Collected Fictions (56 page)

Sleeping, as we all know, is the most secret thing we do. We devote one third of our lives to sleep, yet we do not understand it. Some believe it is only an eclipse of wakefulness; others, a more complex state which embraces at once yesterday, the present, and tomorrow; still others see it as an uninterrupted series of dreams. To say that the elderly lady of my story spent ten years in a state of serene chaos is perhaps an error; every moment of those ten years may have been pure present, without past or future.

If so, we should not marvel overmuch at that present (which in our own case we count in days and nights and hundreds of pages torn from many calendars, and in anxieties and events)—we voyage through it every morning before we are fully awake and every night before we fall asleep. Twice every day we are that elderly lady.

The Jáuregui slived, as we have seen, in a somewhat equivocal position. They saw themselves as members of the aristocracy, but those who made up that class knew nothing of them; they were the descendants of a national hero, but most textbooks omitted his name. It was true that a street commemorated Colonel Mariano Rubio, but that street, which very few people were familiar with, was lost behind the cemetery on the west side of the city.

The day of her centennial was drawing near. On the tenth, a uniformed soldier appeared with a letter signed by the minister himself, announcing his visit on the fourteenth. The Jáureguis showed the letter to the entire neighborhood, pointing out the engraved letterhead and the minister's personal signature. The journalists who would be writing the newspaper reports then began dropping by. They were given all the facts; it was obvious they'd never in their lives heard of Colonel Rubio. Virtual strangers called on the telephone, hoping the family would invite them to the celebration.

The household labored diligently in preparation for the great day. They waxed the floors, washed the windows, removed the muslin covers from the chandeliers, shined the mahogany, polished the silver in the china cabinet, rearranged the furniture, and opened the piano in the parlor in order to show off the velvet keyboard cover. There was much scurrying about. The only person not involved in the bustle of activity was the elderly lady herself, who appeared not to understand what was going on. She would smile; Julia, with the help of the maid, dressed her smartly and arranged her hair, as though she were already dead. The first thing visitors would see when they came in the door was the oil portrait of the hero, and then, a little lower and to the right, the sword of his many battles. Even in the most penurious times, the family had refused to sell it; they planned to donate it to the Museum of History. A neighbor very thoughtfully lent them a pot of geraniums for the occasion.

The party was to begin at seven. The invitations gave the hour as six-thirty because the family knew everyone would come a little late, so as not to be the first to arrive. At seven-ten not a soul had come; somewhat acrimoniously, the family discussed the advantages and disadvantages of tardiness: Elvira, who prided herself on her punctuality, declared it was an unforgivable discourtesy to leave people waiting; Julia, repeating the words of her late husband, replied that visitors who arrived late showed their consideration, since if everyone arrives a little late it's more comfortable all around, and no one has to feel rushed. By seven-fifteen not another soul could squeeze into the house. The entire neighborhood could see and envy Sra. Figueroa's car and driver* (or
chauffeur,
as she was heard to call him); she almost never invited the sisters to her house, but they greeted her effusively, so nobody would suspect that they saw each other only once in a blue moon. The president sent his aide-de-camp, a very charming gentleman who said it was an honor to shake the hand of the daughter of the hero of Cerro Alto. The minister, who had to leave early, read a most high-sounding speech filled with excellent epigrams, in which, however, he spoke more of San Martin than of Colonel Rubio. The elderly lady sat in her chair amid the cushions, and at times her head would nod or she would drop her fan. A group of distinguished females, the Ladies of the Nation, sang the national anthem to her, though she seemed not to hear. Photographers arranged the guests into artistic groupings, and their flashbulbs dazzled the celebrants' eyes. There were not enough little glasses of port and sherry to go around. Several bottles of champagne were uncorked. The elderly lady spoke not a single word; she may not have known who she was. From that night onward she was bedridden.

