The Insufferable Gaucho (13 page)

Illness and Kafka

Elias Canetti, in his book on the twentieth century’s greatest
writer, says that Kafka understood that the dice had been rolled and that
nothing could come between him and writing the day he spat blood for the first
time. What do I mean when I say that nothing could come between him and his
writing? To be honest, I don’t really know. I guess I mean that Kafka understood
that travel, sex, and books are paths that lead nowhere except to the loss of
the self, and yet they must be followed and the self must be lost, in order to
find it again, or to find something, whatever it may be—a book, an expression, a
misplaced object—in order to find anything at all, a method, perhaps, and, with
a bit of luck, the
new
, which has been there all along.

The Myths of Cthulhu

for Alan Pauls

T
hese are dark times we live in, but let me
begin with a buoyant declaration. Literature in Spanish is in excellent
condition! Magnificent, superlative condition!

In fact, if
it was any better I’d be worried.

But let’s not get too carried
away. It’s good, but it’s not going to give anyone a heart attack. There’s
nothing to suggest any kind of great leap forward.

According
to a critic by the name of Conte, Pérez Reverte is Spain’s perfect novelist.
I don’t have a copy of the article in which he makes that claim, so I can’t
cite it exactly. As I recall, he said that Pérez Reverte was the
most
perfect novelist in contemporary Spanish
literature, as if it were possible to go on perfecting oneself after having
achieved perfection. His principal quality, but I don’t know if it was Conte
who said this or the novelist Juan Marsé, is readability. A readability that
makes him not only the most perfect novelist but also the most read. That
is: the one who sells the most books.

But if we
adopt that point of view, Spanish fiction’s perfect novelist could just as
well be Vázquez Figueroa, who spends his spare time inventing desalination
machines or desalination plants: contraptions that will soon be turning sea
water into fresh water, suitable for irrigation, showers, and probably even
for drinking. Vázquez Figueroa might not be the
most
perfect, but he certainly is perfect in his way. He’s readable. He’s
enjoyable. He sells a lot. His stories, like those of Pérez Reverte, are
full of adventures.

I really
wish I had a copy of Conte’s review. It’s a pity I don’t collect press
clippings, like that character in Cela’s
The Beehive
, who keeps an article that he wrote for a
provincial newspaper, probably one of the Workers’ Movement papers, in the
pocket of his shabby jacket—a likable character, by the way; in the movie,
he was played by José Sacristán, and that’s how I always see him in my
mind’s eye, with that pale helpless face, the incongruous face of a beaten
dog, carrying that crumpled clipping around in his pocket as he wanders over
the impossible tablelands of Spain. At this point I hope you’ll allow me to
indulge in a pair of elucidatory digressions or sighs: José Sacristán, what
a fine actor! His performances are so enjoyable, so readable. And Camilo
José Cela, what an odd phenomenon! More and more he reminds me of a Chilean
estate-holder or a Mexican rancher; his illegitimate children (as Latin
Americans would politely say) or his bastards keep springing up like weeds:
vulgar, reluctant, but tenacious and gruff, like candid lilacs out of the
dead land, as the candid Eliot put it.

By
attaching Cela’s incredibly fat corpse to a horse, we could produce the new
El Cid of Spanish letters, and we have!

Statement
of principles:

In principle, I have nothing
against clear, enjoyable writing. In practice, it depends.

It’s always a good idea to state
this principle when venturing into the world of literature: a sort of Club
Med cunningly disguised as a swamp, a desert, a working-class suburb, or a
novel-as-mirror reflecting itself.

Here’s a
rhetorical question that I’d like someone to answer for me: Why does Pérez
Reverte or Vázquez Figueroa or any other bestselling author, for example
Muñoz Molina or that young man who goes by the resonant name of De Prada,
sell so much? Is it just because their books are enjoyable and easy to
follow? Is it just because they tell stories that keep the reader in
suspense? Won’t anyone give me an answer? Where is the man who will dare to
answer? It’s all right, you can keep quiet. I hate to see people lose their
friends. I’ll answer the question myself. The answer is no. It’s not just
that. They sell and they are popular because their stories can be
understood
. That is, because the readers, who are never
wrong—I don’t mean as readers, obviously, but as consumers, of books in this
case—understand their novels or stories perfectly. This is something that
the critic Conte knows, or perhaps, given his youth, intuits. It’s something
that the novelist Marsé, who is old, has learned from experience. The
public, the public, as García Lorca said to a hustler while they hid in an
entrance hall, is never, never, never wrong. And why is the public never
wrong? Because the public
understands
.

