In those days I lived several lives, shifting between autonomous sequences: a series of friends, another of love, of alcohol, of politics, of dogs, of bars, of nocturnal wanderings. I wrote screenplays that were never produced, translated numerous crime novels that always seemed the same, and compiled dry books on philosophy (or psychoanalysis!) that were published under other writers’ names. I was lost, disconnected, until finally—by chance, suddenly, unexpectedly—I ended up teaching in the United States, involved in an incident that I want to put on the record.
I’d received an offer to spend a semester as a visiting professor at the elite and exclusive Taylor University; they’d had an unsuccessful candidate and thought of me because they knew me from before, and so they wrote to me, we moved forward, set a date, but then I started going back and forth, putting it off: I didn’t want to spend six months confined to a wasteland. One day, in mid-December, I received a message from Ida Brown, written with the syntax of an urgent telegram from the old days: All ready. Send syllabus. We await your arrival. It was very hot that night, so I took a shower, got a beer from the fridge, and sat down in my canvas chair facing the window: outside, the city was an opaque mass of distant lights and dissonant sounds.
I had separated from my second wife and now lived alone in an apartment in Almagro that a friend had lent me; it had been so long since I’d published anything that, one afternoon, as I was leaving a movie theater, a blonde woman I’d struck up a conversation with under some pretext was startled to learn who I was because she thought I was already dead. (“Oh, someone told me you died in Barcelona.”)
I was getting by, working on a book about W. H. Hudson’s years in Argentina, but the project wasn’t going anywhere; I was tired, held in place by inertia, and I’d gone a couple of weeks without doing anything until, one morning, Ida tracked me down on the phone. Where had I gone off to that no one could find me? Classes were starting in a month, I had to leave right away. Everyone was waiting for me, she exaggerated.
I gave my friend back the keys to his apartment, put my things in a storage unit, and left. I spent one week in New York and, in mid-January, caught a New Jersey Transit train to the peaceful suburban town where the university operated. Ida wasn’t at the station when I arrived, of course, but she’d sent two students to wait for me on the platform, holding up a sign with my name misspelled in red letters.
It had snowed, and the parking lot was a white desert with vehicles buried in an icy haze. I got into the car and we moved forward at a walking pace, lit up in the middle of the afternoon by the yellow gleam of tall streetlights. Finally, we reached the house on Markham Road, not far from the campus, which Housing had rented for me from a philosophy professor who was spending a year on sabbatical in Germany. The two students were Mike and John III (I would encounter them again in my classes), and they helped me, energetically and wordlessly, with my suitcases, gave me some practical instructions, and opened the garage door to show me Professor Hubert’s Toyota, which was included with the rent; they showed me how the heating worked and wrote down a number to call if it started to freeze (“in a pinch, call Public Safety”).
The town was charming and seemed to exist apart from the world of New York at eighty kilometers away. Residences with wide open gardens, glass picture windows, tree-lined streets, total calm. It was like being in a luxury psychiatric clinic, just what I needed at that time. There were no metal bars, no security watchtowers, no walls anywhere. The fortifications were of a different order. The dangers of life seemed to exist outside of here, on the other side of the woods and lakes, in Trenton, in New Brunswick, in the burned-out houses and slums of New Jersey.
The first night, I stayed up late, investigating the rooms, looking out through the windows at the lunar landscapes of neighboring gardens. The house was very comfortable, but my strange feeling of dislocation returned given the fact that I was living in someone else’s place yet again. The pictures on the walls, the decorations on the mantel, the clothing stowed carefully in nylon bags made me feel more like a voyeur than an intruder. In the study upstairs, the walls were covered with books of philosophy, and, as I went through the library, I thought that the volumes were made of the same dense material that has always allowed me to cut myself off from the present and escape reality.
In the kitchen cupboards I found Mexican salsas, unusual spices, jars of dried mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes, tin cans of oil, and pots of jam, as though the house was prepared to weather a long siege. Canned food and philosophy books, what more could you ask for? I made myself some Campbell’s tomato soup, opened a tin of sardines, toasted some frozen bread, and uncorked a bottle of Chenin Blanc. Then I made coffee and settled down on a sofa in the living room to watch TV. I always do that when I arrive in a different place. Television is the same everywhere, the only tenet of reality that persists beyond all changes. On ESPN the Lakers were beating the Celtics, on the news Bill Clinton was smiling with his good-natured air, in a Honda ad a car was sinking in the ocean, on HBO they were showing Curtis Bernhardt’s Possessed, one of my favorite films. Joan Crawford appears in the middle of the night in a Los Angeles neighborhood, not knowing who she is, remembering nothing from her past, moving along the strangely lit streets as though inside an empty fish tank.
