Lucas Mertehikian translated by Jennifer Croft

The history of the Americas has always been inseparable from the notion of travel, and Argentina is no exception to this rule. In fact, the history of Argentina’s literature can only be understood in connection with the men and women who arrived at its shores from far-off lands and wrote about that very experience.

No sooner had Argentina declared its independence than it began to see travelers—many of them from Great Britain—looking to try their luck and explore the commercial prospects of the new nation. The country’s vast plans captivated this multitude of newcomers who, with their aesthetic sensibilities that tended to fall somewhere in between the naturalism and the romanticism of the era, documented this astonishment in numerous books.

Adolfo Prieto has suggested that it was those books that led the first writers ... Read More »]]>

Lucas Mertehikian
translated by Jennifer Croft

The history of the Americas has always been inseparable from the notion of travel, and Argentina is no exception to this rule. In fact, the history of Argentina’s literature can only be understood in connection with the men and women who arrived at its shores from far-off lands and wrote about that very experience.

No sooner had Argentina declared its independence than it began to see travelers—many of them from Great Britain—looking to try their luck and explore the commercial prospects of the new nation. The country’s vast plans captivated this multitude of newcomers who, with their aesthetic sensibilities that tended to fall somewhere in between the naturalism and the romanticism of the era, documented this astonishment in numerous books.

Adolfo Prieto has suggested that it was those books that led the first writers of the young republic—like Sarmiento, Alberdi, Mármol—to the landscape that would become the foundations of Argentine literature. Then, in the twentieth century, a new breed of celebrity travelers, like José Ortega y Gasset, made their way to Argentina to celebrate the nation’s centennial in 1910 and didn’t stop coming after that. Those “cultural travelers,” as they’ve been called by Gonzalo Aguilar and Mariano Siskind, constitute a cornerstone of early-twentieth century literature in Argentina. The local intellectual and artistic circles eagerly awaited them and heatedly debated both them and their works, all the while hoping they’d be able to provide an answer to the same question Argentina’s earliest authors had asked themselves: what are Argentines?

Between those periods, in the 1920s, there was also another type of traveler to Buenos Aires, coming from Europe and the United States. Neither trailblazers nor celebrities, though some enjoyed a certain notoriety in their home countries. They were not anticipated by the Argentines with any particular eagerness, nor given a particularly warm welcome.

Perhaps because of this, with only a few exceptions, their writing has yet to be translated into Spanish. This series from The Buenos Aires Review aims to revive four of the authors from this in-between category and resuscitate their writings on Argentina: John Foster Fraser, Gordon Ross, Katherine Dreier and John Alexander Hammerton, in that order. Joining these four is Jules Huret, who was translated from French into Spanish at the time by Guatemalan writer Enrique Gómez Carrillo, but these translations have been widely neglected until now.

The chronicles we’ll be presenting here were published between 1914 and 1920. We are interested less in establishing a core Argentine identity than we are in enriching this question with the potency of history that the rereading of these texts, a hundred years after their original publication, demands be taken into account. What, in other words, have Argentines become?

Read the first entry in the series

Read the second entry in the series

John Foster Fraser

Lucas Mertehikian

translated by Jennifer Croft

In 1899, Scottish writer John Foster Fraser (1868-1936) made a name for himself in Great Britain with his book Round the World on a Wheel, the result of a bicycle trip made with two friends across over ten thousand miles of Europe, Asia and the United States. Unlike other books dedicated to travel, Foster Fraser’s book was not “about anthropology or biology or archaeology.” He made no claims to studying the places he went—only claims to fame: “We took this trip round the world on bicycles because we are more or less conceited, like to be talked about, and see our names in the newspapers,” he states in the preface.

And it worked: over the course of the next few decades, Foster Fraser traveled to and wrote about young ... Read More »]]>

John Foster Fraser

Lucas Mertehikian

translated by Jennifer Croft

In 1899, Scottish writer John Foster Fraser (1868-1936) made a name for himself in Great Britain with his book Round the World on a Wheel, the result of a bicycle trip made with two friends across over ten thousand miles of Europe, Asia and the United States. Unlike other books dedicated to travel, Foster Fraser’s book was not “about anthropology or biology or archaeology.” He made no claims to studying the places he went—only claims to fame: “We took this trip round the world on bicycles because we are more or less conceited, like to be talked about, and see our names in the newspapers,” he states in the preface.

And it worked: over the course of the next few decades, Foster Fraser traveled to and wrote about young countries like Canada (Canada As It Is) and Australia (Australia: The Making of a Nation), as well as histories with long and storied traditions, such as Russia (Red Russia) and the nations of northern Africa (The Land of Veiled Women). “Sir John, who was born in Edinburgh, spent almost the whole of his adult life in search of variety,” wrote The Glasgow Herald in his obituary, from June 8, 1936.

It may well have been this same search that led Foster Fraser to Argentina, where, in 1914, he wrote his second-to-last book: The Amazing Argentine: A New Land of Enterprise. Variety, after all, was already in the ethnic composition of his fellow passengers on the ship to Buenos Aires: wealthy Argentines returning from Europe, poor Spanish and Italian immigrants, English businessmen. “South America is not the land of the future. It is the land of to-day,” he writes. The trails blazed by European travelers in the first half of the nineteenth century in the exploration of fields and mines in the Andes had fallen into disuse—but there were now new paths.

Upon his arrival, Foster Fraser encountered a city in which an accelerated capitalist rhythm coexisted alongside archaic gender biases, something Beatriz Sarlo has described as part of Buenos Aires peripheral modernity. Perhaps his voyages around Australia and the Middle East had prepared him for his trip to Buenos Aires, a city whose contradictions he found, as he will note below, strangely fascinating.

Some Aspects of Buenos Aires

John Foster Fraser

The Argentines call their city of Buenos Aires the Paris of the southern hemisphere. It has a population nearing a million and a half, which is greater than that of any other town below the line of the Equator. The people promise that in time it will overtake London.

You insult an Argentine if you mix him up with Chilians, Brazilians, and other South Americans. He does not thank you for being reminded his father sailed from Italy, or his grandfather from Spain. He has no affection for any old land from which his sires came. The beginning of the world for Argentina was in May, 1810, when the Republic was set up.

He has no pride of historic race. When he makes money and visits Europe it is not to find the ancestral home in Spain or Italy. It is to have a good time in Paris. When he takes his family to Paris it is not to spend three, five, or six months. It is to spend three, five, or six hundred thousand pesos —and the value of a peso is one shilling and eightpence. When the pesos have flown he returns to Argentina and makes more.

The Argentines are a dignified people. They accept the English because in round figures five hundred millions of British capital in gold have aided in developing the country. They dislike the citizen of the United States because the big brother Republic of the north patronises them, and they need nobody’s help. They have a contempt for all other Latins beneath the Isthmus of Panama, particularly the Brazilians. They are conscious of their own qualities.

And the visitor blinks, and rubs his eyes, and admits the wonders of Argentina. If his acquaintance with geography is casual he has shrugged his shoulders at South American Republics, where they have revolutions every six weeks, and where tawny Spaniards in quaint costumes drive mules and die from difference of opinion with other Spaniards.

Then he goes to “BA” —the familiar description of Buenos Aires— and he finds he has landed in a rampantly modem American-cum-European city. There is none of the sloth of the Southern, no checking of business between noon and three to pass in siestas.

It is a busy city. The port is thronged with shipping, mostly British. High-shouldered elevators stick out long tongues, and streams of wheat, grown on the plains of the interior, pour food for Europe into the holds. Trucks of cattle grunt through the noisy railway yards. There are huge killing establishments, and animals go to their death by the many thousand every day with a celerity which would awaken a Chicagoan. There are mighty avenues of chilled and frozen meat. Labour-saving machinery carries it on board the steamers which hasten across the Atlantic, carrying cheap beef to the London and Liverpool markets. Commerce is conducted on the latest scientific lines. The North Americans have nobbled the meat trade, and the Jews have control of the wheat market.

