The Best Australian Essays 2017

by Anna Goldsworthy

  Some of Garner’s prejudices are less conscious than others, but I suspect she understands perfectly well that narrative truth – what Elena Ferrante calls ‘authenticity’ (as distinct from mere verisimilitude) – proceeds from a kind of dangerous honesty that is not always conscious but is, rather, half disclosed, imperfectly controlled. Garner’s gradual awakening to her unadmitted anger is what gives her best book, her novel The Spare Room (2008), much of its shattering power. Nicola, an old friend who has been diagnosed with stage IV cancer, comes from Sydney to Melbourne to stay for three weeks with the narrator, who is named Helen. (The novel is closely based on Garner’s experience in caring for a terminally ill friend; typically, she said that she kept her first name in the text so that she would be forced to admit to all the shameful, ‘ugly emotion’ she had actually felt.) Nicola is charming, elegant and maddening. She pretends to be much healthier than she is – she gives ‘a tremendous performance of being alive’, in Garner’s savage phrase – and is committed to a kind of social fraudulence that saddens and then gradually enrages her host. Helen longs for Nicola to abandon her bright laugh and fixed smile, a smile that seems to say ‘Do not ask me any questions’. Worse, she has come to Melbourne to seek alternative therapies – vitamin C injections, ozone saunas, coffee enemas – that seem nonsensical to Helen and which only make her friend sicker.

  The novel tenderly catalogues that labour of caring which is also the labour of mourning. Helen spends her days and nights washing bedsheets that Nicola has sweated through, bringing morphine pills and hot-water bottles, listening outside the bedroom door to Nicola’s snoring, which sounds ‘like someone choking’, driving her friend to the bogus Institute where she undergoes her hopeless remedies. The simple beauty of the novel’s form has to do with its internal symmetry: the two women are locked into a relationship that they can escape only if each admits what she finds most difficult to say. Helen must confess to her exhaustion, her despair at not being a better friend and nurse, her anger at Nicola’s terrible, terminal time wasting. And Nicola must admit that time is fading, that she is going to die, that her alternative therapies are an awful distraction, and that she needs proper help, a kind of assistance that Helen is not equipped to give. Nicola says, ‘I’ve never wanted to bore people with the way I feel.’

  As in The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Garner’s book is a contemporary version of Tolstoy’s novella), the mortal victim must be brought to comprehend her mortality: Helen tells Nicola, ‘You’ve got to get ready.’ There is a deeply moving scene towards the end of the book, when the two friends tearfully embrace in Helen’s yard. ‘I thought I was on the mountaintop,’ Nicola says. ‘But I’m only in the foothills.’

  All day long she kept dissolving into quiet weeping. Sometimes I would put my arms around her; sometimes we would just go on with what we were doing. The hard, impervious brightness was gone. Everything was fluid and melting. There was no need for me to speak. She looked up at me and said it herself, as I put a cup into her hand.

  ‘Death’s at the end of this, isn’t it.’

  After the anger and the tears, the book ends peacefully. Helen flies with Nicola to Sydney, and transfers her to Nicola’s very competent niece. The novel closes: ‘It was the end of my watch, and I handed her over.’ Helen has done as much as she can do. It is a typical Garner sentence, a writing lesson (all novels should end as completely) and a life lesson: spare, deserved and complexly truthful, both a confession of failure and a small song of success.

  Zama: Life at the Limits of Empire

  J.M. Coetzee

  The year is 1790, the place an unnamed outpost on the Paraguay River ruled from faraway Buenos Aires. Don Diego de Zama has been here for fourteen months, serving in the Spanish administration, separated from his wife and sons. Nostalgically, Zama looks back to the days when he was a corregidor with a district of his own to run: ‘Doctor Don Diego de Zama! … The forceful executive, the pacifier of Indians, the warrior who rendered justice without recourse to the sword …, who put down the native rebellion without wasting a drop of Spanish blood.’

