Have you ever taken on a weasel? Are you ready to be torn apart by a weasel? I asked. I know how to fight, Pepe, he replied. There was nothing much left to say, so I got up and told him to stay behind me. The tunnel was black and stank of weasel, but I know how to move in the dark. Two rats came forward as volunteers and followed us.
Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey
for Carmen Pérez de Vega
Although it may not warrant an eminent place in the annals of literary mystery, the curious case of Álvaro Rousselot is worthy of attention, for a few minutes at least.
Keen readers of mid-twentieth-century Argentine literature, who do exist, albeit not in great numbers, will no doubt remember that Rousselot was a skilled narrator and an abundant inventor of original plots, a sound stylist in literary Spanish, but not averse to the use of Buenos Aires slang or lunfardo, when the story required it (as was often the case), though never in a mannered way, at least not for those of us who count ourselves among his faithful readers.
The action of that sinister and eminently sardonic character Time has, however, prompted a reconsideration of Rousselot’s apparent simplicity. Perhaps he was complicated. By which I mean much more complicated than we had imagined. But there is an alternative explanation: perhaps he was simply another victim of chance.
Such cases are not unusual among lovers of literature. In fact, they are not unusual among lovers of anything. In the end we all fall victim to the object of our adoration, perhaps because passion runs its course more swiftly than other human emotions, perhaps as a result of excessive familiarity with the object of desire.
In any case, Rousselot loved literature as much as any Argentine writer of his generation, or of the preceding and following generations, which is to say that his love was somewhat disillusioned. What I mean is that he was not especially different from the others, his peers—he knew the same torments and moments of joy—yet nothing even remotely similar happened to any of them.
At this point it could be objected, quite reasonably, that the others were destined for hells or singularities of their own. Angela Caputo, for example, killed herself in an unimaginable manner: no one who had read her poems, with their ambivalently childish atmosphere, could have predicted such an atrocious death, stage-managed down to the finest detail to maximize the terrifying effect. Or Sánchez Brady, whose texts were hermetic and whose life was cut short by the military regime in the seventies, when he had passed the age of fifty and lost interest in literature and the world in general.
Paradoxical deaths and destinies, yet they do not eclipse the case of Rousselot, the enigma that imperceptibly enveloped his life, the sense that his work, his writing, stood near or on the edge or the brink of something he knew almost nothing about.
His story can be recounted simply, perhaps because, in the final analysis, it is a simple story. In 1950, at the age of thirty, Rousselot published his first book, a novel about daily life in a remote Patagonian penitentiary, under the rather laconic title Solitude. Not surprisingly, the book relates numerous confessions about past lives and fleeting moments of happiness; it also relates numerous acts of violence. Halfway through, it becomes apparent that most of the characters are dead. With only thirty pages left to go, it is suddenly obvious that they are all dead, except for one, but the identity of that single living character is never revealed. The book was not much of a success in Buenos Aires, selling less than a thousand copies, but, thanks to some friends, Rousselot had the pleasure of seeing a well-respected publisher bring out a French edition in 1954. Solitude became Nights on the Pampas in the land of Victor Hugo, where it made little impact, except on two critics, one of whom reviewed it warmly, while the other was perhaps excessively enthusiastic; then it vanished into the limbo of remote shelves and overloaded tables in secondhand bookstores.
At the end of 1957, however, a film entitled Lost Voices was released; it was directed by a Frenchman named Guy Morini, and for anyone who had read Solitude, it was clearly a clever adaptation of Rousselot’s book. Morini’s film began and ended altogether differently, but its stem or middle section corresponded exactly to the novel. It would, I think, be impossible to recapture Rousselot’s feeling of stunned amazement in the dark, half-empty Buenos Aires cinema where he first saw the Frenchman’s film. Naturally, he considered himself a victim of plagiarism. As the days went by, other explanations occurred to him, but he kept coming back to the idea that his work had been plagiarized. Of the friends who were informed and went to see the film, half were in favor of suing the production company, while the others were inclined to think, more or less resignedly, that these things happen—think of Brahms. By that time, Rousselot had already published a second novel, The Archives of the Calle Peru, a detective story, with a plot that revolved around the appearance of three bodies in three different places in Buenos Aires: the first two victims had been killed by the third, the victim in turn of an unknown assailant.
This second novel was not what one might have expected from the author of Solitude, but the critics received it well, although it is perhaps the least successful of Rousselot’s works. When Morini’s film came out in Buenos Aires, The Archives of the Calle Peru had already been kicking around the city’s bookshops for almost a year, and Rousselot had married Maria Eugenia Carrasco, a young woman who moved in the capital’s literary circles, and he had recently taken a job with the law firm Zimmerman & Gurruchaga.
