Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003

by Roberto Bolaño

  ALPHONSE DAUDET

  Time passes at dizzying speed. When I was an adolescent and I lived in the south of Chile, I discovered Daudet, Alfonso Daudet, as he was called then, his name Hispanicized to make it more familiar, though I’ve never heard of Charles Baudelaire or Paul Verlaine being called Carlos Baudelaire or Pablo Verlaine.

  Reading Daudet back then was (and still is) a pleasure and a luxury that only an adolescent lost at the end of the world could fully appreciate, with the happy sense of license that comes after a perfect theft and the feeling of freedom derived from smoking one’s first cigarettes, outside under a tree on a rainy afternoon. His books have accompanied me ever since, especially Tartarin of Tarascon, a treatise on the joy of living which can be ridiculous at times, though it isn’t unusual to come upon the truth, hidden beneath the ridiculous, a brave, relative truth containing great doses of epicureanism; and also Letters from my Mill, a collection of cameos and miscellaneous prose to which the early work of Arreola is much indebted; or the Memoirs, a melancholy book in which Daudet, so well sketched by Jules Renard in his Journal, doesn’t lecture on the human and the divine but rather glides, like a sleepwalker, from the human to the divine, from Cartesian clarity to pure song, from the useful to the useless, and even from the useless to the useless, this last a feat worthy of real writers; or The Nabob, a reflection on the figure of a politician; or L’Arlesienne, which Bizet set to music; not to forget the sequels to the unforgettable Tartarin: Tartarin on the Alps and Port Tarascon.

  Daudet was a friend of Victor Hugo, whose work he admired, and yet he didn’t allow Hugo’s titantic force to negatively influence his own work, which is much lighter, more delicate, approaching at moments the naturalism of Zola and Maupassant. Despite his prestige and success, he always saw himself as a lesser writer, easy to like. In other words, he never took himself too seriously. He was generous and, according to his contemporaries, lacking in envy, a sentiment all too common in the backbiting world of letters (which pretends to be so civilized). He loved his children. One of them, León Daudet, born in 1867, when his father was twenty-seven, became a writer, and his works rank among the worst of French literature, though it would’ve hurt his father more to know that in 1907, his crooked offspring would found, with Maurras, the Action Française, organ of the far right and seed of French fascism. But Alfonso Daudet didn’t live to see it. He died in 1897, after suffering from a nervous complaint for many years. Today, in the south of Chile, almost no one reads Daudet. Not even writers, to whom Daudet sounds vaguely like the name of a pop singer or balladeer.

  JONATHAN SWIFT

  Why does an author become a classic? Certainly not because he writes well; if that were the case, the world of literature would be overpopulated with classics.

  A classic, as it’s most commonly defined, is a writer or work that not only permits multiple readings but ventures into new territory and in some way enriches (that is, illuminates) the tree of literature and smooths the path for those who follow. A classic is the writer or work able to decode and reorder the canon (usually not a book that’s considered required reading, at least from a small-minded perspective). And then there are those classics whose main virtue, whose elegance and validity, is symbolized by the time bomb: a bomb that not only hurtles perilously through its age but is capable of flinging itself into the future. It’s to this latter category — though the two categories aren’t mutually exclusive — that Jonathan Swift belongs, and it’s from the very rich and varied Swiftean oeuvre that the publishing house Península has recently culled a selection of fragments, published under the title Ideas para sobrevivir a la conjura de los necios [Ideas for Surviving the Confederacy of Dunces].

  Here we can find gems like this: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that thedunces are all in confederacy against him” (from Thoughts on Various Subjects). Or “men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at stool” (from Gulliver’s Travels). Or “Silenus, the foster-father of Bacchus, is always carried by an ass and has horns on his head. The moral is that drunkards are led by fools and have a great chance to be cuckolds” (from Miscellanies). Or “every man desires to live long; but no man would be old (from Thoughts on Various Subjects). Or “I have got materials toward a treatise proving the falsity of that definition, animale rationale, and to show it should only be rationis capax. Upon this great foundation of misanthropy the whole building of my Travels is erected” (from the Letters).

