A Reader on Reading

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.