My Two Worlds Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2008 Sergio Chejfec

  Translation copyright © 2011 by Margaret B. Carson

  Originally published in Spanish as Mis dos mundos by Editorial Candaya, 2008

  Introduction copyright © 2011 by Enrique Vila-Matas

  First edition, 2011

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-49-8

  ISBN-10: 1-934824-49-6

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:

  Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  INTRODUCTION

  Enrique Vila-Matas

  (Translated by Margaret B. Carson)

  I begin as I’ll end: adrift. And I begin by wondering if novels have no choice but to narrate a story. The answer couldn’t be simpler: whether they intend to or not, they always tell a story. Because there’s not a single intelligent reader who, given something unique to read, even the most hermetic of novels, would fail to read a story into that impenetrable text. Now then, what happens if the reader is intelligent but the novelist isn’t? I suspect that in those cases a great party takes place. I remember Georges Simenon saying that it’s absolutely unnecessary for a novelist to be intelligent, quite the opposite: the less intelligent he is, the more possibilities open up to him as a novelist. He was unquestionably right, for I’ve dealt with great novelists throughout my life and none have seemed very intelligent to me, especially compared to other people I’ve known, those devoted to other arts, to business, or to the sciences. Of course there are exceptions to this rule. The great Argentine novelist, Sergio Chejfec, is one of them. But if I really think about it, Chejfec is someone intelligent for whom the word novelist is a poor fit, because he creates artifacts, narrations, books, narrated thoughts rather than novels. My Two Worlds, for instance, is above all a book that reminds us that there are novels with stories, but there are also not-so-orthodox novels—Chejfec’s are in this camp—though these may also contain stories. The story in My Two Worlds isn’t easy to summarize because—as is true for all his novels—what’s important seems merely an excuse to highlight the dramatic role of the incidental. And so in My Two Worlds the narrator’s hesitant search makes us ultimately see how the path in the story is etched with disappointment: the walk creates a certain state of mind in the narrator that alternates between fear, confusion, and uncertainty. Insecurity or perplexity can thus be seen in each new sentence, which to us seems the book’s new center of meaning (and at last, a valid interpretation of same), though this becomes diluted a few paragraphs later. The author has in part offered an explanation elsewhere, when he talks about his pleasure in seeing how far a sentence can resist, not only in technical terms, but also tonally: sentences are pushed to expand because there’s a message, while at the same time they’re constrained by a formula, the equation of the sentence. Chejfec is fond of approaching that limit, of making his sentences elastic, not to the point of their incomprehensibility, but yes, of testing that limit to see if it indeed exists. Perhaps that’s why he sometimes leaves sentences unfinished, lengthy sentences whose thread is seemingly lost and cannot close. In this way, Chejfec may be showing us that an author not only tells one or several stories, but also struggles or negotiates with the limits imposed by language.

  As the writer of this prologue, I face a similar problem in compressing the immense and ever-expanding material of this book. But if I had to summarize it in some way, I’d say we have the story of a writer on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, and that, probably because of that crucial date, he wants to turn into a non-writer. We’ll learn this close to the end, though it’s an illusion that gives shape to the story. Not the illusion of writing badly (the impossible dream of the avant-garde), but rather the illusion that the story will disappear into its impossibility, or worse, into its uselessness. In the end, not writing and resigning yourself to an absurd life may be nearly the same as writing and not resigning yourself to anything.

  The writer is visiting a city in the south of Brazil, and he decides to walk through its most emblematic park. The long walk, the stroll, takes up almost the entire book. In the park he comes across elements that he discovers are links to his own past, his condition, his identity. The act of describing nature within an enclosed space animates this discreet traveler, who sees in the half-abandoned park (and in the swan boats, the captive birds, the fish and turtles) signs of his own incomplete condition, a cosmic proof that no authenticity is possible.

  While the narrator (whose two worlds seem muddled, just as the book at times mixes the essayistic with the narrative) hesitates and has doubts about what he’s narrating or, rather, wonders how to do it, Chejfec, in essence, never wonders about it. What’s more, he’s one of those contemporary writers who have mastered, with utmost skill, both the art of digression and the art of narration. On first reading Chejfec, we recall many admired authors, but at a later moment—a more solid and lasting one—we realize that he resembles no one, and that he has chosen an unusual and quite distinctive path, one which reveals itself slowly because of the demanding and very personal searches the author himself carries out in his narrative.

  The pages of this book remind me that from time to time over the course of my life I’ve come across an intelligent novelist or two. And when I do, I’m often told that it’s a shame none of his works have been adapted for film. Surely, this kind of writer—Chejfec appears to be one of them—belongs to a class, still unique today, that must have first come into existence when Marcel Proust showed his contempt for the reductive novel by calling it a cinematographic parade of things. I’ve always thought that kind of a parade—apart from being a simplistic translation of the narrator’s interior life—has a pernicious effect; it prevents us from immersing ourselves in a fragment of a story—or in a detail of a fragment of that story—and from devoting ourselves at last to being adrift, joyful at discovering, in the insecure condition of the story of a story, our own world—in reality stripped bare (why fool ourselves) of meaning.