Rousselot’s life was orderly: he got up at six in the morning and wrote or tried to write until eight, at which time he interrupted his commerce with the muses, took a shower and rushed off to the office, where he arrived at around ten to nine. He spent most mornings in court or going through files. At two in the afternoon, he returned home, had lunch with his wife, and then went back to the office for the afternoon. At seven, he would have a drink with some of his legal colleagues, and by eight, at the latest, he was back home, where Mrs. Rousselot, as she now was, had his dinner ready, after which Rousselot would read, while María Eugenia listened to the radio. On Saturdays and Sundays he wrote for a little longer, and went out at night, unaccompanied by his wife, to see his literary friends.
The release of Lost Voices brought him a degree of notoriety beyond his circle of associates. His best friend at the law firm, who was not particularly interested in literature, advised him to sue Morini for breach of copyright. Having thought it over carefully, Rousselot decided not to do anything. After The Archives of the Calle Peru, he published a slim volume of stories, and then, almost immediately, his third novel, Life of a Newlywed, in which, as the title suggests, he recounted a man’s first months of married life, and how, as the days go by, the man comes to realize that he has made a terrible mistake: not only is the woman he thought he knew a stranger, she is also a kind of monster who threatens his mental balance and even his physical safety. And yet the guy loves her (or rather discovers that he is physically attracted to her in a way that he hadn’t been before), so he holds on for as long as he can before fleeing.
The book was, obviously, meant to be humorous, and was taken as such by the reading public, to the surprise of Rousselot and his publisher. It had to be reprinted after three months, and within a year more than fifteen thousand copies had been sold. From one day to the next, Rousselot’s name soared from comfortable semi-obscurity to provisional stardom. He took it in stride. With the windfall earnings, he treated himself, his wife, and his sister-in-law to a vacation in Punta del Este, which he spen
t surreptitiously reading In Search of Lost Time, a book he had always pretended to have read. While Maria Eugenia and her sister lolled about on the seashore, he strove to redeem that lie, but above all to fill the gap left by his ignorance of France’s most celebrated novelist.
He would have been better off reading the Cabbalists. Seven months after his vacation in Punta del Este, before Life of a Newlywed had come out in French, Morini’s new film, The Shape of the Day, opened in Buenos Aires. It was exactly like Life of a Newlywed but better, that is, revised and considerably extended, much as Morini had done with Lost Voices, compressing the novel’s plot into the central part of the film, while the beginning and the end served as commentaries on the main story (or ways into and out of it, or digressions leading nowhere, or simply—and here lay the charm of the procedure—delicately filmed scenes from the lives of the minor characters).
This time, Rousselot was extremely aggrieved. His case against Morini was the talk of the Argentinean literary world for a week or so. And yet, when everyone presumed that he would take swift legal action for breach of copyright, he decided, to the dismay of those who had expected him to adopt a stronger and more decisive stance, that he would do nothing. Few could really understand his reaction. He did not protest, or appeal to the honor and integrity of the artist. After his initial surprise and indignation, Rousselot simply opted not to act, at least not legally. He waited. Something inside him, which could perhaps, without too great a risk of error, be called the writer’s spirit, trapped him in a limbo of apparent passivity, and began to harden or change him, or prepare him for future surprises.
In other respects his life as a writer and as a man had already changed as much as he could reasonably have hoped, or more: his books were well reviewed and widely read, they even supplemented his income, and his family life was suddenly enriched by the news that María Eugenia was going to be a mother. When Morini’s third film came to Buenos Aires, Rousselot stayed home for a week, resisting the temptation to rush to the cinema like a man possessed. He also instructed his friends not to tell him the plot. At first he thought he would not go to see the film. But after a week it was too much for him, and one night, having kissed his baby son and entrusted him to the nanny’s care as if he were leaving for a war and would never return, he stepped out, resignedly, arm in arm with his wife, and went to the cinema.
Morini’s film was called The Vanished Woman, and had nothing in common with any of Rousselot’s works, or with either of Morini’s previous films. As they left the cinema, María Eugenia said she thought it was bad and boring. Alvaro Rousselot kept his opinion to himself, but he agreed. A few months later, he published his next novel, the longest yet (206 pages), entitled The Juggler’s Family, in which he departed from the style that had characterized his work up till then, with its elements of fantasy and crime fiction, and experimented with what, at a stretch, could be called the choral or polyphonic novel. It wasn’t a form that came naturally to him, and seemed rather forced, but the book was redeemed by other features: the decency and simplicity of the characters, a naturalism that elegantly avoided the clichés of the naturalist novel, and the stories themselves, which were slight and resolute, joyful and pointless, and captured the indomitable Argentine spirit.
The Juggler’s Family was, without doubt, Rousselot’s greatest success, the book that brought all the others back into print, and his triumph was consummated by the Municipal Literary Award, presented at a ceremony in the course of which he was described as one of the five rising stars among the nation’s younger writers. But that is another story. It is common knowledge that the rising stars of any literary world are like flowers that bloom and fade in a day; and whether the day is literal and brief or stretches out over ten or twenty years, it must eventually come to an end.
