Jolts

  _________

  And the dead of the AMIA, murdered in the terror attack of 1994. How many of them? Was it eighty-five of them? The names are painted on the walls at Pasteur / AMIA — white traces against a black wall, also underground. I don’t count them.

  The ideologues behind the attack were never found. The investigation pointed towards a cocktail of Islamist terrorism, state and police complicity, inefficiency, and old-school Argentine antisemitism. There was an Iranian connection and years of nothing and then a national prosecutor in charge of the investigation. He was found dead twenty and so years later, in January 2015, a day before declaring in front of Congress, in a move that according to some would have compromised the then-president Cristina Kirchner (who had recently signed a controversial deal with Iran in order to advance the investigation, if you ask some; in order to shelve it, if you ask others). As his death was investigated things started to turn up about him, dirty laundry. Inappropriate exchanges of information with the American embassy in Buenos Aires, bank accounts abroad, links to foreign secret services. No one will ever know who suicided him. As it is very likely that no one will ever know who bombed the AMIA in 1994, or the Israeli embassy some blocks away, two years earlier. Justice is so slow in Argentina, that frequently it never arrives.

  I can’t remember if it was after the attack on the embassy or the AMIA, when an outraged and emotional old lady on the telly, reflecting upon the atrocity, ended her speech with ‘why do they have to put a bomb here? They haven’t only killed Jews today, they have also killed Argentine people, innocent people.’

  All this would make interesting material.

  _________

  Ariel spends the night with Rita. The next morning he goes for a walk.

  If the piece had taken place during the ’80s, Ariel sooner or later would have bumped into a disappeared-theme demo. If it had taken place in the 1990s, he would have bumped into one against the political corruption and the economic misery that characterised the decade. In 2001 he would have bumped into a horde of angry citizens demanding that all politicians go — que se vayan todos. In the past fifteen years he would have bumped into demos for or against the populist saints or sinners who saved or destroyed the country, that bunch of holy crooks, the Kirchners — Argentina is a country of radical binaries, don’t ask me to explain this in this limited space, in a piece of fiction.

  And now, after hanging around Florida and Lavalle, Ariel is walking down Carlos Pellegrini heading towards Corrientes, being the tourist that he is, when he bumps into a demo, pure coincidence. The posters betray the same lack of imagination as in any demo anywhere. The semiotics of red and black, block capitals, synthetic slogans. A large flag with Che’s face confirms that the lack of imagination in this opportunity is left-leaning. And here a closer look at the posters and signs: they don’t make any sense. Ariel feels dizzy but nevertheless starts to walk with the demonstrators, gets in the midst of the noise, unable to understand the language they speak (metaphorically) and he crosses Avenida 9 de Julio with them, and then stops and watches them disappear banging their drums and singing their chants against the traffic down Corrientes, with that obscene erected Obelisk behind him, and a giant mural of Evita watching him from the building of the Ministerio de Obras Públicas.

  He watches them disappear. Unable to process what is going on, what do they want, what is it about now? He can’t understand because he has spent five years away, because he has slowly disengaged himself from his country, because he doesn’t belong here anymore — Rita is right: he’s a tourist. And yet he’s already thinking of a possible conference paper, why not a journal article: ‘Peripatetic Literature: Argentine Politics and the Poetics of the Demo’. The title just turns up in his mind. He doesn’t even need to know what the demo was about in order to write this. The reason can be found out later, or just invented. He only needs to know that the demo happened. That it will happen again. That Argentines love a demo. And that demos are just another form of literature. And that all literature can and should be captured, killed and vivisected.

  _________

  I spend two weeks in Buenos Aires and never make it home, to the place where I was born and where I spent twenty-five years of my life. Let’s just say that a number of personal and work-related commitments impede it. I get to see my family, most of them. But I don’t see my friends, except for the ones who have turned the possibility of Buenos Aires into a reality. A natural order is repaired by my inability to bridge the 350 kilometres that separate me from Rosario. Some friends verbalise their disappointment and I stop responding to their messages. Others stop replying to my fake apologies. The important part is that a heavy ballast is dropped: we should have stopped talking years ago — we have nothing in common anymore — we were victims of the Dictatorship of Nostalgia that comes with social media.

