A Reading Diary Read Free

of an end, I enjoy all the more the things I’ve grown accustomed to—my favourite books, voices, presences, tastes, surroundings—partly because I know I won’t be here forever. Stan says that, given a sound body and mind, he happily wants this life to continue.
    In his journals, Bioy recounts the funeral of the novelist Maria Luisa Levinson. Her body was displayed in a covered coffin with a small window. Someone remarked that there seemed to be sheets of newsprint covering her face. Her daughter explained that they had put pages from several newspapers inside, “so that if, in the future, the coffin was opened, people would know by the obituaries who was there.”
LATER
    I find it difficult to understand how, living in the Buenos Aires of my childhood, I saw nothing of what was to come later. Swedenborg says that the answers to our questions are all laid out for us, but that we don’t recognize them as such because we have in mind other answers. We only see what we expect to see. What then was I expecting when I was eight, ten, thirteen?
    I remember the long conversations in cafés, in someone’s room after school, walking down so many streets. A peculiar humour permeated all that talking: irony tinged with sadness, absurdity with gravitas. The people of Buenos Aires seemed to possess the capability of enjoying the smallest casual offering, and feeling the most subtle moments of misery. They had a passionate sense of curiosity, a keen eye for the revealing notion and respect for the intelligent mind, for the generous act, for the enlightened observation. They knew who they were in the world and felt proud of that imagined identity. Most important, there was in all this the
possibility
of a blossoming, a ripening. Economic constraints and their attendant politics, imposed from abroad by foreign companies not yet multinational, dictated many of the codes of society, and yet the questioning spirit of Argentinians, their particular wit, their melancholic bravery, held for their society something greater and better, beyond what seemed like passing spells of fraudulent governments. If misfortune struck, as it does sometimes anywhere on earth, then (Argentinians believed) it wouldn’t last long; our country was too rich, too strong, too full of promise to imagine an endlessly bleak future.
    Leopoldo Lugones, writing in 1916: “Politics! That is the national scourge. Everything in this country that standsfor regression, poverty, iniquity, either stems from it or is exploited by it.”
    Today, at breakfast, my brother tells me that “only” ten percent of the judiciary system is corrupt. “Of course,” he adds, “excluding the Supreme Court, where every single member is venal.”
WEDNESDAY
    Perhaps out of modesty, Bioy, ardently Argentinian, lends his hero a Venezuelan nationality.
The Invention of Morel
ends with a nostalgic recapitulation of what his homeland means to the narrator. It is an enumeration of places, people, objects, moments, actions, snatches of an anthem. … I could do the same to remember Buenos Aires.
    Things I remember:
the scarlet of the ten-peso bill
different kinds of rolls sold at the baker’s: pebete (sweetish, brioche-like dough), fugaza (flat, crusty), miñón (smaller and crustier)
the scent of the eau de cologne the barber patted onto my father’s face at the shop in Harrods
a comic radio show on Sunday midday:
La Revista Dislocada
the sepia-coloured girlie magazines sold under the arches of Puente Saavedra
the tiny turkey sandwiches at the Petit Café
a strong smell of ammonia around the huge rubber trees of Barrancas de Belgrano
the sound of the soda cart over the cobblestones outside my window
the soda siphon and the bottle of wine on the dinner table
the smell of chicken broth before lunch
the large steamers moored at the port, reeking of smoke, ready to cross the Atlantic
jacaranda trees in the early spring mornings
    One of the earliest poems I learned by heart was Heine’s “Ich