Into the Looking-Glass Wood

by Alberto Manguel

  And yet something of Che’s ideal survives beyond the political defeat, even in these days when greed has almost acquired the quality of a virtue and corporate ambition overrides mere social (let alone socialist) considerations. In part, he has become another colourful Latin American figure, like Zapata or Pancho Villa: in Bolivia, the National Tourist Board now conducts tours to the site of Che’s final campaign and to the hospital where his body was displayed. But that is not all that remains. The face of Che—alive with his starred beret, or dead, staring as if his eyes could see into a point beyond our shoulder—still seems to encompass a vast and heroic view of men and women’s role in the world, a role that may seem to us today utterly beyond our capabilities or our interest.

  No doubt he had the physique du rôle. Epic literature requires an iconography. Zorro and Robin Hood (via Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn) lent the live Che their features, and in the popular imagination he was a younger Don Quixote, a younger Garibaldi. Dead, as the nuns at the Vallegrande Hospital noted when they surreptitiously snipped off locks of his hair to keep inside reliquaries, he resembled the deposed Christ, dark uniformed men surrounding him like Roman soldiers in modern costume. Up to a point, the dead face superseded the live one. A notorious passage in Fernando Solanas’s four-hour 1968 documentary, The Hour of the Furnaces, which brilliantly chronicled Argentinian history from its earliest days to the death of Che, held the camera for several minutes on that lifeless face, forcing the audience to pay visual homage to the man who carried for us our urge for action in the face of injustice, who bore for us our bothersome agenbite of inwit. We stare at that face and wonder: at what point did he pass from lamenting the sorrows of this world, pitying the fate of the poor and conversationally condemning the ruthless greed of those in power, to doing something about it all, taking action?

  Perhaps it’s possible to point to the moment in which the passage took place. On January 22, 1957, Che Guevara killed his first man. Che and his comrades were in the Cuban bush; it was midday. A soldier started shooting at them from a hut barely twenty metres from where they stood. Che fired two shots. At the second shot, the man fell. Until that moment, the earnest indignation at universal injustice had expressed itself in byronic gestures, bad verse which Che wrote with echoes of nineteenth-century bombast and the sort of academic prose known in Latin America as revolutionary, littered with the vocabulary of inaugural speeches and purple and hackneyed metaphors. After that first death something changed. Che, the ardent but conventional intellectual, became irrevocably a man of action, a destiny that had perhaps been his all along, even though everything in him seemed to conspire against his ever fulfilling it. Racked by asthma that made him stumble through long speeches, let alone long marches, conscious of the paradox of having been born into the class that benefited from the unfair system he had set out to challenge, moved suddenly to act rather than to reflect on the precise goals of his actions, Che assumed, with stubborn determination, the role of the romantic hero, and became the figure whom my generation required in order to ease our conscience.

  Thoreau famously declared that “Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.” Che (who, like all Argentinian intellectuals of his time, must have read Civil Disobedience) would have agreed with this paraphrase of Matthew 10:34-35.

  Imagination to Power!

  Remembering Julio Cortázar

  Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed.

  Not to read him is a serious invisible disease

  which, in time, can have terrible consequences.

  Something similar to a man who has never tasted

  peaches, he would quietly become sadder, noticeably paler, and probably, little by little, he would lose all his hair.

  PABLO NERUDA

  IT WAS 1963. We were fifteen years old and in the third year of the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, that vast, mausoleum-like building, which had, for over a century, bred politicians and intellectuals for the consumption of the state. Here we studied Argentinian history and Spanish, Latin and chemistry, the geography of Asia through long lists of rivers, lakes and mountains, and something called Hygiene, which included bits of anatomy and rudimentary sexual education. For us, it was the Age of Discovery: socialism, metaphysics, the arts of bribery and counterfeiting, friendship, surrealism, Ezra Pound, horror movies, the Beatles and sex. Under the influence of a Borges story that suggested that reality was a fiction, we went around the stores close to the school asking whether they sold fiulsos (a word we had just made up) and to our immense delight were told at one old haberdasher’s that they didn’t have any right now but would be receiving some soon. It was in this welcoming spirit that one afternoon we discovered Cortázar.

  One of us had found, in the bookstore across the street from school, a small volume called Bestiario. It was square, the size of a shirt pocket, and the cover showed a solarized black-and-white photograph of a woman or a cat. We took turns reading the stories: a house inhabited by an elderly couple, brother and sister, is gradually taken over by unnamed invaders; two young people on a bus discover a conspiracy of passengers carrying bunches of flowers; a live tiger roams an otherwise ordinary Buenos Aires household. What these stories meant, why they were written, what allegorical or satirical meanings might have been intended, we didn’t know and we didn’t care; their humour corresponded exactly to our mood: absurd, irreverent, nostalgic for something that hadn’t yet happened.

