The Insufferable Gaucho (14 page)

Declarations like that are a sign of the times. Of course, I’m prepared to
do whatever’s necessary (though that sounds unnecessarily melodramatic) to
ensure that the shrewd writer in question remains free to make that
declaration or any other, according to his taste and inclinations—to ensure
that everyone can say what they want to say and write what they want to
write and publish it as well. I’m against censorship and self-censorship.
But on one condition, as Alcaeus of Mytilene said: if you’re going to say
what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to
hear.

The fact
is, Latin American literature isn’t Borges or Macedonio Fernández or Onetti
or Bioy or Cortázar or Rulfo or Revueltas or even that pair of old bucks
García Márquez and Vargas Llosa. Latin American literature is Isabel
Allende, Luís Sepúlveda, Ángeles Mastretta, Sergio Ramírez, Tomás Eloy
Martínez, a certain Aguilar Camín or Comín and many other illustrious names
that escape me for the moment.

The work of
Reinaldo Arenas is already lost. And the work of Puig, Copi, Roberto Arlt.
No one reads Ibargüengoitia any more. Monterroso, who might well have
included Mandela, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa in his list of
unforgettable figures (though maybe he would have replaced Vargas Llosa with
Bryce Echenique), will soon be swallowed up by the mechanism of oblivion.
This is the age of the writer as civil servant, the writer as thug, the
writer as gym rat, the writer who goes to Houston or the Mayo Clinic in New
York for medical treatment. Vargas Llosa never gave a better lesson in
literature than when he went jogging at the crack of dawn. And García
Márquez never taught us more than when he welcomed the Pope in Havana,
wearing patent leather boots—García, not the Pope, who I guess would have
been wearing sandals—along with Castro, who was booted too. I can still
remember the smile that García Márquez was not quite able to contain on that
grand occasion. Half-closed eyes, taut skin as if he’d just had a face-lift,
slightly puckered lips, Saracen lips, as Amado Nervo would have said, green
with envy.

What can
Sergio Pitol, Fernando Vallejo, and Ricardo Piglia do to counter the
avalanche of glamour? Not much. They can write. But writing and literature
are worthless if they aren’t accompanied by something more imposing than
mere survival. Literature, especially in Latin America, and I suspect in
Spain as well, means success, by which, of course, I mean social success:
massive print runs; translations into more than thirty languages (I can name
twenty languages, but beyond twenty-five I run into trouble, not because I
doubt that language number twenty-six exists, but because it’s hard for me
to imagine the Burmese publishing industry or Burmese readers quivering with
emotion at the magical-realist escapades of Eva Luna); a house in New York
or Los Angeles; dinners with the rich and famous (as a result of which we
learn that Bill Clinton can recite whole paragraphs of
Huckleberry Finn
by heart, or that President Aznar reads
Cernuda); making the cover of
Newsweek
and landing six-figure
advances.

Writers
today, as Pere Gimferrer would be quick to point out, are no longer young
men of means unafraid to inveigh against the norms of respectable society,
much less a bunch of misfits, but products of the middle and working classes
determined to scale the Everest of respectability, hungry for
respectability. Blond- and dark-haired children of Madrid, born into the
lower-middle class and hoping to end their days on the next rung up. They
don’t reject respectability. They pursue it desperately. And in order to
attain it they really have to sweat. They have to sign books, smile, travel
to unfamiliar places, smile, make fools of themselves on celebrity talk
shows, keep on smiling, never, never bite the hand that feeds them,
participate in literary festivals and reply good-humoredly to the most
moronic questions, smile in the most appalling situations, look intelligent,
control population growth, and always say thank you.

