One summer I was at a beach in Mar del Plata with a group of young Argentine friends, around ten men and women, the majority attractive, at an age with more than enough time to spend hours arguing about unimportant matters as if they were the most profound things in the world. I remember that I was fresh out of University and had traveled to Argentina for the summer. My principal interlocutor, strangely, seemed older than I, although in reality he was quite young. He was bolder in the discussion, he seemed to know the names of many more books and authors, his hair was long, his voice husky, his face angular, his body athletic. He was drinking maté and his name was Julio. Everyone else was lying around on towels with dark sunglasses, bikinis, beers, CDs, and cigarettes. Every now and then one of them would enliven the discussion with a favorable comment for Julio or for me, with objections or laughter.
– No, loco, you’re wrong. Or, are telling me you want to write like Oliverio Girondo? Man, you’re bitter.
One of the girls laughed quietly while another recited a dialogue from a Subiela film inspired in part by the works of Girondo. Someone threw sand at her.
I was silent as I lit a cigarette, giving myself time to think of a reply that wouldn’t be offensive to poor Girondo, whose book of poems En la masmedula I like a lot, although I cannot stand Espantapajaros. And then, about ten feet away, I heard a voice calling to us.
– Chicos, hey chicos. Over here. Hey you, kid, come here.
With a jerk of his head, Julio indicated a fat old lady, sitting on an ancient wooden chair. A faded and frilly dress covered her from head to toe. On her head, white tulle covered her fair hair. She was beckoning me, her chubby mouth drawn in the most serious of smiles.
I walked over to her.
– You’re Chilean, right? the little old woman said, offering me a cigarette that I accepted. Sit down for a second, I want to talk to you.
I smoked.
– You know, I just heard you and your friend, you know, without meaning to, chatting about whatever, random things. You guys talk so loud anybody could hear.
– If we’re bothering you, señora, pues…
– No, come on. You can do whatever you want at the beach, that’s why it’s called vacation. What caught my ear was a name that you said. You were talking about how you didn’t want to write like some guy, I can’t remember exactly, Ribeira?
– My friend was the one talking, señora. He was asking me if I wanted to write like Girondo.
– That’s it. Can you repeat his name for me, kid?
– Oliverio Girondo. Oliverio Girondo, a poet from Buenos Aires.
The old woman nodded in satisfaction as I repeated the name. With a smile she turned and called to someone off to her right:
– Facundo, Facundo.
About ten feet away, on a beach chair, an old man reading the newspaper looked back at her. At his side, lying on towels, recently returned from swimming, a slender adolescent boy and his father and mother (a man with a serious moustache and a round woman with blonde, presumably dyed, hair) were watching us. The boy and the old man nodded in response to the old woman, as if giving permission, as if they were translating her. Then they began to whisper among themselves.
– You see kid. I’ve got a grandson, Facundo, he’s a genius. They say that he’s a prodigy. He’s still in high school and he’s won prizes with his stories, important prizes apparently because the cash he’s gotten made it possible for us to come to the beach this summer. You’ll see. When I heard you talking with your friend, one of you said the name of this poet, Girondo. Turns out that my Facu has been dreaming about this name for two months, about something that he wants to write where this name appears. The library back in Avellaneda isn’t very big, but he’s been able to investigate the subject anyway. Though he hasn’t found anything helpful. He says the dream has nothing to do with poetry, but from the beginning there it is, this name, Oliverio Girondo.
The conversation struck me as bizarre. I tried to catch my friend’s eyes, Julio’s eyes, but they were all lying down on the sand, laughing hysterically about something that could have been my situation or some story about any one of our recent nights of partying.
– Listen. I’m going to point out my grandson so you can sit down and talk to him about this Girondo. Maybe you can help him. When you’re done come back here and I’ll give you a few pesos for the bother. Okay?
I agreed. I got up and traversed the sand toward the family of Facundo who looked at me menacingly. The sun was fierce at that hour and my forehead throbbed.
What I really wanted to do was jump in the sea and go for a swim. On the way over, Julio caught up to me.
– Che, what’d grandma say to you? Did she give you a hard time?
Quickly I told him the story of Facundo.
– If it’s true that the little pendejo made himself a millionaire with a few stories that’d be sweet. Fucking Rimbaud.
The man with the moustache and his blonde wife had left. The old man was still reading the paper, throwing us sidelong glances every now and then, making sure we weren’t plotting something against his grandson. The boy was still lying on his towel, building mounds of sand.
– Your grandma told me to come talk to you. Something to do with Oliverio Girondo.
– I know. I heard your conversation too.
He continued mounding sand for a moment. Julio got impatient and went to ask the old man for a cigarette. The boy, Facundo, took advantage of the distraction to stand up abruptly and walk toward the shore. He was carrying a backpack.
– I don’t trust your friend. You’re Chilean, right. Don’t ask me why. For two months, I’ve been telling my family that I dream a story; one day I had to tell them, I couldn’t get out of bed because of everything I had thought about during the night. But the truth is that for two years I’ve been dreaming of a book I must write.
