The Buenos Aires Review just turned two, and we’re celebrating with champagne and a dossier on one of our favorite writers: Mario Bellatin.

Bellatin is a luminary of contemporary Latin American literature, a creator who connects writing with performance art. From the haunting, critically acclaimed Beauty Salon to the apocryphal (but meticulously documented) biography of the Japanese writer Shiki Nagaoka, Bellatin builds complex literary systems with his characteristically spare prose. His aesthetic project also extends beyond the page: in 2003 he organized a Conference of Doubles in Paris, at which the invited authors listed on the marquee (including Sergio Pitol and Margo Glantz) were replaced by stand-ins trained to answer questions in their stead.

Though he cuts a mischievous, unpredictable figure within the literary establishment, there is also a consistency to Bellatin’s work, certain ideas and gestures that resonate between texts. This ... Read More »]]>

The Buenos Aires Review just turned two, and we’re celebrating with champagne and a dossier on one of our favorite writers: Mario Bellatin.

Bellatin is a luminary of contemporary Latin American literature, a creator who connects writing with performance art. From the haunting, critically acclaimed Beauty Salon to the apocryphal (but meticulously documented) biography of the Japanese writer Shiki Nagaoka, Bellatin builds complex literary systems with his characteristically spare prose. His aesthetic project also extends beyond the page: in 2003 he organized a Conference of Doubles in Paris, at which the invited authors listed on the marquee (including Sergio Pitol and Margo Glantz) were replaced by stand-ins trained to answer questions in their stead.

Though he cuts a mischievous, unpredictable figure within the literary establishment, there is also a consistency to Bellatin’s work, certain ideas and gestures that resonate between texts. This is why we’re thrilled that more and more of his books are beginning to appear in translation, and why we’re so pleased to share this dossier with you.

Inside you’ll find:

David Shook‘s lucid, witty translation of a piece Bellatin has yet to write, accompanied by a series of emails clarifying the finer points of the text.

Craig Epplin‘s reflections on doubles, Converse, and the author’s search for Frida Kahlo.

Mat Chiappe‘s interview with the author featuring, among other things, Kamikaze Taxi, the (near omni-) presence of Japan in Bellatin’s work, and the adaptation of Bola negra for the stage.

Edmundo Paz Soldán‘s uncanny encounter with The Uruguayan Book of the Dead, for which Bellatin won the prestigious José María Arguedas prize.

Andrea Rosenberg‘s elegant rendition of Bellatin’s Bola negra.

To top things off, the pieces are all bedecked with images from the great Sebastián Freire and a few from Bellatin himself, together with Ben Rodkin and David Shook for the film Barú.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading this collection as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together.
—The editors

*

Oh, and if you’re inspired to dig for more, here are a few places to start:

Beauty Salon tr. Kurt Hollander (City Lights 2009)
(Read about the book @ Molossus)

Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction tr. David Shook (Phoneme Media 2013)
(Read about the book in The New York Times, or check out a review @ Words Without Borders)

The Transparent Bird’s Gaze tr. David Shook (Phoneme Media 2014)

Jacob the Mutant tr. Jacob Steinberg (Phoneme Media 2015)
(Reviewed for Music & Literature by BAR Founding Editor Heather Cleary)

* *

Image: Ben Rodkin with Mario Bellatin and David Shook for Barú.

from the future Spanish of Mario Bellatin translated by David Shook

Josué’s mother was blind. Not always. She lost her eyes one at a time, starting at about age 49, in people years. That’s seven years old for a Chihuahua, which, though a little early, isn’t exceptionally unusual. The process began with a slight milkiness at the perimeter of her bulging left eye. Aw, she’s got cataracts, the show circuit groomers cooed. Know-nothings with no creativity, no curiosity. She had uveitis. Her ophthalmologist explained the disease by making a drawing on a whiteboard: tiny triangles, which she explained were the eye’s pumps, shedding off the eye’s regular waste emissions—mostly a solution of minerals and salts. The regular wastes were represented by tiny squares that looked like grains of rough-cut salt, maybe Himalayan. The ophthalmologist prescribed two medicines: ... Read More »]]>

from the future Spanish of Mario Bellatin
translated by David Shook

Josué’s mother was blind. Not always. She lost her eyes one at a time, starting at about age 49, in people years. That’s seven years old for a Chihuahua, which, though a little early, isn’t exceptionally unusual. The process began with a slight milkiness at the perimeter of her bulging left eye. Aw, she’s got cataracts, the show circuit groomers cooed. Know-nothings with no creativity, no curiosity. She had uveitis. Her ophthalmologist explained the disease by making a drawing on a whiteboard: tiny triangles, which she explained were the eye’s pumps, shedding off the eye’s regular waste emissions—mostly a solution of minerals and salts. The regular wastes were represented by tiny squares that looked like grains of rough-cut salt, maybe Himalayan. The ophthalmologist prescribed two medicines: a 5% sodium chloride hypertonicity ointment, to help with the shedding of the wastes, and Flurbiprofen, an eye drop administered every other day, to slow the progress of the tiny pump’s malfunction. Josué’s mother, two-time Inland Empire regional show champion Okie Doke, retired at an early age because of the C-section required for Josué’s birth—at 2.2 pounds, she was too small to deliver him. The operation had left two scars: the one along her lower abdomen, which somehow also resulted in the disappearance of one of her left-row nipples, leaving her just seven, her breeder’s favorite number—and God’s—but an unacceptable disproportion for a show dog, and the psychological scar, which faded more slowly, fleshy and keloided and suspicious. It was that scar, more than the eyes, that disqualified her from showing. Still, she remained her breeder’s favorite, his most needy beast, living most of her adult life atop some piece of furniture: his sofa, his favorite Milo Baughman recliner, his bed. She was too small to jump up onto them herself, so he would grip her body like a tiny American football, fingers laced between her uneven nipples.

The breeder’s favorite Chihuahua, Okie Doke, c. 7.5 years old, displays early signs of uveitis in her left eye.

 *

Dik Dik Tracy, named after the miniature African gazelles the breeder had seen as a child in his pictographic encyclopedia, impregnated Okie Doke with Josué one afternoon while the breeder catnapped on the couch, some procedural police show droning on as soundtrack to the dog’s impulsive act. The breeder awoke as the beast’s lipstick penis pumped its penultimate squirt of semen into his innocent Okie Doke. Horrified, he began to scream, then swatted Dik Dik with a rolled newspaper until he cowered beneath the coffee table. The breeder spent the evening floundering in guilt and Malbec, first for having fallen asleep with the two sexually peaking animals unsupervised, then for having punished Dik Dik so severly.

Dik Dik was too large to be a proper show dog, weighing in at just under five pounds. Still, as a young dog he had participated in several shows, more for the experience than the possibility of winning. Plus, the breeder reasoned, perhaps he could get work as a stud, with his strong frame and good lineage. (His grandmother, Queen Isabel, and great-uncle, Columbus Casanova, had both been champions.) In some way, the breeder also considered it a sort of punishment for having impregnated Okie Doke: the meticulous grooming and fuss—gland cleaning, nail polishing, ear flushing—violated Dik Dik’s sense of dignity, as he had Okie Doke’s.

Whether in revenge or by nature, Dik Dik soon embarrassed the breeder publicly, first by humping a judge’s leg, a frowned-upon but not entirely uncommon occurrence for a young show dog, which though not technically disqualifying the animal was perhaps worse for their future on the show circuit, as such behavior was not quickly forgotten and the judge pool, especially in culturally deprived areas like the Inland Empire, was not large. The breeder kept Dik Dik in the competition, despite the humiliation, to practice his new handler, a psoriatic thirty-something vet tech who outweighed Dik Dik by at least 50 times. According to the handler, now one of the breeder’s few true enemies, a leash malfunction had led to Dik Dik’s escape from the grooming area after his humiliating performance. Returned to the floor during the Pomeranian showing, Dik Dik mounted R.S. Poofball, a four-time American Kennel Association champion and fixture on the European circuit—perhaps more unfortunate than his pedigree was his male sex, since, owing to the quick wit of one show commentator, the act was widely referred to thereafter as the Dick-Dick Incident.

It took the breeder several months to consider Dik Dik Tracy a dog again. He read several articles about homosexuality in non-human animals: a natural behavior in giraffes and some birds, apparently. He consulted several dog trainers about the possibility of training it out of him, which they generally advised against. Finally he decided to neuter Dik Dik, a difficult decision considering his previous plans to hire the beast as stud, but an easier and much faster solution, he thought, to curb the dog’s homosexuality—one he would come to regret in old age as an act of unwarranted cruelty, a return to the Middle Ages even, and a failure to accept the personality, however deviant, of one of his beloved dogs.

Clay figurine of R.S. Poofball, sculpted by a deafblind student as part of a history display at the Academy of Writing Arts for the Blind and Deaf.

*

Before I tell much more of this story, I must admit to the strange nature of its telling, which deserves some basic explanation. First, the unusual coindence of my brother’s deafblindness. As best I can understand it, I contracted congenital rubella syndrome in the womb, six weeks into my mother’s first pregnancy, when she came down with a particularly purplish case of rubella in Colton, California. The salt-and-pepper retinopathy of my condition allows me to make out vague figures in well-lighted environments; my sensorineural deafness is severe, but the surgical implantation of an experimental clucking device allows me to identify vocalic, nasal, bilabial, and velar phonemes, and years of practice at contextualization and a system of lexical elimination allow me to identify alveolar sounds with 75% accuracy. My brother, with whom I share a mother but whose father is unknown—at least to me, is far less lucky, having been born with Usher Syndrome I. Though his early doctors hoped he would retain foveal vision, he was completely blind at six, having already learned to read. As I am almost five years his elder, our mother had already endured two bankruptcies in financing my own healthcare costs, and financial limitations prohibited the possibility of discovering whether a clucking device like my own would have also worked for my brother. Perhaps his reading before the complete onset of blindness facilitated his adeptness as Braille, which he quickly mastered—even composing occasional poems in the language, and which we use to communicate to this day, using both his 1970s Brailler, his first—which he prefers for its nostalgia, and my computer, which allows me far greater speed in storytelling.

This document, and its account of the unusual founding of the Academy of Writing Arts for the Blind and Deaf, is primarily for him, typed originally into my computer Brailler over the course of several months, following years of investigation. I have traveled across the country seeking relevant sources, no matter their seeming inconsequentialness, and have interviewed persons from R.S. Poofball’s handler on the morning of the fateful Dick-Dick Incident, who still lives quite nearby in Downey, California, to the surviving heir of the breeder’s poetess companion, who now resides on the East Coast. I have chosen to output this document in its current form in the hopes that it might be of interest to the greater public, both as historical document and as inspiring case study on the fulfillment of improbable dreams by even more unlikely actors. The Braille version of this account is available free of charge from the Academy of Writing Arts for the Blind and Deaf, as well as from several mail-order Braille resource services.

*

One afternoon, sitting in the waiting room at the canine chiropractor while Okie Doke endured her weekly adjustment, the breeder read a magazine article about a blind chemist. He was fascinated. MRIs had shown that Okie Doke’s brain, though just larger than a walnut in its shell, placed her in the upper 20th percentile for her diminutive body weight, and the article made him wonder if, like the blind chemist, her worsening sight had sharpened her other senses. The blind chemist had learned to identify within three to five degrees the temperature of a Bunsen burner’s flame, by the sound of the combusting butane it emitted. The breeder excused himself to the office restroom, where he discretely ripped open the magazine’s seams to remove the three-page article, before disposing of the magazine in the wall-mounted trashcan and covering its remains in several crumpled paper towels. His mind was already whirring.

