A Reading Diary (2 page)

In Buenos Aires itself, people don’t see the ghosts. People seem to live here in a state of mad optimism: “It can’t get worse,” “Something will come up.”

Remy de Gourmont (to whom Bioy owed an unacknowledged debt): “We must be happy, even if it is only for the sake of our pride.”

Silvia, my old schoolmate, tells me that in my school is a plaque to the students murdered by the military. She says I’ll recognize several names.

Argentinians have long bragged about their so-called
viveza criolla
, or endemic cunning. But this trickster mentality is a double-edged weapon. In literature its incarnation is Ulysses, who was for Homer a clever hero—saviour of the Greeks, scourge of Troy, victor over Polyphemus and the Sirens—and for Dante a liar and a cheat condemned to the eighth circle of Hell. Though lately Argentinians seem to have confirmed Dante’s dictum, I wonder if it’s still possible to revert to Homer’s vision and use this dangerous gift in order to vanquish prodigies and overcome obstacles. I’m not optimistic.

Last December, in an angry article in
Le Monde
, I ended by saying that now “Argentina is no longer and the bastards who destroyed it are still alive.” An indignant Argentinian psychoanalyst compared my conclusion to that of the European and American bankers who rejected all guilt for the downfall of the country and saw in it some kind of just retribution for Argentinian arrogance. Such an inane comparison is perhaps due to the psychoanalyst’s own inability (like that of most Argentinians) to accept the fact that, if anything is to change, the country must redefine itself and, above all, establish an unimpeachable justice system.

The experience of everyday life negated by what we want it to be, negated in turn by what we hope it really is.

The unnamed narrator of Bioy’s novel is on the run after committing an unspecified crime, always believing that even here on this distant island, lost somewhere in the Caribbean, “they” will come and catch him. And at the same time, he more or less expects miraculous events: salvation, food, falling in love. From within the character, flight and fancy are coherent; from without, it is like watching the unfolding of a mad double reality, two-headed and contradictory.

The physical reality of the island confirms the narrator’s impressions of nightmare, except that these are filtered, of course, through that same narrator’s eyes. I sit in a café. Coffee is served with packets of sugar bearing the faces of famous twentieth-century characters. I can choose between Chaplin and Mandela. Someone has left an empty Che Guevara sugar packet in the ashtray. Afterwards, I walk by a fresh pasta shop called La Sonámbula, “The Sleepwalker.” The window of a prêt-à-porter is empty except for a large sign:
Todo debe desaparecer
, “Everything must disappear.” Outside a pharmacy, a woman with a doctor’s prescription in her hand is asking those who enter to buy her the medicine she needs, because she has no money.

Bioy’s narrator has been warned not to attempt to reach the island because of a mysterious disease that (rumour has it) infects all those who land there, killing “from outside inwards.” The nails and hair fall out, the skin and the corneas die, and the body lives on for some eight to fifteen days. The surface dies before the inner core. The people he sees are, of course, only surface.

But why keep a diary? Why write down all these notes? The mysterious master of the island, Morel, explains his reasons for keeping a record of his memories: “To lend perpetual reality to my sentimental fantasy.”

I miss my new garden in France, my new walls.

Bioy—aristocratic, intellectual, lady-killer Bioy—describes or foresees the world of the common victim: a literary victim, of course, pursued by literary misfortunes. A Cuban friend once told me that, in Cuba, Bioy is read as a political fabulist; his stories are seen as denunciations of those unjustly condemned, hunted down, all those who suffer the fate of exiles and refugees. “I’ll show how the world, by perfecting the police, the use of identity papers, the press, wireless, customs, renders any judicial error irreparable, and is now one undivided hell for all those who are persecuted.” The tone (the words are spoken by the narrator) was meant to be self-pitying; today they have a documentary ring. I wonder what Bioy would have thought of this reading, he who considered the label
écrivain engagé
a damning insult.

In
The Invention of Morel
, everything is told hesitatingly. The old trick: verisimilitude in fiction is achieved through a pretended lack of certainty.

