ONCE UPON A TIME IN ARGENTINA or Keeping an Eye on the Inverted Commas

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ARGENTINA

or

Keeping an Eye on the Inverted Commas

I last saw Martin in Barcelona. We had dinner in one of those restaurants by the harbour where they serve fish in huge iron skillets. We ate a zarzuela of hake and swordfish, and mussels that looked like ebony sculptures. Martin had insisted on red wine. Outside the street-lights came on, and I saw a young woman wrap a cardigan around her shoulders. A gull called out in the dusk. As the waiter passed our table Martin picked up the empty bottle.

“Otro más,” he said.

Martin was buying dinner as he normally did, though I was never sure how he afforded his lifestyle. He was essentially an Arabist and he wrote articles for learned magazines, and gave lectures. He had never written a book- he claimed he was too lazy which may have been true, and too much the dilettante and used up all his knowledge of a subject in a few pages which I doubted. More recently he had come to take a dilettante’s interest in the Quixote. He had just returned from Buenos Aires. He leant back in his chair. Between us the candlelight flickered; the door of the restaurant was open and there was a breeze starting.

“I had never met him before”, he said. “Though we had corresponded. I was introduced to him in the library where he worked. He invited me back to his apartment. He asked me if I would stay with him a while. We talked that first night about Arab arithmetic which seemed to fascinate him. I remember him running his finger round the rim of a wine glass and telling me that the Arabs’ use of zero was one

of the great inventions of the world. It combined the concept and existence of nothing, of non-existence, with the circle, the supreme symbol and artefact of the recurring.

We got on well enough. He was kind and courteous. Most of our conversations were about things and ideas. He claimed that he lacked the insight into people to write novels with plots and characters, but I did not believe him any more than you believe me. None of his ideas were original he said. They were part of a world that we all shared and always would for as long as there was a world. They were borrowed by writers such as he as books may be borrowed from a library. Each idea was precise and discreet and burnished over time like a ruby. He told me that he despised adjectives and legislators for they sought to qualify the immutable

I said that this reminded me of his stated abhorrence for mirrors and copulation for they both seek to multiply man, who is perhaps just an idea emanating from the eternal. I said that a world without mirrors would be a strange world. He replied that then we would only see ourselves in other men’s eyes. As he got to know me better he would leave me alone in his study while he busied himself in his kitchen or garden. I perused the folios on his table- extracts from The Odyssey and the Quixote, The Thousand and One Nights and The Tempest. I did not at first understand the significance of what I saw. I felt that I was often left alone on purpose and that he wanted me to see what he was doing. Our conversations continued over dinners. He had arranged for me to lecture at the University on Cordoba and the Caliphate so there was time at our disposal. What he was saying seemed to have become more structured but that was probably an illusion; it was I who was beginning to see the truth.

One night he said that the past is altered every time that it is repeated. Another time he said that Don Quixote was real being an immutable idea, whereas all the men who had uncovered and borrowed him- Cide Hemete Benengali, Miguel Cervantes, Pierre Menard, Jorge Luis Borges- were interchangeable and imaginary constructs. But if the idea of the Quixote is immutable then each of these men who played fleetingly with it would at the end produce the same story. Precisely, he said. And perhaps all memory of the others, the previous borrowers, will be obliterated unless credited by their successor. Was I seeing new manuscripts of Homer and Scheherazade’s Tales. I thought about the way these tales were told. Who told them? And when?”

Martin paused for a sip of wine. I said nothing. I could see a plume of smoke and smell the cigar of the man at the next table. I felt something of the quality of a dream. I did not want to contribute. I was frightened of wresting the control of the dream from Martin. To control something can be to destroy it. But Martin paused in his story for a dangerously long time. He was diluting its magic.

“Did Don Quixote dream in his sleep, I wonder, when all his waking life was a dream?”

“Dreams require concentration, Martin”

“That is very true. Something dreamed us, something eternal, and it is a measure of its concentration , which is its essence, that we survive as we do. He told me that he once dreamed that he had so lost interest in life that everything around him was disappearing because he had lost the ability to maintain it. Globes, tables, bureaux ceased to be. Then people vanished, a waitress, a station porter, his own father.

He knew that his life was trickling away like his sight had done, like the sand in an hourglass. And my stay in Buenos Aires was also coming to an end. He became even more focused in what he said and what he showed me. He reminded me of something he claimed Bertrand Russell had said, that perhaps our world was created only yesterday but part of that creation was a universal memory of an imaginary past. I remembered, though I had only read it in his own work. So Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, were they only….?

He never wanted to be explicit. But on my last night with him he had put away the primary texts and showed me two manuscripts by writers of whom I had never heard. One was Humphrey of Arles who had taken holy orders after fighting in the Crusades, but who was never able to expunge from his mind the Islamic doctrines he had encountered. Though a Franciscan he was the author of an Antitrinitarian text. The other was Macrobius whom I was told was a Dark Age Roman who wrote a commentary on a work by Cicero which itself purported to be a dream of Scipio the Younger about his grandfather at Carthage. B told me he was not entirely satisfied with either and as time was now short he wanted me to choose one. I chose Macrobiuswhose writings to me seemed so typical of his own work, or his work. He nodded and

consigned the entire oeuvre of Humphrey of Arles to the fire. I never saw him again. He died within the year”

It was dark outside. The candle had gone out. And I was no longer sure that behind it I could see Martin, or when I would next encounter him.