Las aguas del olvido

From the title of this story ("The waters of oblivion") and its first line ("No one would cross the river"), we should be able to divine what exactly will happen in the end.  Márquez loves books almost as much he loves his wife Ivonne, who does not return his affection; one wonders, in fact, whether she ever did.  He has grown tired of the river; tired of his dog Saúl and his silly games; tired ever so slightly of this world.  To change his routine, Márquez decides to invite a young yet already established writer to his mansion somewhere among Spain's many hillocks and streams, although we are never told why he selected this writer over many others.  The writer himself does not know.  He suspects the invitation may have something to do with Ivonne, who has been less than faithful recently if she ever was before.  Our narrator, who happens to be this nameless writer so cherished by Márquez, steps towards the window and looks down upon the tennis courts of the large estate.  This is, one should say, the natural reaction of most young men entering upon the middle way of life, who behold the endless energy of less aged generations with nostalgic smiles.  He lingers on Ivonne, attracted to her curves, her pelvis, her thighs, the way she stops at the net to talk to her instructor and lover, Charlie Gómez.  Why should Gómez pay attention to these two worthless excuses for men, when

He had the general aspect of those heartthrobs who pose and sell male colognes.  Tall and invariably tanned, he seemed less addicted to Ivonne than to sports and automobiles, and when he played tennis he would tie around his forehead a striped band which Ivonne doubtless found irresistible.  Sitting across from him during breakfast, I came to think that I could consider him an imbecile without a smidgen of remorse.  But could anyone who allowed himself to be called Charlie Gómez be anything but an imbecile?

While the narrator gazes upon the frivolous urges of so many people who think that life is about entitlement, Márquez tries to tell him about the etymology of the river that no one wants to cross, Guadalete.  But his guest finds unabashed adultery more interesting, if only for a few regrettable moments.

The question is whether Ivonne merits such attention.   In the realm of conventional storytelling,  Ivonne would have been a stunning beauty from whose angelic presence Márquez could not turn away.   Had he been a writer – which he certainly isn't – he would have composed odes to the softness of her skin under an eternal sun.  Instead, our narrator finds pictures of Ivonne from another time:

In the shelves above the table lay black-and-white photos of Ivonne; in some of them she was much younger but not as well-dressed or groomed; they undoubtedly stemmed from the time before Márquez entered her life.  I found myself wondering where that had happened and why it was beyond repair.

Márquez does not share the narrator's amazement.  As Ivonne and Charlie finish a meal and skip off with "premeditated agility, as if showing Márquez and me the felicitous advantages of sport and adultery," the two bibliophiles retire to the library to gaze upon things of much truer beauty.  It is here that Márquez renews his conversation with his guest: "Guadalete is an Arab word of Greek origin," a complicated introduction that failed to touch the narrator's nerve the first time they discussed the matter.  Perhaps because novelists tend to be convinced that the only thing worth reading are novels, more specifically, their own?  Márquez is duly aware of such solipsism:

'Reading dictionaries and discovering etymologies, that's what I like,'  said Márquez, looking out the window at Ivonne who had her back to us.  'Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't know of a single novel as fascinating as the pleasure of reading a dictionary.'

He then feels obligated, as all great pedants do, to elucidate his lesson with an example, using the most immediate test rat available – in this case, Charlie.  Charlie (whom the narrator calls an "imbecile" as a sign of solidarity) could be described in plain terms as "jovial," a word ultimately derived from the name of this god.  And since we know that Charlie's only god-like qualities are his stature and complexion, we suspect that Márquez finds fiction not quite as precise as the beginnings of all things.  So while our narrator tries to palliate his host by "signing different inscriptions in each one of his books," Márquez keeps a piece of wood ready "as if calculating the possibility of doing something that made him unsure" and his dog waits patiently by his side.

The story is part of a collection by this contemporary Spanish writer who has garnered quite a few accolades in his recent years.   From what we have seen, albeit superficially, of our narrator, we are inclined to believe that he finds fiction, storytelling and the fantastic much more interesting than the tedium and worries of daily existence.  In many ways, of course, he is right.  The only means to free oneself from the onslaught of bourgeois mores is to deny their validity within yourself by obtaining a deeper meaning to your own life.  This may sound preposterous to most people who have come to believe that their lives are ordinary because they are not famous or rich or otherwise important to anyone outside of their small circle of family and friends.  But the truth is that every life is extraordinary because it is yours and no one else's.  If only the same thing could be said about that river.

