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  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  Aimé Félix Tschiffely was one of those Europeans—Swiss by birth, English by choice—who came to Argentina to look for adventure or to flee from the continent at war, or for both reasons. Shortly after he arrived, he met up with his brother in a town on the Pampas in the province of Buenos Aires, then landed a position as an instructor at St. George’s, but adventure still eluded him. As an ersatz educator, he felt asphyxiated. Octavio Peró, from La Nación newspaper, put him in touch with Emilio Solanet, the Criollo horses breeder who proposed creating a registered trademark, Argentinean and successful, out of that weary breed, so devalued in comparison to the “purebreds.” A quid pro quo: Tschiffely would enjoy his quota of exotic adventures if he managed to ride from Buenos Aires to Washington, DC, with Mancha and Gato, two of Solanet’s Criollo horses, and Solanet in turn will have lent his business a flourish of the epic. They left on April 23, 1925. They spent the first night in a monastery in an Irish community near Luján, not knowing at the time that the horses would return precisely to that town after they were dead, this second time to live through contretemps in their taxidermied versions. In Tschiffely’s opinion, and in keeping with the complementary logic that underlies so many paternal gazes, Gato was mild-mannered, timid, keen, and tame, whereas Mancha was protective, extroverted, dominant, and alert. A two-year journey, an endless number of adventures and perils. They arrived in New York and Washington D.C. as heroes. Medals, conferences, photos, journalists, official receptions. The two horses and the Swiss-Englishman dressed up as a gaucho, all three with furnishings and trappings donated by Argentinean collectors. An epic of sentimental proportions that counteracted the speed of the automobile and the transformations of modernity. From that journey there remained, among other things, Tschiffely’s tale with a preface by Cunningham Graham, the taxidermied horses in the Udaondo Museum, a portrait of the horses by Luis Cordiviola, a great business deal for Solanet and his heirs, a collection of little dolls of Mancha and Gato in miniature that an Englishwoman with teary eyes ordered from the company Julip Horses, a series of horrific monuments in three Argentinean cities, and a brand of Cordovan alfajores.

  (After Aimé Tschiffely, The Tale of Two Horses: A 10,000 Mile Journey as Told by the Horses Equestrian Travel Classics, The Long Riders’ Guild Press, September 2001.)

  • • •

  She places her hand on Gato’s leg, palpates it as if she were one of those large animal vets she once saw on the television station Canal Rural. These horses definitely have all their bones, she concludes, that desperate man invented that story about the candelabras to get out of a bind, to change the subject. Was it also a lie that they were in Madison Square Garden? Still holding onto the horse’s leg she transports herself, like an indigenous psychic, to the bar that was a few blocks from the stadium, her favorite refuge every time she had to be in New York City. Mara liked it because it seemed bizarrely embedded in those blocks that were otherwise set up as tourist-traps. As soon as the conference or the meeting or the summit or whatever was over, she would scurry over there and settle in for a long time at the bar, which for her functioned as a kaleidoscope: as the drinks began to take effect she would find more curiosities among the abundance of objects, pennants, good-luck charms, signed photographs, movie posters, and newspaper articles on display behind the bartender, if you could call that character a bartender. It was like sinking into an old-fashioned children’s game. Every once in a while she’d talk to somebody, or rather, listen. A women once told her that her life was being destroyed by a tattoo, something like a mermaid that started in her pubic area and continued up to the base of her throat. For years she had felt accompanied and even protected by this figure, but now, when she had fallen in love for the first time in her life, she couldn’t help but feel that her boyfriend was less with her than with the tattoo, the mermaid, especially in bed. Mara thought that actually the best sexual experiences arise from these kinds of displacements, but she didn’t say anything. Perhaps that bar functioned for her as a kind of training platform, now that she thinks about it, her first exercises in the art of remaining silent in public. Her bar companion dug deep into a detailed account of her consultations with experts who had promised to leave her without a trace of the mermaid using a wide range of methods and at various prices. That’s why she had traveled from her small town to New York City, because here she’d found a more reliable expert. She wasn’t going to pinch pennies for something like that. While the items behind the bar continued to show her new facets, connections, nuances, Mara remembers having thought that the girl should simply admit that she likes group sex, but she didn’t say that, either. She was wondering why people in the States tended to turn everything into a petty moral dilemma when the girl asked her to accompany her to the bathroom, she needed to show Mara the tattoo so she would be able to offer her verdict on the value of the mermaid. If she wasn’t able to confront the truth with a stranger and far away from her hometown, she would never confront it, she insisted, and that sentence sounded to Mara like it was a line from a dubbed movie. The bathroom was tiny. The tattooed girl spent a long time trying to pull off a very tight T-shirt kind of thing, a garment that resisted her efforts, clinging to her body. When she finally managed, Mara had to agree that the mermaid, truth be told, was much more attractive than her bar companion, but she can’t remember if this was the bit she avoided telling her.