Buenos Aires is the mart where the produce of the rich back-lands is bartered. It levies a heavy toll. The most imposing business buildings are the banks —national banks, British, German, French, Spanish, and Italian banks. In and about Reconquista are these banks, ever busy. Near by are the rival shipping offices, a glut of them. The offices of the great railway companies are enormous. Widespreading premises exhibit the latest and best agricultural machinery that Lincolnshire and Illinois can produce. There is the hustle of commerce. The streets are as narrow and as crowded and as vital as within the City of London. There is earnestness about the men.

The Argentine is sombre in manner. He dresses in conventional black. A light waistcoat, a gay tie or fancy socks, is bad form. You cannot tell the difference between a millionaire and one of his clerks, except that the former has an expensive motor-car and the latter hires a taxi or a victoria, or travels by electric tramcar. At every corner you see evidence of prosperity, of successful money-making. And money speaks in BA as loudly as it does in New York.

Folk of the Saxon breed tend to scoff at the decadence of the Latin race. But there is something revivifying in the transplanting of a people. We have evidence in our own colonies. The man of Spanish descent in the Argentine is not always the spry fellow he thinks himself; but he has dropped the cloak of sluggishness which enwraps Spain. He is often rich; he lives in a gorgeous residence; his extravagances are beyond those of a Russian archduke. He is polite and hospitable.

But the wealthy Spanish Argentine is not the creator of his own wealth. I heard of only one case of a Spanish Argentine owing his great fortune to commercial enterprise. The fortunes of most of these Argentines come from land. Their grandfathers got immense areas by the easiest means. Properties were so enormous that extent was not reckoned in acres, or even square miles, but by leagues. But a hundred leagues, however good for cattle or sheep, or wheat growing —what was its value a couple of hundred miles from a port? Then came British railways. They pierced the prairies. The land bounded in value, tenfold, a thousandfold. Other people came in; first shrewd Scotsmen; then industrious Italians; then Englishmen bent on becoming estancieros. Their children are Argentines. But the mighty fortunes are mostly in the possession of the early Argentines —those who were settled fifty and more years ago. They have sat still and seen their land blossom in value. They pay no income tax; there is no tax on unearned increment. Mr. Lloyd George was once in the Argentine, associated with a land development company. That, however, is another story.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants pour into the Republic every year. They come from every land on earth. Mostly do they come from Spain and Italy. Italy provides the greatest number, and splendid colonists they are. Though the language will always be Spanish, the race is rapidly becoming Italianised. There is a commingling of the sterner stuff from Europe. So in this rich land —rivalling Canada and Australia in productiveness— there is being blended a new people, keen, alert, successful, ostentatious, pagan —a people that has a destiny and knows it.

The Argentines are town proud. You are not in Buenos Aires a couple of days before you are bombarded with the inquiry, “Don’t you think this is a beautiful city?”. It is not that; but it is an interesting city.

In the oldest quarters the streets are narrow, after the Spanish style. So narrow are they that, with electric cars jingling along them, vehicles are allowed to journey only one way. To reach a shop by carriage it is sometimes necessary, to drive along three and a half sides of a block of buildings. Funny little policemen, brown faced, blue clad, and with white gaiters and white wands, direct the traffic. In the Florida —the Bond Street of BA— all wheeled traffic is prohibited between the hours of four and seven in the afternoon, so that shoppers may have an easier way.

Most of the streets are called after Argentine provinces, or neighbouring republics, or national heroes, or some politician or rich man who can influence the authorities. When a popular man has lost his popularity the remnant of his fame is obliterated by the street called after him being named after someone else. It is as though the Government at home decided to change Victoria Street, Westminster, into the Avenida Asquith, with the prospect of its being altered later on to the Calle Bonar Law.

Wide plazas decorate the city. Vegetation is luxuriant, and statues are numerous. The Plaza Mayo is not called after an Irish peer, but after the month of May, 1810. The shops are as big as those in London. Argentina manufactures practically nothing, and all the lovely things have to be imported from Europe. The hotels are imitations of those in Paris. The restaurants are on a par with the best we have in London. A Viennese band plays whilst you have Russian caviare and the waiter is asking your choice in champagne. But everything is expensive. A man needs three times the salary in Buenos Aires to live the same way he would live in London. If you calculate exchange rates you go mad. It is best to count the peso (1s 8d) as a shilling, and then remember that you are spending your shilling in South America, where things are dear. You can get a modest luncheon for 10s; but you will pay 2s for a bottle of beer, and 8s 6d for a cigar worth smoking.

Yet nobody minds. Immense sums are being spent on improving the city. It is built on the American T-square plan. But it is to be subjected to the plan of Haussmann, with great tree-girt avenues radiating diagonally from the Plaza Mayo. An underground railway, honeycombing beneath the town, is in rapid construction. The railways have a great suburban traffic, and are being electrified. There are British colonies at Belgrano and Hurlingham, and you have a choice of three golf courses. In the summer months —December, January, and February— there is river life on the Tigre, the Thames of the Argentine. A charming spot is Palermo, a combination of Hyde Park and the Bois de Boulogne —open sweeps and charming trees, a double boulevard with statues and commemorative marbles in the middle, well-cared-for gardens, radiant flowers and the band playing.

A drive through Palermo at the fashionable hour causes one to gasp at the thought that one is six thousand miles from Europe. Nowhere in the world have I seen such a display of expensive motor-cars, thousands of them. Ostentation is one of the stars of life in the Argentine. Appearances count for everything. You must have a motor-car, even though you have not the money to pay for it, and you owe the landlord of your flat a year’s rent. The ladies are exquisitely gowned, but they have not the vivacity of the French women nor their daring in dress. There is a demureness, a restraint which reminds one that the atmosphere of far-away Castile is still upon them.

On Sundays and Thursdays there are races at Palermo. The price Argentines pay for horseflesh has become a proverb. It is a good race-course. We have nothing in England, neither at Epsom, Ascot, nor Goodwood, so magnificent as the grand stand. It is a glorified royal box. The restaurant is like the Ritz dining-room. Everybody dresses as they would at Ascot. There are no bookmakers. The totalisator is used. Betting is officially conducted by the Jockey Club, and there is constant announcement of the amount of money put on the horses. Those who have backed the winners share the spoil, less ten per cent. As this ten per cent, is deducted from the total amount put on each race, the income of the Jockey Club runs into hundreds of thousands of pounds. So the Club maintains a good racecourse, offers capital prizes, has a house in BA —undoubtedly the most palatial club-house in the southern world— and distributes the remainder amongst the hospitals. The income of the Jockey Club is so large it is really embarrassing. The members are proceeding to build an Aladdin’s palace of super-gorgeousness.

But at the races at Palermo I noticed that no ladies attended, except in the members’ enclosure. Even there they did not mingle with the men-folk. There was no mirth, such as we are used to in Europe. They kept themselves to little groups. Moving from wonder to wonder, I was present at a gala performance at the Colon Theatre. I have seen all the great theatres in the world, and this is the loveliest —a harmony of rose and gold. The audience was as fashionably dressed as at the opera in London, though I missed the dazzling display of diamonds which had been promised. Most of the audience were ladies; there were boxes of them, and most of the men were in the stalls. There was one gallery reserved for women.

I began to discern a strange Orientalism in the relations between the sexes. The Argentine women are amongst the best mothers in the world. But there is practically none of the good fellowship between young fellows and young girls which is so happy a feature of our English life. For a man and a woman to take a walk together would shock the proprieties. There are brilliant receptions, but dinner parties, as we know them, are rare. An Argentine seldom introduces a friend to his wife. Except amongst the poorest a woman scarcely ever goes into the streets alone. If she does she runs risk of being insulted. There are Argentines, who would be offended if refused the name of gentlemen, who think it excellent sport to walk in the Florida in the evening and mutter obscenities to every unprotected woman who passes. Buenos Aires is the most immoral city in the world. So the Argentine guards his women-folk from contact with other men. His attitude is a relic of the days when the Moors had possession of Spain.

I have called Buenos Aires a pagan city. So it is. The men are frankly irreligious. In conversation I have been told of the tolerance to all religions. What is really meant is indifference to any religion.