* *

Ten emails about the translation of the still-unwritten Writing Lessons for the Blind and Deaf, with all characters mentioned explained by the translator

Mario Bellatin and David Shook
translated by Heather Cleary

Craig Epplin

 Y el eco es anterior a las voces que lo producen. —Nicanor Parra

The title of Mario Bellatin’s 2008 biography of Frida Kahlo, Las dos Fridas, is unsurprising, obvious even; of all her paintings, Bellatin chooses one whose resonance with his own literature is unmistakable. Unmistakable because everything in his work seems at once doubled and modified, his endless self-portraits mapping a landscape of dissemination. The name Mario Bellatin, or more often mario bellatin, proliferates, attaching fleetingly to any sort of body, young or old, male or female. One of his most recent books, Disecado (2011), follows the model of a Baroque painting (as Federico Zamora aptly puts it), detailing a somnolent encounter between the narrator and a phantasm of himself. The book feels like an expansive fresco of the literary life of the author, ... Read More »]]>

Craig Epplin

 Y el eco es anterior a las voces que lo producen.
—Nicanor Parra

The title of Mario Bellatin’s 2008 biography of Frida Kahlo, Las dos Fridas, is unsurprising, obvious even; of all her paintings, Bellatin chooses one whose resonance with his own literature is unmistakable. Unmistakable because everything in his work seems at once doubled and modified, his endless self-portraits mapping a landscape of dissemination. The name Mario Bellatin, or more often mario bellatin, proliferates, attaching fleetingly to any sort of body, young or old, male or female. One of his most recent books, Disecado (2011), follows the model of a Baroque painting (as Federico Zamora aptly puts it), detailing a somnolent encounter between the narrator and a phantasm of himself. The book feels like an expansive fresco of the literary life of the author, one of numerous volumes in which Bellatin appears not as a specular figure, but rather as simply another being on display. His writing undergoes a similar process, as every new title seems to reinterpret the previous ones.

In other words, copies abound in Bellatin’s oeuvre, though each is slightly different from its antecedent. Every element acts as a correction or addendum to what came before, which is invariably coupled to something else. He employs numerous strategies of duplication, just as Kahlo, in this painting, ciphers various affinities between her two avatars: physical resemblance, biological dependence, the experience of touch, and the casual brush of worn garments.

The painting is one of her most famous. In it, two representations of the artist clasp hands, sharing both a bench and an artery, their exposed hearts alluding to the biological substrate beneath the multiple experience of life. Their faces are nearly identical, with difference inscribed only in their respective dresses: one is clad in colonial garb, while the other wears indigenous attire. Two Fridas and two Mexicos, in other words, linked together by the coursing of blood, blood that ultimately overflows, staining the white dress of the figure on the left. Redoubled identities, along with their excesses, here signal the irreducibility of national culture.

I wonder, looking at this image, what Bellatin thinks about it: whether he thinks about Mexican history when he looks at it, or whether he sees the red, veiny web at the top of each heart as a little hand reaching up to choke the impassively seated subject—a sign, perhaps, of the ultimately sinister designs our bodies have on us. Despite having borrowed its title, Bellatin never discusses this painting, nor does he include a representation of it in his book. Instead, it hovers in the background, like the overcast sky in the scene itself.

This omission does not indicate an aversion to images. A single photograph adorns each page of Las dos Fridas. These photos seem artificially aged, an effect achieved, Bellatin tells us, by his employment of a toy camera from his childhood. Most of the images chart a trip he took in search of a woman who lives in a small town and sells her wares from a stand at the local market. The woman is not Frida Kahlo, who died in 1954, but she might be. Bellatin is willing to entertain this possibility. At least this is the pretense that grounds the writing of this book.

He describes the circumstances that spawned this unlikely hypothesis in the book’s first pages. When the biography was commissioned, he requested a photograph of Kahlo, which he then circulated among his acquaintances, seeking information about the woman. Most respondents saw the iconic painter and responded accordingly, but one wrote back that he recognized the woman from her stand at the market. Several others later claimed something similar. Bellatin’s reaction, as he registers it, was skeptical but not dismissive: “The information I received,” he writes, “about the supposed existence of Frida Kahlo running a market stand did not seem credible; nevertheless, I was intrigued by the idea that someone could continue living in spite of her death.” His trip is premised on this possibility.

We read about his arrival at the small town. He approaches the market and asks where to find the woman in the photo; his interlocutors snicker and warn him against proceeding. When I read this passage in Las dos Fridas I couldn’t help but think of Pedro Páramo and other quest narratives. Similar moments of sinister foreboding are fundamental to these plotlines. Bellatin plays up this literary parallel, writing that his journey (itself literary from the outset) now mimicked “the regular outline of certain literary works. There always seems to exist an intermediate place where they warn the traveler not to continue on his path.” This point is where life and fiction become indistinguishable.

In spite of this cautionary foreshadowing, the narrator eventually finds the second Frida, the woman who works at the market. She is occupied at her stand and surrounded by assistants, but he manages to carry out an interview through the throng around her. He asks what she knows of Frida Kahlo, the artist. She responds with a succinct biography worthy of Wikipedia—dates, important life events, professional accomplishments, etc. Immediately following this passage, the book’s longest, the narrator tells us that he noticed her reading this list straight from a book hidden in her lap, perhaps a winking fulfillment of Bellatin’s own commissioned task as biographer.

It is a virtual repetition of the dynamic implicit in the Congreso de Dobles, a 2003 exhibition organized by Bellatin wherein various non-professional actors stood in for four Mexican writers, whose presence had been promised in advance. These stand-ins recited memorized scripts, channeling their avatars at a distance. Arturo Valdivia has shown—brilliantly, playfully—how the shadow puppetry of that exhibit coheres both with the strategies of Las dos Fridas—both Bellatin’s book and also, to a degree, Kahlo’s painting. As the second Frida reads what she knows about Kahlo the painter, we become witnesses to an odd scene: Kahlo’s presence is channeled, as if by a medium, but the tangible source of that channeling is underscored, not obscured.

This moment in the narrative recognizes that little up to this point has been directly about Frida Kahlo, at least not in the conventional sense of the word about. I see two possible ways of interpreting this gesture. On the one hand, we might conclude that Kahlo has served simply as a pretext for Bellatin to tell the story of a trip that meanders not in space but in memory: hence the narrator’s extended asides on his dog, friends, and Fascist forebears.  In other words, narcissism is inevitable. We are always writing about ourselves, and Bellatin has simply made this unavoidable conundrum the object of his book. The play on identity and presence would be nothing but a device that enables the writer himself to take center stage.

The other way of understanding Las dos Fridas is less obvious, but might shed more light on Bellatin’s broader practice as a writer. This second option holds that the book actually makes good on its promise; that it is, in its way, a biography of Frida Kahlo, despite the fact that most of the narrative is composed of preparations and tangents, that few of the photographs seem to bear a direct connection to Kahlo or her world, and that the author takes palpable pleasure in leaving most of the standard biographical details for the last few pages.

Bellatin’s approach, then, directly engages the genre of biography and its assumption that a life can be reduced to a sequence of events closely tied to the displacements of a body, arranged chronologically and retold as a linear narrative. In this genre, birth and death provide the framework for family and professional engagements, political action and civic ambitions, and the passage through various institutions. We know, however, that life does not proceed in a vacuum, which is why the best biographies allow us to relate an individual destiny to broader historical forces.

Bellatin insists on this last point, amplifying it, not only in his own, varyingly autobiographical narratives, but throughout the entirety of his work; one strand that unites these texts is their tendency to take the notion of context to its extreme. To stick with the present case, he has decided, in Las dos Fridas, that the mystical path of his friend is somehow relevant to the life of Frida Kahlo, as are the Fascist beliefs common both to his own ancestors and to an isolated immigrant community in rural Mexico. Those are just two instances in a book that is full of such asides. By including so many seemingly unrelated narrative strands in this biography, Bellatin seeks to erase the lines that separate a given life from others and, indeed, from everything else.

That said, the inclusion of these stories is not entirely arbitrary. They emerge successively from the process Bellatin describes at the outset: the circulation of the initial photograph and the road trip that ensued. This process becomes a sort of method, whereby Bellatin seeks to approach his subject through the paths opened up by one manifestation of her image in the present. This method seeks to destabilize the basic unit of biographical writing: the neatly delineated life. In place of this rigid notion, Bellatin seems to propose that a life always extends outward, that it glimmers and reverberates in unexpected places. A project like Las dos Fridas, like much of Bellatin’s work, tries to uncover those places. The background becomes the foreground. Or, to draw out another cinematic analogy, if the traditional biography is a cleanly edited film, Bellatin would rather sit and watch the outtakes.

In other words, if life indeed extends endlessly beyond all limits, then Bellatin sees the task of the biographer as that of hearing the sudden echoes and revealing the subterranean traces of the dead through controlled situations, artificial scenarios. This is biography as séance.

The results of such an operation might turn out to be banal. They might devolve into the brand of narcissism I mention above. Is this a weakness in Bellatin’s method? Maybe, though perhaps it owes more to the fraught nature of the biographical impulse itself, based as it is on the slippery task of delineating a life. And also to the fact that this task has grown even more daunting in the present, when our likenesses proliferate widely, a point that Bellatin underscores toward the end of Las dos Fridas when he photographs a pair of Chuck Taylors silkscreened with the face of Kahlo herself. In this media ecology, traces of the dead—and the living—surface with or without the séance of writing.

Everything becomes outtakes, in other words. The reel is endless. And some of it is even compelling.

* *

Images: Photograph by Sebastián Freire; Las dos Fridas via Proyecto Kahlo.

Edmundo Paz Soldán translated by Sarah Bruni

Fifteen years ago or so, I traveled to Lima in search of a shaman who would free me from the ghost of a dead friend. The friend had killed himself, and his ghost, or what I thought was his ghost, appeared to me every night. Lima, they said, was the solution, so I went. The shaman was dressed in black, wore military boots, was bald and missing his right arm. His name was Mario Bellatin and he went everywhere with his dogs. He was also a writer. He told me he wrote novels, though genres were actually rather blurred for him. He wanted to reach a point where he would be free to just to write books. In the first therapy session he asked me to write for an hour. About ... Read More »]]>

