Odd Jobs (92 page)

Suprino, the Party Secretary, accuses Mateo, the Town Clerk, of being a Communist, and enlists Inspector Llanos and Deputy Inspector Rossi and Guzman, the local auctioneer, in an attempt to oust Fuentes, the Council Leader, who opts to defend the town hall with two local policemen, a released prisoner, and Moyano, a humble gardener abruptly promoted to Director of Parks and Gardens. All these men know each other as fellow villagers, and all claim to be loyal Peronists, yet real bullets begin to fly, and real deaths occur: “The Inspector, posted in a doorway, Guzman and the wounded policeman from the house, and Suprino from the rooftop all fired at the town-hall windows. The shutters and the glass were blown to bits. Moyano fell back. Everybody in the office threw themselves to the floor.… The floor was spattered with blood. There was no sign of movement from Moyano.” The whirlwind of violence, fed by nameless youths on both sides, swirls on into the night, a Walpurgisnacht of rain and mud and confusion and torture given its perhaps too-symbolic capping when a drunken crop-duster drops a load of pig manure from his plane. It is slapstick in which people actually bleed: “Guzman the auctioneer threw himself underneath the Peugeot. Two of the men got into the car, and started off at full speed. Guzman felt its whole weight run over his right hand, and a stabbing pain shot the length of his arm. When he saw the blood spurting from his crushed fingers, he felt sick, and then fainted.” The rapid interlace of dialogue and blundering encounters opens, with sickening quickness, into unbearable pain:

When dawn at last comes, all of the insurrectionists but the instigator have been killed, and two survivors from the other side have this bleary exchange: “It’s going to be a beautiful day, Sergeant.” “A day … for Perón.”

But Perón, the ultimate target of this horrific satire, did not create Latin-American authoritarianism, nor did his passing end it, even in Argentina. Soriano plausibly builds his civic nightmare upon basic human competitiveness and macho pride; he so persuasively shows how a sleepy town can descend into carnage, and its middle-aged officeholders turn into cruel civil warriors, that we ask ourselves what spell holds in harmless suspension the rivalries and ambitions of our own local governments. Not that the United States, especially in its frontier territories, has not known lawless feuds, lynchings, and criminality claiming to be guerrilla protest. But official power
is
transferred peaceably here, with a tolerance for dissent only sporadically and precariously observed in our sister continent’s many constituted republics. We may dislike our government but are not, by and large, afraid of it, or afraid of its sudden collapse, and a book like
A Funny Dirty Little War
reminds us what a luxury this is, and how thin is the skin of social order.

Humberto Costantini, another Argentinian recently returned from exile, has written
The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis
, which also describes a single nightmarish period of less than twenty-four hours. And again, comedy turns deadly, with the difference that in Soriano’s book it is as if the amiable little village world of Don Camillo were blackened by the laconic ugliness of Hemingway’s war writing, while Costantini begins with a mild, musing, midlife protagonist like Italo Svevo’s Zeno—who is, like him, preoccupied by giving up smoking. Soriano’s is a style of brutal efficiency; Costantini’s is ruminative, chatty, with humorously elaborate chapter titles, such as

Francisco Sanctis, the forty-one-year-old head accountant for a small Buenos Aires grocery wholesaling firm, happily married and economically prospering, is phoned one day (Friday, November 11, 1977) at his desk by a ghost from his past—Elena Vaccaro, who seventeen years ago was an overweight fellow university student, like the youthful Sanctis active in literary and left-wing circles. Though their relationship was casual and unconsummated, she now asks him to meet her immediately, on the flimsy excuse that an old student poem of his is being reprinted in a Venezuelan magazine. He very grudgingly agrees to rendezvous on a street corner, and she, grown unexpectedly lean and glamorous, drives him around in her Renault while explaining that what she really wants is for Sanctis to notify two men that they are going to be abducted by the goons of Air Force Intelligence that night. He is naturally reluctant to become involved, contented bourgeois that he is, and yet enough of his old idealism lingers to let this abruptly assigned mission nag at him; he spends the rest of the novel, far into the night, indecisively wandering the streets of Buenos Aires.

