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.







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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)