The Insufferable Gaucho (12 page)

Illness and Travel

Traveling makes you ill. In the old days, doctors used to recommend
travel, especially for patients suffering from nervous illnesses. The patients,
who were generally wealthy, complied and set off on long trips that lasted
months and sometimes years. Poor people who had nervous illnesses didn’t get to
travel. Some, presumably, went crazy. But the traveling patients also went
crazy, or, worse still, acquired new illnesses as they moved from one city or
climate or culinary culture to another. Really, it’s healthier not to travel;
it’s healthier not to budge and never leave home, warmly wrapped up in winter,
only removing your scarf in summertime; it’s healthier not to open your mouth or
blink; it’s healthier not to breathe. But the fact is, we breathe and travel.
Myself, for example, I began traveling very young, at the age of seven or eight.
First in my father’s truck, on lonely Chilean highways that had a post-nuclear
feel to them and made my hair bristle, then in trains and buses, until at the
age of fifteen, I boarded a plane for the first time and went to live in Mexico.
From that moment on, I was constantly traveling. Consequence: multiple
illnesses. In childhood: major headaches, which made my parents wonder if I had
a nervous illness, and whether it might be advisable for me to undertake, as
soon as possible, a long therapeutic voyage. In adolescence: insomnia and
problems of a sexual nature. As a young man: the loss of my teeth, which I left
here and there on my way from country to country, like Hansel and Gretel’s
breadcrumbs; a bad diet, which gave me heartburn and then gastritis; excessive
reading, which weakened my eyes, so I had to wear glasses; calluses on my feet
from long, aimless walks; and an endless string of lingering colds and flus. I
was poor, lived rough, and thought myself lucky because, after all, I was free
of life-threatening illnesses. My sex-life was immoderate but I never caught a
venereal disease. I read immoderately, but I never wanted to be a successful
author. I even regarded the loss of my teeth as a kind of homage to Gary Snyder,
whose life of Zen wandering had led him to neglect dental care. But it all
catches up with you. Children. Books. Illness. The voyage comes to an end.

Illness and Dead Ends

Baudelaire’s poem is called “The Voyage.” It is a long and delirious
poem, possessed of the delirium that results from extreme lucidity, and this is
not the moment to read it all the way through. Here are the first lines in
Richard Howard’s translation:

The child enthralled by lithographs and maps

can satisfy his hunger for the world

The poem, then, begins with a child.
Naturally
the poem of adventure and horror begins with the pure
gaze of a child. Then it goes on:

One morning we set out. Our heart is full,

our mind ablaze with rancor and disgust,

we yield it all to the rhythm of the waves,

our infinite self awash on the finite sea:

some are escaping from their country’s shame,

some from the horror of life at home, and some

—astrologers blinded by a woman’s stare—

are fugitives from Circe’s tyranny;

rather than be turned to swine they drug

themselves on wind and sea and glowing skies;

rain and snow and incinerating suns

gradually erase her kisses’ scars.

But only those who leave for leaving’s sake

are travelers; hearts tugging like balloons,

they never balk at what they call their fate

and, not knowing why, keep muttering “away” . . .

In a way, the voyage undertaken by the crew in Baudelaire’s poem is
similar to the voyage of a convict ship. I shall set off, I shall venture into
unknown territory, and see what I find, see what happens. But first I shall give
up everything. Or to put it another way: genuine travel requires travelers who
have nothing to lose. The voyage, this long and hazardous nineteenth-century
voyage, resembles the patient’s voyage on a gurney, from his room to the
operating theater, where masked men and women await him, like bandits from the
sect of the Hashishin. It’s true that the early stages of the voyage are not
devoid of paradisiacal visions, which owe more to the travelers’ desires or
cultural background than to reality:

Awesome travelers! What noble chronicles

we read in your unfathomable eyes!

