Zama

by Antonio Di Benedetto

  Whatever the real reason, Di Benedetto would not be silenced. He was forbidden to work as a writer while in prison but was allowed to correspond, so he devised a way of including short stories in his correspondence. He would begin, “I had a lovely dream last night; let me tell you about it,” and then write an entire story in letters so microscopic they had to be deciphered through a magnifying glass.

  In the end, the German translation of Zama served him better than anything else he ever published. Bamberg, the book’s translator, persuaded the Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll to write a letter to the Argentine president Jorge Videla on Di Benedetto’s behalf. That letter, along with the intervention of the Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato, finally secured his release in September 1977. His 1983 story collection, Cuentos del exilio, is dedicated to Böll and Sábato, in gratitude.

  Once freed, Di Benedetto, like most who had born the brunt of the generals’ madness and managed to survive, opted to go immediately into exile. He was not unscathed. “I’ll never be sure whether I was jailed for something I published,” he said. “I would have suffered less if they’d told me what it was exactly. But I never knew. That uncertainty is the worst of the tortures.” The short stories he wrote in prison were published in 1978 in Spain under the title Absurdos. With forays to France and the United States—a residency at the MacDowell Colony in 1981—he lived in Madrid until 1984 when he returned to Argentina to reside, at last, in Buenos Aires.

  The writer Sergio Chejfec recalls that in 1985, when he was in his late twenties, he noticed an elderly man sitting alone in a dimly lit Buenos Aires pizzeria. Chejfec, who felt an “intense, secular veneration” for Di Benedetto’s work, lurked outside the doorway waiting for the man to come outside so he could be certain it really was Di Benedetto. It was, and the two struck up a conversation. Chejfec spoke of his admiration for Di Benedetto’s work and mentioned that he was a regular contributor to a prominent literary magazine. Di Benedetto expressed regret for his decision to move to Buenos Aires—he’d been better off in Madrid, he said—but had little use for the offer implicit in Chejfec’s declaration. Before moving off down the street, he told the would-be promoter of his work, “You’re young. That’s why you can believe my work is good. But that’s not how it is. Estoy entregado a la nada. I am delivered up to nothingness.” A photo taken around that time shows Di Benedetto bearded, bare-chested, and scrawny, next to a portrait of Dostoyevsky. A year later, just after receiving SADE’s annual Gran Premio de Honor, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Though he won many prizes, in Argentina and abroad, for novels, short stories, journalism, and a screenplay; though he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and was decorated by the French and Italian governments; and though Zama, during his lifetime, appeared in five subsequent editions, and in German, French, Italian, and Polish translations, and had two scholarly books and a doctoral dissertation dedicated to it, and even—a particular source of pleasure and pride to him—a Madrid bookstore named after it, in 1986, the year he died, only a handful of people anywhere would have declared Antonio Di Benedetto to be a major figure in twentieth-century Latin American literature.

  •

  One of them was a young Chilean writer who lived in Spain. While Roberto Bolaño never met Di Benedetto and may never even have corresponded with him, in 1997, he won a regional literary award— the Premio de Narración Ciudad de San Sebastián—for a short story titled “Sensini.” The title character is a writer’s writer, a cult figure, an Argentine novelist exiled in Spain whose name—Luis Antonio Sensini—the story’s anonymous protagonist is startled to see listed as the third-place winner in a provincial writing competition in which he himself has placed fourth. He describes Sensini’s entry—in Chris Andrews’s elegant translation, first published in Last Evenings on Earth (2007)—as “claustrophobic, very much in Sensini’s manner, set in a world where vast geographical spaces could suddenly shrink to the dimensions of a coffin.” The narrator decides that Sensini’s is “better than the winning story and the one that came second, as well as those that came fourth, fifth and sixth.” The two writers begin to correspond. Any question as to whether this fictional writer is a stand-in for Di Benedetto is banished by the evocation of Sensini’s masterpiece:

  Entitled Ugarte, it was about a series of moments in the life of Juan de Ugarte, a bureaucrat in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata at the end of the eighteenth century. Some (mainly Spanish) critics had dismissed it as Kafka in the colonies, but gradually the novel had made its way, and by [then] Ugarte had recruited a small group of devoted readers, scattered around Latin America and Spain, most of whom knew each other, either as friends or as gratuitously bitter enemies.

  The story ends some years after Sensini’s death when his daughter, Miranda, makes an unexpected visit to the narrator who until then has seen the writer and his family only in the photographs Sensini sometimes attached to his letters. The ending is inconclusive, a quality the story ascribes to Sensini’s work and one that many critics, including Andrews, have noted as characteristic of Bolaño’s, as well. Miranda and the narrator are standing on a terrace late at night, drinks in hand, looking down at the lights of Girona, when “Suddenly I realized that we were at peace, that for some mysterious reason the two of us had reached a state of peace, and that from now on, imperceptibly, things would begin to change. As if the world really was shifting.”

