The Insufferable Gaucho (7 page)

Maybe, she said after a while, he
wanted to witness the process of death from beginning to end, without
intervening or intervening as little as possible. And, after another
interminable silence, she added: We must remember that he was insane, that
we are in the realm of the monstrous—rats do not kill rats.

I hung my head and stayed there, I
don’t know for how long. I might even have fallen asleep. Suddenly I felt
the commissioner’s paw on my shoulder again, and heard his voice ordering me
to follow him. We went back the way we had come, in silence. Just as I had
feared, Hector’s body had disappeared from the morgue. I asked where it was.
In the belly of some predator, I hope, said the commissioner. Then I was
told what I had already guessed. It was strictly forbidden to talk about
Hector with anyone. The case was closed, and the best thing for me to do was
to forget about him and get on with my life and my work.

I didn’t feel like sleeping at the
station that night, so I found myself a place in a burrow full of tough,
grimy rats, and when I woke up I was alone. That night I dreamed that an
unknown virus had infected our people. Rats are capable of killing rats. The
sentence echoed in my cranial cavity until I woke. I knew that nothing would
ever be the same again. I knew it was only a question of time. Our capacity
to adapt to the environment, our hard-working nature, our long collective
march toward a happiness that, deep down, we knew to be illusory, but which
had served as a pretext, a setting, a backdrop for our daily acts of
heroism, all these were condemned to disappear, which meant that we, as a
people, were condemned to disappear as well.

I went back to my daily rounds;
there was nothing else I could do. A police officer was killed and torn to
pieces by a predator; there were several fatalities as a result of more
poisoning from the outside; a number of tunnels were flooded. One night,
however, I yielded to the fever that was consuming my body and returned to
the dead sewers.

I’m not sure whether that sewer
was one of those in which I’d found a victim, or even if I’d been there
before. All dead sewers are the same, in the end. I spent a long time in
there, hiding, waiting. Nothing. Only distant noises, splashes: I couldn’t
say what caused them. When I returned to the station, with red eyes from my
long vigil, I found some rats who swore they’d seen a pair of weasels in the
tunnels nearby. There was a new police officer with them. He looked at me,
waiting for some kind of sign. The weasels had cornered three rats and
several young in the end of a tunnel. If we wait for backup it’ll be too
late, said the new officer.

Too late for what? I asked,
yawning. For the young and their guardians, he replied. It’s already too
late, I thought, for everything. I also thought: When did it become too
late? Was it in the time of my aunt Josephine? Or a hundred years before
that? Or a thousand, three thousand years before? Weren’t we damned right
from the origin of our species? The officer was watching me, waiting for a
cue. He was young and he couldn’t have been on the job for more than a week.
Some of the rats around us were whispering, others were pressing their ears
to the walls of the tunnel; most of them, it was all they could do to stop
themselves from shaking and running away. What do you suggest? I asked. We
do it by the book, replied the officer, we go into the tunnel and rescue the
young.

Have you ever taken on a weasel?
Are you ready to be torn apart by a weasel? I asked. I know how to fight,
Pepe, he replied. There was nothing much left to say, so I got up and told
him to stay behind me. The tunnel was black and stank of weasel, but I know
how to move in the dark. Two rats came forward as volunteers and followed
us.

Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey

for Carmen Pérez de Vega

A
lthough it may not
warrant an eminent place in the annals of literary mystery, the curious case of
Álvaro Rousselot is worthy of attention, for a few minutes at least.

Keen readers of mid-twentieth-century Argentine literature, who do
exist, albeit not in great numbers, will no doubt remember that Rousselot was a
skilled narrator and an abundant inventor of original plots, a sound stylist in
literary Spanish, but not averse to the use of Buenos Aires slang or
lunfardo
, when the story required it (as was often the case),
though never in a mannered way, at least not for those of us who count ourselves
among his faithful readers.

The action of that sinister and eminently sardonic character Time has,
however, prompted a reconsideration of Rousselot’s apparent simplicity. Perhaps
he was complicated. By which I mean
much
more complicated than we had
imagined. But there is an alternative explanation: perhaps he was simply another
victim of chance.

Such cases are not unusual among lovers of literature. In fact, they
are not unusual among lovers of anything. In the end we all fall victim to the
object of our adoration, perhaps because passion runs its course more swiftly
than other human emotions, perhaps as a result of excessive familiarity with the
object of desire.

In any case, Rousselot loved literature as much as any Argentine
writer of his generation, or of the preceding and following generations, which
is to say that his love was somewhat disillusioned. What I mean is that he was
not especially different from the others, his peers—he knew the same torments
and moments of joy—yet nothing even remotely similar happened to any of
them.

