The commentaries of Finnegans Wake define the ideological tradition of the island. The book is like a map, and history is transformed depending on the course chosen. The interpretations multiply and the Wake changes as the world changes, and no one imagines that the life of the book might cease. However, in the flow of the Liffey there is a recurrence of Jim Nolan and Anna Livia, alone on the island, before the last letter. That is the first nucleus, the myth of origin precisely as it is told by the informants (according to Boas).
In other versions, the book is the transcription of Anna Livia Plurabelle’s message. Her reading her husband’s (Nolan’s) thoughts, and speaking to him after he is dead (or asleep), the only one on the island for years, abandoned on a rock, with the red tapes and the cables and the metallic frame in the sun, whispering on the beach until the two hundred families arrive.
13
All the myths end there, and so does this report. I left the island two months ago, Boas said, and I can still hear the music of that language that flows like a river. They say there that he who hears the song of the washerwomen at the shores of the Liffey will not be able to leave. I, for my part, have not been able to resist the sweetness of Anna Livia’s voice. That is why I will be returning to the city that exists in three times at once, and to the bay where Bob Mulligan’s wife lies, and to the Museum of the Novel where Finnegans Wake is found, alone in a room, in a black glass box. I, too, will sing in Humphrey Earwicker’s tavern — drinking beer and pounding on the wooden table with my fist — a song about a one-eyed bird that flies endlessly above the island.
IV ON SHORE
1
Following the turns of the channels and the tributaries of the major waterways of the Delta that borders the city, with its islands and streams and waterlogged lands, was like looking at the chart of a lost continent. Junior had a map, and when he arrived at the Tigre he asked around and was shown the route at one of the terminals of the Inter-Islander. He hired a pilot from the station and rented a motor launch at the Rowing Club. If his calculations were correct, the Russian’s colony should be off of one of the bends of the Pajarito, before reaching the open river. They had to navigate up the Carapachay and come out along the stronger currents of the northern waterways. The further he went up the Paraná de las Palmas, the more and more secure Junior felt, as if he were crossing a border that was taking him back to the past — and somehow, strangely, bringing him closer to his daughter. After traveling for two hours, the vegetation became denser, and they passed the remains of a laboratory, indicating that they were approaching the Russian’s plant. They skirted an islet full of rushes, then a sandbank, and came out again into open waters. Up ahead, hazily in the fog, he could see higher ground, with jagged ravines and cement foundations. In the middle, elevated on stone pillars and surrounded by an iron railing, was a fortified building with broad circular windows facing the gardens and the river. A man on the dock waved his hat at them, motioning for them to moor there. He was one of the Russian’s assistants. He welcomed Junior and helped him off the motor launch, holding his arm firmly, and showed him the path up to the house. The building was in the middle of a clearing. A pebbled path crossed through a small forest of willow trees and led right up to the wire fence surrounding the house.
“Santa Marta Island, and on this side is the Biguá creek. This area has always been occupied by foreigners,” the man explained to him. He seemed friendly and obliging, and spoke with a slight accent that sounded like a speech defect. They went through the gate and climbed toward the gardens. At that moment, a tall, thin man was seen walking across the gardens toward them with his hand extended.
“I am the Russian. You are the journalist, and I must ask you to be discreet and not take any photographs. Come, sit here,” he showed him a wicker chair on the veranda that surrounded the house. “They think,” he said, “that they have disactivated her, but that is not possible, she is alive, she is a body that expands and retreats and captures what is going on. Look,” he said, “there is a faucet out there in the garden, almost at ground level, and very cool, clean, crisp water comes out of it, even in the middle of summer. It is at the foot of those hedges over there. Sometimes I imagine that I go over and lie face up on the grass, to drink. But I never go, so I keep a certain possible action alive. Do you see what I mean? An open option, that is the logic of experience, always what is possible, what is to come, a street in the future, a door in a boardinghouse by Tribunales, near the courthouse, and the strumming of a guitar. There is no such thing as an imperfection, in reality it has to do with stages, the third stage or the third area, as was foreseen. There has been a retreat, a strategic withdrawal.” “We,” the Engineer said, “have reached a point in which we are able to conceive of life as a mechanism whose most important functions are easily understood and reproduced, a mechanism that we can make run at faster or slower rhythms, and thus at a higher or lower intensity. A story is nothing more than a reproduction of the order of the world on a purely verbal scale. A replica of life, if life consisted just of words. But life does not consist just of words. Unfortunately, it is also made up of bodies or, in other words, of disease, pain, and death, as Macedonio would say.
“Physics develops so quickly,” he said all of a sudden, “that within six months all knowledge is outdated. They become hallucinations, forms that spring forth from memory. The moment you remember them, they are already lost.”
He had had a serious illness and had stopped pretending he was European, and from the moment he became a naturalized citizen everyone started thinking that he was an Austrian, Hungarian, or German who pretended he was from Argentina, and they made him out to be a Nazi physicist hiding in the Tigre, an assistant of Von Braun, a disciple of Heidelberg. “You should not try to be one thing so that people will think that you are something else, if you know what I mean. If you are an anarchist, then be an anarchist, and they will assume that you are an undercover policeman and you will never get caught. If you are who you truly are, then everyone believes you are somebody else.” He even knew quite well that it was now being said that he was really Richter, the atomic physicist who had tricked General Perón by selling him the secret to make an atom bomb in Argentina. “But no,” he said, “I am the Russian.” He had studied Richter’s personality because he was amused by the deception he had been able to pull off, “a true virtuoso job,” but he was the Russian, an Argentine inventor who made a living selling small practical devices, cheap patents of simple machines that helped improve demand in hardware and general grocery stores in small towns.
“Look at this, for example,” he said, and showed him a pocket watch. Then he opened it, wound it up, and the face became a magnetic chessboard with microscopic pieces that were reflected and amplified by a magnifying mirror on the concave glass top. “It is the first chess-playing machine designed in Argentina,” the Russian said. “In La Plata, to be precise. It uses the gears and the small clock wheels to program its moves. The hours are its memory. It has twelve options per move, and it was with this very apparatus that I defeated Larse the time he came to play in the Masters Tournament in Mar del Plata, in 1959.” He pressed a button on one of the wheels, and the clock became a clock again. “Inventing a machine is easy, as long as you can modify the parts of a previous mechanism. The possibilities of converting what already exists into something else are infinite. But I would not be able to make something out of nothing. In that respect, I am not like Richter. You cannot compare my discovery with Richter’s invention, he built an atomic plant for Perón using only words, just with the reality of his German accent. He told him he was an atomic scientist and that he had the secret to make the bomb, and Perón believed him and fell like a fool, and had underground buildings and useless labs with pipes and turbines built for him that were never used. Perón would stroll through the marvelously decorated facilities while Richter, with a strong German accent, explained his wild plans of how he would produce nuclear fission in a cold environment. He won him over with his story, he was just a poor high school physics teacher, and he was not even German, he was actually Swiss, and Perón, who spent his life surpassing everyone, who spent his time nudging and winking and saying things with double meanings, believed Richter’s fantastic story and defended it to the end. After all, though, it is the same thing, I mean, for Macedonio that was the basic principle to building the machine. The fiction of a German accent. Everything is possible, all you have to do is find the right words. When he found me, he immediately convinced me that we should start working together.