The Secret of Evil (6 page)

So the Central American is outside the frame of the photograph,
sharing that pristine and deceptive territory with the object of Guyotat’s gaze:
an unknown woman armed only, for the moment, with her beauty. Their eyes will
not meet. They will pass each other by like shadows, briefly sharing the same
hazardous ambit: the itinerant theater of Paris. The Central American could
quite easily become a murderer. Perhaps, back in his country, he will, but not
here, where the only blood he could possibly shed is his own. This Pol Pot won’t
kill anyone in Paris. And actually, back in Tegucigalpa or San Salvador, he’ll
probably end up teaching in a university. As for the unknown woman, she will not
be captured by Guyotat’s asbestos nets. She’s at the bar, waiting for the
boyfriend she’ll marry before long (him or the next one), and their marriage
will be disastrous, though not without its moments of comfort. Literature
brushes past these literary creatures and kisses them on the lips, but they
don’t even notice.

The section of restaurant or café that contains the photo’s nest of
smoke continues imperturbably on its voyage through nothingness. Behind Sollers,
for instance, we can make out the fragmentary figures of three men. None of the
faces can be seen in its entirety. The man on the left, in profile: a forehead,
one eyebrow, the back part of his ear, the top of his head. The man on the
right: a little piece of his forehead, his cheekbone, strands of dark hair. The
man in the middle, who seems to be calling the tune: most of his forehead,
traversed by two clearly visible wrinkles, his eyebrows, the bridge of his nose,
and a discreet quiff. Behind them, there is a pane of glass and behind the glass
many people walking about curiously among stalls or exhibition stands,
bookstands perhaps, mostly facing away from our characters (who have their backs
to them in turn), except for a child with a round face and straight bangs,
wearing a jacket that may be too small for him, looking sideways toward the
café, as if from that distance he could observe everything going on inside,
which, on the face of it, seems rather unlikely.

And in a corner, to the right: the waiting man, the listening man. His
face appears just above Marc Devade’s blond hair. His hair is dark and abundant,
his eyebrows are thick, he is thin. In one hand (a hand resting listlessly
against his right temple), he is holding a cigarette. A spiral of smoke is
rising from the cigarette toward the ceiling, and the camera has captured it
almost as if it were the image of a ghost. Telekinesis. An expert could identify
the brand of cigarette that he’s smoking in half a second just by the solid look
of that smoke. Gauloises, no doubt. He’s gazing off toward the photo’s
right-hand side — that is, he’s pretending not to know that the photo is being
taken, but in a way he too is posing.

And there is yet another person: careful examination reveals
something protruding from Guyotat’s neck like a cancerous growth, which turns
out to be made up of a nose, a withered forehead, the outline of an upper lip,
the profile of a man who is looking, with a certain gravity, in the same
direction as the smoking man, although their gazes could not be more
different.

And then the photo is occluded and all that is left is the smoke of a
Gauloise floating in the air, as if the viewfinder had suddenly swung to the
right, toward the black hole of chance, and Sollers comes to a sudden halt in
the street, a street near the Place Wagram, and feels in his pockets as if he
had left his address book behind or lost it, and Marie-Thérèse Réveillé is
driving on the Boulevard Malesherbes, near the Place Wagram, and J.-J. Goux is
talking on the phone with Marc Devade (J.-J.’s voice is unsteady, Devade isn’t
saying a word), and Guyotat and Henric are walking on Rue Saint-André des Arts,
heading for Rue Dauphine, and by chance they run into Carla Devade who says
hello and joins them, and Julia Kristeva is coming out of class surrounded by a
retinue of students, quite a few of whom are foreign (two Spaniards, a Mexican,
an Italian, two Germans), and once more the photo dissolves into
nothingness.

Aurora borealis. Terrible dawn. As they open their eyes, they
are almost transparent. Marc Devade, alone in bed, snug in gray pajamas,
dreaming of the Académie Goncourt. J.-J. Goux at his window, watching clouds
float through the sky over Paris and comparing them unfavorably to certain
clouds in paintings by Pisarro or the clouds in his nightmare. Julia Kristeva is
sleeping and her calm face seems an Assyrian mask until, with a very slight
wince of discomfort, she wakes. Philippe Sollers is in the kitchen, leaning on
the edge of the sink, and blood is dripping from his right index finger. Carla
Devade is climbing the stairs to her apartment after having spent the night with
Guyotat. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé is making coffee and reading a book.

Jacques Henric is walking through a dark parking garage, which echoes
to the sound of his boots on the cement.

