The Secret of Evil

  Behind the son there’s a kind of furnace. It isn’t clear whether the furnace was there already or whether the fire caused by the zombie rebellion has spread. It’s some blaze. Julie and the boy hold hands. Come on, Julie, says the boy, don’t be afraid, nothing will separate us now. Meanwhile, on the other side, the colonel is trying to break down the door, in vain. His son and Julie walk toward the fire. On the other side, the colonel beats at the door with his fists. His knuckles go red with blood. I’m not afraid, says Julie. I love you, says young Reynolds. On the other side, the colonel is trying to break down the door, in vain. The young lovers walk toward the fire and disappear. The screen goes an intense red. The only sound is a machine gun hammering. Then an explosion, screams, groans, electrical sparking. On the other side, shut off from all this, the colonel is trying to break down the door, in vain.

  SCHOLARS OF SODOM

  for Celina Manzoni

  I.

  It’s 1972 and I can see V. S. Naipaul strolling through the streets of Buenos Aires. Well, sometimes he’s strolling, but sometimes, when he’s on his way to meetings or keeping appointments, his gait is quick and his eyes take in only what he needs to see in order to reach his destination with a minimum of bother, whether it’s a private dwelling or, more often, a restaurant or a café, since many of those who’ve agreed to meet him have chosen a public place, as if they were intimidated by this peculiar Englishman, or as if they’d been disconcerted by the author of Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas when they met him in the flesh and had thought: Well, I didn’t think it would be like this, or: This isn’t the man I’d imagined, or: Nobody told me. So there he is, Naipaul, and it seems that all he can notice are outward movements, but in fact he’s noticing inward movements too, although he interprets them in his own way, sometimes arbitrarily, and he’s moving through Buenos Aires in the year 1972 and writing as he moves or perhaps only wanting to write as his legs move through that strange city, and he’s still young, forty years old, but he already has a considerable body of work behind him, a body of work that doesn’t weigh him down or prevent him from moving briskly through Buenos Aires when he has an appointment to keep — the weight of the work, that’s something to which we shall have to return, the weight and the pride that he takes in his work, the weight and the responsibility, which don’t prevent his legs from moving nimbly or his hand from rising to hail a taxi, as he acts in character, like the man he is, a man who keeps his appointments punctually — but he is weighed down by the work when he goes strolling through Buenos Aires without appointments to exercise his British punctuality, without any pressing obligations, just walking along those strange avenues and streets, through that city in the southern hemisphere, so like the cities of the northern hemisphere, and yet nothing like them at all, a hole, a void that someone has suddenly inflated, a show that is strictly for local consumption; that’s when he feels the weight of the work, and it’s tiring to carry that weight as he walks, it exhausts him, it’s irritating and shameful.

  II.

