[In a glance I can see myself there again, the times and the places all superimposed… Kid Bruzzone from Tigre, Marcelo Gianelli, always the captain, the Basque Arregui who, right at this moment, must be fishing for crab on the Cruz del Sur, on the Beagle…]17
In this account, Hemingway offered Conti a model for the discipline of writing as well as a repository of shared themes. On his final visit, to Hemingway’s former house, now a museum, Conti finds Hemingway’s boat, the Pilar, marooned on the ‘sandbank’ of the grassy lawn. He describes in great detail the dimensions of the boat and its engine capacity, before remarking:
Este es el barco que el Viejo amó como a un hijo, condenado in memoriam a vivir lejos del mar, a navegar nostálgicamente entre arecas y palmeras sobre el césped bien cortado… Saludo al barco en voz baja, porque los barcos son como personas, entienden a su manera.
[This is the boat the Old Man loved like a son, condemned in memoriam to live far from the sea, to nostalgically sail between palms and arecas, over the nicely cut lawn… I greet the boat in an undertone, because boats are like people, they understand in their way.]18
When Conti spoke specifically about Southeaster in the early sixties, he would explain a writing technique which was also, by extension, a philosophy of life. He would begin by stressing the autobiographical and almost ethnographic nature of his work:
El viaje de Boga en cierto modo es mi viaje. Sólo que el viaje del Boga viene mucho después cuando aquello adquirió pasado y se hizo historia para mí… Por fin, otro día, todo aquello (su vida en el Delta) me golpeó como ausencia. Y entonces a punto de perderlo, de alguna manera, ya lejano y extraviado, traté de inventarlo de nuevo…
[Boga’s journey is my own, in a way. Except Boga’s comes very much later, when all that it comprised acquired a past and became a story for me… And then in the end, on another day, all of this (his life on the Delta) invaded me as an absence. And then, when I felt I would lose it in some way, already far off and gone astray, I tried to invent it anew…]19
Writing is not, for Conti, a description of ‘great events’:
Me reconozco en las pequeñas cosas y las pequeñas vidas sin residuo de historia… los pequeños sucesos de un tipo que ni siquiera tiene nombre se juntan y se pierden sobre ese río-tiempo con otras historias tan insignificantes como la suya.
[I see myself in the small things and small lives, the ones that leave no residue of history… the small things that happen to a chap who doesn’t even have a name, converge and disperse on the river-time with the stories of others that are as trifling as his.]
And Southeaster’s landscape of the river offers the perfect location for such a story:
No hay nada que dure sobre este paisaje de olvido, no hay nada que se afirme y resista. Él mismo cambia de forma, tentando continuamente bordes y orillas distintas. Un río nuevo para cada historia.
[There is nothing that lasts on this scene of forgetting, nothing stands firm and endures. It changes its face, continually trying to draw borders and shorelines. The river is new for each story.]20
This image of flow and flux is related to perception and to the nature of writing. Writing is re-creation, not simple description, for there is no objective reality: Lo que existe en todo caso, es una pura fluencia, un caos de estímulos y sensaciones, al que nuestra subjetividad le otorga sentido [What exists after all is pure flow, a chaos of feelings and stimuli, bestowed with meaning by our subjectivity].21 There is a tension in the writing, between a desire for precision and an awareness of flux and flow, which talks of wider issues of engagement, the satisfaction of small tasks in opposition to fatalism and subjectivity. The rhythms of the writing and the shifting narrative perspectives are thus essential to Conti’s overall purpose, and Jon Lindsay Miles’ splendid translation is particularly sensitive here.22
This interview from the early sixties ends with a statement that lyrically encapsulates the novel we have just read.
Hay algo erratil en todo el asunto. Los barcos de humor vagabundo, los tipos que vienen y se van, la espera interminable de algo borroso que arguardamos del tiempo o del agua, el viaje que siempre hemos sonãdo, la ciudad en la espalda, gentes y lugares distintos que presentimos detrás de ese horizonte que en los días grises se confunde con el cielo, pero sobre todo esa sustancia movediza que penetra las horas y los días y que destila ansiedad…
Es la misma nostalgia vagabunda de Kerouac… el tema del ’homo viator’, del tiempo que pasa y nos vuelve ajenos, nos adelgaza en láminas de olvido el esfuerzo por aferrarnos sobre algo sustancialmente movedizo, dejando pistas y rastros de nuestra presencia que se vuelven testimonios de nuestra mayor ausencia, los pequeños objetos poseídos, las cosas que cubrieron o prolongaron o auxiliaron a mi cuerpo, esas pacientes cosas a las que yo he asignado un sentido exclusivo, un uso preciso, inclusive un carácter personal e intransferible: en fin, todos esos vestigios a través de los cuales alguien podrá acaso reconstruir mi rostro, la presión de mis manos, el roce de mis pies, la dirección de mis deseos.
[There is something capricious in all this. The boats with their wandering nature, the blokes who come and go, the interminable waiting for something unclear that the time or the water will bring, the journey we’ve dreamed of forever, the city behind us, different people and places we feel are there beyond that horizon, which on grey days is mixed with the sky, but, more than all this, that substance like quicksand that runs through the hours and the days and exudes a disquiet…
It’s the same nostalgia for wandering Kerouac knew… the theme of the ‘homo viator’, the time that goes by and leaves us estranged, that takes our efforts to hold on to something that’s always essentially shifting, and thins it to layers of forgetting, leaving tracks and prints of our presence that turn into proofs of our much larger absence, the small objects possessed, the things that conceal or sustain or give aid to my body, those long-suffering things that I’ve given a personal meaning, a use that’s required, a personal nature, even, unique, that can’t be exchanged: anyhow, all those remains that someone might use to bring back my face, the press of my hands, the touch of my feet, the course of my longings.]
Thanks to Jon Lindsay Miles’s careful translation, readers in English can at last immerse themselves in the subtle, beautifully wrought, journey of the voyager, ‘homo viator’, whose identity is defined as, and in, movement.
JOHN KING
Leamington Spa,
March 2013
Notes
1 CP Cavafy, ‘Ithaka’, in E Keely and P Sherrard, eds., Six Poets of Modern Greece, London: Thames and Hudson 1960, p. 42.
2 Haroldo Conti, ‘Tristezas de vino de la costa, o la parva muerte de la Isla Paulino’, Crisis 36 (April 1976), p. 51. In this Afterword, all translations appearing inside square brackets are by Jon Lindsay Miles.
3 Ibid, p. 57.
4 See Domingo F Sarmiento, El Carapachay, Buenos Aires: Eudeba 2011, pp. 52–53.
5 See Victoria Ocampo, Autobiografía, Vol 2: El imperio insular, Buenos Aires: Sur 1980, pp. 65–75.
6 Quoted in Rodolfo Benasso, El mundo de Haroldo Conti, Buenos Aires: Galerna 1969, p. 146.