  Now, under a new, centralised system of government meant to tighten Spain’s control over its colonies, chief administrators have to be Spanish-born. Zama serves as second-in-command to a Spanish gobernador: as a Creole, an americano born in the New World, he can aspire no higher. He is in his mid-thirties; his career is stagnating. He has applied for a transfer; he dreams of the letter from the viceroy that will whisk him away to Buenos Aires, but it does not come.

  Strolling around the docks, he notices a corpse floating in the water, the corpse of a monkey that had dared to quit the jungle and dive into the flux. Yet even in death the monkey is trapped amid the piles of the wharf, unable to escape downriver. Is it an omen?

  Besides his dream of being returned to civilisation, Zama dreams of a woman, not his wife, much as he loves her, but someone young and beautiful and of European birth, who will save him not only from his present state of sexual deprivation and social isolation but also from a harder-to-pin-down existential condition of yearning for he knows not what. He tries to project this dream upon various young women glimpsed in the streets, with negligible success.

  In his erotic fantasies his mistress will have a delicate way of making love such as he has never tasted before, a uniquely European way. How so? Because in Europe, where it is not so fiendishly hot, women are clean and never sweat. Alas, here he is, womanless, ‘in a country whose name a whole infinity of French and Russian ladies – an infinity of people across the world – [have] never heard.’ To such people, Europeans, real people, America is not real. Even to him America lacks reality. It is a flatland without feature in whose vastness he is lost.

  Male colleagues invite him to join them in a visit to a brothel. He declines. He has intercourse with women only if they are white and Spanish, he primly explains.

  From the small pool of white and Spanish women at hand he selects as a potential mistress the wife of a prominent landowner. Luciana is no beauty – her face puts him in mind of a horse – but she has an attractive figure (he has spied on her, bathing naked). He calls upon her in a spirit of ‘foreboding, pleasure, and tremendous irresolution’, unsure how one goes about seducing a married lady. And indeed, Luciana proves to be no pushover. In his campaign to wear her down, she is always a move ahead of him.

  As an alternative to Luciana there is Rita, the Spanish-born daughter of his landlord. But before he can get anywhere with her, her current lover, a vicious bully, humiliates her grossly in public. She pleads with Zama to avenge her. Although the role of avenger attracts him, he finds reasons not to confront his formidable rival. (Zama’s author, Antonio Di Benedetto, provides him with a neatly Freudian dream to explain his fear of potent males.)

  Unsuccessful with Spanish women, Zama has to resort to women of the town. Generally he steers clear of mulattas ‘so as not to dream of them and render myself susceptible and bring about my downfall’. The downfall to which he refers is certainly masturbation, but more significantly involves a step down the social ladder, confirming the metropolitan cliché that Creoles and mixed breeds belong together.

  A mulatta gives him an inviting look. He follows her into the dingier quarter of the town, where he is attacked by a pack of dogs. He dispatches the dogs with his rapier, then, ‘swaggering and dominant’ (his language), takes the woman. Once they are finished, she offers in a businesslike way to become his kept mistress. He is offended. ‘The episode was an affront to my right to lose myself in love. In any love born of passion, some element of idyllic charm is required.’ Later, reflecting on the fact that dogs are as yet the only creatures whose blood his sword has spilled, he dubs himself ‘dogslayer’.

  Zama is a prickly character. He holds a degree in letters and does not like it when the locals are not properly respectful. He suspects that people mock him behind his back, that plots are being cooked up to humiliate him. His relations with women – which occupy most of the novel �
� are characterised by crudity on the one hand and timidity on the other. He is vain, maladroit, narcissistic and morbidly suspicious; he is prone to excesses of lust and fits of violence, and endowed with an endless capacity for self-deception.