The French, who distrust our municipal literary awards on principle, were slow to translate and publish The Juggler’s Family. By then, fashions in Latin American fiction had shifted north to more tropical climes. When the novel came out in Paris, Morini had already made his fourth and fifth films, a conventional but engaging French detective story and a turkey about a supposedly amusing family vacation in Saint-Tropez.
Both films were released in Argentina, and Rousselot was relieved to discover that neither bore the slightest resemblance to anything he had written. It was as if Morini had distanced himself from Rousselot, or, under pressure from creditors and swept up in the whirlwind of the movie business, had neglected the relationship. After relief came sadness. For a few days Rousselot was even preoccupied by the thought that he had lost his best reader, the reader for whom he had really been writing, the only one who was capable of fully responding to his work. He tried to get in touch with his translators, but they were busy with other books and other authors, and replied to his letters with polite and evasive phrases. One of them had never seen any of Morini’s films. The other had seen one of the films in question but hadn’t translated the corresponding book (or even read it, to judge from his letter).
When Rousselot asked his publishers in Paris if Morini might have had access to the manuscript of Life of a Newlywed before its publication, they weren’t even surprised. They replied indifferently that many people had access to a manuscript at various stages prior to printing. Feeling embarrassed, Rousselot decided to stop annoying people with his letters and suspend his investigations until such time as he could finally go to Paris himself. A year later he was invited to a literary festival in Frankfurt.
The Argentine delegation was sizable and the journey was pleasant. Rousselot got to know two old Buenos Aires writers whom he considered his masters. He tried to help them in any way he could, offering to render the sort of little services one might expect from a secretary or a valet rather than a colleague. This behavior was condemned by a writer of his own generation, who called him obsequious and servile, but Rousselot was happy and paid no attention. The stay in Frankfurt was enjoyable, in spite of the weather, and Rousselot spent all his time with the pair of old writers.
The atmosphere of slightly artificial happiness was, in fact, largely Rousselot’s own creation. He knew that when the festival was over, he would go on to Paris, while the others would return to Buenos Aires or take a short vacation somewhere in Europe. When the day of departure came and he went to the airport to see off the members of the delegation who were returning to Argentina, his eyes filled with tears. One of the old writers noticed and told him not to worry, they would see each other again soon, and the door of his house in Buenos Aires would always be open. But Rousselot couldn’t understand what anyone was saying to him. He was on the brink of tears because he was afraid of being left on his own, and, above all, afraid of going to Paris and confronting the mystery awaiting him there.
The first thing he did, as soon as he had settled into a little hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, was to call the translator of Solitude (Nights on the Pampas), unsuccessfully. The phone rang, but no one picked up, and when Rousselot went to the publisher’s offices, they had no idea where the translator might be. To tell the truth, they had no idea who Rousselot was either, although he pointed out that they had published two of his books, Nights on the Pampas and Life of a Newlywed. Finally, a guy who must have been about fifty, and whose role in the company Rousselot never managed to ascertain, identified the visitor, and, abruptly changing the topic, proceeded to inform him, in an absurdly serious tone, that the sales of his books had been very poor.
Rousselot then visited the p
ublishers of The Juggler’s Family (which Morini, it seemed, had never read) and made a half-hearted attempt to obtain the address of the translator they had employed, hoping that he would be able to put him in touch with the translators of Nights on the Pampas and Life of a Newlywed. This second publishing house was significantly smaller and seemed to be run by just two people: the woman who received Rousselot, whom he guessed was a secretary, and the publisher, a young guy, who greeted him with a smile and a hug, and insisted on speaking Spanish, although it was soon clear that his grasp of the language was tenuous. When asked why he wanted to speak with the translator of The Juggler’s Family, Rousselot was at a loss for words, because he had just realized how absurd it was to think that any of his translators would be able to lead him to Morini. Nevertheless, encouraged by the publisher’s warm welcome (and his readiness to listen, since he didn’t seem to have anything better to do that morning), Rousselot decided to tell him the whole Morini story, from A to Z.
When he had finished, the publisher lit a cigarette, and paced up and down the office for a long time in silence, from one wall to the other and back, a distance of barely three yards. Rousselot waited, becoming increasingly nervous. Finally the publisher stopped in front of a glass-fronted bookcase full of manuscripts and asked Rousselot if it was his first time in Paris. Rather taken aback, Rousselot admitted that it was. Parisians are cannibals, said the publisher. Rousselot hastened to point out that he was not intending to take any kind of legal action against Morini; he only wanted to meet him and perhaps ask him how he’d come up with the plots of the two films in which he, Rousselot, had, so to speak, a particular interest. The publisher burst into uproarious laughter. It’s all about money here, he said, ever since Camus. Rousselot looked at him, bewildered. He didn’t know whether the publisher meant that idealism had died with Camus, and money was now the prime concern, or that Camus had established the law of supply and demand among artists and intellectuals.