Ruxandra Cesereanu
“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Ernesto Sábato and Julio Cortázar – Entangled in the Sprawling Cities
Abstract: Buenos Aires and Paris, these are two cities that obsess two famous Argentine authors: Ernesto Sábato and Julio Cortázar (the two of them spent enough time in both places). For the former, Buenos Aires is the total metropolis (because it is twofold: physical and psychical, above ground and underground); for the latter, Paris is the total metropolis because it is circumscribed in a never-ending quest both for love and for an inner, intangible, not to be found Grail.
Keywords: Ernesto Sábato; Julio Cortázar; City (metropolis); Subterranean ground; Initiation quest; Blind people.
Sabatizing
The verb “to sabatize” does not exist and if I am inventing it here and now is only in order to honor in this less usual linguistic way Ernesto Sábato, the author of the masterpiece On Heroes and Tombs and of the two other famous books from his trilogy, The Tunnel and The Angel of Darkness. It is possible that Sábato’s name come from Sabat, or maybe it comes from sabado (which in Spanish, as you can easily see, means Saturday). However, I like to believe that the verb “to sabatize” which I created contains the way of writing of the grand Argentine writer, with its ritual techniques used to portray nightmares, with hallucinations in narrative vortex and, especially, with the post-Kafkian charm of hybridizing the solitude, the estrangement from the world and the soul’s depths.
I met Ernesto Sábato in the flesh at Buenos Aires, on the 1st of September 2006, in his house outside the metropolis in a neighborhood called Santo Lugares (Sacred Places). I was there with Corin Braga whose master in prose writing, besides Kafka and Bulgakov, is Sábato himself. We were in front of a house hedged in by a “crazy”, not labyrinthine, but still wild (or anyway miming wilderness) garden with huge rhododendrons and white cedars. A house with plenty of rooms and in one of them, sitting at a desk, dressed in blue jeans and a red shirt, the writer was waiting for us. He knew that we were Romanian and he also knew that he was (for at least one of us, if not for both of us) a master of the 20th century prose.
It is necessary to state that the 95-year old Sábato we had access to was a human being that did not wear anymore the mask of glory or of any other travesty for the media. He was a man beyond glory and writer’s triumph in the solitude of his old age and of his assumed dumbness that was every now and then interrupted by a nice (interrogative and at the same time approving) hmmm, by nods (Sábato’s face was always oldish, so that his oldness did not affect his traits) every now and then when he pronounced a word with difficulties or when he cast the word in the world rapidly, though obstinately.
What should one do when meeting a very important old writer who closed himself up in dumbness (precisely because he accepted his old age, but not the visible deterioration which is its consequence) and who, nonetheless, receives “apprentices” (even if rarely) and admirers? What is to be done when the master, but even more the apprentices, would like to communicate in a way or another, even though not the grand words are those fit for the communion? Nor pure dumbness. We followed the advice we were given and it was us, the visitors, who spoke! It was a great opportunity not only to see Ernesto Sábato, but also to be able to speak to him and to be listened. But this speech had to be clear and faultless. I have to admit now that my speech, even if orderly, was somehow delirious since I put in it some of the eagerness of telling Sábato what I understood from his novels and from his nightmare’s techniques and how his writing formed me as a prose writer (especially in my stories marked by an alluvial pavor nocturnus). I don’t know how much Sábato understood from my tribute which was at the same time a poetical confession but, lucky me, he looked at me with interest and gaiety. The same unruffled and enduring hmmm that accompanied me also accompanied Corin’s speech, a simpler and more precise one, just because of the two of us he was the “apprentice”.
The 95-year old Sábato does not look like a patriarch, but like a partially wise, partially witty elf, even if this can only be inferred. The few words he utters come out of his mouth with a bird-like sonority first, and only afterwards, with a human-like one. It is an instinctual manner of preserving his candor and his curiosity about the world down here. Since it is on such a world from down here (let’s say that of the blind people from On Heroes and Tombs, but that of other dark and ontic “criminals” as well), the writer offered enough confessions related to the art and to the layers of his creative unconscious in El escritor y sus fantasmas. The world of fantasies haunted him once as a supplying reality for a writer who created terrifying fictions. It constituted, admits the writer in The Angel of Darkness, a third world between the world from here and the beyond: “And even if I did not abandon this battle against my monsters, even if resisted the temptation of going back in an observatory like a warrior in an abbey, sometimes I did it in a shameful way, taking refuge in the ideas about fiction – half way between the blood’s pounce and the abbey”.
