A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010
In memoriam
Crime and punishment
“There’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now,
being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next
Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”
“Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice.
“That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?” the Queen said.
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 5
In memoriam
“I went to the Classical master, though. He was an old crab, he was.”
“I never went to him,” the Mock Turtle said with a sigh. “He taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say.”
“So he did, so he did,” said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn; and both creatures hid their faces in their paws.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 9
WHERE TO BEGIN?
Almost every Sunday, from 1963 to 1967, I had lunch not at my parents’ home but in the house of the novelist Marta Lynch. She was the mother of one of my schoolmates, Enrique, and she lived in a residential suburb of Buenos Aires, in a big villa with a red-tiled roof and a flower garden. Enrique had discovered that I wanted to be a writer, and he offered to show his mother some of my stories. I agreed. A week later Enrique handed me a letter. I remember the blue paper, the wobbly typing, the big, ungainly signature, but most of all I remember the overwhelming generosity of those few pages and the warning at the end: “My son,” she wrote, “congratulations. And I pity you more than you can know.” Only one other person, a Spanish teacher at school, had told me that literature could be so important. Together with the letter was an invitation to lunch on the following Sunday. I was fifteen.
I hadn’t read Marta’s first novel, a semi-autobiographical account of her political and amorous involvement with one of the few civilian presidents who came to power after Peron’s ousting. It had won an important literary prize and procured for her the kind of fame that made journalists ring her up for opinions on the Vietnam War and the length of summer skirts, and her large, sensuous face, made dreamy by big eyes that seemed always half closed, appeared every other day in a magazine or a newspaper.
So every Sunday, before lunch, Marta and I sat on a large flowered couch and, in an asthmatic voice that I thought breathless with excitement, she talked about books. After lunch, Enrique, I, and a few others — Ricky, Estela, Tulio—would sit around a table in the attic and discuss politics, the Rolling Stones complaining in the background. Ricky was my best friend, but Enrique was the one we envied because he had a steady girlfriend, Estela, who was then twelve or thirteen, and whom he eventually married.
To us, in our adolescence, politics were part of everyday life. In 1955 my father had been arrested by the military government that had overthrown Perón, and as coup followed government coup we grew accustomed to the sight of tanks rolling down the street as we walked to school. Presidents came and went, school principals would be replaced according to party interests, and by the time we reached high school the vagaries of politics had taught us that the subject called “Civic Education”—an obligatory course taught in school on the democratic system — was an amusing fiction.
The high school Enrique and I attended was the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. The year we entered, 1961, a genius in the Ministry of Education had decided that a pilot scheme would be tested here. The courses, instead of being taught by ordinary high school teachers, would be in the hands of university professors, many of whom were writers, scientists, and poets as well as critics and historians. These teachers had the right (were in fact encouraged) to teach us very specialized aspects of their subject. This meant that besides acquiring an overview of, say, Spanish literature, we would spend a whole year studying in great detail a single book. We were extremely lucky: we were given essential information, and we were taught how to think about particulars, a method we could later apply to the world at large and to our own agonizing country in particular. Discussing politics was unavoidable. None of us thought that our studies stopped at the end of a textbook.
I’ve mentioned that prior to Marta Lynch’s encouragement, one other person had told me that literature was a serious activity. Our parents had explained to us that artistic endeavors were not truly valid occupations. Sports were good for the body, and a little reading, like Brasso, gave one a nice shine, but the real subjects were mathematics, physics, chemistry, and at a pinch history and geography. Spanish was lumped together with music and the visual arts. Because I loved books (which I collected with miserly passion) I felt the guilty shame of someone in love with a freak. Ricky, who accepted my quirk with the magnanimity of a true friend, always gave me books for my birthday. Then one year, on the first day of class, a new teacher walked into the room.
I will call him Rivadavia. He was nothing like some of the other professors of my high school years, such as the Spanish Renaissance specialist who introduced me to Don Quixote. Rivadavia walked in, barely said good afternoon, didn’t tell us what the course would be or what his expectations were, and opening a book, began to read something which began like this: “Before the door stands a doorkeeper on guard. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country who begs admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot admit the man at that moment …” We had never heard of Kafka, we knew nothing of parables, but that afternoon the floodgates of literature were opened for us. This was nothing like the dreary bits of classics we had had to study in our grade five and six readers; this was mysterious and rich, and it touched on things so personal that we would never have acknowledged they concerned us. Rivadavia read us Kafka, Cortázar, Rimbaud, Quevedo, Akutagawa; mentioned what the new critics were reviewing and quoted from Walter Benjamin and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Maurice Blanchot; encouraged us to see Tom Jones even though it was rated R; told us about having heard Lorca recite his own poems one day in Buenos Aires “in a voice full of pomegranates.” But above all, he taught us how to read. I don’t know whether all of us learned, probably not, but listening to Rivadavia guide us through a text, through the relationships between words and memories, ideas and experiences, encouraged me towards a lifetime of addiction to the printed page from which I have never managed to wean myself. The way I thought, the way I felt, the person I was in the world, and that other, darker person I was all alone by myself were for the most part born on that first afternoon in which Rivadavia read to my class.