Open the sea-chests of your memories

The poem also says: Tell us what you’ve seen! And the traveler, or
the ghost that represents the traveler and his companions, replies by listing
the circles of Hell. Baudelaire’s traveler clearly isn’t saying that the flesh
is sad or that he has read all the books, although he just as clearly knows that
entropy’s gem and trophy, the flesh, is more than merely sad, and that once a
single book has been read, all the others have been read as well. Baudelaire’s
traveler has a full heart and a mind ablaze with rancor and disgust, which means
that he’s probably a radical, modern traveler, although of course he’s someone
who, understandably, wants to come through; he wants to
see
, but he
also wants to come through it alive. The voyage, as it unfolds in the poem, is
like a ship or an unruly caravan heading straight for the abyss, but the
traveler, to judge from his disgust, desperation, and scorn, wants to come
through it alive. And what he finds in the end, like Ulysses or the patient
traveling on his gurney who confuses the ceiling with the abyss, is his own
image:

It is a bitter truth our travels teach!

Tiny and monotonous, the world

has shown—will always show us—what we are:

oases of fear in the wasteland of ennui!

In that line alone there is more than enough. In the middle of a
desert of ennui, an oasis of fear, or horror. There is no more lucid diagnosis
of the illness of modern humanity. To break out of ennui, to escape from
boredom, all we have at our disposal—and it’s not even automatically at our
disposal, again we have to make an effort—is horror, in other words, evil.
Either we live like zombies, like slaves fed on soma, or we become slave
drivers, malignant individuals, like that guy who, after killing his wife and
three children, said, as the sweat poured off him, that he felt strange,
possessed by something he’d never known: freedom, and then he said that the
victims had deserved it, although a few hours later, when he’d calmed down a
bit, he also said that no one deserved to die so horribly, and added that he’d
probably gone crazy and told the police not to listen to him. An oasis is always
an oasis, especially if you come to it from a desert of boredom. In an oasis you
can drink, eat, tend to your wounds, and rest, but if it’s an oasis of horror,
if that’s the only sort there is, the traveler will be able to confirm, and this
time irrefutably, that the flesh is sad, that a day comes when all the books
have indeed been read, and that travel is the pursuit of a mirage. All the
indications are that every oasis in existence has either attained or is drifting
toward the condition of horror.

Illness and the Documentary

One of the most vivid images of illness I can recall is of a guy
whose name I’ve forgotten, a New York artist who worked in the space between
begging and the avant-garde, between the adepts of fist-fucking and the
modern-day mendicants. One night, years ago, very late, when the TV audience had
dwindled to me, I saw him in a documentary. He was an extreme masochist, and
extracted the raw materials of his art from his proclivity or fate or incurable
vice. Half actor, half painter. As I remember, he wasn’t very tall and he was
going bald. He filmed his experiments: scenes or dramatizations of pain. Pain
that grew more and more intense, and sometimes brought the artist to the brink
of death. One day, after a routine visit to the hospital, they tell him he has a
fatal illness. At first he is surprised. But the surprise doesn’t last long.
Almost straightaway, the guy begins to film his final performance, which, as
opposed to the earlier ones, turns out to be admirably restrained, at least at
the start. He seems calm and, above all, subdued, as if he had ceased to believe
in the effectiveness of wild gestures and overacting. We see him, for example,
on a bicycle, pedaling along a kind of seaside boulevard—it must be Coney
Island—then sitting on a breakwater, reminiscing about unrelated scenes from his
childhood and adolescence while he looks at the ocean and occasionally throws a
sidelong glance at the camera. His voice and expression are neither cold nor
warm. He doesn’t sound like an alien, or a man desperately hiding under his bed
with his eyes shut tight. Perhaps he has the voice, and the expression, of a
blind man, but if so, it is clearly the voice of a blind man addressing himself
to the blind. I wouldn’t say that he has serenely accepted his fate or resolved
to resist it with all his strength, what I would say is that he is a man who is
utterly indifferent to his fate. The final scenes take place in the hospital.
The guy knows he won’t be getting out of there alive; he knows that death is the
only thing left, but he still looks at the camera, whose function is to document
this final performance. And only at this point does the sleepless viewer realize
that there are in fact two cameras, and two films: the documentary that he is
watching on television, a French or German production, and the documentary
recording the performance, which will follow the artist whose name I’ve
forgotten or never knew right up to the moment of his death, the documentary
that he is directing, with an iron hand or an iron gaze, from his procrustean
bed. That’s how it is. A voice, the voice of the French or German narrator, says
goodbye to the New Yorker, and then, when the screen has faded to black,
pronounces the date of his death, a few weeks later. The pain artist’s
documentary, however, follows the dying step by step, but we don’t see that, we
can only imagine it, or let the image fade to black and read the clinical date
of his death, because if we watched, if we saw, it would be unbearable.