The exposition is leisurely, confident, urbane. The gently erotic comedy of Sanctis’s encounter with his old semi-flame (she admired him, in her plump radical days) is almost Cheeveresque, as he mentally takes her sociological temperature: “Sanctis observes her closely and draws some hasty conclusions: solid economic background, a social life, a pitiless diet consisting of a small glass of grapefruit juice and such for breakfast, dance or body expression, swimming or tennis, beauty treatments and yoga, a very busy husband, independence, the odd lighthearted affair.” In his own apartment, where he briefly alights after ten o’clock, he notices that his wife, María Angélica, has put a bottle of wine in the refrigerator and that her remarks to him are accompanied “by a certain tone and a sleepy smile that Sanctis knows well and that have to do with bed, with a certain French perfume that only now he’s aware he’s been smelling without being conscious of it.” Nevertheless, torn between domestic bliss and political conscience, he goes out into the streets again.

We have been here before, in Argentine novels, in this double invisible net where the secret police and the revolutionary underground intersect on a street corner—for example, Manuel Puig’s
Kiss of the Spiderwoman
. What struck me, following Sanctis’s increasingly ominous
perambulations, was how Borgesian this Buenos Aires is—the practically endless, undistinguished streets that gather to themselves a mysterious maziness wherein a specific address becomes charged with some unspeakable spiritual burden. For Borges, Buenos Aires is not just a city, or even his city, but all cities, a horizontal, paved embodiment of our human lostness. In an early poem, “Daybreak,” he wrote:

As Sanctis approaches, at three in the morning, the second of his two addresses, the author asserts that “something is taking place here in these placid middle-class streets in Villa Urquiza, among old acacias, rubbish bins, pretty little houses, and the silent padding of some cat on the prowl—something serious, something we don’t want to explain too closely.” Beneath the surface of social order, something atrocious waits. As with Kafka’s, Borges’s allegories may be less cosmic and more political than we think. His favorite adjectives—“atrocious” and “labyrinthine”—touch on life in a totalitarian state, and what is the Minotaur who fascinates him but the Dictator, brute power lurking and waiting to consume those trapped in the maze of inscrutable prerogatives and prohibitions? Borges’s curious theology of defective or malign gods and the terror that fringes his stately anecdotes merely give the news, it may be, about Latin-American absolutism. As Costantini’s hero moves through “the labyrinth of his own city,” he evokes other books surveyed here: “with the desperate gesture of a shipwrecked sailor,” he beckons a waiter and reminds us of Luis Velasco adrift on the “dense sea filled with strange creatures,” and in reflecting upon “this miasma of stupidity and violence in which we’re plunged up to our necks” he sums up the viscid immersion of
A Funny Dirty Little War
. All three short narratives make us feel a desperate insecurity, a dreadful bottomlessness to things, a moral chaos in which a bland decent Everyman like Sanctis becomes, against the dark background, a saint.

