They stood there leaning on the parapet of the bridge. In the distance, to the south, the transshipping bridges of La Boca stood out amid the fog that had begun to settle.
The taxi came back and they climbed in.
Once in the Mirador, as Alejandra was making coffee, Martín searched about among the records and found one that she had just bought: “Trying.” And when Ella Fitzgerald’s raw, broken voice sang:
I’m trying to forget you, but try as I may,
You’re still my every thought every day …
he saw Alejandra stop dead still, with her cup in her hand, and heard her say:
“How great! Knocking, knocking at your door …”
Martín looked at her in silence, saddened by the shadows that kept forever stirring behind certain of Alejandra’s phrases.
But then those thoughts were swept away like leaves before a violent wind. And as they clutched each other in their arms like two beings trying to swallow each other (he remembered), that strange rite, each time more savage, more profound, more desperate, took place once again. Swept along by his body, amid the tumult and the consternation of the flesh, Martín’s soul tried to make itself heard by that other on the far side of the abyss. But that attempt at communication that was to end eventually in cries almost without hope had begun some time before, in the moments leading up to the climax: not only by way of the words that were said but also by way of looks and gestures, caresses, and even the clawing of their hands and the rending of their mouths. And Martín tried to reach, to feel, to understand Alejandra by touching her face, stroking her hair, kissing her ears, her neck, her breasts, her belly; like a dog in search of a hidden treasure that sniffs at the mysterious surface concealing it, that surface full of signs, signs that remain obscure and imperceptible to those whose senses are not attuned to them. And as the dog, suddenly sensing that the mysterious thing that it is searching for is closer, begins to dig with febrile, almost maddened fervor (cut off altogether from the outside world now, crazed and demented, all thought and feeling centered on that unique and powerful secret thing so close now), so Martín attacked Alejandra’s body, trying to enter her so deeply that he would reach the very bottom of the dark, painful enigma: digging, biting, frantically penetrating and seeking to perceive the faint sounds, closer and closer now, of the secret, hidden soul of this being so cruelly near and so hopelessly far away. And as Martín probed, Alejandra perhaps struggled there on her own island, shouting a message in code that for him, Martín, was unintelligible, and for her, Alejandra, most likely pointless, and for both desperate.
And then, as after a combat that has left the battlefield strewn with corpses and yet has settled nothing, both lay there in silence.
Martín tried to see the expression on her face, but could make out nothing in the almost total darkness that the room now lay in. They left then.
“I have to make a phone call,” Alejandra said.
She went into a bar and made her call.
Martín watched her anxiously from the door. Whom could she possibly be calling? And what could she possibly be saying?
She came back looking depressed and said:
“Let’s go.”
Martín noted that she seemed distracted, that when he said something or other to her from time to time she kept answering only Hmmm? What did you say? And she kept looking at her watch every few minutes.
“What is it you have to do now?”
She looked at him as though she hadn’t heard his question. Martín repeated it and she replied:
“I have to be somewhere at eight o’clock.”
“Very far away?”
“No,” she answered vaguely.
9
He watched her walk off, feeling sad.
It was a day early in April, but autumn was already beginning to announce itself with premonitory signs, like those nostalgic trumpet echoes (he thought) that can be heard in a symphonic theme that is still dominant, though already they are warning us, with a certain hesitant, gentle, but growing insistence, that that theme is coming to an end, that these echoes of remote trumpets will draw closer and closer until finally they become the major theme. A few dead leaves, the sky that looked as though it were already preparing itself for the long cloudy days of May and June, announced that the most beautiful season in Buenos Aires was silently approaching. As though after the oppressive stridence of summer the sky and the trees were beginning to take on that air of withdrawal from the world round about of things readying themselves for a long period of lethargy.
10
His footsteps took him mechanically to Chichín’s, but his mind continued to follow Alejandra. And with a sigh of relief, as though he were arriving at a known port after an anxious journey fraught with danger, he heard Tito saying: This country’s a hopeless mess, pounding on his copy of Crítica, as though to prove something that they had just been discussing perhaps.
11
But Martin soon left the bar and began to walk toward the park. He went up the stairs of the old quinta, smelled again the strong odor of stale urine that he could always smell when he passed that way, and sat down on the bench in front of the statue, the spot he returned to every time that his love seemed to be undergoing a crisis. He sat there a long time pondering his fate and torturing himself with the thought that at that very moment Alejandra was with someone else. He leaned back on the bench and abandoned himself to his thoughts.
12
The next day Martín telephoned the one person whom he could bear to see in Alejandra’s stead: the one bridge leading to that unknown territory, an accessible bridge but one that ended in a hazy, dreary region, not to mention the fact that his reserve, and Bruno’s, kept him from talking about the one thing that interested him.
He arranged to meet Bruno at La Helvética.
“I must go see Father Rinaldini, but we’ll go there together,” Bruno proposed.
He explained to Martín that Father Rinaldini was very ill and that he, Bruno, had just made representations to Monsignor Gentile in Rinaldini’s behalf, hoping that the latter would be granted permission to return to Rioja. But the bishops detested Rinaldini and it was only fair to say that Rinaldini went out of his way to give them reason to do so.