  I modestly suggest that Chejfec be included among those novelists who belong to the noblest line of literature in Spanish, more precisely in South America (though Chejfec has the air of being the king of stateless prose), and who for some time now have endeavored to translate their interior life to the genre of narrated thought, a genre that, though little-known, has at least escaped with essayistic intelligence from the narrow confines of the great novelists who display an obtuse leaning toward the cinematographic parade of things. And in passing I suggest that we think of My Two Worlds as a narrative that attempts both to convey an experience of perception and to show, with fictitious indolence, the degree to which a writer of great intelligence can give readers some relief from the everyday and increase their happiness with the sudden realization that they’ve lucked upon a book that deeply believes that in art, and especially in literature, only those who jump into the unfamiliar matter. Because one doesn’t discover new lands unless one has first managed to lose sight of all shores, and for a long time.

  I’d prefer not to, but if I had to assign this book to a specific niche within contemporary letters, I’d place it among the liveliest and most decidedly contemporary of novels. I’d locate My Two Worlds among the rarae aves of recent fiction, among those books still capable of blazing new paths on the perilous trajectory of the modern novel. Its antecedents may be European authors, but also a certain Latin American narrative as well—let’s say wide-awake and cerebral—that doesn’t quite fit the literary latinoamericanismo currently in vogue. Chejfec, in My Two Worlds, joins those
writers who have no fear of the open sea, and who get along well with readers who have surely, and for some time, been longing to abandon themselves to unstable territories, to get lost in the dramatic realm of the incidental, in that which seems unimportant, “in that which is generally not noted, that which escapes notice, that which has no importance, that which happens when nothing happens, other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds,” as Georges Perec would say.

  In this sense, or maybe in another—and here I’d like to record my absurd and perhaps entirely useless desire to be neutral about this novel, which I so deeply admire—My Two Worlds still seems to me, months after having read it for the first time, the most complete walk I’ve taken through the ever-incomplete geography of the dramatic realm of the incidental, through the solitary geography of our fissures, through the deep geography of the hollows that are often doors to the unknown, to forgotten places that ignite our imagination and our driftlessness and even our birthday celebrations, which sometimes—on those rare occasions when evening falls in a special way—do not even require that there have been a time lived. Twilight is enough.

  MY

  TWO

  WORLDS

  Only a few days are left before another birthday, and if I’ve decided to begin this way it’s because two friends, through their books, made me see that these days can be a cause to reflect, to make excuses, or to justify the years lived. The idea occurred to me in Brazil, while I was visiting a city in the south for two days. I couldn’t really understand why I’d agreed to go there, not knowing anyone and having almost no idea about the place. It was afternoon, it was hot, and I’d been walking around looking for a park about which I had almost no information, except its somewhat musical name, which by my criterion made it promising, and the fact it was the biggest green space on the map of the city. I thought it impossible for a park that large not to be good. For me parks are good when first of all, they’re not impeccable, and when solitude has appropriated them in such a way that solitude itself becomes an emblem, a defining trait for walkers, sporadic at best, who in my opinion should be irrevocably lost or absorbed in thought, and a bit confused, too, as when one walks through a space that’s at once alien and familiar. I don’t know if I should call them abandoned places; what I mean is relegated areas, where the surroundings are suspended for the moment and one can imagine being in any park, anywhere, even at the antipodes. A place that’s cast off, indistinct, or better yet, a place where a person, moved by who knows what kind of distractions, withdraws, turns into a nobody, and ends up being vague.

  The day before I had attended a literary conference, and when it was over I walked through the plaza where the local book fair had been set up, in one of the city’s historic districts, I assumed, though many relics or landmarks now seemed definitively missing. People were walking slowly, crowding the thoroughfare because of their numbers. I must have been the only solitary walker that day, which luckily no one found strange, because families, groups of friends, or couples went on with their business as I strolled about. Earlier, as I was waiting in an empty room for the conference to begin, I’d read in the newspaper that every year, when the book fair takes place, the regular artisans move their stalls and tables to the adjacent streets. I don’t know why that information seemed important to me, and even more, why it stayed etched in my mind. (The following day, a few blocks from the plaza, I discovered the artisans’ temporary location, where they’d organized themselves by craft, as if protecting themselves from some danger.) Later, at the end of the panel, I didn’t ask any questions; I was, in fact, the first to leave the room, in search of a quick exit to the street. I rode down a glass elevator that looked onto a spacious interior garden, and when I finally left the convention hall, which seemed to have once been a government palace, I had no choice but to join the steady stream of people, like a fugitive trying to blend in.

