As far as our glorious congress was concerned, it was an event excruciating in its boredom, vacuity, and total dearth of any connection with either jungle or literature. For this reason alone, as well as for the utter sordidness of what followed, I'd better change the names of those I came to know there. I wish I could change mine, too, and for the same reasons. Julio Llianos, Tor Ostberg, and, possibly, I myself—plus of course the Great Translator—were the only writers in attendance. Initially I resolved just to ignore this delirium, but when every morning you bump into delegates (male and female deli-gators) at breakfast, in the hall, in the corridors, the whole thing little by little starts to acquire aspects of reality. Toward the end I was fighting like a lion for the creation of a PEN Club section for Vietnamese writers-in-exile. I got all worked up and tears were interfering with my speech.
Eventually a polygon began to take shape: Ulrich von Tim with his wife and Samantha (a subtriangle), Fernando B. (Portuguese) with his wife, Thomas (a Swede) with a lady from Denmark, and me with my Nordic charge. Anonymity is adultery's oxygen, and nothing fills up one's lungs with it like being abroad. In this (plus or minus two furtive, stocky West Germans, half drunk and half insane) company we wandered from one watering hole to another, munched and sipped. Every day, bumping into one another at breakfast in the hotel's cafeteria or in the hall, we would pose one and the same question: "What's on for tonight?" The answer usually contained the name of a restaurant espied by one of us during the daytime or an establishment where the city fathers intended to entertain us, with the pomp, orations, libations, etc., the fathers are so good at. The opening of the congress was attended by the President of the country, General Figueiredo, who uttered three phrases, sat in the presidium for a while, patted Julio Llianos on the equally Latin
American shoulder, and left accompanied by a huge cavalcade of bodyguards, cops, generals, admirals, and photographers from all the local papers, who were snapping his picture with the fervor of people convinced that a lens was capable not only of capturing the great man's epidermis but of penetrating his lobes as well. It was amusing to watch all these flunkies, athletic, youngish, ready any minute to change their master or banner, clad in their blazers, ties, and starched shirts offsetting their highly tensed, sun-baked snouts. The state-bred genus, a cross between a parrot and a monkey. Plus the pining for France and the nonstop quoting, now Victor Hugo, now Andre Malraux, with rather practiced accents. The Third World has inherited everything, including the inferiority complex, of the First and Second.
"When are you flying back?" Ulrich asked me. "Tomorrow," I replied. "Lucky you," he said, for he was staying on in Rio, where he had come with his wife, presumably to salvage their marriage, at which he had already—apparently in no time—succeeded. So for a while he would be stuck in Rio, going to the beach with the local teachers of German lit. and, at night, in the hotel, slipping out of his bed, in his PJ top or bottom, sliding downstairs, and scratching at Sa- mantha's door. Her room was right under his: 1161 and 1061. You can change dollars into cruzeiros but not cruzeiros into dollars.
I had planned to stay in Brazil for about ten days after the congress—either to rent a cheap room somewhere around the Copacabana, go to the beach, bathe, and get a suntan, or else to take a trip to Bahia and try to sail up the Amazon River, and then on to Cuzco, and from Cuzco—to Lima, and then back to New York. But the money was stolen, and although I could have gotten five hundred from American Express, I did not do it. That continent, and that country in particular, do interest me, but I am afraid that, as it is, I've seen more of this world than I've digested. The state of my health wasn't a consideration; at worst, it was a hindrance. After all, it would have been quite amusing for a Russian author to kick the bucket in the jungle: this hadn't happened in a while. But my ignorance as regards South American matters is so immense that even the most disastrous experience probably could not have enlightened me by one iota. There is something revolting in all this drifting along the surface, a camera in your hands, with no particular goal in mind. In the nineteenth century one could still do a Jules Verne or a Humboldt: in the twentieth, flora and fauna should be left to their own devices. In any case, I have seen the Southern Cross, and the young moon flat on its back. As to the destitution of the favelas—may the ones capable offorgiving forgive me for remarking that it, the destitution, is in tune with the uniqueness of the local landscape. Against such a backdrop, the ocean and the mountains, the social drama is looked at askance, and not by the spectators only but by the victims as well. Beauty always renders reality somewhat senseless; here beauty constitutes reality's major part.
A nervous person should not, and in fact cannot, keep a diary. Of course, I would prefer to arrest, or retain, something of these seven days—if only those kebabs, so monstrous in their volume (churrasco rodizio)—but by the second day I already felt like packing, like going back to New York. Of course, Rio is more chic than Sochi, the Cote d'Azur, Palm Beach, or Miami, regardless ofthe thick shroud of exhaust fumes, all the more unbearable in the local heat. But—and this may be the most important point—the essence of all my travels (their side effect, rather, turning into their essence) is in returning here, to Morton Street—in a more and more minute elaboration of the new meaning in- 70 / J О S E PH B R О D S K Y
vested in my notion of "home." The more often you return to it, the more real this doghouse becomes. And the more abstract are the lands and waters I sashay through. I will probably never return to Liteynyi 27, and 44 Morton is but a last-ditch attempt to get away from perceiving the world as a one-way street.
After victory in the battle for the Annamites-in-exile, it emerged that it was Samantha's birthday—she was either thirty-five or forty-five; and Ulrich with his wife, ditto Fernando B., Samantha with the Great Translator (he may after all have indeed been the main writer among us, for the reputation of this whole continent rested precisely on him) went to the restaurant to celebrate. Stupefied by alcohol, I began to pester the Great Translator regarding his living merchandise—to the effect that they all, like the nineteenth- century gringos, for instance, plundered from our European brethren, plus, of course, the gringos themselves, with a touch of local color. That One Hundred Years of Solitude is just another Thomas Wolfe, whom (wasn't it unfortunate!) I'd happened to read right before the Hundred Years; the sense of "overcongestedness" was instantly recognizable. The Great Translator cozily and lazily was fending me off, saying yes, sure, there is an inevitable longing for the world culture, our European fellows themselves are not without this sin, and as for my own Eurasians, they are more guilty than most. That psychoanalysis had not yet taken root under the equator, and therefore his charges are still permitted to fantasize about themselves there, unlike, say, the gringos these days. Squeezed between Samantha and his uncomprehending spouse, Ulrich declared that modernism was the true culprit, and that after its rarefactions the reader gets a craving for real chow and all these Hispanic spices, etc., and that, generally, Borges was one thing and all this cheerful psychedelic blather was something else. "And Cortazar," I added. "]a, Borges and Cortazar," said Ulrich, rolling his eyes toward Samantha, because he was wearing shorts and Samantha's hand was moving into them under the table from the left, unaware that the spouse was after the same goods from the right. "Borges and Cortazar," Ulrich repeated. Then, out of the blue, the other German duo pops up, quite high, and entices the salvaged wife, the Great Translator, and the Portuguese couple away to some party, while Sa- mantha, Ulrich, and I shuffle back toward the Gloria along the Copacabana. In the process they both take off all their clothes and wade into the ocean, where they disappear sharks only know for how long, while I sit on the empty beach guarding their stuff and hiccuping; and I have the sensation that all this' has already happened to me at some point in the past.