Nunca Se Sabrá - No One May Ever Know
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Nunca se
sabrá cómo hay que contar esto, si en primera persona o en segunda, usando la
tercera del plural o inventando continuamente formas que no servirán de nada. Si de pudiera decir: yo vieron subir la luna,
o: nos me duele el fondo de los ojos, y sobre todo así: tú la mujer rubia eran las
nubes que siguen corriende delante de mis tus sus nuestros vuestros sus
rostros. Que diablos.
No one may ever know how to tell this
story. Should it be in the first person or the second, using the third
person plural or continually inventing forms that serve no purpose at
all? If we could say: I they saw the moon rise, or: the inner core of my
our eyes hurts, and, most of all: you the blonde woman were the clouds that
keep racing ahead of my your her our all of your faces. What the hell.
Las Babas
del Diablo
Julio
Cortázar
My Polo Pony Grippe
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
On October 3 I went to Cañuelas, Pcia de
Buenos Aires to watch my grand nephew Jorge O’Reilly play polo. I did not
notice any sick polo ponies. They were all very beautiful and close-up they
were indeed small ponies. I asked Jorge’s father, Georgito why a bunch of polo
mallets in Jorge’s dressing room had numbers like 32 and 31. He told me that mallets
had to be made to accommodate the different heights of polo ponies.
When I returned to Canada on
October 12 I was beginning to cough incessantly. After spending a terrible
October 14 (Thanksgiving holiday) in bed I saw my doctor who prescribed antibiotics
to fight what he said was pneumonia.
I did not have the heart to inform him that
in Argentina
there have been a few isolated cases of humans getting Equine Influenza HRN8 in
a mutation called Equidaegrippe H7N7 and that in fact I did not have pneumonia
but the rarer polo pony grippe.
While I am still alive and recovering I
would have been almost happy to succumb to this so classy a disease that only
the right people in the right social circles might contract
Vuelvo Al Sur
Monday, October 14, 2013
 |
| Portrait d'Ira (1933) Tamara de Lempicka |
I would hasten to assert that the ultimate
human nostalgia may happen if one dies in bed. While staring at the ceiling
waiting for death’s scythe to fall, one’s life (that part that can still be
remembered) is one big chunk of nostalgia.
This nostalgia would be the purest and the
finest as one would not have a way of revisiting it in person by going to
places or seeing people, still alive, in one’s memory. There would be no
letdowns, no disappointments or misconceptions of good times that may have been
rosier in time now but not so in past reality.
As I lay with my heart pumping much too
quickly for comfort in my bed at a Courtesy Inn near the Toronto Airport
on October 13 any nostalgia, anything from my past was of no consequence. The
only thing important was to survive the hour and day to at long last see my
wife and two cats in my home in Vancouver.
My three-week trip to Buenos
Aires was one of tying up loose ends and coming to the perhaps drastic resolve that I
will not be going back.
I remember that when I first left Argentina when
I was a boy that I asked my mother to take me to a toy store that specialized
in intricate lead soldiers. I wanted to buy a couple of San Martín’s lovely
equestrian soldiers, los Granaderos de San Martín. I did and whatever happened
to them is no longer in my memory.
This time around, and before I left Buenos
Aires I made sure to visit San Martín’s elaborate tomb inside the Metropolitan
Cathedral. Two Granaderos, in beautiful Napoleonic uniforms, are in constant
watch over his remains. I took pictures of them knowing they would not speak or
even make me aware that they were noticing me.
I need not ever return to know that those
two or their almost identical replacements will stand guard over a nostalgia of
mine, of experiences that cannot be re-lived in the exact same way as my
remembrances of them in my cluttered mind.
I can listen to Piazzolla playing Milonga
del Angel and no matter how many times I do it cannot bring back Susana from
the grave even though I remember her gently placing her hand on mine as
Piazzola began the beautiful song at the Teatro Florida sometime in 1967.
Returning to Buenos Aires brought the reality that my city
had changed and I could almost not recognize it in spite of the landmarks
looking mostly unchanged. The city seemed bigger.
Living for three weeks with Nora Patrich
and her partner the sweet Roberto Baschetti had me taking a rail line I had
never taken before. This was the Ferrocarril General San Martín. I boarded the
train at Bella Vista and took it 12 stations and 50 minutes later to the downtown
station at Retiro. The end station was not the cavernous and beautiful
Victorian station of the Mitre Line or the smaller but still beautiful one of
the Manuel Belgrano Line. It was a metal roofed shack. On my first trip in the
San Martín train I came to understand that the Buenos Aires of my youth followed the edge of
the city that lies by the River Plate, like a long shoestring and that the
shoestring was the Mitre Line. It was a thin realm of reality. My nostalgic Buenos Aires was now modified by
knowledge of a city I had never experienced. My view had been a privileged one in
which I rarely ever saw poverty or masses of cabecitas negras (little dark
heads), as the Argentine well-to-dos call those with aboriginal blood. My Buenos Aires had been one that included afternoon tea and scones..
Finally at age 71 the new reality, a huge
sprawling Buenos Aires
supplanted a romance all but gone.
But now I know that nostalgia is
what you feel of a place when you are not in it or of it (and it can be awfully rosy)
and that the reality of the place seen now destroys and supplants that nostalgia of old. I do not
feel any sadness as long as I remember that every moment of my present existence, my
now, will someday be the nostalgic when of those I love. They may not
notice now that when they visit Rosemary and me at home, that these moments will someday
pass to be their nostalgia.