I must have dozed off, because the telephone woke me. It was nearly midnight. Someone who knew my name and called me Professor too insistently was offering to sell me cocaine. The whole thing was so extraordinary that it must have been real. I was startled and cut off the line. It might have been a prank caller, an idiot, or a DEA agent monitoring the private lives of Ivy League academics. How did he know my last name?
That call made me very uneasy, to tell the truth. I often have slight attacks of anxiety. No more than the next guy. I imagined that someone was watching me from outside, and I turned out the lights. The garden and street were in shadows, and the leaves of the trees rustled in the wind; off to one side, over the wooden fence, my neighbor’s house was visible, lit up, and a slight woman in jogging clothes was doing Tai Chi exercises in the living room, slow and harmonious, as though floating in the night.
The next day I went to the university to meet the receptionists and a few colleagues, but I didn’t mention the strange nighttime call to anyone. I had my photo taken, signed some papers, received an ID card that would give me access to the library, and installed myself in a sunny office on the fourth floor of the department that looked out over the stone pathways and Gothic buildings of the campus. The semester was just beginning, and students were arriving with their backpacks and wheeled suitcases. There was a happy bustle amid the frozen whiteness of the wide streets lit up by January sun.
I met Ida Brown in the faculty lounge, and we went out to eat at Ferry House. We’d seen each other when I was there three years before, but whereas I was now in decline, she had only improved. She had a distinguished look with her corduroy blazer, her crimson lipstick, her slender body, and her mordant, malicious tone. (“Welcome to the cemetery where writers come to die.”)
Ida was a star in the academic world; her thesis on Dickens had transfixed all studies into the author of Oliver Twist for twenty years. Her salary was a state secret, but it was said that they raised it every six months and that her sole condition was that she must earn one hundred dollars more than the highest-paid male (that’s not what she called them) in her profession. She lived alone, had never married, didn’t want children, was always surrounded by students, and you could see the light on in her office at any hour of night and imagine the soft whirring of the computer where she developed her explosive theses on politics and culture. You could imagine her little laugh of delight as she thought of the scandal her theories would spark among colleagues. They said that she was a snob, that she changed her theories every five years, that each of her books was different from the last because it reflected the fashion of the day, but everyone envied her intelligence and force.
As soon as we sat down to eat, she apprised me of the situation in the Department of Modern Culture and Film Studies, which she’d helped to create. She had included film studies, she said, because students may not read novels, may not go to the opera, may not like rock music or conceptual art, but they will always watch movies.
She was frontal, direct, and she knew how to fight as well as think. (“Those two verbs go hand in hand.”) She was bent on an all-out war against the Derridean cells that ruled over literature departments in the Northeast and, above all, against the central committee on deconstruction at Yale. She didn’t critique them from the same position as defenders of the canon like Harold Bloom or George Steiner (“kitsch aesthetes from magazines for the enlightened middle class”), but instead attacked them from the left, from the great tradition of Marxist historians. (“But it’s a pleonasm to say Marxist historian, it’s like saying American cinema.”)
She worked both for the elite and against it and despised the people who made up her professional circle; her audience wasn’t wide, only specialists read her, but she had an impact on the minority that copies extreme theories, transforms them, popularizes them, and turns them—years later—into mass-media information.
She’d read my books, knew about my projects. She wanted me to teach a seminar on Hudson. “I need your perspective,” she said, with a weary smile, as though that perspective did not matter so much. She was working on the relationship between Conrad and Hudson, she told me, forestalling me by stating that this was her territory and it would be ill-advised for me to go down that road. (She didn’t believe in private property, they said, except when it concerned her field of study.)