  Many years ago, before V. S. Naipaul — a writer whom I hold in high regard, by the way — won the Nobel Prize, I tried to write a story about him, with the title “Scholars of Sodom.” The story began in Buenos Aires, where Naipaul had gone to write the long article on Eva Perón that was later included in a book published in Spain by Seix Barral in 1983. In the story, Naipaul arrived in Buenos Aires, I think it was his second visit to the city, and took a cab — and that’s where I got stuck, which doesn’t say much for my powers of imagination. I had some other scenes in mind that I didn’t get around to writing. Mainly meetings and visits. Naipaul at newspaper offices. Naipaul at the home of a writer and political activist. Naipaul at the home of an upper-class literary lady. Naipaul making phone calls, returning to his hotel late at night, staying up and diligently making notes. Naipaul observing people. Sitting at a table in a famous café trying not to miss a single word. Naipaul visiting Borges. Naipaul returning to England and going through his notes. A brief but engaging account of the following series of events: the election of Perón’s candidate, Perón’s return, the election of Péron, the first symptoms of conflict within the Peronist camp, the right-wing armed groups, the Montoneros, the death of Perón, his widow’s presidency, the indescribable López Rega, the army’s position, violence flaring up again between right- and left-wing Peronists, the coup, the dirty war, the killings. But I might be getting all mixed up. Maybe Naipaul’s article stopped before the coup; it probably came out before it was known how many had disappeared, before the scale of the atrocities was confirmed. In my story, Naipaul simply walked through the streets of Buenos Aires and somehow had a presentiment of the hell that would soon engulf the city. In that respect his article was prophetic, a modest, minor prophecy, nothing to match Sábato’s Abbadon the Exterminator, but with a modicum of good will it could be seen as a member of the same family, a family of nihilist works paralyzed by horror. When I say “paralyzed,” I mean it literally, not as a criticism. I’m thinking of the way some small boys freeze when suddenly confronted by an unforeseen horror, unable even to shut their eyes. I’m thinking of the way some girls have been known to die from a heart attack before the rapist has finished with them. Some literary artists are like those boys and girls. And that’s how Naipaul was in my story, in spite of himself. He kept his eyes open and maintained his customary lucidity. He had what the Spanish call bad milk, a kind of spleen that immunized him against appeals to vulgar sentimentality. But in his nights of wandering around Buenos Aires, he, or his antennae, also picked up the static of hell. The problem was that he didn’t know how to extract the messages from that noise, a predicament that certain writers, certain literary artists, find particularly unsettling. Naipaul’s vision of Argentina could hardly have been less flattering. As the days went by, he came to find not only the city but the country as a whole insufferably aggravating. His uneasy feeling about the place seemed to be intensified by every visit, every new acquaintance he made. If I remember rightly, in my story Naipaul had arranged to meet Bioy Casares at a tennis club. Bioy didn’t play any more, but he still went there to drink vermouth and chat with his friends and sit in the sun. The writer and his friends at the tennis club struck Naipaul as monuments to feeblemindedness, living illustrations of how a whole country could sink into imbecility. His meetings with journalists and politicians and union leaders left him with the same impression. After those exhausting days, Naipaul dreamed of Buenos Aires and the pampas, of Argentina as a whole, and his dreams invariably turned into nightmares. Argentineans are not especially popular in the rest of Latin America, but I can assure you that no Latin American has written a critique as devastating as Naipaul’s. Not even a Chilean. Once, in a conversation with Rodrigo Fresán, I asked him what he thought of Naipaul’s essay. Fresán, whose knowledge of literature in English is encyclopedic, barely remembered it, even though Naipaul is one of his favorite authors. But to get back to the story: Naipaul listens and notes down his impressions but mostly he walks around Buenos Aires. And suddenly, without giving the reader any sort of warning, he starts talking about sodomy. Sodomy as an Argentinean custom. Not just among homosexuals — in fact, now that I come think of it, I can’t remember Naipaul mentioning homosexuality at all. He is talking about heterosexual relationships. You can imagine Naipaul, inconspicuously positioned in a bar (or a corner store — why not, since we’re imagining), listening to the conversations of journalists, who start off by talking about politics, how t