Money-making and flamboyant display —these are the gods which are worshipped. The houses in the wealthier districts are exotic in architecture. I remember driving along the Avenida Alvear, a street of palaces, reminiscent of the Grand Canal at Venice if it were a roadway. But the fine stone blocks are nothing but stucco. The ornamentation, the floral decorations, are not carved stone; they are stucco. Imitation, pretense, showiness, the flaunting of wealth, are everywhere.

Yet this city, which has grown in a generation on the muddy flats by the side of the muddy Parana River, has something that is weird in its fascination.

from The Amazing Argentine. A New Land of Enterprise. London, Cassell and Company, 1914.

 Natalka Sniadanko Translated from Ukrainian by Jennifer Croft

“No photos,” barks the geezer wearing the typically Soviet hat with the visor, synthetic leather sandals, an untucked shirt, and pants that haven’t been washed in ages.

He says it in Russian, but I answer in Ukrainian. “Too bad,” I say with a sigh and survey once more his wares arrayed across a sheet of pleather cast across the cobblestones: a shoddy photocopy of an abridged Mein Kampf in the very center, and next to it a treatise of similar quality on the Ukrainian liberation movement of the 1920s, both against the backdrop of a generous assortment of Komsomol, Young Pioneer, and World War II symbolism: badges, photographs, belts, and Soviet-style cockades. The selection on neighboring tables and mats is neither less varied nor less noteworthy. Soviet and Italian pop hits on ... Read More »]]>

 Natalka Sniadanko
Translated from Ukrainian by Jennifer Croft

“No photos,” barks the geezer wearing the typically Soviet hat with the visor, synthetic leather sandals, an untucked shirt, and pants that haven’t been washed in ages.

He says it in Russian, but I answer in Ukrainian. “Too bad,” I say with a sigh and survey once more his wares arrayed across a sheet of pleather cast across the cobblestones: a shoddy photocopy of an abridged Mein Kampf in the very center, and next to it a treatise of similar quality on the Ukrainian liberation movement of the 1920s, both against the backdrop of a generous assortment of Komsomol, Young Pioneer, and World War II symbolism: badges, photographs, belts, and Soviet-style cockades. The selection on neighboring tables and mats is neither less varied nor less noteworthy. Soviet and Italian pop hits on vinyl; aluminum forks and spoons; Russian and Polish cookbooks spanning the whole of the past century; editions with and without illustrations of books on everything under the sun; fashion magazines from all over the world, ranging from issues that are relatively recent to veritable antiques; a wooden abacus beneath a taut, sign-bearing cord, whose words—“Danger! Archaeological investigation underway”—tremble a little in the wind. Standing pointedly in one of the aisles is one of those classic partly plaid bags on wheels that old folks cart their groceries in; it is capped with a handwritten note announcing the availability of copies of a Polish guidebook to Lviv originally published in 1920. I buy a copy. It’s all the same terrible-quality photocopies at exorbitant prices, but the contents of the guidebook are worth it: in addition to the detailed descriptions of the old streets and buildings, it also contains maps, indispensible in a city where street names change just about every other year. There are piano études by Chopin and Rossini’s biography alongside the memoirs of Soviet General Zhukov; Polish detective novels from the 70s in the original language as well as Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz in Russian translations; collections of reproductions of the works of Russian painter Vasily Surikov and rare editions of Ukrainian poet Vasily Stus, censored yet nominated for the Nobel Prize; a biographical publication in Russian called Marx’s Daughters and a Cossack history of Ukraine; an open suitcase displaying maps of the Bieszczady Mountains in Polish and a guide to Krakow in Russian; sun-bleached umbrellas advertising Ukrainian beer, shading books by Henry Miller, Darya Dontsova, and Agatha Christie.

And towering above it all, there is the great stone figure of Ivan Fedorov, who in the sixteenth century printed the first Ukrainian book. Traversing the books, brides in long white dresses climb the stairs to have their pictures taken in front of the monument while the booksellers sit back in their folding chairs reading whatever they happen to have gotten their hands on. I spot one engrossed in a book with a dingy green pleather cover, titled Alcoholism, author unnamed.

Perhaps out of all of contemporary Lviv, covered as it is in Soviet scabies, excessively sweetened for tourist tastes, this is where real multiculturalism has survived. It is here where German-Polish dictionaries from the Habsburg era rest beside works by the head of Ukraine’s first government and prominent historian Mikhail Grushevsky; Soviet Woman Magazine; old right- and left-wing pamphlets; the graphomaniacal ensembles of Soviet literati; and Ukrainian literature forbidden in the Soviet era, published by the Ukrainian diaspora around the world and smuggled into Lviv as contraband. And although this current array of bookly chaos is geared more toward tourists than toward bibliophiles, as it once was, the shift is understandable, was even inevitable, and it does not mar in any significant way the experience of buying books.

Further down, past Fedorov, there is the entrance into the city’s archives. Its massive wrought iron gates open for a moment, and the geezer with the hat with the visor appears in an aisle. Squinting a little, he glances at my camera—but I don’t quite manage to take my shot in time: the gates have shut again.

**

Read this in Ukranian

**

Paola Cortés Rocca on Bruno Dubner’s Las Muertas (The Dead) translated by Jennifer Croft

1. Images are wily: they don’t lay out facts, don’t make any cases. They’re indolent and superficial: they would have us believe that the world is what we see, and that it’s just fine as it is already. They reside as far away as possible from Comprehension, which begins where we resist appearances and first glances.

2. “When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures,” said Susan Sontag. Photographic discourse is elegiac and crepuscular: it not only cherishes the past, but also converts into past everything it touches. Salvaging it, damning it, protecting it, asphyxiating it. Photography is an overprotective mother, sweet and terrifying. A melancholy lady in eternal agony.

3. In the new regime of technology dominated by the digital, certain characteristics ... Read More »]]>

Paola Cortés Rocca on Bruno Dubner’s Las Muertas (The Dead)
translated by Jennifer Croft

1. Images are wily: they don’t lay out facts, don’t make any cases. They’re indolent and superficial: they would have us believe that the world is what we see, and that it’s just fine as it is already. They reside as far away as possible from Comprehension, which begins where we resist appearances and first glances.

2. “When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures,” said Susan Sontag. Photographic discourse is elegiac and crepuscular: it not only cherishes the past, but also converts into past everything it touches. Salvaging it, damning it, protecting it, asphyxiating it. Photography is an overprotective mother, sweet and terrifying. A melancholy lady in eternal agony.

3. In the new regime of technology dominated by the digital, certain characteristics that may be attributed to visual and linguistic “information”—objectified in artworks, digital books, websites, even watches with no hands—are useful, too, in establishing the way in which that information circulates, the way in which subjects—producers, artists, writers, readers, consumers, etc.—make connections, amongst themselves, with others, with words, images, and the things that support them. Everything is (read: should be, aspires to be) ephemeral and disposable and, at the same time, everything is worth being recorded, catalogued, and archived; everything changes vertiginously, aspires to be updatable, to mutate into new and improved versions of itself while also remaining static enough to incorporate discrete elements that attach to and multiply the same basic platform. The approachable, the intuitive, the easy-to-use reified sarcastically the punk utopia: billed as accessible to all, it is in reality the distillation of absolute specialization, training, and research. We are more intimate than ever before—with other people, other geographies, and other histories—and yet we have never been so distant.

4. The digital is a new regime of technology (Bishop), but it could also be called a new mode of reproducibility (Benjamin) or a new redistribution of the sensible (Rancière). What is clear, however, is that analog photography, as a citizen of Modernity, also inhabits this unstable and ultra-contemporary universe. Photography is very twentieth-century, very aged. Photography is classic, modern, bold, and every so slightly passé. “Yo soy aquel que ayer nomás decía / el verso azul y la canción profana.”

5. In his Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure describes the sign as a psychic entity in which the signified and the signifier are unified by arbitrariness. Signage holds pre- or post-Saussurian signs. There the word is very far from being a psychic entity, be it more or less virtual. It is an object, a thing chiseled onto stone or marble, stamped across glass, resplendent, that then deteriorates and finally rots away. “Gold letters, metallic letters,” announces one sign captured here by the camera of Bruno Dubner. Furthermore, design, typography, materials are nothing if they are not opponents of the arbitrary. There is even some humor in the O of the “Lotto” that contains a lottery drum, as though the word itself were playing. Even if our vision begins to fail us, and we need to go to an optician, we can rest assured that there will be no actual reading required in the signs for them—all we have to do is recognize the typography. In signage, the word explores its analog face.

