“El
Viejo gathered them around the fire and told them that they were
listening to the soul of a man.” (From el
Tío Cuenta-cuentos)
Today.
I
bought the notebook in Florence. One for him, and another for me. The
golden band that enveloped the black leather binding announced that
it was called Tacuino and was still manufactured in the same way it
had been when the greats had used it, like Maupassant, Hemingway, and
some of our other favorite authors.
The
idea of giving him that notebook so that he could write his stories
appealed to me immediately.
It
had been quite a few years since my uncle and I had seen each other.
He was in Argentina and I, where the wind blew me. In spite of the
distance we had maintained some contact, first by mail and later by
phone. E-mail, not at all, it wasn’t his style, and he had
never been interested in computers. We spoke mostly about literature,
ever since I was a kid.
I
still remember, it all began with Platero
and I,
my first book, the book that he gave me before I knew how to read,
and which he read and explained to me when he was about seventeen and
I four or five. Together we would wake up to two symbiotic worlds: he
to that of the storyteller and I to that of the reader, a world that
marked my life from that moment on.
Then
whenever el Tío visited us, I would bring out my most prized
possession and the reading would begin: “Platero is small,
furry, and smooth; so soft on the outside that he might be said to be
entirely cotton, without bones. Only the jet-black mirrors of his
eyes are hard like two scarabs*…” We read it all, cover
to cover; or rather he read it, because I had not yet learned how to
read.
From
the beginning and always I was bewitched by the magic architecture of
the stories, their timeless messages, their multiple universes, their
mirrors and mirages of reality: the real, intoxicating power of
fantasy.
I
learned to read quickly because I wanted to explore those worlds that
opened doors to unexpected and fantastic places, and so I developed
this vice that’s followed me around like a stray dog ever
since.
I
remember the night when, after many hours of stringing syllables
together, I constructed my first word: I said it first with
apprehension and then repeated it again and again, each time with
more confidence, at last savoring it. I couldn’t stop. I
couldn’t tear my face from the page. I had discovered a great
secret and refused to let it escape. I was overwhelmed with joy. We
were all in the kitchen and I couldn’t pull myself away from
the book. I know how to read, I shouted. My parents looked at me with
surprise, but suspecting the truth from my eyes, let me read an
entire paragraph from that book, El
Alfarero,
which I still carry in my memory. I didn’t want to go to bed
that night because I was afraid that when I stopped reading the
enchantment would dissipate and I would lose the treasure I had
scarcely found. My parents had to assure me with a great deal of
conviction that now I would never forget. That night, when I finally
slept, all sorts of words visited me, each one with its own aroma and
melody. Some were made of wheat and sun, others were slippery like
frogs in water, several seemed like baked clay, and a few were
transparent like vaporous citadels. Although nothing had changed,
when I awoke my house was no longer the same. From then on,
everything was possible.
As
time went by, my uncle gave me book after book that stimulated my
imagination and my growing vocabulary. I identified so much with what
I read that I literally was Robin Hood and even imagined new
adventures that always ended with the Sheriff of Nottingham’s
defeat. And in the last chapter I died of grief when Robin, conscious
of his impending doom, with his last remaining strength, drew back
his bow and shot an arrow aimed at the heart of Sherwood Forest,
indicating in an unforgettable gesture that it was there, where his
arrow would fall, that they must bury him. Perhaps like many other
boys, I never resigned myself to Robin’s death and, maybe to
compensate, I kept inventing adventures that always ended with the
defeat of the infamous Sheriff. Looking back, to some extent those
books affected my conduct over the years and the outcome of many
battles that I lost in the belief that one could fight honorably.
Almost
without realizing it, I waited for new books, and they arrived in
abundance. My uncle always brought a book, and each book was a new
leap, a new path. I looked forward to my birthday with anticipation,
since everyone knew that I only wanted books. Thanks to Lobsang Rampa
with his Third
Eye,
I traveled across the world from my little room, returning by morning
to eat breakfast and go to school like other boys. But I knew that by
night my spirit sailed around rising and contemplating, weaving new
stories and participating in the story of the world. I also sailed,
like many of my playmates, on the seas of Sandokan.