“Some day, when he dies, people are going to talk a lot about him. It’s the same as with Galli Mainini. Because in this country full of men burning with resentment one begins to be a great man only when one ceases to be resentful.”
They were walking down the Calle Perú; grabbing Martín by the arm, Bruno pointed a man out to him who was walking in front of them, leaning on a cane.
“Borges.”
When they drew closer, Bruno said hello to him. Martín found himself shaking a tiny hand, with scarcely any bones or strength in it. The features of the man’s face seemed to have been sketched in and then to have been half rubbed out with an eraser. Borges mumbled something, acknowledging the introduction.
“Martín’s a friend of Alejandra Vidal Olmos’s,” Bruno said.
“Caramba, caramba … Alejandra … that’s fine.”
He raised his eyebrows, observed Martín with watery blue eyes and an abstract cordiality addressed to no one in particular, his mind obviously elsewhere.
Bruno asked him what he was writing.
“Well, caramba …,” he mumbled, smiling a half-guilty, half-wicked smile, with that air that Argentine peasants assume, an air of modest irony, a mixture of secret arrogance and apparent diffidence, every time someone admires one of their horses or their ability to do fine leatherwork. “Caramba … well, in a word … trying to write a page or two that’s something more than a scribble, eh, eh? …”
And he mumbled something else, accompanied by a series of clownish facial tics.
And as they walked on toward Rinaldini’s, Bruno imagined Méndez saying sarcastically: A lecturer for snooty women’s clubs! But everything was much more complicated than Méndez thought.
“It’s curiou
s that fantastic literature is so important and of such high quality in this country,” Bruno commented. “I wonder why that is?”
Martín timidly asked Bruno whether it might not be a way of escaping Argentine reality because it was so unpleasant.
“No. Reality is also unpleasant in North America. There must be some other explanation. And as for what Méndez thinks of Borges …”
He smiled.
“They say he’s not very Argentine,” Martín ventured to remark.
“What else could he be but Argentine? He’s a typical national product. Even his so-called Europeanism is national. A European is not Europeanist: he’s simply European.”
“Do you think he’s a great writer?”
Bruno pondered the question for some time.
“I don’t know. What I’m certain of is that his prose is the most remarkable of any being written in Spanish today. But his style is too precious for him to be a great writer. Can you imagine Tolstoy trying to dazzle his readers with an adverb when it’s a question of the life or death of one of his characters? But not everything in Borges’s works is Byzantine: far from it. There’s something Argentine in his best things: a certain nostalgia, a certain metaphysical sadness …”
He walked along in silence for a time.
“The fact is that people say all sorts of ridiculous things about what Argentine literature ought to be. The important thing is for it to be profound. All the rest is just an added fillip. And if it isn’t profound it’s useless to introduce gauchos or colorful picaresque rascals into the picture. The most representative writer in Elizabethan England was Shakespeare. Yet many of his works don’t even have an English setting.”
And then he added:
“… And what amuses me most is that Méndez denies the influence that Europe has had on our writers. And what does he base that opinion on? That’s what’s most amusing of all: on a philosophical doctrine that is the handiwork of a Jew, Marx; a German, Engels; and a Greek, Heraclitus. If we followed the strictures of such critics, we would be obliged to write about ostrich-hunting in Querandí. And all the rest would be imported frills and antinational. Our culture has its roots in Europe—how can we get around that? And for that matter, why even try to get around it? Somebody—I don’t remember who—said he didn’t read so as not to lose his originality. Can you imagine? If a person has been born to create or express original things, he’s not going to lose anything by reading books …. Faulkner for one read Joyce and Huxley, Dostoevski and Proust. Moreover, and this is something new in history, we Latin Americans find ourselves on a different, violent continent; everything here takes a different turn altogether. So critics want total and absolute originality, do they? Such a thing doesn’t exist. Neither in art nor in anything else. Everything is built on what has gone before. Nothing that is human is perfectly pure and pristine. The Greek gods too were hybrids and were infected (so to speak) with Oriental and Egyptian religions. There’s a little passage in The Mill on the Floss in which a woman tries on a hat in front of a mirror: and it’s Proust. What I mean to say is, it’s the seed of Proust. All the rest is simply a process of development. One touched with genius, cancerous almost, but in the final analysis simply a process of development. The same thing is true of one of Melville’s stories, called Bertleby or Bartleby or something like that. When I read it I was impressed by its Kafkaesque atmosphere. And that’s the way it always is. We’re Argentines, for example, even when we reject our country, as Borges frequently does. Especially when he repudiates it with real fury, the way Unamuno repudiates Spain; the way violent atheists put bombs in a church, that being their way of believing in God. The true atheists are those who are indifferent, those who are cynics. And what we might call an atheistic attitude toward this native land of ours is to be found among cosmopolitans, individuals who live no differently here than they would in Paris or London—they live in a country as though it were a hotel. But let’s be fair: Borges is not one of them. I think that in a certain way his heart aches for his country, despite the fact that he doesn’t have the sensitivity or the generosity, of course, for it to ache for his country the way the heart of a day laborer in the fields or a worker in a meat-freezing plant does. And that explains his lack of grandeur, his inability to understand and feel the whole of the country, including all its deep-rooted, complex rottenness. When we read Dickens or Faulkner or Tolstoy on the other hand we feel that total understanding of the human soul.