A world of forms is unfolding before his eyes, a world of distant
noises. The possibility of fear is approaching the way wind approaches a
provincial capital. Henric stops, his heart speeds up, he tries to orient
himself. Before, he could at least glimpse shadows and silhouettes at the far
end of the parking lot; now it seems hermetically black, like the darkness in an
empty coffin at the bottom of a crypt. So he decides to keep still. In that
stillness, his heartbeat gradually slows and memory brings back images of the
day. He remembers Guyotat, whom he secretly admires, openly pursuing little
Carla. Once again, he sees them smiling and then he sees them walking away down
a street where yellow lights scatter and regroup sporadically, without any
obvious pattern, although Henric knows deep down that everything is determined
in some way, everything is causally linked to something else, and human nature
leaves very little room for the truly gratuitous. He touches his crotch. He is
startled by this movement, the first he has made for some time. He has an
erection and yet he doesn’t feel sexually aroused in any way.

T
HE
V
AGARIES
OF THE
L
ITERATURE
OF
D
OOM

It’s odd that it was bourgeois writers who transported José
Hernández’s
Martín Fierro
to the center of the Argentine canon. The
point is debatable, of course, but the truth is that Fierro, the gaucho,
paradigm of the dispossessed, of the brave man (but also of the thug), presides
over a canon, the Argentine canon, that only keeps getting stranger. As a poem,
Martín Fierro
is nothing out of this world. As a novel, however,
it’s alive, full of meanings to explore, which means that the wind still gusts
(or blasts) through it, it still smells of the out-of-doors, it still cheerfully
accepts the blows of fate. Nevertheless, it’s a novel of freedom and squalor,
not of good breeding and manners. It’s a novel about bravery rather than
intelligence, let alone morality.

If
Martín Fierro
dominates Argentine literature and its place
is in the center of the canon, the work of Borges, probably the greatest writer
born in Latin America, is only a footnote.

It’s odd that Borges wrote so much and so well about
Martín
Fierro
. Not just the young Borges, who can be nationalistic at times,
if only on the page, but also the adult Borges, who is occasionally thrown into
ecstasies (strange ecstasies, as if he were contemplating the gestures of the
Sphinx) by the four most memorable scenes in Hernández’s work, and who sometimes
even writes perfect, listless stories with plots imitative of Hernández’s. When
Borges recalls Hernández, it’s not with the affection and admiration with which
he refers to Güiraldes, or with the surprise and resignation evoked by Evaristo
Carriego, that familiar bogeyman. With Hernández, or with
Martín
Fierro
, Borges seems to be acting, acting to perfection, in fact, but in a
play that strikes him from the beginning as not so much odious as wrongheaded.
And yet, odious or wrongheaded, it also seems to him inevitable. In this sense,
his silent death in Geneva is highly eloquent. More than eloquent. In fact, his
death in Geneva talks a blue streak.

With Borges alive, Argentine literature becomes what most
readers think of as Argentine literature. That is: there’s Macedonio Fernández,
who at times resembles the Valéry of Buenos Aires; there’s Güiraldes, who’s rich
and ailing; there’s Ezequiel Martínez Estrada; there’s Marechal, who later turns
Peronist; there’s Mujica Láinez; there’s Bioy Casares, who writes Latin
America’s first and best fantastic novel, though all the writers of Latin
America rush to deny it; there’s Bianco; there’s Mallea, the pedant; there’s
Silvina Ocampo; there’s Sábato; there’s Cortázar, best of them all; there’s
Roberto Arlt, most hard done by. When Borges dies, everything suddenly comes to
an end. It’s as if Merlin had died, though Buenos Aires’ literary circles aren’t
exactly Camelot. Gone, most of all, is the reign of balance. Apollonian
intelligence gives way to Dionysian desperation. Sleep, an often hypocritical,
false, accommodating, cowardly sleep, becomes nightmare, a nightmare that’s
often honest, loyal, brave, a nightmare that operates without a safety net, but
a nightmare in the end, and, what’s worse, a literary nightmare, literary
suicide, a literary dead end.

And yet with the passage of the years it’s fair to ask whether the
nightmare, or the skin of the nightmare, is really as radical as its exponents
proclaimed. Many of them live much better than I do. In this sense, I can say
that I’m an Apollonian rat and they’re starting to look more and more like
angora or Siamese cats neatly deflead by a collar labeled Acme or Dionysius,
which at this point in history amounts to the same thing.

Regrettably, Argentine literature today has three reference points.
Two are public. The third is secret. All three are in some sense reactions
against Borges. All three ultimately represent a step backward and are
conservative, not revolutionary, although all three, or at least two of them,
have set themselves up as leftist alternatives.

