You know Borges? The new Palermo is filled with Borges. He is its industry. The tourists flock to read the postcards of his poems. Oh destiny of Borges, perhaps no stranger than your own. How they shiver when they read those lines. The writer musing on mortality as the readers contemplate their own likely fate and fame.
But I prefer it here to Mar del Plata. I stand there also in stone, befitting the point of my departure. Yes I like it here under the trees, or on the Patio d’Andaluz, a recent gift of Spain but already starting to crumble. The patio is roped off to the public but no-one sees me wander the turquoise steps. Its water chimes like bells. And such shade. A jaguar’s dappling.
Now, didn’t Borges write that the name of the faceless god who waits behind the other gods, the real god’s secret name, consists of fourteen words? And are not those fourteen words written in the black and golden fur of the jaguar? How typical of the man. With his mysteries and his sects and his cod learning. A schoolboy thrilling over an atlas. He never grew up. And yet I enjoy the shadows here. Close to the poets and their bronze agonies.
Yes, I smile to myself. What would JLB have made of the new Palermo? Something marvellous perhaps. Borges dealt in symbols, of course. In magic and universes alternate to our own. So what would Borges have thought of what I noticed today, wandering Palermo. It was a disorderly line of plump, no, enormous people, outside the office of Endemol Argentina, on the once quiet street of Ravignani.
Endemol is not a drug. Or perhaps it is. And it sounds like the name of an angel. But this Endemol makes television programmes, such as Big Brother. Oh yes, I know all about Big Brother. As I speak, there are riots in India, the burning of effigies, because of Endemol’s Big Brother. The whole world is watching television now. We must all be famous. We must all immerse ourselves in celebrity’s acid bath.
But these are people the like of whom I had never seen in Palermo. People wider than the borracho tree. People who suppose themselves fat. Yes, fat. People who believe they qualify for society’s definition of obese. And yes, it makes sense. In a world devoted to the carnality of the emaciated, they strike a strident poise. These must be the new revolutionaries, the new poets. But even I, who was once deemed plain, and sturdy, cannot approve.
For these people believe they have found a role. A meaning. These people stand patiently for a reality show audition for fat people.
Reality? I could tell them about reality. The shadow of the schirrus in the veins of the breast. Mar del Plata muddy to the knee. To the neck. Yet there are so many of them, or they are so enormous, that they stop the traffic. A policeman comes and scratches himself. Because Endemol has sent out its summons, its clarion through cyberspace for extreme people. For fat people. For people who are so large they will stop traffic. The hour of the grotesque has arrived.
As for Borges, who was not so svelte himself, he would have asked, is this procession at Ravignani 1470, the fat people’s dream, the company’s dream, or our own dream of fat people? Who is dreaming whom here? Under the plane trees. Beside the borracho. For surely this cannot be Baires. In the Club Eros and Bar el Gallego where the tallerines con tuco, the matambre, the chorizo de lomu might make us all immense, the diners remain slim as street cats.
Just look at these two. Cartoneros they call them in the new Palermo: two slim, liquid sifters of rubbish. In another world, the coming world of Endemol, they will be models, languid upon their divans, irretrievably ignorant. In the stone-coloured light of the Endemolian infra-red they will sleep a dreamless sleep. Yet here in the capital, for the moment that remains to us, they are anonymous street sweepers, collectors of cardboard and Sprite bottles, riders of the rubbish lorry like children on a hay cart. How dark they are, their skin dirty as centavos. They live in shacks, make love on concrete shelves behind the bus station.
Orchids I call them and I salute their lives, I who was offered no favours and who once sang in a café lit the colour of sour wine while the poets turned their heads to the street.
3pm. The exhausted hour. But it’s less the afternoons now. My moment is midnight. Night time Palermo means neon and the chrome of cockroaches; a glass of Fernet’s bitter fern, that vertiginous vermouth, abandoned on a bar. While the traffic of ghosts is stilled.
My Palermo is the insomnia of eternity. And the plane trees? Mottled like those street cats. I used to think such trees diseased. As pale as leprosy? Yes, the English poet who wrote that knew what derangement meant.