6. There are two stories present in any history of the promotional sign: the one about styles and the one about uses. The first spans the Belle Époque and Toulouse-Lautrec, Art Nouveau, Bauhaus, Russian constructivism. The second speaks to the metamorphoses of the sign from its beginnings as an instrument of advertising designed to sell things and services (drinks, plays, experiences) through its career during the World Wars as a bonds-collecting tool and an encouragement to join the armed forces. The sign is a hybrid being: it signals the meeting, in the second half of the nineteenth century, of art and market, esthetics and civil intervention. Today, when there is nothing but the blurring of boundaries between design, aesthetics, market, advertising, politics, consumption, recreation, and war, signage is a venerable old lady, an illustrious antecessor. “Hora de ocaso y de discreto beso / hora crepuscular y de retiro.”

7. Asked about some of his pictures illustrating signs of Buenos Aires, photographer Bruno Dubner rejects terms like retro or vintage in characterizing his work. His thing is a liking for the old. He also maintains that his relationship with analog is not a kind of fetish (let alone gerontophilia or necrophilia). It’s part of a documentary task in which the oldness of signage is recorded by means of similar age: analog photography. He is exhibiting the results of this labor in a show entitled Las muertas (“The Dead”).

8. “This is not a pipe”: Magritte’s painting shows the ontological, aesthetic, and political distance between the object and its representation. The Dead: Dubner’s photographs head in the opposite direction. Two technologies start to look alike, making a mode of visual representation equivalent to a linguistic form, flirting with the confusion between aesthetic object and merchandise. Las muertas makes note of the scriptural character and the objectual dimension of analog photography, and at the same time, it records the visual becoming of the word in the universe of the promotional sign. “This is not a pipe.” The assertion is now obvious. What we often forget today is exactly what Dubner’s pictures point to: there can be no representation without medium, materiality, support. And that, in adding its meanings and its own history, changes everything. Who believes the word Coca-Cola, the brand, and even the beverage itself could exist in a grim Arial 12?

9. The Dead says that analog photography is traces, brand, symbols, writing. Signage is design, composition, color, highlighting, the display of meaning. The photographer documents their long-lost beauty, their glorious past, their end. He tracks them like a detective. And he finds them rusted, tattered, like the faded letters of the word “epoch” (click, a picture is taken, and it becomes forensic). This is, in fact, a funerary rite.

10.  On behavior at funerals, Manuel A. Carreño writes: “Those accompanying must walk at a slow pace, and with an air of circumspection and devotion that befits both the nature of the ceremony and the situation of the mourners, for it is always a sign of good manners to show that one shares in the grief of those especially afflicted.” (Manual of Civility and Propriety Applicable to All Youth of Both Sexes, Caracas, 1853).

Requiem

The death of god, the decline of man, the culmination of history, the end of art. These are all predictions for the future, evaluations of the present, theoretical preoccupations, urges that guide aesthetic practice, experiments, challenges, and releases. They are also melancholy celebrations, shows of fascination and of fondness. There is a vampire plot to The Dead. Not only in the hazied boundary between celebration and wake, between consecration and obsequies, but also in the moment where the death of signage is declared alongside the death of the analog image at the very same time that the former is brought back to life through the eyes of the latter. The photographer turned documentary-maker, detective, or forensic pathologist celebrates every find in games of framing, precision, and flashes of humor. Perhaps because, with its cheerful funeral and its living dead, Bruno Dubner’s work reminds us that it is just when a medium gets old that it can say anything or think everything. Thus Las muertas exhibits the paradoxical concurrence between obsolescence and utopia.

* *

Translator’s Note

The following quotes from this piece are Rubén Darío’s:

Yo soy aquel que ayer nomás decía
el verso azul y la canción profana.

I am the one who just yesterday spoke
the blue verse and the profane song

Hora de ocaso y de discreto beso
hora crepuscular y de retiro.

time of sunset and a discreet kiss;
time of twilight and seclusion

From Will Derusha and Alberto Acereda’s translation of Rubén Darío in Songs of Life and Hope / Cantos de vida y esperanza. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

 * *

Images: Bruno Dubner 
Las Muertas * Galería Foster Catena * Honduras 4882 * Buenos Aires * until September 2013

Jennifer Croft

I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace.

Albert Camus, The Stranger

Poetry knows that the political rests on forgetting the unforgettable.

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting

Alexander Maksik’s second novel portrays a young Liberian woman named Jacqueline who does little more than meander Santorini, an island in the Aegean that features beaches of lava pebbles and sand in red and black and white, and yet she astonishes, soothes, and horrifies us with perfect efficiency, making A Marker to Measure Drift a masterpiece.

There is the precision of the protagonist’s voice; there are the island’s elements, rendered palpable—its white hot light, in the beginning, and then ... Read More »]]>

Jennifer Croft

I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace.

Albert Camus, The Stranger

Poetry knows that the political rests on forgetting the unforgettable.

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting

Alexander Maksik’s second novel portrays a young Liberian woman named Jacqueline who does little more than meander Santorini, an island in the Aegean that features beaches of lava pebbles and sand in red and black and white, and yet she astonishes, soothes, and horrifies us with perfect efficiency, making A Marker to Measure Drift a masterpiece.

There is the precision of the protagonist’s voice; there are the island’s elements, rendered palpable—its white hot light, in the beginning, and then its slow-encroaching chill. There is the sheer force of the novel’s rhythm, like a symphony that circles, hovers, comes crashing down as it swells relentlessly to its horrific and incomprehensible climax.

The book is neither a quest nor a journey, although she travels. It is not an investigation into a crime, although atrocities loom out of its pages. It is not the story of a young woman coming of age. It’s not about revenge, or repentance.

It is not these things because the logic that informs its structure is radically different from normal narrative thinking. Thus Maksik manages to accomplish in Marker something next to no one has managed to do, namely, to strip the world down to naked life, life in all its glory and all its agony and terror, and death.

Jacqueline is starving when the novel opens. We watch her watch with lupine greed tempered by good breeding as tourists eat and discard food, and we begin to starve with her. It is the sustained tension between animal need and human dignity that keeps Jacqueline alive. Her mother is her main interlocutor from the first page forward, and she admonishes her always to remember who she is: to wait until the family of tourists has fully left the premises before feeding upon their scraps; to eat them slowly, like a lady, no matter what she feels.

Jacqueline’s disciplined scavenging steadily gives way to a job of her own inventing that enables her to purchase what she needs without shame. Pretending to be a college student in America, she combs the beach for tourists who will pay her one euro to massage their feet for five minutes. With astonishing rapidity, Jacqueline has attained a stability that—far from being a relief—becomes a burden.

In the following passage, Maksik’s prose floats weightlessly and then falls like a fist on a table; this literary version of Muhammad Ali’s famous butterfly-bee dictum is as effective as its predecessor in boxing:

She has food and water and shelter. She has lined one side of the cave with flat stones to serve as shelves. Pedestals. The tube of Fresh Mint ChapStick she found in the sand stands upright like a bullet next to her toothbrush. There’s a neat stack of paper napkins she keeps beneath a small smooth rock. Her sandals side by side on their own stone. There’s a paper cup into which she deposits the money she brings home. Today it holds a single coin. She should go out, but she has no appetite. Hunger is no longer the burden. It is time. It is the new absence of need. The instinct is to protect yourself. To build and organize, to form your days, to apply patterns and repeat them. And she has done all of this without intention. She has built a home without meaning to. And now she wants to know what happens next.

She does not have the capacity to kill herself.

But the “new absence of need” is short-lived. Jacqueline is approached by male Africans she senses will harm her. She thinks back to Liberia, to a band of LURD soldiers threatening to kill her and their cologne, making them “like boys preparing for a dance.” The book’s tempo accelerates almost imperceptibly. Jacqueline’s mother helps to guide her up into the ruins of the island’s ancient amphitheater and agora.

