Zama Read online
ANTONIO DI BENEDETTO (1922–1986) was born in Mendoza, Argentina. He began his career as a journalist, writing for the Mendoza paper Los Andes. In 1953 he published his first book, a collection of short stories titled Mundo animal. Zama was his first novel; it was followed by El silenciero, Los suicidas, and Sombras, nada más . . . Over the course of his career he received numerous honors, including a 1975 Guggenheim Fellowship and decorations from the French and Italian governments, and he earned the admiration of the likes of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Roberto Bolaño. In 1976, Di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured by Argentina’s military dictatorship; after his release in 1977 he went into exile in Spain. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1984 and died less than two years later.
ESTHER ALLEN is an essayist and translator from Spanish and French. Among her translations are Horacio Verbitsky’s The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior, José Martí: Selected Writings, and José Manuel Prieto’s Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia. The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded her two translation fellowships, one of them for Zama; the French government has named her a Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Her current project is a biography of José Martí. She teaches at City University of New York’s Graduate Center and at Baruch College.
ZAMA
ANTONIO DI BENEDETTO
Translated from the Spanish by
ESTHER ALLEN
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
This translation was made possible by a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and a translation fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Travel for research in Argentina was funded by the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York. The translator is deeply grateful to all three institutions for their support.
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 2000 by Lucy Di Benedetto
Copyright © 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2009 by Adriana Hidalgo editora, S.A.
Translation and preface copyright © 2016 by Esther Allen
All rights reserved.
Cover photograph: Guido Boggiani, Puerto Casado—Puerto Celina, Paraguay, c. 1896–1901
Cover design: Katy Homans
This translation is published within the framework of Sur Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship of the Argentine Republic.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Di Benedetto, Antonio, 1922–1986.
[Zama. English]
Zama / by Antonio Di Benedetto ; translation and introduction by Esther Allen.
pages cm — (New York Review Books Classics)
I. Allen, Esther, 1962– translator. II. Title.
PQ7797.B4343Z313 2015
863'.64—dc23
2014030362
ISBN 978-1-59017-735-8
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or
write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Preface
ZAMA
1790
1794
1799
A Note on the Cover Art
PREFACE
ON DECEMBER 23, 1849, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, arrested and imprisoned seven months earlier, stood in the heart of St. Petersburg with other members of the Petrashevsky Circle while an officer read out a sentence condemning them all to death by firing squad. For five minutes, the twenty-eight-year-old Dostoyevsky knew his life was about to end. The first three men were tied to stakes, guns lowered in their faces; the future author of Crime and Punishment was in the next group. Just as the shots were about to be fired, an aide-de-camp arrived at a gallop, bearing a stay of execution from the tsar that commuted the group’s sentence to exile and hard labor in Siberia. Many a biographer has linked that moment to themes and passages in the subsequent works. “The memory of this false execution,” observes Henri Troyat, “remained alive in Dostoyevsky’s writing.”
Antonio Di Benedetto, a writer so influenced he would say he was “invented” by Dostoyevsky, also heard his own execution read out and knew he was about to die. For eighteen months during Argentina’s Dirty War, from March 24, 1976 to September 3, 1977, he was imprisoned, tortured, and, on four occasions, taken from his cell and placed before a firing squad. For the Di Benedetto biographer, however, the impact of the mock executions on the literary work requires a more complex calculation. Di Benedetto faced the firing squads two decades after writing Zama, his first novel and third book, which in its growing and inexorable dread, its sense that the present results not only from the past but also from the future, seems uncannily imbued with what its author would live through twenty years later.
•
Antonio Di Benedetto was born on the Day of the Dead, a fact he liked to underscore. He grew up in Mendoza, a city of fifty thousand inhabitants at the base of the Andes in an area of west-central Argentina that by 1922, the year of his birth, was already Latin America’s foremost wine-growing region, famous especially for its Malbecs. His parents were both of Italian descent, his father born in Mendoza, his mother in Brazil. His childhood was marked by the sudden and unexplained death of his father, a former soldier turned oenologist, in 1933. The following year, at the age of twelve, Di Benedetto published his first short story, “Soliloquy of a Boy Prince,” in a student newspaper. He completed a university degree and began studying law but never finished; he was already publishing regularly as a journalist by the time he was eighteen. In 1949 he became the editor of the arts and letters section of Los Andes, a Mendoza newspaper.
The nameless protagonist of a story in his first book, Mundo animal (1953), muses “Maybe everything depends . . . on where you’re born, and the inadequacy of the destiny that follows from that. I don’t know. Maybe I should have been born somewhere else, maybe not. Maybe I shouldn’t have been born in this era. I don’t mean I should have been born during the Middle Ages or the same year as Dostoyevsky. No. Maybe I should have been born in the twenty-first century, or the twenty-second.” However out of place the author of these words felt in space and in time, he had by the time he wrote them made a crucial decision: to remain in the town where he was born and keep a deliberate distance from the cultural and political power center of Buenos Aires. It was a decision he would hold to until history intervened to take the matter out of his hands, and it was as peculiar a stance for a person of literary ambition in Argentina as it would have been for a nineteenth-century Russian writer to stay away from St. Petersburg or for a French writer to opt not to move to Paris.
