Classes started at the beginning of February. I was teaching three hours per week, Monday afternoons in room B-6-M of the library, and the seminar had moderate attendance (six students enrolled). It was an elite group, of course, very well educated, and it displayed the conspiratorial air shared by doctoral students in the years they spend together writing their dissertations. It’s a very strange kind of education, one that’s unknown in Argentina. In fact, it bears more resemblance to a gym in the Bronx where young boxers are coached by old, semi-retired champions who punch them and shout orders over the ring, always running the risk of ending up on the mat. To me, it seems to be one of the few initiation rites still prevailing in the Western world; it may well be that medieval priories possessed that same air of discretion, privilege, and tedium, because the students here are almost entirely cloistered and move within a closed-off circle, living together—like the survivors of a shipwreck—with their professors. They know that no one in the outside world is particularly interested in literature, that they’re the essential curators of a glorious tradition in crisis.
And so, the six recruits that I had sitting around the table were tense and expectant like young, inexperienced killers locked up in a federal prison. Universities are replacing ghettos as the sites of psychological violence. On the very day I arrived, a young assistant professor from a nearby university had barricaded himself in his house in Connecticut and killed a policeman; he remained there in a standoff for twelve hours until the FBI arrived. He was demanding that they reconsider his promotion to associate professor, which they’d rejected, and he thought it was an injustice, a disregard for his achievements and his publications. The funny part was that, in the end, he promised he’d give himself up if they guaranteed that he could have weapons in prison. He was right, it’s in prison where weapons must be used, but they refused, and the young man killed himself.
Campuses are peaceful and elegant; they’re intended to leave experience and passions outside, but beneath them flow the high waves of an underground animosity: the terrible violence of well-educated men. The chair of Modern Culture and Film Studies was Don D’Amato, a veteran of the Korean War, and everyone said it was for that very reason that he’d been chosen to head the new department. Soon, men with experience in prison and war will become the professors responsible for leading university administration forward.
Maybe this is the way I view things after what happened (the accident, the mishap, the setback, as the police here call it), as if the events were a result of the lofty and complex education of the elite in North American academia. In any case, when I sat down on the first day to begin my seminar on Hudson, I felt free and happy, just as I do every time I start a course, inspired by the atmosphere of tense complicity wherein we repeat the immemorial rite of conferring our own era’s ways of reading and its cultural knowledge—and prejudices—onto a new generation.
I was interested in writers who were tied to some double identity, bound up in two languages and two traditions. Hudson fully embodied that subject. The son of North Americans, he was born in Buenos Aires in 1838, raised on the fiery Argentine Pampa in the mid-nineteenth century and finally, in 1874, left for England, where he would live until his death in 1922. A man divided, with just the right dose of strangeness to be a good writer. “I feel myself straddling two homelands, two nostalgias, two essences. I must pay homage to both, and it must be with those two elements that form my double ubiquity: nostalgia and anguish.” He displayed the classic problems of a person who is educated within one culture and writes in another. Like Kipling, Doris Lessing, or V. S. Naipaul, Hudson had been born in a lost territory that would become the distant center of his literature. These were writers whose works incorporated the experience of a non-European and often precapitalist world, against which their characters (and their narrators) are confronted and put to the test. Hudson celebrated that pastoral and violent world with his fine, elegiac prose because he saw it as an alternative in the face of an England sundered by tensions that the industrial revolution had provoked.
We began with a scene from Idle Days in Patagonia, which we might call “A Lesson in Optics.” Situated in Hudson’s childhood, it takes place around 1851. At that moment on the plains, in the desert (Hudson tells us), there is an Englishman with a gaucho who learns to see, who sees for the first time, and so we might also call the scene “Ways of Seeing.” The gaucho laughs at the European because he’s wearing eyeglasses. To him, the man looks ridiculous with that artificial device fixed over his nose. There is a challenge and some tension over determining which of them really does see what he sees well, and little by little the gaucho plays along, finally agreeing to try on the Englishman’s glasses.
