Perfect Day - Ricardo Piglia

Perfect Day 

Ricardo Piglia

Sunday

Here in the east, the sun is setting. Somebody once told me that for the Greeks sunset was not a poetic theme. Everything was written in praise of sunrise, with its metaphors of aurora, dawn, and awakening. Only in Rome, with the decline of the empire, had Virgil and his friends began to celebrate sunset, the twilight, the dying day. 

Would we then have writers of dawn and writers of dusk? These are lists I do enjoy making. But now it is nightfall, and I light an old Uruguayan lamp that brings back a feeling I associate with the sun. How do we define a perfect day? Perhaps it would be better to say, how could I narrate a perfect day?

Is that why I kept a diary? To fix or to reread one of those unforgettable days. For example. 

Friday July 6, 1973

My first impression of China when the plane was landing: a square sampan floating along the river, the trees and the white silhouette of a farmer with round hat working on the rice field. I thought he will be the only man that I'm going to see from now on. 

At the airport in Shanghai I was separated from other passengers and led down a corridor into a secluded room with plush couches and coffee tables. There were screens to protect me from prying eyes. For your safety, the tall and relax Mr. Liang told me in French. Smiling, without making a move, he asked, shall we spend the night in Shanghai. No, I will follow you to Beijing. We drank Chinese tea, slightly perfumed. 

A tense and monotonous music coming out from a speaker, a chorus of women, sounding like ashes, like cats meowing. Then came an old man in blue Mao suit, asking firm but gently, how was my journey? Repeatedly, asking me to watch my steps, while he led me into the dining room with Mr. Liang. Another official wearing a grey Mao suit saluted at the door. The one in grey is lower ranking than the one in blue which in turn is superior to the one in brown. We ate rice with vegetables and seafood. A bitter tasting beer.

During the flight to Beijing. Hostesses in white shirts, braids, socks, always smiling. Sandalwood fans, sweets and fruits. All the passengers are Chinese except for a blond girl sitting on the side, and an Italian delegate at the far end. The hostesses explain the direction of flight, the light function and the significance of the national anniversaries. 

Not long after, the young blonde girl approached me. Are you South American? She noticed me reading a newspaper in Spanish (Pasado y Presente). She is Chilean, daughter of a diplomat. Chinese-speaking, she has been living Beijing for many years, since high school. Her name is Maria Pilar U. She thinks I will be staying at the Nationalities Hotel. She works as a Spanish translator in Xinhua agency. Beautiful, very elegant. I was very careful. Glad that you are Chilean, I said. My favourite Chilean is Nicanor Parra. Oh no, he is a terrible reactionary, he had tea with Nixon, he says. Well Mao too, I told her. She looks at me seriously, it's not the same. Very young, smooth legs, blue eyes, she looks German. There are many Germans in Chile. Yes, they are all bums, she said. Then we got up. I will look for you, she told me. What are you going to do here? Don’t you worry.  Great, I said to her, I need a guide ... You could be my Beatrice. Don’t joke , there no need to, anyway I am married.  All the more I have to then, I say. I'm so disoriented that I fall for the first woman who speaks to me. ("I swear I no longer remember her name, / but I know what to call her: Maria" as in a verse by Nicanor). 

In Beijing, there is a very young man from the reception committee. He is in charge of the cultural work in the city. He has the face of a bird, speaks to me in Chinese. I reply in Spanish: I'm so glad to be in Beijing. Affectionate, with smiles. He offers us a maotai (a kind of rice wine). 

I got on to a rather sinister looking limousine, alone under the starry night. A long avenue of six lanes, tall poplars, the world's most populous city is serene and calm. Men and women cycling by silently like ghosts. We finally entered the infinite and empty Tiananmen Square. English lamps.

The Nationalities Hotel, seems like the Majestic de Avenida, of Mayo. The traveler thought and smiled.

A large living room and a large bedroom, large windows, high ceilings. The hot running water is yellow and rusty. The bathtub has feet like bear claws. The bed is hard, the pillows are too flat. On one table a thermos flask with green tea. Two cups with lids. On the bedroom walls, (rivers, rushes, yellow birds) are Oriental landscapes. No telephone. But there is a bell on the side of the bed. When I pressed it, it rang somewhere far away. But no one came to attend to the call. 

One evening, unexpectedly, I bumped into Bernardo Kordon at Calle Corrientes. The publishing house where I work has published her complete short stories. We had a coffee and chatted, Kordon pulled a notebook and asked if I wanted to travel to China. There was a vacancy, Edgar Bayley at the last moment pulled out. Many brothels, said Edgard. Kordon is president of the Friendship Association China-Argentina, several national writers have already travelled to the Celestial Empire, as he calls it. No obligations to, but if I want to write something about China, it would be better. I thought I could write a travel journal, and at the same time, the observations of a man alone. 

