In no danger of extinction, meanwhile, are the cultural attachés who on nights when the moon is full imagine themselves patrons. It goes without saying, since everybody takes it for granted, that cultural attachés are more attaché than cultural. During their brief reigns their friends take what they can get, which may not be much, but which for them is a lot, everything.
Also in no danger of extinction are those Latin American professors at American universities. Their idea of the patron is based on brute force and boundless cowardice. Most are on the left, politically speaking. To attend a dinner with them and their favorites is like gazing into a creepy diorama in which the chief of a clan of cavemen gnaws a leg while his acolytes nod and laugh. The patron-professor in Illinois or Iowa or South Carolina resembles Stalin and that’s the strangest and most original thing about him.
Then comes an amorphous mass of patrons of different stripes and assorted misfortunes. There are the neurotic virgins, the good Samaritans, the sourpusses, the frustrated housewives, the suicidal bureaucrats, the poet who suddenly discovers he has no talent, the person who thinks no one understands him, the drunk who recites Sallustius, the fat man who wishes he were thin, the bitter man who wants to create a new canon, the neostructuralist who doesn’t understand half of what he says, the priest who yearns for hell, the lady who insists on good manners, the businessman who writes sonnets.
Behind this crowd, however, hides the one true patron. If you have patience enough to search, maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of what you’re looking for. And when you find it, you’ll probably be disappointed. It isn’t the devil. It isn’t the State. It isn’t a magical child. It’s the void.
§All translations from Archilochus are by Guy Davenport, from
Archilochus, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age, Univ. of California Press, 1980. —tr.
III.
(SEPTEMBER 2002 – JANUARY 2003)
JIM
Like everybody else, I once had a friend called Jim. I never saw a sadder American. Once he left for Peru on a trip that should have lasted six months at least, but two months later there he was again. What is poetry, Jim? the Mexican street kids would ask. Jim would listen to them and then he’d vomit. Lexicon, eloquence, quest for the truth. In Central America he was mugged several times. Which was odd for someone who’d been a marine and was a Vietnam vet. His wife was a Chicana poet who every so often threatened to leave him.
Once I saw him watching the fire-swallowers on the streets of Mexico City. I saw him from behind and I didn’t say hello, but it was clearly Jim. The ragged hair, the dirty white shirt, the back hunched as if it still felt the weight of a rucksack and of fear. The red neck, a neck that somehow suggested a lynching in the countryside, a black and white countryside without billboards or the lights of gas stations, a countryside as the countryside is and should be: endless vacant lots without remedy, bricked- or boarded-up rooms from which we’ve escaped and that await our return.
Jim had his hands in his pockets. The fire-swallower shook his torch and laughed fiercely. With his blackened face, he might have been thirty-five or fifteen. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and a vertical scar rose from his navel to his breastbone. Every so often he filled his mouth with flammable liquid and spat out a long snake of fire. People stopped to watch and then went on their way, except for Jim, who stood motionless on the edge of the sidewalk, as if he expected something more from the fire-swallower, a tenth signal after having deciphered the usual nine, or as if in the fire-swallower’s sooty face he had spotted the face of an old friend or someone he had killed. For a long time I stood watching him. At the time I was eighteen or nineteen and I thought I was immortal. If I had known that I wasn’t, I would have turned around and gotten out of there. Maybe I got tired of staring at Jim’s back and the faces of the fire-swallowers. The fact is that I went up to him and called his name. Jim didn’t seem to hear me. When he turned around at last I saw that his face was sweaty. He seemed feverish and was slow to recognize me: he nodded at me and then turned back toward the fire-swallower. When I reached him I realized that he was crying. He was probably feverish too. At the same time, I discovered — with less astonishment than with which I write it now — that the fire-swallower was working exclusively for him. Occasionally the flames flickered out just a few feet from where we were standing.