A ramified and ample Oedipus complex marks the mentality of Sábato’s characters, as if they concentrated all the unconscious guilt that psychoanalysis has been trying for a century to expose in the human beings. That is why the novels of the Argentine writer (ideologically and creatively opposed to the even more famous Jorge Luis Borges) should be understood as a progressive form of ceremonial exorcism.
Argentine’s book-like fantasy
Sometime before arriving in Argentina I started rereading On Heroes and Tombs, Ernesto Sábato’s masterpiece, and I put down the key places in the novel to film not only a real, nowadays Buenos Aires, but also a fantastic one. The multitude of streets and places from Sábato’s novel did not inhibit me at all, but made my ear familiar with the city. So: Lezama Park, Balcarce Street, Colon Park, Retiro Park, Garay Street, Isabela Catolica Street, Admiral Brown Street, Pedro Mendoza Avenue, Belgrano Street, Pueyrredon Street, Leandro Alem Street, the 9th of May Square, Callao Street, Immaculate Conception Street, Luna Park, General Paz Avenue, Corrientes Street, Cangallo Street, San Martin Square etc. I also put down various possible questions for the meeting with Sábato, the only Argentine writer out of the four “prose heavyweight boxing champions” as they are called (i.e. Borges, Bioy Casares, Cortázar and Sábato himself) who was still alive, he himself at the considerable age of 95. First, I wanted to ask Sábato what Argentine-ness was, since in On Heroes and Tombs the writer tried to define the great city (that now has, according to some, 13 million inhabitants, or 17 million inhabitants, according to others, if we take into account the suburbs too). Sábato made a synthesis of the city through its clouds, through the statues of the Lezama Park at dusk, through the streets from the southern neighborhoods, through the roofs of houses. What is this, Argentine-ness? Pampa, gauchos, nostalgia, sentimentalism, the violence of the military Juntas from the second half of the 20th century? Then, why did Buenos Aires look more like Venice (as Sábato claims in On Heroes and Tombs) and less like New York, since the metropolis is nothing else but a new Babylon (in fact, I came to ask this question to Sábato in the flesh, but the writer only answered through a long hmmm). Why is Borges seen in a pretty ironical perspective both in On Heroes and Tombs and The Angel of Darkness? Is Sábato’s trilogy (The Tunnel, On Heroes and Tombs and The Angel of Darkness) a sort of exorcism in prose? Sábato often makes the distinction between the authentic writer and the manipulator of words, the latter being an impostor. The authentic writer is the one who follows his own obsessions irrespective of the talk of the town, irrespective of the accusations of mannerism.
Besides the obsession of meeting Sábato, the other writer we trailed through Buenos Aires was Julio Cortázar, whose novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) touched and stirred me in a peculiar way as an adult, when I finally read it. If Borges was my literary obsession when young, and Bioy Casares – a sailor in prose only through The Invention of Morel, if Sábato influenced me, as a prose writer, in a rather unconscious way, the one that I know acknowledge as a master, so to say, is Julio Cortázar. Another genial Latin American influenced my prose-writing in the past, and probably it is influencing it nowadays too. I’m referring to Gabriel García Márquez, but since the latter is a Columbian and not an Argentine, the master Gabriel’s story does not fit into this one, but in another one, should it ever be that story.