  He is also the author of himself, in a double sense. First, everything we hear about him comes from his own mouth, including such derogatory epithets as ‘swaggering’ and ‘dogslayer’, which suggest a certain ironic self-awareness. Second, his day-to-day actions are dictated by the promptings of his unconscious, or at least his inner self, over which he makes no effort to assert conscious control. His narcissistic pleasure in himself includes the pleasure of never knowing what he will get up to next, and thus of being free to invent himself as he goes along. On the other hand – as he intermittently recognises – his indifference to his deeper motives may be generating his many failures: ‘Something greater, I knew not what, a kind of potent negation, invisible to the eye, … superior to any strength I might muster or rebellion I might wage’, may be dictating his destiny.

  It is his self-cultivated lack of inhibition that leads him to launch an unprovoked knife attack on the only colleague who is well disposed towards him, then to sit back while the young man takes the blame and loses his job.

  Zama’s incurious and indeed amoral attitude towards his own violent impulses led some of his first readers to compare him with the Meursault of Albert Camus’s novel L’Étranger (existentialism was in vogue in the Argentina of the 1950s, when Zama first appeared). But the comparison is not helpful. Though he carries a rapier, Zama’s weapon of choice is the knife. The knife betrays him as an americano, as does his lack of polish as a seducer and (Di Benedetto will later imply) his moral immaturity. Zama is a child of the Americas. He is also a child of his times, the heady 1790s, justifying his promiscuity by invoking the rights of man – specifically the right to have sex (or, as he prefers to put it, to ‘lose myself in love’). The configuration, cultural and historical, is Latin American, not French (or Algerian).

  More important than Camus as an influence was Jorge Luis Borges, Di Benedetto’s elder contemporary and the dominant figure in the Argentine intellectual landscape of his day. In 1951 Borges had given an influential speech, ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, in which, responding to the question of whether Argentina should be developing a literary tradition of its own, he poured scorn on literary nationalism: ‘What is our Argentine tradition? … Our tradition is all of Western culture … Our patrimony is the universe.’

  Friction between Buenos Aires and the provinces has been a constant of Argentine history, dating back to colonial times, with Buenos Aires, gateway to the wider world, standing for cosmopolitanism, while the provinces adhered to older, nativist values. Borges was quintessentially a man of Buenos Aires, whereas Di Benedetto’s sympathies lay with the provinces: he chose to live and work in Mendoza, the city of his birth in the far west of the country.

  Though his regional sympathies ran deep, Di Benedetto as a young man was impatient with the stuffiness of those in charge of the cultural institutions of the provinces, the so-called generation of 1925. He immersed himself in the modern masters – Freud, Joyce, Faulkner, the French existentialists – and involved himself professionally in cinema, as a critic and writer of screenplays (Mendoza of the postwar years was a considerable centre of film culture). His first two books, Mundo animal (1953) and El pentágono (1955), are resolutely modernist, with no regional colouring. His debt to Kafka is particularly clear in Mundo animal, where he blurs the distinction between human and animal along the lines of Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ or ‘Investigations of a Dog’.

  Zama takes up directly the matter of Argentine tradition and the Argentine character: what they are, what they should be. It takes as a theme the cleavage between coast and interior, between European and American values. Naively and somewhat pathetically, its hero hankers after an unattainable Europe. Yet Di Benedetto does not use his hero’s comical hispanophilism to push the case for regional values and the literary vehicle associated with regionalism, the old-fashioned realist novel. The river port where Zama is set is barely described; we have little idea how its people dress or occupy themselves; the language of the book sometimes evokes, to the point of parody, the eighteenth-century novel of sentiment, but it more often calls up the twentieth-century theatre of the absurd (Di Benedetto was an admirer of Eugène Ionesco and of Luigi Pirandello before him). To the extent that Zama satirises cosmopolitan aspirations, it does so in a thoroughly cosmopolitan, modernist way.

  But Di Benedetto’s engagement with Borges was more far-reaching and complex than mere critique of his universalism and suspicion of his patrician politics (Borges called himself a Spencerian anarchist, meaning that he disdained the state in all its manifestations, while Di Benedetto thought of himself as a socialist). For his part, Borges clearly recognised Di Benedetto’s talent and indeed, after the publication of Zama, invited him to the capital to give a lecture at the National Library, of which he was Director.