Araby

Every work of art is in part inspired and disciplined.  We may betake ourselves into pessimistic circles because it is easier to be captious and punctilious than to embrace broadly what is imperfect, but love is truly what inspires and disciplines us at once.  From our teenage years on we develop a sense of what it is to become an adult; to be responsible for one's words and actions; to choose a path and have the wherewithal to maintain the course; to be old enough to fall in love that is undeniably real and eternal.  For every sniper who claims love is merely the troubadour's expression of a chemical bond, I give him the love of something greater than a human body or soul, the love of what we breathe, the love of memory, of time, of joy, of lessons that make us the adults we have always wanted to become.  The casual love of an ephemeral being who just happens to be beautiful and reminiscent of some poem we read once, a long time back, about another person in love beyond her means, we can impute to our need for understanding and, more than that, for sympathy.  Which brings us to this tale of youth and regret.

The young protagonist and narrator is a Catholic school pupil who is neither rich nor abjectly poor.  He attends school, his streets are lit ("the space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns"), and his family is around him and patient.  He has discovered something new in life, something that begins and ends with one note, something he would espy in her home from his own rowhouse, "a figure defined by the light from the half-opened door."  This Beatrice is the sister of his classmate Mangan, and she is oddly introduced as just that; never is she given her own identity outside the likelihood of marrying the sister of one's friend since no one ever really leaves the street of one's childhood.  This unnamed lass soon engirds our narrator with her endless horizons:

Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand.  My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom.  I thought little of the future.  I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration.  But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

Her name is never mentioned and probably doesn't matter, although one might surmise that it has much the same phonetic flavor as Araby, the production which she cannot attend.  The narrator departs and leaves everything behind except what he can snatch from her, from this being presumably a bit older or at least more mature, who has all the trappings of the princesse lointaine necessary for a poet.  Why does a poet need such a distanced object of admiration and affection?  Because that distant object is really his own future work, the embodiment of inspiration – the lyric sensations that this being produces within him – and the discipline that involves forsaking all the women of the world for one woman.  This is the task our narrator undertakes and the one which, of course, is bound to disappoint him since all juvenile love is by definition disappointing.

There cannot be a simpler premise to a story than this.  Our protagonist has little else to do but think about this unapproachable object who, as it were, does talk to him, exuding enough civility to suggest indifference rather than some kind of precocious ego boost.  Time is not, however, on our lad's side:

When I came home to dinner my uncle had not yet been home.  Still it was early.  I sat staring at the clock for some time and when its ticking began to irritate me, I left the room.  I mounted the staircase and gained the upper part of the house. The high cold empty gloomy rooms liberated me and I went from room to room singing.  From the front window I saw my companions playing below in the street. Their cries reached me weakened and indistinct and, leaning my forehead against the cool glass, I looked over at the dark house where she lived.  I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing but the brown-clad figure cast by my imagination, touched discreetly by the lamplight at the curved neck, at the hand upon the railings and at the border below the dress.

It has been said that true maturity arrives when we find ourselves dissenting from group activities, collective notions of fun and edification, and the hedonistic and self-serving interests concealed by the greyness of bourgeois mores.  Our hero enjoys such a moment, however briefly, when some particle of him suddenly feels above the daily hubbub caused and reveled in by his contemporaries.  He wants and in fact deserves more; his soul is deeper and richer than the yells and taunts that surround him.  So, near the story's beginning, when we get a whiff of the "dark and odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness," we may recall a stanza from this poem:  

When last I saw thee drink!  Away!  The fever'd dream is o'er,
I could not live a day and know that we should meet no more!
They tempted me, my beautiful! – for hunger's power is strong –
They tempted me, my beautiful!  But I have loved too long.

Too long means past the daydreams that dissolve time into clear segments – with and without; and to be the subject of such a story only one of these conditions can triumph.  Alas, we know all too well which one.

The Sussex Vampire

It has been about fifty-five months since my fateful re-acquaintance with the world of Holmes and Watson in this bookshop, and perhaps owing to its rather provocative title my eyes fell first to this story.  A fifteen-minute read in the bookstore café and I left with the complete works in two rugged paperbacks (to be devoured in their entirety once I reached my sunny modern loft in Berlin).  Whether I truly remembered the tales from the summer now twenty years ago may be debated; more likely I retained only a few culprits, dialogues and twists, all of which were augmented by my love for the series featuring this late actor.  The story itself was considered promising enough to be expanded into a movie-length episode with Brett, and has remained a minor victory of style and concision. 