  I spend two weeks in Buenos Aires, tying up projects, meeting this or that writer or filmmaker, sorting out papers, buying books and films and eating meat and drinking wine. Working but not only working but also having a reason to be here, for once. And taking down notes — I take down lots of notes, in my notebook. Obviously I take notes with a fountain pen, on a small Moleskine — this is part of my process of simplification, of embracing the stereotype, even the stereotypes I have invented for myself, in other writerly fantasies.

  I take notes in bars, on the bus, on the train and the subte. And people peer at my notes but the notes are in English. A girl on the train speaks to me (in English) after eyeing my writing, ‘Where are you from?’ she says, with my same accent. I reply to her in Spanish. She seems disappointed and asks why I write in English then. I reply that I don’t know. She laughs. She’s beautiful and young, and gets off at the next station, Villa Luro. This girl was some moments ago sitting zazen on the train floor. I had never seen anyone sitting zazen in Buenos Aires. It’s never all about poverty or misery, is it? Not even when I think for an audience, for the page, speculatively, erasing the complexities and colours, in order to please, to be synthetic and available, to be nice to my reader.

  At some point I start missing London. I count the days. Thank god the days fly. I can live a different lie there, one that feels real.

  _________

  After one more session of love with Rita, more tender than passionate, and very likely sterile, hopefully, Ariel sets to the task of getting the boxes out from their hideout.

  What he finds will colour the nature of his return, whatever else happens before or after. Perhaps he finds notes. Or notebooks. Yes, notebooks of his years as a porteño intellectual, the years before the Big Leap into other continents and into a properly structured way of life, a career. Or maybe he finds nothing of any significance. The thought makes him anxious.

  He does open the boxes. The first two house old books eaten away by damp and cockroaches (do they eat books?). He moves these aside, keeps opening. Old clothes, old readers from his undergraduate years. Everything ready for the skip, smelling of time and death.

  But the smell of coffee soon starts to fill the flat, the melancholia is aborted, and Rita turns up with a cup, wearing a long white shirt, barefoot, all post-coital happiness. She moves next to Ariel, crouches next to him, passes him the cup, kisses him on the cheek.

  ‘It’s all rotten,’ he says, Ariel, opening another box.

  ‘It’s very humid down there,’ says Rita; she sits on the floor, careful that the T-shirt clothes what some minutes ago was in the open, because this is how old friends sleep together.

  Paper, this is all paper, and yes, he finally gets to the notebooks. He had the foresight of wrapping them in cling film. They seem unharmed. Two notebooks, pseudo-Moleskine, national production, they will fall apart as soon as the cling film is removed. He moves them to a side, doesn’t bother with them, not now.

  ‘All this can go in the bin,’ he says, pointing at the rest of the boxes, the six stinking boxes, with their mouths open towards the ceiling.

  ‘Polo,’ says Rita,
referring to the building doorman, ‘he can sort this out when he clears the rest of the rubbish tomorrow night, after I leave.’

  ‘Is Polito still alive?’ asks Ariel, surprised.

  ‘Yes!’ says Rita.

  ‘I’d love to say hi to him,’ he says. He won’t.

  _________

  I’m waiting in the departures lounge, Ezeiza airport. I tell myself that I will be back before the end of the year, that this time I’ll make the effort to go back home, not to an ideal or imaginary place, but to the only place I really left behind, to whoever still speaks to me there, to my mother’s house, my childhood things, the books I wish I hadn’t read, the places where I used to spend my time. Of course I won’t.

  But they have Wi-Fi in the airport now and it works quite well. I play with my phone, read the news in English, respond to banal messages (only the banal ones), and when I run out of battery I look at the passing people, singling out the Argentines without effort, their familiar ways and blue jeans and gigantic Nike trainers sticking out in the flurry of wealthy Brazilian tourists, mugged Europeans on their way home, and air hostesses and pilots with their small suitcases rolling over linoleum floors.

  I sit here, listening to the repetitive muzak, waiting to fly back to London, and I think about Ariel’s return, about how the rest of his journey might unfold for him.