  If our parents and grandparents had really read Swift, they wouldn’t have taken us to see the animated movie version of Gulliver’s Travels that I believe came out in the 1960s. Actually, if the authorities or those benighted souls called teachers had really read Swift, they would’ve found a way to ban the movie in Chile. Because one of the great Irishman’s qualities is that no matter how sugarcoated the adaptation of his masterpiece, it’s still a time bomb.

  Of course, making a film of A Tale of a Tub would seem to be an impossible undertaking. And if anyone tried to make a film of A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public it would surely elicit heated protests from some Association for the Protection of Minors that has failed to come to the obvious conclusion that neither in our day nor in Swift’s are children commonly served up as appetizers to cannibals.

  “I have never expected sincerity of anyone, and I’m no more angered by the lack of it in a man than by the color of his hair,” says a Swift weary of imbeciles. And he also says: “I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities; and all my love is toward individuals.” And: “My main purpose in everything I do is rather to enrage than to amuse.”

  This Swift is dangerous. He wallops his readers and keeps them up at night. And yet, if we don’t want to be slaves, if we don’t want our children to be slaves, we must read him and read him again. The task is urgent.

  ERNESTO CARDENAL

  In 1973, any twenty-year-old who wanted to be a poet read Ernesto Cardenal, author of Epigramas [Epigrams], Oración por Marilyn Monroe [Prayer for Marilyn Monroe], Psalms, Homage to the American Indians, this last a new, if flawed, response to Whitman and superior in many ways to Neruda’s Canto general.

  Out now is a book of memoirs with the lapidary title Vida perdida [Lost Life] (Seix Barral), and reading it one can’t help but remember a time when reading Cardenal, a Catholic priest, was fascinating to us — precisely us, lustful sinners who never went to Mass, partly because the priests were such a drag but mostly because we didn’t believe in God. And we had no plans to mend our ways, instead becoming bigger and bigger sinners, and in this endeavor we were helped along, not to say spurred on, by the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal. Now this book appears, uneven like almost all memoirs (and like life), and Ernesto Cardenal’s voice hasn’t changed but everything else has changed, and what was once hope, an invitation to the unknown (or so it seemed to us), now seems more like silence and stillness, a silence and stillness emanating from a lost province where Cardenal still lives and goes about his business, despite all the battles he’s lost, recounting in stately prose the vicissitudes of his family, because that’s what Vida perdida is about, the fate of a family and the fate of a man who’s one of the great poets of Latin America, plus sketches of some friends who live on after death, like the great American writer Thomas Merton, also a priest, and what we’re left with in the end is a life that’s more triumph than failure: a final image of Cardenal as a man who lives in limbo, which isn’t a bad way to live, next door to heaven.

  A NOVEL BY TURGENEV

  When I was eighteen I read a book by Ivan Turgenev that dogged me for the next eighteen years. By that I don’t mean to say I thought about the novel and its protagonist’s tragicomic fate every day, but from time to time the story seemed to loom over me like a serial killer or a question mark. I don’t even remember the title. It isn’t among the books
by Turgenev that I own. I can’t be sure, but I think it was Rudin. Without a doubt it’s one of the saddest novels I’ve read in my life.