– A book of stories?
– A novel, chavon. A whole novel, from beginning to end. All the storylines, all the narrators, the names of the chapters.
– How lucky, I said, surprised and skeptical.
– Don’t give me that crap, it’s a mess. Every night the same story, the same woman having a tit operation, some guys all disguised as the same man, the same protagonist spending every night writing a novel.
– Well, that’s what you’ve got to do to write a novel. Sit down every day and write. The story is already in your head.
– No, be quiet, don’t interrupt me. The problem is I can’t figure out the order of the story; I’ve got like fifty simultaneous chapters in my head. And when I wake up I don’t even remember the fucking names of any characters. It’s as if they were hiding their faces or they’d been erased. The only thing I know is that there’s one who’s named Oliverio Girondo.
I tried to imagine a novel with Gironda as protagonist, it wasn’t difficult. In fact, these days it’s easy to find that sort of thing. It’s like reading Bolaño, Piglia, or Vila-Matas, I thought. Take a writer who actually existed and fictionalize his writing process, his city, his loves, his friendships. Borges did it, didn’t he?
I scratched my head. We’d walked a ways down the beach, moving away from areas where people were concentrated.
– Thinking about it, Girondo could be a secondary character, because he didn’t write novels. Maybe it’s a novel about the literary milieu in Buenos Aires in the thirties and forties, which would be really interesting. Borges, Bioy, and the Ocampos were there, Arlt was there, Girondo was there with Onetti, Alfonsina Storni.
– Stop talking shit, loco. Read.
Facundo opened his backpack and took out a notebook. We sat down on the sand as the sun was setting. I didn’t want to start reading right away; I was distracted by the figure of a young woman in a jumper and overalls who was approaching, jogging across the sand. The girl lifted her head and our eyes met; her hair was black, her features large and lovely. She stopped next to us and asked for a cigarette. Facundo searched his swim trunks and offered her a pack. She waved to me and I waved back.
– You from the interior?
– No, I’m Chilean.
– Vacation? she asked.
I could tell she wanted to talk. Maybe she likes me, I thought, incredulous. Facundo was silent, staring at the sea and smoking. The girl looked me in the eyes. I was unsettled when I realized that her eyes had no color. Maybe an effect of the fading light.
– I shouldn’t smoke while running.
– No. That can’t be good.
– Look, she said, suddenly changing her tone of voice. She approached and turned her back towards me. With her right hand she lifted her dark hair, exposing the back of her neck, showing me where a bone, the first vertebra of her spinal column, protruded beautifully from the nape of her neck.
– I want to tell you something that came into my head when I saw you guys talking so passionately. I was running and I felt a stab in my neck. It must be a tumor, I thought. Something is going to happen tonight that will change everything.
I lit another cigarette, baffled. After a second, the girl sat down on the sand next to Facundo. They began to converse.
– And? What’re you waiting for? The girl said to me wearily after a moment. Read.
I opened the notebook and after two pages I understood. There was the man alone in his apartment while his wife undergoes an ablation of the right breast. There he was, listening to the wind of Santa Rosa. There was the doctor injecting morphine into a different woman. There was the woman’s seventeen-year-old sister. And singing chansons at the piano was the old whore with whom the protagonist’s best friend was in love. There was the priest with his hopeless, atheistic discourse, and there the young whore on the other side of the wall, wailing “crazy world.” There were the short sentences crammed with comparisons, the discontinuous chapters, the symmetric demise of every one of the characters, and the trip to the imaginary city of Santa Maria. There was the English epigraph and the tiny role of Girondo: the novel, published in 1950, is dedicated to Norah Lange and Oliverio Girondo.
I was euphoric, as if I’d had a revelation. Night had fallen, without moon or stars, over the beach of Mar del Plata. I could only make out the lines of shadows. I spoke to Facundo.
– You’ve been dreaming a book that was already written. It’s called A Brief Life and it’s by Onetti.
– How do you know?
– For my degree in literature I wrote a thesis called Writing and Reading Space: The Mise en Scene in the Writing of A Brief Life by Juan Carlos Onetti.
I said all of this staring out to sea, overcome by the melancholy of the grey horizon, so flat. After a few seconds I turned compassionately toward Facundo, to search his face for the despair of dreaming up a book that’s already been written, despair that even the stories that keep us from sleep don’t come from inside us.
But he wasn’t there. He was running, holding the girl’s hand, already far away.
***
Carlos Labbé was born in Chile and is the author of six novels and a collection of short stories. In addition to his writings, he is a musician and has released four albums. He also writes literary essays, most notably on Juan Carlos Onetti, Diamela Eltit, and Roberto Bolaño—three writers whose influence can be seen in Navidad & Matanza.
Will Vanderhyden is a translator of Spanish and Latin American fiction and a graduate of the MALTS (Masters of Arts in Literary Translation) Program at the University of Rochester. He has translated fiction by Carlos Labbé, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Juan Marsé, Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio, and Elvio Gandolfo.