Di Benedetto—along with a few other Argentines of his generation, such as Juan José Saer and Daniel Moyano—was a regionalist whose work did not seek to circumnavigate world literature, as Jorge Luis Borges and the coterie of cosmopolitan littérateurs in the nation’s capital were doing, but delved instead into the particular reality, past and present, of specific, primarily Latin American places. Most of Zama takes place in and around Asunción, now the capital of Paraguay, but for the eponymous main character of the novel, which is set during the last decade of the eighteenth century, a backwater of the Spanish Empire. Asunción lies well over a thousand miles to the northeast of Di Benedetto’s hometown, and Mendoza seems to be the hometown of the novel’s protagonist, as well—the place where Zama’s wife, Marta, lives with their children and his mother, “half the length of two countries and all the width of th
e second” away from him.
Without much claim to cultural prestige or international standing, Asunción suited Di Benedetto’s regionalist impulse, while an odd twist of the city’s origins suited the novel’s enigmatic temporality. In 1537, a group of Spanish soldiers sent out from the first settlement at Buenos Aires chose a bend in the Paraguay River where they were given a generous welcome by the local Guarani as the place to establish a fort. Asunción, which grew up around that fort, would become known as the Mother of Cities; expeditions sent out from it founded a number of other cities in the region, including, curiously enough, Buenos Aires itself, initially settled in 1536, then abandoned, then refounded in 1580—this time successfully—by a group sent out from Asunción consisting of ten Spaniards and fifty Paraguayan mestizos. The mestizos were the result of intermarriage among Guarani women and the conquistadors, who so habitually kept harems of five or six native wives that by the late sixteenth century the local Catholic authorities complained to the Spanish king that Asunción had become a veritable “Mohammedan paradise.”
When we meet him in 1790, Don Diego de Zama is a highly placed administrator chafing against his posting to a provincial outpost founded a quarter millennium earlier, which reached the apogee of its power at the end of the sixteenth century and is now, two centuries later, far outstripped by Buenos Aires—one of several imperial power centers Zama yearns to be transferred to. Zama is a criollo, an americano—a Creole of unmixed Spanish blood born in the Americas—and is therefore an anomaly in the bureaucracy of the Spanish Empire, whose administrators were almost invariably born and educated in the metropolitan homeland, then sent across the Atlantic to serve. Those men’s children were ineligible for service even if well-educated and of full Spanish blood; the risk that those born in the colonies might identify more with the conquered than with the conquerors was too great.
As it turned out, this fear was well-founded. It was the Creoles who rose up across South America to gain their independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century—a movement that Benedict Anderson, in his landmark 1983 study Imagined Communities, sees as a key to the emergence of nationalism across the globe. “Why was it precisely creole communities that developed so early conceptions of their nation-ness—well before most of Europe?” Anderson wonders. “Why did such colonial provinces, usually containing large, oppressed, non-Spanish-speaking populations, produce creoles who consciously redefined these populations as fellow-nationals?” In Di Benedetto’s novel, this revolutionary merging of Creoles, mestizos, former slaves, and natives into a new consciousness of shared nationhood belongs to a near future of which Zama, a man lost in time, never has the faintest inkling.
Zama belongs to no community or class of people. His status in the imperial bureaucracy alienates him from the americanos like himself and makes him an object of suspicion for the imperial over-lords with whom he works. His strident eschewal of relations with women of Indian or African extraction further isolates him, putting him distinctly at odds with his colleagues and the history of the city he’s marooned in. His hypocritically vociferous rejection of interracial fornication might appear to align him with a fledgling nation far to the north that had gained its independence from the British Empire just fourteen years before the novel begins. But the United States of America occupies no place whatsoever in Don Diego de Zama’s mental geography.
Though its three, precisely dated sections—and the long, echoing silences between them—span a decade of thwarted waiting, the novel was written at breakneck speed. Di Benedetto consecrated an eighteen-day vacation from his job at Los Andes to it and when that didn’t give him enough time, he went on writing at his desk in the newspaper offices every morning for seven or eight days until it was done. The writing went so quickly because Di Benedetto had previously devoted many months to research. Saer, one of its greatest admirers, has rightly described Zama as a deliberate refutation of the very idea of the historical novel. Even so, it is based on extensive investigation.
One primary source was a 1952 biography by Efraín U. Bischoff of Miguel Gregorio de Zamalloa (1753–1819). Like Zama, Zamalloa was an americano. In the waning decades of Spain’s empire in the Southern Cone, Zamalloa, too, became a powerful figure in the imperial bureaucracy. After receiving a doctorate in 1776 from the Universidad de Córdoba in central Argentina, Zamalloa served as Corregidor—magistrate or chief justice—for the region of Chichas in present-day Bolivia. Then, in 1785, he was assigned to a lesser position in Asunción and had to remain there unhappily for a long while until his transfer to Montevideo finally came through in 1799— clearly the period of his life that fired Di Benedetto’s imagination. Zamalloa’s subsequent fate couldn’t have been more different from Zama’s; in 1811, the year after Argentina’s war of independence from Spain was launched, Zamalloa became the rector of the Universidad de Córdoba and remained in that post until his death.
