Empty Words

by MARIO LEVRERO

  Because these days my body needs more looking after than before, when it was sturdier and I could subject it to greater privation and strain. Looking after it costs money, to earn money it’s necessary to accept responsibilities, and these responsibilities take up time. But I’ve also acquired new commitments for other reasons—love, for example.

  For a while now, what I’ve been trying to do is get through all the work I’ve accumulated so I can accumulate some proper free time instead. Recently, though, I’ve realized this is the wrong strategy, that it’s based on a misconception. That I’ve put the cart in front of the horse. You can’t arrive at free time by doing more things, because everything you do leads to more things to do, and before you know it you’re trapped in an interminable tangle of minor everyday oppressions. It would be better to draw a nice simplifying line between the essential and the nonessential tasks and then do no more than the absolute minimum of the nonessential ones.

  But that makes me feel uneasy, too, for reasons I don’t fully understand. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, because the things on the “nonessential” side of the line are themselves also essential, only on a deeper and less rational level. And now my discourse seems to have become tangled as well, and what’s more, Alicia’s just come back from her errands with some important things to tell me. Maybe it’s for the best, though; maybe this interruption will release me from the tangle of the discourse.

  Exercises

  December 4

  I’m making myself prioritize these exercises today, despite the psychological pressure I feel to do other, more urgent, work. Although really, trying to be more diligent about these exercises than I have been is itself a way of prioritizing urgent, profitable things above all else. Fundamentally, it’s a battle to recover my identity and principles at a time of great upheaval. I can’t let the whirlwind carry me away. This whirlwind, if I’m not mistaken, began with the moment the keys to the new house were handed over, or perhaps before, with the search for a new house and the decision to buy the one we eventually bought. But back then it was less a whirlwind than a few strongish gusts; only when we took possession of the new keys did the real maelstrom begin. I think it’s caused, essentially, by the interaction of two personalities as different as Alicia’s and my own. My character obliges me, and enables me, to do things one way and not another. I approach tasks with a degree of Zen: as far as I’m concerned, things should be done when they’re good and ready, and their readiness is something I need to feel coming from within myself. I think there’s a right time for everything, which arises from mysterious external causes and/or an internal event that follows a long and equally internal process of elaboration. There comes a point when you inevitably see, feel, sense, and know how things should be done, and at that precise moment you’re given the strength to do them. Alicia, meanwhile, takes the opposite approach, which I’d describe as a “lack of respect for things.” She believes in getting things done through sheer willpower, regardless of circumstances (external or internal), come what may.

  (second sheet)

  I’ll go on exploring this topic while I wait for my visitor to arrive. I don’t want to get caught up in any of my more complicated work, which would be more annoying to interrupt.

  There’s no denying that Alicia’s approach makes her a lot more efficient than me. I’m often jealous of how easy she seems to find it to solve impossible problems. And yet, from the times in my life when I’ve taken a similar approach and acted as efficiently, I’ve learned that such practical efficiency can come at a high spiritual cost.

  … (interruption) …

  The efficient approach to getting things done involves overdeveloping the practical part of the brain, in a kind of militarization of the self. Problems become enemies to confront (and ultimately destroy), not friends to incorporate. They have to be faced head-on and resolved, not in the way that naturally suits each problem but in the way that seems “to me” to be the quickest, most economical, and most convenient at the time. There’s a certain lack of respect for the problem, like the lack of respect people show nature by pruning a tree into a geometric shape.

  This behavior is no good for the spirit, and neither, in the long run, is it truly efficient. We cut the thread instead of patiently untangling the knot, which means we can’t use it again afterwards. The practical approach irritates the Zen approach and vice versa. Alicia and I, then, are in a constant state of mutual irritation. Things get done any old how, and in the end neither of us is even sure how we should be doing them. Alicia thinks we should move as soon as possible, and I think we should move under the best possible conditions, and this conflict is creating the whirlwind.

  The Discourse

  December 4

  What freed me from the tangled discourse in the end was another commotion in Argentina. I was able to watch this one on television, even from outside the country (though admittedly we’re not very far away). I spent hours staring at the TV screen, transfixed by the processions of tanks and the sound of gunshots of different calibers ringing out in those surroundings I know and love.

  The discourse itself didn’t change, but it disappeared for a while. And today I’m starting again, with nothing, remembering only very hazily that at some point I have to be brave enough to explore the “controlled psychosis” cordoning off the Montevidean 80 percent of my life from the rest of it, and feeling, equally hazily, that there’s another more recent and in no way controlled psychosis to explore relating to the four years I spent living in Buenos Aires, which I’ve also erased from my affective memory. What percentage of me is going to be left?

  * * *

  An interruption, per usual. But this time it’s a meaningful interruption, a kind of intrusion of my own discourse into the absence of discourse, into the nothingness of today. Alicia’s just come into the house, dragging the dog behind her and muttering under her breath. She shuts him in the courtyard “in disgrace” and then announces very angrily that he’s just killed a bird.

  Exercises

  December 5

  The harder I try to stay sane, to keep myself as whole as possible in the midst of the whirlwind, the harder Alicia works to make the whirlwind more intense. She’s attacking from all sides.