“And what about Güiraldes?”
“In what sense?”
“His supposed Europeanism, I mean.”
“Well, yes, there is something of that about his work. In a certain sense a number of passages of Don Segundo Sombra could have been written by a Frenchman who had lived on the pampa. But please note, Martín, that I said ‘in a certain sense’ and ‘a number of passages ….’ By that I mean that it is not a novel that could have been written by a Frenchman. The work as a whole strikes me as essentially Argentine, though Lynch’s gauchos are truer to life than Güiraldes’s. Don Segundo is a mythological peasant, but even so he has all the power of a myth. And the proof that it’s a genuine myth is that it’s taken hold in the very soul of our people. Not to mention the fact that Güiraldes’s metaphysical preoccupation is Argentine. That is typical of our writers: just look at Hernández, Quiroga, Roberto Arlt …”
“Roberto Arlt?”
“No question. Lots of fools think he’s important for his local color. No, Martín, almost everything in his work that is picturesque local color is a defect. He’s great in spite of that. He’s great because of the awesome metaphysical and religious tension in Erdosain’s monologues. The Seven Madmen is riddled with defects. I don’t mean stylistic or grammatical ones; that would be of no importance. What I mean is that it’s full of ‘literature’ in quotation marks, of pretentions or apocryphal characters, such as the Astrologer. But Arlt is a great writer despite all that.”
He smiled.
“But … on the whole the fate of great artists is quite sad: when they’re admired, it’s usually for their weaknesses and their shortcomings.”
Rinaldini himself came to the door to let them in.
He was a tall man with very white hair and an austere, aquiline profile. In his expression there was an intricate combination of kindliness, irony, intelligence, modesty, and pride.
The apartment was very shabby, but full to overflowing with books. When Bruno and Martín walked in, there were remains of bread and cheese alongside his papers and a typewriter. Rinaldini shyly tried to whisk them away without their noticing.
“All I can offer you is a glass of Cafayate wine.” He went and got a bottle of it.
“We’ve just seen Borges on the street, Father,” Bruno said.
Rinaldini smiled as he set out glasses. Bruno explained to Martín that Rinaldini had written very important things about Borges.
“Well perhaps, but lots of water has gone under the bridge since then,” Rinaldini commented.
“What, would you take back what you’ve written about him in the past?”
“No,” Rinaldini replied with an ambiguous gesture. “But I’d say other things now. I find his stories less and less bearable as time goes by.”
“But you liked his poems a lot, Father.”
“Well, yes, some of them. But there’s lots of high-flown rhetoric in them.”
Bruno remarked that he was moved by the poems that recalled Borges’s childhood, the Buenos Aires of another era, the old patios of bygone days, the passage of time.
“Yes,” Rinaldini conceded. “But what I find intolerable are his philosophical entertainments, or better put, his pseudophilosophical ones. He’s an ingenious writer, a cunning artificer. Or as the British say, a sophisticate.”
“Nonetheless, Father, a French periodical has published a lengthy discussion on Borges’s philosophical profundity.”
Rinaldini offered them cigarettes as he smiled a Mephistophelean smile.
“Do t
ell …”
He lit their cigarettes and said:
“Look, take any one of those entertainments of his. The Library of Babel, for instance. In it he plays sophisticated games with the concept of the infinite, which he confuses with the indefinite. An elementary distinction—one you can find dealt with in almost any little philosophical treatise of the last twenty-five centuries. And naturally one can deduce anything from an absurd premise. Ex absurdo sequitur quod libet. And as a consequence of this puerile confusion he comes up with a sort of impious parable that implies that the universe is incomprehensible. Any student knows, and even I would venture to conjecture (as Borges would say) that the actualization of all possibilities at one and the same time is impossible. I can be standing up and I can be sitting down, but not both things at once.”
“And what about the story of Judas?”
“An Irish priest said to me one day: ‘Borges is an English writer who goes out to the suburbs to blaspheme.’ He should have added: the suburbs of Buenos Aires and of philosophy. The theological argument put forth by Señor Borges-Sörensen, that sort of centaur who’s half Scandinavian and half a denizen of Buenos Aires, has scarcely even the appearance of a genuine argument. It’s painted theology. If I were an abstractionist painter, I too could paint a chicken by setting a triangle and a few little dots down on canvas, but I wouldn’t be able to make chicken soup out of it. Now the real question is: is the game deliberate on Borges’s part, or is it simply something that comes to him naturally and spontaneously? What I mean is: is he a sophist or a sophisticate? The meaning behind this joke is not to be tolerated in any decent and honorable man, even though he tells himself it’s art for art’s sake.”