Edmundo Paz Soldán
translated by Sarah Bruni

Fifteen years ago or so, I traveled to Lima in search of a shaman who would free me from the ghost of a dead friend. The friend had killed himself, and his ghost, or what I thought was his ghost, appeared to me every night. Lima, they said, was the solution, so I went. The shaman was dressed in black, wore military boots, was bald and missing his right arm. His name was Mario Bellatin and he went everywhere with his dogs. He was also a writer. He told me he wrote novels, though genres were actually rather blurred for him. He wanted to reach a point where he would be free to just to write books. In the first therapy session he asked me to write for an hour. About what, I asked. Anything you want, like when you were a child. So I did, somewhat nervous because I wasn’t used to such informality. I admired Vargas Llosa—that meticulous structure, that narrative architecture. Mario laughed when I mentioned Vargas Llosa to him. He told me that writing was intuition and gave me some of his books. Beauty Salon impressed me, Flowers and The Szechuan School of Human Pain startled me, and Blind Poet left me cold. I asked him about my dead friend. In reply, Mario started to spin like a dervish. He belonged to the Sufi religion, he told me, and this had taught him that I should not be afraid of my friend. Instead, I should enjoy him. The dead are alive and remain with us, he said. They live in another reality, perhaps more interesting than this one. I left Lima with a certain peace of mind; although the friend didn’t stop appearing, I already knew what to do with him, at least, that’s what I thought. Five years later I traveled to Mexico, and in the subway I encountered a man dressed in black, wearing military boots, bald, and missing an arm. Mario, I whispered. He told me that by pure coincidence his name was Mario, but he didn’t know me. His last name, also by pure coincidence, was Bellatin. He sold his books in front of the subway. They were handmade books, in good condition. He wanted to write a hundred books, and if he published a thousand of each, he would sell a hundred thousand. I bought several from him, still surprised by the meeting, sure that he was who I said even if he denied it. At home, I read books I didn’t understand, with titles that mentioned dead hares and great glasswork, books written in an impenetrable style that denied me access. Even so, I went back to the subway the next day to say hello. I didn’t find him. I thought that maybe Mario Bellatin had died long ago and I had run into his ghost. A little while later, in Ithaca, where I live, the visions began. One day, in the mall, Bellatin started walking with me and stole a baseball hat from an Old Navy store. Another day he gave a presentation to my students on Beauty Salon, during which he never opened his mouth. The students listened entranced to a recording of Mario on the autobiographical origins of Beauty Salon. To talk about Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction, he showed us a ten-minute video in which he goes on about Rulfo, José María Arguedas, and Prince while his dogs run around the house. Bellatin stopped appearing, but his books continue to. The most impressive of all is called The Uruguayan Book of the Dead (published by Sexto Piso). “The truly unique images come from the intuitive,” says the narrator of this flawless book, whose name is Mario Bellatin, although this intuition is, of course, also governed by a meticulous structure, an impressive narrative architecture. Which Mario is the narrator? It doesn’t matter anymore. I now understand that, starting with his years in Lima, he has been building a phantom reality from his apparently iniquitous practice. A space where the rules are different. So different that they made possible a moment in which, at my age, I would set out after a Mario Bellatin who wandered through the subway stations of Mexico City selling, one by one, the books that—irony of ironies—are slowly turning him into one of those indispensible beings that will never die.

* *

Image: Sebastián Freire

Mat Chiappe translated by Anna Hardin

Mario Bellatin once said to me: “I don’t want to go to Japan.” I don’t know if we went on talking about something else or what happened, but I never got a better explanation. And so, when I was presented with the opportunity to interview him specifically about the relationship between lo japonés and his literature, I decided the most important thing for me was a response to that statement. I prepared a long list of other questions (as you’ll see, all useless), dressed as seriously as I could, stowed my computer in my backpack, and took the metro to his house. I rang the doorbell and waited until, from the other end of a long hallway, the author, filmmaker, lecturer, and translator appeared.

“Hello, Mat,” he said, holding back his dogs, “come ... Read More »]]>

Mat Chiappe
translated by Anna Hardin

Mario Bellatin once said to me: “I don’t want to go to Japan.” I don’t know if we went on talking about something else or what happened, but I never got a better explanation. And so, when I was presented with the opportunity to interview him specifically about the relationship between lo japonés and his literature, I decided the most important thing for me was a response to that statement. I prepared a long list of other questions (as you’ll see, all useless), dressed as seriously as I could, stowed my computer in my backpack, and took the metro to his house. I rang the doorbell and waited until, from the other end of a long hallway, the author, filmmaker, lecturer, and translator appeared.

“Hello, Mat,” he said, holding back his dogs, “come through here, I was just making some passionfruit juice… have you noticed you can’t get it here in México?” I nodded, without mentioning you can’t get it in Argentina, either. We went into his house, the interior fluctuating between minimalist and colonial. I sat, played with his dogs, talked about how my studies were going, about his life, a recent trip, his son Tadeo, the teacher’s strike in the Zócalo, that he owed me some gnocchi. “Next time for sure,” he declared. I was a little nervous; I had seen him many times before and in more interesting situations than an interview; I don’t know why I felt perversely professional this time.

Because I’m scatterbrained, without even opening the computer I had planned to record him with, I blurted out the stupidest and most predictable question possible while he served me passionfruit juice: “So, Mario, which works of Japanese literature do you like most?” He gave me a long list, from which I remember House of the Sleeping Beauties by Kawabata and Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe as the best. “The first is simply fascinating, stunning, the scenes that pass one into the other in that closed room, as if in a camera obscura… and the other, I still feel the Kafka-esque anguish of that sand they can never stop moving.” He asked if I had read A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel. “No, should I?”… “Another gem… a woman in England remembers her past in Japan during the war, and the pre-war years, that other Japan, lost in time… Then, that’s all lost, and the text transforms into a typical European novel until the end.” Silence. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, you should go read it now.” He smiled.

He talked for a long time about how rootlessness, the memory of that ancient Japan, the traditional pre-war Japan, characterized the Japanese literature he liked most. “I’m also interested in intersections, mixtures, journeys.” I guessed that had to do with his Peruvian-Mexican status, the hybridization, the mixed nationalities. “Ah… I have another recommendation for you.” He reached for my computer. “Yes, yes, let’s watch the trailer, it’s great.” He took the device from my hands. “It’s called Kamikaze Taxi, have you seen it?” No, I hadn’t. “It’s delirious: two friends face off against the Japanese government and mafia: one of them is a doctor living in Peru, who builds a hospital there and then comes back with his Peruvian son; the other is a horrible guy who manipulates the first one to achieve his political ambitions… the craziest circumstances make the doctor commit ritual suicide by seppuku… His son becomes a taxi driver, meets a woman, they flee the yakuza together, she asks him to escape to Peru, to start a new life; he tells her he has a final mission, a score to settle.” I kept quiet. “Terrible,” he finished, “but the very fact that it exists, that someone could make a movie or write a novel or whatever about these intersections, these connections, seems absolutely fascinating to me.” He played the trailer again, and again. Then, the whole film.

He told me about his fascination with Japanese cinema, about Kurosawa and Kitano films, with particular emphasis on Ozu. “Seen anything of his?” No, Mario. “Alright, watch them… with Ozu, everything repeats: in one film a train passes into the distance; in another, the same scene, another train, but with a slight difference; in a third, another train. In another film there will be a family fight; you know what the daughter will say to defend herself, because you’ve seen it in another film; what you’re waiting to see is how the filmmaker will manage to insert a subtle difference in this one.” I recommended a film to him: Paprika. “Tsutsui Yasukata wrote it, the author of…”… “The one who wrote Salmonella Men on Planet Porno, yes, I loved those stories, the one about the bonsai that causes erotic dreams in those who sleep next to it is almost as Borgesian as it is pop.” Then he put on another trailer or some music (I don’t remember which). “Give me more things from Tsutsui to read, Mat, he’s brilliant: his perversions, his deformities, his strange, insecure bodies; it’s a really bizarre mixture.” I noted all this mentally. “And if this were possible… in a good translation, you see how it really is all there.”

Immediately, I pressed him to expand a bit on the subject of translation. “It must be so hard to translate Japanese literature to Spanish… yes, you’re totally insane.” (Indeed, I study Japanese and plan to translate someday). What he said was that “it’s like two worlds, a ‘there’ and a ‘here’, which are moreover fictitious, because underneath is something that unites us… it’s like two worlds created by language, and when you try to bring them together something is left over that can’t be said, fuzzy boundaries.” “You don’t have to be so politically correct, I’m not recording you.” “Ah… what I mean is that Spaniards translate like animals,” he concluded. We brought up words like gilipollas, chutar, sabéis, os, and so on. “They have nothing to do with us Latin Americans.” Then he brought up names I never thought he would know: Atsuko Tanabe, Javier Sologuren, Guillermo Quartucci, others I’d never heard of, a long list of Latin American translators and academics who specialized in Japan. I took the opportunity to interject Mexicans like Tablada and Paz, and Peruvians like Arguedas and Vargas Llosa, each one of whom included Japanese characters, elements, and themes in their works. I don’t think he liked the comparison at all, though he acknowledged he was closer to the phantasmagoria of the first set than the realism of the second. He returned to the subject of translation. “Octavio Paz was another awful translator… he could translate one measly haiku into fifty of his own lines.” We talked about Liliana Ponce, César Aira’s wife, who translated Murakami from the Japanese. “In terms of the translation, everything got worse when they started bringing in a lot of Kenzaburō Ōe… from then on, it was a total disaster.”

I asked which of his novels should be translated into Japanese tomorrow. He answered with the titles of those which made explicit reference to Japan: his Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose of Fiction, Illustrated Biography of Mishima, Mrs. Murakami’s Garden, and The Notary Clerk Murasaki Shikibu. The first is an apocryphal biography of a Japanese writer who immigrates to Peru and is tormented by his monstrous nose. The second narrates the wanderings of the decapitated ghost of the writer, soldier, and bodybuilder Yukio Mishima. In the third, the widowed and resentful Izu insists on having betrayed her artistic ideals in her youth, destroying her beautiful, traditional garden. The final novel relates the transformations of a Mexican writer into various others, including the author of the now-classic first novel in the history of literature: Murasaki Shikibu.

He served me more passionfruit juice. “Maybe the Japanese don’t want a novel a-la-Japanese, maybe they want something more, uh, Latin American,” I blurted out. “That’s true, you might have to translate a different one.” “What about Beauty Salon? It has just the right amount of Japanese-ness, what with that Kawabata epigraph, a subtle reference to the masterwork we already talked about: House of the Sleeping Beauties.” He agreed. “Just the same, this thing about lo-japonés and lo-latinoamericano seems a little outdated to me.” I asked if he knew, in relation to his novels, that various critics had voiced and repeated phrases such as “processes of decontextualization,” “strangeness,” “mechanisms of defamiliarization” in order to explain his use of elements and themes characteristic of Japan. According to them, Bellatin would use the Japanese world as an example of that farthest from his own culture. “What do you think about that?” I asked. “I don’t know… I just love Japanese literature. Maybe a few of them, when they say decontextualization, really mean escapism, which is ridiculous; this, the other… everything blends together in language.”

This “decontextualization” led to another, somewhat unexpected, topic: he started telling me about Fujimori and his youth in Peru. Regarding the former he elaborated quite a bit, with details, and even compared the former president with a samurai, whom the Japanese gave a hero’s welcome after he fled in 2000. There was Mario Bellatin talking to me about politics, ideology, like those Japanese poets of 1920 who couldn’t just write haiku or tanka like their contemporaries. Hayama and Kobayashi, among others. “My link to Japan also comes from my childhood,” Bellatin told me, or I read somewhere, “most of Peruvian society still has strong anti-Japanese feelings, a product of the U.S. propaganda from the 20th century; all Japanese were potential nationalists, and therefore a threat… So much so that my parents were always embarrassed that my grandparents had hidden a Japanese immigrant during the Second War, and Japanese food was actually forbidden in my house… I’ve lost touch with them now.” Some of his words sounded familiar; more of them I don’t know if he’d said to me or if I’d read them somewhere: “It’s more and more obvious to me that my characters are my other selves… It’s a way of understanding the world: every thing is everything, every thing forms part of everything.”

“But let’s change the subject…” Mario continued, “if you’re interested in all that about ‘decontextualization,’ the best story is Black Ball.” Son of a bitch; I hadn’t read that one, either. How can you interview someone about their links to Japanese culture if you don’t know the text he thinks is most important to this connection? “I didn’t read it…” I confessed. “Ay, Mat, Mat…” he laughed, “it’s about an apathetic entomologist, Endo Hiroshi, who finds an extinct species of insect on an expedition. He keeps it in a box, conserves it, treasures it, but the bug finally turns into a black ball… In the end, he only finds one way to keep it forever, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.” “Sounds like something from Abe, something from Shimada,” I added. “Very much so… although the story’s true significance is something else; come, follow me.”