The first is the fiefdom of Osvaldo Soriano, who was a good minor
novelist. When it comes to Soriano, you have to have a brain full of fecal
matter to see him as someone around whom a literary movement can be built. I
don’t mean he’s bad. As I’ve said: he’s good, he’s fun, he’s essentially an
author of crime novels or something vaguely like crime novels, whose main virtue
— praised at length by the always perceptive Spanish critical establishment — is
his sparing use of adjectives, a restraint lost, in any case, after his fourth
or fifth book. Hardly the basis for a school. Apart from Soriano’s kindness and
generosity, which are said to be great, I suspect that his sway is due to sales,
to his accessibility, his mass readership, although to speak of a mass
readership when we’re really talking about twenty thousand people is clearly an
exaggeration. What Argentine writers have learned from Soriano is that they,
too, can make money. No need to write original books, like Cortázar or Bioy, or
total novels, like Cortázar or Marechal, or perfect stories, like Cortázar
or Bioy, and no need, especially, to squander your time and health in a lousy
library when you’re never going to win a Nobel Prize anyway. All you have to do
is write like Soriano. A little bit of humor, lots of Buenos Aires solidarity
and camaraderie, a dash of tango, a worn-out boxer or two, an old but solid
Marlowe. But, sobbing, I ask myself on my knees, solid where? Solid in heaven,
solid in the toilet of your literary agent? What kind of nobody are you, anyway?
You have an agent? And an Argentine agent, no less?

If the Argentine writer answers this last question in the affirmative,
we can be sure that he won’t write like Soriano but like Thomas Mann, like the
Thomas Mann of
Faust
. Or, dizzied by the vastness of the pampa, like
Goethe himself.

The second line of descent is more complex. It begins with Roberto
Arlt, though it’s likely that Arlt is totally innocent of this mess. Let’s say,
to put it modestly, that Arlt is Jesus Christ. Argentina is Israel, of course,
and Buenos Aires is Jerusalem. Arlt is born and lives a rather short life, dying
at forty-two, if I’m not mistaken. He’s a contemporary of Borges. Borges is born
in 1899 and Arlt in 1900. But unlike Borges, Arlt grows up poor, and as an
adolescent he goes to work instead of to Geneva. Arlt’s most frequently held job
was as a reporter, and it’s in the light of the newspaper trade that one views
many of his virtues, as well as his defects. Arlt is quick, bold, malleable, a
born survivor, but he’s also an autodidact, though not an autodidact in the
sense that Borges was: Arlt’s apprenticeship proceeds in disorder and chaos,
through the reading of terrible translations, in the gutter rather than the
library. Arlt is a Russian, a character out of Dostoyevsky, whereas Borges is an
Englishman, a character out of Chesterton or Shaw or Stevenson. Sometimes,
despite himself, Borges even seems like a character out of Kipling. In the war
between the literary factions of Boedo and Florida, Arlt is with Boedo, although
my impression is that his thirst for battle was never excessive. His oeuvre
consists of two story collections and three novels, though in fact he wrote four
novels, and his uncollected stories, stories that appeared in newspapers and
magazines and that Arlt could write while he talked about women with his fellow
reporters, would fill at least two more books. He’s also the author of a volume
of newspaper columns called
Aguafuertes porteños
[Etchings from Buenos
Aires], in the best French impressionist tradition, and
Aguafuertes
españoles
[Etchings from Spain], sketches of daily life in Spain in the
1930s, which are full of gypsies, the poor, and the benevolent. He tried to get
rich through deals that had nothing to do with the Argentine literature of the
day, though they did have something to do with science fiction, and they were
always categorical failures. Then he died and, as he would have said, that was
the end of everything.

But it wasn’t the end of everything, because like Jesus Christ,
Arlt had his St. Paul. Arlt’s St. Paul, the founder of his church, is Ricardo
Piglia. I often ask myself: What would have happened if Piglia, instead of
falling in love with Arlt, had fallen in love with Gombrowicz? Why didn’t Piglia
devote himself to spreading the Gombrowiczian good news, or specialize in Juan
Emar, the Chilean writer who bears a marked resemblance to the monument to the
unknown soldier? A mystery. In any case, it’s Piglia who raises up Arlt in his
own coffin soaring over Buenos Aires, in a very Piglian or Arltian scene, though
one that takes place only in Piglia’s imagination, not in reality. It wasn’t a
crane that lowered Arlt’s coffin. The stairs were wide enough for the job. The
body in the box wasn’t a heavyweight champion’s.