Are you trying to get barbecued? I asked. A stupid, thoughtless thing to say, but suddenly I realized that that was exactly what Jim wanted. “Screw me, voodoo me / screw me, voodoo me,” was the chorus, I seem to remember, of a song that was popular that year in some dive bars. Screwed and under some voodoo curse is what Jim looked like he was. Let’s get out of here, I said. I also asked whether he was high, whether he was sick. He shook his head. The fire-swallower glanced at us. Then, with his cheeks puffed out like Eolus, the god of the wind, he came toward us. I knew in an instant that it wasn’t exactly wind that he was going to spew. Let’s go, I said, and I pulled Jim away from the terrible edge of the sidewalk.
We went off down the street, toward Reforma, and a few blocks away we parted. Jim didn’t open his mouth the whole time. I never saw him again.
THE SUICIDE OF GABIREL FERRATER
Countless writers have committed suicide and some of their deaths still retain the original glow, the aura of legend, the blast force or the impact of implosion that so frightened their contemporaries, those who experienced the suicide from up close, because the victim was a friend or a teacher or a colleague, someone they only really noticed at the moment of death. There are suicides that are masterpieces of black humor, like that of the surrealist Jacques Rigaut, or of Jacques Vaché, a forerunner of surrealism. There are suicides that threaten our notion of culture, like that of Walter Benjamin; and others, like that of Hemingway, that seem more like a customs procedure, a long-postponed encounter in an airport.
The suicide of Gabriel Ferrater, one of the best Catalan poets of the second half of the twentieth century, fits the category of cerebral or consciously premeditated suicide, though this in no way means that Ferrater spent his life stroking his own suicide, as other poets stroke their overdeveloped egos. On the contrary, it seems that sometime in his twenties, closer to thirty than twenty, Ferrater decided to kill himself, and he chose the year 1972, a year as ordinary as any other except that it was the year he would turn fifty, a round number and a landmark age. To live past fifty, he decided, was not simply a waste of time but a surrender to the indignities of age.
After that he gave it no further thought, though it’s likely he mentioned it from time to time while out drinking with a few of the younger poets who loved him so much, like Barral and Gil de Biedma. As the fateful date approached but was still very far off, he devoted himself body and soul to reading, translating (Kafka, Chomsky), fucking, drinking, traveling, visiting museums, riding around Barcelona on his motorcycle with quarts of whiskey in his system, making friends, falling in love with very strange women. The photographs we have of him show a generally handsome man, sometimes with the look of a screen actor, white hair, black-framed glasses, turtleneck sweater, hard and intelligent features, lips with a slight (and more than sufficient) sardonic tilt — lips that must have been feared in his day.
He only wrote a few books of poems. Three, if I remember correctly. All incomparable. In any case, Ferrater lived his life — and wrote his poems — like a Roman. When at last the year 1972 came and he turned fifty, he stepped forth to meet his fate and killed himself, in Sant Cugat del Vallès, a little town near Barcelona. No one found it strange.
RODRIGO REY ROSA IN MALI (I THINK)
It might be a good idea to discuss Rey Rosa’s latest books, the book about India and his most recent novel, a little gem that takes a new angle on the noir, a genre in which many try to make their mark and few succeed. To say that Rodrigo Rey Rosa is the most rigorous writer of my generation and at the same time the most transparent, the best crafter of stories and the brightest star, is to say n
othing new.
Today I would rather remember a story that he told me. The story is about a trip to an African country — Mali, I think, though I can’t be sure. In any case, Rey Rosa flies into the capital, a chaotic city near the coast. After spending a few days there he travels by bus to a town in the interior. There the road ends, or perhaps it instead becomes uncertain, like a desert track that a gust of wind could erase.
The town is near a river and Rey Rosa takes a boat that sails interminably upstream. Finally he reaches a village, and after walking around and talking to people, he comes to a house, a one-room brick house, which is where he was heading. The house — which belongs to a Mallorcan painter, probably one of the best contemporary painters — is empty. In it there’s a chest and in that chest, safe from termites, are the painter’s books. That night Rey Rosa reads until late, by candlelight, because of course there’s no electricity. Then he covers himself with a blanket and goes to sleep.