• • •

Adolfo Bioy Casares has been known in the English-speaking world primarily as a friend and collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges, and the coauthor of the ornate literary jokes of
Chronicles of Bustos Domecq
(1967). Bioy Casares, however, is a prolific and successful writer on his own, and nearly a generation younger than Borges—he was born in 1914, and Borges in 1899. (Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1928, Augusto Roa Bastos in 1917, Osvaldo Soriano in 1943, Humberto Costantini in 1924.) Bioy Casares’s
The Invention of Morel and Other Stories
arrives with a double Borgesian stamp: a preface by the master to the long title story and pen-and-ink illustrations by Norah Borges de Torre, Borges’s sister. The illustrations are clumsy and few and do little harm. The preface is a provocative and revealing critical document; like
The Invention of Morel
, it dates from 1940. It claims that this
Invention
is perfect (“To classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole”) and represents a blow in the good fight against that deplorable nineteenth-century invention, the plotless “psychological” novel, which includes Balzac, the Russians, and Proust. Borges was, we might say, the first self-consciously postmodern writer; his rebellion against Proust and Joyce and Woolf and James took the form of preferring Shaw, Wilde, Wells, and Chesterton. His preface offers the detective story—at its peak in the Thirties—as an example of what “works of reasoned imagination” might be. He and Bioy Casares collaborated on detective stories as well as on film scripts, anthologies, and translations. In a sense, Bioy Casares—whom Borges called “really and secretly the master” in these collaborations—armed the Borgesian counterrevolution. He provided boyish bravado, a typewriter, and, in
The Invention of Morel
, a prime text; the little novel won a municipal literary award in Buenos Aires and impressed such rising literati as Octavio Paz and Julio Cortázar. Further, it came to the attention of another postmodern theorizer, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and inspired the betranced repetitions and overlaps of his film
Last Year at Marienbad
.

Read in 1986,
The Invention of Morel
entertains in the dated way of science fiction by Wells or Jules Verne. Technology betrays its own acolytes: Wells’s Time Machine was a late-Victorian gewgaw, a “glittering metallic framework” with parts of nickel and ivory and crystal, a kind of idealized elevator cage, and Alfred Jarry went into futuristic raptures over the then-newest thing, the bicycle. Bioy Casares, as of 1940, was understandably struck by the inventions of the motion-picture projector
and the phonograph, which preserve reality as seen and heard; he imagines an island where an obsessed inventor, Morel, has constructed machines, tirelessly powered by the tides, that over and over project, in three palpable dimensions, the same recorded scenes of a week among friends. Thus he has created a kind of paradise, an eternity of returns; the original objects captured by his superphotography unfortunately wither and perish, but this seems a modest price to pay. Onto this island blunders our nameless narrator, who slowly comes to understand the illusion and, eventually, to enroll in it. Movies can’t
do
that, we want to protest, just as elevators and bicycles can’t become time machines. Nevertheless, there are ingenious technological twists: doors that normally open freeze shut when they are being projected, and broken walls implacably heal, sealing our hero in. And there are poignant moments: one of the projected beings, Faustine, becomes a love object for the castaway, and, as he disintegrates, his early life in Venezuela, from which he is a political exile, becomes another frozen paradise, projected in his head. But our interest in this rather too intricate fable, and in the six accompanying short stories from a 1948 volume,
La trama celeste
, tends to be magnetized by the elements that are, with a striking distinctness, Borgesian.

What could be more like Borges than this dream: “When I slept this afternoon, I had this dream, like a symbolic and premature commentary on my life: as I was playing a game of croquet, I learned that my part in the game was killing a man. Then, suddenly, I knew I was that man”? Or the lilt of these sentences, with their lifted eyebrow of complicated disclaimer: “He said that he waved his hand, and immediately afterward the gesture seemed false”; “After an extended stay in Paris, Horvath had returned to his own country, almost famous and totally discredited”; “He treated love and women with a dispassionate scorn that was not devoid of courtesy”? Or these fey modifiers, so curiously vibrant: “I experienced an intimate heaviness in my arms and legs”; “She was wearing a dress that was extremely green”; “He had deep circles under his eyes and an expression of astonished fatigue”? Borges’s favorite adjective, “atrocious,” recurs in Bioy Casares, and the image of a labyrinth, and that Borgesian device of the heterogeneous list, shorthand for the inventory of the maddeningly infinite universe. Abrupt islands of mathematical and topological distinctness imply the surrounding vague vastness, and the paradoxes of philosophical idealism are pursued to their monstrous conclusions. A dandified Gnosticism speaks in such an epigram as
“To be alive is to flee, in an ephemeral and paradoxical way, from matter.”