Paul Ricoeur reads Arendt as suggesting that the only reason we can’t forgive ourselves is that we can’t see ourselves for what we are. “We are dependent upon others,” says Arendt, “to whom we appear in a distinctness which we ourselves are unable to perceive.”

Up in the ancient city, Jacqueline meets a tour guide by whom she fights to allow herself to be befriended. In her extended isolation, Jacqueline has forgotten the facial expressions for conversations, their usual cadences, how to pay attention and not get scared: “She held out a small plastic water bottle and crackled it to get Jacqueline’s attention. The noise was very loud.” Haunted by her memories of the cacophonously horrific events that occasioned her flight from Liberia, Jacqueline can barely bear present sounds. We learn from the tour guide that we are now in what was once the epicenter of thriving Minoan culture; Minoan culture, we are told, has vanished off the face of the earth, and everyone living here was killed by a massive volcanic eruption: “Can you imagine?” says the tour guide. “I was thinking of the sound,” says Jacqueline. But what sound could we possibly assign to death and destruction on such a scale?

As she runs out of provisions, Jacqueline allows herself to be talked into riding back down the mountain with the tour group. She frets as they approach their destination: “It was the prospect of noise that was the most daunting. The rush of cars and wind and voices. She was so grateful for the shelter of that bus. Its insulation and quiet.” Having floated for a little while in that quiet insulation, Jacqueline is ejected back again into the world.

Movement towards a goal necessitates the prior progression backwards of one’s mind. An objective is identified, and a sequence of steps is then issued that leads carefully back down to one’s current condition. Targeting is the application of retrospect to the future, its tense the future perfect: you will have graduated, you will have gotten a job, you will have had kids. You will have paid off your mortgage. And only then can the goal be attained, at which time, of course, it simply ceases to exist.

Jacqueline lacks the capacity to move back and forth in this way. Jacqueline is aimless. The novel is aimless. She takes us around and around its molten core.

Having goals is a way of dividing life into blacks and whites: one either successfully achieves one’s goals or one does not. Life is either successful or it is not.

Can there be meaning, however, without aim?

Charles Taylor, who ruled Liberia from 1997-2003, is widely held to be responsible for some of the worst atrocities in recent human history. In April of last year, Taylor was convicted in The Hague of aiding and abetting acts of terrorism, murder, rape, sexual slavery, “outrages upon personal dignity,” enslavement, pillage, and “conscripting or enlisting children under the age of 15 years into armed forces or groups, or using them to participate actively in hostilities,” among other counts.

Jacqueline’s father was Charles Taylor’s right-hand man. Jacqueline grew up in perfect privilege in a house poised high above Liberia’s fast-festering capital, Monrovia.

Then she escaped and came to Santorini.

What does all this make Jacqueline? “And when I die,” she tells her sister, before, “you’ll keep me in your memory, and that’s the only way there’s God.” Jacqueline is spared twice by opposition forces who charge her with conveying their message to the outside world, a mission she has not accepted when we meet her in the Aegean. Jacqueline is not a witness. She is more like living life support to the spirit of her family. She interacts with them constantly, unable to make room for her fellow living beings who surround her. She isolates herself out of fear, but also as the only way of giving herself over fully to the memories of her sister and her parents.

Who was Jacqueline’s father? What did he know of all that torture, murder, rape? How could he not have known?

He knew, of course. And her mother must have known, too. Jacqueline, who returned from her education in England to work for the Ministry of Tourism, where she would call foreign dignitaries and entreat them to come (“You’ve never seen such beaches. A secret paradise, sir.”), must have known. She imagines her boyfriend Bernard, an international aid worker, being unable to separate “her from them” once the scale of the atrocities has finally been revealed.

We can’t separate her from them. And that means we can’t separate them from us.

She tells us what Bernard tells her: that he’s seen children “rip out a man’s intestines and use them for rope. Rope for a checkpoint. Strung across a road, Jacqueline.” Jacqueline remembers conversations with her dad when she was a kid:

Tell me about school. Tell me about these boys your mother says are chasing you. Should I have them shot? I will have them shot tomorrow. Tell me the one you like the most and I’ll have him shot first. Or maybe we’ll cut his head off. Chop off his hands. Give him some long sleeves.

No one was funnier than he. No one more brilliant. No one more handsome. She laughed until she couldn’t breathe.

The same things all fathers say to their daughters, only that in that laughter there is already the slight snarl of an attack: maybe her father really did have those boys shot, decapitated, or mutilated later. Who knows?

Scenes of domestic bliss get darker: there are the four of them sitting around a radio, but the program they are listening just consists of announcements of encroaching opposition forces and the rape of girls “as young as eleven.” When the radio quits working, her parents plug it into her sister’s nostrils. Is this funny?

“We are not a permanent place,” says the ghost of Jacqueline’s mother. Like all of us, all the time, Jacqueline is complicit in cruelty. She has our unwavering sympathy as she narrowly escapes Liberia and as she roams these foreign shores, penniless, defenseless, devastated. “You’ll keep me in your memory,” she has told her sister, “and that’s the only way there’s God.” But what would happen to a person if there were no one there to remember them? Where would their God be?

Jacqueline searches:

Then she watched the sun disappear. She tried not to blink. She tried to imagine the earth moving. She tried to imagine riding its great back. She pressed her hands flat against the ground. She kept her eyes on the sun and swore she could feel the world taking her, hurtling away as the sky at the horizon burst and divided into orange and blue, pink and yellow, and then little by little everything went dark and Jacqueline began to cry.

She was thinking of the way she used to walk into parties.

The prose floats and crashes. Jacqueline submits to “the world taking her” only to feel rebellion welling up within her. No, she will not simply be taken by the world. What about the way she used to walk into parties?

Why does Jacqueline not go to the press? Why does she not seek asylum? Why does she not go to her friends from school in England? She could even go find Bernard in France—she thinks about him all the time, clearly loves him still.

But sometimes Jacqueline’s placid person is brimmed over by violence. Sometimes Jacqueline erupts. She dreams of Bernard: “of making love, of him pressing down on her, and she dreamed of breaking his skull with a heavy rock.” As we are dragged further and further into a music that begins to turn to frenzy, Jacqueline attempts to make a friend, a waitress who takes pity on her and serves her breakfast for free one day. The two meet for a drink.

More crucial than anything else in this novel is this meeting. This connection, and this confession—because when she tells the waitress the story of what happened to her family in Liberia, it reads less like testimony than it does like confession.

Maksik portrays perfectly the precariousness of Jacqueline’s position. Talking to the waitress is like walking a tightrope strung over an abyss. She makes near-missteps; she realizes she sounds strange. She almost falls. When asked how her sister died, she knows that if she lets herself, she will scare her new friend off, and that if she does that, she will have lost everything. But try as she might, Jacqueline cannot operate on the level of the future perfect:

Jacqueline looks over at the girl. She looks back. She seems so young, so frightened. Jacqueline is drunk. She could crush Katarina. And she wants to. She wants to beat her with what she knows. She wants to scream at her. What I have to say, little girl. The things I have to say. She wants to deliver them with violence. But she waits for it to pass. She waits because she does not want to hurt this girl, her waitress, her nurse.

“No,” Jacqueline says. “She wasn’t sick.”

And then, as though in order not to fall herself, she crushes us. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee: A Marker to Measure Drift’s last few pages are so powerful as to be revolting, once our hearts have been rent.

*

I met Muhammad Ali once at the Tulsa International Airport, when I was ten or so. He signed autographs for my sister and me. We’d just flown in from Rochester, Minnesota, where my sister at the age of six had undergone her first brain surgery, and I was tired and inattentive. I do remember that he was kind, and that what I later learned was Parkinson’s syndrome made his voice quaver and his hands shake.

“We pay for our sins, for the sins of others,” says her mother on the novel’s first page. “Anyway, we can’t understand.”

Now in my turn-of-the-century apartment building in Buenos Aires, the slow-spiraling stone steps sag toward the center. I always think when I leave or return to my apartment of how many people must have climbed and descended them before me, to have trodden down stone.