One of the things that impressed me in Buenos Aires was the number of beautiful young people on the metropolis’ streets. Very European faces since Buenos Aires is a Babel Tower of immigrants from all over the world, but especially Europe. Not only beautiful faces, but also intelligent, vivid faces that belonged to inner intellectuals, if I may call them so. Paris or New York did not offer me this new sensation that Buenos Aires did. This was the city where I would have wanted, had it been possible, to spend my faculty years. It was here that I would have wanted to be a student twenty years ago, if I could only turn back in time. Probably that it had something to do with the place where we started hanging around, namely Lezama Park (it is here that the story in On Heroes and Tombs starts) and then Recoleta space where we could find a hippie atmosphere as in the 70s, with plenty of stalls (postmodern jewels, miniature sculptures, CDs, etc.), the smell of mate (the Argentines’ national tea) and roasted peanuts covered in chocolate.
What impressed me a lot was the great number of huge bookshops on avenues and famous streets and the fact that they were filled with people. Bookshops where small cafes and (non-smoking) tea shops can be found and where the readers can really enjoy their time. Bookshops for gourmands and gourmets, but also for common people. Here, in Argentina even the waiters know about Borges (even if they do not understand his texts) or they heard something about Sábato and Cortázar. On Buenos Aires’ streets one can feel the smell of pudding and chocolate, and of books. Nowhere have I found something similar. Everybody seems greedy for books. Almost everybody reads. In one of the big bookshops (there are three huge networks of good quality bookshops, Ateneo, Cuspide and Distal) we even watched an important photo documentary on Cortázar. But the icing on the cake was the important bookshop Ateneo on Santa Fe Street, since this was housed in a former theater, so that in the boxes and in the balconies there are books, thousands of books as spectators. The luxurious theatrical space transforms that bookshop into a real delight.
We looked a little bit, in Buenos Aires, for Borges as well. We looked for him at the almost imperial building of the former National Library whose director the writer had been for a long time. Then we looked for him at the house where he lived and that was afterwards sold instead of being transformed into a museum. We tried to see a tango show, but we only got to a variety show where, truth be told, they played the tango very passionately, but they did not dance. We loitered in the residential neighborhood San Isidro, where hacienda-type villas, but also British-style, red brick houses were scattered all over. We went to the famous Recoleta cemetery and paid a visit to Evita Peron’s and Bioy Casares’ tombs. We caught our breath in the famous Plaza de Mayo where there still are protests related to the unpunished torturers who were involved in the Los Desaparecidos affair (“the disappeared”, victims of the military Juntas). And still, our trip was more than anything else under the sign of the coveted meeting with Sábato, having as a leitmotif one of the writer’s key sentences “We sleep, we close our eyes and thus we get transformed into blind people”.
At Don Ernesto’s
The success of our Argentinean trip was thus due to the visit that we managed to pay to Ernesto Sábato who lives, as I have already mentioned, somewhere outside the great Buenos Aires. The way to Sábato was a Kafkian one, there were labyrinths and we got lost, but in the end we got there. First our eyes laid on an almost wild garden. We were received in a guest room where we identified in a terrible photo a young, strange woman: then I thought that that woman could have been the model for Alejandra, the demonic Alejandra from On Heroes and Tombs. Then, we were invited in Sábato’s room. He was waiting for us, sitting at his desk, but his back turned to the desk. Thin, rather small, well-groomed. He muttered approvingly when he saw us, his speech limited to a continuous hmmm. I first explained to him my name, the sonorous difference to Alejandra, then I talked about what I was writing, the obsessions in prose (the nightmares, for instance), I took up the idea of exorcism, but I also talked about the blinding of the body and of the spirit. It is a great chance to be able to talk to an important writer about you, because generally the important writers do not have the time to listen to anybody, especially to their admirers. Or, here, at Sábato’s place we were privileged. Then it was Corin’s turn. He spoke in a less delirious way than I did about his three masters he learned almost everything from when it came to prose, i.e. Kafka, Bulgakov and Sábato himself. He thanked Don Ernesto for his writing which sprang from the bowels and for his nightmares from which he learned a lot.