We went to the guest bedroom. On the upper shelves were the first five thousand of the famous Hundred Thousand Books of Mario Bellatin. Underneath was a collection of his making titled Writers of America, two volumes of hollow books in which (he showed me) he kept the first, signed leaves of all the books he had been given. Beyond the occasional title (Rulfo, Tanizaki, Roth), there were no books by other authors. Some were stacked strangely, placed secretively, perhaps on purpose. I got the feeling some kind of ritual was regularly performed here, like the Japanese construction of Shinto shrines, or that popular gift-wrapping practice, furoshiki. Mario moved some books, took out magazines about Japan, his illustrated books, special editions – all a delicate collection of book-objects. Then he took out a small white box and gave it to me. It was the object-edition of Black Ball. It had a vial and a bulb on one side; turning this, a small hatch opened and inside was a canvas on which the entire story was printed. It was the little box of the entomologist Endo Hiroshi:

“Black Ball is going to be a movie now,” Mario continued. “not the same, I don’t even know if it should be called a documentary or a narrative or both.” He reached for my computer again; he put on another short video with images. “The worst thing happening in Ciudad Juárez is the naturalization of horror, it’s deterritorialized, everything’s already somewhere else; horror is the norm… in Black Ball, the musical of Ciudad Juárez, and I want it to have this title, Mat, different from the story’s; what I want to do in the film is decontextualize the decontextualized, imposing a seemingly unconnected story on the city, on reality, to see if the sentences can develop a new dimension and illuminate what’s happening there in another way; new ways of getting close to the facts, of feeling them… A novel that speaks quasi-heroically doesn’t interest me; I wanted to think about what would happen with a group of young people who are part of a choir and want to make an opera there, in the land of a horror that is not only normalized, but also institutionalized and corporatized.” The images continued on the computer, a strange superposition of the hills of Ciudad Juárez, businesses, kids singing. Then I realized that the story about a Japanese entomologist, that self-contained story seemingly unrelated to anything, from the remove of its little artisanal box in a guest room in the largest metropolis in Latin America, was also a symbol for all of México.

We went back to the living room. I stared at my still unused computer and tried to make a mental note of all the names and references and quotes, everything about Kawabata, Ozu, translation, the sinister and political past and present. “Look, Mario… everything you’ve told me is fascinating, but I still have one question I want you to answer, one that I think is behind all the others.” He looked at me. “What is it, Mat?… You’ve gotten very serious.” I told him: “You once told me you didn’t want to go to Japan… I demand a public explanation.

There was another long silence; I don’t know if I’d made him uncomfortable again. He smiled. “It’s simple… I want to maintain my distorted idea of what ‘Japan’ is, a sort of essence, a constructed essence, fictitious and flawed… My interest is in what remains of those ruins, not in their origins… What remains, the residue, what translations leave behind, the mystery, the text, the characters, a whole system of language, and, above all, how this can be transmitted through the centuries—these things are enough for me. I don’t care as much about the reality of Japan as I do about that illusion, or more precisely: how we construct the illusion.” I thought of Severo Sarduy, who said something very similar in relation to India. Roland Barthes also came to mind, and his words upon returning from Tokyo in The Empire of Signs:

If I want to imagine a fictional town, I can give it a made-up name, treat it as a fantastical object, found a new Garabagne, without compromising as such any real country in my imagination (but then this same fantasy is that which I compromise in the signs of literature). I can also, without any claim to represent or analyze reality in the least (here the greatest gestures of Western discourse), take somewhere in the world (there) a definite number of features (graphical and linguistic word) and with them deliberately create a system. I will call this system: Japan.

Mario brought out cuernitos, little pastries we call medialunas in Argentina. More than defending an exotic Japan, the orientalist construction of the West, Bellatin exposes that self-same construction, puts it onstage, tells us that yes, it’s no more than a fabrication, a system, that it is what we can and want to imagine. Those imaginations say much more about us than they do about the other, more about Latin America than Japan, more about Ciudad Juárez than the entomologist Endo Hiroshi, more about the transvestite hairdresser from Beauty Salon than Kawabata’s sleeping beauties.

We finished our snack and I took one last sip of passionfruit. It was night when Mario put on another trailer for a Japanese movie from the 40s. And then I remembered: “Ah, I didn’t even record you.” “Oh, well…” “Don’t complain later if I pull quotes from someplace else and make up an interview with it.” “No worries.” We say goodbye. While I waited for the metro I remembered that form of Japanese poetry, the renga, in which Octavio Paz, Charles Tomlinson, Jacques Rouband, and Edoardo Sanguinetti dabbled. In the renga, a poet improvises some lines, then another provides some new ones continuing the previous themes or words, then another does the same, and another, and seven or eight poets link verses like this until the circle comes back to the beginning. Finally, the copyists of antiquity transcribed what they wanted, and bitter debates arose about who was the true author of the poem. Bellatin himself, in a note for The Nation titled “Kawabata: Embrace of the Abyss,” through appropriation and copy-paste, plagiarized critics and Kawabata himself, using their phrases, quotes, references. This compulsory form of re-writing, which this interview would have to be, was what I discerned getting on the metro, during the journey, arriving home. In the end, as Mario has put it: “I don’t have anything to say, I only know that I want to say something, and to do that I need to create narrative forms.” I opened my computer and wrote all I could.

* *

Images: Sebastián Freire (portraits) and Mat Chiappe (Bola negra)

Mario Bellatin translated by Andrea Rosenberg

1- BLACK BALL RELOADED

Author’s first look at the bande dessinée Black Ball

Yesterday I received some information about the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. I replied that toward the end of his life he’d seemed unable to bear the too loud a solitude in which he lived. So he’d climbed out onto a window ledge on an upper floor of the nursing home they’d put him in and leaped into the void. The response I received said that during his last years he’d been obsessed with the bustling pigeons he could see through the windows of the ward as he lay in bed. Maybe he wanted to turn into a bird, said the message. Maybe that’s why he’d attempted to fly, as if he were one of them. The person writing to me was my psychoanalyst. ... Read More »]]>

Mario Bellatin
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

1- BLACK BALL RELOADED

Author’s first look at the bande dessinée Black Ball

Yesterday I received some information about the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. I replied that toward the end of his life he’d seemed unable to bear the too loud a solitude in which he lived. So he’d climbed out onto a window ledge on an upper floor of the nursing home they’d put him in and leaped into the void. The response I received said that during his last years he’d been obsessed with the bustling pigeons he could see through the windows of the ward as he lay in bed. Maybe he wanted to turn into a bird, said the message. Maybe that’s why he’d attempted to fly, as if he were one of them. The person writing to me was my psychoanalyst. I’d had countless sessions with her a few years back. I remember I paid for the therapy not with money but with pieces of writing. Indeed, my lack of money was the very symptom that had brought me to her in the first place. My complete inability to pay for goods or services. Perhaps because of who my correspondent was, I started thinking about pigeons after that. Wasn’t it actually possible instead that they’d annoyed Hrabal so much that he was eventually driven to suicide? Couldn’t it have been because of their constant cooing that he’d come up with that phrase too loud a solitude, which appeared so often in his writing? Today my dogs killed a pigeon. In the park two blocks from my house, a wide pool had formed after last night’s heavy rains. People were lingering beside the water, next to a woman who sells breakfast from a cart in the mornings. A few pigeons were eating scraps that the people were tossing them. I’d left the house with my dogs just a few moments before. When I got to that area, Isaías and Manga caught one of the birds and fatally injured it, then left it floating in the pool. The people breakfasting protested loudly. I fled. When I saw what was happening, after a few meters I turned back. The dogs followed me. As we walked, they kept looking toward their fallen prey. They probably wanted to keep tearing at it. Or maybe bring it to me like an offering, a trophy. I heard someone yelling behind me, ordering me to pick up the dead bird and put it on a tree branch. It seemed like an odd request. Maybe the person believed it was more dignified for a pigeon to die on a tree branch than in a murky pool. I thought about the increasingly complicated relationship between men and animals. About current modes of thought. About the obligations we face these days. About norms that just a few years ago would have struck us as ludicrous. For example, adopting animals instead of buying them. Neutering males and females alike. Abandoning the custom of pointlessly mutilating them or giving them haircuts to meet obsolete standards of animal beauty. I also thought about the insects all around us. About how damaging they generally are, except for the ones we eat. I just now traded the books I’m currently working on for a bunch of giant ants. I also thought about the rats I sometimes hear under the floor of my study. I received another call today, too. In it, they informed me that the dog I’d given to my editor eight years earlier had just died from biting a poisonous toad. My editor is heartbroken. She’d taken the dog out to her country house, where the accident occurred. There’s no antidote for that kind of poison. When my editor calls, she’s in the waiting room of a pet crematorium. I haven’t yet gone out to walk the dogs. After the incident in the park, I return home. The dogs are all worked up. I’m not sure whether it’s because of the pigeon or because they haven’t gotten a full walk. Perezvón and Manga and Isaías and Abelardo keep circling endlessly around me. I ignore them, thinking I’ll take them out again at midmorning, and then settle in my study and open the book Black Ball, a project the artist Liniers has been working on. I admire its green cover. The ball—yes, black—in the center. The green that fills most of the space looks synthetic. I don’t think of nature at all when I look at it. Somehow it seems like the right green for the kind of trance experienced when diving into a book like Black Ball. The ideal green for, among other things, describing the artificiality of a half-wild pigeon hunt in a pool formed after a nighttime rain. The leaves of the tree where the breakfasters asked me to place the bird’s battered body must be that color. And it is, no doubt, the hue of that poisonous toad. From what she told me, my editor’s dog was carrying the toad’s corpse in its jaws. The black ball reminds me of a bowling ball. Of an iron ball chained to prisoners on death row in the United States. It could also represent the interior of the universe. I’m one of the few people who knows it’s a sort of food bolus. The same kind that both the insect discovered in the jungles of Africa and described in the text and the entomologist who found it turned into. For the moment, though, I try to pretend I don’t know what it’s from. When I turn the page, I realize it’s actually the ball from which my most terrible nightmares emerge. There I am, standing behind a lectern on a stage. One of my arms is missing. There seems to be a sizable audience in the auditorium-like space. I become aware once more that I’m missing an arm. I’m surprised by it. In the first scene of the book Black Ball by Liniers, we see the writer Mario Bellatin without his right arm. The void where it would have been is rigid and empty. It’s very strange to see him that way. Without his right arm. Could he have left it backstage? Is it some sort of joke he’s playing on his audience? His head is bald as usual, setting off perfectly the cut of the clergy shirt he wears when he’s not in a black tunic. I’m nervous. It is becoming reality, the worst thing that could befall that kind of writer. I don’t think he can stand up there and face an auditorium without his arm. But the awful scene is already set down in Black Ball. Mario Bellatin remembers how in the book Flowers there’s a similar character. Though unlike the one in Black Ball, the character in Flowers finds himself in front of a packed theater, naked and missing a leg. I think in that book, Flowers, it’s a writer who’s having a similar nightmare. A bad dream that began when he suddenly felt as if he were living inside a violet that his mother was growing in a flowerpot. As the dream continues, he is forced to dance naked on his single leg. It’s the opening number, the one that introduces the heroes of the evening. The Kuhn Twins. Two brothers who were found in a basket at the bottom of a ravine. And who were immediately handed over to the city orphanage. A line of women formed, eager to play their mother, and indicated both the type of child with which they hoped to perform their role and the schedule that suited them best. As soon as the little boys arrived, the women fought for temporary custody. One of the twins didn’t have any arms. The other had no legs. Many years later they choreographed a dance that fascinated and frightened everyone who saw it. The twins’ fame spread rapidly. They were so successful that they were even incorporated into the chapter in Flowers that Mario Bellatin was remembering at that moment. I look at the book Black Ball more closely, and then I see my teeth. They appear right at the point in the story when I wind up in front of a microphone and start to read Black Ball out loud. The entomologist Endo Hiroshi decided one morning to stop eating anything that other people might consider sustenance . . .

