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Overview
"Saer is one of the best writers of today in any language."—Ricardo Piglia
"What Saer presents marvelously is the experience of reality, and the characters' attempts to write their own narratives within its excess."—Bookforum
In modern-day Paris, Pichón Garay receives a computer disk containing a manuscript—which might be fictional, or could be a memoir—by Doctor Real, a nineteenth-century physician tasked with leading a group of five mental patients on a trip to a recently constructed asylum. Their trip, which ends in disaster and fire, is a brilliant tragicomedy thanks to the various insanities of the patients, among whom is a delusional man who greatly over-estimates his own importance and a nymphomaniac nun who tricks everyone—even the other patients—into sleeping with her.
Fascinating as a faux historical novel and written in Saer's typically gorgeous, Proustian style, The Clouds can be read as a metaphor for exile—a huge theme for Saer and a lot of Argentine writers—as well as an examination of madness.
Juan José Saer was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation. The author of numerous novels and short-story collections (including Scars and La Grande), Saer was awarded Spain's prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event. Five of his novels are available from Open Letter Books.
Hilary Vaughn Dobel has an MFA in poetry and translation from Columbia University. She is the author of two manuscripts and, in addition to Saer, she has translated work by Carlos Pintado.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781940953359 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Letter |
| Publication date: | 04/18/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 574 KB |
About the Author
Hilary Vaughn Dobel has an MFA in poetry and translation from Columbia University. She is the author of two manuscripts, Hot Cognition (finalist for the 2015 Brittingham Prize) and He Imagined Himself Laughing (finalist for the 2015 Colorado Prize for Poetry). She also has two forthcoming translations in the works, one by Juan José Saer and one by Carlos Pintado.
Read an Excerpt
PROLOGUE
He finds himself now on the corner by the ice cream stand, shielded from the sun
by the broad red-and-white-striped awning. Before moving out of the shade to the sunny sidewalk across the street, he anticipates the feeling of heat-softened asphalt beneath the soles of his brown loafers. And now his shadow pools at his feet on the gray sidewalk that smolders and shimmers in the summer siesta hour—shrunken by the sun’s position as it finally begins to sink, slowly, from its zenith.
He is about to eat a double-scoop of chocolate and vanilla, all he’ll have for lunch, and if he’s waited unusually long to leave his office to buy it—it’s nearly two-thirty—it is because he’s decided that the ice cream ought to get him by until dinnertime. Doubtless, the heat is the primary cause of such frugality, but a sort of athletic stoicism, as he imagines it (a result of the day’s caprice rather than habit), colors this stratagem of his ever so slightly with virtue. So he is pleased for the moment: content, spry, and healthy, and, not yet too far into his fifties, he believes he has great prospects, both immediate and long-term. He feels tall, bright, and vital, as if a red carpet stretched from the tips of his toes on to infinity. But almost immediately the harsh summer weather, the tumult of the street, and the black, noxious exhaust fumes tips him back to reality, to that midpoint in his soul between anxiety and euphoria that acquaintances—himself included, grown convinced by what began as an idle joke—refer to with unjustified certainty as his temperament.
The heat wave has broiled the city for over a week. From a cloudless blue sky, the sun beats down with a merciless, all-pervading light that scorches the trees, muddies the senses, and dulls the mind. The heat relents only at night, and, then, only a little, but during Daylight Savings Time—strictly an administrative decision, he likes to joke, only until the hens change their minds—nightfall never ends and the high-summer dusk lingers until just after 3 A.M.; when everyone has barely slept on account of the heat, dawn breaks, livid, in the east, and the intolerable sun reappears. Crowds of people lie tanning on the riverbanks, waiting for night, rain, vacation, an unlikely breeze, but the sweaty workers who eye them from the docks or one of the bridges, from the bus or the elevated metro over the Seine, watch the crowds with skepticism rather than jealousy.