And as soon as he tries them on (which work perfectly for him, in an almost surrealist act of chance), the paisano sees the world as it is; he discovers that, up to this point, he’s had a clouded vision of nature and has been seeing only vague blotches and uncertain forms on the gray plains. He puts on the lenses and everything changes; he sees colors and the clear contour of the landscape and recognizes the true coat of his dappled horse, and he suffers a kind of optical epiphany.
“I can see that cart over there,” the gaucho says, unable to believe its vivid color, and then he goes over and touches it, thinking it’s been freshly painted. The gaucho’s walk toward the cart and his gesture of touching what he sees represents a discovery and an encounter with reality. The world has become visible and real to him. (“The green of the leaves, the yellow of the grass.”) The gaucho understands that nature was not so natural before, or that nature in its truly natural form is only visible to him by means of an artificial device.
So it is a scene of transformation, a pedagogical scene we might say, but also, of course, a scene of colonialism: the native has become civilized. Hudson belongs to the lineage of Conrad, and the title of that chapter is “Sight in Savages.” From then on, the gaucho starts wearing glasses and surely becomes the first gauderio to ride bespectacled on horseback across Buenos Aires Province.
Who wore glasses in Argentina during the mid-nineteenth century? I showed them a few images and engravings. With the invention of the printing press, the demand for glasses had increased, and by around 1829 it had expanded to the point that an English eyeglass manufacturing corporation was granted rights to export to Argentina. On the other hand, we should apply the notion of Kulturbrille (cultural lenses) from the anthropologist Franz Boas, who underlined the disadvantage that any writer who sets out to study another culture must reckon with.
Hudson would separate and stop talking about himself, situating himself in the biased position of the witness who was there. This method of construction bore a familial resemblance to that of other writers fascinated by distant worlds. It was what Conrad had elevated to perfection beginning with Youth, the novella that began his series narrated by Marlow. I asked them to read that work as well as Kipling’s story “Mrs. Bathurst,” in which, along with that disconnected intimacy, cinema had appeared for the first time in literature. I also added “Juan Darién,” the Horacio Quiroga story in which a tiger, transformed into a man, watches the world with incredible lucidity and detachment and pays the price for the clarity of his vision.
I handed out the syllabus, organized the oral presentations, and for the first few weeks everything went along fine. Each of them read Hudson’s books in a different way, as though they were actually texts written by different authors. Rather than unifying these versions, I tried to delve into their differences.
I was gradually adapting to the passage of days; the academic routine helped me to order the disorder of my life. My nocturnal visions weren’t improving, but at least I was busier. I’d started to record my meetings with Orion in my notebooks. I’d dedicated myself to observing him, studying his routines and the places where he took refuge over the course of the day. He had a habit of sitting motionless for a long time, always in the sun, as though trying to conserve energy. He shifted around, following the light and settling himself in sunny islands, seeking warmth and brightness. “Like a stone, Monsieur,” he told me one day, “we must try to be like stones, hard and firm.” His other primary activity was walking, and he went about town as if on a journey, moving with a balanced and tranquil step, a way of walking that he called the mental march. He was only able to think if he was on his way somewhere. At dusk he’d be approaching Natural, an organic supermarket at the bottom of town. There, among the end-of-day scraps, he could find everything: yogurt, fruits, vegetables, bread, cereal, cookies. He called it food rescue, and they let him do it even though the practice was banned. Orion would protest and grow furious about the fact that anyone could throw away food but picking it up and using it wasn’t allowed.