Back in Buenos Aires, we headed towards the church the Immaculate Conception and its square, because there, according to Sábato’s masterpiece, is the entrance in the blind people’s world. A church like any other church, and a very common small square, with hippies, beggars and homeless people. The passage to the underground is not accessible anymore. It is in a restaurant in whose cellar bottles of wine are stored. The presupposed underground ways from the past (terrifying in An Account on the Blind, Fernando Vidal Olmos’ testimony from On Heroes and Tombs) are locked by walls nowadays. The entrance passage from the past is no longer there, had it ever been there and had it not been only another fantasy.
Sprawling cities (above ground and underground)
The metropolis Buenos Aires, depicted by Sábato in On Heroes and Tombs is double: on the one hand, the city above ground, and, on the other, the underground city. But, even if the real, geographical city is airy and spacious, the novel’s reader feels cramped up and supervised, forced to sneak on streets and avenues that come one after another in avalanche. The streets seem to be somehow syrupy. Probably that’s why the author makes the strange comparison between Buenos Aires and Venice (the comparison belongs to Bruno – a character who twins the two cities only on account of their damp air). It is as if, metaphorically speaking, the metropolis in On Heroes and Tombs had changed into a lagoon with narrow lanes which if they are not really (physically) damp, then they are psychically humid, mentally slimy. Buenos Aires is, however, a metropolis doubled by the blind’s clammy underground labyrinths (on which Fernando Vidal Olmos gives an account in his famous paranoid manuscript). Only in this enciphered and symbolic sense is the city “Venetian”, being doubled by a sub-city, an underground region controlled by the blind. The visible city has an underground mollusk (the blind’s underground region), and one of this mollusk’s tentacles got roots above ground in Alejandra’s strange house. Vidal Olmos family house is the very concentration of the blind’s underground region, a tomb-dwelling inhabited by strange beings, a space impregnated with fear. It is a layered house (like a sick palimpsest, but also like an onion). At another level and to another extent, the blind’s underground region is one of insidious, intersected brains, it’s a brain map well hidden near the church of the Immaculate Conception. We deal with a horizontal Russian puppet, an underground, fragmented worm. When comparing the city’s underground with its surface, the visible metropolis appears, according to Fernando Vidal Olmos (the declared anti-hero, the one who willingly or unwillingly wanders in the Inferno, a Siegfried of the nether world as he himself claims to be), to be just a trompe l’oeil, a deceit. The key point seems to be the fact that the character’s passing through the blind’s underground region seems to be symbolically related to the initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries, but with a macabre ending. More precisely, it is as if Oedipus had been initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries so that in the end, as a supreme revelation of the initiation, his eyes would be pulled out. And the things do not stop here: there is a second revelation – the blind’s underground region is continued by the sewage pipes of the metropolis, with all the inherent dejection!
And still, there are other urban spaces in On Heroes and Tombs, non-demonized ones which shrink from perversion: the parks, for instance (i.e. Lezama and Retiro) are regions when one can breathe freely, deprived of constraints, outside the slimy and fatal streets. They are meditative oases, of memories and memories’ stocks (they are related to the small solitary places on the river’s bank). Lying on relatively incontrollable surfaces, they withstand the supervised streets (walked by somnambulist-like beings) or the dark underground regions. Still, the parks are, every now and then, visited by agents of the nether world or by beguilers (Alejandra) who cannot shrink from the dark lights that control them. However, the parks host especially meditative raisonneurs (Bruno, for instance), and dreamers or vulnerable and bewildered beings who do not have a grasp of their own self. And there is another spatial element especially outlined by the author in his urban geography: the multitude of cafes and pubs from Buenos Aires. These are places of beguilement and evasion, in the midst of the tumultuous streets and still hidden within, as if walled in them.