It’s hardly
surprising that they are prone to sudden fatigue. The struggle for
respectability is exhausting. But the new writers had and in some cases
still have parents (may God preserve them for many years to come), parents
who exhausted themselves, who wore themselves out for a manual laborer’s
paltry wages, and as a result the new writers know that there are things in
life far more exhausting than smiling incessantly and saying yes to the
powerful. Of course there are far more exhausting things. And there’s
something touching about their efforts to secure a place in the pastures of
respectability, although it means elbowing others aside. There are no more
heroes like Aldana, who said, Now it is time to die, but there are
professional pundits and talk show guests, there are members of the academy
and political party animals (on the left and the right), there are cunning
plagiarists, seasoned social climbers, Machiavellian cowards, figures who
would not be out of place in earlier ages of literary history, and who, in
the face of numerous obstacles, play their parts, often with a certain
elegance—and they are precisely the writers that we, the readers or the
viewers or the public (the public, the public, as Margarita Xirgu whispered
into García Lorca’s ear) deserve.

God bless
Hernán Rivera Letelier, God bless his schmaltz, his sentimentality, his
politically correct opinions, his clumsy formal tricks, since I am partly
responsible. God bless the idiot children of García Márquez and the idiot
children of Octavio Paz, since I am to blame for them seeing the light. God
bless Fidel Castro’s concentration camps for homosexuals and the twenty
thousand who disappeared in Argentina and Videla’s puzzled mug and Perón’s
old macho grin projected into the sky and the child-killers of Rio de
Janeiro and Hugo Chávez’s Spanish which smells of shit and is shit, since I
created it.

Everything
is folklore in the end. We’re good at fighting and lousy in bed. Or was it
the other way round, Maquieira? I can’t remember any more. Fuguet is right:
you have to land those fellowships and massive advances. You have to sell
yourself before the buyers (whoever they are) lose interest. The last Latin
Americans who knew who Jacques Vaché was were Julio Cortázar and Mario
Santiago, and both of them are dead. The story of Penelope Cruz in India is
worthy of our most illustrious stylists. Pe arrives in India. Since she
likes local color or authenticity she goes to eat in one of the worst
restaurants in Calcutta or Bombay. Pe’s own words. One of the worst or one
of the cheapest or one of the most down-market places. She sees a hungry
little boy at the door who stares back at her fixedly. Pe gets up, goes out
and asks the boy what’s wrong. The boy asks her for a glass of milk. Which
is odd, because Pe isn’t drinking milk. Nevertheless, the actress gets a
glass of milk and takes it to the boy, who is waiting patiently at the door.
He gulps the glass of milk straight down, under Pe’s benevolent gaze. When
the boy finishes the glass, Pe tells us, his grateful happy smile makes her
think of all the things she has but doesn’t need, although Pe is wrong
there, because in fact she needs everything she has, absolutely everything.
A few days later, Pe has a long philosophical but also practical
conversation with Mother Teresa of Calcutta. At one point she tells the
story of the boy. She talks about the necessary and the superfluous, about
being and not-being, about being-in-relation-to and
not-being-in-relation-with . . . what? How does it work? And
in the end what does it mean “to be”? To be oneself? Pe gets confused.
Meanwhile Mother Teresa keeps moving like a rheumatic weasel around the room
or the porch where they’re talking, while the Calcutta sun, the balmy sun,
but also the sun of the living dead, scatters its dying rays, as it sinks
away in the west. Yes, yes, says Mother Teresa and then she murmurs
something that Pe doesn’t understand. What? asks Pe in English. Be yourself.
Don’t worry about fixing the world, says Mother Teresa: help, help, help one
person, give a glass of milk to one child, and that will be enough, sponsor
one child, just one, and that will be enough, says Mother Teresa in Italian,
clearly in a bad mood. When night falls, Pe returns to her hotel. She takes
a shower, changes her clothes, dabs herself with perfume, all the while
unable to forget Mother Teresa’s words. When dessert is served:
suddenly—illumination! It’s all a matter of taking a tiny pinch out of your
savings. It’s all a matter of not getting distressed. Give an Indian child
twelve thousand pesetas a year and you’re already doing something. And don’t
get distressed and don’t feel guilty. Don’t smoke, eat dried fruit, and
don’t feel guilty. Thrift and goodness are indissolubly linked.