I meet Silvia at La Puerto Rico, the café my friends and I used to go to when we were in high school. It hasn’t
changed: the wood-panelled walls, the round, grey stone tables, the hard chairs, the smell of roasted coffee, even perhaps the same waiters, agelessly old, in stained white smocks. Silvia describes the state of the country as an adolescence come once again. More ghosts, studying for exams at that table, waiting for a friend at that other one, making plans for summer camp at the one over there—all people now disappeared, dead, lost.

In Morel’s villa, which he calls a museum, the library contains (with one exception) only works of fiction: novels, poetry, drama. Nothing “real.”

The English-speaking reader has not yet discovered the works of Bioy. Though his books are published in the United States, they are not read, and the first (perhaps only) novel by Bioy published in England was
The Dream of the Heroes
, in 1986. The ignorance of the English-speaking reader never ceases to amaze me.

The magazine stands are full of glossy publications that track the lives of the rich and famous in exultant banality. Life carries on. Alfred Döblin ends his exile journal back in Baden-Baden after the war and remarks of his fellow Germans, “They have not yet experienced what it is they have experienced.”

My sister, who is a psychoanalyst and one of the most intelligent people I know, tells me that almost all of her patients are undergoing a crisis. But there is also a resurgence of the creative impulse: dozens of new literary and political magazines have appeared, and theatre and film have acquired a new life. The country’s downfall has mysteriously given birth to a palpable atmosphere of creativity, as if artists and writers had suddenly decided to conjure up from the dust that which has been stolen from them.

Morel reminds me of certain characters (Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard
or the faithful daughter in Merchant-Ivory’s
Autobiography of a Princess)
who spend their days watching the past come to life on a screen. The theme of the loved one recalled as a projected image appears for the first time, as far as I know, in an 1892 Jules Verne novel,
The Carpathian Castle
(which, according to Gavin Ewart, inspired Bram Stoker’s
Dracula)
. In Verne’s version, the eccentric Baron Gortz brings back to life the beautiful opera singer Stilla, who has died in the middle of her farewell performance, and with whom the Baron has been long and obsessively in love. In the end, it is revealed that what the Baron has recreated is not her flesh and blood, but merely her image captured on a glass pane, and her voice in a recording.

(I now remember an earlier example: the shadows in Plato’s cave.)

Bioy follows the precepts of the detective novel: hide nothing from the very beginning, reveal nothing until the last possible moment. (Although, in
The Invention of Morel
, the revelation appears almost exactly halfway through the novel.)

The projected images of characters from Morel’s past repeat pre-recorded conversations. In one of these (overheard by the narrator), Morel proposes as a subject the theme of immortality. A false clue, since immortality is not merely persistence. I’m reminded of the clinical nomenclature of the inability to forget: “perseverance of memory.”

Proust: “Everything must return, as it is written on the dome of Saint Mark’s, and as it is proclaimed, while they drink from the marble and jasper urns on the Byzantine pillar capitals, by the birds that signify both death and the Resurrection.”

I had a discussion with Stan Persky on immortality. He argues against the alarms of dystopians that scientific advances will lend us, if not eternal life, at least the possibility of a lengthy enjoyment of the present. I’m not sure;
I don’t know if I want to go on for a very long time, a time beyond eighty or ninety years (already a small eternity). As I begin to glimpse the certainty of an end, I enjoy all the more the things I’ve grown accustomed to—my favourite books, voices, presences, tastes, surroundings—partly because I know I won’t be here forever. Stan says that, given a sound body and mind, he happily wants this life to continue.

In his journals, Bioy recounts the funeral of the novelist Maria Luisa Levinson. Her body was displayed in a covered coffin with a small window. Someone remarked that there seemed to be sheets of newsprint covering her face. Her daughter explained that they had put pages from several newspapers inside, “so that if, in the future, the coffin was opened, people would know by the obituaries who was there.”