  In the next days, after relocating to an AirBnB flat in Palermo Hollywood, he will dedicate himself full-time to sorting out the final details of the sale. Rita will be too busy, organising her move first and settling into her new place later, to meet him until the very last moment. He will welcome this space, spend his time in the bookshops of Calle Corrientes, the bars, perhaps even go watch a film in one of the old cinemas left down Calle Lavalle, if they haven’t all turned into evangelic temples. He will end up signing the papers by the end of the week and receive the confirmation of the bank transfer the following Monday morning. The notebooks will remain unopened until after the sale, the transfer, after all the to-dos, and Rita. Until he’s had time to breathe and properly realise that he has nothing left in Buenos Aires, that all his traces in this place are contained in these two notebooks. So he leaves it until this very last moment, when I’m sitting at the departures lounge in Ezeiza airport, waiting for the plane that will take me to London, to the place we call home.

  The cling film comes off easily and the notebooks don’t fall apart. The first one — a clutter of blue and black ink — contains mostly quotes from this or that book. The second one, this is the one that matters. The first page makes it clear.

  A note (unedited, in Spanish).

  Ezeiza airport, April 13, 2002. A departure. This seems to be one of the tropes I’m expected to write about. And now that I depart, now that I’m here waiting for the plane that will take me away, I toy with the idea of writing something about a departure, perhaps just to surrender, to stop running away from this mandate, or from the fact that I’m leaving. I’M LEAVING. And I don’t have a clue what will happen with my life, where I’ll end up, doing what. It’s such a cliché, for an Argentinean to depart, and to write about it. It’s a terrible destiny; it reeks so much of tango. But at least it’s something to do. And what’s more: departing is meaningless; worse is living in Argentina.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Of all the myths surrounding literature none is further from the truth than fancying the journey of the writer as a solitary and heroic quest. But that it is impossible to survive the blank page alone is obvious to anyone approaching it armed with a second language. There were many sidekicks instrumental in turning this book into a reality — here is a very likely incomplete attempt to nod at them.

  Without the constant learning that is editing a literary journal none of these stories would have made it to the page. My thanks to everyone involved in the Minor Literature[s] cargo cult — whether you are an editor, a contributor, or a reader, our conversations, agreements and disagreements are central to my cerebral activity.

  Earlier versions of some of these stories appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Numéro Cinq and Open Pen — many thanks to the editors who saw value in them. Some of these stories were also published in the USA by LCG Media — my thanks for their input and support. Needless to say that this book wouldn’t be in your hands now without the labour of love that is Influx Press — to them, my enduring gratitude. To all of the above: please, keep taking risks.

  This book is in many ways a response to other stories, films, music, and art, from different places, thrown together here in order to concoct a constellation that might make sense of this disjointed existence I have written myself into. The constellation hasn’t joined any pieces together but I trust the references in the book are clear enough to avoid turning these final paragraphs into a redundant name-dropping exercise.

  So finally, family and friends: you already know what there is to be known. But in the unlikely event you read this book and reach this page: thanks for the love and patience and sorry for the time these stories stole from us. Nevertheless, I can think of many worse things than turning lost time into books.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Fernando Sdrigotti was born in Rosario (Argentina) in 1977. His fiction and critical writing has appeared widely online and in print, and has been translated into French, Italian, Turkish, Norwegian and Spanish. Shitstorm, a novella, was published in 2018 by Open Pen. Dysfunctional Males, his first collection of short stories in English, was published in 2017 by LCG Media. He lives in London.

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Influx Press

  The Greenhouse

  49 Green Lanes, London, N16 9BU

  www.influxpress.com / @InfluxPress

  All rights reserved.

  © Fernando Sdrigotti, 2020

  Copyright of the text rests with the author.

  The right of Fernando Sdrigotti to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Influx Press.

  First edition 2020.

  Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International.

  Paperback ISBN: 9781910312513

  Ebook ISBN: 9781910312520

  Editor: Kit Caless

  Assistant Editor: Sanya Semakula

  Cover design: Austin Burke

  Interior design: Vince Haig

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.