  I was going up in the elevator and just between the first and second floors I felt I was going to vomit up a little rabbit. I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don’t think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit.

  We became Cortázar followers. We read the stories in End of Game, The Secret Weapons, All Fires the Fire. We understood exactly what he meant when he spoke of the dangers of walking an unmentionable creature through the city, of attending a play and finding ourselves suddenly on the stage, of being transported from an innocent operating table to the sacrificial altar of an ancient Aztec priest. These nightmares made sense to us; we didn’t know then that they were also describing something like the soul of the times.

  Cortázar was born in Brussels in 1914, of Argentinian parents, and was brought up and educated in Buenos Aires. In his early twenties, working as a teacher in the provinces, he started writing his first short stories. “House Taken Over,” one of the masterpieces of fantastic literature, was published by an admiring Jorge Luis Borges in 1948 in a small municipal magazine. In 1951, during Perón’s dictatorship—but explicitly not for political reasons—he moved to Paris where he lived for the rest of his life, preserving in his storytelling (an exile’s privilege) a Buenos Aires that no longer existed.

  So much for the biography.

  When I met him, he was already a celebrated writer, the playful storyteller who shared the logic of Lewis Carroll and a surrealist humour. But he was also what the French call un écrivain engagé, one of the “fellow travellers” sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. In certain writers (the Mexican Juan Rulfo, the Argentinian Rodolfo Walsh) both qualities were inextricably one. Not so in the case of Cortázar.

  In 1968, just after the May Revolution, during which the French students had taken over the city, I arrived in Paris and, with an introduction from the poet Alejandra Pizarnik, went to see him. The man I met was a baby-faced giant (he was almost two metres tall), immensely affable and with a grim sense of humour. Cortázar offered to guide me through the city. He showed me the archway under which Pierre Curie had been struck dead by a carriage and where Marie Curie had picked up the scattered bits of his precious brain; he took me to the Place Da
uphine, the triangular opening at the tip of the Ile de la Cité, which Aragon called “the sex of Paris”; he pointed out Picasso’s bust of Apollinaire across from the Café Bonaparte; he suggested I take his picture in front of his favourite May ‘68 graffiti: “L’imagination au pouvoir,” “Imagination to Power.”

  Five years before our meeting, in 1963, he had published Hopscotch, the novel through which, Mario Vargas Llosa declared, Latin American writers “learned that literature was an inspired way of enjoying ourselves, that it was possible to explore the secrets of the world and of language while having a great time and that, while playing, one could explore mysterious levels of life hidden to our rational mind, to our logical intelligence, chasms of experience into which no one can look without serious risks, such as madness or death.” As most readers now know (even those who have never read the novel) Hopscotch gives us explicit permission to go through the story following whatever sequence of chapters we choose; Cortázar suggests one sequence (not the one in which the book is arranged) as if to imply that by once ignoring the hierarchy of chapters imposed by the novelist, the reader makes all other combinations possible. A precursor of Cortázar’s game was Museum of the Eternal Novel by Borges’s mentor, Macedonio Fernández, which offers the reader a number of forewords and first chapters, and no ending. “My readers,” Fernández had declared, “are the readers of beginnings—that is to say, the perfect readers.” Another precursor might have been Borges’s story, “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain,” in which the reader is invited to follow not a random sequence of chapters but a series of novels, each of which chooses a different possibility stemming from the same plot. In each of these cases, what matters is the reader’s illusion of intellectual freedom (which Laurence Sterne, the master of them all, had proposed in Tristam Shandy). The computer games of hypertext continue and enhance this illusion.

  But while Cortázar was pursuing these literary games, he was also attempting to respond to the political struggles in Latin America. Cuba’s Revolution had seemed a promise to most artists and intellectuals, and Cortázar—in spite of the warnings from Cubans exiled in Paris—gave Castro his support. For Cortázar, voluntarily distanced from the place he still called home, an artistic response didn’t seem enough; a political response was required, a prise de position, a badge of allegiance. Rather than write the fantastic tales for which he had become famous, he attempted a more realistic, even documentary form of writing—and failed. Those accusatory stories and his novel A Manual for Manuel founder in spite of (or because of) these good intentions. Cortázar himself was well aware of the dangers of a literature written from a sense of duty. Speaking in 1962 to a Cuban audience in Havana, he said that he fervently believed in the future of Cuba’s literature.

  But this literature will not have been written through obligation, following the slogans of the day. Its themes will be born only when their time has come, when the writer feels the need to fashion them into stories or novels, poems or plays. Its themes will then carry a deep and true-ringing message because they won’t have been chosen for didactic or proselytizing reasons; they will have been chosen because an irresistible force will have struck the writer who, calling on all the resources of his art and craft, without sacrificing anything to anyone, will transmit this force to the reader, in the manner in which all essential things are transmitted: from blood to blood, hand to hand, human being to human being.