Sometimes he went to the Greek bar across from campus to get hot soup or ordered coffee and a bagel at the student cafeteria. He always paid with a quarter, and they would accept it regardless of the cost of whatever he’d eaten. He paid the amount that his consumption had cost back in the seventies, when he first arrived, from what they said, as a graduate student, before he sank little by little into inactivity and poverty. He never begged, just found coins that had been dropped in the street, and that was one of his tasks over the course of the day. He would walk along the sidewalk near the curb, combing an entire block, and could always find fallen coins. During the thaw, when the sun melts the snow, is when he finds the most money; he stops at drains, and all he needs is a scrap of cloth or some wire mesh to fish out enough for him to survive for several days in his economy of the past. Everyone there knows him and lets him do it, and no one bothers him. “They’re friendly if you’re friendly, they’re frightened if you’re frightened, they smile if you smile at them”: that was one of his conclusions on the workings of social life.
I quickly realized that there were two well-defined groups within my seminar: one consisted of two girls, Yu Yho Lyn and Carol Murphy, both very studious and shy, and one boy, Billy Sullivan, who basically always seemed angry. They went around in a state of some confusion because they were first-year students, just beginning their postgrad seminars at the university. The other group was a trio made up of John Russell III, Mike Trilling, and Rachel Oleson, a girl originally from Sweden, very athletic and intelligent. They always moved as a group and were advanced students who’d already had their thesis proposals approved. The brightest was John III, Ida’s young heir apparent, who had the look of a student at Oxford (which was indeed where he’d sprung from) and was writing his thesis on The Monkey Wrench Gang, the novel by Edward Abbey with illustrations by Robert Crumb about a gang of fugitive punk anarchists who defend nature by killing the people who are ravaging the forests and by destroying bulldozers, steam shovels, and chainsaws. He was taking my course on Hudson because he saw a prehistory of modern environmentalist movements in those books exalting the Argentine Pampa. Everyone said that John III was Ida’s favorite and at the same time—they predicted with satisfaction—her future rival. There was news of disagreement and conflict because Ida had been opposed to his dissertation project (“It’s stupid and backward to write your thesis on a single book in this day and age”), but John III held firm and arrogantly defended his plan to work on a fictional text of violence and gore that, according to him, picked up the traditions of country songs and rural banditry. As for Mike, he was the classic lower-middle-class Yankee from Philadelphia, a young guy with a broken nose and a buzz cut, more serious and respectful than the others, and so polite that I came to believe that the tension behind his manners was that typical of people who’ve done time in jail. Mike had been a long-distance truck driver (“Yes, I’m one of the ones who read On the Road in high school”) until he finally made up his mind to apply for graduate school. They accepted him because he’d published a short story in Stories journal and because he submitted a very fine piece on the autobiographical tradition in the American novel. Now he was in his third year at the university and was writing a thesis on blue-collar culture in the Beat Generation. He was forging an academic career but didn’t believe in the university except as a place to earn one’s living comfortably. He admired Thomas Wolfe, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey because, according to him, they weren’t fussy East Coast intellectuals.
Rachel was a descendant of scholars and diplomats—her mother was a New Yorker who taught French literature at Vassar and her father had been the cultural attaché at the Swedish embassy in Washington—and she was very energetic and attractive. Her project was on the feminine bildungsroman; she was the teaching assistant in Ida’s courses and was in love with John III, who in turn was in love with Mike, who of course loved Rachel. That invisible, fluid comedy of entanglements was enough to distract me from my worries, and I observed it with the same pensive interest that Hudson used in studying the birds of the Argentine shoreline.