(I was thirty, and on the other side of the world. Would this be considered a perfect day?)

Translated by J. Loke

http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2012/05/02/actualidad/1335952444_526104.html

Hotel Almagro - Ricardo Piglia (Formas Breves, pp. 9 -12)

When I came to live in Buenos Aires I rented a room in Hotel Almagro, situated between Rivadavia and Castro Barros. I was about to finish my first book and Jorge Álvarez offered me a contract to publish and work at the publishing house. I was to prepare an anthology of North American prose from Poe to Purdy. With this salary and what I had earned in the university, I was able to settle and live in Buenos Aires. During this period, it was at the department of Introduction-History in the Faculty of Humanity, and I had to travel every fortnight to La Plata. I rented a room at the pension close to the bus station and stay three days of the week in La Plata teaching classes. I had a life divided, living two lives in two cities as if I was two different person, with different circles of friends in each place.

What was the same, however, was the life in the hotel room. The empty corridors, the lobbies, the anonymous atmosphere of those places where one is always passing. Living in a hotel is the best way to avoid the illusion of 'having' a personal life, and of not having anything personal to tell, except the traces left by others. The lodging in La Plata was an endless house converted into a kind of hotel managed by a 'long-term' student who sublets the rooms. The landlady was hospitalised and every month the chap  dropped some money into the mailbox of the hospital at Las Mercedes. 

The room I rented was comfortable, with a balcony facing the street and a high ceiling. The room at Hotel Almagro had a high ceiling too, and the window opens to the view of the back of the Boxing Federation. The two rooms have similar closets, the kind with two doors and shelves lined with newspapers. One afternoon, in La Plata, I discovered, at a corner of the closet, letters by a woman. I always find traces left by the previous occupants of a hotel room. The letters were hidden in a gap as if someone was concealing a pack of drugs. The nervous handwriting was illegible. I almost understood nothing - as always when I read the letters of a stranger, the allusions, and to really understand clearly to decipher the words but not the meanings or the passing emotions. The woman is called Angelita, she wasn't willing to come to live in Tranque-Lauquen. She had ran away from home and sounded desperate, giving me the feeling of someone rejected. On the last page, with another letter attached, someone had written a telephone number. When I tried to call it was the guard of a hospital in City Bell who answered. Nobody there knew Angelita. 

Naturally I forgot the matter, but after some time, in Buenos Aires, lying on the bed of the hotel room, I happened to get up and inspect the closet. On one side, between a gap, there were two letters of the woman from La Plata. 

I have no explanation. The only possible explanation is to think that I was placed in a parallel world, and there were other two, also placed in a parallel world, passed from one side to another like me, and by these strange coincidences that chance produces, the letters had coincided with me. It is not rare for one to meet a stranger twice in two cities, but it seems rarer to find in two different places letters of  the two person that were communicating, and which one does not know. 

The pension in La Plata still exist, and the 'long-term' student is still there. Now he is a calm old man who sublets the rooms to students and business travellers passing La Plata on their way to the south of the Buenos Aires province. Hotel Amalgro is still the same, and when passing by Avenida Rivadavia, towards the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at Calle Puan, I always walk past the door and remember those days. Opposite is the confectionary Las Violetas. Of course there is a quiet bar, and with good lighting as if one is living in a hotel room. 

Translated by Justin Loke

Literary talent and money - Ricardo Piglia, El Ultimo Lector p. 167

Economy is the basic metaphor of the device: it defines, first and foremost, a relation between literature and money. Joyce, for example, believed that his talent could be explained by his tendency to waste: spending what he did not have, giving huge tips, borrowing and getting into debts, and seeing how this prodigality with money as related to his literary talent.

The reverse could be Kafka: money is like a foreign and dangerous object. In a letter to Milena, during January 1922, he told a story that could illuminate what is being said. In procrastination, the scene concentrates on the narrative world of Kafka: 'Once, when I was little, I had acquired a ten cent coin and very much wanted to give it to a beggar that used to sit between the two squares. Well now, it seems to me a huge amount of money, a sum that probably no beggar has ever received, and therefore I am ashamed to have done something so extravagant in front of the beggar. But nevertheless I had to give the money: change the coin, give one cent to the old woman, and then go round the block of the municipality and the arcade, returning to appear as a new benefactor from the left, returning to give another cent to the beggar, then run around and repeat the same action ten times. (Or maybe less, because I believe that at certain moment the beggar has lost her patience and disappear.)' As always with Kafka, everything is displaced: the generosity is a requirement, unavoidable, one must try to hide it, even though it is futile.