  The world really was shifting. Bolaño’s own work made its way— and not gradually—to vast international acclaim in the years before and after his death in 2003. “Sensini,” for example, has since 2012 been included in The Norton Anthology of World Literature. But the shift was not only toward Bolaño. Readers of his celebrated 1998 Savage Detectives know that Los Suicidas is a rare brand of mezcal, no longer in production, which the novel’s protagonists drink over the course of a very long night of conversation. More and more of them are also aware that Los suicidas is the title of Di Benedetto’s third novel.

  As the generation of Di Benedetto enthusiasts such as Chejfec and Bolaño grew in prominence, a regional publishing house, Adriana Hidalgo Editora, based in Córdoba, Argentina, began reissuing his work. The first of the new editions appeared in 1999 with a prologue by Saer. When the novelists Ricardo Piglia and Osvaldo Tcherkaski were asked in 2001 to select the twenty-four greatest works of Argentine literature for a series titled Biblioteca Argentina, they included Zama. In 2004, Ejercicios de pudor, a highly influential study of Di Benedetto by Jimena Néspolo, was published by Adriana Hidalgo. The fiftieth anniversary of Zama’s publication was celebrated in 2006 with a weeklong festival in Buenos Aires.

  Since then, a feature film titled Aballay, based on a story Di Benedetto wrote while in prison, was selected as the 2011 Argentine entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Currently, Lucrecia Martel, widely regarded as one of the foremost contemporary Argentine moviemakers, and particularly known for her Salta trilogy—three films about the provincial Argentine town where she was born—is working on an eagerly awaited version of Zama. Long after he and his creator gave up waiting for it, Don Diego de Zama’s ship would appear, finally, to have come in.

  •

  Zama—the novel and its eponymous protagonist—is out of place in time, premature or belated, prescient or outmoded. The de-lay of more than half a century between the novel’s first publication and this, its first appearance in English, only exacerbates that condition. Zama willfully disorients. Its highly precise, linear chronology throws into question all relations between past, present, and future. It anchors itself emphatically in the final decade of the eighteenth century while simultaneously refuting that pretense with a language that only occasionally toys with archaism and a narrative style, perspective, and antihero very much of the twentieth century. Now the novel is reborn into the twenty-first century.

  There are hazards attendant upon its introduction into English at this late date. Written only half a decade after the 1949 preface to The Kingdom of This W
orld in which Alejo Carpentier first put forth his notion of lo real maravilloso (an expression translated into Eng-lish as “magical realism”), Zama appears in English a couple of years after the death of Gabriel García Márquez, the writer most associated with that trend—though, like Di Benedetto, García Márquez devoted much of his life to journalism.

  Di Benedetto knew well how difficult it was to elude this blanket category that came to dominate the international reception of Latin American literature. At the time of his death, he was organizing a collection of one hundred of his short stories for the publishing house Alianza. He proposed a table of contents that sorted them by subject matter or technique. Among the subheads were “On Metamorphoses,” “Psychological,” “Tortured,” “Oneiric,” “Realist,” “Magical Realism” (he used “Realismo mágico,” a Spanish back formation from the English translation of lo real maravilloso), “Lyrical Realism,” “Fanta-Historical Realism,” “On the Unreal,” “Trans-Realist,” “Objectivist,” “Naturalist,” “Fables,” “With Animals But Not Fables,” “Zoo-Botanical,” “Fantastical,” and “Ominous.” After his death the project foundered and was never published; the caustic attempt to drown out the cliché of magical realism in a volley of parodic counterparts was in vain.

  García Márquez often cited Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a primary influence on his work. The first translation of it published in Latin America came out in 1938 and was signed by Borges. (García Márquez’s memoir calls it a “false translation”; the Spanish researcher Christina Pestaña has demonstrated that Borges’s “translation” is identical in every respect to an unsigned Spanish rendering, probably by Margarita Nelken, published in Madrid in 1925.) In Di Benedetto’s first book, Mundo animal, which concerns all sorts of transactions and transmutations between human and animal, the profound influence of Kafka and particularly of The Metamorphosis seems much in evidence, though Di Benedetto would claim that he didn’t read Kafka until 1954, the year after Mundo animal came out, the year before he wrote Zama.

  Underscoring the connection to Kafka, Bolaño’s Sensini has a son —unlike Di Benedetto, whose only child was a daughter—whose name was Gregorio and who disappeared into the maw of the Dirty War; Gregorio’s sister confirms the narrator’s suspicion that he was named after Gregor Samsa. That prompts a closer look at the name Zama. In Rioplatense Spanish the z is sibilant, like the English s, which suggests that the name might be read less as a truncated version of the historical Zamalloa than as an almost exact repetition of Samsa.