Now, let’s move again. Let’s extend our promenade. And look where we are. Even I find this hard to credit. It is Jorge Luis Borges Street. Poor Palermo? I don’t think so. Its afternoons are busier now, its heyday at hand. And that too will pass. But yes, poor Borges. Did we ever meet? Hardly. The older woman’s is an impossible role, too excruciating for your worst enemy.
Sometimes I thought him a salamander. More often a tortoise under the reading light. Yes, the tortoise of old Palermo. Yet, some aspects of life remain unchanged. I still see the virgins in the tango bars going to hell on a sunbeam. But now the porteños sit in Sushi Libre and Starbucks. The American developers are here: beggars with Blackberries. The fight is on. The twin ziggurats of Hollywood are already constructed.
In Bar el Gallego, the owner has written on the wall ‘la ultima de Baires resiste en Palermo Hollywood’. Such is their defiance. And sometimes I too sit in El Gallego, at three or four in the afternoons when there is only an old man with a plate of crumbs or a group of business types lingering over a bottle of Torrentes. But one morning, drifting by, I was sure I saw the blonde woman, the man with a camera, in a far corner, there for breakfast, talking to a waiter in the new Lunfardo.
But of course not. It is many years since I visited the house of harpsichords. And then I thought, yes, it is possible. Because once, didn’t the tortoise write of ‘witnessing’, of the death of the last witness at Christ’s crucifixion?
What was lost from the world, he asked, when that witness died? And of himself? What will die with me when I die? he wrote. What will become extinct? Borges could find little more than the image of a roan horse in the vacant lot at Serrano and Charcas. And yes, here we are now. Where Charcas, now called Borges, meets Serrano.
Is there a horse? I look around. And maybe even a ghost can gasp. There are, in fact, two horses, with jacaranda in their manes, pulling a tourist carriage. How peculiar. But a vacant lot? No. A pharmacy and some flats. But at 2154, or is it 2156, here is a house called Casa del Maestro.
Is that where JLB lived? I cannot remember. Not everything remains clear. But maestro? Maybe. Let’s give him that. It would have pleased his mother and his two belated wives. But especially it pleases Palermo.
Close to the end, I whispered to my son who was also my companion. The world is over, I told him. This is it. Time has run away from me, Alfonsna Storni, the poet, the professor, run faster than a Rivadavia tram. Not that Baires was all of my life. Didn’t I see the foal born in the pasture, the dam biting its neck to make it rise? And a girl entering a cactus-wood confessional to whisper her shame?
Yet now it occurs, perhaps Borges was correct after all. Perhaps all this is one of old JLB’s dreams, a dream of the tortoise, the tortoise that wins the race. Because as he says himself, if the tortoise starts first, none of us will ever catch up. Never Achilles. Never the hare.
Dear listener, my problem was Argentine men. They were either wolves or waifs. That was the choice. After a while I gave up trying to salvage something from the masses in their mackintoshes who crowded every evening into the trams, rushing away from what they hated, to lives they never understood.
Men in their cafes. Always their cafes. The water glass, the napkin, the eye of coffee dark as a doe’s. And men forever in groups, their heads together over the table, impenetrable as a thorn bush. Safety in numbers.
So when I lifted my eyes who could meet my gaze? Yes, they turned their faces when I stood up to recite because my voice was greater than theirs and inhabited a region they had never
visited. Recite? I declaimed in whispers. I thundered like the humming bird. But did Borges ever enjoy my poems? He forgot to say.
So what did his learning amount to if it burned out his eyes? What is celebrity when a 62-year old man must be escorted by his mother on a lecture tour of Texas? Of all places. Why didn’t he take some chica, some immodest scholar who could ignore raised eyebrows? And what’s intelligence when the woman a man worships shrivels unwoo’d, unwed? If that’s what she cares about. Oh destiny of Borges. Perhaps no stranger than my own.
In a Rainforest
The map was unforgiving. Surely there were no kin or kind of mine in those hills. But I went on, a moon over the passing places and Saturn in the pawnbroker’s window.
Soon on both sides the valleys were black cisterns, the only colour where loggers bled the spruce of their gold.
