locked my door in his face, trembling with rage. I have the impression that he was on the other side of the door for a long time, stunned, without managing to move, hazily remembering that he’d argued with someone, with whom, about what . . .
We missed Verónica, who stayed in the country. She alone could save us from the infinite, penniless (there was never money in the house) boredom, before the start of classes. We traveled all around the city on foot, often even reaching the nearby hills or the open country. On afternoons that were beginning to grow shorter, wandering through a forest or field where urbanization projects were plotting the courses of future streets or along the slopes of a hill, we discussed every conceivable topic. You said that men were a burden, that you would never get married, that all of my mother’s insinuations and anxieties produced in you the opposite effect of what she wanted. Your entrance into the University was settled and you announced that you were going to make a living teaching. However poorly they paid. You didn’t need much to live. I mentioned that I hadn’t thought about getting married either. Perhaps we could live together; although we might not earn much, two incomes would be combined. We would have to set aside a monthly fund for travel, of course. You found that the travel fund wasn’t a bad idea. I wasn’t wrong. Although one might earn more than the other, you more than I, the money would be shared and we would use the travel fund equally. “Or differently. If one wants to travel and the other doesn’t . . .” Differently. Independence would be fundamental; a firm agreement; no one would try to impose rules, set curfews, rituals of any kind. Questions would be prohibited. We were going to undermine the order my mother sought to establish, otherwise unsuccessfully, despite her futile complaints. We would carry the refusal of that order to its ultimate consequences. “Don’t you think?” Were you entirely sure? You would say yes, of course. “Wonderful!” I shouted, raising my arms, elated. The night came too soon, the cold wind of the mountains, and you suggested going back. Hunger was nagging at us. We imagined in advance a disappointing alphabet soup or a plate of spinach; at that time, a fried egg over spinach would have been quite an extravagance.
Translated by Lisa Boscov-Ellen
*
FROM EL MUERTE DE MONTAIGNE
[A NOVEL]
Michel de Montaigne, incidentally, was a marvelous reader. In the Latin American world there are only three or four writers who read, who connect with the history of literature, who converse with the dead (to quote don Francisco de Quevedo), in a comparable manner, akin to his. I think of Jorge Luis Borges, of the Brazilian Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, of Alfonso Reyes. I think of them and their origin, their relatives, more numerous than one would think, of their progeny. I don’t know which Spaniards we might cite: Cervantes, Quevedo, Gracián, Azorín, José Ortega y Gasset? In my adolescence and in my early adulthood, as some people know, I read Azorín with delight, whose short works quoted Montaigne once in a while. Brevity, by the way, was an intention or a weakness to which both writers confessed. Later I abandoned the reading of Azorín in a foolish, probably sectarian way. And now I come to the conclusion that there was an aesthetic itch in his prose, an affectation, a verbal coquetry, which wears thin over time. Even in Borges, suddenly a similar coquetry appears from somewhere. Not, on the contrary, in Alfonso Reyes. One could argue that Alfonso Reyes is the strongest prose writer of all, but this, perhaps, is an abuse on my part. Regarding the writing of the Lord of the Mountain, we might say that it’s an astonishingly natural, playful writing, of unparalleled rhythm, predisposed to somewhat disjointed digressions, fragmented almost by definition. Suddenly, without saying “heads up!” he inserts a note that’s crude, dissonant, sharp. In this respect, Montaigne is less formal, less cautious, than any of the writers I’ve referenced above. Furthermore, he frequently introduces dissonance, sets up the effect of surprise, through a quotation. Surreptitiously. As though an indiscreet muse might have whispered something in his ear. For example, he reminds us that Horace, one of his favorite Latin poets, raises the following question: does lack of literacy make one’s member less hard? Interesting question, which has a certain and definitive answer. In the opera by Dimitri Shostakovich, Lady Macbeth, the great provincial lady, in love with a worker at her husband’s factory, is, without knowing it, proof of what Horace suggests. The worker was less literate, but his manly attributes, as Montaigne would say, were more compelling.
Judging from my own journey through the essays, which often repeat themselves, which tend to relapse, Montaigne’s preferred readings are more or less known. Among essayists, ethicists, historians, in a prominent place, in the front row, are Plutarch and Seneca. Austerity and stoicism from Seneca; from Plutarch, the power of his depictions, sentences sculpted with a chisel. A language without fat, without appendages, of stainless steel. Successive and fragmentary writers, who one can start reading from any point. He didn’t feel the same identification with or the same affection for Ciceronian discourse. He had the impression that Cicero was bombastic, full of himself, and that his great verbal jabs usually fell a little wide of the mark. He loved, however, Horace’s concise, sharp verse, and deep prolonged harmonies, and he felt dazzled by Virgil’s lyric tirades. We, ignorant, read the Virgilian strophes cited by Montaigne, those marvelous strophes, and are left flabbergasted. He prefers the Georgics, and suggests that in certain passages of the Aeneid the author neglected to take it up a notch. He uses an ancient word, pigne, which I don’t find in my dictionaries, but the pignon is a cogwheel that serves to move another wheel. In short, another turn of the cogwheel, of the pigne or the pignon, valid advice for us all.
I have already said something about the literary succession of Michel de Montaigne and now I’m in a position to add some more detail, some detail that is more than a detail. Montaigne had a sense of nature, of the natural, which touched many things, which influenced his way of being, his style, his way of composing essays and even his manner of writing essays and well-structured, meticulously composed non-literary texts. He maintains somewhere that he is a “naturalist,” before that word was invented to apply to men of science dedicated to the study of the natural sciences. That said, what could be defined, essentially, as love for nature, respect for the natural, often leads our figure to express himself bluntly, with minimal affectation. His literary heirs, abundant, diverse, present in the most unexpected areas, did not always understand this aspect of Montaigne’s prose, which sometimes stemmed directly from the Latin and Greek classics, but which also related, in another way, by other means, to the rural world around him. We have already seen, for example, that when Montaigne criticizes the know-it-alls, the idolaters of knowledge, among whom, in his completely naïve opinion, figured Pierre Eyquem, his father, he references Horace without major bias, who pondered whether by being less literate a person would have a more flaccid member. In this respect, Azorín, fussy, skittish, lean in body and soul, wouldn’t follow the master in any way. Gustave Flaubert, who kept his essays as bedside reading, probably so. Guy de Maupassant, his spiritual—and perhaps corporeal (as some academic gossips suggest)—son as well. André Gide—elegant, aloof, modern, and classic—less so, but for different reasons than Azorín, given that his relationship with, let’s say, the male member, his awareness in that regard, his point of view, were different.
The side that’s dirty, mischievous, sensual, provocative, in the Lord of the Mountain’s prose appears in many of his anecdotes. The essays consist of interspersed, interwoven reflections and anecdotes, which emerge from the ardor of writing and which come, in many cases, from the personal memory of the author, and in others, from his favorite books, from the library on the third floor of his tower. He tells a story—I don’t know now whether regarding inebriation or some other matter—that took place in his region some years ago. A fairly young widow, a peasant, rural, with generous curves, went to a party in the countryside. She tried wines from the new harvest, she became quite animated, and on the way back she fell asleep under some bushes. She didn’t remember much the following day, but after a few weeks she realized that she was pregnant. We assume that she was spread out at the edge of the path and that her skirts, rumpled, hiked
