If Arlt, who as a writer is the best of the three, is the basement of the house that is Argentine literature, and Soriano is a vase in the guest room, Lamborghini is a little box on a shelf in the basement. A little cardboard box, covered in dust. And if you open the box, what you find inside is hell. Forgive me for being so melodramatic. I always have the same problem with Lamborghini. There’s no way to describe his work without falling into hyperbole. The word cruelty fits it like a glove. Harshness does too, but especially cruelty. The unsuspecting reader may glimpse the sort of sadomasochistic game of writing workshops that charitable souls with pedagogical inclinations organize in insane asylums. Perhaps, but that doesn’t go far enough. Lamborghini is always two steps ahead of (or behind) his pursuers.
It’s strange to think about Lamborghini now. He died at forty-five, which means that I’m four years older than he was then. Sometimes I pick up one of his two books, edited by Aira — which is only a figure of speech, since they might just as well have been edited by the linotypist or by the doorman at his publishing house in Barcelona, Serbal — and I can hardly read it, not because I think it’s bad but because it scares me, especially all of Tadeys, an excruciating novel, which I read (two or three pages at a time, not a page more) only when I feel especially brave. Few books can be said to smell of blood, spilled guts, bodily fluids, unpardonable acts.
Today, when it’s so fashionable to talk about nihilists (although what’s usually meant by this is Islamic terrorists, who aren’t nihilists at all), it isn’t a bad idea to take a look at the work of a real nihilist. The problem with Lamborghini is that he ended up in the wrong profession. He should have gone to work as a hit man, or a prostitute, or a gravedigger, which are less complicated jobs than trying to destroy literature. Literature is an armor-plated machine. It doesn’t care about writers. Sometimes it doesn’t even notice they exist. Literature’s enemy is something else, something much bigger and more powerful, that in the end will conquer it. But that’s another story.
Lamborghini’s friends are fated to plagiarize him ad nauseam, something that might — if he could see them vomit — make Lamborghini himself happy. They’re also fated to write badly, horribly, except for Aira, who maintains a gray, uniform prose that, sometimes, when he’s faithful to Lamborghini, crystallizes into memorable works, like the story “Cecil Taylor” or the novella How I Became a Nun, but that in its neo-avant-garde and Rousselian (and utterly acritical) drift, is mostly just boring. Prose that devours itself without finding a way to move forward. A criticism that translates into the acceptance — qualified, of course — of that tropical figure, the professional Latin American writer, who always has a word of praise for anyone who asks for it.
Of these three lineages — the three strongest in Argentine literature, the three departure points of the literature of doom — I’m afraid that the one which will triumph is the one that most faithfully represents the sentimental rabble, in the words of Borges. The sentimental rabble is no longer the Right (largely because the Right busies itself with publicity and the joys of cocaine and the plotting of currency devaluations and starvation, and in literary matters is functionally illiterate or settles for reciting lines from Martín Fierro) but the Left, and what the Left demands of its intellectuals is soma, which is exactly what it receives from its masters. Soma, soma, soma Soriano, forgive me, yours is the kingdom.
Arlt and Piglia are another story. Let’s call theirs a love affair and leave them in peace. Both of them — Arlt without a doubt — are an important part of Argentine and Latin American literature, and their fate is to ride alone across the ghost-ridden pampa. But that’s no basis for a school.
Corollary. One must reread Borges.
Natasha Wimmer
CRIMES
She’s sleeping with two men. She’s had other lovers before and now she has two. That’s the way it is. They don’t know about each other. One says he’s in love with her. The other one says nothing. She doesn’t care much what either of them says. Declarations of love, declarations of hate. Words. She’s sleeping with two men; that’s just the way it is.
She’s a journalist. Now she’s sitting in a bar near the newspaper office with a book open in front of her, but she can’t read. She tries, but she can’t. She’s distracted by what’s happening outside, although there’s nothing special to see. She shuts the book and stands up. The man behind the bar sees her coming and smiles. She asks what she owes him. The man names a sum. She opens her purse and hands him a note. How’s things? asks the man. She looks him in the eye and says: So so. The man asks her if she’d like something more. On the house. She shakes her head, No, I’m fine, thanks. She stands there for a while, waiting for something. Then almost inaudibly she takes her leave and walks out of the bar.
She returns unhurriedly to the office. Waiting for the elevator, she notices a young man, about twenty-five, wearing an old suit and a tie whose design intrigues her: identical sky-blue faces screwed up in surprise against a background of watery green. Beside the young man, on the floor, is a suitcase of considerable dimensions. They say hello. The doors of the elevator open and both of them get in. Having examined her, the young man says that he sells socks, and that if she’s interested he can offer her a good deal. She says she’s not interested and then she thinks that it’s strange to find a sock salesman inside the building, especially at a time when most of the offices are closed. The sock salesman gets out first, at the third floor, where there’s an architect’s studio and the office of a legal firm. As he’s stepping out of the elevator, he raises his left hand and touches his forehead with the tips of his fingers. A salute, she thinks, and smiles at him. As the doors of the elevator close, he returns her smile.
When she gets back to the newspaper office, the only person there is a woman, sitting on a chair next to the window, smoking. The journalist goes to her desk, switches on her computer, and then walks over to the window. At this point the woman who’s smoking realizes she’s there and looks at her. The journalist sits on the windowsill and looks down into the street, which, unusually, makes her feel dizzy. Both of them are quiet for a few seconds. The woman who’s smoking asks the journalist if she’s OK. Fine, she says, I came back to finish the article about Calama. The smoking woman turns and looks out of the window at the river of cars flowing away from the city center, then half closes her eyes and laughs. I read something about it, she says. Complete shit, says the journalist. It was kind of funny, says the woman who’s smoking. I don’t get you, says the journalist. After thinking for a moment, the smoking woman says, Actually, it wasn’t funny at all, and looks out of the window at the traffic again. Then the journalist gets up and walks over to her desk. She has stories to file and she’s running late. She takes a walkman from a drawer and puts the headphones on. She gets to work. But after a while she takes the headphones off and turns on her chair. There’s something weird about all this, she says. The woman who’s smoking looks at her and asks her what she’s talking about. About the woman in Calama, she says. At that moment the silence in the newspaper office is absolute. Or so it seems. Not even the hum of the elevator.