Waste, alm, loans, credits, all these terms could be highly productive metaphors of modes of reading. Rather than an interpretation, it is a system of appropriation that defined such uses - the property is displaced. E. M. Forster, in Aspect of Novel, imagined all the novelists from different eras writing at same time on a table in a library with the entire literature at his disposal. An idea that, surely, is the opposite of linearity and hierarchy; any past element could be used as new. The image of Forster is the representation of a concrete space where instruments, experiments, and preparations coexist. It is Joyce working in his room with rough papers and books, in bed with a magnifying glass and the entire literature in front of him. The literary tradition is a field of associations as visible as the streets of Dublin. Or rather, a physical space as visible as the paths of the city. See how Joyce realised all the literary styles in English lanaguge in the chapter on the clinic in Ulysses: regardless of the era, totally out of context, or rather, within the context of his current usage.







.

Useless Actions - Ricardo Piglia

Repeating useless actions is a sign of old age. When one reaches ninety, one is already a little mad. Everything is a copy of something that was lived before. Hence, younger people hate the old: we live in what for them will be the future. Old age has the structure of a prophecy. Telling about the future something nobody could recognise clearly

(Prison Perpetua)

Greek Coin - Ricardo Piglia

Greek Coin

The tiny town is like a Greek coin that has sunk into the bottom of the river shining under the last light of the afternoon. It represents nothing, except that it is lost. There is a date, but out of time, and with the condition of art, as worn, not aged, it has been made a beautiful object that governs exchange and wealth.

For the last few days, I remembered the pages that Claude Levi-Strauss wrote in The Savage Mind about the work of art as miniature. Reality works towards an actual scale, while art works towards a miniature (in French). Art is a synthetic form of the universe, a microcosm that reproduces the specificity of the world. The Greek coin is an entire model of an economy, of an entire civilization, but at times, only a lost object that shines in the late afternoon under the transparent water.



(The Last Reader [El Ultimo Lector], Ricardo Piglia, p.13)

absent city - notes

The Girl p.46-7 "Extravagant References"
The girl (Laura) was born healthy. It was only with time that they began to notice certain strange signs. Her system of hallucinations was the topic of a complicated report that appeared in a scientific journal, but her father had deciphered it long before that. Yves Fonagy called it "extravagant references." In these highly unusual cases the patient imagines that everything that occurs around him is a projection of his personality. The patient excludes real people from his experience, because he considers himself much more intelligent than anyone else. The world was an extension of herself; her body spread outward and reproduced itself. She was constantly preoccupied by mechanical objects, especially electric light bulbs. She saw them as words, every time one was turned on it was like someone had begun to speak. Thus she considered darkness as a form of silent thinking. One summer afternoon (when she was five years old) she looked at an electric fan spinning on a dresser. She thought it was a living being, a female living being. The girl of the air, her soul trapped in a cage. Laura said that she lived "there," and raised her hand to indicate the ceiling. There, she said, moving her head from left to right. Her mother turned off the fan. That is when she began having difficulties with language. She lost the capacity to use personal pronouns. With time she stopped using them altogether, then hid all the words she knew in her memory. She would only utter a little clucking sound as she opened and closed her eyes. The mother separated the boys from their sister because she was afraid that it was contagious. One of the small town beliefs. [...] They did not want her to be committed. So they took her twice a week to an institute in La Plata and followed the orders given by Doctor Arana, who treated her with electric shock therapy. He explained that the girl lived in an extreme emotional void. That is why Laura's language was slowly becoming more and more abstract and unpersonalized. At first she still used the correct names for food. She would say "butter," "sugar," "water," but later began to refer to different food items in groups that were disconnected from their nutritive nature. Sugar became "white sand," butter, "soft mud," water, "wet air."

p.74 Mirror
because politics is a mirror... faces and faces that appear and look at each other and get lost again and are substituted by new faces that appear and look at each other and get lost again.
It swallows up faces.
But the mirror is always there. The truth is television is a mirror. A mirror that holds onto the faces.

p.116 Atomic Bomb
The possibilities of converting what already exists into something else that are infinite. But I would not be able to make something out of nothing. In that respect, I am not like Richter. You cannot compare my discovery with Richter's invention, he built an atomic plant for Peron using only words, just with the reality of his German accent. He told him he was an atomic scientist and that he had the secret to make the bomb, and Peron believed him and fell like a fool, and had underground buildings and useless labs with pipes and turbines for him that were never used.

