25
So what did Amalfitano’s students learn? They learned to recite aloud. They memorized the two or three poems they loved most in order to remember them and recite them at the proper times: funerals, weddings, moments of solitude. They learned that a book was a labyrinth and a desert. That there was nothing more important than ceaseless reading and traveling, perhaps one and the same thing. That when books were read, writers were released from the souls of stones, which is where they went to live after they died, and they moved into the souls of readers as if into a soft prison cell, a cell that later swelled or burst. That all writing systems are frauds. That true poetry resides between the abyss and misfortune and that the grand highway of selfless acts, of the elegance of eyes and the fate of Marcabrú, passes near its abode. That the main lesson of literature was courage, a rare courage like a stone well in the middle of a lake district, like a whirlwind and a mirror. That reading wasn’t more comfortable than writing. That by reading one learned to question and remember. That memory was love.
26
Amalfitano’s sense of humor tended to go hand and hand with his sense of history and both were as fine as wire: a skein in which horror mingled with a gaze of wonderment, the kind of gaze that knows everything is a game, which might explain why after these rare outpourings Amalfitano’s inner self, forged in the rigors of dialectical materialism, was left stricken, somehow ashamed of itself. But this was his sense of humor and there was nothing he could do about it.
Once, when he was teaching in Italy, he somehow found himself in the middle of an informal dinner attended by new-fledged Italian patriots, the same people who years later would form the New Right.
The dinner was held at a celebrated Bologna hotel and between the dessert course and the after-dinner drinks there were speeches. At a certain point, clearly as the result of a misunderstanding, it was Amalfitano’s turn to speak. To sum it up in a few words, his short speech-delivered in a passable Italian flavored by what more than a few listeners thought was a real or faked central European accent-was about the mystery of so-called great civilizations. In two lines he dispatched the Romans and the princes of the Renaissance (with a tossed-off mention of the tragic fate of the Orsini, probably referring to Mujica Láinez’s Orsini), arriving rapidly at the subject of his toast: World War II and the role of Italy. A role that was distorted by history and obscured by Theory: the ersatz exploits, forged in mystery, of the brave Alpini and the gallant Bersaglieri. Immediately, and without putting too fine a point on it, he asked what the French of the Charlemagne Brigade had achieved, what the Croats or the Austrians or the Scandinavians of the Viking Division, the Americans of the 82nd Airborne Division or the 1st Armored Division, the Germans of the 7th Panzer Division or the Russians of the 3rd Guards Tank Army had really accomplished. Shreds of glory, he mused aloud, deeds that pale alongside the countless hardships of old Badoglio’s Greek Campaign or the Libyan campaign of bold Graziani, the anvil on which Italian identity was forged and the well from which the strategists of the future will drink when the mystery is uncovered at last. The desert raids, he said, and he raised a finger skyward, the bitter fight to hold the forts, the fixed-bayonet charges of the brave men of the Littorio (a tank division) still rouse the ardor of this patient and peaceful nation. Next he spoke in commemoration of the generals, old and young, the most skilled and steadfast that the palm groves and huts of Africa (he said the word huts, or bohíos, in Spanish, to the bafflement of his audience, except for a professor of Latin American literature who understood the term but was left even more in the dark) had ever seen. Then he argued that the glory of the Germans obscured the memory of Gariboldi, for one, who, to make matters worse, was dogged by a nagging error: in nearly every country’s history books, except those of Italy, France, and Germany-meticulous in this regard-he was referred to as Garibaldi, but history, Amalfitano confided, was rewritten daily, and, like a humble and virtuous seamstress, constantly stitched up any holes. He warned that Africa should strive to be worthy of Sicily’s stubborn resistance or the hard fighting on the steppes that had earned Italy the admiration of the Slavs. At this point, those who weren’t whispering to each other or staring off into space with cigars in their mouths realized that he was pulling their leg and the uproar and shouting began. But Amalfitano refused to be cowed and he continued to hold forth on the matchless courage of those who fought to the last on the peninsula, the San Marco Regiment, the Monte Rosa, the Italia, the Grenadiers of Sardinia, the Cremona, the Centauro, the Pasubio, the Piacenza, the Mantua, the Sassari, the Rovigo, the Lupi de Toscana, the Nembo. The betrayed Army, fighting at a disadvantage, and yet still, at some point, like a miracle or an annunciation, laughing in the faces of the arrogant pups from Chicago and the City.
The end was quick. Blood, Amalfitano asked himself, to what end? What justifies it, what redeems it? And he answered himself: the awakening of the Italian colossus. The colossus that everyone since Napoleon has tried to anesthetize. The Italian nation, which has yet to speak its final word, its brilliant final word. Its radiant final word, in Europe and the world. (Punches, shoves, shouts of foreigner go home, the applause of two vaguely anarchist professors.)
27
Sitting on the porch of his Mexican house at dusk, Amalfitano thought that it was strange that he hadn’t read Arcimboldi in Paris, when the books were closer at hand. As if the writer’s name had been suddenly erased from his mind when the logical thing would have been to go in search of all his novels and read them. He had translated The Endless Rose at a moment when no one outside of France, except for a few Argentinean readers and publishers, had shown any interest in Arcimboldi. And he had liked it so much, it had been so thrilling. Those days, he remembered, the months before the birth of his daughter, were perhaps the happiest of his life. Edith Lieberman was so beautiful that sometimes she seemed to glow with a dense light: lying in bed, on her side, naked and smooth, her knees drawn up a little, the serenity of her closed lips disarming, as if she passed straight through every nightmare. Forever unscathed. He would stand there watching her for a long time. Exile, with her, was an endless adventure. His head swarmed with projects. Buenos Aires was a city on the edge of the abyss, but everyone seemed happy, everyone was content to live and talk and plan. The Endless Rose and Arcimboldi were-he realized then, though later he forgot-a gift. A final gift before he and his wife and daughter entered the tunnel. What could have made him fail to seek out those words? What could have lulled him like that? Life, of course, which puts the essential books under our noses only when they are strictly essential, or on some cosmic whim. Now that it was too late, he was going to read the rest of Arcimboldi’s novels.