It is November, cold, mysterious, a month that drifts into perpetual gloaming, when the detectives receive a message from a certain Ferguson.  Ferguson was once Watson's regular opponent during their rugby days, a time that Watson typically recollects with exaggerated fondness (such is the machismo of the the average male that brutal, useless afternoons are transformed into a charming period of camaraderie).  Ferguson relates an almost impossible tale about the household of a close friend in which inexplicable events have cast a pallor upon the souls that therein reside.  This friend, whose personal life is known by Ferguson in suspicious detail, married a Peruvian beauty five years ago after his first wife died leaving him a son, Jack, now about fifteen.  While initially a happy pairing, their marriage soon becomes a conduit for suppositions that do not involve merit or mention, and the gentleman feels that he shall never come to know his wife:  

The fact of her foreign birth and of her alien religion always caused a separation of interests and of feelings between husband and wife, so that after a time his love may have cooled towards her and he may have come to regard their union as a mistake.  He felt there were sides of her character which he could never explore or understand.  This was the more painful as she was as loving a wife as a man could have - to all appearance absolutely devoted. 

A small stereotype of Anglo-Saxon and Latin relationships perhaps, but one that rings true in the matter of frankness and passion.  The mistrust could surely be imputed to the fact that they had known each other only a few weeks before taking their vows, yet another inherent difference persists even after they decide to have a child of their own, a difference buttressed by the description of the manor upon Holmes and Watson's arrival:

The room, as I gazed round, was a most singular mixture of dates and of places.  The half-panelled walls may well have belonged to the original yeoman farmer of the seventeenth century.  They were ornamented, however, on the lower part by a line of well-chosen modern water-colours; while above, where yellow plaster took the place of oak, there was hung a fine collection of South American utensils and weapons, which had been brought, no doubt, by the Peruvian lady upstairs.  Holmes rose, with that quick curiosity which sprang from his eager mind, and examined them with some care.  He returned with his eyes full of thought.

More specifically, full of thought on the horrific scene depicted by Ferguson, who is quickly revealed as both the author and subject of the long letter beseeching Holmes and Watson to help him discover what could be wrong with his wife – the same wife caught on more than one occasion sucking the blood out of her infant's neck.

Avid readers of detective fiction and horror will undoubtedly reach the right conclusion about the alleged vampirism, which Holmes refers to as "rubbish," "absurd," and something that "does not happen in criminal practice in England," an interesting way of avoiding a question regarding its actual existence.  As in many of Conan Doyle's later works, there are elements and clues already famous from other entries, a sidelight more indicative of fatidic patterning rather than any lack of creativity on his part.  To those not enchanted (alas, at one point I counted myself among them) by the miniatures of genius that these tales represent, our vampire and her appurtenances can proffer as fine an introduction as any of the more canonically recognized classics, most of which predate our sleuth's temporary demise.  In fact, reading them in order of publication suggests both that Holmes and Watson are necessarily wiser as time progresses and that their cases begin to echo past achievements.  Not that there could ever be any real-life vampires for two men of science apart from an occasional bat.

The Dance of Death

It has been said that destiny steers us just enough for us to ride it, which is a gentler way of claiming that over time we embrace our fate as we recognize its inevitability.  In modern literature many fictional characters have developed the rather annoying habit of realizing that they are nothing more than constructs of some alien imagination and lamenting the prison in which they rot – but this is a boring subject for other pages.  What we can learn from these poor trapped shades is not that they are, in fact, captive and subject to their warden's every whim, but that there are certain moments in each life where we seem to be fulfilling a role unchosen yet scripted in detail.  You will notice such humbug when we tell a departing and disliked colleague that we will miss him, when a schmaltzy film tugs on our heartstrings because it thinks our hearts to be average and submissive, and when we find ourselves laughing at a cruel joke that could not possibly be funny.  Why do we do these things?  Because life shuffles its deck and recommends certain behavioral conformity that elevates minutia into events and obliges us to make the most of every second by filling up our time with overwrought emotions.  It has also been said that there is nothing sweeter than scandal, which brings us to this famous play.

