Then we have the melancholy grandma. Who isn’t the grandmother of her protegés, of course, or even a great aunt, and who to a certain degree resembles those elderly Russian ladies, lovers of literature, who for a time filled the streets of Paris, Venice, and Geneva. The grandmas dress impeccably. They talk about Proust as if they’d known him. Sometimes they reminisce about candlelit evenings in palaces one has never heard of. They possess (out of ignorance) a high regard for authors who’ve been translated into more than three languages, and their collections of dictionaries and encyclopedias are often impressive. They’re in danger of extinction.
In no danger of extinction, meanwhile, are the cultural attachés who on nights when the moon is full imagine themselves patrons. It goes without saying, since everybody takes it for granted, that cultural attachés are more attaché than cultural. During their brief reigns their friends take what they can get, which may not be much, but which for them is a lot, everything.
Also in no danger of extinction are those Latin American professors at American universities. Their idea of the patron is based on brute force and boundless cowardice. Most are on the left, politically speaking. To attend a dinner with them and their favorites is like gazing into a creepy diorama in which the chief of a clan of cavemen gnaws a leg while his acolytes nod and laugh. The patron-professor in Illinois or Iowa or South Carolina resembles Stalin and that’s the strangest and most original thing about him.
Then comes an amorphous mass of patrons of different stripes and assorted misfortunes. There are the neurotic virgins, the good Samaritans, the sourpusses, the frustrated housewives, the suicidal bureaucrats, the poet who suddenly discovers he has no talent, the person who thinks no one understands him, the drunk who recites Sallustius, the fat man who wishes he were thin, the bitter man who wants to create a new canon, the neostructuralist who doesn’t understand half of what he says, the priest who yearns for hell, the lady who insists on good manners, the businessman who writes sonnets.
Behind this crowd, however, hides the one true patron. If you have patience enough to search, maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of what you’re looking for. And when you find it, you’ll probably be disappointed. It isn’t the devil. It isn’t the State. It isn’t a magical child. It’s the void.
§All translations from Archilochus are by Guy Davenport, from
Archilochus, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age, Univ. of California Press, 1980. —tr.
III. (SEPTEMBER 2002 — JANUARY 2003)
JIM
Like everybody else, I once had a friend called Jim. I never saw a sadder American. Once he left for Peru on a trip that should have lasted six months at least, but two months later there he was again. What is poetry, Jim? the Mexican street kids would ask. Jim would listen to them and then he’d vomit. Lexicon, eloquence, quest for the truth. In Central America he was mugged several times. Which was odd for someone who’d been a marine and was a Vietnam vet. His wife was a Chicana poet who every so often threatened to leave him.
Once I saw him watching the fire-swallowers on the streets of Mexico City. I saw him from behind and I didn’t say hello, but it was clearly Jim. The ragged hair, the dirty white shirt, the back hunched as if it still felt the weight of a rucksack and of fear. The red neck, a neck that somehow suggested a lynching in the countryside, a black and white countryside without billboards or the lights of gas stations, a countryside as the countryside is and should be: endless vacant lots without remedy, bricked- or boarded-up rooms from which we’ve escaped and that await our return.
Jim had his hands in his pockets. The fire-swallower shook his torch and laughed fiercely. With his blackened face, he might have been thirty-five or fifteen. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and a vertical scar rose from his navel to his breastbone. Every so often he filled his mouth with flammable liquid and spat out a long snake of fire. People stopped to watch and then went on their way, except for Jim, who stood motionless on the edge of the sidewalk, as if he expected something more from the fire-swallower, a tenth signal after having deciphered the usual nine, or as if in the fire-swallower’s sooty face he had spotted the face of an old friend or someone he had killed. For a long time I stood watching him. At the time I was eighteen or nineteen and I thought I was immortal. If I had known that I wasn’t, I would have turned around and gotten out of there. Maybe I got tired of staring at Jim’s back and the faces of the fire-swallowers. The fact is that I went up to him and called his name. Jim didn’t seem to hear me. When he turned around at last I saw that his face was sweaty. He seemed feverish and was slow to recognize me: he nodded at me and then turned back toward the fire-swallower. When I reached him I realized that he was crying. He was probably feverish too. At the same time, I discovered — with less astonishment than with which I write it now — that the fire-swallower was working exclusively for him. Occasionally the flames flickered out just a few feet from where we were standing.
Are you trying to get barbecued? I asked. A stupid, thoughtless thing to say, but suddenly I realized that that was exactly what Jim wanted. “Screw me, voodoo me / screw me, voodoo me,” was the chorus, I seem to remember, of a song that was popular that year in some dive bars. Screwed and under some voodoo curse is what Jim looked like he was. Let’s get out of here, I said. I also asked whether he was high, whether he was sick. He shook his head. The fire-swallower glanced at us. Then, with his cheeks puffed out like Eolus, the god of the wind, he came toward us. I knew in an instant that it wasn’t exactly wind that he was going to spew. Let’s go, I said, and I pulled Jim away from the terrible edge of the sidewalk.
We went off down the street, toward Reforma, and a few blocks away we parted. Jim didn’t open his mouth the whole time. I never saw him again.
THE SUICIDE OF GABIREL FERRATER
Countless writers have committed suicide and some of their deaths still retain the original glow, the aura of legend, the blast force or the impact of implosion that so frightened their contemporaries, those who experienced the suicide from up close, because the victim was a friend or a teacher or a colleague, someone they only really noticed at the moment of death. There are suicides that are masterpieces of black humor, like that of the surrealist Jacques Rigaut, or of Jacques Vaché, a forerunner of surrealism. There are suicides that threaten our notion of culture, like that of Walter Benjamin; and others, like that of Hemingway, that seem more like a customs procedure, a long-postponed encounter in an airport.
The suicide of Gabriel Ferrater, one of the best Catalan poets of the second half of the twentieth century, fits the category of cerebral or consciously premeditated suicide, though this in no way means that Ferrater spent his life stroking his own suicide, as other poets stroke their overdeveloped egos. On the contrary, it seems that sometime in his twenties, closer to thirty than twenty, Ferrater decided to kill himself, and he chose the year 1972, a year as ordinary as any other except that it was the year he would turn fifty, a round number and a landmark age. To live past fifty, he decided, was not simply a waste of time but a surrender to the indignities of age.
After that he gave it no further thought, though it’s likely he mentioned it from time to time while out drinking with a few of the younger poets who loved him so much, like Barral and Gil de Biedma. As the fateful date approached but was still very far off, he devoted himself body and soul to reading, translating (Kafka, Chomsky), fucking, drinking, traveling, visiting museums, riding around Barcelona on his motorcycle with quarts of whiskey in his system, making friends, falling in love with very strange women. The photographs we have of him show a generally handsome man, sometimes with the look of a screen actor, white hair, black-framed glasses, turtleneck sweater, hard and intelligent features, lips with a slight (and more than sufficient) sardonic tilt — lips that must have been feared in his day.