The cabrerista students pretend they’re the lone survivors of a cataclysm and there they go, out into that mutating landscape, running around releasing the wild shrieks of earthly science fiction after nonfiction science class. As mentioned: these kids are different. They read a lot and write a fair amount; they worship their school pens (Insert: “303 brand pens typical of the working class; Shaeffers, distinctive of the intellectual middle class; Parkers, sign of the bourgeoisie. Some and others were thrown like knives at the wood floors, the Styrofoam ceilings, the backs of an enemy, to see if they stuck in. Some and others get their butt ends bitten during exam nerves and when, after excess chewing, teeth perforated the ink cartridge, the mouth flooded with a rush of that metallic and washable navy-blue taste. A taste they imagined must be what death tastes like and they played at being struck down by an internal hemorrhage of ink and surprise. Mouths erupting with a vomit of real blue blood”); they don’t watch much television because there isn’t much to watch (“En su corcel, cuando sale la luna …,” “Space, the final frontier …,” “There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man … This is the dimension of the imagination.”); and at night they dream they’re given an encyclopedia. Twelve volumes with Roman numerals on the spines and, yes, there was a not-so-remote yet irrecoverable time when childish longing passed through books. Lo Sé Todo [I know It All] was the name of that—megalomaniacal and messianic—encyclopedia. It contains neither batteries nor electricity. Paper and ink. Lo Sé Todo (ambitious project by the publisher Larousse; from whom they already all had acquired, by scholastic mandate, the dictionary Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado, which came with little drawings in the margins, but wasn’t small, and made them feel its weight in their book bags) promised with its hubristic title to put the sum of all knowledge in the universe within reach of their little hands. And all that accompanied by full-color drawings emulating the aesthetic of trading card and action figure albums of the day, and composed in the style of the student who draws better than the rest of the class: detailed and, at the same time, simple and easy to imitate or trace in their notebooks. Everyone’s favorite volume of Lo Sé Todo was number V; because it included the material referencing pre-Columbian civilizations whose ruins (the little cabreristas jumping around amid the brand new ruins surrounding their school to the point of strangling it) they profoundly envied, being from a country where the indigenous peoples had ridden horses a lot and had settled down very little and never managed to attain the dialectical wisdom of, for example, the Mayans when it came to greeting. Lo Sé Todo knew this and demonstrated it with an I-bet-you-didn’t-know-this face: when two Mayans met they greeted one another like this. One said “In lak’ ech” (“I am another you”) and the other answered: “Hala ken” (“You are another me”). And, oh, those consonant and tongue-twisting names of plumed and serpentine Aztec gods. And pyramids atop of which to rip out hearts and cities in the Andean mountains where, they said, Pink Floyd would soon land (years before creating that insomniac man, walled inside a hotel room and dismantling everything in front of the television of his memory) to play their long and hypnotic songs live. All these years later, there are no young boys left who, today, would wish for something so great that takes up so much space. Now, the cosmic wish is for everything to fit in the palm of a hand and to be no more than a couple thumb-lengths and thumb-swipes away. The utopia of the micro and invisible and infinite, of everything in reach for everyone, futurism made present. And everyone plays not at being apprentices but Deus Ex Machinas running across pixelated meadows. Not them. They still run around outside and sit down inside to read and it doesn’t occur to them to wonder if they’re the last normal children or the first strange children.
In one of his biji notebooks (which one?) he has a photograph of all of them, all together, last names first and first names last.
