Help a él

Help a él (Alfaguara, 2009)
by Fogwill
Argentina, 1983

One of the more curious things I've seen Borges taken to task for over the years is the idea that his oeuvre is so lacking in sex and romance that it might almost be classified as asexual as a whole.  Fortunately for Borges and his admirers, in the Argentinean Literature of Doom: Año 2 year of 1983, Fogwill came to JLB's rescue so to speak with this graphic sex-ridden, scatological, and drug use-filled parody of Borges' "El aleph" in which a vibrator referred to as "el concejal" ["the Town Councillor"] plays an all too prominent role.  Shall I continue?  Although I'm not sure how many other people could have even dreamed up a Borges meets Osvaldo Lamborghini hallucination of this nature, Fogwill mostly pulls it off with a pair of nifty Borgesian anagrams (Help a él = "El aleph," of course, and the narrator's suicide muse Vera Ortiz Beti is a not so subtle re-scrambling of "The Aleph"'s Beatriz Viterbo sans the second "B" for Borges, who's never mentioned by name in the novella), a frisky sense of humor, a series of Buenos Aires in-jokes, and a surprisingly tender ending given all the bodily fluid excesses and occasional sadomasochism that precede it.  Those sex scenes are something else, though, and I don't mean that in a good way!  Thankfully, the humor is both verbal and visual: in one instance, the uncle of the narrator's writer friend Laiseca calls his nephew a great writer before quickly adding: "--... Lo que quiere decir --agregó-- que será un perfecto fracasado.  ¡Lástima que la prima no viva para apreciar el éxito de su fracaso...!" ["'Which means,' he added, 'that he'll be a perfect failure.  What a  shame that his aunt isn't alive to witness the success of his failure!'"] (246); in another, the narrator notes how the photos of Evita and Perón on the wall of Laiseca's bedroom are accompanied by others of Mao, Mussolini, Hitler and Oliveira Salazar (249).  The in-jokes, too, are both literary and political.  Adolfo B. Laiseca, the narrator's "perfect failure" of an acquaintance, bears a name that pays homage to both Borges' well-known writer friend Adolfo Bioy Casares and Fogwill's lesser-known writer friend Alberto Laiseca, for example, and there's another reference to an "inédito de Leonor Acevedo, que atesora Piglia" ["an unpublished work by Leonor Acevedo which Piglia possesses"] (261) which would seem to be an approving wink at the stunt that Ricardo Piglia pulled off in 1975 when he published an original novella titled Homenaje a Roberto Arlt [Homage to Roberto Arlt] and passed it off as the critical edition of a lost Arlt manuscript that had just been discovered.  It may help you appreciate Fogwill's literary joke more if you realize that his Arlt, Leonor Acevedo, just happens to share the same maiden name as Borges' mother; similarly, it may help you appreciate Fogwill's edgy political game more if you realize that the name of Vera Ortiz Beti's friend, Idische Zeitung, was the name of a Buenos Aires Yiddish weekly that was once closed down by the military government in the 1940s and that another minor character is an arms importer who likes to play cards at the nearby naval base.  Considering that Fogwill's previous claims to fame for me were the writing of "Muchacha punk" (one of my all-time favorite short stories), the penning of Los pichiciegos (one of my all-time favorite Spanish-language novels), and the nicknaming of García Márquez as García Marketing (one of my all-time favorite dismissive nicknames), I'd have to say that even though Help a él doesn't quite resonate for me at those same sorts of levels, it's still quite the one-stop shopping experience for anyone desiring a late Dirty War era read that insults "turistas argentinoides" ["Argentinoid tourists"] playing Beatles songs  in Uruguay (242) and riffs on the concepts of Buenos Aires as a "puerta falsa en el tiempo" ["trap door in time"] (Ibid.)) and the way that the dead live on in "las memorias y las fabulaciones de los vivos" ["the memories and the inventions of the living"] (284) all while--hmm, how can I put this delicately?--sexing Borges' cherry.

Source

Help a él appears on pages 235-284 of the Fogwill anthology Cuentos completos (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2009).  Naturally, this novella (and hardly anything else for that matter by the mighty Fogwill [1941-2010]) isn't yet available in English translation.

Los pichiciegos

Los pichiciegos (Mondadori, 1998)
by Fogwill
Argentina, 1983

-¿Ustedes son boludos?

-Sí, señor!

-¡No!  Ustedes no son boludos, ustedes son vivos.

["Are you all idiots?"

"Yes, sir!"

"No!  You're not idiots--you're alive."]

(Los pichiciegos, 243)

