike smile” are rather pale and wispy posters to be blazoned with such portentous words as “the incarnation of the despair the current state of affairs was pushing them to.” Most unfortunately, the novel’s climax of political violence befalls a character, Lopito, so repulsive, verbose, adhesive, and tiresomely self-destructive that the reader is sneakily grateful when the police do him in. The surge of indignation and sympathy that the text indicates should greet his demise does not come. Lopito makes a poor martyr.
Jacobo Timmerman has written, in whole-hearted praise of Curfew, that in it Donoso “reveals that even those who fight against the dictatorship may be cowards and antiheroes. Most important of all, he shows that not everything in Chile is clear—there is also confusion and despair.… No individual act of political protest is more telling than the sad lives that Chileans are forced to lead.” Perhaps in Spanish the novel is more persuasive, less wordy and diffuse and slack, than in English; but in any translation the unhappy revolutionaries must quarrel and drink and seethe and drone in a political vacuum. Donoso, who returned to Chile in 1981, after an absence of eighteen years, generously credits the personnel of the regime with “human complexity,” and perceives that the anti-regime forces can sink into “a hatred of all for all.” In his exposition, however, the regime has little face and less philosophy, and those who oppose it have no dream or memory of good government. How things came to this claustrophobic pass is not explained, nor is a way out indicated. What human virtue we see resides in the oldest characters, the two venerable writers, Fausta and Don Celedonio, survivors from a more gracious time; in the last chapter, they are taking care of the novel’s children, since nobody else will.
In Chinua Achebe’s novel, too, a fine writer’s spirits and prose appear to have been dampened by the politics of his country. The novel’s country is called Kangan, its capital Bassa, and its drought-stricken rebellious region Abazon, but Achebe’s native Nigeria and his painful identification with the Ibo cause in the Biafran war supply the blood that flows through his fantasy nation. The sorry condition of contemporary Africa is his subject; drought and the situation of women have been added, as major African concerns, to those of official corruption, regional division, and the continuing legacy of colonialism. Like Curfew, though at less length, Anthills of the Savannah seeks to encompass too much. The author’s first novel in twenty-two years, it shows signs of piecemeal composition and interrupted inspiration. Jaggedly told, from a multiplicity of viewpoints, it quite lacks the purposeful narrative flow of Achebe’s masterpiece, Things Fall Apart; its voices fitfully range from poems and myths to cocktail gossip, from almost unintelligible dialogue in West African patois (“You think na so we do am come reach superintendent. Tomorrow make you go contravene His Excellency for road and if they ask you you say you no know am before”) to equally opaque flights of literarese:
It was perhaps the strong, spiritual light of that emergent consciousness that gave Elewa, carrying as it turned out a living speck of him within her, this new luminosity she seemed to radiate which was not merely a reflection of common grief which you could find anywhere any hour in Kangan, but a touch, distinct, almost godlike, able to transform a half-literate, albeit good-natured and very attractive, girl into an object of veneration.
In some sentences, the words accumulate like sandbags being piled up by a weary worker:
Before his voice had impinged on my thoughts I had temporarily withdrawn into them while physically appearing to attend to the Commissioner of Works struggling overconscientiously with an almost casual comment from General Lango that our highways break up even as they are being laid unlike highways he had seen in Europe and America and even Kenya.
Nevertheless, from the fractured telling a number of truths about Africa emerge. African educated elites are smallish, and power struggles can involve old friends. The three main male characters—Ikem Osodi, the crusading editor of the National Gazette; Chris Oriko, its former editor and now government Commissioner for Information; and Sam, now called His Excellency, the President of Kangan—were classmates, disciplined and influenced by the same English masters at a colonial institution called Lord Lugard College. As Chris remembers those days, “Ikem was the brightest in the class.… Sam was the social paragon.… He was the all-rounder.… He never failed once in anything. Had the magic touch. And that’s always deadly in the long run. He is paying the bills now, I think. And if we are not lucky we shall all pay dearly. How I wish he had gone to Medical School which had been his first ambition. But he fell instead under the spell of our English headmaster who fought the Italians in Abyssinia in 1941 and had a sword from an Ethiopian prince to prove it. So Sam enrolled in the first school cadet corps in the country and was on his way to Sandhurst.” The military proved to be the post-colonial path to power, but Sam has kept in touch with Chris an
d Ikem, and has shared some of his power, uneasily. Chris explains, “Ikem may resent me but he probably resents Sam even more and Sam resents both of us most vehemently. We are too close together, I think. Lord Lugard College trained her boys to be lonely leaders in separate remote places, not cooped up together in one crummy family business.”
If African government is a “crummy family business,” it is also a chancy raffle. The author states, “In the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quite easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people’s shit in buckets on his head.” To those whom the caprice of the raffle has favored, “the people” are a distant reality, idealized and avoided. The President declines to meet with delegates from drought-stricken Abazon, and Chris’s flight by bus into this province becomes a redemptive immersion in the suffering masses. He reflects, “The kind of people—local bourgeoisie and foreign diplomats—who sidle up to you at cocktail parties to inform you that Bassa was not Kangan are the very ones who go on behaving as though it was. Why? Because, like the rest of the best people, they have never travelled by bus out of Bassa on the Great North Road.” Embarked on the dusty vast plains, coached in talking pidgin and evading policemen, Chris rejoices as “the ensuing knowledge seeped through every pore in his skin into the core of his being continuing the transformation, already in process, of the man he was.” A parallel transformation, more ardently than convincingly described, is that of Ikem’s lower-class mistress, Elewa, into a pregnant “object of veneration” and a Madonna of national hope. The realer woman in the novel is Chris’s lover, Beatrice Okoh, a government official who has undergone the dispiriting ordeal of education and urbanization.