When the strangers had left, the family improvised a little cold supper. The smell of tobacco and coffee had already dissipated the light odor of benzoin.*

The morning and evening newspapers told loyal untruths; they exclaimed upon the almost miraculous memory of the hero's daughter, who was "an eloquent archive of one hundred years of Argentine history." Julia tried to show her those reports. In the dim light, the elderly lady lay unmoving, her eyes closed. She did not have a fever; the doctor examined her and said everything was all right. In a few days she died. The storming of her house by the mob, the unwonted stir, the flashbulbs, the speech, the uniforms, the repeated handshakes, and the popping of the champagne corks had hastened her end.

Perhaps she thought it was one of Rosas' posses* that had come.

I think about the men killed at Cerro Alto, I think about the forgotten men of our continent and Spain who perished under the horses' hooves, and it occurs to me that the last victim of that chaos of lances in Peru was to be, more than a hundred years afterward, an elderly lady in Buenos Aires.

For Juan Osvaldo Viviano

It is the sort of story that Henry James (whose writings were first revealed to me by Clara Glencairnde Figueroa,*one of the two protagonists of my story) might not have scorned to use. He would have consecrated more than a hundred tender and ironic pages to it, and would have embellished them with complex and scrupulously ambiguous dialogue; he might well have added a touch of melodrama. The essence of the story would not have been altered by its new setting in London or Boston. But the events in fact took place in Buenos Aires, and there I shall leave them. I shall give just a summary of the case, since the slowness of its pace and the worldliness of the circles in which it occurred are foreign to my own literary habits. Dictating this story is for me a modest, sideline sort of adventure. I should warn the reader that the episodes of the tale are less important than the situation that led to them, and less important, too, than the characters that figure in them.

Clara Glencairn was tall and proud and had fiery red hair. Less intellectual than understanding, she was not clever yet she was able to appreciate the cleverness of others—even of other women. In her soul, there was room for hospitality. She was delighted by differences; perhaps that is why she traveled so much. She knew that the locale in which chance set her was a sometimes arbitrary conjunction of rites and ceremonies, yet she found those rituals amusing, and she carried them out with grace and dignity.

Her parents, the Glencairns, married her off when she was still quite young to a Dr. Isidro Figueroa—at that time the Argentine ambassador to Canada, though he eventually resigned his post, declaring that in an age of telegrams and telephones, embassies were an anachronism and an unnecessary expense to the nation. That decision earned him the resentment of all his colleagues; though Clara herself liked Ottawa's climate (she was, after all, of Scottish decent) and did not find the duties of an ambassador's wife distasteful, she never dreamed of protesting. Dr. Figueroa died a short time later; Clara, after a few years of indecision and quiet casting about, decided to become a painter. She was inspired to this, perhaps, by her friend Marta Pizarra.

It is typical of Marta Pizarro that whenever she was mentioned, she was defined as the sister of the brilliant (married and separated) Nélida Sara.

Before taking up her brushes, Marta had considered the alternative of literature. She could be witty in French, the language her readings generally were drawn from; Spanish for her was no more than a household utensil, much like Guaraní for the ladies of Corrientes province. Newspapers had put the pages of Argentina's own Lugones and the Spaniard Ortegay Gasset into her hands; the style of those masters confirmed her suspicions that the language to which she had been fated was suited less to the expression of thought (or passion) than to prattling vanity. Of music she knew only what any person might know who dutifully attended concerts. She was from the province of San Luis; she began her career with meticulous portraits of Juan Crisòstomo Lafinur* and Colonel Pascual Pringles,* and these were predictably acquired by the Provincial Museum. From the portraiture of local worthies she progressed to that of the old houses of Buenos Aires, whose modest patios she limned with modest colors rather than the stagy garishness that others gave them. Someone (most certainly not Clara Figueroa) remarked that Marta Pizarro's
oeuvre
took for its models the solid works of certain nineteenth-century Genoese bricklayers.* Between Clara Glencairn and Nélida Sara (who was said to have fancied Dr. Figueroa at one point) there was always a certain rivalry; perhaps the duel was between those two women, and Marta but an instrument.