  The plot is as follows: a young man arrives at a country house, owned by one of the richest men in the region. I don’t remember what brings him there. Probably he’s been hired as a tutor to the landowner’s children. He’s from Moscow or St. Petersburg, of course, and he’s versed in the latest city fashions as well as its most advanced ideas. In a word: he’s an intellectual and also as handsome as the young Werther, and in time he infects the children with the virus of adventure and revolution, in a manner calling to mind the first chapters of Explosion in a Cathedral, by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, except that in Carpentier’s book the children are on their own, orphans in a sense, and orphans, as we know, are a blink away from adventure or just about anything, and in Turgenev, Carpentier’s precursor, the young students aren’t orphans and the revolution is thousands of versts away. Of course, this distance matters little to the young Russians, and it matters even less to the older of the two siblings, a beautiful, headstrong girl who begins to dream of a bohemian life in Paris, in the company of her tutor, naturally. At first, the young Moscow intellectual (let’s say he’s from Moscow) is flattered by the love his student professes for him, but later, as he glimpses the future that awaits him, he begins to have his doubts. First, he doubts that the student’s love will survive the daily privations of a life lived hand to mouth, even a life lived between Paris and Venice or Paris and Geneva. Then he doubts himself, because it’s one thing to preach change, political or personal, and quite another to actually strive for it. He begins to consider the likely reaction of the girl’s father, who respects him as a tutor and an intellectual and who, when the moment comes, won’t hesitate to call on influential friends in Moscow (or St. Petersburg) to help the young man find a better job and begin to build a secure and possibly even brilliant future for himself, but who would in no way tolerate the young man’s marriage to his daughter. Finally, he thinks about himself, about what he wanted when he left the city (the help of the rich landowner, etc.), and what he’ll have if he listens to his heart and runs away with the disinherited heiress.

  Along very broad lines, that’s the whole novel, similar in some ways to Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, though definitely a lesser work. Of course, the handsome young intellectual chooses security (his security) and eloquently rejects the love of the girl, who, I seem to recall, soon marries her former suitor, an utter peabrain, which goes to show that either she isn’t very smart after all or she’s a confirmed masochist. But then comes the best part of the novel, just when it seems as if everything’s settled and the end is near. The young intellectual suddenly realizes that he is in love with the heiress. And he also realizes that his behavior has been shameful and despicable. I’m not sure, but I think he writes the girl a letter and then tries to kill himself on the grounds of the country house. He can’t do it, discovering in a single night his love and his cowardice. The next day he leaves the house empty-handed, with no letters of recommendation. In Moscow, back in the outside world, he disappears. He isn’t heard from again. Thirty years go by. In the novel’s last chapter or final paragraphs, the reader is shown a barricade in Paris, described with great sympathy, a barricade manned by the poor, by the disinherited, but also by adventurers and bohemians from the most far-flung corners of Europe. The army charges. From the top of the barricade a white-haired old man whose appearance betrays the vestiges of a lost grace urges on the defenders. He’s felled by a bullet. Some strangers or possibly friends carry him to his poor foreigner’s room. As he lies dying, the old man speaks in Russian, and Turgenev suggests to us that not only has he found courage but also the burning bridge that links words and acts. When I was eighteen, I waited until the very last sentence for his former beloved to suddenly appear at his bedside. But she never came.

  HORACIO CASTELLANOS MOYA

  The first person who talked to me about Castellanos Moya was Rodrigo Rey Rosa, after paella in Blanes with Ignacio Echevarría. The second person was Juan Villoro. This was some time ago now. Of course I tried, without much hope, to find his books at two bookstores in Barcelona, and, as I expected, I couldn’t find them. A little while later I received a letter from Castellanos Moya himself and after that we kept up an irregular and melancholy correspondence, tinged on my end by an admiration for his work, which little by little has come to populate my bookshelves.

  So far I’ve read four of his books. The first was El asco [Nausea], maybe the best of all, or at least the darkest, a long tirade against El Salvador that caused Castellanos Moya to receive death threats obliging him to go into exile yet again. El asco, of course, isn’t just a settling of scores or a writer’s response to a moral and political situation that he finds profoundly discouraging, it’s also a stylistic exercise, a parody of certain works by Bernhard, and the kind of book that makes you laugh out loud. Sadly, very few people in El Salvador have read Bernhard, and fewer still have a sense of humor. One’s country is no laughing matter. That’s the word, and not just in El Salvador, but also in Chile and Cuba, Peru and Mexico, and even Austria and more than a few other European countries or regions. If Castellanos Moya were Bosnian or Kosovar and he had written and published this book in Bosnia or Kosovo, chances are he wouldn’t have had time to catch a plane out. Herein lies one of the book’s many virtues: nationalists can’t abide it. Its acid humor, like a Buster Keaton movie or a time bomb, threatens the hormonal stability of the idiots who, upon reading it, feel an irresistible urge to string the author up in the town square. Truly, I know of no greater honor for a real writer.