he country has merrily set its course toward the abyss, and then, to cheer themselves up, they move on to amorous encounters, sexual conquests and lovers. All of their faceless lovers have at some point, Naipaul reminds himself, been sodomized. I took her up the ass, he writes. It’s an act that in Europe, he reflects, would be regarded as shameful, or at least passed over in silence, but in the bars of Buenos Aires it’s something to brag about, a sign of virility, of ultimate possession, since if you haven’t fucked your lover or your girlfriend or your wife up the ass, you haven’t really taken possession of her. And just as Naipaul is appalled by violence and thoughtlessness in politics, the sexual custom of “taking her up the ass,” which he sees as a kind of violation, fills him ineluctably with disgust and contempt: a contempt of Argentineans that intensifies as the article proceeds. No one, it seems, is exempt from this pernicious custom. Well, no, there is one person quoted in the essay who rejects sodomy, though not with Naipaul’s vehemence. The others, to a greater or lesser degree, accept and practice it, or have done so at some point, which leads Naipaul to conclude that Argentina is an unrepentantly macho country (whose machismo is thinly disguised by a dramaturgy of death and blood) and that in this hell of unfettered masculinity, Perón is the supermacho and Evita is the woman possessed, totally possessed. Any civilized society, thinks Naipaul, would condemn this sexual practice as aberrant and degrading, but not Argentina. In the article or perhaps in my story, Naipaul is seized by an escalating vertigo. His strolls become the endless wanderings of a sleepwalker. He begins to feel queasy. It’s as if, by their mere physical presence, the Argentineans he’s visiting and talking to are causing a feeling of nausea that threatens to overwhelm him. He tries to find an explanation for their pernicious habit. And it’s only logical, he thinks, to trace it back to the origins of the Argentinean people, descended from impoverished Spanish and Italian peasants. When those barbaric immigrants arrived on the pampas they brought their sexual practices along with their poverty. He seems to be satisfied with this explanation. In fact, it’s so obvious that he accepts it as valid without further consideration. I remember that when I read the paragraph in which Naipaul explains what he takes to be the origin of the Argentinean habit of sodomy, I was somewhat taken aback. As well as being logically flawed, the explanation has no basis in historical or social facts. What did Naipaul know about the sexual customs of Spanish and Italian rural laborers from 1850 to 1925? Maybe, while touring the bars on Corrientes late one night, he heard a sportswriter recounting the sexual exploits of his grandfather or great-grandfather, who, when night fell over Sicily or Asturias, used to go fuck the sheep. Maybe. In my story, Naipaul closes his eyes and imagines a Mediterranean shepherd boy fucking a sheep or a goat. Then the shepherd boy caresses the goat and falls asleep. The shepherd boy dreams in the moonlight: he sees himself many years later, many pounds heavier, many inches taller, in possession of a large mustache, married, with numerous children, the boys working on the farm, tending the flock that has multiplied (or dwindled), the girls busy in the house or the garden, subjected to his molestations or to those of their brothers, and finally his wife, queen and slave, sodomized nightly, taken up the ass — a picturesque vignette that owes more to the erotico-bucolic desires of a nineteenth-century French pornographer than to harsh reality, which has the face of a castrated dog. I’m not saying that the good peasant couples of Sicily and Valencia never practiced sodomy, but surely not with the regularity of a custom destined to flourish beyond the seas. Now if Naipaul’s immigrants had come from Greece, maybe the idea would merit consideration. Argentina might have been better off with a General Peronidis. Not much better off perhaps, but even so. Ah, if the Argentineans spoke Demotic. A Buenos Aires Demotic, combining the slangs of Piraeus and Salonica. With a gaucho Fierrescopulos, a faithful copy of Ulysses, and a Macedonio Hernandikis hammering the bed of Procrustes into shape. But, for better or for worse, Argentina is what it is and has the origins it has, which is to say, of this you may be sure, that it comes from everywhere but Paris.