I traveled to the moon with Jules Verne long before Armstrong would
take his giant leap for mankind. And when I saw on TV what seemed
impossible to others, I blissfully relived what I already knew was
possible thanks to Jules Verne’s little book, where all had
been imagined and which I read nonstop in the Mentruyt library in
Lomas de Zamora, where a sole librarian knew everything and could
mysteriously produce any book. With the same author, who was a
sorcerer and talked with scientists, I explored the secrets of the
sea long before seeing them on a television that did not then exist.
Later,
with Bradbury, I discovered that Martians were more human than humans
and, now considerably older, I shared with my uncle powerful
story-tellers like Calvino, Cortazar, Marquez, and Borges, and with
them a subtle and precise universe opened before my eyes. I felt
nothing in the world could keep me from writing if only just one line
like the ones I read from those masters, explorers of the human soul.
My
uncle always wanted to have a special place to jot down his ideas,
poems, and stories, and now, nearly seventy, he had enrolled as a
student in a literary workshop where he taught more than learned,
but, and more than anything, he had a blast.
“Today
we had a vino
literario,”
he would say. “The girls read some of their stories, and I read
some short poems. The
prof told us she’s thinking of publishing a book with the best
stuff we’ve written.”
It
was nice to listen to so much bliss, although I suspected that his
motivations for attending the course had more to do with the
professor’s figure than with what she could teach him.
“You
always learn,” he told me, “even when you teach.”
He had fallen hopelessly in love with that woman who, unlike her
female students, really was a girl, thirty years his junior. And she,
like all enamored women, would have followed him to the ends of the
earth, turned the universe inside out, and faced anything to remain
by his side. But he, knowing what none of us could have guessed,
severed the relation. He persuaded us that he had mentally erased the
most sinuous hips and fragrant love so he could age in peace. His
explanations never convinced me because they dismissed love for a
tranquility that would have seemed absurd to him in the past. He had
never cared about age difference or any difference for that matter,
so long as the hallucination of love was present.
Time,
with its patience to untie knots, confirmed my suspicion that
something more serious and intimate was operating on his soul,
something that I unfortunately didn’t discover until the end.
Four
years ago.
He
had been ill, one of those illnesses that no one could diagnose, and
from which he miraculously recovered after already receiving his last
sacraments.
More
than a year passed before I could visit him in his little apartment
in La Lucila. When I saw him, I could tell that his recovery process
was sluggish; the illness had left its marks. He was emaciated, his
voice tremulous and at times aphonic. Only his smile and his
sprightly eyes betrayed my same uncle.
I
never knew what to do in those situations so I veiled my anxiety as
best I could and, as if wielding a great treasure, almost
ceremoniously, proffered him the Tacuino.
“So
you can write the things in life that really eat away at you,”
I said as I gave him the notebook that said nothing on its own but
would acquire a deeper and more intimate meaning than its appearance
conveyed.
He
was moved and gave me an eternal hug that returned me to my childhood
and the difficult farewell of my exile. Despite the atmosphere of
reunion, the undesirable anticipation of a new departure shifted our
attention to the Tacuino.
“I
knew that these notebooks existed, but I never saw one before,”
he said assuredly. “Your aunt, who, you know, came from
Florence, a great reader, and an inveterate fabulist, told me about
them. She used to say that the deepest secrets of those who possessed
them were guarded inside.”
I
let him wander through memories and as soon as I had a chance I said,
“Let’s make a deal. I bought one for myself. So every
once in a while, whenever I travel to Buenos Aires, we’ll meet
and read each other what we’ve written… Who knows, we
might even achieve the chimerical dream of writing a book together.”
“This
Tacuino,” he said with a formality unusual in him, forever the
comedian “will allow me to distil the fundamental, the
essential. Since I’m still recovering and drained, I’ll
try to synthesize, to reflect in only one sentence or a few phrases
the entire essence of a novel or story. Poets are great because they
can create a world for you with only a verse. So I’ll give it a
shot, even if only to keep myself in shape and avoid dying inside, so
what I have to say doesn’t disappear with me. When I get
better, I’ll still have my skill intact so I can continue where
I left off.”