2- The teeth don’t look like that anymore. Here they are spaced apart, prominent, demonic. Now they’re worse. They were filed down two days ago and are now jagged and yellow. They’ve become the teeth of an old man. On Monday the dentist convinced me he could fix the ones I’ve had since childhood, employing a number of strategies to obtain my consent. Most persuasive was when he suggested how embarrassed I must be to appear in press photos with such gapping, quadrangular teeth, like the ones Liniers drew in the book Black Ball.  I’m not sure how the dentist heard of that book. Nor do I know how he has become familiar with the images it contains. I wonder these things primarily because the book has not yet been published. It disturbs me to think that there are dentists who find about their patients’ teeth that way—even if those teeth are only imagined from hundreds of kilometers away. I have no choice but to accept. The dentist gets to work. He files down the tips. He keeps sharpening them one by one until it seems to me they have become little guts. They become a row of stalactites through which the outside air comes whistling in. An hour later the dentist hands me a little mirror so I can take a look. I’m horrified. I’m gripped by a sensation similar to the one I felt this morning as I watched my dogs killing a pigeon or when I found out that my editor’s dog had just died from a poisonous toad. Maybe it’s the same thing audiences experience at Kuhn Twins performances. Not only have my teeth become sort of individual shards, they have also lost any trace of color. I find myself gazing at utterly lifeless fragments. They are of a shade that is not quite deep black, but dark—dark like the Black Ball on the book’s cover must have been at some point. If the morning’s breakfasters had been present there in the dentist’s office, they would no doubt have urged me to hang the wreckage in my mouth from the branch of some tree. I imagine it hanging there. To be able to appreciate it like that, it would first have to be extracted and made thousands of times larger. Those stalactites I had in place of teeth would have to swell and expand. And become flexible. One of Bellatin’s giant polished teeth would rest upon each branch of the tree, each adapting to the shape of the surface that cradled it. Like those exhausted, drooping clocks we’ve all seen. Holding the little mirror, the dentist looks satisfied with his work. He keeps asking me if it hurts. It’s true. There’s pain. I realize then that the horror I feel comes not just from what I’m seeing reflected in the moon but also from the pain my teeth are causing me. He tells me the effects of the anesthesia are wearing off now. At that moment I realize those sharp pains I felt were the shots he gave me during the process. He adds that I shouldn’t worry. He tells me I can’t go out on the street like that. He claims he’s got everything ready. He’s going to put on some veneers that will function as temporary false teeth and prescribe some painkillers. In the end he does what he’s promised. For a few interminable moments, he leaves me alone. Then he goes to work inside my mouth. Coming and going. Prodding my jaws open and shut. Making molds of my teeth. When he finishes, I look at myself in the mirror again and see other teeth. Not like the lugubrious gappy teeth in Liniers’s Black Ball. Which we see right when I mention the existence of the entomologist Endo Hiroshi. But not like the pointy, blackened teeth I saw a few minutes ago, either. Bellatin has some strange teeth now. They’re not the ones he had with him this morning. The dentist adds that they’re not the ones he’ll be keeping, either. The teeth in Bellatin’s mouth will be his for only three days. This very Friday they’ll be switched out for permanent ones. I’m alarmed to think what might happen after Friday to the initial image of the author’s mouth that appears in Liniers’s book Black Ball. What can I do to show that Bellatin’s teeth are no longer Bellatin’s teeth? It’s not even just a simple matter of having dentures—which are really the same teeth. Thus, Bellatin is denied not just the option of removing his arm and leaving it backstage but also the option of removing his teeth and leaving them to slumber in a glass of water that some distracted houseguest will probably gulp down in the middle of the night. As he leaves, Bellatin discovers he’s spent eight hours sitting in that dentist’s chair. He finds it quite extraordinary to have put himself through such a thing and allowed himself to be manipulated in such a manner just because the dentist has seen his teeth in Liniers’s book Black Ball. For Bellatin, the day is already over. He has no desire to do anything in the hours that remain. He heads out into the street, and in the chill of the wind he feels a sharp pain. He also feels like the temporary teeth he’s got aren’t attached securely. He has to twist his mouth a certain way to keep them from falling out. At that moment he would have liked to belong to the Caravan of Toothless Souls that appears in the book Black Ball. To be one of those unlucky creatures who, when they feel their last tooth fall out, know that they must depart toward death. As a child, Bellatin heard that story over and over again. His grandmother told it to him. For her part, she had heard it from the mother of a Japanese family that moved in next door, fleeing one of the waves of famine that were always engulfing the Orient. His grandmother told Bellatin that the story of her neighbor’s life hadn’t seemed to end that way at all. She wasn’t convinced that her neighbor had been forced to make a decision after discovering that she had lost the last of her teeth. According to his grandmother, the story of the Caravan of Toothless Souls came to a close the night government forces rounded up Japanese immigrants to ship them off to concentration camps in the United States. The neighbor and her husband committed suicide that very night. My grandmother told me that they’d asked her to look after their young children just a few hours before. The little boy was very fat and the little girl very skinny. She also told me that an hour later they heard a gunshot, and then another. The husband first killed his wife and then committed suicide. The neighbor had asked her to hide the children well. The fat one and the skinny one. To care for them as if they were her own. But my grandfather turned the children over to the police shortly after the shots rang out. I think it was partly by way of excusing him that my grandmother sometimes told me how hard times were back then. That I shouldn’t condemn my grandfather’s actions or those of the rest of my family. I think it is because of their actions that I understand all the better Bohumil Hrabal as he clambered out on that ledge, saying he was going to scare off the pigeons. They say that his fall was deafening. That he showed not a trace of the elegance with which a bird executes its final flight. Actually, birds die huddled in some remote corner of nature. I remember seeing some of them dying on the southern beaches. I used to think, when I was a boy, that the seagulls that could no longer fly were staying still because they’d decided to make friends with human beings. As soon as I spotted them, I’d chase after them. I tried to feed them. I didn’t notice that many of them were hobbling. Others stayed still, allowing my hand to stroke them. Hours later I’d find them dead. They’d lie there motionless, staring into nothing. They wouldn’t eat even a crumb of bread. They seemed to be atavistically rejecting anything other people might consider sustenance. Just like Endo Hiroshi, who declared one morning that he was going to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance. Then Mario Bellatin put his hand on the sheet of paper resting on the lectern where he was reading Black Ball aloud. An enormous fly appeared in front of the microphone. A fly like the ones that buzz around corpses when they start decomposing. Like those that certainly had circled the corpse of the pigeon placed on a tree branch by the breakfasters who’d watched in horror as my dog Isaías broke its neck in an instant. Or looped above the violets that the mother of the legless writer was growing in a flowerpot. I was even more terrified of the fly than I was of standing armless in front of an audience to read the text of Black Ball. A text in which an entomologist suddenly decides to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance.

3- The entomologist Endo Hiroshi decided one morning to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance. He made the decision after a night of insomnia—brought on, perhaps, by the memory of the household’s old cook leaving for the Caravan of Toothless Souls after his parents’ wedding reception.¹ All that night he had felt, as he hovered between sleep and wakefulness, his arms and legs disappearing, consumed by the unrestrained voracity of his own stomach.