He saved that photograph of his class the way others saved supposed pieces of the supposed cross on which Jesus Christ was supposedly crucified. A cross—to judge by the quantity of wood splinters that adorned it—taller than the Empire State building and wider than The Widest Avenue in the World. He saves that photograph, he supposes, because he needs to believe in something. He finds it easy to believe in that photograph because, appropriately, it’s hard to believe in. All of them together and wearing uniforms of a blinding white, which makes the contrast between the grays and blacks of the photograph still more supernatural. A photograph of a group of ghosts—because when you’re shorter and newer you’re nothing but a ghost of yourself—where the most authentic and verifiable specter of all is the absence of Pertusato, Nicolasito. The empty space radiating his presence. His last name always preceding his first name. Like when attendance was taken every morning at the foot of a twisted flagpole where a dirty-colored flag barely waved. Or like when they went out in single file, after eating lunch and assuming that digestive “resting position” (head between arms, resting on the cafeteria table, speaking in whispers, sometimes someone fell asleep, which was almost considered a show of cowardice), for the longest recess of the day, while, there outside, the rumble of the bulldozers and the rat-tat-tat of the jackhammers reminded them that The Widest Avenue in the World was hungry and it wasn’t resting and time was running out before it would eat all of them. The Widest Avenue in the World wanted blood as if it were one of those Aztec deities thirsting for sacrifice.
And Pertusato, Nicolasito was the offering. Though Pertusato, Nicolasito hadn’t been his real name. The alias came from (he’d given it to him, many years later) the name of that harmoniously proportioned dwarf that seems to be sneaking in, in motion and slightly out of focus, in that scene where everyone else is motionless and in focus, on one side of Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas (one of the works he always visited whenever he went to the Prado, the other is that dog of Goya’s) and that reminded him so much of the names of the hero-dreamers of the most hilariously demented novels and stories by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Nicolasito Pertusato had been a palace dwarf come from Italy, first to the court of Felipe IV and later that of Carlos II. A small social climber who, they say, climbed to great heights (and, no doubt about it, a dwarf who figured out how to pass from one court to the next had to know how to play his cards and graces just right). A character of the most colorful kind who outlived all the other figures who appear in Las Meninas, including its painter. He’d given his first rival in the literary arts that name, first, because it sounded like his real name. And second, because he liked seeing him as a dwarf. His Pertusato, Nicolasito was small and pale and of diminutive aspect and asthmatic respiration; but he seemed to grow every time he fought a “composition duel” (an idea of that woman who was so much younger than the rest of the teachers, that entrancing woman who taught “artistic activities” and who, under her pinafore, wore really tight blue jeans instead of a skirt) against him, his primary rival. In front of all their classmates and even students from classrooms of older classes, who were given the power to judge and vote (democratic activity that was regaining popularity around that time, after many years of not existing, in his now nonexistent country of origin) for the person who wrote “best and most interestingly.” It’s not easy for him to admit and remember that Pertusato, Nicolasito almost always beat him for reasons inexplicable to him at the time, but that he now understands with perfect clarity: Pertusato, Nicolasito wrote what others wanted to read and hear, in a flowery and purple prose and a precise and functional narrative sensibility. But (only recently could he admit it, remembering many of his compositions word for word, with that memory children have for remembering forever and never forgetting something that they hate or that makes them feel bad) the brief stories of Pertusato, Nicolasito already breathed with a certain precocious brilliance. Turns of phrase, a strange way of adjectivizing, long sentences. Features of a style he began to study and imitate. And very soon it was difficult to distinguish the one from the other. And his teacher had reproached him with a smile and he’d acted like he ha
dn’t heard her, but soon he knew—no longer able to tell where Pertusato, Nicolasito’s thing began and his thing ended—that there wasn’t room for two writers in that same class and classroom.
One night he saw a horror movie on television, the kind his classmates couldn’t watch for the simple reason that—unlike his—their parents were home at night. It was called Tales from the Crypt, starring his favorite actor: Peter Cushing, the best Van Helsing in history, a remarkable Sherlock Holmes, and a Victor Frankenstein who wasn’t half bad. And it was one of those movies in episodes, telling various stories, like episodes of The Twilight Zone, but with much bloodier modalities. But Peter Cushing was not in the segment that most impressed him. It was the penultimate episode and it was titled “Wish You Were Here,” like that album he listened to over and over, and—with time he realized—whose plot was an adaptation of a classic story of the genre, one of the most terrifying tales in the history of literature: “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs. In that episode, a Chinese statue replaced the monkey’s paw of Jacobs’s original, but the plot device was the same: the figure grants three wishes that come true in ever more terrifying ways that the movie exaggerated to grotesque effect, concluding with the wish that someone be brought back from the dead, failing to remember that person had been embalmed. He had difficulty sleeping that night, but finally fell asleep wishing Pertusato, Nicolasito wouldn’t participate in the grand finale of the composition competition that would take place the next week.