Our setting is fin-de-siècle Sweden and our characters are primarily two.  Edgar, an army captain, and Alice, his wife and a former actress, have been married for twenty-five apparently miserable years and do not hesitate to remind each other of it.  Their barbs have the wicked slant so commonly incident to unhappy marriages whereby each knows every last weakness of the loathsome being who roams his house (in the play's rarely-staged second part, their remote island home is revealed to have once been a prison).  Yet it hardly takes an attentive reader to notice that their vocations are not haphazard: both of them operate exclusively under orders, be it those of a general or a playwright.   As such, everything they say to each other seems to be translated from some unspoken or even secret codex on moral conduct.  The Captain is alternatively portrayed as lazy, aggressive, sick, booming with health, protectively jealous, indifferent, ambitious and brilliant, hopelessly untalented, lascivious, sexless, ascetic, alcoholic, vampiric, passive, recalcitrant and a lockstep soldier.  How can one person be all those things?  The simple answer, of course, is that we all assume these personas – if only very briefly at times – in the course of our lives, which may be crudely equated with the title ("Death demands sacrifices.  Otherwise he comes at once"), but there are also expectations on the part of both spouses.  The Captain would love for his wife to be young because his youth meant being a soldier, active, polished and uniformed; Alice, on the other hand, would like to be an actress, which means, for her at least, that her husband would let her be whoever she wants.  An actress by definition must adapt to the given situation and lend it some modicum of plausibility, but she also may continue to act once the curtain falls just like an old soldier often forgets he will no longer be called to arms.  For that reason we might conclude that whatever the Captain says about Alice is perfectly true, and what Alice says about her husband is complete nonsense.

Why this dichotomy, so often criticized as misogynist?  It is not from any presumption that Alice is a typical female, but from the fact that Alice is a typical failed actress.  In every scene with her husband and her odd, religious but at the same time sinful cousin Kurt, she comes off as bitter (over her uncapitalized beauty) and vindicative (against an old soldier who no longer fancies her looks).  Kurt picks up on the venom in her tone quite rapidly:

But tell me, what do you do in this house?  What happens here?  The walls smell of poison – one feels ill the moment one enters.  I'd like to leave, if I hadn't promised Alice to stay.  There are corpses under the floorboards; there's such hatred here, it's difficult to breathe.

That being an actress allows you to circumvent the innumerable rules and regulations that a military upbringing requires is a simple point, yet one that colors the whole play from grumpy, tired beginning to the last pages of the second part in which one of the characters does not manage to evade his lot. Kurt and Alice's relationship is given the caption when we sinned, and there is an active effort on their part to pair off their respective children, Allan and Judith, as if to compensate for a missed opportunity.  This matchmaking despite Alice's repeated claims that Judith despises her and is at the Captain's beck and call.  Alice will spend almost entire scenes trying to convince Kurt, whom she wishes to seduce, as well as her daughter that the Captain has consecrated a large chunk of his off-duty hours to terrorizing her with his peremptory whims and "vampirism" (a term used several times).  Once these secondary characters exeunt, however, the Captain and Alice share a nasty laugh:

But do you remember Adolf's wedding – that fellow in the Hussars?  The bride had to wear her ring on her right hand because the bridegroom, in a fit of tender passion, had chopped off the third finger of her left hand with a jewelled penknife.

To which Alice reacts by "holding a handkerchief to her mouth to stifle a laugh" – which may be the most revelatory reaction in the entire play; even more surprising is that her husband treats her laughter as natural and almost pleasant.   What could be more delightful than one failing marriage?  Apparently one that fails even before it officially begins.

Strindberg wrote a bevy of other works but The Dance of Death will remain among his most performed and a perfect reflection of the doubts and nightmares that plagued him at the time of composition.  The most fascinating character in the play is neither the Captain nor Alice, but Kurt.  Having abandoned his family, a point the Captain repeats, Kurt traveled to the U.S. where he bore witness to evils that made him appreciate his everyday life in Sweden.  He returns to Sweden to find the couple still married but ready to harangue each other about the slightest detail, and he alternates between believing Alice's exaggerated accusations and defending the Captain's integrity (which desperately needs defending).  Too bad integrity is one thing that didn't rub off on Kurt.          

La Veneziana

To Alexandra on her birthday.

