MEMOIRS
Of all books, memoirs are the most deceitful because the pretense in which they engage often goes undetected and their authors are usually only looking to justify themselves. Self-congratulation and memoirs tend to go together. Lies and memoirs get along swimmingly. No memoirist (though exceptions do exist) has ever been known to speak ill of himself or poke fun at himself or coldly recount an embarrassing episode from his life, as if nothing embarassing had ever happened to him. No memoirist has ever boasted of his cowardice. In fact, memoirists aren’t just brave, they usually live in the eye of the storm, or have passed through it. The most flagrant example of this kind of memoirist in recent literary history is Pablo Neruda and his deplorable Memoirs. Occupying a somewhat different position is Ernesto Sábato’s last book, Antes del fin [Before the End] (Seix Barral), published after more than twenty years of silence. For a reader of Sábato, the truth is that the book lacks flavor — or, rather, for a reader who hasn’t already resigned himself to the fact that Sábato wrote only three novels and will probably never write anything else. The first thing one notices is its length: it’s just 188 pages long, skimpy for a memoir, by any measure. But later, as the reader makes some headway into what is in no way a strident book, he realizes that 188 pages is enough and even too much to say what must be said, in other words that unhappiness still exists and that utopia can also exist, that we breathe and that we stop breathing. And that’s all Sábato thinks he has to tell us.
SPRINGTIME IN BLANES
Spring comes to Blanes, the season that makes us all equals, and even the town’s most disagreeable residents attempt not a smile but a different kind of gaze, as if spring were a spinster machine, in other words a machine incomprehensible in principle, incontrovertible, that comes to town from who knows where, maybe the sea, maybe the mountains, maybe the fields where black men and white men work hard planting who knows what and they stop in the middle of a row or in the middle of digging in the same way that the most disagreeable townspeople stop at a corner suddenly swarming with flies to watch the arrival of spring, the spinster machine that children, even the most disadvantaged children, understand better than adults, and that’s it, there’s nothing else to discuss, spring comes to town and Blanes becomes Blanes Ville or Blanes sur Mer, as Joan de Sagarra would say, our imaginary little city, our city in thrall to the whims of the spinster machine that came from somewhere though no one knows where, surely not from the sea, because even the sea seems surprised by its arrival, and in fact, if you think about it (in other words, if you start to think like a spinster machine), spring seems to have come in from the tower of Sant Joan, which is, along with the Gothic fountain, the only structure in town that remains unperturbed, as if the four seasons coexisted in its molecular makeup, and it’s this tower that some residents of Blanes feel is the perfect gateway not only for the arrival of spring but for many other things, an eschatological page by Joaquim Ruyra, for example, or the reddest shrimp on the Costa Brava, or the joy of being alive with no need for further discussion.
CHILEAN LITERATURE
Quiet days in Blanes. I’m teaching a course on new Chilean fiction. I’m the teacher of the course and the only student in the course. Which is fine. Although sometimes my laziness as a student horrifies me and sometimes my clumsiness as a lecturer brings on sudden fits of sleep. These fits are called narcolepsy, which is what River Phoenix had in that Gus Van Sant movie. But River Phoenix also had Keanu Reeves, or to put it another way: Phoenix had a place to rest his weary head and I can only rest mine on books. And books, especially if one mistakes them for pillows, can cause nightmares. Despite it all, I sleep and read. Chilean literature, I say to myself in my sleep, is an endless nightmare: for so many writers, for so many critics, for so many, many readers. The presence of the nightmare wakes me all of a sudden and I go out. It’s seven in the evening. I go to the bank and a man with a cane cuts in front of me when I open the door. I know who he is. Once he threw a beer mug through the window of a bar. Will you hold the door for me? he asks. Of course, I say. And while I’m getting money from the automatic teller, the man with the cane stands in a corner, poring