The Insufferable Gaucho (11 page)

25.
Everything was dark, except for the snow. I started going down Cerro del Moro.
26.
I was barefoot and it was cold. My feet sank into the
snow, and with every step I took, some blood came off my skin. When I’d gone a
few yards I realized that someone was following me. A policeman? I didn’t care.
They rule the earth, but right then, as I walked through the luminous snow, I
knew that I was in charge.
27.
I left Cerro del Moro behind. On
the level ground the snow was deeper still; I crossed a bridge, hanging my head.
Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the shadow of an equestrian statue. My
pursuer was a fat, ugly adolescent. Who was I? That didn’t matter at all.
28.
As I walked, I said good-bye to everything I saw. It
was poignant. I quickened my pace to warm myself up. I crossed the bridge, and
it was as if I had passed through a time tunnel.
29.
I could
have killed the boy, made him follow me down an alley and stuck it to him till
he croaked. But why bother? He was bound to be some whore’s kid from Cerro del
Moro; he’d never talk.
30.
I washed my old shoes in the
bathroom at the station, I wet them and scrubbed away the bloodstains. My feet
had gone to sleep. Wake up. Then I bought a ticket for the next train.
Whichever, I didn’t care where it was going.

Literature + Illness = Illness

for my friend the hepatologist Dr. Victor Vargas

Illness and Public Speaking

N
o one should be surprised
if the speaker loses his thread. Let us imagine the following scenario. The
speaker is going to speak about illness. Ten people spread themselves around the
auditorium. The buzz of anticipation in the air is worthy of a better reward.
The talk is scheduled to begin at seven in the evening or eight at night. No one
in the audience has had dinner. By seven (or eight, or nine), they are all
present and seated, with their cell phones switched off. It’s a pleasure to
speak to such a well-mannered group of people. But the speaker fails to appear,
and finally one of the organizers of the event announces that he will not be
coming because, at the last minute, he has fallen gravely ill.

Illness and Freedom

Writing about illness, especially if one is gravely ill, can be
torture. Writing about illness if one is not only gravely ill but also a
hypochondriac is an act of masochism or desperation. But it can also be a
liberating act. It’s tempting—I know it’s an evil temptation—but all the same it
is
tempting to exercise the tyranny of the ill for a few minutes,
like those little old ladies you meet in hospital waiting rooms, who launch into
an explanation of the clinical or medical or pharmacological aspects of their
life, instead of explaining the political or sexual or work-related aspects.
Little old ladies who give the impression that they have transcended good and
evil, and look for all the world like they know their Nietzsche, and not just
Nietzsche, but Kant and Hegel and Schelling too, not to mention their closest
philosophical relative: Ortega y Gassett. They could be his sisters, or rather
his cronies, although actually they’re more like the philosopher’s clones. The
resemblance is so striking that sometimes (as I reach the limits of my
desperation) it occurs to me that Ortega y Gasset’s paradise, or his
hell—depending on the gaze but above all the sensibility of the observer—is to
be found in hospital waiting rooms: a paradise in which thousands of duplicates
of Ortega y Gasset live out the various episodes of our lives. But I mustn’t
wander too far from what I really wanted to talk about, which, in fact, was
freedom, a kind of liberation: writing badly, speaking badly, holding forth
about plate tectonics in the middle of a reptiles’ dinner party—it’s so
liberating and so richly deserved—offering myself up to the compassion of
strangers and then dishing out insults at random, spitting as I talk, passing
out indiscriminately, becoming a nightmare for the friends I don’t deserve,
milking a cow and pouring the milk over its head
, as Nicanor Parra
says in a magnificent and mysterious line.