  Then, all of a sudden, in the late seventies, Cortázar, still faithful to his old political beliefs but disillusioned with the possibility of rendering these in literary terms, “without sacrificing anything to anyone,” returned to his fantastic writing in his final book, Unreasonable Hours. Magically, a number of these stories—“Tara,” “The School at Night,” above all the masterful “Nightmare”—turned out to be not only brilliant examples of Cortázar at his fantastic best, but also among the most powerful political stories written in Spanish in those years—years especially noted for the literature of outrage sparked by the military dictatorships throughout Latin America. In “Tara,” a group of guerrilleros has sought refuge from the military in a poor, faraway village, and their leader finds in the word games he likes to play the revelation that will allow him, before his death, to understand the evil he has been fighting. “The School at Night” follows the venerable tradition of a hero’s cautionary descent to the underworld, where, among the horrors, he is given to see the dreadful times to come. “Nightmare,” perhaps the last story Cortázar wrote, is in many ways a companion piece to “House Taken Over,” only that here the invading presence is in the mind of a comatose woman while the outsiders—her family—can only witness the invasion from the wings. The moment of understanding overlaps with that of final destruction, when the unconscious woman’s vision coincides with an assault from the real world. Anyone familiar with the report on Argentina’s “disappeared” (published under the title Nunca Más) will understand exactly the overlapping of the two atrocious ends.

  What will Cortázar be remembered for? I venture to suggest that, like one of his own characters, he will undergo a metamorphosis. The common reality that attached itself to him like a second skin—the political struggles, the difficult affairs of the heart, the messy business of literature with its passion for novelty and gossip—will quietly fade and what will remain is the shining teller of uncanny tales, tales that hold a delicate balance between the unspeakable and that which must be told, between the daily horrors of which we appear to be capable and the magical events with which we are gifted every night in the labyrinthine recesses of the mind.

  IV SEX

  The Knight looked surprised at the question. “What does it matter where my body happens to be?” he said. “My mind goes on working all the same. In fact, the more head downwards I am, the more I keep inventing new things.”

  Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter VIII

  The Gates of Paradise

  “Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice.

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter VII

  ONE OF THE OLDEST VERSIONS of Beauty and the Beast, told in Latin by Apuleius sometime in the second century, is the story of a princess ordered by an oracle to become the wife of a dragon. Fearing for her life, dressed in mourning, abandoned by her family, she waited at the top of a mountain for her winged husband. The monster never came. Instead, a breeze lifted her and bore her down into a peaceful valley, in which stood a house of gold and silver. Disembodied voices welcomed her, and offered her food and drink, and sang to her. When night fell, no lights were lit and in the darkness she felt someone near her. “I am your lover and your husband,” a voice said, and mysteriously she was no longer afraid. The princess lived with her unseen spouse for many days.

  One evening, the voices told her that her sisters were approaching the house, searching for her, and she felt a great desire to see them once again and tell them of the wonderful things that had taken place. The voices warned her not to go but her longing was too great. Crying out their names, she hurried to meet them. At first the sisters seemed overjoyed, but when they heard her story they cried and called her a fool for allowing herself to be deceived by a husband who required the cover of darkness. “There must be something monstrous about him, if he will not show himself to you in the light,” they said, and felt pity for her.

  That night, steeling herself for a hideous revelation, the princess lit an oil lamp and crept to where her husband was sleeping. What she saw was not a dragon, but a young man of extraordinary beauty, breathing softly into the pillow. Overjoyed, she was about to extinguish the lamp, when a drop of hot oil fell on the sleeper’s left shoulder. He awoke, saw the light, said not a word, and fled.

  Eros vanishes when Psyche tries to perceive him.

  As an adolescent, reading about Eros and Psyche one hot afternoon at home in Buenos Aires, I didn’t believe in the moral of the story. I was convinced that in my father’s almost unused library, where I had found so many sec
ret pleasures, I would find, by magic chance, the startling and unspoken thing that crept into my dreams and was the butt of schoolyard jokes. I wasn’t disappointed. I glimpsed Eros through the chiffonnerie of Forever Amber, in a tattered translation of Peyton Place, in certain poems of García Lorca, in the sleeping-car chapter of Moravia’s The Conformist which I read haltingly at thirteen, in Roger Peyrefitte’s Particular Friendships.

  And Eros didn’t vanish.

  When a couple of years later I was able to compare my readings to the actual sensation of my hand brushing for the first time over my lover’s body, I had to admit that, for once, literature had fallen short. And yet the thrill of those forbidden pages remained. The panting adjectives, the brazen verbs, were perhaps not useful to describe my own confused emotions, but they conveyed to me, then and there, something brave and astonishing and unique.