over his savings book. When I leave, he says goodbye and I decide not to reply. I don’t like people who read their savings books like novels. And yet, the man with the cane is a relatively cultured person. Once, at a different bar, he talked to me about Peter Pan. He was drunk and he said that a long time ago he had been rich and he cried. River Phoenix would have made a good Peter Pan, I think as I walk away from the bank, and then I think some more about new Chilean fiction. New, say, from Manuel Rojas onward. Before I realize it, my feet take me to a store that sells games. The owner’s name is Santi and he’s my friend and I owe him three thousand pesetas. Of course: that was why I went to the bank to get cash. The store is full and only Santi is working. Instead of helping him, I stand in a corner, like the man with the cane, and watch the people. Most are kids buying video games. I feel worse and worse. I close my eyes. Suddenly I hear someone talking with an unmistakably Chilean accent. I open my eyes and discover a trio composed of a horrible adolescent with a neutral accent, his mother, who speaks with a kind of Colombian accent, and a man with very black hair, who was the first to speak and who is Chilean. All three are wearing tight pants and boots. All three are short. The adolescent is smoking. He looks tough and doesn’t seem too bright, but he can’t hide the fact that he’s a child. His mother, the Colombian, must be about forty, maybe younger, and she really does have a hard face, but now she seems at peace. The Chilean is with the Colombian, but it’s clear he isn’t the kid’s father, he must be thirty, if that, and he’s as interested or more interested than his stepson in buying games. They seem, the three of them, like recent arrivals from hell. Ready (the Colombian woman) to cook a good meal that night and ready (her two boys) to spend a week playing video games. I think about Guy Debord and the Situationists. I think about virtual reality and the new Chilean novel. Santi shows me a new computer game. I take a look at it, it’s called Settlers and must be similar to Age of Empires. I pay him what I owe and leave. On the way home I buy honey and camomile tea. I’m back at my apartment. I’m back in my seminar. I read. I listen to the noises from the street. I fall asleep and dream about a book that is a map of wakefulness and sleep. Then I open my eyes in the dark and on the wall, like Mount Rushmore, I see the faces of the cripple and the diabolical threesome. What writers do the survivors read? I ask aloud. Those hypocrites, my own kin.
FERDYDURKE IN CATALAN
All is not lost, Ferdydurkists. A few months ago, almost on tiptoe, one of the most luminous books of this century of shadows became available for purchase. It’s Ferdydurke (Quaderns Crema), the first novel by Witold Gombrowicz, originally published in 1937, and whose translation into Spanish, sponsored by the literary circles of Café Rex in Buenos Aires, surely constitutes a landmark of extravagance and generosity, in other words one of our century’s landmarks of literary joy. That legendary translation, whose main author was the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera, is difficult if not impossible to find in the bookstores of Spain, which has deprived readers of the key work in the Gombrowiczian oeuvre, unless one could lay hands on the French or Italian or German version. From now on, however, we’ll no longer have to go so far to look for it. Anyone who can read Catalan and who has two thousand pesetas in his pocket will be granted access to one of the key novels of this century, in an excellent translation by Anna Rubió and Jerzy Slawomirski. All of this is made possible thanks to Jaume Vallcorba Plana, a model publisher if ever there was one, in whose catalogues one can find jewels like Lord Byron’s Cain, Hölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles, and Novalis’s Fragments, as well as contemporary Catalan writers like Quim Monzó, Ponç Puigdevall, or Maurici Pla, to name just a few. What was going through Vallcorba’s head when he decided to publish Ferdydurke? I don’t know. Anything, except thoughts of profit. What I do know is that a publisher who sets out to publish Gombrowicz is a publisher to watch an
d that a language — Catalan — in which it’s possible to reproduce the work of the great Polish writer is certainly a living language, a language in which Filidor can live on and continue to scheme. All is not lost, Ferdydurkists.