It is the sixth of July. Last year, intending to settle affairs with his few remaining friends, Pichón visited his native city from mid-February through the beginning of April after a twenty-year absence. Despite the years, the let-downs, and the strangeness of it all, he returned to Paris with a handful of good memories and a promise from Tomatis to come visit, but a whole year has (had) passed with him waiting for Tomatis to make travel plans. Certain Sundays, they spoke on the telephone though they never had anything particular to say. As they lived in different hemispheres, high summer for one meant the other had fists of frozen rain beating at his window. And because of the time difference—morning in the city is evening in Paris, and evening in the city is nighttime in Paris—the weather occupied much of their conversation. Until one Sunday in May, less than two months ago, they spoke about the weather a little longer than usual because, despite the difference in season, country, continent, and hemisphere, climatic conditions were identical (a cold, rainy day) and Tomatis announced the good news at last: in early July he would spend several days in Paris.
But that wasn’t all. Tomatis went on to say that Marcelo Soldi—that bearded lad, they’d spent a day taking his father’s dinghy out with the boys to visit Washington’s daughter, did he remember?—meant to send something he’d been preparing over the last few months, and Tomatis, without further explanation, let drop an enigmatic phrase to pique Pichón’s interest: “He went to search for Troy and nearly tumbled into Hades.” But he must have said it in earnest since, perhaps a month later, the parcel arrived: a very long letter and a floppy disk in a medium-sized, self-sticking bubble envelope, which Soldi had further sealed up with clear adhesive tape as a precautionary measure. Soldi had masculinized the word disquette and given it an accent grave, which, as written, appeared as el dìsket. In a passage from the letter, he said: Beyond conversations with Tomatis, who can occasionally tax my patience, I’ve been amusing myself with impromptu jaunts out to the countryside and poking my nose into old papers that, often miraculously, preserve the memories of this place—or of some other place, if one happens to live elsewhere. What’s valid for one place is valid for all space, and we know that if the whole contains a part, the part, in its way, contains the whole.
And elsewhere in the letter: “I have a certain advantage over the archive’s other aficionados: I get along with the elderly. The text I’ve sent you in the dìsket was entrusted to me by a woman in her nineties who, I believe, never actually read it. Lucky for her, she died, the poor thing, while I was deciphering and transcribing it with the utmost fidelity into a clean copy, so now I won’t have to be evasive or lie to her about the contents of these papers; as their owner has no heirs, I have deposited them in the Provincial Archive where they can be consulted now that I’ve finished the copies. We are terribly interested in your opinion because, contrary to what I think, Tomatis asserts that the document is not an authentic historical text but a work of fiction. But I say—and I’ve thought about this carefully—what else are the Annals, Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry, the Napoleonic Code, the crowds and cities, suns and universe, but fiction?” And, at the end: “The manuscript the old woman gave me was untitled, but if I understood certain passages correctly, I believe the author would not have found it unsuitable if we called it THE CLOUDS.
The envelope arrives in June, the twenty-first, to be exact, at summer’s door. As Pichón is still finishing out the year at the university, between reunions, exams, and colloquia, he’s had no time to investigate the contents of the mysterious dìsket, since then covered in dust, abandoned somewhere among the books, notepads, and papers on his desk. On July second, his wife and boys left for the seaside, and he has remained in Paris, delayed by a couple appointments, and because Tomatis has announced he’ll arrive in Madrid at seven that night. The two men have decided to spend two or three days together in Paris where they will be able to speak more freely, and plan to travel together afterward, meeting up with Babette and the children in Brittany.
That morning, around 9:30, Pichón attends a faculty meeting and remains in his office afterward, working until 2:30, when he goes out for ice cream, then heads home for a siesta. Many city-dwellers have already left and, as the tourists (for some reason) have yet to arrive, perhaps preferring the ocean or the mountains in the excessive heat, the city is deserted; because of his family’s trip, so too is Pichón’s flat, hereby establishing a curious parallel between home and city. As the windows are always open to capture stray currents of air, there exists between the city and house a sort of continuity; for a moment, he can’t tell which contains the other. There is a silence, older and grander than usual, and it expands with the coming of hot, sticky night after the interminable day. Pichón leans out the second-story window in his shorts with all the lights off, surveying the quiet, empty street, and smoking cigarette after cigarette, taking in the night as through a stethoscope—not so much the external details as the sensations those details arouse within him, taking him back to the past, to his childhood most of all, to moments so bright and intense that time seems to stop; to the point where he’s forced to consider that many sensations he’s always believed belonged to a place in fact belong to summer.
