Magical idealism

In 1971 I decided to return to Argentina after several years of wandering in Europe. The military dictatorship was in full force. Jorge Luis Borges was soon to publish an open letter accusing the generals of leading young soldiers to slaughter, they themselves “having never heard a bullet whistle past their own ears”. An indignant retired general retorted: “I am an Argentinian general and I have heard a bullet whistle past my ears”. Borges replied: “I was mistaken. There is one Argentinian general who has heard one bullet whistle past his ears”. At a time when writers were routinely kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured and made to “disappear”, Borges was deemed too famous to punish.

Back in Buenos Aires, I was offered a job as a roaming cub reporter at the conservative newspaperLa Nación. On my first day I was shown into the journalists’ room, where greying men (no women) were seated along both sides of an expansive desk, each in front of a Remington typewriter. I was introduced to them by the editor-in-chief and recognized the names of the essayists, novelists and poets whom I had studied in high school. I was twenty-three and felt deeply inadequate.

The man sitting next to me was in his early forties, the incarnation of the swarthy South American from the novels of Agatha Christie. In a rich basso voice he welcomed me to “the news factory” and began to instruct me in the rules of the game. Ángel Bonomini had the erudite, ironic sense of humour I associated above all with Borges, and over many a coffee break he explained how to write out a report, compose an obituary and conduct an interview. Our hours were from 6pm to midnight, and often we walked back to our homes “tacitae”, as he would say, “per amica silentia lunae”. Bonomini was a poet who admired Virgil.

He had worked as editor at the Spanish edition of Life magazine, translating articles from the original English (which he spoke badly). He told me that, because there were no strict deadlines, he could spend days revising a simple text, carefully avoiding repetitions and trying out new combinations of words. In his own poetry he preferred a simple idiom. His first poetry collection, Primera enunciación (1947), appeared when he was still an adolescent; his second, Argumento del enamorado/Baladas con ángel (1952), was published jointly with his then partner, María Elena Walsh, who would go on to become the most famous children’s author and the most famous balladeer in South America.

Bonomini was part of a subgroup of Argentine writers interested in matter metaphysical and religious, joined by the poet Alberto Girri (a translator of Wallace Stevens) and the essayist Héctor Murena (a follower of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, and the first translator of Walter Benjamin into Spanish). Early on the trio had attempted a translation of Novalis’s unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), but they never got beyond the first few pages. (Heinrich von Ofterdingen was the final book that Borges, on his deathbed, asked his nurse read to him.) Nevertheless, they continued to share a belief in what Novalis called “magical idealism”: the use of creative imagination to break down the boundaries between words and the world. Where Borges achieved this by mining the paradoxes of theology and mathematics, Bonomini’s circle set about developing what one critic called “the art of moral elegance”. This did not mean that they were blind to Argentina’s political turmoil: they declared themselves against both the junta and the murderous guerilla movements that opposed it. Bonomini liked to quote Borges’s dictum aimed at Juan Perón in 1946: “Dictatorships encourage cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they encourage idiocy … To fight against these sad monotonies is one of the writer’s many duties”.

Bonomini was less interested in stories that lead from cause to consequence than in ones in which the eruption of something unexpected demands a revision of conventional ethical assumptions. This eruption might be the sight of a caravan of elephants in the streets of Milan, or the otherworldly appearance of a jasmine flower in a suburban garden, or, in the case of The Novices of Lerna (Los novicios de Lerna) the discovery that the narrator is one of a legion of identical men.

This novella first appeared in Argentina in 1972, in a collection of short stories bearing the same title. It tells the story of a recently graduated lawyer, Ramón Beltra, who receives the offer of a six-month fellowship at the (fictitious) University of Lerna in Switzerland, all expenses paid, no obligations demanded. The proposal seems too good to be true; Beltra accepts. Almost immediately something disquieting seeps in. The reply to his acceptance letter is so servile and mawkish, it becomes repugnant to him.

On the way to Switzerlandhe falls for Sandra, the flight attendant, and they manage to spend thirty-eight hours together on a stopover in Lisbon. Beltra has to submit a seven-page form with his complete physical information, including not only his height and weight, but all bodily measurements, “so detailed and varied that someone could have easily reproduced my body down to the millimeter”. Arriving at the university, he senses that someone has done just that: the twenty-three other recipients of the fellowship, known as “novices”, are so similar to him that he feels like “a single person reflected fully in each fragment of a shattered mirror” – a reference to Novalis’s metaphor for humanity’s splintered view of the universe. In spite of this unanimity, Beltra realizes that each of the novices has “some subtle characteristic that made him unique”. This uniqueness is fragile; in front of a fellow recruit, he feels he is mimicking the other’s special trait, sparking in him a secret sense of guilt. One of the novices tells Beltra that he has devised a plot for a detective story set in a community like theirs. “If there were a string of murders in the group”, he says, “and supposing I were the murderer, finally two of us would remain. In that case, I should let myself be killed by the other so the survivor would be charged guilty and executed.”

In Greek mythology Lerna was the lake at the entrance to the underworld and the lair of the Hydra. Bonomini’s Lerna also harbours a many-headed (and many-bodied) monster. “Danger gathers people”, says Beltra, “brings them together, compels them to live with one another in order to face it.” Paradoxically, it also provokes a great need for solitude (“I preferred to wait for death alone”). Yet “the adult thing to do was not to indulge myself. I had a duty toward the others: to give them my presence”. Gradually Beltra realizes that the authorities of Lerna are employing a subtle strategy that will lead to the novices’ elimination; but the reason for this monstrous plan escapes him. All he can do is assert his individuality.

On September 18, 1972, Adolfo Bioy Casares wrote to Bonomini after reading his collection of stories: “I’m so enthralled by the book that one night, when Borges came over, I proposed we read the only story I hadn’t read yet, The Novices of Lerna … We were dazzled”. But the enthusiasm of a great reader is not always sufficient to secure a writer’s fame. Certain books, however powerful, seem to get lost on the shelves of the Universal Library. Happily, it is never too late, and Jordan Landsman’s excellent first English translation of The Novices of Lerna offers the opportunity to rescue Bonomini from undeserved oblivion. This elegant slim edition, in a type size ideal for the visually impaired, would have pleased the author, who admired care in layout and design.

Bonomini, like Novalis, believed that our most intimate questions call for ineffable answers, and that literature can hint at these. In a poem from 1982, “Poética”, he expressed a similar intuition (my translation):

There was a time
– not yet born –
when there arose in his mind
the suspicion of angels,
and in those faces identical to his own
he was to find the key
to all meaninglessness.
…
However, he often turns to the lees of his memory
and writes down those faint recollections
with the intention
of being himself again.
I believe he tries to go back
to not yet having been born.

Alberto Manguel is the director of Espaço Atlântida in Lisbon

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