I have always felt that I was her favorite grandson. I have lived on that conviction — if evasively skirting around reality, which is what my experience comes down to, can really be called living. My grandmother didn’t hesitate to give me half her winnings, “for your little trip,” as she said. That was all she needed to say; we both knew what she was talking about. But there are many deferred projects of this kind in the family, and almost all of her children, grandchildren, and children-in-law could have benefited, as I did, from her generosity. Had she been obliged to make a choice? What would she do with the rest of the money? I didn’t ask myself these questions at the time, perhaps because they might have led to uncomfortable conclusions. But after all, given my grandmother’s function as our source of life, the fact that she had chosen me could only mean that my need was the greatest.
The trip was (and is) related to what I’ve been claiming as my “vocation” all these years: literature. I know that my grandmother would prefer me to have a life. I’d prefer that too, of course. But I’m stubborn, as the weak-willed often are, and I cling to a profession that’s really no such thing, even though I may not be cut out for it, and haven’t yet shown the slightest sign that I am. I persist in asserting, precisely, that literature does not require proof of aptitude. In my heart of hearts I never felt called to literature, or saw myself doing the work that such a vocation would entail. If I were to reply sincerely to the question of which professions I would have liked to pursue, had I possessed enough vigor to lead a real life, I’d have to list, in this order: ladies’ hairdresser, ice cream vendor, bird and reptile taxidermist. Why? I don’t know. It’s something deep, but at the same time I can feel it in my skin, in my hands. Sometimes, during the day, I find myself unintentionally gesturing as if I were doing those kinds of work and, in a sort of sensory daydream, experiencing the satisfaction of a job well done and the desire to excel myself; and then, as in a dream within a dream, I begin to hatch vague plans to market my skills, build up my client base, and modernize my premises.
What my three unrealized vocations have in common is a certain analogy with sculpture, of which they appear to be impermanent and degraded (or repressed) forms. My observations in this area have led me to conjecture that behind every frustrated vocation lies the desire to sculpt.
If that’s the case, the frustration that I’ve felt with literature up till now must also be related to sculpture. In fact, now that I think of it, the idea of basing my literary project and my attempts to distinguish myself as a writer on the search for “new forms of asymmetry” (to cite the title of my only published book) must have arisen from a twisted analogy with shapes and arrangements in three-dimensional space.
The trip to Tandil has finally confronted me with experience in itself. Before leaving, I put a notebook in my pocket and all the way here on the bus I was writing these preliminary notes. Now, as I begin my journal, I would like to dedicate it to someone. The obvious person, for various reasons — loyalty, gratitude, good manners, simplicity — is my grandmother. But no. A dark urge impels me to write something else, namely this (as a dedication, it’s pretty dull):
“To my beloved reproductive organs.”
It’s nearly midnight; I’m sitting at a little table against the wall in this hotel room in Tandil. The door is bolted, the shutters closed. For once, I don’t have to look for a theme. Because today, as soon as I got here, something extraordinary happened to me, which has not only given me a theme to write about, but has also transformed my very person into a theme. Nothing like this has ever happened to anybody before. I’m the first, the one and only, which obliges me to bear witness, but also simplifies my task, since whatever I say and however I say it, my words will automatically constitute a testimony and a proof (by virtue of the fact that I am the person saying them).
This is what literature really is. Now I can see it. Everything that came before, everything that people, including writers, think of as literature, that is to say the laborious search for themes and the exhausting work of giving them shape, all of that collapses like a house of cards, a youthful illusion or an error. Literature begins when you become literature, and if there’s such a thing as a literary vocation, it’s simply the transubstantiation of experience that has taken place in me today. By pure chance. Because of a fortuitous encounter, and the revelation that followed.
I saw the back of a ghost. Today, a little while ago, shortly after arriving. I came to the hotel from the bus terminal, checked in, went up to my room to leave my bag, and went out for a walk almost straightaway to stretch my legs and get to know the city. Tandil’s not much more than a big town built on the pampa, at the foot of some hills that are among the oldest in the world. It seemed to be livening up a bit at that time: kids were gathering on the street corners, people were leaving work and heading home, or going to cafés, but only in the small downtown area. I returned to the hotel via some streets a bit farther out (just a bit), and they were deserted: I didn’t see a soul for quite a while. By then it should have been dark already. The day’s afterglow was still hanging in the air. All the colors were shrouded in a uniform silver, and a deep silence reigned. The rectilinear streets ran away toward the horizon, and they looked so alike that on one corner I thought I’d lost my sense of direction. I hadn’t, but when I set off again, sure that I knew which way to go, I walked a bit more quickly, paying more attention. To what? There was nothing to pay attention to.
Perhaps because of the pallid absence surrounding me, I noticed a little movement that I would have overlooked in the bustle of a busy street. Not so much a movement as its shadow, the shifting of a minuscule volume of air, or not even that. I was walking past an empty house, whose façade was hollowed out into a kind of loggia with columns: no doubt the whim of a traditional Italian builder, one of the many who left their mark on our provincial towns. Time had darkened the gray of the stucco, and, beyond the arch, the dim light of dusk gave out entirely. There at the back, floating halfway between floor and ceiling, in front of the walled-up door, was a ghost. The movement that had revealed his presence must have been a tic. It was followed by intense stillness. He looked at me, we looked at each other, for barely an instant, no more than the moment it took for fright to imprint itself on his weary features. Before I had time to be afraid, he had turned and gone back in. Clearly, it was a chance occurrence that he could not have foreseen. Decades of habit and boredom would have convinced him that no one went past at that time. But that “no one” didn’t include me. I was a stranger who had just arrived in town, walking about idly with nowhere to go. My presence there took him by surprise, interrupting his “stepping out for a breath of fresh air,” which was perhaps the repetition of an evening habit from the old days, when he was alive. And he reacted to the surprise by turning around and going back the way he had come (through the wall), without realizing that this instinctive movement would show me something no human being had ever seen: his back.
Humans have seen a great many things in the course of their long history; it might be said that, collectively, they have “seen it all.” I thought I’d seen it all myself, even with my limited experience. The individual repeats the “alls” and the “nothings” of the species, but there is always “something” that is extra or missing. Only the unrepeatable is truly alive. That unrepeatable “something” is a single, unique entity, in which the worlds of life and death come together like the points of an inconceivable double vertex. And nobody, until today, had seen the back of a ghost.