Edward Gardner, the publisher who discovered Conrad, had published Hudson’s books as well. That was how the two writers met and became friends; they were the finest prose writers in English at the end of the nineteenth century, and both had been born in exotic and distant lands. Ida was interested in the traditions of people who set themselves against capitalism from an archaic, pre-industrial position. The Russian populists, the Beat Generation, the hippies, and now environmental activists had taken up the myths of natural living and the rural commune. Hudson, according to Ida, had added his interest in animals to that rather adolescent utopia. “The cemeteries that serve luxurious suburban neighborhoods are full of graves for cats and dogs,” she said, “while the homeless are freezing to death in the streets.” For her, the only thing that had survived from the literary struggle against the effects of industrial capitalism were Tolkien’s stories for children. But, well, anyway, what was I thinking of doing in my classes? I explained my plans for the seminar, and the conversation continued along that line without any major surprises. She was so beautiful and so intelligent that she seemed slightly artificial, as though she was making an effort to diminish her charm or even considered it to be a weakness.
We finished the meal and then walked down Witherspoon toward Nassau Street. The sun was starting to melt the snow, and we moved carefully along the icy sidewalks. I would have a few free days to get adjusted, and I had only to let her know if there was anything I needed. The receptionists could take care of the administrative details; the students were enthusiastic about my course. She hoped I was comfortable in my fourth-floor office. When we said goodbye on the corner facing campus, she rested her hand on my arm and said with a smile:
“In the fall I’m always hot.”
I stopped short, confused. And she looked at me with a strange expression, waited a moment for me to say something, and then walked resolutely away. Maybe she hadn’t said what I’d thought I heard, maybe she said In a fall I’m always a hawk. Hot-hawks, maybe. Fall meant the fall semester, but it was only the beginning of the spring semester. Of course, hot could be slang for speed, and fall could be a term for prison time. Meanings proliferate when you’re talking to a woman in a foreign language. It was another sign of the destabilization that would only grow worse in the days to come. I tend to obsess over language, a bad habit left over from my education. My ear has been poisoned by Trubetzkoy’s phonetics, and I always hear more than is actually there and sometimes get hung up on anacolutha and substantive adjectives but miss the meanings of the sentences. It acts up when I’m traveling, when I haven’t slept, when I’m drunk, and also when I’m in love. (Or would it be more grammatically correct to say: it happens to me when I travel, when I grow tired, when I drink, and when I love?)
I spent the following weeks filled with these strange resonances. Speaking in English made me uneasy; I make mistakes more often than I’d like and then attach onto those mistakes the threatening implications that words sometimes hold for me. Down the street there are pizzerias to go to, and the pavement is a nice, bluish slate gray. I could never think that in English, I’d start translating it straight away: En el fondo de la calle hay una pizzería y el asfalto (el pavimento) brilla agradable bajo la luz azulada.
My exterior life was peaceful and monotonous. I did my shopping at Davidson’s grocery and cooked for myself at the house or went out to eat at the professors’ club, facing the gardens at Prospect House. Every now and then I’d get into Professor Hubert’s Toyota and visit other villages nearby. Old one-horse towns that held traces of battles from the Revolutionary War or the cruel Civil War. Sometimes I would walk along the banks of the Delaware, a canal that connected Philadelphia to New York in the nineteenth century and had been the main route of commerce. Irish immigrants had excavated it with shovels, and it had a very complex system of locks and dams, but now it was out of operation and had been converted into a wooded walking path with luxurious houses on the hills overlooking its calm waters. It was frozen this time of year, and children with yellow jackets and red caps flew along like birds over the transparent surface on their skates and sleds.
One of my pastimes was observing my neighbor. She was the lone image of peace in my solitary mornings. A diminutive figure, tending flowers in a little private garden in the middle of the lifeless ground. From the shadows of my room on the top floor, I could see her go down to the park every morning, walking with careful little steps because of the snow, and then lift the yellow cloth that she used to protect the greenhouse flowers that she grew along one side, under the shelter of a stone wall. She tried to keep the sprouts going through the frost and the lack of sunlight and the desolate winter air. I think she spoke to them, to the plants, and the sound would reach me as a gentle murmur in a strange tongue, like some soft and unfamiliar music. Sometimes I thought I could hear her whistling; I don’t remember having heard many women whistle, but one morning I heard her intoning Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Reality does have background music, and in this case that Russian melody—a rather light tune—was very fitting for the atmosphere and my state of mind.