  TWO

  THE FONDLY HELD BELIEF that one must consider the phases of the moon when deciding when to plant, not to mention doing so in coordination with a lunar eclipse, she reads, are mere superstitions. Mara is taking notes. The only thing she knows about gardening is that you shouldn’t plant during months that have the letter r, though at this point she wonders if this one thing she knows might also belong in the category of superstitions. She doesn’t care. It’s a cold morning, she has two days off, and here is this yard she will convert into a garden-laboratory. She keeps reading her gardening manual. Just like with the rhetoric manual, the only other book she brought with her on this experiment year, her intention is to follow word for word the instructions of the Boutelous. That will allow her to see how the flowers described therein grow in other latitudes, in a different century, at other temperatures. Or how they don’t grow, she couldn’t care less about results. What interests her is to witness the process, the chimerical exercise, the slight distortion that will result from fanatically following a manual written in a different era, in the other hemisphere. She lingers on pages chosen at random: for a long time now her relationship with what she reads is marked by caprice. Never again that business of swallowing whole texts that would help her understand, the next day when she was shut away in her booth, the issues being talked about, the implicit understandings, and the proper nouns that occur with the most predictable frequency. She gets up to make more tea. The walls of the house and the high ceilings hold the cold, and for a moment she is tempted to press herself against one of them, emulating a kind of insect she doesn’t know, one with sticky tentacles that stores the cold internally, as a protection against the torrid months, which will be here soon enough, she has just realized. She keeps leafing through the pages of the manual, the Treatise on flowers: wherein is explained the methods of growing ornamental garden plants. She particularly notes the names of some of the species mentioned by the two Boutelous, the book’s coauthors: Mirror of Venus, Hoary Stock, Four O’Clock Flower, Dogtooth Violet, Red Hot Cat’s Tail, Aztec Marigold, Chinese Aster, Cramp Bark, Naked Ladies. She is going to devote herself to these, not to roses or irises or all the others they also mention. What might those Boutelous have been to each other, she wonders? Brothers, father and son, cousins? And which one did the actual writing? Or did they divide up the chapters? She knows she could find out, even the answer to that last question, if she wanted, but no, better not. She prefers to imagine them sharing some undefined bond, elegant, dining formally every night, with no trace on their hand
s of having ever touched dirt or water or mud.