BERLIN
A little while ago I was in Berlin to read from my novel Nazi Literature in the Americas. All fine and good. The hospitality of the Berliners, beginning with my translator and friend Heinrich von Berenberg, was commendable; the food wasn’t bad; I walked all over the city, day and night, and met lots of interesting people. All unexceptional. Except for two things. First: the organization put me up in a mansion on the Wannsee, the lake on the edge of the city where, in 1811, von Kleist killed himself along with the unfortunate Henriette Vogel, who did in fact resemble a bird, but a drab and ugly bird, one of those birds that doesn’t have to spread its wings to resemble a gateway to darkness, to the unknown. But I read von Kleist when I was twenty, and I thought I had left him behind. I remembered the Prince of Homburg, which dramatizes the struggle between the writer and his father, between the individual and the State; I remembered Michael Kohlhaas, published as part of the old Austral series, a story about bravery and its twin, stupidity, and also a story called The Earthquake in Chile, published in 1806, from which there are still moral and aesthetic lessons to be learned. But the fact is that I’d left von Kleist behind. I’d been told that other writers stayed at the mansion and that the scene there was lively, especially after sundown, which was when the residents, Eastern Europeans, a Greek or two, the odd African, came out to drink and discuss literature in one of the castle’s countless halls. The first night I got in very late. They left me the key in a kind of mailbox made to look like a drainpipe, with a note informing me of my room number. Oddly, the key opened one of the outside doors to the castle, a side door once used by the service, as well as the door to my room. Surprise. There wasn’t a soul anywhere. The place was huge. In one hall I saw fallen flags (Heinrich said that during the day they were shooting a period film). In another hall there was a long table. In another there was nothing but an ancient iron lamp that didn’t work. And there were corridors everywhere, shadows that stretched high up the walls, and stairs that led nowhere. When I found my room at last, the window was open and the walls were covered with mosquitos, the mosquitos of Wannsee, a plague the likes of which I hadn’t seen in years, ever since I was in Panama, which in itself was an odd thing, because one can accept mosquitos in Panama or the Amazon as a normal if annoying phenomenon, whereas in Berlin it’s certainly not what one expects. Upset, I went to ask someone for insect repellant and only then did I realize that I was alone in that enormous mansion on the lake. There were no writers, no staff, no one. I was the only overnight guest there that week. On tiptoe, trying not to make a sound, I went back to my room and spent all night killing bugs. After my fortieth victim I stopped counting. In between I pressed my nose to the window, which I didn’t dare to open now, and I thought I could see, on the shores of the Wannsee, the ghost of von Kleist dancing in a cloud of phosphorescent mosquitoes. But one can get used to anything and at last I fell asleep.
The second strange thing I saw in Berlin was much more disturbing. I was with a friend, in her car, driving along the Bismarckstrasse, when all of a sudden a stretch of boulevard no more than fifteen yards long became a street in Lloret de Mar. The very same street.
CIVILIZATION
For the Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse Now, there was no better breakfast than the smell of napalm. According to him, it smelled like victory. Perhaps. The smell of burning (with that tinge of acid said to be left hanging in the air) is sometimes like victory, and other times like fear.
I’ve never smelled napalm. I’ve smelled gunpowder, and gunpowder definitely doesn’t smell like victory. Sometimes it smells like verbena and other times it smells like fear. In contrast, the smell of tear gas (which tends to precede the smell of gunpowder in some countries) is reminiscent of sporting events and rotting guts. Triumphal marches always smell like dust, a hyaline and solar dust that clings like leprosy to the skin and arms. Crowds in closed spaces smell like dust and death, which may be the same thing. Crowds in big open spaces, like stadiums or esplanades, smell like fear. I hate soccer matches, concerts, and rallies: the fear that clings to them is unbearable.
Instead, I like to walk with the dirty old men along the Paseo Marítimo in Blanes in the summer. I like to watch the beach. There, from that triumphal throng of half-naked bodies, beautiful and ugly, fat and thin, perfect and imperfect, a magnificent smell wafts up to us, the smell of suntan lotion. I like the smell that rises from that mass of bodies in all shapes and sizes. It isn’t strong, but it’s bracing. Though it isn’t perfect. Sometimes it’s even a sad smell. And possibly metaphysical. The thousand lotions, the sunscreens. They smell of democracy, of civilization.
