I didn’t feel like sleeping at the station that night, so I found myself a place in a burrow full of tough, grimy rats, and when I woke up I was alone. That night I dreamed that an unknown virus had infected our people. Rats are capable of killing rats. The sentence echoed in my cranial cavity until I woke. I knew that nothing would ever be the same again. I knew it was only a question of time. Our capacity to adapt to the environment, our hard-working nature, our long collective march toward a happiness that, deep down, we knew to be illusory, but which had served as a pretext, a setting, a backdrop for our daily acts of heroism, all these were condemned to disappear, which meant that we, as a people, were condemned to disappear as well.
I went back to my daily rounds; there was nothing else I could do. A police officer was killed and torn to pieces by a predator; there were several fatalities as a result of more poisoning from the outside; a number of tunnels were flooded. One night, however, I yielded to the fever that was consuming my body and returned to the dead sewers.
I’m not sure whether that sewer was one of those in which I’d found a victim, or even if I’d been there before. All dead sewers are the same, in the end. I spent a long time in there, hiding, waiting. Nothing. Only distant noises, splashes: I couldn’t say what caused them. When I returned to the station, with red eyes from my long vigil, I found some rats who swore they’d seen a pair of weasels in the tunnels nearby. There was a new police officer with them. He looked at me, waiting for some kind of sign. The weasels had cornered three rats and several young in the end of a tunnel. If we wait for backup it’ll be too late, said the new officer.
Too late for what? I asked, yawning. For the young and their guardians, he replied. It’s already too late, I thought, for everything. I also thought: When did it become too late? Was it in the time of my aunt Josephine? Or a hundred years before that? Or a thousand, three thousand years before? Weren’t we damned right from the origin of our species? The officer was watching me, waiting for a cue. He was young and he couldn’t have been on the job for more than a week. Some of the rats around us were whispering, others were pressing their ears to the walls of the tunnel; most of them, it was all they could do to stop themselves from shaking and running away. What do you suggest? I asked. We do it by the book, replied the officer, we go into the tunnel and rescue the young.
Have you ever taken on a weasel? Are you ready to be torn apart by a weasel? I asked. I know how to fight, Pepe, he replied. There was nothing much left to say, so I got up and told him to stay behind me. The tunnel was black and stank of weasel, but I know how to move in the dark. Two rats came forward as volunteers and followed us.
Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey
for Carmen Pérez de Vega
Although it may not warrant an eminent place in the annals of literary mystery, the curious case of Álvaro Rousselot is worthy of attention, for a few minutes at least.
Keen readers of mid-twentieth-century Argentine literature, who do exist, albeit not in great numbers, will no doubt remember that Rousselot was a skilled narrator and an abundant inventor of original plots, a sound stylist in literary Spanish, but not averse to the use of Buenos Aires slang or lunfardo, when the story required it (as was often the case), though never in a mannered way, at least not for those of us who count ourselves among his faithful readers.
The action of that sinister and eminently sardonic character Time has, however, prompted a reconsideration of Rousselot’s apparent simplicity. Perhaps he was complicated. By which I mean much more complicated than we had imagined. But there is an alternative explanation: perhaps he was simply another victim of chance.
Such cases are not unusual among lovers of literature. In fact, they are not unusual among lovers of anything. In the end we all fall victim to the object of our adoration, perhaps because passion runs its course more swiftly than other human emotions, perhaps as a result of excessive familiarity with the object of desire.
In any case, Rousselot loved literature as much as any Argentine writer of his generation, or of the preceding and following generations, which is to say that his love was somewhat disillusioned. What I mean is that he was not especially different from the others, his peers — he knew the same torments and moments of joy — yet nothing even remotely similar happened to any of them.
At this point it could be objected, quite reasonably, that the others were destined for hells or singularities of their own. Angela Caputo, for example, killed herself in an unimaginable manner: no one who had read her poems, with their ambivalently childish atmosphere, could have predicted such an atrocious death, stage-managed down to the finest detail to maximize the terrifying effect. Or Sánchez Brady, whose texts were hermetic and whose life was cut short by the military regime in the seventies, when he had passed the age of fifty and lost interest in literature and the world in general.
Paradoxical deaths and destinies, yet they do not eclipse the case of Rousselot, the enigma that imperceptibly enveloped his life, the sense that his work, his writing, stood near or on the edge or the brink of something he knew almost nothing about.
His story can be recounted simply, perhaps because, in the final analysis, it is a simple story. In 1950, at the age of thirty, Rousselot published his first book, a novel about daily life in a remote Patagonian penitentiary, under the rather laconic title Solitude. Not surprisingly, the book relates numerous confessions about past lives and fleeting moments of happiness; it also relates numerous acts of violence. Halfway through, it becomes apparent that most of the characters are dead. With only thirty pages left to go, it is suddenly obvious that they are all dead, except for one, but the identity of that single living character is never revealed. The book was not much of a success in Buenos Aires, selling less than a thousand copies, but, thanks to some friends, Rousselot had the pleasure of seeing a well-respected publisher bring out a French edition in 1954. Solitude became Nights on the Pampas in the land of Victor Hugo, where it made little impact, except on two critics, one of whom reviewed it warmly, while the other was perhaps excessively enthusiastic; then it vanished into the limbo of remote shelves and overloaded tables in secondhand bookstores.
At the end of 1957, however, a film entitled Lost Voices was released; it was directed by a Frenchman named Guy Morini, and for anyone who had read Solitude, it was clearly a clever adaptation of Rousselot’s book. Morini’s film began and ended altogether differently, but its stem or middle section corresponded exactly to the novel. It would, I think, be impossible to recapture Rousselot’s feeling of stunned amazement in the dark, half-empty Buenos Aires cinema where he first saw the Frenchman’s film. Naturally, he considered himself a victim of plagiarism. As the days went by, other explanations occurred to him, but he kept coming back to the idea that his work had been plagiarized. Of the friends who were informed and went to see the film, half were in favor of suing the production company, while the others were inclined to think, more or less resignedly, that these things happen — think of Brahms. By that time, Rousselot had already published a second novel, The Archives of the Calle Peru, a detective story, with a plot that revolved around the appearance of three bodies in three different places in Buenos Aires: the first two victims had been killed by the third, the victim in turn of an unknown assailant.