  • • •

  Recently, just a few days ago, she decided to start her botanical experiment sooner, right after her boss called her in for a meeting to give her news that supposedly would make her happy. Starting next week, she will be spending half the work day assisting a taxidermist they’ve finally hired to restore Mancha and Gato, like new. That’s what she said: like new. Then, in her office warmed by two electric heaters, she enthusiastically launched into a detailed description of the efforts the director has been making for years to improve the condition of those horses and other pieces and the museum in general. At some point she started going into details about Mara’s new responsibilities as an assistant and, in the final sluggish stretch, she descended into a mumbled monologue marked by something akin to pedagogical pride. Afterwards Luisa explained to her that the director of the museum had received a donation, or a grant, she didn’t remember exactly, money, in any case, to restore the horses that had been so badly damaged in the flood a couple of decades ago, in the eighties if she remembered correctly, she was very young at the time. Mara knew that promotions were compulsively given at large corporations, but she never thought that would also be the case at a provincial museum in decline. In fact, that’s why she chose a place like this, a place where nobody was obsessed with improving their position or their salary or their image or their quota or their level of English or their contacts or their skin or their education or their muscle tone or their networks or their car or their house or their speech or their efficiency or their manners or their memories or their nutrition or their words or their prosthesis or their posture. And now, suddenly, something was intervening that promised to improve not only her working conditions but also the condition of the embalmed horses in her room, those horses inexorably in decline, which she had somehow begun to grow fond of. Or something akin to fondness. She keeps staring at her future garden. She was always absolutely clear that her experiment in detachment would not be the practice of an ascetic in a tower or a fugitive in the forest: what interested her was to practice the art of remaining silent while interacting with the world. But from the beginning she was also quite clear that those others would circulate on parallel tracks, never interfering in her life, her everyday existence, and it is precisely this, the implicit interruption, that she now finds intolerable about this job as assistant, which has just been dumped her. It took her months to decide what job would best suit her experiment, months, until one day the job of museum guard appeared on the horizon. And another few months to get it, to fabricate dates, to clear up any suspicions. She goes to get a glass of cold water, ice water, that freezing cold liquid that goes directly into the middle of the forehead, to clear things up. She should really give that garden a chance; find out if for her, like for so many others, it offers some kind of answer, inspiration, or solace, the little plants, which she has no idea if they’ll grow, appeasing her rage. But she doubts it. She recalls her other manual, the one of rhetoric, and the passage that had been crucial when she started to enact her plan, initiate her gesture that would go against the grain. This, her fetishized passage, describes the impact an instant of silence and, in turn, of stillness, can have in the middle of an enthusiastic and fluent oration, one of those instants when the orator spaces out, distracted by something much more interesting or revealing or urgent than what she was talking about, something she will not mention when she takes up her speech but that will be inevitably eloquent, triggering the broadest array of hypotheses. That instant—that gesture—is what Mara was seeking by coming here, and she figured that she needed one year to fine tune it. This business of having to be somebody’s assistant, having to talk to him, deal with messages and give reports, was, at the very least, an interference. No: an interruption. No: an unforgiveable insult.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  The ambiguous expression of Huysmans’s character, Des Esseintes: a mixture of fatigue and ingenuity. Not the slightest trace of ambiguity, however, in his plan for total isolation. Reasons for his fatigue: the present day, new idolatries, new anxieties, murky conventions, stupidity, gossip, ignorance, provincialism, the city laid to waste. Leave Paris, leave Paris urgently. Leave and isolate himself. Conditions of his isolation: a modest house in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a couple of servants living upstairs, specially designed shoes for said servants so he doesn’t even need to hear their footsteps, a very select collection of paintings and books. Obsession with Gordon Pym, admiration for Baudelaire, fascination with Petronius’s absent plotline and Jan Luyken’s gloomy fantasy. The shadows, darkness, a fondness for the Devil. Rereads, re-listens to, mentally reviews episodes in his life. Nothing to do in his fortress but spend the days lost in one of those works, his favorites. But cracks in the plan for perfect isolation begin to show. He attempts a trip: his phobia of traveling. He buys a plant collection: he tires of plants. The neuroses increase, multiply, sharpen. Everything goes wrong, the cracks deepen, the plan fails. Definitive interruption. Escape followed by perfect isolation fails. They say—Sylvia Molloy says—that Latin American writers of the nineteenth century admired Huysmans but couldn’t rewrite him. In the twenty-first century someone, like a duelist, picks up the glove.

  (After J. K. Huysmans, Against the Grain.)