John III, Mike, and Rachel had a habit of coming to my office in the late afternoons to talk about their projects and theses. The three would be waiting for me in the hallway together, exhibiting the joyful camaraderie that young people experience when they study and spend all their time in each other’s company (I must say that for some time I imagined they were all going to bed together as well). I’d chat a while with each of them in my office and then go out for coffee with all three at Chez Nana, the French café in Palmer Square. I remember that one afternoon John III insisted we go to see the nearby house where Hermann Broch had lived, on College Street. A touristy guided visit intended for the literary types who came to the university, which also included a few photos of us, taken in the garden of the residence. Broch had written his novel The Death of Virgil upstairs in the house, and in fact he’d died at the hospital in town. The novel was published in English in 1946, and I was surprised to learn that the second foreign edition of the book was the Spanish translation published in Buenos Aires in 1947, the same Ediciones Peuser copy I had in my house, which I’d read and tried—unsuccessfully—to copy a couple of times. (The Death of Alberdi was one of my more successful failed projects.) Broch had been paid an advance of three thousand dollars for the publication of the novel in Argentina; I’d have to calculate how much that would be worth now, those three thousand dollars from 1947…
After parting ways with the students I headed back home, and on the corner of Nassau Street and Harrison I came across a man dressed in jeans and a plaid flannel jacket who was taking advantage of the avenue’s slow traffic light to spread political propaganda. He was holding up a poster in support of the Republican candidate for the congressional elections in May. Onto it he’d attached a little American flag, a signal that he belonged to the patriotic right. I’d never seen a proselytizing act done by a lone man before. Everything is individualized here, I thought; there are no social or union conflicts, and if they throw an employee out of the post office where he worked for more than twenty years there’s no chance that the others would show solidarity with a strike or a demonstration, and that’s why it’s routine for the one who’s been treated unjustly to go up on the rooftop of the building where he used to work with a machine gun and a couple of hand grenades and kill all of his indifferent compatriots passing by. The United States could use a bit of Peronism, it amused me to think, so as to lower the rate of mass murders carried out by individuals rebelling against the injustices of society.
Hudson’s skill for observing animals was an art form in itself. You could make a literary zoo out of all the creatures from La Pampa that appear in his work. Like all good writers, he was patient and knew how to wait, and he could describe the movements and rapid changes in rhythm of the most varied life forms (including human beings). “A more interesting animal is the Ctenomys magellanica, a little less than the rat in size, with a shorter tail, pale gray fur, and red incisors. It is called tuco-tuco from its voice, and oculto from its habits; for it is a dweller underground.… it is found living; not seen, but heard; for all day long and all night sounds its voice, resonant and loud, like a succession of blows from a hammer… first with strong measured strokes, then with lighter and faster, and with a swing and rhythm.”
Hudson’s viewpoint is never static, and he has a particular relationship with living beings, neither trying to capture them (Melville, Hemingway) or aspiring to a nature without animals (Conrad) but acting instead as an extreme voyeur, never killing or catching, only observing. But sometimes Hudson describes the way animals look at him. “One, the Galictis barbara, is a large bold animal that hunts in companies; and when these long-bodied creatures sit up erect, glaring with beady eyes, grinning and chattering at the passer-by, they look like little friars in black robes and gray cowls; but the expression on their round faces is malignant and bloodthirsty beyond anything in nature, and it would perhaps be more decent to liken them to devils rather than to humans.”
We no longer know how to describe animals unless they’re domesticated. That same day, according to the local news on TV, a bear had been seen in the woods, on the edge of a gully, not far from here. It was a blot among the trees, a blur of reddish brown. It wended its way along and turned up in a vacant lot on the side of Mountain Avenue. Rearing up on two legs, irritated by the noise of cars, with a murderous gleam in its eyes, it circled around and finally moved off toward the undergrowth. It reminded me of a bear from a traveling circus that set up camp on an empty piece of land behind my house in Adrogué when I was a boy. I’d watched it for hours from the privet hedge. Tied on a chain, it too moved around in circles and could sometimes be heard growling in the night. The circus ended its program with theatrical performances, shows adapted from costumbrista plays and popular radio dramas. The actors had asked my mother if they could borrow some furniture for their set. When I went to the performance, the pale wooden chairs from the garden of our house that appeared onstage would not allow me to believe in what I was seeing. This bear prowling around the vicinity of the campus has the opposite effect on me: I believe anything could be possible.