Illness and Height

But let’s if not get to the point at least approach it briefly, where
it lies like a seed deposited by the wind or a pure chance bang in the middle of
a vast bare tabletop. Not long ago, as I was leaving the consulting rooms of my
specialist Victor Vargas, among the patients waiting to go in I found a woman
waiting for me to come out. She was a small woman, by which I mean short; her
head barely came up to my chest—the top of it would have been about an inch
above my nipples—even though, as I soon realized, she was wearing spectacularly
high heels. Needless to say, the consultation had not been reassuring, at all;
the news my doctor had for me was unequivocally bad. I felt—I don’t know—not
exactly dizzy, which would have been understandable after all, but more as if
everyone else had been stricken with dizziness, while I was the only one keeping
reasonably calm and standing up straight, more or less. I had the impression
that they were crawling on all fours, while I was upright or seated with my legs
crossed, which to all intents and purposes is as good as standing or walking or
maintaining a vertical position. I wouldn’t, however, go so far as to say that I
felt well, because it’s one thing to remain upright while everyone else is on
their hands and knees, and another thing entirely to watch, with a feeling I
shall, for want of a better word, call
tenderness
or curiosity or
morbid curiosity, while those around you are suddenly reduced, one and all, to
crawling. Tenderness, melancholy, nostalgia: feelings befitting the sentimental
lover, but hardly appropriate in the outpatients’ ward of a Barcelona hospital.
Of course, had that hospital been a mental asylum, such a vision would not have
disturbed me at all, since from a tender age I have been familiar with—though
never obeyed—the proverbial injunction, When in Rome, do as the Romans do, and
the best way to behave in an asylum, apart from maintaining a dignified silence,
is to crawl or observe the crawling of one’s partners in misfortune. But I
wasn’t in an asylum; I was in one of the best public hospitals in Barcelona, a
hospital that I know well, because I’ve been a patient there five or six times,
and until that occasion I had never seen anyone on all fours, although I had
seen some patients turn canary yellow, and others suddenly stop breathing—they
were dying, which is not unusual in such a place, but crawling, I’d never seen
anyone do that, which made me think that the doctor’s news must have been much
worse than I had initially realized, in other words, I was in
seriously
bad condition. And when I came out of the consulting rooms and saw everyone
crawling, this sense of my own illness intensified, and I was about to succumb
to fear and start crawling too. But I didn’t, because of that little woman: she
stepped forward and said her name, Dr. X, and then pronounced the name of my
specialist, my dear Dr. Vargas—my relationship with him is like the marriage of
a Greek shipping magnate who loves his wife but prefers to see her as rarely as
he can—and Dr. X went on to say that she knew about my illness or the progress
of my illness and that she would like me to participate in a study she was
conducting. I asked her politely about the nature of the study. Her reply was
vague. She explained that it would only take half an hour of my time, if that;
she had a series of tests for me. I don’t know why, but I ended up saying yes,
and then she led me away from the consulting rooms to an elevator of impressive
proportions, in which there was a gurney, with no one to push it, and no one on
it, of course, a gurney that lived in the elevator, going up and down, like a
normal-sized girl alongside—or inside—her oversized boyfriend. It really was
very large, that elevator, large enough to accommodate not just one gurney but
two, plus a wheelchair, all with their respective occupants, and the strangest
thing was that we were alone in there, the tiny doctor and myself, and at that
point, having calmed down or become more excited, I’m not sure which, I realized
that the tiny doctor was not at all bad-looking. No sooner had I come to that
realization than I found myself wondering what would happen if I suggested that
we make love in the elevator, since we had a bed at our disposal. And then,
inevitably, I remembered Susan Sarandon, dressed up as a nun, asking Sean Penn
how he could think about fucking when he had only a few days left to live. In a
censorious tone of voice, of course. And, unsurprisingly, I’ve forgotten the
name of the film, but it was a good film, I think it was directed by Tim
Robbins, who’s a good actor and maybe a good director too, but he’s never been
on death row. When people are about to die, all they want to do is fuck. People
in jails and hospitals, all they want to do is fuck. The helpless, the impotent,
the castrated, all they want to do is fuck. The seriously injured, the suicidal,
the impenitent disciples of Heidegger. Even Wittgenstein, the greatest
philosopher of the twentieth century, all he wanted to do was fuck. Even the
dead, I read somewhere, all they want to do is fuck. Sad to say and hard to
admit, but that’s the way it is.