At this point it could be objected, quite reasonably, that the others
were destined for hells or singularities of their own. Angela Caputo, for
example, killed herself in an unimaginable manner: no one who had read her
poems, with their ambivalently childish atmosphere, could have predicted such an
atrocious death, stage-managed down to the finest detail to maximize the
terrifying effect. Or Sánchez Brady, whose texts were hermetic and whose life
was cut short by the military regime in the seventies, when he had passed the
age of fifty and lost interest in literature and the world in general.

Paradoxical deaths and destinies, yet they do not eclipse the case of
Rousselot, the enigma that imperceptibly enveloped his life, the sense that his
work, his writing, stood near or on the edge or the brink of something he knew
almost nothing about.

His story can be recounted simply, perhaps because, in the final
analysis, it is a simple story. In 1950, at the age of thirty, Rousselot
published his first book, a novel about daily life in a remote Patagonian
penitentiary, under the rather laconic title
Solitude
. Not
surprisingly, the book relates numerous confessions about past lives and
fleeting moments of happiness; it also relates numerous acts of violence.
Halfway through, it becomes apparent that most of the characters are dead. With
only thirty pages left to go, it is suddenly obvious that they are
all
dead, except for one, but the identity of that single living character is never
revealed. The book was not much of a success in Buenos Aires, selling less than
a thousand copies, but, thanks to some friends, Rousselot had the pleasure of
seeing a well-respected publisher bring out a French edition in 1954.
Solitude
became
Nights on the Pampas
in the land of Victor
Hugo, where it made little impact, except on two critics, one of whom reviewed
it warmly, while the other was perhaps excessively enthusiastic; then it
vanished into the limbo of remote shelves and overloaded tables in secondhand
bookstores.

At the end of 1957, however, a film entitled
Lost Voices
was
released; it was directed by a Frenchman named Guy Morini, and for anyone who
had read
Solitude
, it was clearly a clever adaptation of Rousselot’s
book. Morini’s film began and ended altogether differently, but its stem or
middle section corresponded exactly to the novel. It would, I think, be
impossible to recapture Rousselot’s feeling of stunned amazement in the dark,
half-empty Buenos Aires cinema where he first saw the Frenchman’s film.
Naturally, he considered himself a victim of plagiarism. As the days went by,
other explanations occurred to him, but he kept coming back to the idea that his
work had been plagiarized. Of the friends who were informed and went to see the
film, half were in favor of suing the production company, while the others were
inclined to think, more or less resignedly, that these things happen—think of
Brahms. By that time, Rousselot had already published a second novel,
The
Archives of the Calle Peru
, a detective story, with a plot that
revolved around the appearance of three bodies in three different places in
Buenos Aires: the first two victims had been killed by the third, the victim in
turn of an unknown assailant.

This second novel was not what one might have expected from the author
of
Solitude
, but the critics received it well, although it is perhaps
the least successful of Rousselot’s works. When Morini’s film came out in Buenos
Aires,
The Archives of the Calle Peru
had already been kicking around
the city’s bookshops for almost a year, and Rousselot had married Maria Eugenia
Carrasco, a young woman who moved in the capital’s literary circles, and he had
recently taken a job with the law firm Zimmerman & Gurruchaga.

Rousselot’s life was orderly: he got up at six in the morning and
wrote or tried to write until eight, at which time he interrupted his commerce
with the muses, took a shower and rushed off to the office, where he arrived at
around ten to nine. He spent most mornings in court or going through files. At
two in the afternoon, he returned home, had lunch with his wife, and then went
back to the office for the afternoon. At seven, he would have a drink with some
of his legal colleagues, and by eight, at the latest, he was back home, where
Mrs. Rousselot, as she now was, had his dinner ready, after which Rousselot
would read, while María Eugenia listened to the radio. On Saturdays and Sundays
he wrote for a little longer, and went out at night, unaccompanied by his wife,
to see his literary friends.

The release of
Lost Voices
brought him a degree of notoriety
beyond his circle of associates. His best friend at the law firm, who was not
particularly interested in literature, advised him to sue Morini for breach of
copyright. Having thought it over carefully, Rousselot decided not to do
anything. After
The Archives of the Calle Peru
, he published a slim
volume of stories, and then, almost immediately, his third novel,
Life of a
Newlywed
, in which, as the title suggests, he recounted a man’s first
months of married life, and how, as the days go by, the man comes to realize
that he has made a terrible mistake: not only is the woman he thought he knew a
stranger, she is also a kind of monster who threatens his mental balance and
even his physical safety. And yet the guy loves her (or rather discovers that he
is physically attracted to her in a way that he hadn’t been before), so he holds
on for as long as he can before fleeing.

The book was, obviously, meant to be humorous, and was taken as such
by the reading public, to the surprise of Rousselot and his publisher. It had to
be reprinted after three months, and within a year more than fifteen thousand
copies had been sold. From one day to the next, Rousselot’s name soared from
comfortable semi-obscurity to provisional stardom. He took it in stride. With
the windfall earnings, he treated himself, his wife, and his sister-in-law to a
vacation in Punta del Este, which he spent surreptitiously reading
In Search
of Lost Time
, a book he had always pretended to have read. While Maria
Eugenia and her sister lolled about on the seashore, he strove to redeem that
lie, but above all to fill the gap left by his ignorance of France’s most
celebrated novelist.