By this I don’t mean to say that Arlt is a bad writer, because
in fact he’s an excellent writer, nor do I mean to say that Piglia is a bad
writer, because I think Piglia is one of the best Latin American novelists
writing today. The problem is, I find it hard to stand the nonsense — thuggish
nonsense, doomy nonsense — that Piglia knits around Arlt, who’s probably the
only innocent person in this whole business. I can in no way condone bad
translators of Russian, as Nabokov said to Edmund Wilson while mixing his third
martini, and I can’t accept plagiarism as one of the arts. Seen as a closet or a
basement, Arlt’s work is fine. Seen as the main room of the house, it’s a
macabre joke. Seen as the kitchen, it promises food poisoning. Seen as the
bathroom, it’ll end up giving us scabies. Seen as the library, it’s a guarantee
of the destruction of literature.

Or in other words: the literature of doom has to exist, but if nothing
else exists, it’s the end of literature.

Like solipsistic literature — so in vogue in Europe now that the young
Henry James is again roaming about at will — a literature of the I, of extreme
subjectivity, of course must and should exist. But if all writers were
solipsists, literature would turn into the obligatory military service of the
mini-me or into a river of autobiographies, memoirs, journals that would soon
become a cesspit, and then, again, literature would cease to exist. Because who
really cares about the sentimental meanderings of a professor? Who can say,
without lying through his teeth, that the daily routine of a dreary professor in
Madrid, no matter how distinguished, is more interesting than the nightmares and
dreams and ambitions of the celebrated and ridiculous Carlos Argentino Daneri?
No one with half a brain. Listen: I don’t have anything against autobiographies,
so long as the writer has a penis that’s twelve inches long when erect. So long
as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her
old age. So long as the author of the tome in question has lived a remarkable
life. It goes without saying that if I had to choose between the solipsists and
the bad boys of the literature of doom I’d take the latter. But only as a lesser
evil.

The third lineage in play in contemporary or post-Borgesian Argentine
literature is the one that begins with Osvaldo Lamborghini. This is the secret
current. It’s as secret as the life of Lamborghini, who died in Barcelona in
1985, if I’m not mistaken, and who left as literary executor his most beloved
disciple, César Aira, which is like a rat naming a hungry cat as executor.

If Arlt, who as a writer is the best of the three, is the
basement of the house that is Argentine literature, and Soriano is a vase in the
guest room, Lamborghini is a little box on a shelf in the basement. A little
cardboard box, covered in dust. And if you open the box, what you find inside is
hell. Forgive me for being so melodramatic. I always have the same problem with
Lamborghini. There’s no way to describe his work without falling into hyperbole.
The word
cruelty
fits it like a glove.
Harshness
does too, but
especially
cruelty.
The unsuspecting reader may glimpse the sort of
sadomasochistic game of writing workshops that charitable souls with pedagogical
inclinations organize in insane asylums. Perhaps, but that doesn’t go far
enough. Lamborghini is always two steps ahead of (or behind) his pursuers.

It’s strange to think about Lamborghini now. He died at forty-five,
which means that I’m four years older than he was then. Sometimes I pick up one
of his two books, edited by Aira — which is only a figure of speech, since they
might just as well have been edited by the linotypist or by the doorman at his
publishing house in Barcelona, Serbal — and I can hardly read it, not because I
think it’s bad but because it scares me, especially all of
Tadeys
, an
excruciating novel, which I read (two or three pages at a time, not a page more)
only when I feel especially brave. Few books can be said to smell of blood,
spilled guts, bodily fluids, unpardonable acts.

Today, when it’s so fashionable to talk about nihilists (although
what’s usually meant by this is Islamic terrorists, who aren’t nihilists at
all), it isn’t a bad idea to take a look at the work of a real nihilist. The
problem with Lamborghini is that he ended up in the wrong profession. He should
have gone to work as a hit man, or a prostitute, or a gravedigger, which are
less complicated jobs than trying to destroy literature. Literature is an
armor-plated machine. It doesn’t care about writers. Sometimes it doesn’t even
notice they exist. Literature’s enemy is something else, something much bigger
and more powerful, that in the end will conquer it. But that’s another story.

Lamborghini’s friends are fated to plagiarize him ad nauseam,
something that might — if he could see them vomit — make Lamborghini himself
happy. They’re also fated to write badly, horribly, except for Aira, who
maintains a gray, uniform prose that, sometimes, when he’s faithful to
Lamborghini, crystallizes into memorable works, like the story “Cecil Taylor” or
the novella
How I Became a Nun
, but that in its neo-avant-garde and
Rousselian (and utterly acritical) drift, is mostly just boring. Prose that
devours itself without finding a way to move forward. A criticism that
translates into the acceptance — qualified, of course — of that tropical figure,
the professional Latin American writer, who always has a word of praise for
anyone who asks for it.