Now that hundreds of thousands of Cubans are dreaming of Barack Obama (dreams that are, should be, distressing nightmares for some), I suddenly remembered the Obama writer. The one who in ¨Los sueños de mi padre¨ said: “In the beginning, my intention was to write a very different book.”
The phrase is at the beginning of the book. Nearing the end of ¨La arquitectura del fantasma¨, autobiography-collage by Argentine writer Héctor Libertella, I read: “What I wanted to tell here maybe it was something else.”
How many things cannot be counted on the distance, on the space that opens itself like a black hole between these two sentences at first sight so similar, almost equivalent?
What in the future head of the White House -those memories of himself were not even remotely presidential, but, undoubtedly those of becoming a presidential candidate- already resonates with a warm eco of seduction, openness, security and farsighted lucidity, and with the inevitable melody of the American dream behind, in the author of ¨La Libreria Argentina¨ and ¨El Arbol de Saussure, ¨ -that volume that as he tells us, some booksellers accommodated in the section of linguistics and others in the narrative one-is pure dislocation, madness , waste, quicksand, oneiric disorder a bit in the manner of Lorenzo García Vega: epilepsy of exiled memory and all dreams.
I will not say that Hector Libertella (Bahía Blanca, 1945-2006) was like a García Vega of Buenos Aires, but he could be it. Stars of the same constellation. Possible vertices from one of those flight stopovers between traditions. Literary blood ties, secret lineages. Libertella was, speaking in terms of networks, the Argentine link of the Cuban writer, the one who became operational ¨Devastacion del Hotel San Luis¨ to then being published by Mansalva Editorial; García Vega then would dedicate him the book -subtitled as antinovel or bad novel project: our Macedonio Fernández of Miami, and in the dedication he recalled his words after reading the manuscript.
“I ‘m realizing that I did not make a reading of your book but simply an exchange of imaginaries”, Libertella wrote to Lorenzo. “We already talked about this at Guemes Plaza: we are not crazy, we are the aristocracy of literature, and let the others to remain watching us with their stupid and bewildered faces.”
Among the various fragments comprising La arquitectura del fantasma as a file or installation, between reflective notes, images and anecdotes of all kinds, there are also letters to García Vega. (The latter begins this way: “Maese, we better step aside the autobiography and try luck in fiction, in real fiction. The imaginary is the only real thing of the text, François Wahl told me at a conference in Brasilia . I owe myself to this real, and all the rest is reality”). Indeed, the presences of those letters in the index were the ones that led me to read, with my stupid and perplexed face, the complete set, plus the title, of course. The title of the autobiography of Héctor Libertella is unsurpassed.
Why La Arquitectura del fantasma? Several passages in the book take us directly there. For example, a possible path: in Lowell, Massachusetts, Libertella shares the bar of a bar with old friends of Jack Kerouac, whom he had been buried right there recently.
“Between drink s, something appeared that still today scares me: none of them trusted on Kerouac; they thought he was a man who just wanted to write. That is, a traitor of life, someone who shares drinks with them but then ran home to cool it all. As if the thousand and one stories of drugs, sex, alcohol, women and roads could be summarized in the image of a monomaniac robot facing a Remington and alien to the world that he pretended to belong to. Someone who in his Remington is writing a book called ¨The zero degree of sex, drugs, alcohol, women and roads. ¨A living dead? That ghost and / or that design of the absent moved me deeply, and I even become identified myself with him. But identification is always a temporary effect. “
This idea of the ghostly presence / absence is designed differently in the memory of a stay in New York. Libertella is housed in a radical lesbian headquarters in lower Manhattan. There, in a small apartment, he tells us, “I served as an advisor or pet of them.”
“How to explain this? Three years ago I had been the only macho man in the First Feminist Congress of Latin America, which lasted a whole month in Córdoba. Maybe we should talk architecturally about the incident, that strange element to a building that paradoxically justifies, defines and enhances its structure; something that could not miss. Now, why should I be there? “
Architecture. Space. The strange element. I conclude with a third fragment that seems to me that expands and gives another turn to the above mentioned (besides being another good button displaying the tone of writing that moves La arquitectura del fantasma):
“When speaking about tribe, anthropology warns us that that word does not mean that we have to see in it the picture of a group of Aborigines in the exotic Amazon jungle, but a good western architecture if you want, and as accidental that the very notion of space always makes us changing the place, while writing. CL-S, whom to respect his anonymity I will not call Claude Levi-Strauss, tells what he saw and heard in one of his field studies: To be Someone, in that tribe they all speak at once and are exchanged for each other. There, the one who remains silent and do not exchange himself is Nobody. “
I am not sure if this has anything to do, but there are times when you agree with that: they are all talking at the same time, a field chattering where literature takes its thing, while putting its part. Times when it is salutary to remember to that aristocratic tribe, the one of Nobodies who are not exchanged with anyone, those who prefer exchanging imaginaries: the only real of the text.
Authors
Jorge Enrique Lage,
Jorge Enrique Lage