  The second book I read was The She-Devil in the Mirror, a grim novel, in fact an extremely grim novel, though it’s narrated by a daddy’s girl or pampered princess or rich bitch from San Salvador, after the end of the civil war, when the country has moved fully into a no-holds-barred capitalism. The victim is a friend of the narrator, the wife of a businessman. The narrator’s voice — a voice full of tics, a voice brilliantly realized, a voice that leads us from a darkish room to a darker room and so on gradually to a room plunged in total darkness — is only one of its achievements. This book, I believe, is the first by Castellanos Moya to be issued in Spain, by the small publishing house Linteo.

  The third book that I read is also out in Spain, from Casiopea, another small publishing house. It’s a reissue of El asco, preceded by two long stories: “Variaciones sobre el asesinato de Francisco Olmedo” [Variations on the Killing of Francisco Olmedo], a text that surely deserves a place in any anthology of contemporary Latin American short fiction, and “Con la congoja de la pasada tormenta” [With the Sorrow of the Spent Storm]. Both stories delve into the garbage pit of history, and, like crime novels, their premises are speculative, though they tumble (from the very beginning) toward a vaguely familiar horror, one that we know or have heard about.

  The last book by Castellanos Moya to fall into my hands was the novel El arma en el hombre [The Human Weapon], published by Tusquets Mexico, which in a certain way expands upon matters dealt with in The She-Devil in the Mirror, the stories of some characters who were marginal or barely sketched and who here take center stage, like Robocop, a former soldier from an assault troop who, at the end of the war, is left without work and who decides (or maybe it’s decided for him) to become a killer for hire. One of his victims is Olga Trabanino, the close friend of the narrator of The She-Devil in the Mirror, and the crime is one also featured in El asco, so prominently that it could be said that the killer of that poor bourgeois housewife constitutes one of the focal points of Castellanos Moya’s fiction. The other focal points are horror, corruption, and a sense of the quotidian that trembles on every page and makes his readers tremble.

  Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in 1957. He’s a melancholic and he writes as if from the bottom of one of his country’s many volcanoes. This sounds like magic realism. But there’s nothing magic about his books, except
possibly the boldness of his style. He’s a survivor, but he doesn’t write like a survivor.

  BORGES AND PARACELSUS

  Like all men, like all living things on earth, Borges is inexhaustible. In one of his lesser-known books, Shakespeare’s Memory (1983), a slender collection of four stories, three of them previously published elsewhere plus one new one that lends the volume its title, the reader can find and read or reread “The Rose of Paracelsus,” a very simple text, diaphanous in execution, that describes how Paracelsus is visited by a man who wants to be his disciple. That’s all there is to it. The story is told with a kind of languor suited to the time of day, which is dusk. Paracelsus is tired and a small fire burns in the hearth. Then night falls and Paracelsus, who has dozed off, hears someone knocking. The stranger at the door wants to be his disciple.

  The story begins like this: “Down in his laboratory, to which the two rooms of the cellar had been given over, Paracelsus prayed to his God, his indeterminate God — any God — to send him a disciple.” And the disciple, when the skies have long been dark, has come at last, and he hands Paracelsus a pouch full of gold coins and a rose. At first Paracelsus thinks that the disciple wants to become an alchemist, but the disciple soon clears up the misunderstanding. “Gold is of no interest to me,” he says. What does he want, then? The path to the Stone. To which Paracelsus replies: “The path is the Stone. The point of departure is the Stone. If these words are unclear to you, you have not yet begun to understand. Every step you take is the goal you seek.”

  The stranger says that he’s ready to endure every necessary hardship alongside Paracelsus, but before he takes the final step he needs some proof. Paracelsus, troubled, doesn’t ask what proof he demands, but when he wants to see this proof. Immediately, the stranger answers. “They had begun their discourse in Latin; they now were speaking German,” writes Borges. “You are famed,” says the stranger, “for being able to burn a rose to ashes and make it emerge again, by the magic of your art. Let me witness that prodigy. I ask that of you, and in return I will offer up my entire life.”