If I remember the story correctly, the then 41-year old Fogwill supposedly wrote all of Los pichiciegos [The Pichiciegos; available in English under the artificially fabricated and hence completely idiotic title of Malvinas Requiem] in Buenos Aires in 1982 during the two months of that year that la Guerra de las Malvinas a/k/a the Falklands War took place--a war that saw nearly 1,000 people lose their lives over land that could only be loved by sheep.  Legend has it that early manuscript copies of the work circulated by hand among the author's friends until the departure of the military government in the following year made it safe to publish the work without fear of reprisals.  In any event, you, the intrepid Spanish Lit Month reader, can now enjoy Los pichiciegos in the privacy of your own home and in one or both of the two bellicose languages to boot--great news since Fogwill somehow managed to turn this punch in the mouth of Argentine nationalism into one of my personal faves in all of recent Spanish-language literature.  How, exactly, did he do it?  To try and answer that, I should probably begin by noting that the titular pichiciegos, named after a rare breed of blind mini-armadillo found in Argentina's wine country whose most famous attribute is said to be its ability to burrow underground and live unseen by man, are a small band of deserters trying to ride out the remainder of the war while trapped in the dangerous no man's land between Argentinean and British lines.  Since survival is the only form of "victory" that matters to these human pichiciegos, they spend most of their time underground digging, expanding their storehouse of food, water, and cigarettes, fantasizing about what they'll do if they ever make it out alive, and occasionally trading information to the British troops in exchange for food, batteries, and other essential supplies while waiting for the war to hurry up and end.  I suspect that the speed with which Fogwill wrote Los pichiciegos may account for some of the 121-page novel's considerable energy.  However, he also makes it easy for the reader to identify with his none too heroic cast of characters both because of the conversational tone and the humor of the narrative but also on account of a rare knack he has for being able to shift from the horrors of war to the often comic camaraderie among the men without missing a beat.  You'd probably have to read this for yourself to understand why one scene of a pichiciego cheering on a British bombing run against non-pichiciego Argentine troops or another scene of a British Sea Harrier playing mind games with a lone pichiciego who has been caught out in the open and is too paralyzed to move remain indeliby etched on my mind, but in the meantime here's a good short example of Fogwill getting at the futility of this particular war with his typical sense of humor.  The set-up: a few pichiciegos have just gotten ahold of a British newspaper which, once translated, reveals the uncomfortable truth that the British are just as uncertain about how the war will end as the Argentineans are (282):

  -¡No saben lo que pasa ni lo qué va a pasar! -decía Viterbo.

-¿Y a vos qué te gustaría que pasara?

-Qué gane la Argentina.

-¡Y vas en cana!

-¡Yo qué sé!  ¿Vos?

-Yo quisiera que pacten y que se dejen de joder.

-¿Vos?

-Que pacten, que podamos volver.

-¿Vos?

-Que ganen ellos, que los fusilen a todos, y que a nosotros nos llevan de vuelta a Buenos Aires en avión.

Idea de porteño.

["They don't know what's happening nor what's going to happen!" Viterbo was saying.

"And what would you like to see happen?"

"That Argentina wins."

"And you're going to jail!"

"What do I know?  You?"

"I'd like them to make a peace treaty and stop fucking around."

"You?"

"That they make a peace treaty, so we can return."

"You?"

"That they win, that they execute everybody, and that they take us back to Buenos Aires by plane."

A Buenos Aires guy's idea.]

Fogwill (1941-2010)

Los pichiegos is available separately or as part of the Cantos de marineros en La Pampa anthology, which is where I read it (Barcelona: Mondadori, 1998, 229-350).  Fogwill's as yet untranslated "Muchacha punk" is one of the best short stories I've ever read, so the next thing I read by this famous wacko is sure to be a massive letdown.  I'm OK with that for now.

Muchacha punk

Fogwill, versión 2006 (foto: Clarín)

"Muchacha punk"

por Fogwill

Argentina, 1979

Había querido leer este "famosísimo" cuento argentino, un objeto de culto escrito en el año punk de 1978 y publicado en el año punk de 1979, desde hace algún tiempo, y no me decepcionó.  Un relato que tiene que ver con la historia del encuentro entre un viajero argentino y una muchacha punk británica en Londres a finales de la década de los setenta, la obra ofrece una visión bastante cómica de una aventura amorosa que empieza en una pizzería española.  Aunque el narrador es sumamente chistoso (compara la semblanza del "mozo español de pizzería inglesa" con "cualquier otro mozo español de pizzería de París o Rosario" antes de añadir, con un guiño al lector, "he elegido Rosario para no citar tanto a Buenos Aires" [59]), también me gustó su manera de narrar los eventos porque me pareció ser un personaje con actitudes y opiniones fidedignas.  De hecho, me reí mucho con sus detalles cuentísticos tan personales: la mezcla de Chianti y Coke bebida por la muchacha punk y sus amigas, la escena donde una amiga de la muchacha punk se despide de él con un sarcástico "Bye, Borges" y un ademán irrespetuoso, su "decepción" al descubrir que la muchacha punk Coreen "era tan limpia como cualquier chitrula de Flores o Belgrano R.  Nada previsible en una inglesa y en todo discordante con mis expectativas hacia lo punk" (74), etcétera.  Aunque no voy a decir nada sobre la manera en cual el enamoramiento del narrador con la muchacha punk se puede leer como un comentario sobre el choque de culturas (basta invocar la escena anterior en la pizzería con la amiga fea:  "--Bye, Borges --me gritó cara de sapo desde la vereda, amagando sacar de cu cintura una inexistente espadita o puñal; yo me alegré de ver tanta fealdad hundiéndose en el frío, y me alegré aún más pensando que asistía a otra prueba de que el prestigio deportivo de mi patria había franqueado las peores fronteras sociales de Londres" [65]), está claro que el tono pícaro del relato también esconde algo más siniestro.  ¿Qué hace el viajero en Londres de verdad?  ¿Y por qué, en estos años de la dictadura militar, quiere comprar un catálago de armas para su "gente" en Argentina antes de regresar al país?  Por supuesto, ustedes tendrán que leer el cuento para proponer sus propias respuestas a estas preguntas.  Mientras tanto, yo buscaré a los Cuentos completos de Fogwill en cuanto posible porque éste fue un knockout.  Fuente: Juan Forn (selección y prólogo).  Buenos Aires: Una antología de nueva ficción argentina.  Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1992, 53-78.

* "Muchacha punk" en línea *