It is, of
course, only reasonable to accept and indeed to demand that a novel should
be clear and entertaining, since the novel, as an art form, is at best
tenuously related to the great forces that shape public history and our
private stories, namely science and television; nevertheless, when the rule
of clarity and entertainment-value is extended to serious non-fiction and
philosophy, the results can be catastrophic, at least at first glance,
although the idea, the ideal, remains compelling, a goal to be desired and
aspired to in the longer term. “Weak thought,” for example. Honestly, I have
no idea what weak thought was or is supposed to be. Its promoter, I seem to
remember, was a 20th-century Italian philosopher. I never read any of his
books or any book about him. One reason—this is a fact, not an excuse—is
that I had no money to buy books. So I must have learned of his existence in
the pages of some newspaper. That’s how I discovered that there was such a
thing as weak thought. The philosopher is probably still alive. But in the
end he’s immaterial. Maybe I completely misunderstood what he meant by weak
thought. Probably. But what matters is the
title
of his book. Just as when we talk about
Don Quixote
, what we’re usually referring to is not so
much the book itself as the title and a couple of windmills. And when we
talk about Kafka (may God forgive me), it’s less about Kafka and the fire
than a lady or a gentleman at a window. (This is known as encapsulation, an
image retained and metabolized by the body, fixed in historical memory, the
solidification of chance and fate.) The strength of weak thought—this
intuition came to me in a fit of dizziness, brought on by hunger—sprang from
the way it presented itself as a philosophical method for people unfamiliar
with philosophical systems. Weak thought for the weak classes. With a bit of
well-targeted marketing, a construction worker in Gerona, who has never sat
down on the scaffolding, thirty yards above street level, with his copy of
the
Tractatus
logico-philosophicus
, or reread
it while chewing through his
chope
roll, might be prompted to
read the Italian philosopher instead or one of his disciples, whose clear,
enjoyable, intelligible style is bound to go straight to his
heart.

At that
moment, in spite of the dizziness, I felt like Nietzsche when he had his
Eternal Return epiphany. An inexorable succession of nanoseconds, each one
blessed by eternity.

What is
chope
? What does a
chope
roll consist of? Is the bread rubbed with
tomato and a few drops of olive oil, or is it just plain bread that is
wrapped in aluminum foil, also known by its brand name as
albal
? And what does the
chope
consist of? Mortadella cheese, maybe? Or a
mixture of mortadella and boiled ham? Or salami and mortadella? Does it
contain chorizo or sausage? And how did the foil come to have the brand name
albal
? Is it a family name, the name of Mr. Nemesio
Albal? Or is it an allusion to
el
alba
, the dawn, the bright dawn
of lovers and workers who, before setting off for their daily labor, put a
pound of bread and the corresponding ration of sliced
chope
into their lunch boxes?

Dawn with a
slight metallic sheen. Bright dawn over the shithole. That was the title of
a poem I wrote with Bruno Montané centuries ago. The other day I came across
the title and the poem attributed to another poet. Honestly, honestly, what
are these people thinking? The lengths they go to, tracking, poaching,
harassing. And the worst thing is, it’s an appalling title.

But let us
return to weak thought, which goes down like a treat on the scaffolding.
It’s pleasant to read, you can’t deny that. It isn’t short on clarity
either. And the socially weak or powerless understand the message perfectly.
Hitler, to take another example, there was an essayist or philosopher—take
your pick—who specialized in weak thought. He’s always understandable!
Self-help books are in fact books of practical philosophy, enjoyable
down-to-earth philosophy that the woman and the man in the street can
understand. That Spanish philosopher, who analyzes and interprets the ups
and downs of Big Brother, is a readable and clear philosopher, although in
his case the revelation came a couple of decades late. I can’t recall his
name for the moment, because, as many of you will have guessed, I am writing
this speech on the fly a few days before delivering it. All I can remember
is that the philosopher in question lived for many years in a Latin American
country; I imagine him there feeling thoroughly sick of his tropical exile,
and the mosquitoes, and the ghastly exuberance of the flowers of evil. Now
the old philosopher lives in a Spanish city, somewhere north of Andalusia,
enduring endless winters, muffled in a scarf and a woolen cap, watching the
competitors in Big Brother and taking notes in a notebook with pages white
and cold as snow.

