A Reader on Reading

“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.