That organ was so aggressive, in fact, that in the first light of dawn Endo Hiroshi already felt like one of those people who eats only to destroy it. Who try to turn it into a near-useless appendage. Endo Hiroshi had seen them up close and personal, young people who died stick-thin because they’d suddenly refused to eat even a grain of rice. Some said that many of those vanishing appetites had been wiped out by a romantic disappointment of some sort, and others that they were the result of a slavish adherence to Western fashions. On the other hand, he also knew of men and women who stuffed themselves with food, their fleshy bodies in the grip of their uncurbed desire to represent the whole universe within themselves.² Both situations had occurred at one time or another in his own family. There had even been twin cousins, a girl and a boy, the former of whom had succumbed to anorexia while the latter became a champion sumo wrestler.³ Endo Hiroshi also remembered stories from the war years that he’d heard as a boy, stories of a scarcity so dire that people had killed each other for a scoop of rice or a piece of fish.⁴ He’d also heard tales of elegant sushi made with rodent meat, and of children who caught flies and ate them like millet.⁵ It seems that the effect of these stories was that the entomologist Endo Hiroshi had acquired, from a very young age, a sort of mingled revulsion and reverence toward food. That’s why he never really agreed with that foreign saying that his country’s food seemed to be made more for visual appreciation than for eating.⁶ In his grandparents’ house, where he spent a good portion of his childhood because his parents were not allowed to live together as long as the cook was still alive, they never let anything edible go to waste. Often—based mainly on the teachings of the prophet Magetsu, of whom the whole family were devotees—they had engaged in a peculiar way of preparing food, which involved burying the ingredients for several hours among stones heated with wood or charcoal. The prophet Magetsu, a monk who is said to have died not once but many times, conceived of the creation of the universe as an offering from mother earth to the universe’s constituent elements, which of course include humankind. Once when he was invited on a long trip to Africa by his entomologists association, Endo Hiroshi had to eat all sorts of packaged foods, which he bought in a shop near his house recommended by the organization’s members. He made that trip with his suitcases loaded with plastic jars and boxes containing different types of dehydrated foodstuffs. Endo Hiroshi just had to add boiling water to the containers to achieve a sort of food that at least vaguely resembled that originally consumed in his country. The entomologist Endo Hiroshi himself dubbed that trip “the long journey of boiling water” because teapots and hotplates were so essential en route, allowing him not just to eat but also to drink tea in the traditional manner. Endo Hiroshi could have easily gone without food for several days, but it was practically impossible for him to give up drinking tea for more than four hours at a time. A few entomologists advised him to take advantage of the trip and sample one of the many edible insects incorporated into the diets of the regions they were visiting. Everything from your everyday ants, which were coated in honey and served in a paper cone, to the flesh of a species of blue-legged tarantula that lives only in the crown of certain trees.⁷ As they ate these specimens, the members of the expedition often talked about insects’ nutritional properties. Some years back, led by the scientist Olaf Zumfelde from the University of Heidelberg, a number of experts had drawn up a table showing the quantity of protein from invertebrates that was absorbed immediately by the human body.⁸ And yet Endo Hiroshi ate nothing but the prepackaged food he’d bought back home. He continued his journey with his dehydrated foods, his tea, his teapot, and his little battery-operated hotplate at his side. He was working with his usual diligence, only a few days from the end of the trip, when he found a strange specimen that had been thought extinct. A theretofore unknown subspecies. The only one on record, the Newton camelus eleoptirus, was a different color. He stored it in the best conditions he could and, without mentioning it to the rest of the expedition, carried it back with him on the return home. Once he’d disembarked, he headed straight for the lab he’d set up in the rear of what would later become his parents’ house.⁹ At the time, his parents were still unmarried and lived apart. Nevertheless, the family members came together every night in that house, where Hiroshi had lived since childhood, to recite the prayers of the monk Magetsu. Endo Hiroshi knew that his find would be the making of his career as an entomologist. His name, Hiroshi, would forevermore be used to refer to the species he’d captured. The insect already identified had been blue, not red like the one Hiroshi had found. The new subspecies would bear the name Hiroshi camelus eleoptirus. But to his surprise, when he opened the plastic box he found only a tiny black ball instead of his insect. The ball was so miniscule, it was strange that he could make it out at all. The box had been specially designed to transport specimens of this sort—that is, small and medium-sized insects. They were made exclusively for the members of his entomologists association and were constructed in such a way that the insects could live inside them a long time. The eleopter he’d found last week couldn’t possibly have escaped. Endo Hiroshi had seen it in the Nairobi airport before he’d boarded his return flight. He’d taken another peek on the plane, and just yesterday, as soon as he was home again, he’d gazed at it for a long time through entomology glasses.¹⁰ On that last occasion, he’d been comparing it not just to the Newton camelus eleoptirus that appeared in an illustration in an insect book he always carried with him but also to a number of specialized tomes that filled his library. He was so startled by the absence that he didn’t notice the arrival of his parents, ready to resume prayers in the living room now that their son was home safe and sound. For the weeks he’d been away in Africa, they’d had no choice but to pray in the temple of the Prophet, which perched on the slopes of the highest mountain. It was an exhausting climb to get there, but they had no other option. The parents were not just forbidden to live together before the cook’s death would allow them to marry, they were unable to be in the main house for even a minute without their son’s physical presence. Hiroshi heard them call to him—they wanted to say hello, of course, but more importantly they wanted to begin the religious rites, which they could not perform without him. Just then Shikibu, the old servant, finished preparing a large pot of white rice that would be passed around after the ceremony. Ever since he’d turned fifteen, the bowl of rice served after prayer was the only food that Endo Hiroshi ate all day. Rice and, as mentioned earlier, several liters of tea. Anyone would have predicted that such a diet would make him grow thin and weak. But his vitality proved otherwise. Just as it had been for the old monks, even the prophet Magetsu himself, a bowl of rice a day was enough food for a lifetime. On a related note, it is said that one of the prophet Magetsu’s deaths—to all appearances the definitive one—occurred when the Prophet decided to allow his body to feed off his body.¹¹ To bear witness to the process, during which his flesh gradually disappeared, curiously transformed into the traces of his own flesh, he relied on his disciple, Oshiro, who wrote on a large rice paper scroll, still available to anyone who wishes to consult it, the words dictated to him by his master during the process. Curiously, the final word could be translated as “peace.” It seems strange that a being as spiritually advanced as the prophet Magetsu, having carried out such a complex process of dying, would utter a word whose meaning for many people would seem quite obvious. Before beginning the ritual of devotion to the Prophet, Endo Hiroshi and his parents had to check the teeth of the wizened cook. His parents were always more interested in that inspection than he was, as they would only be able to marry and live together when the woman had lost all of her teeth. The day that she could no longer eat, the cook would starve to death on her lonely journey—an endless road that would start at one of the many roads encircling the highest mountain—which she would be forced to begin the night the man and woman of the house were finally married. The moment a dental inspection revealed the total absence of teeth, the preparations for the wedding would begin. Two days later, it would all be over. Man and woman would now be husband and wife. During those two days, the old woman would not be allowed to eat even a crumb from the wedding banquet, ensuring that on her journey toward death, things would proceed as quickly as possible. A few minutes later, after the usual greetings and paying their respects to the image of the prophet Magetsu, the inspection of the cook’s teeth began. It was not yet time to begin the prayers: in order to achieve the proper intonation, it was important to know whether or not the cook still had teeth. On this occasion, though he carried it out to the letter, Endo Hiroshi paid no attention to the ritual he was leading. He was baffled by the insect’s disappearance. Nevertheless, a loyal devotee, he hid it as well as he could. He’d put on his traditional tunic and, after greeting his parents as any son recently returned from a long journey should, he started sprinkling the water—which he scooped out of a small wooden bowl—over their prone bodies. After the greetings, his parents had stretched out face-down on the floor. Once that part of the ritual was over, they noticed the cook was gone. The parents sensed it immediately, in fact. The raced to the kitchen, where they found the old woman hiding behind the firewood for the stove. As they’d guessed, when they pried open her mouth they discovered that the last molar, which had had them on tenterhooks for the last few years, had vanished. The old servant pleaded, refusing to open her jaws again. Endo Hiroshi, who had followed his parents to the kitchen, suddenly understood what had happened to his insect. He realized that the tiny ball he’d found in place of the exotic specimen was a sort of stomach of the insect. Actually, it looked like the bug had simply swallowed itself. He didn’t find such a theory at all bizarre. It was not for nothing that he’d spent practically his whole life, every free moment his career as an entomologist permitted him, leading the rites of the monk Magetsu. It seemed to have repeated itself, there within his entomologist’s box, that process the monk had undergone before dying for good. That ball must be a formless mass made up of the elements that had composed the little bug. The old woman was emitting heartrending screams.¹² His parents would not bend. At last she fell quiet—a sudden silence that seemed to suggest a full acceptance of her fate. His parents could then discuss the wedding plans in peace. They talked mostly about the banquet. They’d serve traditional foods. No modern touches, except the sea bream served to the couple before the ceremony began. They’d have to find a cook skilled enough to prepare the ghost bream,¹³ the recipe for which consisted of cutting up the fish until it was fleshless but still alive and then placing it in a fish tank in the center of the happy couple’s table. The couple would eat the flesh while the animal kept swimming, dying, its internal organs exposed for all the world to see. As a good omen for the marriage, the meal should last exactly as long as it took the fish to die. That evening, the entomologist Endo Hiroshi confirmed his suspicions. After they’d sentenced Shikibu and performed—with more intensity than usual—the Prophet’s rituals, he went back to his room and with the help of a microscope found that, in fact, the insect appeared to have consumed itself. For no apparent reason, he felt a wave of nausea. He vomited. Meanwhile, downstairs, his parents were still making plans. Not only could his mother now arrange the house as she wished, but she could also paint her teeth black. In addition to starting to give orders around the house, his father now had the right to go to the dentist to have his front teeth removed once and for all. These characteristics—the blackened teeth and the missing front teeth—were symbols of having a full life. Reflecting on the transformation undergone by an insect that might have been called Hiroshi camelus eleoptirus, a name that would have instantly made him famous around the world, he decided that after his parents’ wedding, the end of his own life would consist in reducing as far as possible the normal functioning of his stomach. He would seek to neutralize it in a manner similar to the liver atrophy suffered by those geese that are obsessively overfed by their owners, or by the ducks that in some countries are raised in tiny cages and fed with chemical-soaked corn. When the sun shone in through the window the next day, illuminating the plastic box that still contained the insect’s supposed stomach, Endo Hiroshi decided to eat not only that black ball but also a bunch of weevils and other bugs that he’d collect later that morning. In the armoire in his room, practically brand-new, he still had the outfit he used to wear for the caterpillar hunt that took place every leap year. The last time he’d participated, he’d gone with his cousin, the excessively slender girl who’d died of slenderness, and with his other cousin, the obese sumo wrestler.

*

Notes

1 Archaic custom that must be followed by citizens who have lost all of their teeth.

2 Popular belief, primarily among the Assyrian Chaldeans, that the whole of the celestial spheres is contained within the human body. Thanks to recent psychological studies, it is believed that men retain remnants of this conviction as a symbol of social superiority.

3 Type of martial art that celebrates times of harvest or abundance. It is especially prevalent in regions governed by the solar calendar.

4 The fish that has provoked the greatest number of murders is the sole.

5 Even today newspapers occasionally run stories about merchants who are selling toasted flies instead of edible seeds.

6 See Newsweek magazine, no. 234, p. 56.

7 They were phosphorescent Larpicus tarantulas, found only in eastern Namibia.

8 Consult the Zumfelde Table, available from the Berlin Nutritionists Society.

9 According to the tradition of the prophet Magetsu—which the Western world found incomprehensible—a man and woman were not permitted to marry until the eldest of their female servants had lost the last of her teeth. This prohibition did not impede their right to have children.

10 He used a pair of Stewarson glasses imported by the Tenkei-Maru department store.

11 See the Hiro-Sensei sect’s book of the Holy Catechism.

12 It is said that some of the neighbors were unable to sleep that night.

13 Teachers of this technique tend to be found on the country’s southern coast.

* *

Images: Ben Rodkin, with Mario Bellatin and David Shook, for Barú. Text first published with BAR in November 2013.

Mario Bellatin translated by Andrea Rosenberg

1- BLACK BALL RELOADED Author’s first look at the bande dessinée Black Ball

Yesterday I received some information about the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. I replied that toward the end of his life he’d seemed unable to bear the too loud a solitude in which he lived. So he’d climbed out onto a window ledge on an upper floor of the nursing home they’d put him in and leaped into the void. The response I received said that during his last years he’d been obsessed with the bustling pigeons he could see through the windows of the ward as he lay in bed. Maybe he wanted to turn into a bird, said the message. Maybe that’s why he’d attempted to fly, as if he were one of them. The person writing to me was my ... Read More »]]>