  She decided to buy a house and set her heart on a far more expensive one than she could afford at the time. I found myself chained to my work as a crossword-setter, which is paid in dollars, as a way of helping with the debt. Meanwhile, fairly predictably, my work got more complicated thanks to some materials that needed preparing in advance, since the people I work with are on holiday in January. My work is generally more complicated these days, too, in that I’ve agreed to write some articles for a newspaper, which pays better than the other things I do. On top of that, there’s a good chance I’m going to have a couple of books published. And on top of that, I want to write something literary rather than profitable. But the thing is, none of this seems to be enough. Not only did Alicia choose (with my approval, I should add) the particularly expensive house, but she also wants to move into it as soon as possible—ideally by the end of the year. And that’s still not enough: she’s also making a whole string of demands that involve a whole string of things being done to the house before we move in. She’s delegated responsibility for all of this to me, wanting me to take it as a sign of trust. When I try to do things my way, however, she thinks I’m wasting time and starts doing them herself. Then she “asks for help” with the messes she gets into, and I feel myself getting worse and worse, more and more blocked and useless and with more and more to do, and all the while time is passing, dispersing into a mist in which nothing is ever resolved. I become stricter and more authoritarian, fighting to maintain some semblance of a psychological structure. But the whirlwind is gathering speed, and it’s carrying me away.

  The Discourse

  December 5

  Over the past few years, I’ve noticed time and again that whenever I begin writing a text like this one, which I start
ed several days ago, something bird-related takes place. It happened twice in Buenos Aires, and it happened here in Colonia last year, when I began a short story (which I later finished, and then burned on the stove). And the other day, just as I was drifting away from the story of the dog, a bird made a dramatic entrance inside the dog’s mouth. Things like this are disconcerting and troublesome, most of all because of their symbolic power. It’s as if circumstances had suddenly placed me smack in the middle of a topic I’m trying to avoid, a topic I still don’t feel mature enough to address.

  When I started writing this, my idea was simply to recover the form of an existing discourse and wait for its contents to be revealed as I went along. Now, though, it looks as if just by beginning to write—and not for the first time—I’ve inadvertently come up against a secret mechanism, a secret way things have of working, and my clumsy fingers bashing away at the typewriter keys have somehow interfered with it. I feel trapped inside a mechanism I know nothing about, gripped by the magical fear that my apparently private, personal, and innocent act has put me in touch with a formidable and dangerous world, a world I can’t control and can only barely, uncertainly, feel is there.

  That section of my past, to which I still haven’t managed to restore the emotional charge, goes on pressuring me from the hidden recesses of my unconscious. Meanwhile, my external reality is also pressuring me more and more, to work, to act, to do all kinds of things I don’t want to do. I’m trapped between two worlds, which ceaselessly call to me like two gaping, insatiable mouths. For too long now I’ve been unable to pay enough attention to one of the mouths, and when you don’t pay it enough attention, it ends up wanting to devour everything. I need to stand firm and decide what my priorities are: the most important thing has to be the inner self, the intimate call, the release of those frozen, and perhaps even slightly rotten, feelings. But I’m scared to face up to the task. I don’t know how to go about it; I haven’t got time to stop and look carefully into myself. And I’m frightened of getting lost for too long in that world of shadows, false pretenses, and old pain.

  Exercises

  December 6

  The person writing these lines is the beginning of the new ME. Last night, when I was undressing for the shower, I saw an image of myself in the little bathroom mirror that I didn’t like one bit. “I hate this body,” I thought. Then I realized that I don’t hate this fat, misshapen body because it’s fat and misshapen, but instead that my body has become this way precisely because I’ve been hating it for so long. I realized that hating it will never help me to reshape it the way I’d like, and I also thought that being this physically monstrous must be an accurate reflection of how psychologically monstrous I am. “I need to change, body and soul,” I told myself then.

  When I woke up this morning, I hadn’t forgotten or even broken off from this line of thinking. And I’d made a resolution—not a very clear one, admittedly, though the underlying attitude is clear enough.

  The general line of thinking is this: (1) I’m too focused on what’s happening around me and have lost all contact with myself; (2) My violent assault on my body and mind has been going on for too long now (the first cigarette of the day when I don’t even feel like it, “to wake myself up”; the first meal of the day when I’m not even hungry, out of habit; and so on. I need to “eat when I’m hungry and sleep when I’m tired”); (3) Everything I have to do can be put off indefinitely; what I can’t put off any longer is taking care of myself.

  That’s the general idea, and I’d like to be able to develop it further. It’s very Zen, very antianxiety. But it won’t be easy, because the Devil sometimes works in league with a person I love. I hope I’ll be strong enough.