For a few days he stays at the village, which hardly has enough huts to deserve the name. He buys food from the locals, drinks tea by the river, takes long walks to the edge of the desert. One day he finishes the book he’s borrowed from the by now legendary chest and then he puts it back, locks up the house, and leaves. Anyone else would have started back immediately. Rey Rosa, however, leaves the village by the back door, as you might say, and heads for the mountains instead of the river. I’ve forgotten what they’re called. All I know is that at dusk they take on a bluish tinge that gradually shades from pale to metallic blue. Darkness falls, of course, as he walks in the desert and that night he sleeps among the wild things.
The next day he sets out again. And so it goes, until he reaches the mountains, which cradle small barren valleys, where the sea of sand is wearing away the rocks. He spends yet another night there. Then he returns to the village, the river, the town, the bus, the capital, and the plane that carries him back to Paris, where he was living at the time.
When he told me the story, I said that a trip like that would kill me. Rodrigo Rey Rosa — who believes in life as only children and those who’ve felt the presence of death can — replied that it was nothing.
A FEW WORDS FOR ENRIQUE LIHN
He was without a doubt the best poet of his generation, the so-called Generación del ’50, and one of the three or four best Latin American poets born between 1925 and 1935. Or maybe one of the two best. Or maybe he was the best. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that doesn’t mean much.
In my adolescence, to talk about Lihn and Teillier as opposing choices was commonplace. The sensitive kids, those who didn’t want to grow up (or those who wanted to grow up as fast as possible), preferred Teillier. Those who were prepared to argue the point preferred Lihn. This wasn’t the least of his virtues. To read much of his poetry is to encounter a voice that questions everything. But it isn’t the voice of hell, or of millenarian prophecies, or even a prophetic ego, but the voice of the enlightened citizen, a citizen who awaits the arrival of modernism or who is resignedly modern. A citizen who has learned at the feet of Parra, Lihn’s teacher and fellow prankster, and whose Latin American vision is often dazzling and original. But all the dazzle in Lihn is modulated by a constant exercise of intelligence. In the 1970s, that clarity would cause him to be stigmatized and declared anathema by the dogmatic and neo-Stalinist left, which would even go so far as to accuse him of connivance with Pinochetism. The same people who back then didn’t speak up to defend Reinaldo Arenas and who today adapt themselves like Putins¶ to the new situation, tried to wipe him from the map, to delegitimize a voice that had always considered itself a bastard voice, a child at the mercy of fate and necessity, a lone rider.
Are we Chileans deserving of Lihn? This is a pointless question, something he would never have asked himself. I think we are. Not really, not entirely, but we are deserving of him, even if only because of the pure souls, the idiot princes, and the cheerful illiterates who the country once produced with such strange generosity and who are still being produced today, or so one hears from those who’ve been there recently, though in more limited quantities. In a certain light, Lihn himself could pass for an idiot prince and a cheerful illiterate.
As a writer of poetry, to which he was always faithful, there’s only one poet in the Spanish language to whom he can be compared, Jaime Gil de Biedma, though Lihn’s range of tone is much wider. As a writer of essays, reviews, manifestos, and even libel, no Chilean writer was ever more free or unerring. In fiction he never reached the heights of Donoso or Edwards, though the suspicion will always linger that deep down, like all of Chile’s great poets, he judged the art of fiction as something unnecessary, something short of life-saving.
And yet his stories are still alive, as is La orquesta de cristal [The Glass Orchestra], a book so hard to find that it’s become a mythical object, and that I don’t dare to call a novel, though I know that if it has to be called something, novel comes closest to fitting. There are two prose writers of the Generación del ’50 who have yet to be discovered: Lihn and Giaconi.
These days it’s strange to think of Lihn, Giaconi, Parra, Teillier, Rodrigo Lira, or Gonzalo Rojas, of poets like Maquieira and Bertoni, of young writers like Contreras and Collyer; it’s strange to think of them, and of so many others. One is left with the strange feeling that for once literature has measured up to reality. The famous re, the re, the re, the re-al-it-y.