  • • •

  Now she finally understands those women who sweep the sidewalks in front of their houses every Sunday; their efforts are no longer unfathomable. There’s fury, anger, rage, furiously angry rage behind it. Mara moves her chair to sweep underneath, and over there also, between all the wheels on almost all the furniture in her museum room. As she sweeps she touches those pieces with her broom, raising dust, disobeying as she sweeps all the rules they explained to her the first day. She almost knocks over the bust of Carola Lorenzini with a movement of her elbow, as if the poor thing hadn’t already suffered enough from her fatal fall. She tries to dust the wheels of the snowplow, the first one that went to the South Pole, and when she approaches those wheels wrapped in chains so they could move through not only the snow but also the unknown, she feels like climbing aboard, shifting into first gear, and driving out of this room, plowing everything out of her way: exhibits, staff, visitors, stray dogs, other exhibits, thin walls, cabinets, street vendors, shop windows, street signs, more exhibits, hired help, cultural tourists, security people, suppliers, researchers, more exhibits, restorers, taxidermists, management personnel, whole collections not on display, collections on display, presidential carriages, assistants, possible donors, junk, one-of-a-kind pieces, onward and onward, flattening all of it and everything else, onward, to the Soviet steppes such tractors know so well, onward to the island of Sakhalin and who knows where else. Someone pssts to her from the door. She stops and hears someone asking her what she is doing, in a tone of voice marked by that prosody of reprobation, which only guards who belong to the category “replacements” have the right to use, a category that does not underscore, in this universe, the implied precariousness of the terms of their employment but rather other connotative lines that are much more à la page, such as nomadism, diversity, transculturalism; also, as opposed to simple guards, who spend hours sitting on their only chair, replacements circulate from room to room, as well as alternate between the front door, the boss’s office, the garden if the weather is good, the security post, even the director’s study, and in so doing, their permanently nomadic state lends them power because of its implicit cosmopolitanism and their resulting privileged access to gossip. Replacements are the divas of the guards, and they know it, and from that position this particular one asks Mara what she is doing, why she is cleaning the room today when cleaning day was yesterday. Mara stands there staring at her as if instead of listening to a weekly work schedule, she were attending a keynote address on mathematics. The information reaches her as remote, incomprehensible. She releases one of her hands that was clutching the broom tightly. She looks at her palm, her fingers. Because of the p
ressure, she thinks, she must have cut off her circulation, and this has given them a strange, unrecognizable shape and color; her hand reminds her of a picture of a prehistoric species that she once saw in a scientific magazine.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  Flight plans. No other kind. Two sentences are enough to complete the biography of Carola Lorenzini (future project: a book of microbiographies). No indication that she was ever interested in anything other than flying. But Carola L. was neither Amelia Earhart nor Beryl Markham but rather a girl in San Vicente, Argentina, in the nineteen-thirties—no famous publicist, no celebrated mentor to ease her way. Every day she had to go to her job in an office at the telephone company, every day. Morning after morning, like Kafka, Huysmans, Borges, Martínez Estrada, Cavafy. Office hours, office interruptions, and the one benefit: to pay for her pilot training course. She received her license, broke records, established flight paths, organized a mission to unite fourteen provinces, famously perfected the inverted loop. She was the only one who could perform that highly dangerous aerobatic maneuver besides her teacher, Santiago Germanó, who lifted hats and even scarves when he scrapped along the ground with his airplane in reverse. Carola L. became a local celebrity. She would land in an open field and people would run to see her, attribute superpowers to her, bless her, ask her to cure various illnesses, believe in her, think she performed miracles. In order to avoid accidents, Carola L. always tried to land at some distance from these fans who were waiting for her, then she’d get on a horse and ride to them: precautionary strategies that could be read as a mise-en-scène, or that had the same effect. She did all of that while still needing to work at the telephone company. One of Carola L.’s mornings in the office. Efficient, affable, lighthearted: this was how she behaved at work, nothing to indicate a misunderstood or striving diva. Nevertheless, with time and among female aviators who came to see her as an icon, today brought together in ORFEA (Organización Femenina de Aeronavegantes, Organization of Female Pilots), there is an hypothesis that behind those good manners, behind that desk in the office, she accumulated rage, a lot of rage. Rage against the head of the telephone company, against the leaders of the Air Force. Rage against prohibitions and exclusions, against suspensions and a lack of systemic support: the interrupters and the great versatility of their efforts to stand in the way. According to the same hypothesis, so much rage that Carola L. wrongly calculated the inverted loop at that show where she was invited at the last moment and after some arm twisting. Fury rather than incompetence as the cause of the fatal accident, according to the women of ORFEA.