The night was freezing, and the windows had fogged over. The pianist who lives opposite, on the other side of the street, was practicing Schubert’s last sonata. He would advance a little, pause, and start over. It gave me a sensation like a sliding window getting caught and taking a while to open. But now I saw him under the yellow light of the streetlamp, standing in front of his car, the hood raised, in a state of repose. From time to time he leaned forward and listened to the sounds of the running engine. Then he would straighten up again and remain there, motionless, in an indecipherable waiting.
What would Orion be doing at this hour? He would already have retired to his chambers, as he says sometimes. He’s forgotten everything and lives in the moment, in the pure present. He suffers from some uncertain defect that alters his sense of time. He’s muddled up in a continuous motion that forces him to think in order to hold confusion at bay. Thinking isn’t the same as remembering; you can think even if you’ve lost your memory. All the same, he hasn’t forgotten language, and he can find anything that he needs to know in the library, according to him. Knowledge is no longer a part of his life.
The Weather Channel announced that a storm was coming and was expected to hit early in the morning. I got into my car and drove along Route 1 to the mall under the bridge, the unceasing caravan of cars from New York seeming like an invasion by an enemy army. Cars upon cars, one after the next, all moving at the same speed and staying the same distance apart, their headlights on, traveling in a single direction as though guided by a common goal, going by just like that for hours and hours. In the end, after passing Junction, I exited south off Route 1, crossed a bridge, and turned toward the main square. I took a few loops before finding the Home Depot. The hardware store was enormous, with tools, machinery, and equipment of all kinds and sizes covering the space as if it were an endless workshop or wrecking yard with newly arrived pieces. There were no customers or employees; the place was empty. I walked along the numbered aisles between large red objects and mechanical drills. I had the sensation of being in a museum, a kind of replica of the sheds you find behind old houses where people keep tools and disused objects, but everything here was shiny and brand-new.
The cash registers were locked and covered. At the end of the aisle, a lone girl was working at the only counter open. I bought a snow shovel, a pair of canvas gloves, and some pliers (to open and close the windows). A snowstorm was about to arrive, maybe the last one of the winter.
The next day, D’Amato’s receptionist told me that the department chair wanted to see me and was inviting me for a drink in his house. He lived in a residence on Prospect Avenue, and I went to see him that evening. Don was a particularly North American mix between a scholar and a man of action. In the Korean War, at age eighteen, posted near the border on the edge of the 38th parallel, he’d been caught by a mine on his way out of the field latrine and now had a wooden leg. He opened the door for me and turned about as though his left leg were the mast of a ship. He was tall and broad, and his white hair, which came down to his shoulders, resembled the rigging of a sailboat.
His book on Melville had been a point of reference in the academic world during the sixties, but then his star had begun to wane. On the top floor of his house he had a room dedicated to Melville where he collected objects that had once belonged to the writer—for example, a portable desk, an extremely rare piece from the 19th century—and also a vast library specializing in the author of Benito Cereno. People told the most extravagant stories about Don, and I always got along well with him. He was a forthright type, and they said he no longer prepared for classes; in his course (his mythic seminar on Moby-Dick), he would simply ask the students to write their questions on cards and then read them out in class and improvise the answers. He was on his own that night—and every weeknight—because his wife and children spent long stretches of time in New York and couldn’t stand life out in the town. D’Amato only lived with them on the weekends, and that had furthered his reputation as a womanizer.
His study was covered with objects from the whaling world that he’d collected as part of his Melville Museum. He showed me a replica of Queequeg’s harpoon and the original cedar desk on which Melville—“always on his feet”—had written his tedious reports while working as a clerk in the New York customs office. He also brought out the 1789 edition of Shakespeare’s works that Melville had been working through while he wrote the novel. It was evident that Captain Ahab arose from his encounter with the works of the Bard, and it was there that he’d encountered the high, tragic tone that the novel takes on after its more traditional beginning. It begins as a book about whaling and ends as a work on the magnitude of Macbeth.
