However, though God could draw water from a stone and cause the people of Nineveh to repent, He still could not make them think. The cattle, incapable of thought, He could pity. But speaking to Jonah as Creator to creator, as Artist to artist, what was God to do with a people who, as He said with such divine irony, “don’t know their right hand from their left”?
At this, I imagine, Jonah nodded and was silent.
The Legend of the Dodos
“Why,” said the Dodo, “the best way to explain it is to do it.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 3
IN LE MONDE OF 23 MARCH 2007, I read that Francis Esmenard, president of the commercial publisher Albin Michel, declared, at the Salon du Livre of Paris, that “there are too many small publishers” and that they “clutter the shelves of our bookstores.” To which Antoine Gallimard, president of the venerable publishing company that bears his name, added that small publishers “are responsible for the surplus production of books.” These interesting comments reminded me of an old Mauritanian legend:
A long time ago, the dodos, flightless birds with enormous appetites, discovered that on a certain island, which was the nesting ground of the local tits, pumpkins grew to a colossal size. Delighted with the prospect of a gargantuan meal, the dodos built a small raft and crossed the narrow strait that separated them from the island. There they feasted for days on the pumpkins (which were indeed huge, and very stodgy and sweet), trampling carelessly on the small berries and grains, too delicate for their large beaks, which they left to the tits, who, with patience and care, planted some in the ground and carried others off to their nests to feed their young. After only a few weeks, there were no more pumpkins left, and the dodos decided to return home. Barely able to walk after all they had eaten, they dragged their fat bellies onto the raft and pushed off to sea. A few moments later, quantities of water began to wash over the deck. “I think we’ve eaten too many pumpkins,” said one of the younger dodos in a quaking voice. “I’m afraid we’re sinking.” The eldest dodo pointed an angry feather at the top of the mast where a tiny tit had settled with a red berry in its beak. “That’s the culprit,” shouted the dodo. “He’s much too heavy for the raft. There’s not enough room for all of us. Get rid of him at once!”
And they all started jumping up and down to frighten it away. Hearing all the noise, the tit flew off towards the land, and the raft sank in the shark-infested waters.
And that is how the dodos became extinct.
PART SEVEN
Crime and Punishment
“There’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now,
being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next
Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”
“Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice.
“That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?” the Queen said.
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 5
In Memoriam
“I went to the Classical master, though. He was an old crab, he was.”
“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.