Illness and Dionysus

To tell the truth, the honest truth, cross my heart and hope to die,
it’s something I find very hard to admit. That seminal explosion, those cumulus
and cirrus clouds that blanket our imaginary geography are enough to sadden
anyone. Fucking when you don’t have the strength to fuck can be beautiful, even
epic. Then it turns into a nightmare. But what can you do? That’s how it is.
Consider, for instance, a Mexican jail. A new prisoner arrives. Not what you’d
call handsome: squat, greasy, pot-bellied, cross-eyed, malevolent and smelly
into the bargain. Before long, this guy, whose shadow creeps over the prison
walls or the walls of the corridors at an exasperating, slug-like pace, becomes
the lover of another guy, who is just as ugly, but stronger. It’s not a long,
drawn-out romance, proceeding by tentative steps and hesitations. It’s not a
case of elective affinity, as Goethe understood it. It’s love at first sight;
primitive, if you like, but their objective is not so different from that of
many normal couples or couples we consider to be normal. They are sweethearts.
Their flirting and their swooning are like X-ray images. They fuck every night.
Sometimes they hit each other. Sometimes they tell the stories of their lives,
as if they were friends, but they’re not really friends, they’re lovers. And on
Sundays, their respective wives, who are every bit as ugly as they are, come to
visit. Obviously, neither of these men is what we would normally call a
homosexual. If someone called them homosexuals to their faces, they’d probably
get so angry and be so offended, they’d brutally rape the offender, then kill
him. That’s how it is. Victor Hugo, who, according to Daudet, was capable of
eating a whole orange in one mouthful—a supreme test of good health, according
to Daudet, and a sign of pig-like manners, according to my wife—set down the
following reflection in
Les Misérables
: sinister people, malicious
people know a sinister and malicious happiness. Or that’s what I seem to
remember, because
Les Misérables
is a book I read in Mexico many years
ago and left behind in Mexico when I left Mexico for good, and I’m not planning
to buy it or reread it, because there’s no point reading, much less rereading,
books that have been made into movies, and I think
Les Misérables
has
even been turned into a musical. Anyway, the malicious people in question, with
their malicious happiness, are the horrible family who adopt Cosette when she is
a little girl, and not only are they the perfect incarnations of evil and a
certain
petit bourgeois
meanness or rather the meanness of those who
aspire to join the
petit bourgeoisie
, they are also, at this point in
history, thanks to technological progress, emblematic of the middle class in its
entirety, or almost, be it left- or right-wing, educated or illiterate, corrupt
or apparently upstanding: healthy individuals, busily maintaining their good
health; they may be less violent, less courageous, more prudent and more
discreet, but basically they’re just the same as the two Mexican gunmen living
out their idyll in the confines of a penitentiary. There’s no stopping Dionysus.
He has infiltrated the churches and the NGOs, the governments and the royal
families, the offices and the shantytowns. Dionysus is to blame for everything.
Dionysus rules. And his antagonist or counterpart is not even Apollo but Mr.
Uppity or Mrs. Toplofty, Mr. Prissy or Mrs. Lonely Neuron—bodyguards who are
ready to cross over to the enemy camp at the first suspicious bang.

Illness and Apollo

Where has that faggot Apollo got to? Apollo is ill, seriously
ill.

Illness and French Poetry

As the French are well aware, the finest poetry of the nineteenth
century was written in France, and in some sense the pages and the lines of that
poetry prefigured the major and still unresolved problems that Europe and
Western culture were to face in the twentieth century. A short list of the key
themes would include revolution, death, boredom and escape. That great poetry is
the work of a handful of poets, and its point of departure is not Lamartine, or
Hugo or Nerval, but Baudelaire. Let’s say that it begins with Baudelaire,
reaches its highest volatility with Lautréamont and Rimbaud and comes to an end
with Mallarmé. Of course there are other remarkable poets, like Corbière or
Verlaine, and others of considerable talent, like Laforgue or Catulle Mendès or
Charles Cros, and even a few who are not entirely insignificant, like Banville.
But, really, with Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, there’s plenty
to be going on with. Let’s begin with the last of the four. I don’t mean the
youngest, but the last one to die, Mallarmé, who missed out on the twentieth
century by two years. He wrote in
Brise marine
:

The flesh is sad—and I’ve read every book.

O to escape—to get away. Birds look

as though they’re drunk for unknown spray and skies.

No ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes,

nothing can hold this heart steeped in the sea —

not my lamp’s desolate luminosity

nor the blank paper guarded by its white

nor the young wife feeding her child, O night!

I’m off! You steamer with your swaying helm,

raise anchor for some more exotic realm!

Ennui, crushed down by cruel hopes, still relies

on handkerchief’s definitive goodbyes!

Is this the kind of squall-inviting mast

the storm winds buckle above shipwrecks cast

away—no mast, no islets flourishing? . . .

Still, my soul, listen to the sailors sing!

A charming poem. Although Nabokov would have advised the translators,
E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, to abandon the rhyme scheme, to use free verse, to
produce a deliberately ugly version, and if he’d known Alfonso Reyes, who
translated the poem into Spanish, with rhymes, he’d have given him the same
advice. Now Reyes might not mean a lot to Western culture as a whole, but he
does (or should) mean a great deal to that part of Western culture that is Latin
America. What did Mallarmé mean when he said that the flesh was sad and that
he’d read all the books? That he’d had his fill of reading and of fucking? That
beyond a certain point, every book we read and every act of carnal knowledge is
a repetition? And after that there is only travel? That fucking and reading are
boring in the end, and that travel is the only way out? I think Mallarmé is
talking about illness, about the battle between illness and health: two
totalitarian states, or powers if you prefer. I think he’s talking about illness
tricked out in the rags of boredom. And yet he presents an image of illness that
has a certain originality; he speaks of illness as
resignation
,
resignation to living, or to whatever. In other words, he’s talking about
defeat. And in order to counter that defeat, he vainly invokes sex and reading,
which, I suspect, in Mallarmé’s case—to his greater glory and the bemusement of
his good wife—were interchangeable, because how else could anyone in their right
mind say that the flesh is sad, period, in that emphatic way? How could anyone
declare that the flesh is
essentially
sad, that
la petite
mort
, which doesn’t even last a minute, casts a pall over all lovemaking,
which, it is widely known, can last for hours and hours, and go on interminably?
If the line had been written by a Spanish poet like Campoamor, it might have
meant something like that, but such a reading is quite at odds with the work and
life of Mallarmé, which are indissolubly linked, except in this poem, this
encoded manifesto, which Paul Gauguin, and he alone, followed to the letter (as
far as we know, Mallarmé himself never listened to the sailors singing, or if he
did, it certainly wasn’t on board a ship bound for an unknown destination). And
the claim to have read all the books makes even less sense, because although
books themselves may come to an end, no one ever finishes reading them all, and
Mallarmé was well aware of that. Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite,
but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our
fears, our hopes for peace. And what is left for Mallarmé, in this famous poem,
when the desire to read and the desire to fuck, so he says, are all used up?
Well, what is left is travel, the desire to go traveling. And maybe that’s the
key to the crime. Because if Mallarmé had concluded that the only thing left to
do was pray or cry or go crazy, maybe he’d have come up with the perfect alibi.
But no, what Mallarmé says is that the only thing left to do is travel—which is
like saying “to sail is necessary, to live is not necessary,” a sentence I used
to be able to quote in Latin, but that’s just one of the many things I’ve
forgotten with the help of my liver’s traveling toxins—in other words he sides
with the bare-chested traveler, with Freedom (who’s bare-chested too), with the
simple existence of the sailor and the explorer, which isn’t so simple when you
get right down to it: an affirmation of life, but also a constant game with
death, and the first rung on the ladder, the first step in a certain kind of
poetic apprenticeship. The second step is sex, and the third, books. Which means
that the Mallarmean choice is paradoxical or regressive, a starting over. And at
this point, before we return to the elevator, I can’t help recalling a poem by
Baudelaire, the father of them all, in which he speaks of travel, the voyage,
the naïve enthusiasm of setting out, and the bitterness that every voyage
bequeaths to the voyager when all is said and done, and it occurs to me that
perhaps Mallarmé’s sonnet is a reply to Baudelaire’s poem, one of the most
terrible poems I have read, an
ill poem
, a poem that offers no way out,
but perhaps the most clear-eyed poem of the entire nineteenth century.