Around 7:00, a little dazed from the heat and his overly long nap, he leaves to do some shopping in the neighborhood, but after dallying in a wine shop, selecting bottles of white for the coming days, he finds himself feeling refreshed, clean, and perfectly content, passing back through the blue evening air down stifling, deserted streets, and returns to his empty house. As soon as he enters, he goes to shower, dries himself gently, patting the towel over his skin, as onedabs blotting paper over lines of fresh ink, never rubbing; then he puts on only a clean pair of shorts.He has a light dinner—a slice of ham, a few tomatoes, a nugget of cheese, and mineral water—but when he sits down at the computer, starting it up and inserting the dìsket to read out its contents on the screen, he thinks the better of it and makes his way to the refrigerator. He returns with a big, white crockery mug of cherries, sets it on his desk within reach of his left hand, amid the mess of pens, pencils, lighters, and cigarette packs, and an ashtray of heavy, dark green glass. He begins to read the text marching down the screen, and though he lifts the cherries to his mouth, one by one, without looking, the taste, at once sweet and tart, conjures vivid little red globes in his mind as if the flavor and feeling they’re about to produce on his tongue make a detour through his eyes, or through memory, before arriving in his brain. Large, meaty, cold, gloriously firm and red, by chance the first he’s gotten, the reality is that although they’ve been flourishing, the month of July is flying by, and, as much as he hopes otherwise, they are the last cherries of summer. And nothing reassures Pichón that once this black, interminable summer has passed, they’ll return again with that same capricious grace, emerging from nothing into the light of day.
***
Rivers swollen to excess, an unexpected summer, and that most-peculiar cargo: With the perspective of time and distance, it could be summed up thusly to explain the paradoxical difficulty of crossing the plain, our hundred leagues of troubles.
That arduous, protracted voyage took place, as if I could forget, in the August of 1804. On the first of that month, we set out for Buenos Aires during a terrible freeze, horseshoes cracking at blades of hoarfrost, a blue-tinged pink in the dawn, but within a few short days we found ourselves embroiled in a summer as squalid as it was cruel.
We made progress ten times faster on the trek from Buenos Aires to the city, Santa Fé, than we did on the return journey, though there were just four of us on horseback that time, and despite countless obstacles, the cold always tormenting us even in full sunlight. And so this sudden onset of sweltering heat was doubly confounding, both for its great intensity and for its unseasonable arrival, contradicting the laws of nature and the order of the seasons. How little nature takes our plans into account; she proved insolent, opposing the laws that contain her, with that strange heat in the depths of one of the bleakest winters the region, according to numerous testimonials, had suffered. That unwholesome “summer,” which blossomed into a sham spring only to be obliterated a few days later, unleashed an anomalous chain of seasons marching in hurried disarray, all in the space of a month. But Osuna, the man who guided us to the city and who led us, in a large convoy this time, back to Buenos Aires, kept saying that once in a while a mid-August dry spell like this would set in, anticipating the Santa Rosa storms on the thirtieth. Suffice it to say, he was right as always, and precisely on the thirtieth, some days before we reached our destination, the predicted storm descended to crown our parade of hardships—though it also helped to extricate us from a most precarious situation.
But I am getting ahead of the facts and, perhaps, out of consideration for the possible reader, decades from now, into whose hands this memoir might someday fall, it would behoove me to introduce myself: I am Dr. Real, specialist of those afflictions not of the body, but of the mind and soul. A native of Bajada Grande del Paraná, I was born and raised in those treacherous northern hills where the great river’s ceaseless red current has its source. I learned my letters under the Franciscans, but when I reached the age for a young man to delve into his studies, my parents thought Madrid preferable to anywhere else as the capital of knowledge; this can be accounted for by the fact that they were Castilian, and hoped the tumult dividing France—a commotion which had shaken Europe for the past six or seven years—would not reach the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. Unlike my parents, I was drawn to that tumult, and, given my growing interest in diseases of the mind, when I caught wind that Salpetrière Hospital was loosing its madmen, I resolved to continue my studies amid the frays of Paris rather than the sleepy cloisters of Alcalá. As happens so often throughout history, the last decade of the previous century had been tumultuous; like all parents, mine sought to educate me at the margins of that tumult, and, like all young people, I sensed that it was in that very tumult where my life was to begin.