I’d read Hudson several times over the course of my life and, in the past, had even visited the ranch—Los Veinticinco Ombúes—where he was born. It was near my house in Adrogué, and I would ride my bicycle to kilometer 37 and go up the dirt path among the trees until I came to the farm amid the fields. We all enjoy nature when we’re very young, and Hudson—like so many writers who convey those childhood emotions—seemed to retain that quality throughout his life. Many years later, in 1918, while ill for six weeks in a house near the sea in England, he had a kind of extended epiphany that allowed him to relive his early days of happiness in La Pampa with a “marvelous” clarity. Propped up on the pillows and equipped with a pencil and notebook, he worked ceaselessly, in a state of feverish happiness, writing Far Away and Long Ago, his wondrous memoir. That relationship between illness and memory bears some resemblance to Proust’s involuntary memory, but, as Hudson himself explained, “It was not like that mental condition, known to most persons, when some sight or sound or, more frequently, the perfume of some flower, associated with our early life, restores the past suddenly and so vividly that it is almost an illusion.” Rather, it was a kind of illumination, as if he were back there once again and could see clearly into the days he’d once lived. The prose that emerged from those memories remains one of the most memorable literary moments in the English language and, paradoxically, is also one of the luminous events in the faded literature of Argentina.
Maybe he wrote in that way because his English was blended with the Spanish of his childhood; uncertainties and errors do appear in the original versions of his writings, revealing Hudson’s lack of familiarity with the language he was writing in. One of his biographers records that he often paused, searching for a word, and would immediately turn to Spanish for a substitute in order to keep going. It was as if his childhood language always remained close to his literature, and there was some deep place where those lost voices lingered on. He wrote in English, but his syntax was Spanish, and it retained the soft rhythms of a desert orality from the plains of El Plata.
In 1846, the Hudsons left Los Veinticinco Ombúes and traveled to Chascomús, where his father had rented a small farm. The routes were almost impassable back then, and it isn’t hard to imagine the difficulty of the journey, which lasted three days. They set out early one Monday morning in an ox-drawn wagon, following the meager remnants of a track that led off toward the south. Under the canvas roof traveled the parents and children and little else besides, for the clothes and dogs and silverware and books were being shipped downriver on a barge. The cart advanced slowly, creaking and lurching, through the middle of the fields in search of the soldiers’ path. A lantern balanced on the cross of the wagon, and ahead there was nothing to be seen but night.
I left the library as evening fell and walked back along Nassau Street toward the house. I often got a table to eat at Blue Point, a seafood restaurant along the way. There was a beggar who stood in the parking lot there. He had a sign that read “I’m from Orion” and wore a white rain jacket buttoned up to the neck. From a distance he looked like a doctor or a scientist in his lab. Sometimes I would pause to talk with him. He’d written that he came from Orion in case anyone else from Orion appeared. He needed company, but not just any company. “Only people from Orion, Monsieur,” he told me. He thought I was French, and I hadn’t denied it because I never wanted to alter the course of our conversations. After a while he’d go silent and then lean back under the overhang to sleep.
Back at home I organized the notes I’d taken in the library and spent the night working. I made tea, listened to the radio, tried to stop the morning from coming.
Hudson nostalgically recalled the period of his life when he was a soldier in the Guardia Nacional and took part in the military exercises and maneuvers of 1854 near the Colorado River in Patagonia. “During my military service I learned a great deal with the troop about the life of the gaucho soldier, with no women or respite, and I learned from the Indians to sleep stretched out on the back of my horse.”
A Crystal Age, Hudson’s novel, recreated that harsh and ascetic dream in a world located in a distant future. “The sexual passion is the central thought in my novel,” Hudson said in a letter, “the idea that there is no millennium, no rest, no perpetual peace till that fury has burnt itself. We may maintain that we are improving, morally and spiritually, but I find that there is no change, no sign of a change, no decline in the violence of the sexual rage that afflicts us. It burns as fiercely now as it did ten thousand years ago. We may look forward to the time when it will no more be said that the poor are always with us—but we see no end to prostitution.”