Illness and Poetry

Between the vast deserts of boredom and the not-so-scarce oases of
horror, there is, however, a third option, or perhaps a delusion, which
Baudelaire indicates in the following lines:

Once we have burned our brains out, we can
plunge

to Hell or Heaven—any abyss will do—

deep in the Unknown to find the
new
!

That final line, deep in the Unknown to find the new, is art’s paltry
flag pitting itself against the horror that adds to horror without making a
substantial difference, just as one infinity added to another produces an
infinite sum. A losing battle from the start, like all the battles poets fight.
This is something that Lautréamont seems to contradict, because his voyage takes
him from the periphery to the metropolis, and his way of traveling and seeing
remains cloaked in the most impenetrable mystery, so that we can’t tell if we’re
dealing with a militant nihilist or an outrageous optimist or the secret
mastermind of the imminent Commune; and it’s something that Rimbaud clearly
understood, since he plunged with equal fervor into reading, sex, and travel,
only to discover and accept, with a diamond-like lucidity, that writing doesn’t
matter at all (writing is obviously the same as reading, and sometimes it’s
quite similar to traveling, and it can even, on special occasions, resemble sex,
but all that, Rimbaud tells us, is a mirage: there is only the desert and from
time to time the remote, degrading lights of an oasis). And then along comes
Mallarmé, the least innocent of all the great poets, who says that we must
travel, we must set off traveling again. At this point, even the most naïve
reader has to wonder: What’s got into Mallarmé? Why is he so enthusiastic? Is he
trying to sell us a trip or sending us to our deaths with our hands and feet
tied? Is this an elaborate joke or simply a pattern of sounds? It would be
utterly absurd to suppose that Mallarmé had not read Baudelaire. So what is he
trying to do? The answer, I think, is perfectly simple. Mallarmé wants to start
all over again, even though he knows that the voyage and the voyagers are
doomed. In other words, for the author of
Igitur
, the illness afflicts
not only our actions, but also language itself. But while we are looking for the
antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the
new
, which can only
be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex,
books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it
happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.

Illness and Tests

And now it is time to return to that enormous elevator, the biggest
I’ve ever seen, an elevator in which there was space enough for a shepherd to
pen a smallish flock of sheep, or a farmer to stable two mad cows, or a nurse to
fit two empty gurneys, and in which I was torn between asking the tiny
doctor—almost as small as a Japanese doll—if she would make love with me, or at
least give it a try, and (this was the likelier option) bursting into tears,
like Alice in Wonderland, and flooding the elevator not with blood, as in
Kubrick’s
The Shining
, but with salt water. This was one of those
situations in which good manners, which are never redundant, and rarely a
hindrance, did in fact hinder me, and soon the Japanese doctor and I were shut
in a cubicle, with a window from which you could see the back part of the
hospital, doing some very odd tests, which seemed to me exactly like the tests
you find on the puzzle page of the Sunday paper. I was careful to do them as
well as I could, as if I wanted to prove to her that my specialist was
mistaken—a futile enterprise, because however perfectly I did the tests, the
little Japanese doctor remained impassive: not even a tiny smile of
encouragement. Between tests, while she was getting the next one ready, we
talked. I asked her about the chances of success with a liver transplant. Vely
good, she said. What percent? I asked. Sixty per cent, she said. Jesus, I said,
that’s not much. In politics it’s absolute majolity, she said. One of the tests,
maybe the simplest, made a big impression on me. It consisted of holding my
hands out in a vertical position for a few seconds, that is, with the fingers
pointing up, the palms facing her and the backs to me. I asked her what the hell
that test was about. Her reply was that at a more advanced stage of my illness,
I wouldn’t be able to hold my fingers in that position. They would, inevitably,
curve toward her. I think I said: Christ almighty. Maybe I laughed. In any case,
every day since then, wherever I happen to be, I take that test. I hold my hands
out, palms facing away, and for a few seconds I examine my knuckles, my nails,
the wrinkles that form on each phalange. The day when my fingers can’t hold
themselves up straight, I don’t really know what I’ll do, although I do know
what I
won’t
do. Mallarmé wrote that a roll of the dice will never
abolish chance. And yet every day the dice have to be rolled, just as the
vertical-fingers test has to be taken every day.