His library was the most complete private collection on Melville that existed in the United States. He’d been made offers to sell it but always refused with a smile. “If I sell these books I’ll just get bored,” he would say. He was very friendly with me that night considering that I was an obscure South American writer and he a third-generation scholar, a peer of Lionel Trilling and Harry Levin.
We sat in the leather armchairs of his study with glasses of brandy and went back and forth about the relationship between Hudson and Melville; there was a long chapter in Idle Days in Patagonia about the whiteness of the whale in Melville. “Both writers could be identified by the great grasslands and the vast sea,” said D’Amato, “while we in contrast are writers of stories that unfold in closed rooms and tiny spaces. The hardest thing to do in a novel is make the characters leave their homes, and Melville has them travel around the world in a whaling ship.” He laughed with a powerful voice while pouring me a brandy, as if we were in a pirate’s tale.
Then we moved to the dining room, ate a pizza that arrived by motorcycle, and opened the bottle of Argentine wine that I’d brought. D’Amato asked me about my future projects. If I intended to remain in the United States, the department would be delighted to renew my contract for another year. My colleagues, the students, and especially Professor Brown were very pleased with my work. At that point I had no clear idea of my future, but I didn’t want to return to Buenos Aires; I thanked him for the offer and answered evasively. D’Amato wanted to convince me to go visit the old seafaring areas of Massachusetts. I had to go to Nantucket, it was near Concord, and all of American literature had been written in that region. I answered that Sarmiento, our greatest writer in the nineteenth century—our Melville, I added, to give him the idea—was a close friend of Mary Mann, née Peabody, who was the sister of Hawthorne’s wife. Sarmiento had visited Emerson and met Hawthorne, and he might even have met Melville on his visits to Horace and Mary Mann’s house. Might there be a letter from Sarmiento to Melville? He looked at me, I wouldn’t say in surprise, but indifferently. I know that when I talk about the South American writers I admire, North American scholars listen to me with polite distraction as if I were always telling them about some kind of patriotic version of Salgari or about books in the style of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Yes, of course, the southern seas, he reconciled, the Pequod had gone around Cape Horn. The conversation went on a bit longer and began to languish, and then he invited me to visit the basement.
Basements are underground structures that have a great tradition in North American culture: young teenagers have their sexual initiations in the depths of houses; in horror movies, you have to expect the worst when someone goes down to the basement; murderers hide in the basements of houses out in the country and then eliminate the family members one by one. But I couldn’t imagine what would be waiting for me in the bowels of D’Amato’s house.
The staircase that led below was at a side entrance, next to the kitchen. Behind a metal partition, Don had isolated the heating boilers, the washer and dryer, the breaker box, the concrete pillar with the alarm panel, and some old crates and containers. He had emptied the rest of the floor space in the long basement and turned it into a great aquarium with glass walls and a sliding lid. You could walk over the top of the enormous fish tank on a few planks of wood that spanned the glass structure.
Below, a white shark swam in the enormous aquarium. It moved through the clear water like a shadow, its fin skirting along through the air. “It’s a dogfish,” he told me, “a pup, they don’t live very long in captivity.” It was beautiful and sinister and moved with cold elegance. “And how do you feed it?” “With visiting professors!” said Don, pretending to push me but only resting his hand on my shoulder. He turned on the lights, and this seemed to enrage the shadow, for it plunged down until it became invisible and for a while there was nothing to hear but the lapping of water, but then the shark returned to the surface like a savage apparition, its fin cleaving the water in silence, a smooth gray line in the transparency of the air. He fed it live mollusks and strips of meat, but never gave it newborn cats or dogs to eat, no matter what his slanderous neighbors said.
We watched the sinister undulations of the proud fish for a while and then went back above ground and parted ways cheerfully, aided by the haze of alcohol.
As I walked back, the night was calm, the trees barely moving in the March breeze, the moon gleaming in the sky. Not far from here the white shark was gliding silently through the water under the surface of a Victorian house.