In the beginning of A Marker to Measure Drift, Jacqueline eats the scraps of food left behind by a family. Sitting “in their depressions,” Jacqueline is released from the expectation of making her own mark. In her aimlessness, Jacqueline does not mean anything. She just means, intransitively, in the same inspiring way that a lightning bug glows.

Our heroine finishes her desperate, elegant meal:

There was nothing to see in the sun or the water. Maybe there was something in the boats, she thought. Maybe there was something there. She liked boats, though she knew nothing about them and had traveled on only a few in her life and most of those, recently. She found them exotic and mysterious in their simplicity. It was that a boat rested on the surface of the water. That was all. Just that it did that. It was not the traveling or the adventure or the freedom. She was not interested in sailors or fishermen. Just the objects and the way they floated. She watched a small yacht pass across the wide bay. Then she turned away.

240 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. 2013.

Image: “Monterey” (2013) by Julia Ng

translated by Jennifer Croft

HOW WILL TERROR TAKE ROOT IN THE FUTURE?

We jump right in, head first. The beginning is incredible. Halfway through is incredible. You quit smoking. We do the things people do under the influence of talismans. You start smoking again. You say you’re not against me, or against the people who are against me. I can’t love someone without knowing what they’re afraid of. But you don’t think about the future, you act like it doesn’t exist, you configure an idea of a present continuous like the past doesn’t exist. Or are we our past? You’re scared of it, you don’t want for anything to be gone and buried with whatever else has already happened. But some things of yours and mine are gone, some of the delight of that pink I put on. When we drift off, I have dreams about people going wild, a flight attendant jumping out of a plane mid-air who winds up fighting in Cambodia. At dawn I wake ... Read More »]]>

translated by Jennifer Croft

HOW WILL TERROR TAKE ROOT IN THE FUTURE?

We jump right in, head first.
The beginning is incredible. Halfway through
is incredible. You quit
smoking. We do the things
people do
under the influence
of talismans. You start
smoking again. You say
you’re not against me,
or against the people who are against me.
I can’t love someone
without knowing what they’re afraid of.
But you don’t think
about the future, you act
like it doesn’t exist, you configure
an idea of a present continuous
like the past doesn’t exist. Or
are we our past? You’re scared
of it, you don’t want for anything
to be gone and buried
with whatever else has already happened.
But some things of yours and mine
are gone,
some of the delight of that pink I put on.
When we drift off,
I have dreams about people going wild,
a flight attendant jumping out of a plane mid-air
who winds up fighting in Cambodia.
At dawn I wake up
hating you and thinking of your dense slumber,
where man is most animal
and incapable of making his breathing
into a music in between marx and god,
wild boar, without that amulet
of words that make
magic, and I know that my enmity
empowers you. You hate my critical
spirit, although you don’t consider hatred
a passion, but rather a category. I just hate
being neutral. I’d like it
if there were something you didn’t like,
something you didn’t find charming.
Something ideological or religious, moral
or outright physical. That good cheer
you like blocks out the sad
parts. So what about
crime, or those games of conquest
you play when you go out with your friends
in that state of constant promise,
and you all play Playstation and do
coke. You crossed over
into a gray area that crushes
any idea of new, the heroic side
of jazz and of the comings and goings
of women. A bundle
of tenderness. Nostalgia
for the idea of a network, for that
system of necessities; nostalgia
for the epic of an epoch
is nostalgia for that epoch.
Those famous actors
you say you look like,
or say people say you kind of
look like would find it funny if they found out,
as I find it funny, that empathetic pity
that draws me to people
in raising the veil and leaving their weakness
at the elements’ mercy, and I so love
that little attack
on my heart that never kills me
when you come in. When we sleep
something remains at attention, with
purely aesthetic ends. Kind of like those cacti
that don’t need anything other than an okay
from the upper classes to be beautiful. Otherwise
they’re aridity, pain, hell. An insomnia
like the sex with love and that slight
resentment we feel when we see
each other wanting
to form a single skin. You’d like to leap
across the shadow
our love casts on the carpet, you’d like to move
on to the dirt road you’re drawn to in your hypnoid
states, but Freud is out
of fashion, and your parallel agenda
is a conscious act. When we ask for
more, it’s always more
femininity. When we’re done
your eyes become slits like an immigrant’s.
I don’t want that account in my name,
I want an extension, someone to take over
my debts. My finances are weak,
as only as Andorra la Vella sounds.
Nobody wants a person with a big
tragedy in their office.
You text quick
as a kid.
I’m more and more removed
from the architecture and the experience
of being a girlfriend. We looked at new houses
making believe we were in an American
film about what could happen
within these four walls—
but there’s anti-us trafficking.
One time you told me I wasn’t good
at the little things. Last night I found out
someone was going to die.
I told someone over the phone,
I said, You have to live your life.
But what is living your life?
Death is the most appealing
thing in the world, a field that magnetizes
sex and food.
I spent the whole afternoon saying
I’m like this I’m like that
or I’m really like this, too, a solo
flight, capable incapable
of sticking to the pact.
I don’t believe in people who say
I’m really this really that.
Words are totem
because I’m afraid of them.
They fall across the sky of my unconscious
like shooting stars conveying portents
of fortune or misfortune,
spurring on that crazy horse
of thought.
That’s what I’m afraid of. If your fear
is of the future, what will your fear be
when the future arrives?

* *

 Image: Vera Rosemberg

[an excerpt]

Lara began to kiss me. I hadn’t kissed her first because I thought you couldn’t kiss them on the mouth. I touched her breasts over her bra and lay down on the bed. They were fine. Mariela had had hers done last year. The first time we were together—my first time—she didn’t let me take her t-shirt off. She said they were too small, and if I saw them I wasn’t going to want to be with her anymore. She also didn’t want me to take off my t-shirt. She said I was really thin, and that it freaked her out. She didn’t even take her tights all the way off. She got this idea in her head that if I wanted it so bad, I ought to have to tear through her ... Read More »]]> Eitán Futuro
translated by Jennifer Croft

[an excerpt]

Lara began to kiss me. I hadn’t kissed her first because I thought you couldn’t kiss them on the mouth. I touched her breasts over her bra and lay down on the bed. They were fine. Mariela had had hers done last year. The first time we were together—my first time—she didn’t let me take her t-shirt off. She said they were too small, and if I saw them I wasn’t going to want to be with her anymore. She also didn’t want me to take off my t-shirt. She said I was really thin, and that it freaked her out. She didn’t even take her tights all the way off. She got this idea in her head that if I wanted it so bad, I ought to have to tear through her tights with my teeth. So for my first time there was no physical contact. Just latex, nylon, and cotton all rubbing up against one another.

For six months we had a secret relationship. Tumbi, who was friends with both of us, was in love with her, and they would have these endless talks on Mariela’s balcony while I would play the piano in the living room. At the bus stop for the 29, Tumbi would go on and on and on to me about it, and I couldn’t tell him what I thought about his conflict because that would have meant breaking my vow of silence that I had with Mariela. My dad taught me two things when I was five, and I asked him if I could start karate: never hit somebody when their back is turned, and a person’s word is sacred. He’d known I’d listen because I wanted to be a ninja, so he combined one of the rules he had learned from his Okinawa master when he was doing karate at the JCC with a more conventional disciplinary technique.

Then came the horror of our graduation trip, that scene against the backdrop of Nahuel Huapi Lake, with the ORT Music Production Class of 2003 in the foreground doing our dance of assisted sterile mating, in most of the cases symbolic, emotional masturbation en masse, a bukkake to Hebrew heaven for the relinquishing of intelligence. Do you have to get drunk and let your girlfriends get seduced by the trip coordinators dreaming in strobe lights?  Totally cool, Mati!  Whatever floats your boat, Yoni, we’ll wait here at the base of the Tronador because it turned out when we came to Ski Day that we hadn’t actually paid to go up the mountain. The contract said very clearly that they would take us to the base to do cross-country skiing, no, they’re not assholes, you’re right, Mati, if we had wanted to ski like just kind of striking out instead of skidding around horizontally like newborn ducklings, throwing snowballs at each other saying “the snow is so pretty, I want to live in the snow,” and later we’d be told how it is pretty, although it’s prettier up there where it doesn’t form a solid base, where it swirls around like sugar in the cotton candy machines they have at the zoo and gets into your nose all frisky so that you have to try and get it out with your big black glove, so that you end up undoing the Velcro and you feel how that nakedness of your hand in the snow at those heights burns, too—if we had wanted the complete experience, we should have asked our parents to spring for the complete package, and it’s a shame about our parents, and a shame about us.