I too lived in a transparent world and, drawn on by a certain monastic cathexis, tried to follow a set routine even though I was growing more and more agitated. Minor disruptions produced strange effects in me. I couldn’t sleep, and on nights of insomnia I’d go out walking. The town would appear deserted, and I’d advance into the dark neighborhoods like a specter. I’d see the houses in the blackness of night, the open gardens; I’d hear the rustling of the wind among the trees and sometimes listen to voices and uncertain sounds. I even came to think that those sleepless nights spent walking the empty streets were actually dreams, and indeed I would wake in the morning, exhausted, not sure that I hadn’t just spent the night turning in bed without ever leaving the room.
I would emerge from such states half-blinded, as though I’d been staring too long into the light of a lamp. I’d get up feeling unusually lucid, vividly recollecting certain isolated details—a broken chain on the sidewalk, a dead bird. It was the opposite of amnesia: the images were fixed with the clarity of a photograph.
It might have been the effect of a nightmare or it might have been the effect of insomnia, but I kept these symptoms secret. Only my doctor in Buenos Aires knew what was happening, and in fact he’d advised me not to travel, but I objected, convinced that living on an isolated campus was going to cure me. There’s nothing better than a peaceful, wooded town.
“There’s nothing worse,” Doctor Ahrest had cut in, holding out a prescription. He was a great doctor and a good-natured man, always serene. According to Ahrest, I was suffering from a strange ailment that he called arborescent crystallization. It was the result of exhaustion and an excess of alcohol, as though I was suddenly undergoing little attacks of nervous recollection. Maybe this was my illness, or maybe it was the feeling of dislocation made worse in a place where I’d been some years before and could remember vaguely.
Whenever I felt especially constricted, I’d escape to New York and spend a couple of days amid the multitudes of the city, not calling anyone, not showing myself, visiting anonymous places and avoiding Central Park and wide-open areas. I found Renzi’s Café on MacDougal Street and became friends with the owner, but he couldn’t tell me how the café got its name. I stayed at The Leo House, a Catholic guesthouse run by nuns. It had once served as lodgings for family members visiting the sick at a nearby hospital but was now a little hotel open to the public, although priests and seminarians were still given priority. I would see them at breakfast time, celibate and ceremonious, laughing like children at any little thing and reading their religious books with a deliberate air of absorption.
From there I would head out, as I’d done so many times in the Buenos Aires night, in search of an adventure. I’d take walks around the Village or Chelsea, going around the icy streets and watching girls pass in their long waterproof coats and little high-heeled boots. I was getting old; fifty years had gone by, and I was starting to become invisible to women. That may have been why I decided, one afternoon, to call Elizabeth Wustrin, whose small publishing house had printed my short stories many years before. One night, on my first trip to New York three years earlier, we’d spent a night together.
She was slight and very energetic, with dark skin, mixed-race, but she’d actually been raised by a pair of German immigrants after her mother—who was black (Afro American, in her words)—had given her up for adoption. She’d never seen her mother and had no way to contact her, because the woman had taken every legal precaution in order not to be identified. In the end, Elizabeth had hired a detective to find her, but, once the man tracked her down in Saint Louis, she couldn’t bring herself to go and see her. The woman had changed her name and was living downtown in the city, working at a fashion magazine. Elizabeth never met her mother, but she did become friends with the detective, and one afternoon she took me to visit him. His name was Ralph Parker, of the Ace Agency, and he lived in an apartment near Washington Square. Downstairs, in the building’s entryway, there was a control panel on the door, a metal detector, and surveillance cameras. Parker was waiting for us when we stepped out of the elevator. He must have been forty years old, with dark glasses and a face like a fox. He lived in an environment of high ceilings, an almost empty space with picture windows that looked out over the city. On a vast desk there were four computers arranged in a semicircle, always running, with open files and several active websites. It was the first time I’d seen a website running a special search engine, WebCrawler, that had just been released. The browser connected to the files related to Parker’s search, and the information arrived instantaneously. “We never set foot in the streets anymore, us private eyes,” he said. “You can find whatever you’re looking for on there.” One of the screens was linked to a warehouse on the docks, and by moving the cursor you could zoom into the building and see a group of men sitting around a table and listen in on what they were saying. Parker turned off the sound but left the image up, and it flowed along as in a dream. The men were laughing and drinking beer, and in one of the feeds I thought I could see a gun. “In a strict sense there are no private detectives anymore either,” he said then; “there’s no private person who investigates crimes. That works in the movies, on TV shows, but not in life. The real world is shadowy, psychotic, corporate, illogical. If you were on your own in the streets you’d only last two days,” Parker smiled. He smoked one joint after another and drank ginger ale. The Ace Agency was an organization with many affiliated but independent members. They worked with informants, with the police; they recruited drug addicts, prostitutes, soldiers; they were infiltrators, acting as a group. But none knew any of the other agents, they were all connected virtually. “Best not to know the people you’re working with personally, too many bad guys in this profession. Private shit.”
