2666 (33 page)

Amalfitano had
 
some
rather idiosyncratic
 
ideas
 
about jet lag.
 
They weren't consistent, so it might be an
exaggeration to call them ideas. They were feelings. Make-believe ideas. As if
he were looking out the window and forcing himself to see an extraterrestrial
landscape. He believed (or liked to think he believed) that when a person was
in Barcelona, the people living and present in Buenos Aires and Mexico City
didn't exist. The time difference only masked their nonexistence. And so if you
suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn't exist or
hadn't yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon
known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion
of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn't traveled. This was
something he'd probably read in some science fiction novel or story and that
he'd forgotten having read.

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their
satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own. They
turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into
personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a
brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or
end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a
possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more
than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was
at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.

And although Amalfitano later found more information on the
life and works of Rafael Dieste at the University of Santa Teresa
library—information that confirmed what he had already guessed or what Don
Domingo Garcia-Sabell had insinuated in his prologue, titled "Enlightened
Intuition," which went so far as to quote Heidegger (
Es
gibt Zeit: there is time)
—on the afternoon when he'd
ranged over his humble and barren lands like a medieval squire, as his
daughter, like a medieval princess, finished applying her makeup in front of
the bathroom mirror, he could in no way remember why or where he'd bought the
book or how it had ended up packed and sent with other more familiar and
cherished volumes to this populous city that stood in defiance of the desert on
the border of Sonora and Arizona. And it was then, just then, as if it were the
pistol shot inaugurating a series of events that would build upon each other
with sometimes happy and sometimes disastrous consequences, Rosa left the house
and said she was going to the movies with a friend and asked if he had his keys
and Amalfitano said yes and he heard the door bang shut and then he heard his
daughter's footsteps along the path of uneven paving stones to the tiny wooden
gate that didn't even come up to her waist and then he heard his daughter's
footsteps on the sidewalk, heading off toward the bus stop, and then he heard
the engine of a car starting. And then Amalfitano walked into his devastated
front yard and looked up and down the street, craning his neck, and didn't see
any car or
Rosa
and he gripped Dieste's book
tightly, which he was still holding in his left hand. And then he looked up at
the sky and saw the moon, too big and too wrinkled, although it wasn't night
yet. And then he returned to his ravaged backyard and for a few seconds he
stopped, looking left and right, ahead and behind, trying to see his shadow,
but although it was still daytime and the sun was still shining in the west,
toward
Tijuana
,
he couldn't see it. And then his eyes fell on the four rows of cord, each tied
at one end to a kind of miniature soccer goal, two posts perhaps six feet tall
planted in the ground, and a third post bolted horizontally across the top,
making them sturdier, the cords strung from this top bar to hooks fixed in the
side of the house. It was the clothesline, although the only things he saw
hanging on it were a shirt of
Rosa
's, white
with ocher embroidery around the neck, and a pair of underpants and two towels,
still dripping. In the corner, in a brick hut, was the washing machine. For a
while he didn't move, breathing with his mouth open, leaning on the horizontal
bar of the clothesline. Then he went into the hut as if he were short of
oxygen, and from a plastic bag with the logo of the supermarket where he went
with his daughter to do the weekly shopping, he took out three clothespins,
which he persisted in calling
perritos,
as they were called in Chile,
and with them he clamped the book and hung it from one of the cords and then he
went back into the house, feeling much calmer.

The idea, of course, was Duchamp's.

All that exists, or remains, of Duchamp's stay in
Buenos Aires
is a
ready-made. Though of course his whole life was a readymade, which was his way
of appeasing fate and at the same time sending out signals of distress. As
Calvin Tomkins writes: As a
wedding present for his sister Suzanne and his
close friend Jean Crotti, who were married in Paris on April 14, 1919, Duchamp
instructed the couple by letter to hang a geometry book by strings on the
balcony of their apartment so that the wind could "go through the book,
choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages."
Clearly, then,
Duchamp wasn't just playing chess in
Buenos
Aires
. Tompkins continues:
This
Unhappy
Readymade, as
he called it, might strike some newlyweds as an oddly
cheerless wedding gift, but Suzanne and Jean carried out Duchamp's instructions
in good spirit; they took a photograph of the open hook dangling in midair (the
only existing record of the work, which did not survive its exposure to the
elements), and Suzanne later painted a picture of it called
Le Readymade
malheureux de Marcel. As
Duchamp later told Cabanne, "It amused me to
bring the idea of happy and unhappy into readymades, and then the rain, the
wind, the pages flying, it was an amusing idea."
I take it back: all
Duchamp did while he was in
Buenos
Aires
was play chess. Yvonne, who was with him, got
sick of all his play-science and left for
France
. According to Tompkins:
Duchamp
told one interviewer in later years that he had liked disparaging "the
seriousness of a book full of principles," and suggested to another that,
in its exposure to the weather, "the treatise seriously got the facts of
life."

That night, when
Rosa
got
back from the movies, Amalfitano was watching television in the living room and
he told her he'd hung Dieste's book on the clothesline.
Rosa
looked at him as if she had no idea what he was talking about. I mean, said
Amalfitano, I didn't hang it out because it got sprayed with the hose or
dropped in the water, I hung it there just because, to see how it survives the
assault of nature, to see how it survives this desert climate. I hope you
aren't going crazy, said
Rosa
. No, don't
worry, said Amalfitano, in fact looking quite cheerful. I'm telling you so you
don't take it down. Just pretend the book doesn't exist. Fine,
Rosa
said, and she shut herself in her room.

The next day, as his students wrote, or as he himself was
talking, Amalfitano began to draw very simple geometric figures, a triangle, a
rectangle, and at each vertex he wrote whatever name came to him, dictated by
fate or lethargy or the immense boredom he felt thanks to his students and the
classes and the oppressive heat that had settled over the city. Like this:

Drawing 1

Or like this:

Drawing 2

Or like this:

Drawing 3

When he returned to his cubicle he discovered the paper and
before he threw it in the trash he examined it for a few minutes. The only
possible explanation for Drawing 1 was boredom. Drawing 2 seemed an extension
of Drawing 1, but the names he had added struck him as insane. Socrates made
sense, there was a fleeting logic there, and Protagoras, too but why Thomas
More and Saint-Simon? Why Diderot, what was he doing there, and God in heaven,
why the Portuguese Jesuit Pedro da Fonseca, one of the thousands of
commentators on Aristotle, who by no amount of forceps wiggling could be taken
for anything but a very minor thinker? In contrast, there was a certain logic
to Drawing 3, the logic of a teenage moron, or a teen bum in the desert, his
clothes in tatters, but clothes even so. All the names, it could be said, were
of philosophers who concerned themselves with ontological questions. The B that
appeared at the apex of the triangle superimposed on the rectangle could be God
or the existence of God as derived from his essence. Only then did Amalfitano
notice that an A and a B also appeared in Drawing 2, and he no longer had any
doubt that the heat, to which he was unaccustomed, was affecting his mind as he
taught his classes.

That night, however, after he had finished his dinner and
watched the TV news and talked on the phone to Professor Silvia Perez, who was
outraged at the way the
Sonora
police and the local Santa Teresa police were carrying out the investigation of
the crimes, Amalfitano found three more diagrams on his desk. It was clear he
had drawn them himself. In fact, he remembered doodling absentmindedly on a
blank sheet of paper as he thought other things. Drawing 1 (or Drawing 4) was
like this:

Drawing 4