Wolo had awoken at seven in the morning and had gone down the two blocks to the lake in his brown leather jacket over four white cotton t-shirts, one after another—the warmest thing you can do is multiple layers of cotton—and he’d cleared a space in the pebbles and sat down to read random pages of The Antichrist, which had highlighting in it in two different greens, the lighter one for important sentences and the darker one for important words in important sentences; concepts he didn’t understand or that he wanted to investigate further were marked in blue. He came back to the room at eleven and woke me up with the smell of the fart he let out while he was unzipping his jacket. Wolo was sleeping in the normal bed, and I had thrown a mattress on the floor after some long soul-searching: the bed I’d gotten stuck with (the coin had landed heads) was two beds, one directly on top of the other, a bunk bed, and if I took the top bunk I risked falling out the first time I moved in my sleep, and if I took the bottom one I risked the top one collapsing on top of me. “If there’s a problem here that can’t be solved,” Wolo’d said, “it’s that you’re a dumbass.” Wolo had been obsessed with Nietzsche since the beginning of senior year, and he was also obsessed with zoophilia. “There’s this website, whorse.com, that specializes in equestrian penetration,” he told me on one of our walks to the lake, “and I jerk off a little, like, hard, and then I feel bad. Why would I feel so bad about it?”

I sat up on my mattress and rubbed my ears.

“I was thinking,” he said. “I’m not going to go to the chocolate factory.”

“Me neither,” I said.

The trip to the chocolate factory was so that we could buy gifts for our families.

Wolo believed in micro-resistance, saying no to the free drink they’d offer you at clubs, not going on outings whose only purpose was consumption. We still had Ski Day left, and our last night at Grisú, this labyrinthine club that was supposed to look like a coalmine. Each of the three days we had been there, each time it was almost time to go somewhere all together, and the rest of the class went to the punks from Flores’ room to smoke pot, me and Wolo would go to the lake. We were becoming friends.

Seen from behind as we crossed San Martín Avenue going towards Nahuel Huapi Lake, we must have looked like we were the same height. Wolo was a few inches taller than me, although I had an afro that made me taller. I was wearing a gigantic parka with fur around the neck that my dad had brought back from London in the early eighties and sandals with two pairs of socks, and Wolo’s hulking figure was zipped up in that brown leather jacket. Seen like that, from behind, we must have looked like father and son.

Wolo swept the stones aside with his foot, a circle for him, and a circle for me, and we sat down facing the lake. I told him the story of my relationship with Mariela, how she wanted it to be open for the duration of the trip, and how it all had to be kept secret because of the pact I’d made with Tumbi:

“We were on the corner at the Pasta Factory at lunch time, eating ravioli by the door like we did every Friday. That day the punks from Flores had left because they had a handball game, and the three of us got to talking, as always, about what we were going to do about what was happening. Tumbi and I were both in love with Mariela, and she didn’t want to choose between us, and there was no way we were going to get into a three-way relationship. “If I could make you guys into a single man,” she’d say, the little bastard. Tumbi was facing us, sitting more out on the sidewalk. He proposed a pact, according to which neither of us would be with Mariela, because the three of us were friends, and that was the most important thing. All three were in agreement.”

Wolo listened to my story looking out at the lake, seeking out with his right eye a ray of sunlight that was reflected in the undulation of the surface of the water. The line of light that got projected onto his face moved and changed its form like a benevolent scar.

“So you fucked him over,” he said, and rubbed his eye. Then after a while he said, “you know that Asian girl on the third floor?”

“What are you talking about?”

“She’s sick.”

I waited for him to develop this idea, but he didn’t develop it.

“Sick bad or sick good?” I asked him after a while.

“She turns me on. Asian girls in general, although I don’t know if I would actually be with one.”

I wasn’t really into Asian girls, although I did have a fondness for Japanese culture that I had inherited from my dad. “I am into Japanese girls,” I thought. “I think I just have this idea that Chinese people are vulgar and Japanese people are refined, and Koreans, you don’t really know what they are. Maybe instead of thinking of Asian girls as mostly Chinese, if I think of them as pretty much Japanese, I might start to be able to be into them.”  I told Wolo.

“Why would Chinese girls be vulgar?” he said.

“No, not Chinese girls, no, Wolo, just Chineseness,” and I told him the story my dad had passed along to me when I had begun karate at the age of five, which he had heard from his Okinawa master when he was eighteen:

“Okinawa, before being invaded by the Satsuma clan of Japan in the seventeenth century, was called the Kingdom of Ryukyu.

“In the Kingdom of Ryukyu, the master Zhang Chou Chung was born, lived, and made his name. He was a descendent of the Chung clan, banished from China by the Ming dynasty.

“Zhang Chou Chung developed the kung fu he’d learned from his father, blending it with the traditional dances done by the family’s servants in their free moments, and he named his creation Kempo.

“The Royal Kempo School opened for business in 1597. Zhang taught classes to any student from any caste, an act which won him disinheritation by his father, and he was banished by his banished family.’”

“There’s no such word as ‘disinheritation,’” Wolo interrupted me, clicking his tongue.

“How much you wanna bet?  We can look it up,” I said.

“Did you bring a dictionary on this trip?” he said.

“Just a little Webster’s,” I said.

I’d also brought a purple notebook divided in half, where from the front cover to the middle I would write new words I was learning from the dictionary—I perceived a yawning lexical abyss on account of thinking about music all the time—and the part of the notebook that started on the back cover was for ideas for musical works. “Sounds that will follow the evolution of a tree branch” or “Mom is a basso continuo: cacophony as potential destabilizer.”

I returned to my story: Zhang Chou Chung had been disinherited for publicly teaching his kung fu mixed with Okinawa dances.

“In 1609, when the Satsuma clan from Japan was getting ready to invade Okinawa, and Zhang Chou Chung had reached the ripe old age of ninety four, the master summoned his close to two hundred disciples and formed an army to resist the attack.

“When his best disciple, Kurata ‘One-Eyed’ Ryu, asked the master who was going to be in charge of the army, just assuming the master was too old to fight, Zhang Chou Chung answered, ‘I will be in charge of the resistance: one hundred and ninety-nine men is too few, but two hundred should do the trick.’

“The six thousand men of the Satsuma clan of Japan, led by General Yoshuma Takanashi, crushed the Okinawa resistance in barely two hours. When the master saw the enemy employ the very movements he had developed, and when he saw his best disciple, Kurata ‘One-Eyed’ Ryu, disappear into the foam of the sea like a criminal deserter, he cut his jugular with his own sword.

“The battle concluded, and between the bodies of his compatriots, Kurata ‘One-Eyed’ Ryu received six gold coins that he managed to place between the folds of his hakama before the Japanese general Yoshuma Takanashi beheaded him with two strikes, the first interrupted by the bone of his spinal column.

“The fifty-one years that General Takanashi survived after the conquest of Okinawa he dedicated to perfecting and spreading the art of war developed by the master of Chinese origins and taught to him by the traitor disciple, presenting himself as the creator of Karate-Do (“the way of the open hand”), as he called the martial art after seeing Kurata ‘One-Eyed’ Ryu display his empty hands on receiving the first impact of the katana, and after watching him ask his master’s forgiveness before receiving the second blow, whereby the general would grant him his death.

“That’s the story of karate, Wolo.”

“That’s all between the Japanese and the Okinawans. I don’t see where the Chinese women being vulgar come in.”

“Not just the women, Wolo. Besides there’s Zhang Chou Chung’s father, who was Chinese, and the Japanese general that was the one that took Kempo and converted it into karate, which as a martial art is much more refined than kung fu.”