For books
about theology, there’s no one to match Sánchez Dragó. For books about
popular science, there’s no one to match some guy whose name escapes me for
the moment, a specialist in UFOs. For books about
intertextuality, there’s no one to match Lucía Extebarría. For books about
multiculturalism, there’s no one to match Sánchez Dragó. For political
books, there’s no one to match
Juan Goytisolo. For books about history and mythology, there’s no one to
match Sánchez Dragó. For a book about the ill-treatment of women today,
there’s no one to match that lovely talk-show host Ana Rosa Quintana. For
books about travel, there’s no one to match Sánchez Dragó. I just love
Sánchez Dragó. He doesn’t look his age. I wonder if he dyes his hair with
henna or ordinary dye from the hairdresser. Maybe his hair hasn’t gone grey.
And if he hasn’t gone grey, how come he hasn’t gone bald, which is what
usually happens to men whose hair doesn’t lose its original
color?

And now for
the question that has been tormenting me: Why hasn’t Sánchez Dragó invited
me to appear on his TV show? What is he waiting for? Does he want me to get
down on my knees and grovel at his feet like a sinner before the burning
bush? Is he waiting for my health to deteriorate even further? Or for me to
get a recommendation from Pitita Ridruejo? Well, you watch out, Víctor
Sánchez Dragó! There’s a limit to my patience and I was a gangster in a
former life! Don’t say you weren’t warned, Gregorio Sánchez
Dragó!

Hear this.
To the right hand side of the routine signpost (coming—of course—from
north-northwest), right where a bored skeleton yawns, you can already see
Comala, the city of death. This speech is bound for that city, mounted on an
ass, as all of us in our various more or less premeditated ways are bound
for the city of Comala. But before we get there, I would like to relate a
story told by Nicanor Parra, whom I would consider my master if I was worthy
to be his disciple, which I’m not. One day, not so long ago, Nicanor Parra
received an honorary doctorate from the University of Concepción. The honor
might have been conferred by the University of Santa Barbara or Mulchén or
Coigüe; I’ve been told that in the '90s all you needed to start up a private university in Chile was to have
finished primary school and secured the use of a reasonable sized house;
it’s one of the boons of the free-market system. The University of
Concepción, however, has a certain prestige; it’s a big university and still
a state-run institution as far as I know, and a tribute to Nicanor Parra was
organized there and they gave him an honorary doctorate and invited him to
conduct a master class. So Nicanor Parra turns up and the first thing he
explains is that when he was a kid or a teenager, he went to that
university—not to study, but to sell sandwiches (sometimes called
sánguches
in Chile), which the students used to wolf
down between classes. Sometimes Nicanor Parra went there with his uncle,
sometimes he went with his mother, and occasionally he went on his own, with
a bag full of sandwiches, wrapped not in
albal
foil but in newspaper or brown paper, and
perhaps he didn’t carry them in a bag but in a basket, covered with a dish
cloth, for hygienic and aesthetic and even practical reasons. And addressing
that roomful of smiling southern professors, Nicanor Parra evoked the old
University of Concepción, which was probably disappearing into the void, and
continues to disappear, even now, into the void’s inertia or our perception
of it; and he remembered his younger self: badly dressed, we can assume,
wearing sandals and the ill-fitting clothes of a poor adolescent, and
everything—even the smell of that time, a smell of Chilean colds and
southern flus—was trapped like a butterfly by the question that Wittgenstein
asks himself and us, speaking from another time, from faraway Europe, a
question to which there is no answer: Is
this
hand a hand or isn’t it?

Latin
America was Europe’s mental asylum just as North America was its factory.
The foremen have taken over the factory now and the labor force is made up
of escapees from the asylum. For over sixty years, the asylum has been
burning in its own oil, its own fat.

Today I
read an interview with a famous and shrewd Latin American author. They ask
him to name three people he admires. He replies: Nelson Mandela, Gabriel
García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. With that answer as a starting point,
you could write a whole thesis about the current state of Latin American
literature. The casual reader might wonder what links those three figures.
There is something that links two of them: the Nobel Prize. And there is
something more that links all three: years ago they were all left wing. They
probably all admire the voice of Miriam Makeba. All three have probably
danced to her catchy hit song “Pata-pata,” García Márquez and Vargas Llosa
in colorful Latin American apartments, Mandela in the solitude of his prison
cell. All three have made way for deplorable heirs: the clear and
entertaining epigones of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, and, in the case
of Mandela, the indescribable Thabo Mbeki, the current president of South
Africa, who denies the existence of AIDS. How could anyone name those three, without
batting an eyelid, as the figures he most admires? Why not Bush, Putin and
Castro? Why not Mullah Omar, Haider and Berlusconi? Why not Sánchez Dragó,
Sánchez Dragó and Sánchez Dragó, disguised as the Holy Trinity?