The Parable of the Knife

By Juan Forn

Translated from the Spanish by Jorge R. Sagastume

 

The 25 th of March 1976, one day after the military took over the Argentine government, a Dutch painter, just arrived in Buenos Aires , fell in love with the Argentine light. This was an awful time to fall in love, true, but it is also true that one does not choose the moment to fall in love, the same way one does not pick the moment one's body is attacked by a terrible toxic fever. That's precisely what Pat Andrea says he felt, and the same thing he repeated to his surprised compatriots when he announced, a couple of years later, that he was returning to that Argentina that the military had converted into a gigantic concentration camp.

 

Andrea had arrived in Argentina for the first time as a result of a series of coincidences: in 1973, a certain contemporary art collector in Brussels was robbed of fifteen paintings, among them two Magrittes that the Interpol later found in Córdoba , Argentina . The collector had to travel to identify the paintings, and while in the country he wanted to see the work of Argentine painters. That's where he came across the paintings of Guillermo Roux, who, according to the collector, appeared to be the “artistic brother” of one of his favorite artists. He made sure Roux and Andrea began to write to each other, and that's how, finally, Roux invited Andrea to visit Argentina . Neither one nor the other imagined that the chosen date would coincide with one of the most fatidic and obscure moments in the history or our country.

 

Pat Andrea says that, the first time he went from the Ezeiza Airport to the city, even before knowing that the military had taken over Isabel Perón's government, he thought that deciding to make the trip was a mistake. To cross the world to see the same green prairies, with the same cows not by chance called Dutch-Argentine, seemed stupid. He thought this too when that same day they took him to Tigre , to sail through the Delta: “In the schools of my country they teach us that The Netherlands is the great European delta.” Even on the roadside, the advertisements about the therapeutic properties of a certain beverage invented in Holland (“A shot everyday / stimulates and feels good,” the proverbial slogan by Erven Lucas Bols) appeared as a mockery to Pat Andrea's obsession with traveling so far to submerge himself in the unknown.

 

A few hours talking to the locals were enough for Andrea to realize where he was. He came to understand this by two different mediums: the soft-spoken fearful conversations explaining to him how delicate the political situation was, and a sensorial shock in the air that didn't need words, but gave these explanations a double eloquence. Because what happened to Andrea that first day in Buenos Aires, was that he felt possessed by the Argentine light, and what that light revealed to his sight was: particles of violence floating in the air, making twice as sharp the appearance of things.

 

Back then, Andrea was thirty-four years old and had traveled a lot: After traveling through Eastern Europe and Greece in the hands of the military, he had lost a good

 

part of his Dutch candor. But, during those months during 1976, in Buenos Aires, first covering the city by foot and later visiting the northern provinces by bus, experiencing in his own flesh a day of closure (read: “background checks”) in an ominous police department in the province of Jujuy, Andrea says that the blindfold fell off his eyes and he began to see things under a different light. According to him, he learned to see what was behind things and began to think about how he could transfer those impressions into painting. For this reason, despite the fact that his European friends were horrified, he wanted to return to Argentina two years later: to exhibit in Buenos Aires what he had been painting ever since he went back to The Netherlands, and to receive a new dose of that fever-producing substance that now fed his painting.

 

If the first time Andrea came to Argentina was, significantly, a sad date, the date of his return was a saga: The 1978 World Cup (please, remember the song in the final game, Argentina vs. The Netherlands: “That who doesn't jump is a Dutch”). Gabriel Levinas (who shortly after started the magazine El Porteño ) saw Pat's paintings and agreed to exhibit them in one of the few remaining reputable locations left during that time in Buenos Aires : His art gallery Artemúltiple . That's how things were during those days: a book like The Little Prince could be prohibited because of its presumably subversive connotations, while at the same time they would overlook an exhibit such as Andrea's that portrayed images perversely lyrical (the results of the sketches that Andrea had accumulated during his trips to the northern provinces), populated by figures such as a citizen tripping over an automatic rifle, or a man in a uniform contemplating in rapture a woman on a chair and a child crying in the background.

 

During that second trip, and upon returning to Europe , Andrea felt that he needed to go beyond and that he could, indeed, go further. The question, however, remained: How?

 

He found the answer in a small book of tango lyrics that he had bought in Avenida de Mayo and that he carried with him while returning to The Netherlands. Putting aside oils and casein, Andrea began a series of charcoal drawings, in the fashion of choreographic variations around the tango La puñalada (The Stab of the Dagger) and the insistence of that tango on the idea of the crafty stabbing, on the back, leaving its victim with an open mouth, stupefied, and without answers.

 

The drawings were a series of rotations: a woman stabbing another woman, a woman stabbing a man, a man stabbing another man, a man (or several of them) stabbing a woman. The leitmotif was the fulminating trajectory of the metal in the air loaded with invisible blood, as an electrical shock.