Readers of these pages are well-acquainted with what makes true art live and breathe: a clear and precise vision coupled with unshakable principles.  Few will ever contest that art, regardless of the medium, can survive bereft of vision, even though many current entries in modern museums have the arrogance to think that any form of expression is worth preserving as artistic (I once met an impressionable young woman who admitted that after traveling through Italy for three months and visiting the finest European museums, her favorite painter was still some splattering American mediocrity).  Of course, these modern museums cater to trends and box office receipts and have long since understood that the vast majority of us do not want to be intimidated by art.  The vast majority of us would like to waltz into any museum of the world and be able to grasp on some lazy Sunday afternoon with a vapid guide and a bunch of other clueless tourists the essence of all that we see – as if the nuances of the years of work of past masters can be gleaned by the hasty and uninitiated.  True art takes as much preparation on the part of the observer as on the part of the artist himself, a topic broached elegantly in this story.

Apart from a few wispy servants, our characters are five: a Colonel decorated for his forays in Afghanistan; his talented and somewhat cavalier son Frank; an art restorer by the name of McGore and his much younger wife Maureen; and Simpson, Frank's college roommate and complete opposite.  The site of their gathering is the Colonel's estate, which reeks of the liquor and stale glory that supposedly dignify old soldiers.  With minimal effort and secret smiles, Frank and Maureen demolish the Colonel and Simpson at lawn tennis (McGore does not or cannot participate), leading the Colonel down his habitual slope of gruff looks, overformality, and, of course, omnipresent booze.  The occasion for the McGores' visit is ostensibly for Mr. McGore, a cheerless old dog "who considered life's Creator only a second-rate imitator of the masters whom he had been studying for forty years," to work on La Veneziana, which is described thus:

The painting was very fine indeed.  Luciani had portrayed the Venetian beauty in half-profile, standing against a warm, black background.  Rose-tinted cloth revealed her prominent, dark-hued neck, with extraordinarily tender folds beneath the ear, and the gray lynx fur with which her cherry-red mantlet was trimmed was slipping off her left shoulder.  With the elongated fingers of her right hand spread in pairs, she seemed to have been on the point of adjusting the falling fur but to have frozen motionless, her hazel, uniformly dark eyes gazing fixedly, languidly from the canvas.  Her left hand, with white ripples of cambric encircling the wrist, was holding a basket of yellow fruit; the narrow crown of her headdress glowed atop her dark-chestnut hair.  On the left the black was interrupted by a large, right-angled opening straight into the twilight air and the bluish-green chasm of the cloudy evening.

A more mature Nabokov would alter our expectations in a superior story, also about forgers and easels, which I will not spoil here.  Suffice it to say that the picture turns out to resemble wholly and strikingly a certain Maureen McGore, a fact noticed by the love-struck Simpson and the very indifferent Mr. McGore.  And so, after batting around a few impassioned ideas that could easily have been expanded into a novel (the story itself is Nabokov's longest), our eyes fall to Simpson, who is very much in love with Maureen but can do very little about his shy unattractiveness and her magnificence.

There are other details that often seem to dovetail in fiction.  Frank happens to be a stellar athlete, inattentive student, and, sub rosa, an artist.  But how this odd fact is introduced (Frank early on states, quite sarcastically to his father, that "paintings perturb me") seems a bit arbitrary:

[There were] occasional rumors that Frank was good at drawing but showed his drawings to no one.  He never spoke about art, was ever ready to sing and swig and carouse, yet suddenly a strange gloom would come over him and he would not leave his room or let anyone in, and only his roommate, lowly Simpson, would see what he was up to.  What Frank created during these two or three days of ill-humored isolation he either hid or destroyed, and then, as if having paid an agonizing tribute to his vice, he would again become his merry, uncomplicated self.

It should be said that this set of characteristics is accurate: it describes, more or less, the poet who is embattled by societal circumstances and the plain nonsense of being a "public intellectual" (a ridiculous title and usually self-imposed).  In fact, true artists will often find the subject of art, which so carelessly devolves into oneupmanship, tedious and unbecoming of real interaction because most people – including numerous artists – cannot converse casually with the precision that such matters deserve.  And what do they deserve?  Perhaps more than McGore, a Philistine of occasional wit and endless platitudes, can offer.  Perhaps McGore, who speaks at length about people entering pictures as a rebuttal to Simpson's silly Gothic notion of portraits' coming to life, is not the type of person to pay any heed to true beauty, even beauty in his immediate vicinity.  That would explain, of course, a few things; yet the motivation behind the McGores' marriage is never fleshed out, apart from the hint of financial stability.  But Venetians have always had far too much art and culture to let money hold them back.