A Reader on Reading

The fourth book of the Odyssey tells of Proteus, king of Egypt, known as “the Ancient One of the Sea,” who was able to tell the future and to change shape at will. According to one version of the story, he was the first man, imagined by the gods as a creature of endless possibilities. Like the apparent shapes of that ancient king, our desire need not be limited. Heterosexuality and homosexuality were no doubt two of those protean forms, but they are neither exclusive nor impermeable. Like our literary tastes, our sexual affinities need only declare allegiance and define themselves under duress. In the moment of pleasure, we are as indefinable as the moment itself. Perhaps that generous sense of pleasure will ultimately prevail.

Our social organizations, however, still demand labels, require catalogues, and these unavoidably become hierarchies and class systems in which some assume power and others are excluded. Every library has its shadow: the endless shelves of books unchosen, unread, rejected, forgotten, forbidden. And yet the exclusion of any subject from literature, whether by design of the reader or of the writer, is an inadmissible form of censorship that degrades everyone’s humanity. The groups ostracized by prejudice may be, and usually are, cut off, but not forever. Injustice, as we should have learned by now, has a curious effect on people’s voices. It lends them potency and clarity and resourcefulness and originality, which are all good things to have if one is to create a literature.

The Further off from England

“What matters it how far we go?” his scaly friend replied.

“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.

The further off from England the nearer is to France —

Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 10

BETWEEN THE END OF HIGH school in Buenos Aires and the beginnings of a full-time publishing career in Europe, I spent a splendid decade in Paris and London reading in an almost perfectly haphazard way, dipping into books that were too expensive for me to buy, skimming over others that incautious friends had lent me, borrowing a few from public libraries for company rather than for instruction’s sake, and hardly ever finishing anything. No method, erudite order, sense of duty, or rigorous curiosity ruled my reading. In body as in mind, I drifted.

The year of the Beatles’ last LP I left Paris, where I had been living happily for a year or so, and settled for a few months in London, sharing a house with three other guys and paying five pounds a week. My Argentinean passport made it impossible for me to get a work permit in Europe, so I made a living selling painted leather belts, which I hawked on Carnaby Street and later in a store called Mr. Fish. My hour of glory came when Mick Jagger Himself bought one of my belts and wore it onstage during a concert. Life was never that magnanimous again.

But we trifle with Fortune. On the spur of the moment, I accompanied a friend back to Paris and spent a few days nursing a coffee at the Café de Flore and wondering why I had ever left this most rousing of cities; then, having visions of irate clients storming beltless up and down Piccadilly, I decided it was time to get back to London. This was in the prehistoric days before the Eurostar, and the train fare was fairly inexpensive. I bought my ticket and set off for Calais in the late afternoon.

The caramel-colored coach of the express Garde-du-Nord-Calais, with cracked leatherette seats and curiously encrusted window frames, was not the most welcoming of places. I tried to read but felt distracted, uneasy. As we left the gray neighborhoods and started crossing the ugly districts of the northern banlieues, the entire coach seemed to be momentarily possessed by a mood of collective melancholy: the woman in the corner seat stopped humming, the baby stifled its crying, the rowdy group of adolescents talked no more, and in eerie silence we entered the flat countryside of Normandy under cover of darkness. We sped through Arras, a town I never visited, and which in my imagination carried the copyright of Saint-Exupéry. Then the air became musty and salty, and the signs along the platform announced that we had reached Calais.

Crossing what the British like to call the English Channel is, as everyone knows, a sickening experience, unrelieved by the sight of the white cliffs of Dover, which, in the pale moonlight, greet the nauseated traveler like huge piles of slightly off cottage cheese. I walked unsteadily up the gangplank and waited in line for passport control.