“Under no circumstances would that argument hold up. The cool one here is Zhang Chou Chung. The Japanese guy just stole the movements from the one-eyed guy.”

“The one-eyed guy taught them to him,” I corrected Wolo. “He sold out for four gold coins.”

“Isn’t that what happened with Judas?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and then I kept thinking about it.

Wolo became pensive, too. He threw a stone into the water, and as the reflection of the sun ran across his face like an illuminated virus, he said, “Nah, I bet you ten pesos you made up the word disinheritation.”

On the bus home we were distanced, literally, Mariela at one end and me at the other, and in the middle all the suspicion of all our classmates, Tumbi’s next to me, most of them not caring that much, Wolo doing his erotic drawings of the Middle Ages with round faces and big foreheads, and we went back home and also back to school, to the ORT, that fort made up of three buildings with a metal wall to protect the border in between the yard and Rio de Janeiro Street, and a little elevated guard tower to look out from upon those that not only make up the street’s pedestrians but also make out with the gray skirts and the green sweatshirts from the Sudamericano School right nearby, or the skateboarders, exiled from Parque Centenario, also only three blocks away, who wax the curbs along here instead now, or even me, because I recently went to take pictures to have a record of that wall, that mixture of blue and gray with the little guard tower standing out against the sky and looking into the school, too, two thousand kids at the same time deserve to be observed, a Foul Cult Panopticon, Wolo and I used to say when we were seniors, and we thought we were so awesome, it was really such a colossal institution with such an obsession with making it clear that inside there was security and nothing but security, physical, psychological, and future security, a high school made up by somebody straight out of the fictional story in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, where those couple hundred Jews dedicated themselves to controlling the destiny of the universe, a Jewish mind, exclusively, and starting in the second half of the last century a place like that could have been created and, in the interest of putting the Brilliantine of the crania of Wolo and myself on display, left some incredible holes when it came to taking any interest in those around us, a place where people spent more time in school than they had to, where half an absence every day became a Cult of Skipping with its headquarters at the pool hall on the corner where you could smoke, touch girls’ butts from younger grades, and be happy with no other authority than the money necessary to get the right to stay at the place, just a few pool tokens that were also really cheap, and any student at our school could cover it without having to explain anything to those parental sponsors of the amorous and Dionysian contents with which we filled that absence, that half-absence, to be more precise, because the most beautiful thing was to get there after lunch for those most benevolent periods with which they occupied our afternoons in order to not overly tire us, PE, for example, but with the much-abused NPA allowance, No Physical Activity for all the kids with chlorine allergies, and the asthmatics, and the ones with flat feet, the most beautiful thing was to have missed four hours of the required classes with punishment that was minimal and aesthetically desirable like the “½” that you would see amongst so many “P”s and “A”s, alphabetical, ugly. We went back to the three buildings of the ORT that are now four buildings as I was able to discern when I went to take pictures and a police officer asked me to delete them, after having been advised to do so by the internal security of the school, men with little beige vests and black pants that clung to imperfections on the corners where the kids would take the bus, the one oh five and the fifteen and the one forty-six and the one twenty-four and the sixty-five, the officer asked me to delete the pictures from my pocket digital camera despite the fact that I was a former student and that the request was illegal, despite the fact that I had dedicated so so so much time out of my most precious youth to playing the drums to represent the school to the American investors, for executives form all over the world, live and by videoconference, one time until two o’clock in the morning on a weekday after coming through that door in the metallic wall at seven forty-five in the morning; we took the bus back to our adolescent lives and hated it, even though we were almost done, even though we were already checking out the descriptions in dead languages of different majors at the University of Buenos Aires on the internet, the ones that didn’t take too long to do, and Mariela got that she didn’t have much time left for her little drama that converted her into a goddess for at least two of her classmates, and after having discovered on the graduation trip that I, too, had my representative capacity, or that I had realized that I could shed my coat of self-pity and get a Korean girl from the third floor of the hotel in Bariloche to have a crush on me to the point of sucking on her breasts, more than that would have made her feel bad about her boyfriend in Buenos Aires, a girl with clear limits, and Mariela saw hers, and the gifts from her started piling up, a painting she’d done with the nickname “Blito” written on it in fat red letters with glitter, a spray can of whipped cream for the exploration of our sexuality that we left out for anyone that wanted to to see, and people that didn’t want to, too, because we had abandoned the ban on PDAs, we could make out on cars parked on the street that celebrated us with their alarms of five melodies on loop, no more secrets, finally just not giving a shit about Tumbi because her love for me was more intensely obsessive than any social norm, except for the one that required respect for her father, the only one who had permission to touch her, in the most incestuous, unctuous, and sumptuous relationship I’ve ever been fortunate enough to witness, there was no such respect with my parents, we’d used every single one of the beds in the two houses that had arisen as a result of their separation, left condom wrappers in the family bathrooms, hickeys on each other in places where you could see them, and a spray can of whipped cream with a note on it that said “Do not touch, for your sake!” amongst the sodas in the fridge in my dad’s and Jana’s house.

And then that love crumbled under its own initiation weight, made way for other obsessive explorations, my entrance into the cult of macrobiotics a few years later, when we were broken up just because we were, because it’s not good to be too complacent, we still loved each other, a verb that was very different and much more noble, we were friends that had sex every so often, shared an account of the impressions of our oversensitive sensibilities with the intimacy of both having discovered the other, until finally that slowly dissolved amongst the infinite possibilities of time seen from the shore, and I went on trying to outwit death with diets with whole grains and activities that only barely required any expenditure of vital energy, while she went out with younger and younger guys with afros—the ORT produces whole litters of them at a time—Mariela tethered with her vocal contributions to the school band, a poorly paid position but nonetheless a paid one after her graduation from the institution, afros of younger and younger guys, with more life to entrust to her, she lived off blood, music, and mirrors, a cocktail that culminated in breast augmentation, a gesture of intelligence, the body cures the troubles of the soul in its grotesque reflection, feeling desirable in a moment of humanity educated with breasts as the peak of nutritional capacity, breasts as the vanishing point of the others, the punctum where the eyes go, commanded by the brain to seek out food, warmth, everything we could ever want, everything else is formal variations, Mariela’s insurance allowed for two plastic surgeries per year, and the father of this friend of ours owned a clinic, we must have just seen each other twice in the past year, and one of those times she showed me the results of that operation in the middle of the street, at night, I was walking her home along Mansilla, and she lifted up her shirt, we gave each other a kiss on the cheek a little ways away from her door so that the security guard who’d been working there for five years and who sometimes took liberties and meddled wouldn’t see me, and then I went on to the bus stop, for the twenty-nine, as I had done with Tumbi many times, and many more times alone, which is fine if there are plans, a future, I had that, I was going to travel the world, study the guitar like a maniac to exhaust my demands on myself till that moment of contemplation that would arrive at around eight at night in general, and it was around then that I took the twenty-nine to my dad’s house that day, we hadn’t arranged for me to come over, but I liked the stop and the trajectory of the Olivos line, I must have watched the girls getting off the bus out the window because the contortions I would have had to subject myself to in order to watch them while they were on the bus was not particularly cool, I must have watched them walk with their high-heeled boots with their light-colored jeans tucked in, with their Puro purses and their straight hair that went down to their shoulder blades, I must have floated over the asphalt with the bus across the city thinking that everything was okay, that I had been born at the right time, with velocities and disappearances corresponding to my spirit, my companions, and my semi-solitudes to keep busy till we got to the stop where I got off.

“To my mind, the most important thing in any relationship is honesty,” Lara told me at Esmeralda Vip.

I’d been the one to start the conversation. I hadn’t lasted long, and I actually really wanted to talk to her. She asked me if I had a girlfriend, and I told her I was recently separated. I asked her if she had a boyfriend, and she told me she’d just broken up with someone too. That when she told him about her job, the guy just left.

“We parted on good terms and all, he understood, but you just can’t have a relationship like this.”

“Are you from here?  From Buenos Aires?  Sorry, do you mind that I’m asking you these questions?”

“Mmm hmm.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to—“

“No, I meant yes I’m from here.”

“Oh.”

“You?”

 * *

Image: “We are all superheroes” by Jennifer Croft