Mario Bellatin
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

1- BLACK BALL RELOADED
Author’s first look at the bande dessinée Black Ball

Yesterday I received some information about the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. I replied that toward the end of his life he’d seemed unable to bear the too loud a solitude in which he lived. So he’d climbed out onto a window ledge on an upper floor of the nursing home they’d put him in and leaped into the void. The response I received said that during his last years he’d been obsessed with the bustling pigeons he could see through the windows of the ward as he lay in bed. Maybe he wanted to turn into a bird, said the message. Maybe that’s why he’d attempted to fly, as if he were one of them. The person writing to me was my psychoanalyst. I’d had countless sessions with her a few years back. I remember I paid for the therapy not with money but with pieces of writing. Indeed, my lack of money was the very symptom that had brought me to her in the first place. My complete inability to pay for goods or services. Perhaps because of who my correspondent was, I started thinking about pigeons after that. Wasn’t it actually possible instead that they’d annoyed Hrabal so much that he was eventually driven to suicide? Couldn’t it have been because of their constant cooing that he’d come up with that phrase too loud a solitude, which appeared so often in his writing? Today my dogs killed a pigeon. In the park two blocks from my house, a wide pool had formed after last night’s heavy rains. People were lingering beside the water, next to a woman who sells breakfast from a cart in the mornings. A few pigeons were eating scraps that the people were tossing them. I’d left the house with my dogs just a few moments before. When I got to that area, Isaías and Manga caught one of the birds and fatally injured it, then left it floating in the pool. The people breakfasting protested loudly. I fled. When I saw what was happening, after a few meters I turned back. The dogs followed me. As we walked, they kept looking toward their fallen prey. They probably wanted to keep tearing at it. Or maybe bring it to me like an offering, a trophy. I heard someone yelling behind me, ordering me to pick up the dead bird and put it on a tree branch. It seemed like an odd request. Maybe the person believed it was more dignified for a pigeon to die on a tree branch than in a murky pool. I thought about the increasingly complicated relationship between men and animals. About current modes of thought. About the obligations we face these days. About norms that just a few years ago would have struck us as ludicrous. For example, adopting animals instead of buying them. Neutering males and females alike. Abandoning the custom of pointlessly mutilating them or giving them haircuts to meet obsolete standards of animal beauty. I also thought about the insects all around us. About how damaging they generally are, except for the ones we eat. I just now traded the books I’m currently working on for a bunch of giant ants. I also thought about the rats I sometimes hear under the floor of my study. I received another call today, too. In it, they informed me that the dog I’d given to my editor eight years earlier had just died from biting a poisonous toad. My editor is heartbroken. She’d taken the dog out to her country house, where the accident occurred. There’s no antidote for that kind of poison. When my editor calls, she’s in the waiting room of a pet crematorium. I haven’t yet gone out to walk the dogs. After the incident in the park, I return home. The dogs are all worked up. I’m not sure whether it’s because of the pigeon or because they haven’t gotten a full walk. Perezvón and Manga and Isaías and Abelardo keep circling endlessly around me. I ignore them, thinking I’ll take them out again at midmorning, and then settle in my study and open the book Black Ball, a project the artist Liniers has been working on. I admire its green cover. The ball—yes, black—in the center. The green that fills most of the space looks synthetic. I don’t think of nature at all when I look at it. Somehow it seems like the right green for the kind of trance experienced when diving into a book like Black Ball. The ideal green for, among other things, describing the artificiality of a half-wild pigeon hunt in a pool formed after a nighttime rain. The leaves of the tree where the breakfasters asked me to place the bird’s battered body must be that color. And it is, no doubt, the hue of that poisonous toad. From what she told me, my editor’s dog was carrying the toad’s corpse in its jaws. The black ball reminds me of a bowling ball. Of an iron ball chained to prisoners on death row in the United States. It could also represent the interior of the universe. I’m one of the few people who knows it’s a sort of food bolus. The same kind that both the insect discovered in the jungles of Africa and described in the text and the entomologist who found it turned into. For the moment, though, I try to pretend I don’t know what it’s from. When I turn the page, I realize it’s actually the ball from which my most terrible nightmares emerge. There I am, standing behind a lectern on a stage. One of my arms is missing. There seems to be a sizable audience in the auditorium-like space. I become aware once more that I’m missing an arm. I’m surprised by it. In the first scene of the book Black Ball by Liniers, we see the writer Mario Bellatin without his right arm. The void where it would have been is rigid and empty. It’s very strange to see him that way. Without his right arm. Could he have left it backstage? Is it some sort of joke he’s playing on his audience? His head is bald as usual, setting off perfectly the cut of the clergy shirt he wears when he’s not in a black tunic. I’m nervous. It is becoming reality, the worst thing that could befall that kind of writer. I don’t think he can stand up there and face an auditorium without his arm. But the awful scene is already set down in Black Ball. Mario Bellatin remembers how in the book Flowers there’s a similar character. Though unlike the one in Black Ball, the character in Flowers finds himself in front of a packed theater, naked and missing a leg. I think in that book, Flowers, it’s a writer who’s having a similar nightmare. A bad dream that began when he suddenly felt as if he were living inside a violet that his mother was growing in a flowerpot. As the dream continues, he is forced to dance naked on his single leg. It’s the opening number, the one that introduces the heroes of the evening. The Kuhn Twins. Two brothers who were found in a basket at the bottom of a ravine. And who were immediately handed over to the city orphanage. A line of women formed, eager to play their mother, and indicated both the type of child with which they hoped to perform their role and the schedule that suited them best. As soon as the little boys arrived, the women fought for temporary custody. One of the twins didn’t have any arms. The other had no legs. Many years later they choreographed a dance that fascinated and frightened everyone who saw it. The twins’ fame spread rapidly. They were so successful that they were even incorporated into the chapter in Flowers that Mario Bellatin was remembering at that moment. I look at the book Black Ball more closely, and then I see my teeth. They appear right at the point in the story when I wind up in front of a microphone and start to read Black Ball out loud. The entomologist Endo Hiroshi decided one morning to stop eating anything that other people might consider sustenance . . .

2- The teeth don’t look like that anymore. Here they are spaced apart, prominent, demonic. Now they’re worse. They were filed down two days ago and are now jagged and yellow. They’ve become the teeth of an old man. On Monday the dentist convinced me he could fix the ones I’ve had since childhood, employing a number of strategies to obtain my consent. Most persuasive was when he suggested how embarrassed I must be to appear in press photos with such gapping, quadrangular teeth, like the ones Liniers drew in the book Black Ball.  I’m not sure how the dentist heard of that book. Nor do I know how he has become familiar with the images it contains. I wonder these things primarily because the book has not yet been published. It disturbs me to think that there are dentists who find about their patients’ teeth that way—even if those teeth are only imagined from hundreds of kilometers away. I have no choice but to accept. The dentist gets to work. He files down the tips. He keeps sharpening them one by one until it seems to me they have become little guts. They become a row of stalactites through which the outside air comes whistling in. An hour later the dentist hands me a little mirror so I can take a look. I’m horrified. I’m gripped by a sensation similar to the one I felt this morning as I watched my dogs killing a pigeon or when I found out that my editor’s dog had just died from a poisonous toad. Maybe it’s the same thing audiences experience at Kuhn Twins performances. Not only have my teeth become sort of individual shards, they have also lost any trace of color. I find myself gazing at utterly lifeless fragments. They are of a shade that is not quite deep black, but dark—dark like the Black Ball on the book’s cover must have been at some point. If the morning’s breakfasters had been present there in the dentist’s office, they would no doubt have urged me to hang the wreckage in my mouth from the branch of some tree. I imagine it hanging there. To be able to appreciate it like that, it would first have to be extracted and made thousands of times larger. Those stalactites I had in place of teeth would have to swell and expand. And become flexible. One of Bellatin’s giant polished teeth would rest upon each branch of the tree, each adapting to the shape of the surface that cradled it. Like those exhausted, drooping clocks we’ve all seen. Holding the little mirror, the dentist looks satisfied with his work. He keeps asking me if it hurts. It’s true. There’s pain. I realize then that the horror I feel comes not just from what I’m seeing reflected in the moon but also from the pain my teeth are causing me. He tells me the effects of the anesthesia are wearing off now. At that moment I realize those sharp pains I felt were the shots he gave me during the process. He adds that I shouldn’t worry. He tells me I can’t go out on the street like that. He claims he’s got everything ready. He’s going to put on some veneers that will function as temporary false teeth and prescribe some painkillers. In the end he does what he’s promised. For a few interminable moments, he leaves me alone. Then he goes to work inside my mouth. Coming and going. Prodding my jaws open and shut. Making molds of my teeth. When he finishes, I look at myself in the mirror again and see other teeth. Not like the lugubrious gappy teeth in Liniers’s Black Ball. Which we see right when I mention the existence of the entomologist Endo Hiroshi. But not like the pointy, blackened teeth I saw a few minutes ago, either. Bellatin has some strange teeth now. They’re not the ones he had with him this morning. The dentist adds that they’re not the ones he’ll be keeping, either. The teeth in Bellatin’s mouth will be his for only three days. This very Friday they’ll be switched out for permanent ones. I’m alarmed to think what might happen after Friday to the initial image of the author’s mouth that appears in Liniers’s book Black Ball. What can I do to show that Bellatin’s teeth are no longer Bellatin’s teeth? It’s not even just a simple matter of having dentures—which are really the same teeth. Thus, Bellatin is denied not just the option of removing his arm and leaving it backstage but also the option of removing his teeth and leaving them to slumber in a glass of water that some distracted houseguest will probably gulp down in the middle of the night. As he leaves, Bellatin discovers he’s spent eight hours sitting in that dentist’s chair. He finds it quite extraordinary to have put himself through such a thing and allowed himself to be manipulated in such a manner just because the dentist has seen his teeth in Liniers’s book Black Ball. For Bellatin, the day is already over. He has no desire to do anything in the hours that remain. He heads out into the street, and in the chill of the wind he feels a sharp pain. He also feels like the temporary teeth he’s got aren’t attached securely. He has to twist his mouth a certain way to keep them from falling out. At that moment he would have liked to belong to the Caravan of Toothless Souls that appears in the book Black Ball. To be one of those unlucky creatures who, when they feel their last tooth fall out, know that they must depart toward death. As a child, Bellatin heard that story over and over again. His grandmother told it to him. For her part, she had heard it from the mother of a Japanese family that moved in next door, fleeing one of the waves of famine that were always engulfing the Orient. His grandmother told Bellatin that the story of her neighbor’s life hadn’t seemed to end that way at all. She wasn’t convinced that her neighbor had been forced to make a decision after discovering that she had lost the last of her teeth. According to his grandmother, the story of the Caravan of Toothless Souls came to a close the night government forces rounded up Japanese immigrants to ship them off to concentration camps in the United States. The neighbor and her husband committed suicide that very night. My grandmother told me that they’d asked her to look after their young children just a few hours before. The little boy was very fat and the little girl very skinny. She also told me that an hour later they heard a gunshot, and then another. The husband first killed his wife and then committed suicide. The neighbor had asked her to hide the children well. The fat one and the skinny one. To care for them as if they were her own. But my grandfather turned the children over to the police shortly after the shots rang out. I think it was partly by way of excusing him that my grandmother sometimes told me how hard times were back then. That I shouldn’t condemn my grandfather’s actions or those of the rest of my family. I think it is because of their actions that I understand all the better Bohumil Hrabal as he clambered out on that ledge, saying he was going to scare off the pigeons. They say that his fall was deafening. That he showed not a trace of the elegance with which a bird executes its final flight. Actually, birds die huddled in some remote corner of nature. I remember seeing some of them dying on the southern beaches. I used to think, when I was a boy, that the seagulls that could no longer fly were staying still because they’d decided to make friends with human beings. As soon as I spotted them, I’d chase after them. I tried to feed them. I didn’t notice that many of them were hobbling. Others stayed still, allowing my hand to stroke them. Hours later I’d find them dead. They’d lie there motionless, staring into nothing. They wouldn’t eat even a crumb of bread. They seemed to be atavistically rejecting anything other people might consider sustenance. Just like Endo Hiroshi, who declared one morning that he was going to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance. Then Mario Bellatin put his hand on the sheet of paper resting on the lectern where he was reading Black Ball aloud. An enormous fly appeared in front of the microphone. A fly like the ones that buzz around corpses when they start decomposing. Like those that certainly had circled the corpse of the pigeon placed on a tree branch by the breakfasters who’d watched in horror as my dog Isaías broke its neck in an instant. Or looped above the violets that the mother of the legless writer was growing in a flowerpot. I was even more terrified of the fly than I was of standing armless in front of an audience to read the text of Black Ball. A text in which an entomologist suddenly decides to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance.

3- The entomologist Endo Hiroshi decided one morning to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance. He made the decision after a night of insomnia—brought on, perhaps, by the memory of the household’s old cook leaving for the Caravan of Toothless Souls after his parents’ wedding reception.¹ All that night he had felt, as he hovered between sleep and wakefulness, his arms and legs disappearing, consumed by the unrestrained voracity of his own stomach.

