A Reading Diary Read Free Page A

hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland” (“Once I had a lovely homeland”).
THURSDAY
    Memory as nightmare: the narrator of
The Invention of Morel
dreams of a brothel of blind women which (he says) he once visited in Calcutta. In the dream, the brothel becomes a rich, stuccoed Florentine palazzo. Here in Buenos Aires, I dream in Spanish of people who never speak and can’t hear me, and always of the city I knew, never as it is now. In my dreams, the Avenida 9 de Julio ends at Avenida Santa Fe.
    Bioy’s narrator has the impression that he is merely playing a game, not fighting for his life.
    The day after tomorrow, I leave. I have lunch with my nephew Tomás. We talk about the betrayal of Argentina’s history, and of his need to keep believing in the possibility of doing something positive. He is thrilled by a line he has read in Simone de Beauvoir: “I discovered with scorn the ephemeral nature of glory.”
    Perhaps, in order for a book to attract us, it must establish between our experience and that of the fiction—between the two imaginations, ours and that on the page—a link of coincidences.
MONDAY
    I’m back in France. On the plane, I read an article on the so-called Argentine ants. Vicious fighters in their homeland, in Europe these insects have stopped fighting (for some undetermined reason) and with that surplus energy have managed to build a tunnel, six thousand kilometres long, from northern Spain to southern Italy.
    Today I start setting up my library.
    The shelves are ready, waxed and clean. I realize that before I can put the books in place, I have to open all the boxes, since the subjects are mixed up and I won’t otherwise know how much space I need for, say, detective novels or the works of Bioy. In one of the first boxes I find a copy of Bioy’s
La otra aventura
, a collection of essays I edited when I worked for the publisher Galerna in Buenos Aires. I was twenty years old, and we were three in the company: the editor, his wife and I. The book is small, 8
½
by 17½ centimetres, with a black line drawing on a red background. I remember going to Bioy’s house to pick up the manuscript, a bundle of carbon copies, and reading them on the bus back home.
    That was in the early months of 1968. Just over thirty years later I saw Bioy again, weeks before his death. He had shrivelled into a frail, bony man who mumbled his words, but his eyes were still extraordinarily bright. He told me that he had thought of the plot for a new novel, a fantastic novel. “There will be an island in it,” he said. And then, with a smile, “Again.”
    I have a photo of Bioy aged seventeen, in profile, bearded, classically handsome. I also have one of him at that last meeting, shoulders hunched, cheeks caved in. It isn’t certain that Morel would have chosen to preserve the young man rather than the dying one, the image of what was overthe image of what would be. Morel says to the image of his beloved Faustine (with whom the narrator also has fallen in love), “The influence of the future on the past.” Exactly.
    What others see as our finest achievements are often not what we ourselves see. Edith Sorel once interviewed Marc Chagall in his house in St-Paul-de-Vence. The painter was in his mid-eighties and was living with his second wife, Vava, whom he had married a decade earlier. Edith was asking Chagall about how it felt to be one of the world’s most famous artists, when Vava excused herself and left the room for a minute. Chagall quickly grabbed Edith’s hand, pointed to his departing wife and, his face glowing with pleasure, whispered, “She’s a Brodsky!” For the poor Jewish boy who had grown up in the shtetl of Vitebsk, more than any artistic fame, what filled him with pride was having married the daughter of a rich merchant family.
    Who is Faustine? Who was she in Bioy’s mind? I’ve just read that the Argentinian Inés Schmidt became the model for Rosa Fröhlich, the Marlene Dietrich character in
The Blue