A Reading Diary (3 page)

Today I start setting up my library.

The shelves are ready, waxed and clean. I realize that before I can put the books in place, I have to open all the boxes, since the subjects are mixed up and I won’t otherwise know how much space I need for, say, detective novels or the works of Bioy. In one of the first boxes I find a copy of Bioy’s
La otra aventura
, a collection of essays I edited when I worked for the publisher Galerna in Buenos Aires. I was twenty years old, and we were three in the company: the editor, his wife and I. The book is small, 8
½
by 17½ centimetres, with a black line drawing on a red background. I remember going to Bioy’s house to pick up the manuscript, a bundle of carbon copies, and reading them on the bus back home.

That was in the early months of 1968. Just over thirty years later I saw Bioy again, weeks before his death. He had shrivelled into a frail, bony man who mumbled his words, but his eyes were still extraordinarily bright. He told me that he had thought of the plot for a new novel, a fantastic novel. “There will be an island in it,” he said. And then, with a smile, “Again.”

I have a photo of Bioy aged seventeen, in profile, bearded, classically handsome. I also have one of him at that last meeting, shoulders hunched, cheeks caved in. It isn’t certain that Morel would have chosen to preserve the young man rather than the dying one, the image of what was over
the image of what would be. Morel says to the image of his beloved Faustine (with whom the narrator also has fallen in love), “The influence of the future on the past.” Exactly.

What others see as our finest achievements are often not what we ourselves see. Edith Sorel once interviewed Marc Chagall in his house in St-Paul-de-Vence. The painter was in his mid-eighties and was living with his second wife, Vava, whom he had married a decade earlier. Edith was asking Chagall about how it felt to be one of the world’s most famous artists, when Vava excused herself and left the room for a minute. Chagall quickly grabbed Edith’s hand, pointed to his departing wife and, his face glowing with pleasure, whispered, “She’s a Brodsky!” For the poor Jewish boy who had grown up in the shtetl of Vitebsk, more than any artistic fame, what filled him with pride was having married the daughter of a rich merchant family.

Who is Faustine? Who was she in Bioy’s mind? I’ve just read that the Argentinian Inés Schmidt became the model for Rosa Fröhlich, the Marlene Dietrich character in
The Blue Angel
, after Heinrich Mann met her in Florence in 1905.

I’m in my library, surrounded by empty shelves and growing columns of books. It occurs to me that I can trace all
my memories through these piling-up volumes. Then suddenly everything seems redundant, all this accumulation of printed paper. Unless it is my own experience that isn’t necessary. It is like the double reality that the narrator experiences when he quotes Cicero: “The two suns that, as I heard from my father, were seen during the Consulate of Tuditanus and Aquilius.” Impossibly, the narrator finds in the house an identical copy of the pamphlet he is carrying in his pocket: not two copies of the same pamphlet but twice the same copy. Double reality obliterates itself; that is why meeting our doppelgänger means that we must die.

Title for an essay: “The Library as Doppelgänger.”

The room in which my library is to be lodged seems to me huge, and as the books begin to fill it, even more so. I pick up a collection by the Iraqi poet Bakr Al-Sayyab and read:

For years, for lack of space, I kept most of my books in storage. I used to think I could hear them call out to me at night. Now I stand for a long time among them all, flooded with images, bits of remembered text, quotations in random
order, titles and names. I find my early copy of
The Invention of Morel:
the second edition, published by
Sur
in 1948, the year I was born.

Several days of unpacking, and many weeks more to come. Memories and false memories. I think I remember something in a certain way, distinctly. A note on the endpaper pages of a book I open by chance tells me I’m wrong; the event happened somewhere else, with someone else, at a different time. Bioy’s narrator: “Our habits suppose a certain way in which things take place, a vague coherence of the world. Now reality appears to me changed, unreal.”

Papers that have fluttered out of my books as I dust: a Buenos Aires tramway ticket (trams stopped running in the late sixties); a phone number and a name I can’t place; a line,
“laudant illa sed ista legunt”;
a bookmark from the now defunct Librairie Maspéro in Paris; a ticket stub for
Grease;
a stub for an Athens-Toronto flight; a bill for books from Thorpe’s in Guildford, still in shillings and pence; a sticker from Mitchell’s Bookstore in Buenos Aires; a drawing of two ducks or two doves done in red crayon; a Spanish playing card, the ten of clubs; the address of Estela Ocampo in Barcelona; a receipt from a store in Milan for a hat I don’t remember ever owning; a passport photo of
Severo Sarduy; a brochure from the Huntington Library in Pasadena; an envelope addressed to me on George Street in Toronto.

We don’t choose what remains. In the past moments captured by Morel in his ghostly projections persist two abominable pieces of music: “Valencia” and “Tea for Two.” My mother had an LP with Sara Montiel singing “Valencia.”

The fantastic must survive a series of logical or absurd explanations. (Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”) Bioy’s narrator proposes five hypotheses for the strange things he sees: that he is sick with the plague; that he has become invisible through bad air and lack of food; that the people he sees are creatures from another planet, incapable of hearing; that he has gone mad; that the phantoms are his dead friends and the island is a form of purgatory or heaven. The true solution is presumed to be “scientific.”

Bioy (Bioy’s own sarcastic voice) intrudes into the narrative: “The possibility of several heavens has been stated; if there were only one and all were forced to go there and a charming couple awaited us with all their literary
Wednesdays, many of us would have stopped dying long ago.” Also this: “Man and mating can’t bear long and intense moments.” (Borges must have been thinking of this line when he attributed to Bioy the famous quotation in “Tlön, Uqbar”: “Mirrors and mating are abominable, because they multiply the number of men.” The two friends, Borges and Bioy, mirrored features of one another in their writings. Both
The Invention of Morel
and “Tlön, Uqbar” were written in the same year, 1940.)