That organ was so aggressive, in fact, that in the first light of dawn Endo Hiroshi already felt like one of those people who eats only to destroy it. Who try to turn it into a near-useless appendage. Endo Hiroshi had seen them up close and personal, young people who died stick-thin because they’d suddenly refused to eat even a grain of rice. Some said that many of those vanishing appetites had been wiped out by a romantic disappointment of some sort, and others that they were the result of a slavish adherence to Western fashions. On the other hand, he also knew of men and women who stuffed themselves with food, their fleshy bodies in the grip of their uncurbed desire to represent the whole universe within themselves.² Both situations had occurred at one time or another in his own family. There had even been twin cousins, a girl and a boy, the former of whom had succumbed to anorexia while the latter became a champion sumo wrestler.³ Endo Hiroshi also remembered stories from the war years that he’d heard as a boy, stories of a scarcity so dire that people had killed each other for a scoop of rice or a piece of fish.⁴ He’d also heard tales of elegant sushi made with rodent meat, and of children who caught flies and ate them like millet.⁵ It seems that the effect of these stories was that the entomologist Endo Hiroshi had acquired, from a very young age, a sort of mingled revulsion and reverence toward food. That’s why he never really agreed with that foreign saying that his country’s food seemed to be made more for visual appreciation than for eating.⁶ In his grandparents’ house, where he spent a good portion of his childhood because his parents were not allowed to live together as long as the cook was still alive, they never let anything edible go to waste. Often—based mainly on the teachings of the prophet Magetsu, of whom the whole family were devotees—they had engaged in a peculiar way of preparing food, which involved burying the ingredients for several hours among stones heated with wood or charcoal. The prophet Magetsu, a monk who is said to have died not once but many times, conceived of the creation of the universe as an offering from mother earth to the universe’s constituent elements, which of course include humankind. Once when he was invited on a long trip to Africa by his entomologists association, Endo Hiroshi had to eat all sorts of packaged foods, which he bought in a shop near his house recommended by the organization’s members. He made that trip with his suitcases loaded with plastic jars and boxes containing different types of dehydrated foodstuffs. Endo Hiroshi just had to add boiling water to the containers to achieve a sort of food that at least vaguely resembled that originally consumed in his country. The entomologist Endo Hiroshi himself dubbed that trip “the long journey of boiling water” because teapots and hotplates were so essential en route, allowing him not just to eat but also to drink tea in the traditional manner. Endo Hiroshi could have easily gone without food for several days, but it was practically impossible for him to give up drinking tea for more than four hours at a time. A few entomologists advised him to take advantage of the trip and sample one of the many edible insects incorporated into the diets of the regions they were visiting. Everything from your everyday ants, which were coated in honey and served in a paper cone, to the flesh of a species of blue-legged tarantula that lives only in the crown of certain trees.⁷ As they ate these specimens, the members of the expedition often talked about insects’ nutritional properties. Some years back, led by the scientist Olaf Zumfelde from the University of Heidelberg, a number of experts had drawn up a table showing the quantity of protein from invertebrates that was absorbed immediately by the human body.⁸ And yet Endo Hiroshi ate nothing but the prepackaged food he’d bought back home. He continued his journey with his dehydrated foods, his tea, his teapot, and his little battery-operated hotplate at his side. He was working with his usual diligence, only a few days from the end of the trip, when he found a strange specimen that had been thought extinct. A theretofore unknown subspecies. The only one on record, the Newton camelus eleoptirus, was a different color. He stored it in the best conditions he could and, without mentioning it to the rest of the expedition, carried it back with him on the return home. Once he’d disembarked, he headed straight for the lab he’d set up in the rear of what would later become his parents’ house.⁹ At the time, his parents were still unmarried and lived apart. Nevertheless, the family members came together every night in that house, where Hiroshi had lived since childhood, to recite the prayers of the monk Magetsu. Endo Hiroshi knew that his find would be the making of his career as an entomologist. His name, Hiroshi, would forevermore be used to refer to the species he’d captured. The insect already identified had been blue, not red like the one Hiroshi had found. The new subspecies would bear the name Hiroshi camelus eleoptirus. But to his surprise, when he opened the plastic box he found only a tiny black ball instead of his insect. The ball was so miniscule, it was strange that he could make it out at all. The box had been specially designed to transport specimens of this sort—that is, small and medium-sized insects. They were made exclusively for the members of his entomologists association and were constructed in such a way that the insects could live inside them a long time. The eleopter he’d found last week couldn’t possibly have escaped. Endo Hiroshi had seen it in the Nairobi airport before he’d boarded his return flight. He’d taken another peek on the plane, and just yesterday, as soon as he was home again, he’d gazed at it for a long time through entomology glasses.¹⁰ On that last occasion, he’d been comparing it not just to the Newton camelus eleoptirus that appeared in an illustration in an insect book he always carried with him but also to a number of specialized tomes that filled his library. He was so startled by the absence that he didn’t notice the arrival of his parents, ready to resume prayers in the living room now that their son was home safe and sound. For the weeks he’d been away in Africa, they’d had no choice but to pray in the temple of the Prophet, which perched on the slopes of the highest mountain. It was an exhausting climb to get there, but they had no other option. The parents were not just forbidden to live together before the cook’s death would allow them to marry, they were unable to be in the main house for even a minute without their son’s physical presence. Hiroshi heard them call to him—they wanted to say hello, of course, but more importantly they wanted to begin the religious rites, which they could not perform without him. Just then Shikibu, the old servant, finished preparing a large pot of white rice that would be passed around after the ceremony. Ever since he’d turned fifteen, the bowl of rice served after prayer was the only food that Endo Hiroshi ate all day. Rice and, as mentioned earlier, several liters of tea. Anyone would have predicted that such a diet would make him grow thin and weak. But his vitality proved otherwise. Just as it had been for the old monks, even the prophet Magetsu himself, a bowl of rice a day was enough food for a lifetime. On a related note, it is said that one of the prophet Magetsu’s deaths—to all appearances the definitive one—occurred when the Prophet decided to allow his body to feed off his body.¹¹ To bear witness to the process, during which his flesh gradually disappeared, curiously transformed into the traces of his own flesh, he relied on his disciple, Oshiro, who wrote on a large rice paper scroll, still available to anyone who wishes to consult it, the words dictated to him by his master during the process. Curiously, the final word could be translated as “peace.” It seems strange that a being as spiritually advanced as the prophet Magetsu, having carried out such a complex process of dying, would utter a word whose meaning for many people would seem quite obvious. Before beginning the ritual of devotion to the Prophet, Endo Hiroshi and his parents had to check the teeth of the wizened cook. His parents were always more interested in that inspection than he was, as they would only be able to marry and live together when the woman had lost all of her teeth. The day that she could no longer eat, the cook would starve to death on her lonely journey—an endless road that would start at one of the many roads encircling the highest mountain—which she would be forced to begin the night the man and woman of the house were finally married. The moment a dental inspection revealed the total absence of teeth, the preparations for the wedding would begin. Two days later, it would all be over. Man and woman would now be husband and wife. During those two days, the old woman would not be allowed to eat even a crumb from the wedding banquet, ensuring that on her journey toward death, things would proceed as quickly as possible. A few minutes later, after the usual greetings and paying their respects to the image of the prophet Magetsu, the inspection of the cook’s teeth began. It was not yet time to begin the prayers: in order to achieve the proper intonation, it was important to know whether or not the cook still had teeth. On this occasion, though he carried it out to the letter, Endo Hiroshi paid no attention to the ritual he was leading. He was baffled by the insect’s disappearance. Nevertheless, a loyal devotee, he hid it as well as he could. He’d put on his traditional tunic and, after greeting his parents as any son recently returned from a long journey should, he started sprinkling the water—which he scooped out of a small wooden bowl—over their prone bodies. After the greetings, his parents had stretched out face-down on the floor. Once that part of the ritual was over, they noticed the cook was gone. The parents sensed it immediately, in fact. The raced to the kitchen, where they found the old woman hiding behind the firewood for the stove. As they’d guessed, when they pried open her mouth they discovered that the last molar, which had had them on tenterhooks for the last few years, had vanished. The old servant pleaded, refusing to open her jaws again. Endo Hiroshi, who had followed his parents to the kitchen, suddenly understood what had happened to his insect. He realized that the tiny ball he’d found in place of the exotic specimen was a sort of stomach of the insect. Actually, it looked like the bug had simply swallowed itself. He didn’t find such a theory at all bizarre. It was not for nothing that he’d spent practically his whole life, every free moment his career as an entomologist permitted him, leading the rites of the monk Magetsu. It seemed to have repeated itself, there within his entomologist’s box, that process the monk had undergone before dying for good. That ball must be a formless mass made up of the elements that had composed the little bug. The old woman was emitting heartrending screams.¹² His parents would not bend. At last she fell quiet—a sudden silence that seemed to suggest a full acceptance of her fate. His parents could then discuss the wedding plans in peace. They talked mostly about the banquet. They’d serve traditional foods. No modern touches, except the sea bream served to the couple before the ceremony began. They’d have to find a cook skilled enough to prepare the ghost bream,¹³ the recipe for which consisted of cutting up the fish until it was fleshless but still alive and then placing it in a fish tank in the center of the happy couple’s table. The couple would eat the flesh while the animal kept swimming, dying, its internal organs exposed for all the world to see. As a good omen for the marriage, the meal should last exactly as long as it took the fish to die. That evening, the entomologist Endo Hiroshi confirmed his suspicions. After they’d sentenced Shikibu and performed—with more intensity than usual—the Prophet’s rituals, he went back to his room and with the help of a microscope found that, in fact, the insect appeared to have consumed itself. For no apparent reason, he felt a wave of nausea. He vomited. Meanwhile, downstairs, his parents were still making plans. Not only could his mother now arrange the house as she wished, but she could also paint her teeth black. In addition to starting to give orders around the house, his father now had the right to go to the dentist to have his front teeth removed once and for all. These characteristics—the blackened teeth and the missing front teeth—were symbols of having a full life. Reflecting on the transformation undergone by an insect that might have been called Hiroshi camelus eleoptirus, a name that would have instantly made him famous around the world, he decided that after his parents’ wedding, the end of his own life would consist in reducing as far as possible the normal functioning of his stomach. He would seek to neutralize it in a manner similar to the liver atrophy suffered by those geese that are obsessively overfed by their owners, or by the ducks that in some countries are raised in tiny cages and fed with chemical-soaked corn. When the sun shone in through the window the next day, illuminating the plastic box that still contained the insect’s supposed stomach, Endo Hiroshi decided to eat not only that black ball but also a bunch of weevils and other bugs that he’d collect later that morning. In the armoire in his room, practically brand-new, he still had the outfit he used to wear for the caterpillar hunt that took place every leap year. The last time he’d participated, he’d gone with his cousin, the excessively slender girl who’d died of slenderness, and with his other cousin, the obese sumo wrestler.

*

Notes

1 Archaic custom that must be followed by citizens who have lost all of their teeth.

2 Popular belief, primarily among the Assyrian Chaldeans, that the whole of the celestial spheres is contained within the human body. Thanks to recent psychological studies, it is believed that men retain remnants of this conviction as a symbol of social superiority.

3 Type of martial art that celebrates times of harvest or abundance. It is especially prevalent in regions governed by the solar calendar.

4 The fish that has provoked the greatest number of murders is the sole.

5 Even today newspapers occasionally run stories about merchants who are selling toasted flies instead of edible seeds.

6 See Newsweek magazine, no. 234, p. 56.

7 They were phosphorescent Larpicus tarantulas, found only in eastern Namibia.

8 Consult the Zumfelde Table, available from the Berlin Nutritionists Society.

9 According to the tradition of the prophet Magetsu—which the Western world found incomprehensible—a man and woman were not permitted to marry until the eldest of their female servants had lost the last of her teeth. This prohibition did not impede their right to have children.

10 He used a pair of Stewarson glasses imported by the Tenkei-Maru department store.

11 See the Hiro-Sensei sect’s book of the Holy Catechism.

12 It is said that some of the neighbors were unable to sleep that night.

13 Teachers of this technique tend to be found on the country’s southern coast.

* *

Images: Ben Rodkin, with Mario Bellatin and David Shook, for Baru
Coming soon… the Bellatin dossier from BAR