THE POET OLVIDO GARCÍA VALDÉS
A while ago I was in Toledo with Carolina and our son Lautaro and we visited the poet Olvido García Valdés and her partner, the poet Miguel Casado. I had come to know Miguel through a kind of epistolary and telephonic friendship, and through my admiration for his poetry, in my judgment some of the liveliest being written in Spain today. Actually, my friendship with Miguel began in an unusual way. One day I received a letter from him. My ignorance of the wasps’ nest of contemporary Spanish poetry meant that his name didn’t ring any bells, but I suspected that he might be a poet and in response I asked him to send me some of his poems. Miguel sent me a journal, El signo del gorrión [The Sign of the Swallow], and — much later, as befits a Castilian poet, by nature modest and retiring — one of his books. From that moment on I became a faithful reader of his work. The poets of his generation that I had read struck me as terrible, and for years I had chosen to ignore what was being written in Spanish poetry by those born after 1950, contenting myself with reading and rereading Pere Gimferrer, Leopoldo Panero, and a few others of the previous generation. But discovering Miguel Casado reconciled me to a certain extent with the poetry of my own generation, though it would be more accurate to say that it reconciled me with one poet of my generation; in any case a friendship grew up between us, and Miguel’s collections of poems became daily fare, the kind of books that once read are left somewhere around the house near at hand and that one takes to the movies or the bathroom, rereading one or two poems at random, and whose ability to inspire discomfort, reflection, and aesthetic pleasure doesn’t wane as time goes by. The three books of his that I own (Inventario [Inventory], published by Hiperión, and Falso movimiento [False Move] and La mujer automática [The Automatic Woman], both Cátedra), were dedicated succinctly to Olvido. I didn’t know back then that Olvido was Olvido García Valdés, considered by many to be the best Spanish woman poet of the twentieth century, which sounds extreme, but isn’t so much if one considers the scarcity of female voices in twentieth-century Spanish poetry. Anyway, that was my baggage before traveling to Toledo to spend a few days there. I had read Miguel in a conscientious way and each reading had brought him closer to me. I hadn’t read Olvido (although I did know her by name long before I met Miguel) and what people told me about her was wild and even terrifying. There were those who compared her to Santa Teresa, others who said that she was too serious, even gruff, and those who claimed that even her friends were stunned by her arrogance. I looked for a picture of her. I found one in which she appeared with a group of writers, but it was blurry. In another, published in a poetry journal, she was surrounded by old men, poets of Madrid, like in the Poussin painting Susanna and the Elders. Finally I went to a bookstore in Barcelona and looked for one of her books, but they told me that the most recent ones had sold out and there was no picture of her in the only one they had. So we left for Toledo with no face for Olvido García Valdés. What we finally discovered exceeded all our expectations. In a single day, hand in hand with Miguel, but especially hand in hand with Olvido, we saw all the synagogues, mosques, and cathedrals of Toledo. We lunched and dined opulently. At
the first toy store we passed, Olvido bought my son three toys. My son, naturally, fell in love with her. And continuing on in the same Rabelaisian vein, that night, after showering, I read straight through Ella, los pájaros [She, the Birds], a collection of poems by Olvido that dazzled me as only true poetry can dazzle. Much later, when I was back in Blanes and far from Toledo, I read Caza nocturna [Night Hunt], her most recent book (Ave del Paraíso, 1997), and my admiration for her grew even more, if possible. We have almost nothing in common. The poets she likes I don’t like, and vice versa.
ROBERTO BRODSKY
New Chilean fiction, which is hardly new and sometimes hardly fiction, has just gained a new practitioner: Roberto Brodsky, a Chilean born in 1957, who in this first novel delves confidently into horror’s forgotten corners. The novel is called El peor de los héroes [The Worst of Heroes] (Alfaguara, 1999) and its subject, or one of its subjects, is sadness in the face of the irrevocable, though it can also be read as an existential adventure story. The protagonist, lawyer Bruno Marconi, recalls Chile’s recent history as he tries to piece together a contemporary picture in his memory and the reader’s mind: that of bodies piled in a refrigerator like a shipment of frozen chicken, which Marconi discovers by chance. Roberto Brodsky, in addition to being from the same country as me and sharing the same name, is my friend, and sometimes I ask myself how often he’s been on the verge of death, in what strange way he isn’t also the “worst of heroes.” When he was a boy, fishing on a deserted beach, he got his hand caught in the rocks. Then the tide began to rise and no matter how hard he pulled he couldn’t get it loose. When he told me this story I imagined he was making it up, but deep down I knew it was true. I also imagined that Brodsky the boy had died and I was talking to a ghost. At the last minute, of course, a fisherman appeared who dove down and freed his hand from the rocks. A few months ago Brodsky was at my house in Blanes with Paula, his wife, and his incorrigible son, Pascual. El peor de los heroes hadn’t come out yet. We talked about sadness and bravery, two constants in his novel, and I think sadness won. We talked about laughter, which follows Brodsky the way other people are followed by dogs. We talked about likely and unlikely adventures and we agreed that the two were one and the same.
Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003 Page 11