  December 7

  My perception of my body is an age-old problem. It began with my enforced immobility between the ages of three and eight or nine, during which time I learned to separate myself from my body and live in my head. Other incidents later on complicated things further, and every so often I find myself “living in my head” for extended periods of time. When I do, it’s as if the body exists only when it hurts, and even then I know I have plenty of tricks to avoid feeling pain. For example, when I spend a long time reading the way I did last night, I don’t notice the aches and cramps of prolonged bad posture until the moment I put the book down. Then I feel guilty—because of how late it’s gotten, because I know I’ll be tired and sore when I wake up, because my sight’s getting worse by the day and now my eyes are weepy with exhaustion, and above all because I can tell I’ve fallen into that particular kind of trance that comes from lacking the willpower to change. Is it really too late to turn things around? I don’t think I have much in the way of inner resources at the moment. I could do with some of that famous “motivation,” but sadly I can’t find any inside myself, and there’s no point expecting it to come from anywhere else.

  December 8

  Today I read a newspaper article about the “disease of the nineties”: chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). I may not have all the symptoms it mentioned, but I certainly have some. Apparently the syndrome has to do with some kind of virus. I don’t know about that, but I’m in no doubt whatsoever about my chronic fatigue, and there seem to be similarities between it and the CFS described in the article, especially psychologically, when it comes to the features that distinguish it from ordinary depression (for example, wanting to do things you can’t do because of the fatigue that hits you as soon as you start your day, or even as soon as you wake up). Since it was discovered only recently, I have no way of fine-tuning my diagnosis; I’ll have to keep treating myself as if I had depression. Yesterday I started taking antidepressants. I haven’t noticed anything so far, and nor was I expecting to, since I know they take a few days to have any visible effect. I just want to put an end to this feeling of being crushed, once and for all. Maybe the medication will help, but at the moment it’s hard to see a clear future. I can’t even catch a glimpse of an acceptable present.

  Whatever my illness is, if Alicia’s hyperactivity and absences aren’t causing it, they must at least be making it worse. Her absences have been getting longer (I mean her absences from our relationship and the way she fills her time completely, without leaving a single gap; not necessarily absences that involve being out of the house). Things are postponed over and over again, and the day when we start “living together” never seems to arrive.

  December 9

  I’m still waiting to see the effects of the medication: if there have been any so far, they’ve been entirely negative. I don’t feel well at all, and my symptoms and complaints have gotten even worse. I’ll see how things progress in the coming days, but I still think circumstances play such an important role that I can expect only so much from unilateral work on myself. It’s like being submerged in a pool of poisonous water: if my environment doesn’t change, how can I possibly find the formula I need to overcome my condition? I don’t know why things are going this way. Maybe there’s a basic incompatibility between us that we can’t or don’t want to see. Whatever it is, time is passing, and far from being resolved or reconciled, things are reaching ever more complicated extremes. The new house, the work that needs to be done on it, and the upcoming move are all making the situation more fraught. And yet everything is subjective: no one’s forcing these time frames on us. Alicia is imposing her own rhythm on the preparations for the move, and it’s a rhythm I can’t keep up with. I still haven’t been able to put into practice my system of mentally “placing myself” in the new house and imagining how things will work there. For me this is absolutely crucial, but I don’t know if I’ll manage it now because everything is in motion, because Alicia has seized control, because the house is taking on forms that haven’t been “lived” by me (or anyone else), because this is all being forced upon me—just as here, in this house, rituals and ways of life that I haven’t had the chance to examine are imposed on me. We don’t do the things we do because of any genuine need; they’re not necessary
. We do them because there’s a pattern, an abstract form, acting on us all like a supernatural force.

  December 10

  I don’t know how I expect to have good handwriting in my current state. Never mind, I’m carrying on with these exercises anyway, out of discipline—on the condition that they don’t require too much of it. But let me have another go, properly this time. O.K., every now and then it gets better. I’ll aim to keep it like this. Good. (How does the G go again?) G G G G G G—no, I’m not convinced at all. G G G. Good, this is the best I can manage today. I feel physically shattered, as if I’ve been beaten up by half a dozen well-fed soccer hooligans. My mind’s in pieces as well, and the days go by without anything getting resolved. I’m tired of formulating survival strategies, wedded to a way of life I have no real incentive to carry on with (almost literally wedded to—a nice unconscious play on words). Everything works asymptotically, like science and reality, two things approaching each other without ever quite meeting. The curve gets closer and closer to the straight line, but no dice.

  December 11

  I think the antidepressants are starting to do something. I’m definitely noticing the side effects, anyway. As for the primary effects, they might be related to the dreams I had at lunchtime.

  I was walking through a building with Dr. NN, and he pointed out a scrawny, dark-skinned, foreign-looking character leaving a room and going down some stairs. The doctor told me this man had been interned there (as a patient or a prisoner) for two (or twenty) years. I remembered this scene later on, because at that moment it had occurred to me to play the lottery, on number two hundred, and afterwards I heard the radio announcing excitedly that that very number had come up. I was amazed, even though I hadn’t actually played. I wanted to tell this anecdote to various people on various occasions, but it made the full story too long and complicated, and no one would let me finish; they kept interrupting to talk about other things, and I got frustrated and angry. I was angry at myself, too, for not being able to condense my story, to get to the heart of what I wanted to say. I tried again and again, and every time I ended up going around in circles and getting lost in minor details.