The rest was slate. Even the sun was slate. And slate-eyed the roadagents who swarmed in that place. But how quickly it was evening when light split like slate, slats and slits of it, and the stars too, slate-coloured and screwed into their slots.
So whose was the face under the slate lintel of the schoolhouse? I swear I saw her. The parting in her hair a comet’s trail. That woman, they said, had paced her room for thirty years. Slight her silhouette. A sloven they said. Disconsolate slut. Yet I saw a saint desolate in her desire.
No kin to me. No kind. But on I went under the ash trees’ slatey buds, slate on my tongue and slate dust in my shoes, the people too, sharp as slate and all its angles, their language megaliths in my mouth.
Then next morning there was the river and where the slate was blue the water was green and where the slate was green the water was black and where the slate was black the water was sharp as shellac or purple as Aberangell eels.
So I stopped there. Climbed a wall and topped a stile, followed a rope ladder through the wood along the riverbank, came to a cord someone had tied around the trees. That they might escape. To tell the tale. And I went on.
To find myself sniffing the air. To feel myself a polecat in that place, a marten maybe, some creature back from the brink. Because I had unextincted myself. I was alive and there I stood, a being with eyes closed, my blood the hot circuit of honeysuckle that hung from the hurdles of the wood.
And that was where I stooped to drink, my mouth to the moss and moschatel, a vineland of water that waystation, the trees humming like pylons as I sipped sap, the rain a bead and bezel in every web.
What were the others there? Ticks, leeches, dewcats. But I looked harder. There was a light. On I went towards that glow to find a glade lit like a sick room. And there they were. Waiting for me. For two thousand years they had waited and now I had arrived. The rendezvous was made.
Where the dead are coral and coal the corpseflowers grow. Here they sprouted from Ordovician hearts and wombs. Many bodies must have lain under the trees: Romans who hadn’t turned back, children deaf to warnings, coffins from the cholera graves slipped down the hill of knives from Corris.
And what flowers. Mauve and white, set like teeth on the trunks, and in such luxuriance they might have been undisturbed for centuries.
What else? Bryony on its abacus, orchids with their mirrors and mascara. But I had eyes only for the corpseflowers.
An offertory of candles they seemed to me. Flames of the marsh gas, prehistoric pilot lights, as around us the slate settled itself, its darkness infiltrating the delirious dew.
Then my foot touched a twmp. There was a rail under the mulch, the drum of a dram wheel. Maybe a station name. This was where the trains had come, opening up the country, bringing the settlers in and the slate out, that slate cut and dressed in the cliff’s quarto, the last of it now left slewed in the slough, with me in slomo slummocking back to the road.
nok, nok, nokia on Heaven’s Door: the Outlook from Helsinki
Football? The last time I had anything to do with football was sharing a lift with Ryan Giggs.
We were staying at a hotel in Tirana. He held a pair of muddy boots and stared at the floor as around him American voices on a UN mercy mission talked about afforestation and the turbidity of local red wine.
Outside, dictatorship was deceased. In its place, young and exceedingly raw capitalism was bringing its own brand of savagery to the streets of the Albanian capital. Giggs had missed a sitter in the national stadium, and Wales hung on for a 1-1 draw with Europe’s leading emerging nation. Emerging from the hermetic isolation and the paranoid fantasies of its recent past. Emerging perhaps from purgatorial poverty. But not emerging, it transpired, from the culture of the blood feud or the rituals of ethnic violence.
Five years later, I picked up the microphone. It was a midsummer midnight in Lahti, one hundred kilometres north of Helsinki. The sky was the colour of vodka. It was my job to commentate on a Finland versus Rest-of-the-World soccer match. Two hundred voices roared the Finns on but within ten minutes they were 4-0 down. In that dusk-dawn whiteness the players slipped like phantoms amongst the birch trees. Fearing the result would plunge the spectators into stereotypical national gloom, I urged them not to drown their sorrows in the nearby lake.
At half time, fifteen minutes into the match and comprising a pause for a couple of bottles of Koff, this commentator was substituted. At full time, Finlandia’s midnight sons had lost 7-4. They toasted their humiliation in Russian champagne.