He was investigating the deaths of three black soldiers from a Gulf War infantry battalion in which most of the officers and noncommissioned officers were from Texas. A group of the family members of African American soldiers had hired him to investigate. He was certain that they’d been murdered. Pure racism. They’d killed them for sport. The agency had made contact with several soldiers who were still in Kuwait, and they would be the ones to expose the matter. “I only process the information,” he said. If he succeeded in proving it, they would go to court, and he would provide the evidence to the lawyers. He showed us a photo, a stretch of sand and three young black soldiers wearing combat uniforms in the Iraqi desert.
Then we went out to eat at a Chinese restaurant. Parker continued clueing me in on the realities of his profession. In 1846, the first detective agency opened, specializing in industrial espionage and the control of workers on strike. (“Following an individual at all times, wherever he went, in order to intimidate him, conducting undercover surveillance on the emerging union organizations, these figured among their typical activities.”) Parker cultivated a kind of romantic cynicism as if he were the only one to have discovered that the world was a hostile swamp. The only light in the midst of that darkness seemed to be Marion, his ex, who had left him overnight; he was trying unsuccessfully to win her back. The woman worked at a bookstore, and when Parker found out I was a writer (or used to be a writer), he insisted that we go to see her and called her on the phone, pacing from one end of the Chinese restaurant to the other as he told her that we’d be stopping by and that she had to meet me, couldn’t miss it, because I’d been a great friend of Borges. We went to the store, Labyrinth, on 110th Street in the neighborhood of Columbia University. The bookstore did indeed have a Borges quote about labyrinths printed on the front wall, but there weren’t any of his books on the shelves. The woman was very attractive, a tall and serene redhead who talked about Parker as if he wasn’t there. They’d lived together for a few months, but she left him because he exhausted her with his jealousy and his insults, and now Parker was having her tailed by one of his minions and had discovered that she was going out with a married man. Parker shifted around constantly and kept interrupting her, trying to convince her to come out for a drink with us at The Algonquin, but she refused, using precise arguments and extreme caution as if she had to convince a patient who’d just come out of the asylum. In the end Elizabeth and I left but Parker stayed, flipping through books, surely waiting around for Marion to finish her shift.
He was a very good detective, according to Elizabeth, but his personal life was chaotic; he knew too much about everyone not to be plagued by jealousy and widespread mistrust. She gave me the feeling that she too had some history with the detective and had also been investigated by him. “The other issue,” she said, as though able to read my thoughts, “is that he’s always armed and can turn violent.” I accompanied her back to her apartment but, despite her insistence, declined her offer to stay and went to the Port Authority terminal to catch a bus that went across New Jersey and would drop me in my town.
I arrived after midnight. Everything was deserted and dark, and only the parked cars gave any sense that the place was not uninhabited. I found some mail in the box, but nothing important, unpaid bills, advertisements. Just as I was about to enter the house, I saw my neighbor coming out of the laundromat where she’d gone to wash her clothes. She couldn’t sleep at night either, she told me, as though she thought I’d been out to combat my insomnia. She spoke English with a slight European accent and told me that she was Russian, a retired professor of Slavic literature, and that her husband had died two years before. I could come over to her house anytime I wanted for tea and a chat. She was older, small, agile, energetic; she had fine features and pale eyes, quite piercing. One of those women who is beautiful at any age, with a malicious air that the years had not erased. She spoke with such animation and such grace that she didn’t seem old at all, really; rather, she had the appearance of an actress playing the role of a lady who was getting on in years. (“Women my age don’t grow old, dear, they just go mad,” she said to me one day.)