A number of
enigmas are still floating in the air like ectoplasm. If Pe went to eat in a
cheap restaurant, why didn’t she end up with a case of gastroenteritis? And
why did Pe, who isn’t short of money, go to a cheap restaurant in the first
place? To save money?

We’re lousy
in bed, lousy at braving the elements, but good at saving. We hoard
everything. As if we knew the asylum was going to burn down. We hide
everything. The treasures that Pizarro will return to rob over and over
again, but also utterly useless things: junk, loose threads, letters,
buttons, which we stash in places that are then wiped from our memories,
because our memories are weak. And yet we like to keep, to hoard, to save.
If we could, we’d save ourselves for better times. We’re lost without mom
and dad. Although we suspect that mom and dad made us ugly and stupid and
bad so they could shine by contrast in the eyes of posterity. Saving, for
mom and dad, meant permanence, work and a pantheon, while for us, saving is
about success, money and respectability. We’re only interested in success,
money and respectability. We are the middle-class generation.

Permanence
has been swept aside by the rapidity of empty images. The pantheon, we
discover to our astonishment, is the doghouse of the burning
asylum.

If we could
crucify Borges, we would. We are the fearful killers, the careful killers.
We think our brain is a marble mausoleum, when in fact it’s a house made of
cardboard boxes, a shack stranded between an empty field and an endless
dusk. (And, anyway, who’s to say that we didn’t crucify Borges? Borges said
as much by dying in Geneva.)

And so let
us do as García Márquez bids and read Alexandre Dumas. Let us follow the
advice of Pérez Dragó or García Conte and read Pérez Reverte. The reader
(and by the same token the publishing industry) will find salvation in the
bestseller. Who would have thought. All that carrying on about Proust, all
those hours spent examining pages of Joyce suspended on a wire, and the
answer was there all along, in the bestseller. Ah, the bestseller. But we’re
lousy in bed and we’ll probably put our foot in it again. Everything
suggests that there is no way out of this.

Copyright © 2003 by The Heirs of Roberto
Bolaño

Translation copyright © 2010 by Chris
Andrews

Originally published in 2003 by Editorial Anagrama,
Barcelona, Spain, as
El gaucho insufrible
, published by arrangement
with The Heirs of Roberto Bolaño and Carmen Balcells Agencia Literaria,
Barcelona.

All rights reserved. Except for a brief passage quoted
in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of
this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
Publisher.

Translator’s Note: The epigraph to the book is taken
from Edwin and Willa Muir’s translation of Franz Kafka’s “Josephine the
Singer, or The Mouse People” (in
Selected Stories of Franz Kafka,
Modern Library, New York, 1952). The translation of “Brise Marine” (“Sea
Breeze”) by Stéphane Mallarmé in “Literature + Illness = Illness” is by E.
H. and A. M. Blackmore, and is quoted from
Six French Poets of the
Nineteenth Century
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000). The
translation of “Le Voyage” (“Travelers”) by Charles Baudelaire in
“Literature + Illness = Illness” is by Richard Howard, and is quoted from
Les Fleurs du mal: The Complete Text of The Flowers of Evil
(London, Picador, 1987). In “The Myths of Cthulhu,” “Hear this. To the right
hand side of the routine signpost (coming—of course—from north-northwest),
right where a bored skeleton yawns” is a slightly modified version of Andrew
Hurley’s translation of some lines of poetry in Jorge Luis Borges’s story
“The Aleph” (in
Collected Fictions,
Viking, New York,
1998).

Grateful acknowledgment is made to
Harper’s, The New
Yorker,
and
Zoetrope,
where some of this material first
appeared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data

Bolaño, Roberto, 1953–2003.

[Gaucho insufrible. English]

The insufferable gaucho / Roberto Bolaño ; translated
by Chris Andrews.

Chris Andrews

p. cm.

Originally published in Spain in 2003 as El gaucho
insufrible.

Includes five stories, two essays.

eISBN 978-0-8112-2053-8

I. Andrews, Chris, 1962– II. Title.

PQ8098.12.O38G3813 2010

863'.64—dc22 2010021112

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

New Directions Books are published for James
Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011