And, yes, Pertusato, Nicolasito isn’t in that photograph, because by the time it’s taken Pertusato, Nicolasito is no longer alive and is already dead. He and his friends managed, for once, to convince Pertusato, Nicolasito, when school was dismissed, to come out and play in the ruins surrounding it, which they imagine and believe are pre-Columbian; and they all go down into a crater and in its bottom they see what appears to be an extraterrestrial hand protruding out of the rubble. At the time, the alien-archeological theories of Erich von Däniken—in books and magazines and documentaries—are very popular. And they all shriek with excitement and tell and order Pertusato, Nicolasito, as he himself is a newbie in that landscape, that he has the honor and duty to welcome that god from beyond the stars. So Pertusato, Nicolasito shakes the hand which is nothing but a high voltage cable that one of the workers forgot to disconnect and what all of them see then is something the best special effects in movies still haven’t achieved: Pertusato, Nicolasito’s hair begins to smoke and his eyes pop out and sparks shoot from those holes (Pertusato, Nicolasito seems to have emerged from or entered one of those animated drawings where everyone dies so they can be resuscitated and die again) and, oh, that horrible smell that’ll keep them from eating baked chicken for months without feeling nauseated and running to the bathroom. And, yes, as already mentioned: Pertusato, Nicolasito is his first dead person. The first of various, of many. But he’s more than that, he’s more than a simple and common dead person: Pertusato Nicolasito is a live dead person, a dead person seen in the very moment of dying, in the precise instant when a living person begins their life as a dead person. And he sees him again very soon, one last time, there inside, looking over the edge of the coffin, like someone peering into an abyss. An unscheduled field trip to the wake and burial and all of them walking through that cemetery where the tombs resemble small houses. His first dead person at his first funeral. His first dead colleague. And, of course, not his last. There were many more to come. Writers were fragile machines. They broke down easily. Ever more quickly and more frequently. And from a very young age he spent time going to authors’ funerals. His black suit and white face always at the ready. The heavy, unbearable, lightness of the dead. The coffin full of an empty body. (Readers clapping for the coffin with the same emphasis, between frightened and victorious, with which they clap when the airplanes they’re traveling in land or, best not to think of it, the way they clap when a boy is separated from his parents on a beach.) Funerals like those sites that always change location but maintain their climate and geography: you travel there to look at yourself in the mirror of your own future death that—still, for the moment, who knows how long—reflects back a different face, that’s not ours, but that we know better than our own face, because we looked at it more often, for more time.
And seven days after his funereal debut, he reads his composition (which is a kind of hypocritical but heartfelt elegy-homage to Pertusato, Nicolasito in which he appears as a close friend and literary guide) and draws tears and applause from the auditorium and for the first time he feels a strange feeling. A feeling he doesn’t understand very well, but knows it’s what really ends up turning him into a real writer. On the one hand, discovering the possibilities the real can offer when passed through the filters of reality. One the other, experiencing for the first time that happiness so unique and particular to writers: that joy a writer feels not when something goes well for him, but when something goes badly for another writer.
A joy running hand-in-hand with the joy of writing a good sentence or of reading an excellent page.
What’s known as—for lack of a better designation—the literary vocation.
Random notes from his biji notebooks:
† He was always a writer. Even before he knew how to write. Before being a writer he was already a writer-to-be: a nextwriter.
† And over the years they will ask you, over and over again, that question of “As a writer, where do you get your ideas?” And, wearing that parentheses face, that writer who will always be that boy will wonder why it is that they never ask him something far more important, or, at least, more interesting, than “As a writer, where do you get your ideas?”