ALL SUBJECTS WITH FRESÁN
My friendship with Rodrigo Fresán is based not only on mutual esteem (and affection, on my side) but also on our endless conversations on the most random topics, which often turn into arguments, though this doesn’t always happen in Barcelona, because I live on the Costa Brava and not even on the Costa Brava but more concretely in the living room of my house in Blanes, and he lives in Barcelona, and despite the fact that both of us travel quite a bit (he more than I), neither of us has a car or knows how to drive, and with time we’re becoming sedentary.
In general, it could be said that we talk about many things. I’ll try to list them in no particular order. 1) The Latin American hell that, especially on weekends, is concentrated around some Kentucky Fried Chickens and McDonald’s. 2) The doings of the Buenos Aires photographer Alfredo Garófano, childhood friend of Rodrigo and now a friend of mine and of anyone with the least bit of discernment. 3) Bad translations. 4) Serial killers and mass murderers. 5) Prospective leisure as the antidote to prospective poetry. 6) The vast number of writers who should retire after writing their first book or their second or their third or their fourth or their fifth. 7) The superiority of the work of Basquiat to that of Haring, or vice versa. 8) The works of Borges and the works of Bioy. 9) The advisablity of retiring to a ranch in Mexico near a volcano to finish writing The Turkey Buzzard Trilogy. 10) Wrinkles in the space-time continuum. 11) The kind of majestic women you’ve never met who come up to you in a bar and whisper in your ear that they have AIDS (or that they don’t). 12) Gombrowicz and his conception of immaturity. 13) Philip K. Dick, whom we both unreservedly admire. 14) The likelihood of a war between Chile and Argentina and its possible and impossible consequences. 15) The life of Proust and the life of Stendhal. 16) The activities of some professors in the United States. 17) The sexual practices of titi monkeys and ants and great cetaceans. 18) Colleagues who must be avoided like limpet mines. 19) Ignacio Echevarría, whom both of us love and admire. 20) Some Mexican writers liked by me and not by him, and some Argentine writers liked by me and not by him. 21) Barcelonan manners. 22) David Lynch and the prolixity of David Foster Wallace. 23) Chabon and Palahniuk, whom he likes and I don’t. 24) Wittgenstein and his plumbing and carpentry skills. 25) Some twilit dinners, which actually, to the surprise of the diner, become theater pieces in five acts. 26) Trashy TV game shows. 27) The end of the world. 28) Kubrick’s films, which Fresán loves so much that I’m beginning to hate them. 29) The incredible war between the planet of the novel-creatures and the planet of the story-beings. 30) The possibility tha
t when the novel awakes from its iron dreams, the story will still be there.
Of course, these thirty items come nowhere near to exhausting our topics of conversation. Let me add just a couple of things. I laugh a lot when I talk to Fresán. We almost never talk about death.
MEMORIES OF LOS ÁNGELES
A few months ago I was flying from Madrid to Barcelona and I ended up sitting next to a young guy, a Chilean. He turned out to be from Los Ángeles, Bío-Bío, the place I lived longest in Chile. He was on his way to Cairo, on a business trip, god knows what he was selling, and our conversation was brief and not particularly illuminating. He said that Los Ángeles had grown a lot but was still a town, he mentioned two or three factories, he talked about a ranch that produced I don’t know what. He was an ordinary and profoundly ignorant kid, but he knew how to travel first class.
After the plane took off I traded seats with a woman who wanted to be next to her children and I went to sit next to a photographer who was sweating profusely. He looked like a Pakistani, so I thought that maybe after a while he would pull out a nail file and hijack the plane. If I have to die, I said to myself, I’d rather die gnawing on the ankle of a Pakistani than sitting next to a Chilean from Los Ángeles. Then I began to think about my childhood and the part of my adolescence that I spent in Bío-Bío.
To my surprise, I realized that I remembered lots of things. For example, I remembered the wooden walls of the house where we lived. And how the walls (and the floorboards) were soaked during the endless southern rains. I also remembered a dwarf lady who lived five houses away. A dwarf lady from Germany, teacher of something at some school, who was the living image of exile, or anyway the nineteenth-century image, the Pontian image. For a while I thought this woman was actually an extraterrestrial.
Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003 Page 19