I find it difficult to understand how, living in the Buenos Aires of my childhood, I saw nothing of what was to come later. Swedenborg says that the answers to our questions are all laid out for us, but that we don’t recognize them as such because we have in mind other answers. We only see what we expect to see. What then was I expecting when I was eight, ten, thirteen?

I remember the long conversations in cafés, in someone’s room after school, walking down so many streets. A peculiar humour permeated all that talking: irony tinged with sadness, absurdity with gravitas. The people of Buenos Aires seemed to possess the capability of enjoying the smallest casual offering, and feeling the most subtle moments of misery. They had a passionate sense of curiosity, a keen eye for the revealing notion and respect for the intelligent mind, for the generous act, for the enlightened observation. They knew who they were in the world and felt proud of that imagined identity. Most important, there was in all this the
possibility
of a blossoming, a ripening. Economic constraints and their attendant politics, imposed from abroad by foreign companies not yet multinational, dictated many of the codes of society, and yet the questioning spirit of Argentinians, their particular wit, their melancholic bravery, held for their society something greater and better, beyond what seemed like passing spells of fraudulent governments. If misfortune struck, as it does sometimes anywhere on earth, then (Argentinians believed) it wouldn’t last long; our country was too rich, too strong, too full of promise to imagine an endlessly bleak future.

Leopoldo Lugones, writing in 1916: “Politics! That is the national scourge. Everything in this country that stands
for regression, poverty, iniquity, either stems from it or is exploited by it.”

Today, at breakfast, my brother tells me that “only” ten percent of the judiciary system is corrupt. “Of course,” he adds, “excluding the Supreme Court, where every single member is venal.”

Perhaps out of modesty, Bioy, ardently Argentinian, lends his hero a Venezuelan nationality.
The Invention of Morel
ends with a nostalgic recapitulation of what his homeland means to the narrator. It is an enumeration of places, people, objects, moments, actions, snatches of an anthem. … I could do the same to remember Buenos Aires.

Things I remember:

• the scarlet of the ten-peso bill
  
• different kinds of rolls sold at the baker’s: pebete (sweetish, brioche-like dough), fugaza (flat, crusty), miñón (smaller and crustier)
  
• the scent of the eau de cologne the barber patted onto my father’s face at the shop in Harrods
  
• a comic radio show on Sunday midday:
  La Revista Dislocada
  
• the sepia-coloured girlie magazines sold under the arches of Puente Saavedra
  
• the tiny turkey sandwiches at the Petit Café
  
• a strong smell of ammonia around the huge rubber trees of Barrancas de Belgrano
  
• the sound of the soda cart over the cobblestones outside my window
  
• the soda siphon and the bottle of wine on the dinner table
  
• the smell of chicken broth before lunch
  
• the large steamers moored at the port, reeking of smoke, ready to cross the Atlantic
  
• jacaranda trees in the early spring mornings
  

One of the earliest poems I learned by heart was Heine’s “Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland” (“Once I had a lovely homeland”).

Memory as nightmare: the narrator of
The Invention of Morel
dreams of a brothel of blind women which (he says) he once visited in Calcutta. In the dream, the brothel becomes a rich, stuccoed Florentine palazzo. Here in Buenos Aires, I dream in Spanish of people who never speak and can’t hear me, and always of the city I knew, never as it is now. In my dreams, the Avenida 9 de Julio ends at Avenida Santa Fe.

Bioy’s narrator has the impression that he is merely playing a game, not fighting for his life.

The day after tomorrow, I leave. I have lunch with my nephew Tomás. We talk about the betrayal of Argentina’s history, and of his need to keep believing in the possibility of doing something positive. He is thrilled by a line he has read in Simone de Beauvoir: “I discovered with scorn the ephemeral nature of glory.”

Perhaps, in order for a book to attract us, it must establish between our experience and that of the fiction—between the two imaginations, ours and that on the page—a link of coincidences.

I’m back in France. On the plane, I read an article on the so-called Argentine ants. Vicious fighters in their homeland, in Europe these insects have stopped fighting (for some undetermined reason) and with that surplus energy have managed to build a tunnel, six thousand kilometres long, from northern Spain to southern Italy.