  Zama, though, is a Samsa in reverse, a negative image of Samsa, not trapped in home and family but trapped in exile away from home and family. While the circumstances of which he is a victim do not seem to be of Samsa’s own creation, Zama is aware, dimly or fully, and more or less from the start, that he himself is the primary engenderer of his own difficulties and delusions. He might be described as a would-be magical realist who can’t quite extricate himself from reality. In Samsa’s own mind, he truly, palpably is an insect, while Zama’s hallucinations are largely self-induced, which, despite his best efforts to the contrary, he knows. Even his urgent need to abandon himself to love is thwarted by his despairing drive for lucidity and the blind contempt it engenders. The unreal, trans-realist, or fanta-historical aspects of the novel mainly amount to nightmares that are nightmares, fever dreams induced by fever, and a glum form of the pathetic fallacy that leads Zama to see himself in the flora and fauna that surround him. In the last of the novel’s three sections, Zama defines himself in a suicidal act of demystification: “But I had done for them what no one had ever tried to do for me. To say, to their hopes: No.”

  •

  What defines Zama for the reader, however, is his own first-person singular—yet another of the elements, like space and time, in which he is lost. His haughty, often peremptory voice ranges between ranting and stillness, dejection and delirium, meandering circumlocution and curtly abrupt finality. The voice even occasionally evinces an ironic detachment from its own predicament, momentarily tempered by what Edwin Frank—to whose neurosurgical edit this translation owes a greater debt than can be told—calls “a certain abject nobility.” As I worked on the translation, I looked for English counterparts to that voice. Certain lines from James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson seem to strike a similar plainspoken yet strident note, at once archaic and timeless: “Sir, he was impertinent to me, and I beat him.” And, even more so: “The great business of his life, he said, was to escape from himself.”

  Finally, Samuel Beckett was the writer whose English I found most useful in making the translation. And no, Di Benedetto cannot have been aware of Beckett when he wrote this book. One line from Molloy, the first novel in Beckett’s trilogy, published in French in 1951 and in Beckett’s English translation in 1955, the year Di Benedetto wrote this novel, seems both a perfect counterpart to the prose voice of Zama and a perfect summation of the story it tells.

  I include it here as an epigraph to the translation: “The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.”

  —ESTHER ALLEN

  ZAMA

  A las víctimas

  de la espera.

  To the victims

  of expectation.

  1790

  1

  I left the city and made my way downriver alone, to meet the ship I awaited without knowing when it would come.

  I reached the old wharf, that inexplicable structure. The city and its harbor have always been where they are, a quarter-league farther upriver.

  I observed, among its pilings, the writhing patch of water that ebbs between them.

  A dead monkey, still whole, still undecomposed, drifted back and forth with a certain precision upon those ripples and eddies without exit. All his life the water at forest’s edge had beckoned him to a journey, a journey he did not take until he was no longer a monkey but only a monkey’s corpse. The water that bore him up tried to bear him away, but he was caught among the posts of the decrepit wharf and there he was, ready to go and not going. And there we were.

  There we were: Ready to go and not going.

  •

  Nature, as she exists in this country, is most gentle, and for that very reason I’m at pains to keep my distance from her. For she is childlike and might captivate me, and in moments of lassitude when I’m barely half awake she may bring me sudden, treacherous thoughts that persist far too long and give neither satisfaction nor repose. Nature holds up the mirror of external things; were I to submit to her wiles I might recognize myself there.

  Such musings were for myself alone, excluded from conversations with the Gobernador or any of the rest of them by my scant or even nonexistent capacity for making friends with whom I might unburden myself. The waiting, the exasperation, were a long soliloquy I communicated to no one, as the occasionally rather insolent Ventura Prieto would remind me. That afternoon he attached himself to me—not having sought me out, of course, merely by chance. He remarked that in this flat country I seemed to have been cast down a well. To me, he said it only the once, but to others many times, heedless of what everyone knew: that I was a fighting cock, or, at the very least, ringmaster of a cockfighting pit.

  He appeared as the monkey was entertaining me and I pointed it out in order to distract him and ward off questions about what I might be waiting for in that spot. And Ventura Prieto, my inferior, pondered, as if seeking to outdo me with some greater curiosity or stranger discovery of his own. He then proceeded to recount one of his so-called investigations, though whether they were any such thing I cannot say, for I suspected him of insinuating comparisons. These investigations of his disconcerted me and sometimes echoed intolerably in my thoughts.

  He said that in this very river there lives a fish that the river spurns, and the fish must spend its life going to and fro like the monkey, though with greater difficulty, for the fish is alive and must wage continual battle ag
ainst the ebb and flow that seek to cast it upon dry land. And these long-suffering fish, Ventura Prieto said— so attached, perhaps despite themselves, to the very element that repudiates them—must devote nearly all their energies to the conquest of remaining in place, and though they are always in danger of being cast from the river’s bosom, so much so that they are never to be found in the middle of the current but always and only along the banks, the span of their life is long, longer than that of other fish. Only when their effort exhausts them to the point that they can no longer seek food do they succumb, he said.

  I had followed this story, which I did not believe, with morbid curiosity. The longer I considered the matter, the more reluctant I was to think of this fish and myself at the same time. I therefore proposed to Ventura Prieto that we return to the city, and stifled my opinions.

  I sought to occupy my mind with the reason for my stroll: the fact that I was awaiting a ship, and that if a ship came it might bring a message from Marta and the children, even if she and they did not come, or were never to come.

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