If for Sábato Buenos Aires is a double city (above ground and underground), the Paris in Rayuela (Hopscotch), Julio Cortázar’s masterpiece, is also a double city although it is inscribed only on the above ground surface (we will see that this surface has a double meaning). In the first part of Cortázar’s novel there is a subjective, concentrated map of Paris: Rue de Seine, Quai de Conti, Pont des Arts, Le Marais, Boulevard Sébastopol, Parc Montsouris, Place de la Concorde, rue des Lombards, rue de Verneuil, Pont Saint Michel, Pont au Change, Chatelet, Tour Saint Jacques, rue de Cherche-Midi, Boul’ Mich, Carrefour de l’Odéon, Montparnasse, Porte d’Orléans, Boulevard Jourdan, rue de Médicis, Belleville, Pantin, rue Scribe. The previous list is that of streets and Parisian spaces enumerated in the first chapter of the novel: but what’s the point of this enumeration? All these places contain and embody Maga, Horacio Oliveira’s mistress. All these journeys are exclusively linked to the image of the beloved woman, to the search for her and to the waiting for her, to her gestures, rethought by the man who loves her and who lost her (as we will find out at a certain point). Can Paris be perceived through a woman’s broken portrait? Cortázar proves that the answer is affirmative. That is why the first part of the novel is a long love and sad letter, prolonged and descended in the Parisian streets and places. There is an entire “Maga-world” and the streets, the cafes, the pubs, the bookshops contain her in a memorial manner. All that Maga breathes, eats or smells is stocked in these spaces, i.e. all the cigarettes she smoked, all the kisses she gave, since the journey is a sentimental one and then each place (not only the streets, but also the street corners, the entrances etc.) has an embedded memory.
There is no point in quoting all the Parisian streets and spaces the author mentions. I transcribed only the names of those to be found in the first chapter, because otherwise, similarly to a makeshift topographer, I should have quoted a fifth of the Parisian places! Horacio Oliveira’s love can be remembered, re-gestated and stocked only through the streets’ mediation: it is a genesis’ act. The sprawling city can be tamed exclusively through the male character’s love. The pilgrim’s bohemia also helps. The mental wanderings in Paris (after the physical ones took place sometime in a lost reality) are a genesis effort of re-creating Maga and, especially of re-making, virtually at least, their love. The musical background of the first part in Hopscotch is purposefully picturesque and aphrodisiac (jazz rhythms and classical sonorities, too).
For Horacio Oliveira (who shelters in his character’s skin, without any disguise, Cortázar himself), Paris is a city identical to Buenos Aires: “In Paris everything was for him Buenos Aires and vice versa: in the most passionate region of love loss and oblivion suffered and were subdued” (En París todo le era Buenos Aires y viceversa: en lo más ahincado del amor padecía y acataba la pérdida y el olvido). The two cities overlap, but not in a palimpsestic manner, since emotionally speaking they are one and the same. The fabulous Paris, as Oliveira calls it, especially Paris at night, is a city of entangled stories, is a saga. It is an epic city similar to Buenos Aires (we can infer). And not only narratively towards itself as a city; it is a metropolis that stimulates narration (the life stories). Oliveira’s wanderings in Paris have an initiatory-erotic meaning too: the character sets up vague dates with Maga, in a neighborhood or another, at various hours. Missing out on a date (in a semi-aphrodisiac, but postponed, purpose) leads to a more intense scenting of the metropolis, to its ritual tasting. The journeys are purposefully labyrinthine, so that they might entangle the wandering lovers. Only on the streets of Paris can the two lovers be one and the same, can they unify as they cannot in the closed spaces. On the metropolis’ streets they can even make love, without really making it – the physical, carnal act takes place in various rooms, but the essential, psychic act takes place on the street. That is why the obsessing, almost suffocating Parisian journeys are so relevant in Hopscotch.
Another character in the novel, Gregorovius, will declare that “Paris is an enormous metaphor”. The meaning of this will be inferred afterwards: Paris is Oliveira’s metaphor for the idea and the action of looking for something unknown, ineffable, fascinating and hypnotizing. But the reader already knows that Paris is Maga herself, the woman, the mistress, the lost one. Maga herself will state later on that “Paris is a grand, blind love” (Paris es un gran amor a ciegas). But why? The ineffable of this metropolis comes from the fact that it is dirty and beautiful at the same time, fit for Horacio Oliveira’s wanderings of psychical clochard. The fact that the second part of the novel Rayuela takes place in Buenos Aires is not relevant anymore, since Paris swallowed in its womb the huge Argentinean metropolis.
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