This second novel was not what one might have expected from the author of Solitude, but the critics received it well, although it is perhaps the least successful of Rousselot’s works. When Morini’s film came out in Buenos Aires, The Archives of the Calle Peru had already been kicking around the city’s bookshops for almost a year, and Rousselot had married Maria Eugenia Carrasco, a young woman who moved in the capital’s literary circles, and he had recently taken a job with the law firm Zimmerman & Gurruchaga.
Rousselot’s life was orderly: he got up at six in the morning and wrote or tried to write until eight, at which time he interrupted his commerce with the muses, took a shower and rushed off to the office, where he arrived at around ten to nine. He spent most mornings in court or going through files. At two in the afternoon, he returned home, had lunch with his wife, and then went back to the office for the afternoon. At seven, he would have a drink with some of his legal colleagues, and by eight, at the latest, he was back home, where Mrs. Rousselot, as she now was, had his dinner ready, after which Rousselot would read, while María Eugenia listened to the radio. On Saturdays and Sundays he wrote for a little longer, and went out at night, unaccompanied by his wife, to see his literary friends.
The release of Lost Voices brought him a degree of notoriety beyond his circle of associates. His best friend at the law firm, who was not particularly interested in literature, advised him to sue Morini for breach of copyright. Having thought it over carefully, Rousselot decided not to do anything. After The Archives of the Calle Peru, he published a slim volume of stories, and then, almost immediately, his third novel, Life of a Newlywed, in which, as the title suggests, he recounted a man’s first months of married life, and how, as the days go by, the man comes to realize that he has made a terrible mistake: not only is the woman he thought he knew a stranger, she is also a kind of monster who threatens his mental balance and even his physical safety. And yet the guy loves her (or rather discovers that he is physically attracted to her in a way that he hadn’t been before), so he holds on for as long as he can before fleeing.
The book was, obviously, meant to be humorous, and was taken as such by the reading public, to the surprise of Rousselot and his publisher. It had to be reprinted after three months, and within a year more than fifteen thousand copies had been sold. From one day to the next, Rousselot’s name soared from comfortable semi-obscurity to provisional stardom. He took it in stride. With the windfall earnings, he treated himself, his wife, and his sister-in-law to a vacation in Punta del Este, which he spent surreptitiously reading In Search of Lost Time, a book he had always pretended to have read. While Maria Eugenia and her sister lolled about on the seashore, he strove to redeem that lie, but above all to fill the gap left by his ignorance of France’s most celebrated novelist.
He would have been better off reading the Cabbalists. Seven months after his vacation in Punta del Este, before Life of a Newlywed had come out in French, Morini’s new film, The Shape of the Day, opened in Buenos Aires. It was exactly like Life of a Newlywed but better, that is, revised and considerably extended, much as Morini had done with Lost Voices, compressing the novel’s plot into the central part of the film, while the beginning and the end served as commentaries on the main story (or ways into and out of it, or digressions leading nowhere, or simply — and here lay the charm of the procedure — delicately filmed scenes from the lives of the minor characters).
This time, Rousselot was extremely aggrieved. His case against Morini was the talk of the Argentinean literary world for a week or so. And yet, when everyone presumed that he would take swift legal action for breach of copyright, he decided, to the dismay of those who had expected him to adopt a stronger and more decisive stance, that he would do nothing. Few could really understand his reaction. He did not protest, or appeal to the honor and integrity of the artist. After his initial surprise and indignation, Rousselot simply opted not to act, at least not legally. He waited. Something inside him, which could perhaps, without too great a risk of error, be called the writer’s spirit, trapped him in a limbo of apparent passivity, and began to harden or change him, or prepare him for future surprises.
In other respects his life as a writer and as a man had already changed as much as he could reasonably have hoped, or more: his books were well reviewed and widely read, they even supplemented his income, and his family life was suddenly enriched by the news that María Eugenia was going to be a mother. When Morini’s third film came to Buenos Aires, Rousselot stayed home for a week, resisting the temptation to rush to the cinema like a man possessed. He also instructed his friends not to tell him the plot. At first he thought he would not go to see the film. But after a week it was too much for him, and one night, having kissed his baby son and entrusted him to the nanny’s care as if he were leaving for a war and would never return, he stepped out, resignedly, arm in arm with his wife, and went to the cinema.
Morini’s film was called The Vanished Woman, and had nothing in common with any of Rousselot’s works, or with either of Morini’s previous films. As they left the cinema, María Eugenia said she thought it was bad and boring. Alvaro Rousselot kept his opinion to himself, but he agreed. A few months later, he published his next novel, the longest yet (206 pages), entitled The Juggler’s Family, in which he departed from the style that had characterized his work up till then, with its elements of fantasy and crime fiction, and experimented with what, at a stretch, could be called the choral or polyphonic novel. It wasn’t a form that came naturally to him, and seemed rather forced, but the book was redeemed by other features: the decency and simplicity of the characters, a naturalism that elegantly avoided the clichés of the naturalist novel, and the stories themselves, which were slight and resolute, joyful and pointless, and captured the indomitable Argentine spirit.
The Juggler’s Family was, without doubt, Rousselot’s greatest success, the book that brought all the others back into print, and his triumph was consummated by the Municipal Literary Award, presented at a ceremony in the course of which he was described as one of the five rising stars among the nation’s younger writers. But that is another story. It is common knowledge that the rising stars of any literary world are like flowers that bloom and fade in a day; and whether the day is literal and brief or stretches out over ten or twenty years, it must eventually come to an end.
The French, who distrust our municipal literary awards on principle, were slow to translate and publish The Juggler’s Family. By then, fashions in Latin American fiction had shifted north to more tropical climes. When the novel came out in Paris, Morini had already made his fourth and fifth films, a conventional but engaging French detective story and a turkey about a supposedly amusing family vacation in Saint-Tropez.
Both films were released in Argentina, and Rousselot was relieved to discover that neither bore the slightest resemblance to anything he had written. It was as if Morini had distanced himself from Rousselot, or, under pressure from creditors and swept up in the whirlwind of the movie business, had neglected the relationship. After relief came sadness. For a few days Rousselot was even preoccupied by the thought that he had lost his best reader, the reader for whom he had really been writing, the only one who was capable of fully responding to his work. He tried to get in touch with his translators, but they were busy with other books and other authors, and replied to his letters with polite and evasive phrases. One of them had never seen any of Morini’s films. The other had seen one of the films in question but hadn’t translated the corresponding book (or even read it, to judge from his letter).