p.121
Macedonio and the fundamental chord (guitar) the entire universe is derived

p.122 M & E
"... Macedonio fell in love with Elena before he met her, as he used to say, because they had told him so much abut her that it was as if a spirit had come to visit him. Even many of the things he had done earlier in life were to impress her at a distance and to try to get her to fall in love with him, he would say. He always thought that his passion is what made her ill, he always thought it as his fault that she died. Macedonio saw her for the first time at a cousin's house the day she turned eighteen, and again by coincidence one afternoon on a street in Azul. This second meeting proved to be definitive. He had gotten off the train because he was doing an experiment having to do with the length of thoughts. He got off there without knowing where he was was because he had already traveled the number of leagues needed for his thoughts, and had decided to send a telegram from there saying he would be coming back late. When he left the post office he sat down at a bar to have a brandy, and then walked around the corner and ran into Elena, who was looking at window of a shoe store, as if she had been placed there just so Macedonio would find her. She started to laugh because she thought it was funny to see that man dressed in a white shirt and a dark suit at siesta time, as if he were sleepwalking in a lost town in the middle of the Pampas. He looked like a seminarist going out to ask for alms for the poor parish. And I was asking for alms, Macedonio would say, because she gave me the grace of her beauty and of her intelligence, bright as the morning sun. He invited her to have tea with him at the cafe in the train station, and from that afternoon on, they were together until the day she died."

p.129-30
I know the Police Museum, with the wax reproductions of the criminals. Punk Head, Madman Gaitan... wearing the clothes they had on when they were arrested or killed (the shirt with the bullet hole in back), and the cells where they were locked up... and the instruments used by the police for centuries to hold the murderers. He used to say to me that narrative is an art that belongs to the police, that they are always trying to get people to tell their secrets, to narc on other suspects, to tell on their friends, their brothers. That is why the police and the so-called justice system have done more for the progress of narrative, he used to say, than any writer in history.

p.131
Lugones Chief of Police

Shotgun Blues

In this club, I told Renzi, one can drink and drink without anyone getting upset. Look at the man over there, the fat one with the jacket on: he gets drunk every night, always by himself, and yet preserves a strange dignity. There's a story about him, I tell Renzi, a painful story. While cleaning a shotgun he killed has wife of just three months. I told him that it was doubtless an accident and not a crime, for nobody kills his wife of three months in that fashion, with a shotgun blast in the face, unless he's crazy. And besides, I tell him, the man has been literally broken since the accident. He does nothing but get drunk and says that firearms are the work of the devil. Two glasses of gin, that's right, I tell the waiter. Oh, and please bring a bit more ice. You, I say to Renzi, have no doubt read my compatriot Korzeniowski, the Polish writer who wrote in English. A renegade, to tell the truth, a romantic of the worst sort. He spent his life fascinated by that sort of character. The man has a secret. But which of us does not have a secret? Even the most insignificant person,I say to him, if he had some listeners, could fascinate them with the mystery of life. It's not even necessary to have killed a woman with a shotgun blast. That other fellow - see? - the one over there, next to that column. His name is Iriarte; he has a watch shop, is the classic type of insignificant person, and yet I am sure that when he has had enough to drink he also dreams of the great man he almost became. At some moment in his life he must have witnessed something that he needs to keep hidden. That happens to all of us. Each one of us, I tell him, has his own repertory of extraordinary moments and heroic illusions. Everyone, Renzi says to me; the difference lies in that only some are able to realize those illusions. Illusions? That depends on one's age. After one's thirtieth birthday, I tell him, we are nothing but a sad collection of illusions and of women we have killed with shotgun blasts. Besides, I tell Renzi, what a man thinks of himself is of absolutely no importance.



Ricardo Piglia, Artificial Respiration, trans. Daniel Balderston, Duke University Press: North Carolina, pp.108-9

The Absent City

'The State knows all the stories of all the citizens, and retranslates them into new stories that are then told by the president of the republic and his ministers. Torture is the culmination of that desire to know, the maximum degree of institutional intelligence. That is how the State thinks, and why the police mainly torture the poor, only the poor or the workers or the dispossessed . . . only in very exceptional cases have they tortured people belonging to other social classes, and these cases have become major scandals . . . and at the end they had to retreat before international pressure, which accepts as a given that the humble from the fields, the wretched and feverish from the ghettos and the poorest neighborhoods of the city will be massacred and tortured, but reacts when intellectuals and politicians and the children of well-to-do families are treated this way. Because, in general, the latter already collaborate of their own accord and serve as an example and adapt their lives to the criteria of reality established by the State, without there being any need to torture them. The others would do the same, but they cannot because they have been leveled and cornered, and even if they wanted to and took great pains to that end, they can no longer act like the model Japanese citizen who works fifteen hours per day and always greets the general manager of his company with the slighest of nods. They control everything, they have founded the mental State . . . which is a new stage in the history of institutions. The mental State, the imagined reality, we all think like they do and imagine what they want us to imagine.'

'Elena thought the man was a magnet that attracted and drew the iron shavings of the soul to itself. She was already thinking like a madwoman. She felt her skin release a metal dust. That is why her body was completely covered, including gloves and a long-sleeved blouse. The only part exposed was her face, the rusted skin of her external gears.'