Then, on 28 June 1966, an army coup led by General Juan Carlos Onganía overturned the civil government. Troops and tanks surrounded the government palace, only a few blocks from our school, and President Arturo Illia, old and frail (cartoonists portrayed him as a tortoise), was kicked out into the streets. Enrique insisted that we organize a protest. Dozens of us stood on the steps of the school chanting slogans, refusing to go to class. A few of the teachers joined the strike. There were scuffles. One of our friends got his nose broken in a fight with a pro-military group.
In the meantime, the meetings at Enrique’s house continued. Sometimes we were joined by Estela’s younger brother, sometimes only Enrique and Ricky attended. I became less interested. On a few Sundays I left after lunch with some uneasy excuse. Marta Lynch published several more novels. She was now one of the best-selling authors in Argentina, but she longed for some success abroad, in the United States, in France. It never happened.
After graduation, I spent a few months at the University of Buenos Aires studying literature, but the plodding pace and the unimaginative lectures made me sick with boredom. I suspect that Rivadavia and the critics he had introduced us to had spoilt my enjoyment of a straightforward course: after being told, in Rivadavia’s thundering voice, of Ulysses’ adventures through a Borges story, “The Immortal,” in which the narrator is Homer, alive throughout the ages, it was difficult to listen for hours to someone drone on about the textual problems in early transcriptions of the Odyssey. I left for Europe on an Italian ship in the early months of 1969.
For the next fourteen years Argentina was flayed alive. Anyone living in Argentina during those years had two choices: either to fight against the military dictatorship or allow it to flourish. My choice was that of a coward: I decided not to return. My excuse (there are no excuses) is that I would not have been good with a gun. During my European peregrinations I kept hearing, of course, about the friends I’d left behind.
My school had always been known for its political activities, and throughout history many notable Argentinean politicians had come from the same classrooms in which I had sat. Now it seemed as if the government had specifically targeted not only the school but my schoolmates. News about them began to trickle out, month after month. Two friends (one had taught himself to play the oboe and gave impromptu performances in his room; the other had observed that those performances were “more boring than dancing with your own sister”) were shot dead at a petrol station just outside Buenos Aires. Another friend, whose name now seems to have vanished with her, so small she seemed to be about twelve when I last saw her, aged sixteen, was gunned down in a military prison. Estela’s brother, barely fifteen, disappeared one afternoon on his way to the movies. His corpse was delivered, inside a mailbag, to his parents’ doorstep, so badly mangled it was hardly recognizable. Enrique left for Spain. Ricky escaped to Brazil. Marta Lynch committed suicide. She shot herself in the kitchen while outside a taxi was waiting to take her to an interview at a radio station. The note she left read simply, “I can bear all this no longer.”
A few years ago I found myself in Brazil on a stopover. Back in Buenos Aires, one of my brothers had run into Ricky’s mother, and she had given him Ricky’s address in Rio, which my brother then forwarded to me. I called him. He was now married, with kids, teaching economics at the university. I kept trying to understand what had changed in him because he didn’t look older, merely different. I realized that everything he did now seemed slowed down — his speech, his gestures, the way he moved. A certain flabbiness had overtaken him; little seemed to excite him.
He had made a home in Brazil now—his wife, his children were Brazilian—but it was still a foreign country. He told me that in exile, as he called it, a number of refugees had set up “memory groups.” Memory groups, he explained, were in charge of recording political crimes so that nothing might be forgotten. They had lists of names of torturers, spies, informants. The Commission on the Desaparecidos in Argentina, set up by President Alfonsin in 1983 to investigate the fate of the thousands who disappeared during the military dictatorship, later recorded the testimony of the surviving victims. The memory groups kept records of the victimizers, in the hope that one day they would be brought to justice. I suspect that some of Ricky’s despondency came from the fact that he foresaw the outcome of the trials Alfonsin had promised: a few sentences, a few reprimands, and then the general amnesty proclaimed in 1991 by the new president, Carlos Menem.
I mentioned how extraordinary it seemed that our friends, our school, had been a target of the government. Ricky said that the military had depended on informants. That inside the school there were those who provided the torturers with details about our activities, with names, addresses, character descriptions. I agreed that there were those who had always publicly supported the military, but that there was a fair distance between waving a pro-military banner and actually collaborating with torturers.
Ricky laughed and said that I obviously had no idea of how those things worked. The military hadn’t depended on a group of reactionary kids chanting things like “Homeland, Family, Church.” They needed intelligent, resourceful people. Such as Rivadavia. Ricky said his group had solid proof that for several years Professor Rivadavia had passed on to the military government detailed information about us—his students. Not simply the names, but careful notes on our likes and dislikes, on our family backgrounds and school activities. He knew us all so well.
Ricky told me this a few years ago, and I have never stopped thinking about it. I know Ricky wasn’t mistaken. In my mind, I have three options:
· I can decide that the person who was of the uttermost importance in my life, who in a way allowed me to be who I am now, who was the very essence of the illuminating and inspiring teacher, was in fact a monster and that everything he taught me, everything he had encouraged me to love, was corrupt.
· I can try to justify his unjustifiable actions and ignore the fact that they led to the torture and death of my friends.
· I can accept that Rivadavia was both the good teacher and the collaborator of torturers, and allow that description to stand, like water and fire.
I don’t know which of these readings is the right one.
Before saying good-bye, I asked Ricky if he knew what had become of Rivadavia. Ricky nodded and said that Rivadavia had left the school and entered a small publishing company in Buenos Aires, and that he wrote book reviews for one of the major Argentinean newspapers.
As far as I know, he’s still there.