We returned to Buenos Aires when I was seven, to a large, dark, cool house on a cobblestoned street, where I was given my own room perched on the back terrace, separate from the rest of the family. Until then, I had spoken only English and German. I learned to speak Spanish, and, gradually, Spanish books were added to my shelves. And still nothing prompted me to write.
Homework, of course, did not count. “Compositions,” as they were called, required one to fill a couple of pages on a given subject, keeping always closer to reportage than to fiction. Imagination was not called for. “Portrait of Someone in Your Family,” “What I Did on Sunday,” “My Best Friend” elicited a sugary, polite prose, illustrated in colored pencils with an equally cordial depiction of the person or event concerned, the whole to be scrutinized by the teacher for accuracy and spelling mistakes. Only once did I diverge from the imposed subject. The title given to us was “A Sea Battle,” the teacher no doubt imagining that his students, all boys, had the same enthusiasm for war games that he had. I had never read the books on airmen and soldiers that several of my schoolmates enjoyed, the “Biggles” series for instance, or the abridged histories of the world wars, full of pictures of airplanes and tanks, printed on spongy, coarse paper. I realized that I completely lacked the requisite vocabulary for the task. I decided therefore to interpret the title differently, and wrote a description of a battle between a shark and a giant squid, no doubt inspired by an illustration from one of my favorite books, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I was surprised to discover that my inventiveness, instead of amusing, angered the teacher who told me (quite rightly) that I knew very well that this was not what he had meant. I think that this was my first attempt at writing a story.
Ambition prompted my second attempt. Every year, just before the summer holidays, the school put on a vaguely patriotic play, exemplary and dull. I decided that I could write something at least not worse than these pedagogical dramas, and one evening after dinner, I sat down and composed a play about the childhood of one of our ancient presidents, famous, like Washington, for having never told a lie. The first scene opened with the boy facing the dilemma of denouncing a playmate or lying to his parents; the second portrayed him inventing a story to protect his friend; in the third, my hero suffered the pangs of a tormented conscience; in the fourth, his loyal friend confessed to the awful crime; the fifth showed our hero repenting of his lie, thus adroitly circumventing the real dilemma. The play bore a title that had the virtue of being, if not inspiring, at least clear: Duty or Truth. It was accepted and staged, and I experienced for the first time the thrill of having the words I had written read out loud by somebody else.
I was twelve at the time, and the success of the experience prompted me to try and repeat it. I had written Duty or Truth in a few hours; in a few more hours I tried to write an imitation of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (inspired by Disney’s Fantasia); a religious drama in which Buddha, Moses, and Christ were the main protagonists; and an adaptation of “Falada, the Talking Horse,” taken from the Brothers Grimm. I finished none of them. I realized that if reading is a contented, sensuous occupation whose intensity and rhythm are agreed upon between the reader and the chosen book, writing instead is a strict, plodding, physically demanding task in which the pleasures of inspiration are all well and good, but are only what hunger and taste are to a cook: a starting point and a measuring rod, not the main occupation. Long hours, stiff joints, sore feet, cramped hands, the heat or cold of the workplace, the anguish of missing ingredients and the humiliation owing to the lack of knowhow, onions that make you cry, and sharp knives that slice your fingers are what is in store for anyone who wants to prepare a good meal or write a good book. At twelve I wasn’t willing to give over even a couple of evenings to the writing of a piece. What for? I settled comfortably back into my role as reader.
Books continued to seduce me, and I loved anything that had to do with them. During my Buenos Aires adolescence, I was lucky enough to come across a number of well-known writers. First in an English-German bookstore where I worked between school hours, and later at a small publishing company where I apprenticed as an editor, I met Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, Marta Lynch, Marco Denevi, Eduardo Mallea, José Bianco, and many others. I liked the company of writers and yet I felt very shy among them. I was, of course, almost invisible to them, but from time to time one would notice me and ask: “Do you write?” My answer was always “No.” It was not that I didn’t wish, occasionally, to be like them and have my name on a book that other people would admire. It was simply that I was aware, very clearly, that nothing that I could produce would ever merit sitting on the same shelf as the books I loved. To imagine a book that I might write rubbing covers with a novel by Joseph Conrad or Franz Kafka was not only unthinkable but incongruous. Even an adolescent, in spite of all his overwhelming arrogance, has a sense of the ridiculous.
But I listened. I heard Bioy discuss the need to plot carefully the successive episodes in a story so as to know exactly where the characters are headed, and then cover the tracks, leaving only a few clues for the readers to think that they are discovering something invisible to the writer. I heard Ocampo explain why the tragedy of small things, of ordinary people, was more moving than that of complex and powerful characters. I heard Lynch speak passionately, enviously, of Chekhov, Denevi of Dino Buzzati, Mallea of Sartre and Dostoyevsky. I heard Borges break down a Kipling story into its many parts and reassemble it, like a clockmaker inspecting a precious ancient instrument. I listened to these writers tell me how the stuff that I read and loved had been made. It was like standing in a workshop and hearing the master craftsmen argue about the strongest materials, the best combinations, the tricks and devices by which something can be made to balance at a difficult angle or keep on ticking indefinitely, or about how something can be built to look impossibly slim and simple and yet hold a myriad complex springs and cogwheels. I listened not in order to learn a new craft but better to know my own.
In 1969, having decided not to follow a university career, I left for Europe and did desultory freelance work for a number of publishers. The pay was abysmal, and I seldom had enough money for more than a few meals a week. One day, I heard that an Argentinean paper was offering a five hundred dollar prize for the best short stories. I decided to apply. I quickly wrote, in Spanish, four stories that were readable, formally correct, but lifeless. I asked Severo Sarduy, whom I had met in Paris and who wrote in a rich, exuberant, baroque Spanish that resonated with literary allusions, to read them over for me. He told me they were awful. “You use words like an accountant,” he said. “You don’t ask words to perform for you. Here you have a character who falls and loses one of his contact lenses. You say that he lifts himself ‘half blind’ from the floor. Think harder. The word you want is ‘Cyclops.’” I obediently wrote Cyclops in the story and sent the lot off. A few months later, I heard that I had won. I felt more embarrassed than proud, but was able to eat properly for a couple of months.
Still I would not write. I scribbled a few essays, a few poems, all forgettable. My heart wasn’t in it. Like someone who loves music and tries his hand at the piano, I undertook the experience less out of passion than out of curiosity, to see how it was done. Then I stopped. I worked for publishers, I selected manuscripts and saw them through the press, I imagined titles for other people’s books and put together anthologies of different kinds. Everything I did was always in my capacity as reader. “David was talented and knew how to compose psalms. And I? What am I capable of?” asked Rabbi Ouri in the eighteenth century. His answer was: “I can recite them.”