That
night, with a tremulous hand, he inaugurated the Tacuino:
“Stories
keep us perversely alive, preserving what we were, a reinvented past,
while projecting toward a volatile but necessary future. Words keep
our identity alive. And even if the future does not exist, the
illusion is what counts.”
Three
years ago.
The
next year I visited him again. He had written a couple of poems, the
beginning of a story, three paragraphs of a very defunct novel, and
phrases from other authors.
“I
know it seems strange but I jot down whatever I consider essential,
important to me, no matter the author. Look, I have things from
Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, our friend Pope, reflections on memory, things
from Giardinelli, fragments from Borges stories, from that guy Funes
who couldn’t forget anything.”
As
for me, I read him “The kite-maker”, a little story that
I had timidly published, and in which he was one of the main
characters.
He
listened attentively as if he were remembering. Smiling at moments,
he seemed to enjoy the story. When I finished reading he said:
“Nephew,
don’t waste any time. The time we’re born with is already
too short and there’s so much to tell, there’s so much to
understand.”
In
his usual way he urged me to dedicate myself to what was important,
to abandon what was adventitious and easy, for being a writer carried
with it responsibility. And that responsibility existed now,
yesterday, today.
“Who
will interpret our dreams, our anguish and mistakes and our ghosts if
not…?” he added with a smile that illuminated the room.
I
had no answers to his questions, which for quite some time now had
not been at all theoretical. But I left content, imagining that,
although slowly, he was improving.
One
year ago.
When
I saw him again, I knew right away that he was a different person.
The
man that I knew had disintegrated little by little, and although he
hid his illness for a considerably long time, there was a moment in
which he crossed that threshold from which there is no return. His
door closed, leaving behind his identity, that set of subtle
characteristics that define us as ourselves, and that, though they
keep us within the category of human beings, also distinguish us,
separate us from the rest and identify us as José,
the storekeeper’s son
or Carlos,
the crazy Galician.
In short, as ourselves.
Those
attributes, which reside somewhere in the soul, and which at the same
time are perhaps lodged in a bundle of neurons, and maybe in some
other internal organ, define us and identify us, and are the reason
that we are seen as what we are, or what we believe we are, and also
result from the intimate collaboration between those that see us and
those that we see.
Those
attributes had dissipated. I found myself now with a photograph in
negative, a rudimentary sketch of my uncle, a reproduction without
the gleam of his eyes – which instantaneously tells us not only
with whom we are, but also how we are. His eyes were lost, they
sailed other seas and betrayed his absence from conversation and body
language.
That
uncle was not my uncle, he was now the generic uncle, an organism
with all his functions but incapable of conveying his unique and
particular humanity, and, perhaps because of that, possibly beyond
feeling anguish or joy. There must have been a moment, however, in
which he felt panic upon realizing that his memory had abandoned him.
I imagine that it was like being in a tunnel or buried alive, but
alone and divested of all aid, cold and without the possibility of
returning, with an even greater terror from not knowing what would
happen or what he would feel when things changed so much that there
no longer remained a link with the recognizable world. What to do
then? How to defend himself? Maybe by writing to remember, in an
exercise that, though condemned, would lead him to read and reread,
or rather, reread himself, because in the end it was about him.
Writing
to write himself and remember himself and try to remember the things
that allowed him to function more or less normally, or perhaps to
ignore the fact that things were truly bad. Every moment he was less
who he was, or who he supposed he was. Memory loss was turning him
into stone, a mineral that still feels but that at every moment is
more mineral and less human, from which he needed to be rescued in
order not to forget. The best that others could do was remember, and
come to visit, and tell him about things, above all things about him,
and about his children and family and friends, about day-to-day
things and the things that always made him feel unique.