Unlike Huxley’s “feelies” (films that you can touch or “finger”) in
Brave New World
, Morel’s projected images can be perceived through the sense of smell as well as by touch (a procedure he says was easily achieved), and through the perception of heat. “No witness will admit that these are images,” he boasts to the narrator. He is also certain that his “imitations of people” lack consciousness—“like the characters in a film,” he adds. (Like books, I think. Like friends remembered.)

The friends I remember are caught in time, as if captured on film. They (many of them are now dead, disappeared) are still the age at which I last saw them; I doubt if they would recognize me now. They are what I know of the past.

“Who would not distrust someone who said, ‘I and my friends are apparitions, a new type of photography’?” As I walked around the Buenos Aires I thought I remembered, the ghosts seemed to ask that same ironic question. In my adolescence, I never had the sense of being in a “remembered” place.

Foreseeably, reality co-opts fiction. On Morel’s island, the walls of the villa are film projections that coincide with the walls built out of brick and plaster and cover up any cracks or holes in the real thing. In Bioy’s later novel
Plan of Escape
, which takes place on another of his fantasy islands, he imagines a prison in which painted walls create for the inmates the illusion of freedom. History bettered both notions. José Milicúa, a Spanish art historian, has revealed that, during the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans (!) built cells with disturbing murals in the style of Modernist and Surrealist paintings: six feet high, three feet wide and six feet long, hot and airless, and with the cots so angled that the prisoner would fall onto the floor whenever he tried to lie down. An endless loop of the eye-slicing scene in Buñuel’s
Un Chien andalou
was projected onto one of the walls. The architect of this nightmare was an Austrian-born Frenchman, Alfonso Laurencic, who called his creations “psychotechnic torture.”

I will sleep one night in the library to make the space truly mine. C. says that this is equivalent to a dog peeing in the corners.

Morel’s first idea is to construct an anthology of images exhibited as mementoes; that is why the villa is called a museum. He suggests that our technology is constantly inventing machines “to counterbalance absence.” Absence, he argues, is merely spatial, and he imagines that every voice, every image produced by those no longer alive is preserved somewhere, forever. One day, he hopes, there will be a machine capable of rebuilding everything, like an alphabet that allows us to understand and compose any possible word. Then, he says, “life will be a storage-room for death.” One single advantage for Morel’s people-images: they have no memory of the repetition; they relive the moment as if it were always the first time.

It is said that those who don’t visit the Chapel of San Andrés de Teixido in Galicia during their lifetime must do so after death.
“A San Andrés de Teixido vai de morto quen non foi de vivo.”

A definition of hell: every one of our acts, our utterances, our thoughts preserved since the beginning of time,
increasing infinity by an infinite number of infinities, a repetition from which there is no escape.

I see (I hadn’t remembered) that the narrator hears Faustine speak of Canada, my Canada. Since I became a Canadian citizen in 1985, I’ve enjoyed finding references to Canada in unexpected places and I’ve become attentive to capital Cs on the page. I’m aware that, for Bioy, Canada was equivalent to Shangri-La without the exoticism: mere distance, the archetypal faraway place. It is curious how readers form their own text by remarking on certain words, certain names that have a private meaning, that echo for them alone and are unnoticed by any other. This reminds me of the anonymous reviewer of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
who, in the English magazine
Horse
&
Hound
, remarked that Lawrence’s book contained fine descriptions of the British countryside, unfortunately marred by certain sentimental or erotic digressions.

Hubert Nyssen asks me if I’ve ever thought that the brain is like a folded codex of almost limitless memory: the mind as book.

I’ve finished
The Invention of Morel
, again. Bioy’s voice echoes in the room. I pick up his diary to read this evening, before I fall asleep.

The books I take up to my bed at night and the books I sort out in the library during the day are different books. The former impose on me their time and length, their own rhythm of telling before I fall asleep; the latter are ruled by my own notions of order and categories, and obey me almost blindly (sometimes they rebel and I have to change their place on the shelf).

What company will Bioy’s novels keep when the library is all set up? In what grouping will I find them? Where will
The Invention of Morel
sit after all these towering columns of books are up on the shelves? (If I keep them in alphabetical order, grouped by language, Bioy’s novels will be preceded by the poems of Jaime Gil de Biedma and will be followed by the superb short stories of Isidoro Blaisten.)

I find this comment in Bioy’s diary: “I’ve always said that I write for the reader, but the fact that I continue writing today, when readers (whole-hearted, full-blooded readers) have vanished, proves irrefutably that I write simply for myself.”

I’m on the Eurostar to London. The air conditioning doesn’t seem to be working and it’s humid and hot. Two women in front of me have been talking ever since we left Paris, too low for me to catch every word but not low enough for me to be able to shut them out. Their voices grate, one especially, and my head is drumming. Then the one with the less grating voice says, quite distinctly, “He curled up in a little ball and died.”

A dog? A cat? Was she describing the death of someone she knew? I have the feeling of having walked into a story whose beginning and end I’ll never know.

I try to go back to my book, H. G. Wells’s
The Island of Dr. Moreau
, in a pocket hardcover Everyman edition I’ve had since high school. The first time I read
Dr. Moreau
was during the summer holidays. I was twelve, the book a birthday present from my best friend, Lenny Fagin. That was a lucky summer; in the quiet country house we had rented near Buenos Aires, I discovered Nicholas Blake’s
The Beast Must Die
, the stories of Horacio Quiroga, Ray Bradbury’s
The Martian Chronicles
. Now Wells was to be added to my desert island hoard.