He would have been better off reading the Cabbalists. Seven months
after his vacation in Punta del Este, before
Life of a Newlywed
had
come out in French, Morini’s new film,
The Shape of the Day
, opened in
Buenos Aires. It was exactly like
Life of a Newlywed
but better, that
is, revised and considerably extended, much as Morini had done with
Lost
Voices
, compressing the novel’s plot into the central part of the film,
while the beginning and the end served as commentaries on the main story (or
ways into and out of it, or digressions leading nowhere, or simply—and here lay
the charm of the procedure—delicately filmed scenes from the lives of the minor
characters).

This time, Rousselot was extremely aggrieved. His case against Morini
was the talk of the Argentinean literary world for a week or so. And yet, when
everyone presumed that he would take swift legal action for breach of copyright,
he decided, to the dismay of those who had expected him to adopt a stronger and
more decisive stance, that he would do nothing. Few could really understand his
reaction. He did not protest, or appeal to the honor and integrity of the
artist. After his initial surprise and indignation, Rousselot simply opted not
to act, at least not legally. He waited. Something inside him, which could
perhaps, without too great a risk of error, be called the writer’s spirit,
trapped him in a limbo of apparent passivity, and began to harden or change him,
or prepare him for future surprises.

In other respects his life as a writer and as a man had already
changed as much as he could reasonably have hoped, or more: his books were well
reviewed and widely read, they even supplemented his income, and his family life
was suddenly enriched by the news that María Eugenia was going to be a mother.
When Morini’s third film came to Buenos Aires, Rousselot stayed home for a week,
resisting the temptation to rush to the cinema like a man possessed. He also
instructed his friends not to tell him the plot. At first he thought he would
not go to see the film. But after a week it was too much for him, and one night,
having kissed his baby son and entrusted him to the nanny’s care as if he were
leaving for a war and would never return, he stepped out, resignedly, arm in arm
with his wife, and went to the cinema.

Morini’s film was called
The Vanished Woman
, and had nothing
in common with any of Rousselot’s works, or with either of Morini’s previous
films. As they left the cinema, María Eugenia said she thought it was bad and
boring. Alvaro Rousselot kept his opinion to himself, but he agreed. A few
months later, he published his next novel, the longest yet (206 pages), entitled
The Juggler’s Family
, in which he departed from the style that had
characterized his work up till then, with its elements of fantasy and crime
fiction, and experimented with what, at a stretch, could be called the choral or
polyphonic novel. It wasn’t a form that came naturally to him, and seemed rather
forced, but the book was redeemed by other features: the decency and simplicity
of the characters, a naturalism that elegantly avoided the clichés of the
naturalist novel, and the stories themselves, which were slight and resolute,
joyful and pointless, and captured the indomitable Argentine spirit.

The Juggler’s Family
was, without doubt, Rousselot’s greatest
success, the book that brought all the others back into print, and his triumph
was consummated by the Municipal Literary Award, presented at a ceremony in the
course of which he was described as one of the five rising stars among the
nation’s younger writers. But that is another story. It is common knowledge that
the rising stars of any literary world are like flowers that bloom and fade in a
day; and whether the day is literal and brief or stretches out over ten or
twenty years, it must eventually come to an end.

The French, who distrust our municipal literary awards on principle,
were slow to translate and publish
The Juggler’s Family
. By then,
fashions in Latin American fiction had shifted north to more tropical climes.
When the novel came out in Paris, Morini had already made his fourth and fifth
films, a conventional but engaging French detective story and a turkey about a
supposedly amusing family vacation in Saint-Tropez.

Both films were released in Argentina, and Rousselot was relieved to
discover that neither bore the slightest resemblance to anything he had written.
It was as if Morini had distanced himself from Rousselot, or, under pressure
from creditors and swept up in the whirlwind of the movie business, had
neglected the relationship. After relief came sadness. For a few days Rousselot
was even preoccupied by the thought that he had lost his best reader, the reader
for whom he had really been writing, the only one who was capable of fully
responding to his work. He tried to get in touch with his translators, but they
were busy with other books and other authors, and replied to his letters with
polite and evasive phrases. One of them had never seen any of Morini’s films.
The other had seen one of the films in question but hadn’t translated the
corresponding book (or even read it, to judge from his letter).

When Rousselot asked his publishers in Paris if Morini might have had
access to the manuscript of
Life of a Newlywed
before its publication,
they weren’t even surprised. They replied indifferently that many people had
access to a manuscript at various stages prior to printing. Feeling embarrassed,
Rousselot decided to stop annoying people with his letters and suspend his
investigations until such time as he could finally go to Paris himself. A year
later he was invited to a literary festival in Frankfurt.