My present will rapidly become their future rosy
past. And I will not mind when the scythe falls.
Vuelvo al
Sur
Lyrics by
Fernando “Pino” Solanas
Music by Astor Piazzolla
Defintive version sung by Roberto Goyeneche
Llevo el
Sur,
como un
destino del corazon,
soy del
Sur,
como los
aires del bandoneon.
Sueño el
Sur,
inmensa
luna, cielo al reves,
busco el
Sur,
el tiempo
abierto, y su despues.
Quiero al
Sur,
su buena
gente, su dignidad,
siento el
Sur,
como tu
cuerpo en la intimidad.
Te quiero
Sur,
Sur, te
quiero.
Vuelvo al
Sur,
como se
vuelve siempre al amor,
vuelvo a
vos,
con mi
deseo, con mi temor.
Quiero al
Sur,
su buena
gente, su dignidad,
siento el
Sur,
como tu cuerpo
en la intimidad.
Vuelvo al
Sur,
llevo el
Sur,
te quiero
Sur,
te quiero
Sur...
I am returning to the
South
I am returning to the
South,
the way love always
returns,
I am returning to you,
with my own wish, with
my own fear.
I carry the South,
like a destiny of the
heart,
I am the South,
like the airs of the
bandoneon (instrument).
I dream the South,
immense moon, heaven
on earth,
I am searching for the
South,
the open time, and
everything after.
I love the South,
its good people, its
dignity,
I feel the South,
like your body during
intimate moments.
I love you South,
South, I love you.
I am returning to the
South,
the way love always
returns,
I am returning to you,
with my own wish, with
my own fear.
I love the South,
its good people, its
dignity,
I feel the South,
like your body during
intimate moments.
I am returning to the
South,
I carry the South,
I love you South,
I love you South...
La Noche Boca Arriba
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Y ante el
vacío que avanzaba hacia él a medida que su sangre se escapaba, buscó una razón
para haber vivido, algo que le hiciera valedera la serena aceptación de su
nada, y de pronto como un golpe de sangre más que el que le hubiera, el
recuerdo de Ana la Cretense le fue llenando de sentido toda la historia de su
vida sobre la tierra. El delicado tejido azul de sus venas en sus blancos
pechos, un abrirse de las pupilas con asombro y ternura, un suave ceñirse de su
piel para velar su sueño, las dos respiraciones jadeando entre tantas noches,
como un mar palpitando eternamente; sus manos seguras, blancas, sus dedos
firmes y sus uñas en forma de almendra, su manera de escucharle, su andar, el
recuerdo de cada palabra suya, se alzaron para decirle al Estratega que su vida
no había sido en vano, que nada podemos pedir…
La muerte
del estratega
Álvaro
Mutis
The emptiness was
approaching him. Inexorably as his blood drained he sought a reason for having
lived; for something that would validate his serene acceptance of his
nothingness. Suddenly as an even greater wound of bloodletting he was filled by
the memory of Ana the Crete which brought him
a purpose all his existence on earth. There was the delicate weaving of blue veins
on her on her white chest, the opening of her pupils with amazement and tenderness,
the soft clinging of her skin to watch over his sleep, both of them breathing
and gasping between so many nights, like a sea palpitating eternally; her safe
hands, with, her firm fingers and her almond-shaped nails, her way of
listening as he walked, the remembrance of every word she uttered, all rose to tell the Estratega
that his life had not been in vain, that there is nothing that we can ask…
La muerte
del estratega
Álvaro
Mutis
My translation
On Sunday, October 13th
I arrived in Toronto from a long flight from Buenos Aires. It was four
in the morning and I managed to make it to a nearby hotel that my Rosemary had
kindly found for me. I had a 12-hour wait for my trip back from Toronto to Vancouver.
I managed to crash for two hours, in spite of a terrible cough that was later
to be diagnosed as pneumonia. I woke up suddenly. My arms were numb and my
chest felt restricted. I was short of breath. My immediate thought was not fear
of death but the fear that I would never see my wife Rosemary again or my two
cats. I was in a sort of calm panic. I managed to get up and make myself a pot
of hotel-room coffee. The little heart action subsided.
I recalled immediately
the beautiful story by Colombian poet and writer Álvaro Mutis who died at
age 90 on September 22 in Mexico City.
That calmed me down. But there was another story that did the opposite. This
was Julio Cortázar’s La Noche Boca Arriba (The Night Face Up) about a young man
who has a terrible accident on a motorcycle and is having a horrific nightmare
in his hosptial room. He dreams that he is a prisoner of the florid wars in
ancient Tenochtitlan
and that the Aztecs are carrying him up to the top of a pyramid for his
eventual sacrifice. It is only at the end that Cortázar reveals to the reader
that the dream is the strange world of motorcycles, cars and red and green
traffic lights and that the reality is that indeed an obsidian knife is about
to be plunged into the poor dreamer’s chest.
I managed to get enough
energy to take a picture with my new Fuji X-E1 of the two Argentine books I was
reading on the plane. I had finished the one of Eva Perón and was in the middle
chapters of the second one on Juan Perón.
I did get back to the
airport and back to Vancouver.
I have been in bed ever since relishing and enjoying every moment of being with
Rosemary and my two cats. Unlike Mutis’s Estratega I don’t have to be bleeding
to death from an arrow shot in battle to realize that my life indeed has a
purpose.