  In 1940, along with two writer colleagues associated with the magazine Sur, Borges had edited an Antología de la literatura fantástica, a work that had a far-reaching effect on Latin American literature. In their preface the editors argued that, far from being a debased subgenre, fantasy embodied an ancient, preliterate way of seeing the world. Not only was fantasy intellectually respectable, it also had a precursor tradition among Latin American writers that was itself a branch of a greater world tradition. Borges’s own fiction would appear under the sign of the fantastic; the fantastic, deployed upon the characteristic themes of regional literature, with the narrative innovations of William Faulkner added to it, would give birth to the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez.

  The revaluation of the fantastic advocated by Borges and the writers around Sur was indispensable to Di Benedetto’s growth. As he testified in an interview shortly before his death, fantasy, coupled with the tools provided by psychoanalysis, opened the way for him as a writer to explore new realities. In the second part of Zama, the fantastic comes to the fore.

  *

  The story resumes in 1794. The colony has a new governor. Zama has acquired a woman, a penniless Spanish widow, to satisfy his physical needs, though he does not live with her. She has borne him a son, a sickly child who spends his days playing in the dirt. Her relations with Zama are entirely without tenderness. She ‘allows him in’ only when he brings money.

  A clerk in the administration named Manuel Fernández is discovered to be writing a book during office hours. The governor takes a dislike to Fernández and demands that Zama find a pretext for dismissing him. Zama reacts with irritation, directed not at the governor but at this hapless young idealist, ‘this book-writing homunculus’ lost in the outer reaches of Empire.

  To Zama, Fernández innocently confides that he writes because it gives him a sense of freedom. Since the censor is unlikely to permit publication, he will bury his manuscript in a box for his grandchildren’s grandchildren to dig up. ‘Things will be different then.’

  Zama has run up debts that he cannot settle. Out of kindness, Fernández offers to support Zama’s irregular family – indeed, to marry the unloved widow and give the child his name. Zama responds with characteristic suspiciousness: what if it is all a scheme to make him feel indebted?

  Short of money, Zama becomes a boarder in the home of a man named Soledo. Included in Soledo’s household is a woman, seen only fleetingly, who is at one point claimed (by the servants) to be Soledo’s daughter and at another to be his wife. There is another mystery woman, too, a neighbour who sits at her window staring pointedly at Zama whenever he passes. Most of Part 2 is concerned with Zama’s attempts to solve the riddle of the women: are there two women in the household or just one, who performs rapid changes of costume? Who is the woman at the window? Is the whole charade being orchestrated by Soledo to make fun of him? How can he get sexual access to the women?

  At first, Zama takes o
n the riddle as a challenge to his ingenuity. There are pages where, with a nudge from his translator, he sounds like one of Samuel Beckett’s heroes of pure intellect, spinning one far-fetched hypothesis after another to explain why the world is as it is. By degrees, however, Zama’s quest grows more urgent and indeed fevered. The woman at the window reveals herself: she is physically unattractive and no longer young. Half drunk, Zama feels free to throw her to the ground and ‘[take] her with vehemence’, that is, rape her, then, when he is finished, demand money. He is back on familiar psychic terrain: on the one hand he has a woman whom he can despise but who is sexually available, on the other a woman (or perhaps two women) who, in all her/their ‘fearsome charm’, can continue to be the unattainable (and perhaps inexistent) object of his desire.

  Zama took a long time to gestate but was written in a hurry. The haste of its composition shows most clearly in Part 2, where the dreamlike topography of Soledo’s residence will be as confusing to the reader as it is to Zama, drifting from room to darkened room trying to grasp what it is that he is after. Confusing yet fascinating: Di Benedetto lets go of the reins of narrative logic and allows the spirit to take his hero where it will.

  There is a rap at the door. It is a ragged, barefoot boy, a mysterious messenger who has appeared in Zama’s life before and will appear again. Behind the boy, as if in tableau, a trio of runaway horses are engaged in trampling a small girl to death.