 

Exhausted, after finishing drawing number 33 he decided that the series was concluded. Hours later a friend of his who was an editor came to visit him. The man, also Dutch, said that he definitely wanted to do something with those drawings, but his area was books; in other words, the drawings needed a text to accompany them. “It has to be a text written by an Argentine, it has to come from an Argentine. Only from an Argentine,” he added. And with a shine of greed in his eyes he said: “Borges, perhaps?”. “Borges is blind,” Andrea replied, without taking away his eyes from his drawings. Lifeless he concluded: “Let me think of something else.”

 

Back in those days Andrea rented a small room in Paris , and with his drawings under his arm, he left for Paris almost immediately. Through Antonio Seguí he was able to get the telephone number of his favorite Argentine writer and, to his surprise, a few days later, someone knocked on the door of his underground apartment. When he opened the door, he faced a giant who had to bend over to enter the room. The giant decided to sit on the bed, to avoid the uncomfortable position of being bent over while talking. Sitting on the bed, Julio Cortázar went over the thirty-three drawings populated by daggers, he looked at Andrea and said that he couldn't do it, that he shouldn't do it, or rather that he didn't want to write an essay about the drawings given the political situation in Argentina. Cortázar paused and said: “This gives room, however, for a short story.” “Give me a little time to think and see if, in reality, this could be the source for a short story.” And he stood up, bent over again, and left the room.

 

Five months later, Andrea receives in the mail, at his house in The Netherlands, the short story “El tango de la vuelta” (The Tango of the Return). In his short story there is a woman, still young, mother of a boy, and married to a businessman who is away on a trip. There is another character in the short story: A man who belongs to the woman's past, a man who, one day, returns, to stubbornly move into a house right across from hers, where he smokes, looks at her windows and waits.

 

The short story has only one political note, in mute: It says that the woman left the man who now smokes and waits, and that she did that when she decided to move back to Argentina from Mexico to marry the businessman. The word Mexico , back in 1979, was synonym for exile. That note was sufficient. Cortázar's short story and Andrea's drawings offer no concrete reference to the time of the dictators, but climatically they cannot refer to anything else. Not only do they aim at the same point in space, but they also seem to come from the same place, as if they were searching for each other, with the same vehement silence, with the same methodic urgency.

 

The story continues. The anecdote behind the short story, for obvious reasons, will remain unveiled. The story of the corpus, forming drawings and text is as follows:

 

Andrea shows his series of drawings to the powerful art gallery owner, Elizabeth Franck. Immediately after he shows her Cortázar's short story, Franck sends out the text to be translated immediately into Dutch and French, and publishes four hundred copies of the book, which later is presented in the 1982 Art Fair of Paris. Cortázar approaches Franck's stand at the fair, shakes hands with Andrea and tells him that he doesn't have much time: He is on his way to the hospital, where his wife, Carol Dunlop lies in bed. “The worst is over, but I hope you will understand, I prefer to be by her side,” says as a way of farewell, and walks away with the five copies of the book that were destined for him.

 

The next day, Carol Dunlop dies. In the meantime the Dutch and French versions of The Stabbing are sold out and Franck, full of courage, decides to print two more editions, one in Spanish and the other in English. But, shortly after, she goes through a crisis from which she will never recover. First she thinks she has become a paralytic, and secludes herself (in a wheel chair) in the Hotel Georges V in Paris , while her Scottish

 

gigolo spends half of her fortune. When she recovers from this she buys an old mill in Ronda and decides to create a commune for artists, but after a snake bites her little dog and kills him, she puts the project aside and enters into a deep depression.

 

Andrea loses touch with her. Eight years go by. In Madrid , in the edition ARCO 2000, the Colombian Celia Birbagher, who directs the art magazine Nexus , and the art gallery owner Eugenia Niño meet. At some point during the conversation Niño relates to Birbagher the story that Andrea had told her regarding The Stabbing , and Birbagher tells her that in a warehouse in Miami , she keeps several boxes that Elizabeth Franck had entrusted to her, and that she hasn't dared touch ever since Franck died.

 

Upon returning to Miami , Birbagher breaks the seal of one of the boxes and notifies Niño that she had found the Spanish edition of “The Stabbing.” Of the four hundred copies, two hundred and forty copies had survived in mint condition, reaching Madrid several months later. While the books are being unloaded from a pick-up truck in front of the Sen Gallery, in the center of Madrid, an anonymous pedestrian stops, pulls out a pocket knife, opens one of the boxes, takes one copy of the book and shouts: “It is mine, now it is mine!.” Niño and Pat Andrea (who is at the time in Madrid to color one drawing in each of the recovered copies of the book before the gallery puts them out for sale) witness the scene in disbelief. Pat walks to the open box, pulls out one of the books, turns its pages, and reaches that page where the information about the press appears and reads: “This book was printed in the city of Brussels on the 15 th of February of the year 1984.” Cortázar—do I need to say it?—was born in Brussels . And the 15 th of February of 1984 is the date of his burial in Paris .