Patty: The phrase “of-the-moment” is so annoyingly trite, but for lack of a better expression, Sergio Chejfec is perhaps one of today’s most of-the-moment writers, and the short fiction/systematic essay-musing “The Witness”—translated by Steve Dolph and published in Asymptote’s July issue as part of our Latin American feature—proves beyond a shadow of a doubt just why that is.
They say, more or less, that anyone who’s made the mistake of leaving can’t make the mistake of returning.
Eva: This is an unusual, formal piece, densely focused not on the interactions of one or two or three characters (though these aren’t missing), but on the systems and objects that make up a place. In this case, the place is Buenos Aires, where the Argentine Jewish author Chejfec was born, and the objects and systems in question are phone books and bus maps, library procedures and the right way to make mate (hint: it shouldn’t be cold). These systems take on specific meaning for “our new protagonist” Samich when he visits his family home in Buenos Aires and immediately feels “a creeping sense of not-belonging, of distance, of desolation, he’s not sure what to call it. He feels like a foreigner.”
What follows this sensation of alienation is a dizzying description of Samich’s attempts to see life in the city of his exile presented “without intrusion”—that is, life not as presented in the novels and stories of great, capital-a Authors; and not life as presented by his memories; but life as it is presented in phone books and bus maps, where the necessarily overlapping coordinates and axes between all those who live in Buenos Aires can come through and be felt.
He tried putting himself in someone else’s skin, someone completely unfamiliar with the city who was seeing everything for the first time. But he didn’t do this to deceive himself with a different life, nor did he mean to be another person: he was trying to avoid the tow of the past, which despite the physical differences and changed aspects of the visible world constantly signaled to Samich that he was from there, that, simply put, the things around him had a better memory than he did.
Patty: I seem to be relying on quite a few truisms today, despite the genre-bending nature of “The Witness”… Regardless, it’s boringly common-sensical but nonetheless true to affirm that when we read, we are writing the text as well—we, as readers, re-animate the zombie text each and every time. But “The Witness” lays bare the distortion of time and space we, as readers, both officiate and are subject to when reading and inhabiting a text. When we subject ourselves to a fiction, or, in Samich’s case, a set of letters referring to supposedly “real” coordinates of actual existence, we forgo our (perhaps erroneous and self-deceptive) possession of temporality for a moment.
For Samich—as it is for me, personally, and presumably any reader even remotely engaged with her reading—the realization of this disruptive narrative truth comes as a shock and shatters the mechanics of his (and my) linear day-to-day existence.
But at the same time [the phone books] form a collective picture: mute as they are, they tell him more about the city than is apparent. He thinks of almost nothing, with them at hand, apart from his own curiosity as a casual reader. He senses that he’s got a sort of ambiguous material at hand, illustrative and mysterious, so much so that he can’t tell if it seems a little useless too. Apparently, this is what Samich has decided to read, this is the practical consequence of looking for books where life presents itself without intrusion.
Eva: Of course, in “The Witness,” life does not present itself without intrusion. The narrative unfolding of the story is frequently interrupted by interesting formal elements, such as categorial titles of “The Event,” “Buses,” “Library,” “Narration,” and “Conclusion” that separate the story in distinct parts, and the first-person possessive “our” that begins the text, allying the reader not with any protagonist, but with the work’s narrator. In this way, life here is presented as all authorial intrusion, all authorial interruption, which is perhaps some of what makes the inevitable listing of addresses, dates, names, and numbers that results from Samich’s search through the phone books so unsettling. Its style is so alien from what we are used to. As Samich reads, contemplates, and even visits these addresses, roaming the city by “mobile capsules” (buses), his nostalgia for this world of never-intruded-upon connections becomes, actually, a longing for an impossible “past” life, a life built only on interrelated traces.
In 1932, Banchs lived in the Colegiales neighborhood (835 Delgado). Under Barletta there’s a woman (Amelia O. Barletta)—Samich, in his eagerness for connections, assumes it’s his wife—living at 1228 Cangallo in 1937, curiously, Samich thinks, the same place where thirty years later a large publishing house will be headquartered. Bernárdez is just as unavailing: in 1937 there’s only a “Bernárdez family” at 1214 Centenera.
Patty: It’s funny how rereading the piece for this spotlight makes me realize the circles within circles I’ve been screwing in my own life. As of right now, a heavy-yet-pleasingly-crisp paperback copy of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch is weighing down my purse (along with the three other books I happen to be reading at the moment—sigh). I picked it up today, having eyed it for a long time (perhaps in no small part due to its mention in this piece: it has been on the brain for quite some time). Coordinates in this Chejfec piece intersect with details, bus routes, fortuitous encounters of my own life. I read Chejfec, Cortàzar, Casares while reading the menu of the Chinese place I’m having dinner at, looking at street signs in a new town, writing down account numbers and to-do lists.
In reading and immersing myself in other words, I forfeit control over my own experiences. Somehow, reading allows us—forces us, rather—to achieve a certain degree of spaceless-ness and liminality. This is perhaps not transcendence per se, but it’s certainly arguable, and visible in the cleverly constructed meta-narrative of “The Witness,” that dedicated reading stretches our hallucinatory occupation of reality, imposing upon us a syntax and vocabulary with which to negotiate our (rather quotidian) lives.
In his mind, the phone books would substantiate the addresses and the physical places would validate the phone books. But it turns out that almost none of this remains.
If finding a telephone number, a proof of existence and impression, is a marvel, so be it: like Samich-through-Cortázar, I marvel at the way writing both inscribes and erases our presence, how words—especially translated ones, which stretch the question of meaning to its absolute limits!—witness to the phenomena of being, thinking, and reading-through-writing.