  The layout of that plaza was, as I said, in the old style: a rectangular block with two diagonal and two perpendicular lines that meet at the center, where there’s a statue. Despite such a simple design, all the same the moment soon arrived when I felt lost, probably because of the multitudes, to which you’d have to add the dense foliage and the nighttime shadows. I found myself stationed from time to time in front of the same booths; in reality there were only a few offering any titles that aroused my curiosity, which was weak in any case, and only after peering at the tables between the shoulders of an army of onlookers did I realize that I’d already been there, and had of course stopped in front of the same books. But though I sensed a few areas remained to be covered, I wasn’t sure which ones I’d already visited. And so I joined the throngs once more and let myself be carried by the flow. I remember that as I walked, the repetition of the strands of incandescent lights made me feel drowsy, just as in some movies. At the rear of the plaza, keeping in mind the orientation of the central statue, and on a short passageway that led to several public buildings, the food stands for the book fair had been set up, and these were also mobbed. Depending on the breeze, the odors from the burners, generally of fried foods or rancid oil, wafted over; at times when I raised my eyes I could see columns of smoke billowing through the strands of lights and the fringed edges of the awnings. Anyhow. I should say that it was this sensation of being hemmed in by the incessant swarm of people that led me to think of the existence of a park I’d like to visit. It would be just compensation, I thought.

  One consults the map of the first city that comes to mind and everything seems accessible: one needs only to obey the street plan. But on the afternoon I’ve been talking about, reality, as is almost always the case, turned out to be different. The retaining walls of the elevated streets, the access roads and overpasses, the ramps for pedestrians or those exclusively for cars—all of them prevented me, at each moment and in different ways, from leaving behind the point I’d chosen downtown for the sole purpose of continuing onward to the park. On the other hand, if I tried to take the long way around, I’d risk getting lost or, even worse, would spend the rest of the day meandering through indistinguishable and unavoidably sad streets; for if the map had proved useless in showing me the shortest way, it was absurd to follow it in taking a longer one.

  On one side I had the grounds of a gigantic hospital, like those of years ago, with enormous pavilions and endless gardens. An overpass rose before me, with ramps and streets that didn’t seem to go anywhere in particular. And on the other side, an express lane cut the grid of the streets in two. I was, nevertheless, alone in my indecisiveness in this part of the world, because the rest of the people were coming and going, sure of their direction and moving with remarkable ease. I noticed that the more I looked at the map, the less I understood it; what’s more, because my eyesight is poor and my glasses aren’t strong enough, I must have looked pathetic, since I had to put the map practically against my face in order to see it above my eyeglasses. Every now and then I raised my eyes to the street, hoping to find some point or street sign that would orient me, but I immediately understood that the effort was in vain and I looked down again, spending more valuable time trying to find myself once more on the map. I was like this for a good while. I realized that my sense of direction, which had always been a secret source of pride, and was, in fact, almost the only thing I could brag about, had suddenly abandoned me as well.

  And curiously, due perhaps to the never-ending flow of people at my side, no one stopped to offer me any help or to ask if things were all right. I felt invisible, as if I had hidden my face and didn’t want to talk to anyone. Then someone went, “Psst,” toward where I was standing. It was a street vendor who had to pick up a heavy load and put it in a two-wheeled cart. I thought he was calling me and I looked at him, half-curious and half-hopeful: he probably took pity on me and was waving me over because he didn’t want to leave his merchandise unattended. But it turned out he was calling someone else, a young man passing behind me, whose help he wanted to lift the load. So you have to ask for help,
I thought . . . I began to imagine the aerial view of that part of the city, probably similar to what was depicted on the map, my silhouette motionless while people and cars continually passed beside me. I don’t know why, but that physical image of my solitude or helplessness made me lose patience. Moved by an unjustifiable impulse, I began to rotate the map in order to see it from another angle, and even turned it like a set of handlebars; maybe that would clear things up, I thought. The aerial observer was circling, I supposed, and that’s why the map revolved as it did.

  On my walk at the book fair the night before, I only began to feel alarmed when I found myself, for the ninth or tenth time, in front of the booth for the local historical society. But what worried me wasn’t that on each new turn I felt the same innocence as I had initially, that is, an anxiety to discover an important book, one that perhaps I’d been dreaming of for years without realizing it, and that would allow me entrée to a rather difficult, half-guarded store of knowledge; no, what alarmed me instead was that the repetition I had yielded to no longer exasperated me. Even when I looked upward at the sky, seeking to find something simple and clear to dispel my confusion, I discovered, for the most part, columns of smoke that were rising quickly from the grills, and hardly anything else, nothing that could be found consoling or inspirational. Another booth that had by now become rather familiar to me belonged to the publishers’ association, as had one for a bookstore that offered an assortment of popular titles. I wanted to forget the reason I came to the city, and was even tempted by the idea of forgetting my own name and trying to be someone else, someone new.

  That touched off a long train of thought not worth summarizing. I’ll only say that being someone else meant not so much a new beginning or a new personality, but rather a new world, I mean, that reality and all people in it would lose or cast aside their memory and admit me as a previously unknown member, a recent arrival, or as someone with no ostensible ties to the past. Later on, as I was saying, when the crowds began to tire me, I decided to get a map of the city as soon as I could, to see if it would confirm the existence of that great park, one that was fairly large and that would measure up to my expectations.