The soccer players were writers. For a week every two years, Lahti teems with journalists and literary types brought together from around the world to discuss a ‘theme’. Our theme on that occasion was ‘literature is the enemy of stupidity’. But first we had to agree on what constituted such an opponent.
Most delegates agreed stupidity could be a good thing. In the right circs. Was not stupidity light, playful, ironic, iconoclastic, even wise in the manner of Good Soldier Schweik, or Shakespeare’s fools, or Peter Sellers’ character in Being There? (Perhaps we should cut the Sellers)
And wasn’t stupidity a useful tool for anarchists everywhere, though perhaps not the Black Block ‘anarchists’ of the protests at Prague, Goteborg and subsequently Genoa. Indeed, was not stupidity clever in many respects?
This was where delegates (well, this one) equated stupidity with accelerating globalisation. Didn’t such globalisation, I enquired, endanger cultural and economic as well as ecological variety? Didn’t such a process engender the stupidities of uniform appetite and aspiration? And were not the symbols of that stupidity, such as the global brands of Gap, McDonald’s, Pepsi, as visible in Lahti as Los Angeles.
I pressed on in that company of scribes. If McDonald’s was responsible for environmental damage and poor health, if a paper plate of Chicken McNuggets had become a talisman for millions of upwardly mobile Chinese, if Nike and its globalising consortia represented Western culture at its nadir, weren’t the stupidities of the consumerist machine yet marketed with genius? If nothing was crummier, nothing was cleverer.
Such was the paradox of our globalised world. At least, so it appeared on that undarkenable day. Because there is nothing cleverer than this type of stupidity. This stupidity understands its enemies are imagination, independence, curiosity, self-sufficiency.
Too simple, came the response. Globalisation was not necessarily a means of dumbing down. Or of controlling society. Globalisation had gone on in Europe since Latin grew its tree of languages, since religion took to reproducing itself, since the expeditions west out of the blue Tagus.
And forget McDonald’s, someone said. A McWorld does not necessarily mean a McMind. America’s totalitarian kitchens are the least of our problems. The godfathers of globalisation were Jesus Christ and Mohammed. English and Spanish were its midwives. Then came the combustion engine, the microchip. And now gene technology.
Globalisation? We’ve seen nothing yet. Because cloning is coming. And in our lifetimes too.
Booker-nominated Michael Collins related a story from his place of work, Microsoft in Seattle. One factor, claims Microsoft, that slows c
omputers down is the English language. It’s big, baggy, dirty, devious and adept at changing its spots. So why not give the software a break by reducing English to a necessary hardcore vocabulary?
The grave of George Orwell, I mentioned to Collins, is found in the English village of Sutton Courtenay. I had stood there a year previously, looking for something else, and found a white rose tree and a red rose tree hanging over the headstone. How their petals would fly as the writer revolved beneath. Collins shrugged. The woman who had that Newspeak brainwave was on the Microsoft fast-track. She would make her mark.
Collins is right, said a voice. In English. Stupidity is not the problem. The problem is intelligence. Intelligence has created more misery than stupidity ever could. Stupidity can be thwarted. But never intelligence. And what is intelligence doing now? Looking into the atom. And what does it see? That every atom has many rooms. And that those rooms are palaces too.
Don’t worry. The more we see the more there will be to see. But truly the enemy is stupidity. The question is, how do we arm ourselves against it?
This sauna of debate was interrupted by evening readings. In Lahti’s Sibelius Hall, an acoustics test proved the audience might hear a pin drop on stage. We bowed to the crowd in that resin-scented chancellery and toasted each other with Manohar Shetty’s feni, an enamel-blistering Goan elixir distilled from cashew pulp.
The audience departed, switching its nokias back on, returning to the light that would not quit and plates of reindeer casserole. And to the trees. Because Finland is its trees. Without trees, it appeared to me, there could be no country called Finland at all.
I sympathised with the language irony. The irony that is always present at conferences such as Lahti. Here was I, an English language writer, representing a bilingual country that wasn’t even a country, complaining about a shrinking world.
Easy for you to say, said the Byelorussians.
Easy for you to say, said the Lithuanians.
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