Why do they never ask: “What made you want to be a writer?”
† Though less and less, it still works: an atavistic reflex, an ancient instinct. They ask him what he does, he answers “I am a writer.” And then something happens to the expression of those asking. A film forms over the eyes of his interlocutors; as if they were overcome with emotion, as if suddenly they were evoking an imaginary kingdom from their childhood they hadn’t heard mentioned and hadn’t traveled to for so long. Some of them, even, catch a glimpse of a very distant past in which they too wanted to be that.
Then, right away, it left them and leaves them now.
And everything returns to normality.
And they no longer think about any of that.
† Each of the many times they ask how you become a writer, save some time and gain some truth, and always give the same answer: “But the thing is we’re all born writers. We all have that need to tell something. And all of us, around more or less five years old, have the tools (very inexpensive) and the faculties (very sophisticated) to be and do it. The trouble comes with the added need to tell it better and better. Better and better and better and even better and better still and just a little bit more to be a little bit better and … So, the majority of writers die very young. Of exhaustion or heartbreak. Many commit suicide. And they’re reborn as something else, with another profession, with another vocation. And, sometimes, on nights of insomnia (the world is full of writers’ ghosts, of bewitched people), they say: “Once upon a time I was a writer” or “I could have been a writer.” If there’s any luck, all those people will receive the better-than-consolation prize of turning into great readers. The closest thing to being a writer. But without the invented part, without the part of having to go around inventing all the time.
† The true mystery doesn’t pass through how one became a writer (there’s nothing too strange about that first lightning bolt, about that need to put something in writing that beats inside everyone at some point early on in life and that in the majority of cases flashes out after toppling a tree or electrocuting some passerby), but through why one continues to be one after already having been one, which has been proven to be a desperate, when not demented, gesture and that—unlike what happens with other forms of madness—doesn’t disturb two or three or ten or a thousan
d or a million others and make them worry about our mental health. For them, we’re not mad (madness does arouse certain curiosity and interest), we’re just fools (and there’s nothing less interesting than a fool insisting on his foolishness). The answer to the enigma, in any case, is not at all surprising. One keeps on writing because—like what happens with those bomber pilots who discover they no longer have enough fuel to make it back to base—they can’t do anything but keep on flying and dropping bombs from on high, hoping that they hit the right target, that they finish off the bad guys and help the good guys, before coming down and crashing into the sea or the forest. Quoting that William Gaddis quote about how the idea of “leaving it all behind” seems quite tempting, but then he understands that “it’s too God damned late now even to be any of the things I never wanted to be.”
† Shamanstvo (шама́нство) / According to Vladimir Nabokov, shamanstvo—a sound that contains the word “shaman”—was the most important gift a writer could have. “The enchanter quality,” he explained. Generating in the reader the irrepressible need to keep reading. Shamanstvo applied to the use and calibration of the two narrative elements according to the Russian formalists: the fabula (the story as a sum total of interconnected events) and the syuzhet (the ordered and managed plotting of those events). One and the other defining and deciding the best way to tell something. To show and to hide and to insinuate and Vladimir Nabokov raises this tension to the max in stories like “The Vane Sisters” and “Signs and Symbols” and in novels like Transparent Things.
The Canadian writer Robertson Davies also invoked that Russian word—“shamanstvo”—and compared it “to the silk-spinning and web-casting gift of the spider” and the writer who makes use of it “must not only have something to say, some story to tell or some wisdom to impart, but he must have a characteristic way of doing it … A true writer is descended from those storytellers many hundreds of years ago who spread a mat in the marketplace, sat on it, placed their collection bowl well forward and cried: ‘Give me a copper coin, and I will tell you a golden tale.’ If the story-teller was good, a small crowd gathered around, to whom he told his tale until he arrived to the most interesting part; then, he paused and passed around the collection bowl again. That’s how he earned a living; if he didn’t retain an audience, he had to devote himself to something else. That is what a writer should do.”
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