Everything, as we all know, happens first in other countries and then after a time in Argentina. The sect of painters, today so unfairly forgotten, that was called "concrete" or "abstract" (as though to indicate its contempt for logic and for language) is one of many examples of this phenomenon. The movement argued, I believe, that just as music is allowed to create a world made entirely of sound, so painting, music's sister art, might essay colors and forms that do not reproduce the forms and colors of the objects our eyes see. Lee Kaplan wrote that his canvases, which outraged the
bourgeoisie,
obeyed the biblical stricture, shared with Islam, against human hands' creating images (Gr.
eidolon)
of living creatures. The iconoclasts, then, he argued, as breakers of the idols, were returning to the true tradition of pictorial art, a tradition which had been perverted by such heretics as Dürer and Rembrandt; Kaplan's detractors accused him of invoking a tradition exemplified by rugs, kaleidoscopes, and neckties. Aesthetic revolutions hold out the temptation of the irresponsible and the easy; Clara Glencairn decided to become an abstract artist. She had always worshiped Turner; she set out to enrich abstract art with her own vague splendors. She labored without haste. She reworked or destroyed several compositions, and in the winter of 1954 she exhibited a series of temperas in a gallery on Calle Suipacha
—a gallery whose specialty was art that might be called, as the military metaphor then in fashion had it, "avant-garde." The result was paradoxical: general opinion was kind, but the sect's official organ took a dim view of the paintings' anomalous forms—forms which, while not precisely figurative, nonetheless seemed not content to be austere lines and curves, but instead suggested the tumult of a sunset, a jungle, or the sea. The first to smile, perhaps, was Clara Glencairn. She had set out to be modern, and the moderns rejected her. But painting itself—the act of painting—was much more important to her than any success that might come of it, and so she continued to paint. Far removed from this episode, Painting followed its own course.

The secret duel had now begun. Marta Pizarra was not simply an artist; she was passionately interested in what might not unfairly be called the administrative aspect of art, and she was undersecretary of a group called the Giotto Circle. In mid-1955 she managed things so that Clara, already admitted as a member, was elected to the group's new board of directors. This apparently trivial fact deserves some comment. Marta had supported her friend, yet the unquestionable if mysterious truth is that the person who bestows a favor is somehow superior to the person who receives it.

Then, in 1960 or thereabout, two "world-renowned artists" (if we may be pardoned the cliché) were competing for a single first prize. One of the candidates, the older of the two, had filled solemn canvases with portraits of bloodcurdling gauchos as tall as Norsemen; his rival, the merest youngster, had earned applause and scandal through studied and unwavering incoherence. The jurors, all past the half century mark, feared being thought to be old-fashioned, and so they were inclined to vote for the younger man, whose work, in their heart of hearts, they disliked. After stubborn debate (carried on at first out of courtesy and toward the end out of tedium), they could not come to an agreement. In the course of the third discussion, someone ventured the following:

"I do not think Bis a good painter; I honestly don't think he's as good as Mrs. Figueroa."*

"Would you vote for her?" another asked, with a touch of sarcasm.

"I would," replied the first, now irritated.

That same afternoon, the jury voted unanimously to give the prize to Clara Glencairnde Figueroa. She was distinguished, lovable, of impeccable morality, and she tended to give parties, photographed by the most costly magazines, at her country house in Pilar. The celebratory dinner was given (and its costs assumed) by Marta. Clara thanked her with a few well-chosen words; she observed that there was no conflict between the traditional and the new, between order and adventure. Tradition, she said, is itself a centuries-long chain of adventures. The show was attended by numerous luminaries of society, almost all the members of the jury, and one or two painters.

We all think that fate has dealt us a wretched sort of lot in life, and that others must be better. The cult of gauchos and the
Beatus ille
... are urban nostalgias; Clara Glencairn and Marta Pizarra, weary of the routines of idleness, yearned for the world of artists—men and women who devoted their lives to the creation of beautiful things. I presume that in the heaven of the Blessed there are those who believe that the advantages of that locale are much exaggerated by theologists, who have never been there themselves.