  THE ROOM NEXT DOOR

  I was once, if I remember rightly, present at a gathering of madmen. Most of them were suffering from auditory hallucinations. A guy came up and asked if he could have a few words with me in private. We went to another room. The guy said that his medication was unhinging him. I’m getting more nervous every day, he said, And sometimes I have weird thoughts. That often happens, I told him. The guy said it was the first time it had happened to him. Then he rolled up the sleeves of his sweater and scratched his navel. He had a hand gun pushed into the top of his trousers. What’s that? I asked him. It’s my fucking belly button, said the guy: It itches and itches and what can I do? I’m scratching it all day long. Sure enough the skin around his navel was red and raw. I told him I didn’t mean his navel, but what was below it. Is that a gun? I asked. Yes, it’s a gun, said the guy, and he pulled it out and aimed it at the only window in the room. I considered asking if it was a fake, but I didn’t. It looked real to me. I asked if I could have a look. Weapons aren’t for loan, the guy said. It’s like with cars and women. If you steal a car, you can lend it. Not something I’d recommend, but you can. The same if you’re with a hooker. I wouldn’t do it myself, I’d never lend any woman, but, you know, you could. When it comes to weapons, though, no way. And what if they’re stolen or fakes? I asked him. Not even then. Once your fingerprints are on a weapon, you can’t lend it. You understand? Sort of, I said. You have a commitment to the weapon, said the guy. In other words, you have to take care of it for the rest of your life, I said. Exactly, said the guy, you’re married and that’s all there is to it. You’ve got it pregnant with your fucking prints and that’s all there is to it. Responsibility, said the guy. Then he raised his arm and aimed the gun straight at my head. I don’t know if it was then or later that I thought of Moreau’s belle inertie, or maybe I remembered having thought about it earlier, in a feverish and futile sort of way: beautiful inertia, the compositional procedure by which Moreau was able, in his canvases, to freeze, suspend and fix any scene, however hectic. I shut my eyes. I heard him asking me why I’d shut my eyes. Moreau’s tranquility, some critics call it. Moreau’s fear, say others who are less drawn to his work. Terror bedecked with jewels. I remembered his transparent pictures, his “unfinished” pictures, his gigantic, shadowy men, and his women, small in comparison to the masculine figures and inexpressibly beautiful. J. K. Huysmans wrote of his pictures: “An identical impression was created by these different scenes: that of a spiritual onanism, repeated in a chaste body.” Spiritual onanism? Onanism period. All Moreau’s giants and women, all the jewels, all the geometrical poise and splendor drop like paratroopers into the zone of chastity or responsibility. One night, when I was a sensitive young man of twenty, I overheard, in a boarding house in Guatemala, two men talking in the room next door. One of the voices was deep, the other was what you might call gravelly. At first, of course, I paid no attention to what they were saying. Both were Central Americans, though perhaps not from the same country, to judge from their intonation and turns of phrase. The guy with the gravelly voice started talking about a woman. He weighed up her beauty, the way she dressed and carried herself, her culinary skills. The guy with the deep voice agreed with everything he said. I imagined him lying on his bed, smoking, while the guy with the gravelly voice sat at the foot of the other bed, or maybe in the middle, with his shoes off, but still wearing his shirt and trousers. I didn’t get the feeling they were friends; maybe they were sharing
the room because they had no choice, or to save some money. They might have had dinner and some drinks together; that was probably as far as it went. But that was more than enough in Central America back then. I fell asleep several times while listening to them. Why didn’t I sleep right through till the next morning? I don’t know. Maybe I was too nervous. Maybe the voices from the other room got louder every now and then, and that was enough to wake me up. At one point the guy with the deep voice laughed. The guy with the gravelly voice said, or repeated, that he had killed his wife. I assumed that it was the woman he’d been praising before I fell asleep. I killed her, he said, and then he waited for the other guy to respond. It was a load off my mind. I did what was right. Nobody laughs at me. The guy with the deep voice shifted in his bed and said nothing. I imagined him with dark skin, with Indian and African blood, more African than Indian, a guy from Panama on his way home, maybe, or heading north to Mexico and the US border. After a long silence, during which all I could hear were strange noises, he asked the other guy if he was serious, if he’d really killed her. The guy with the gravelly voice said nothing; maybe he nodded. Then the black guy asked if he wanted a smoke. Why not, said the guy with gravelly voice, one more before we go to sleep. I didn’t hear any more from them. The guy with the gravelly voice might have gotten up to switch off the light, while the black guy watched from his bed. I imagined a bedside table with an ashtray. A dark room, like mine, with a minuscule window that looked onto a dirt road. The guy with the gravelly voice was skinny and white, for sure. A nervous type. The other guy was black, big and solidly built, the sort of guy who doesn’t often lose his cool. I stayed awake for a long time. When I reckoned they’d gone to sleep, I got up, trying not to make any noise, and switched on the light. I lit a cigarette and began to read. Dawn was infinitely distant. When I eventually started to feel sleepy again and switched off the light and stretched out on the bed, I heard something in the room next door. A woman’s voice — it sounded like she had her lips to the wall — said Good night. Then I looked at my room, which, like the room next door, contained three beds, and I was afraid, and a scream rose in my throat, but I stifled it because I knew I had to.