I
had him before me, and he looked at me as if he didn’t see me,
completely rational, speaking with long pauses, measuring what he
said, calculating where he might commit an error, a slip that would
give him away. Perhaps thinking that no, it was not yet the moment to
let us catch on. I am still myself, he might have said, and I will
continue to function as myself until the end. But when will the end
come? And he scrutinized, searching for an answer in order to know if
he could continue and he had fooled us, we hadn’t caught on.
For a few more days, perhaps, he would be safe.
He
watched me as if through glass. It was the two of us, but we were no
longer the two of us, because somehow the interaction wasn’t
the same and was changing me through one of those perverse
versatilities that adapt us to the worst circumstances as we pretend
to ignore in order to proceed, as if proceeding would calm us,
because proceeding was refusing to admit that we had already changed,
it was forgetting, ignoring, or pretending to ignore that we were no
longer the same. We both knew it but on a hidden level, a level where
wisdom emerges from some niche of the soul and tells us where to go,
like a whiff of knowledge, a primitive and effective tool that
perhaps allowed us to recognize each other at the dawn of the
species.
He
looked at me as if from another sea, searching for me on the horizon,
not in my eyes, on the horizon, insinuating an extemporary smile,
caricatured, filling the depths of his memory with generic elements
and generic phrases that gave a sense of unreality to what was
occurring. I knew he was lost in that white, strange sea, free from
fear and worry, except perhaps for a deliberate intention to conceal
and avoid his bewilderment.
I
gave him the clue of my name. Then, and now without dissimulation, he
searched in his Tacuino for the notes that captured the essence of my
identity:
“Son
of la negrita, my sister. I taught you the art of kite-making and the
magic of words… now I have to hurry so that you don’t
forget what’s most important… before I forget myself.”
I
froze. I never expected him to “jot me down”, I never
suspected to what extent he was forgetting. I was angry that this was
happening and that he had forgotten me, until now his favorite
nephew.
On
the flight home I couldn’t sleep, the loss was too great. And
the last sentence was insistent. What had he forgotten?
Yesterday.
In
my apartment in Madrid a brown envelope awaited me with the little
Tacuino inside and a letter without postage addressed to me. The
writing, shaky, almost illegible, denoted the enormous effort with
which he had written it.
Dear
Nephew,
The
time has come to leave you this message before this illness prevents
me from doing it. Soon we won’t be able to talk about anything,
because I’ll have even forgotten language. Perhaps I’ll
wander, prisoner of my own shadows, roaming the rugged paths of my
own body without knowing where I am, who I am, to whom I belong.
I’m
leaving you the Tacuino so you can continue what we started, because
only a story can twist today into yesterday. I hope you tell my
story, the stories I told you, all those you imagine, and the ones
that create the story of the world and invented my life, as well as
yours. Tell them without worrying about the precise facts, and when
you tell them, have fun. The important thing is the story. If it also
has a message, all the better. I don’t know if fiction can save
us, but just in case, let’s keep going, and one of these days,
who knows.
Your
fabulist uncle
Translated
from Spanish by Katherine
Willcox in collaboration with
the author
*
From Platero
and I,
by Juan Ramón Jiménez
Español
©
R. Ariel Gómez
“I grew
up in a small town South of Buenos Aires. As a child, I was convinced
that nothing ever happened there and wished to be whisked away where
real adventures occurred. Unable to persuade my parents to flee with
me to some exotic place, I escaped by reading and imagining all kinds
of stories that at some point I started to write. Now that I have
traveled for real, I keep discovering my little town, everywhere I
go.
I
am a scientist and a pediatrician and I am
fortunate to direct a team of very talented researchers at the
University of Virginia where we study how cells know their identity.
Although I am thrilled when we discover the wondrous inner workings
of a cell, science is not enough, and I have this pervasive longing
to understand whatever more is there to understand. It is then, when
a story appears, irresistible, inevitably taking over, transporting
me once again, saving my day. My stories have appeared in Street
Light, Hospital drive,
and Puro
Cuento.
I live in Charlottesville with wife and my three wonderful children."
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