Another source (as Malva Filer demonstrated in a 1982 study) was the Descripción é historia del Paraguay y del Río de la Plata and other works by the Spanish naturalist and military officer Félix de Azara who traveled in the region from 1781 to 1801. To write the novel, Di Benedetto told an interviewer, he needed to know “the country’s topography, hydrography, fauna, winds, trees, and grasses, the indigenous families and colonial society, medicines, beliefs, minerals, architecture, weapons, Guarani, the language of the Indians, domestic habits, fiestas, the map of the principal city, the towns, rural labor and crime.” The textual sources were crucial because Di Benedetto didn’t visit Asunción in the flesh until a decade and a half after the novel was published.
•
A Buenos Aires publisher, Doble P, brought out the first edition of Zama in 1956. It attracted few readers but received several admiring reviews, including one in the prestigious and highly influential literary magazine Sur. Di Benedetto and his work were not unknown in Buenos Aires literary circles. Borges had been on the jury of the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (a writers’ organization known by the evocative acronym SADE) that gave a prize to Mundo animal, and Borges would later express support for Di Benedetto’s work in brief notices and blurbs. Di Benedetto visited the capital on occasion, knew many of the writers there, and became the Mendoza correspondent for the Buenos Aires daily La Prensa the year Zama was published. Still, his self-imposed exile in Mendoza cost him, and dearly.
Take, for example, the remarkable 1,664-page tome titled simply Borges, which staggered the Argentine literary world when it came out in 2009. Borges compiles half a century of journal entries by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges’s closest friend and writing partner, into an extraordinary record of a lifelong conversation between two great writers. The index of this documentary masterpiece of twentieth-century literature stretches over 130 pages and lists thousands of people, writers and non-writers, famous and obscure, loved and loathed, admired and reviled, alive and dead, from every place and time. The name Antonio Di Benedetto simply doesn’t appear. He wasn’t part of the conversation.
To escape the binary of province versus capital that dominated Argentine cultural life, Di Benedetto began traveling extensively, especially after 1960, when he spent a year in Paris on a grant from the French government and also visited England and Italy. He covered the Bolivian revolution that brought René Barrientos to power in 1964, and at the invitation of the U.S. State Department, spent several months in the United States the following year. Di Benedetto was seated in the audience during the 1966 Academy Awards when The Sound of Music picked up the Oscar for Best Picture. Himself the author of two screenplays, Di Benedetto attended film festivals in Cannes, Berlin—where he interviewed Alain Robbe-Grillet—and San Sebastián. He visited Israel, Greece, and Morocco, and took his mother on a trip to her native Brazil, visiting Paraguay for the first time on the way home. He also published two more novels, El silenciero (1964) and Los suicidas (1969). Neither shares plot points or characters with Zama, but the three books are connected by strong thematic threads and ha
ve been published together in a single volume under the title La trilogía de la espera (The Trilogy of Expectation).
Perhaps Di Benedetto imagined he could leapfrog Buenos Aires, going directly from Mendoza into an international literary career. Some suggestion of this is present as early as Declinación y ángel / Decline and Angel, a curious bilingual edition published in 1958 by Mendoza’s public library. The intent behind the inclusion of English translations, as the jacket copy explains, was to make the slim paperback a missive out into the world beyond Spanish. It was a good idea, but one ahead of its time; Borges would not see the first volume of his work in English translation until 1962. And the execution was problematic. The translator—her name given simply as “Ana” on the title page—was equipped for her daunting task with a bilingual dictionary and an at best intermediate grasp of English. If Di Benedetto presented the non-Spanish speakers he met in the course of his travels with copies of this slim volume, it can’t have served him well.
The ambition for international recognition remained. “I’ve traveled,” he told an interviewer, “but I’d prefer for my books to travel more than me.” He had some fulfillment of his wish when Zama was published in 1967 in a German translation by Maria Brunswig de Bamberg under the title Und Zama wartet. In Germany, the book was a critical success—and sold well, too.
Horacio Verbitsky, a left-wing investigative journalist associated with the Peronist guerrilla group known as the Montoneros, spent a few months working alongside Di Benedetto in Mendoza in the early 1970s. Verbitsky and others who knew Di Benedetto during that period of rising political ferment remember him as quiet, hardworking, socially reserved, and politically conservative. Why, in March 1976, only a few hours after the military coup that brought the generals who launched Argentina’s Dirty War into power, the new government decided to arrest him, and then to imprison him, torture him, and subject him to four mock executions over the course of the next eighteen months—that question would remain a mystery to Di Benedetto and to those who’ve subsequently investigated it. It was a historia de faldas, some have whispered, conjecturing that a romantic rival with political clout used this drastic means to get him out of the way. Others maintain that Di Benedetto was being punished for his journalistic ethics, his insistence on reporting the facts of the stories he covered rather than reshaping them to suit the generals’ purposes.