Woes of the True Policeman

Arcimboldi, he said, had overnight become a fashionable author in Spain, where they were publishing or about to publish everything he’d written. Not a week went by without an article on the great French writer, or a profile of him. Even The Endless Rose (his third or fourth novel?) — a difficult and deceptive work despite its apparent simplicity, to the point that sometimes it seemed like a book for morons — was already in a second printing, when it had scarcely been out for a month. The new Spanish translation was by a writer from Navarra, suddenly revealed to be an expert — which he was, though he’d certainly kept it under wraps — on the Arcimboldean oeuvre. I prefer your translation, said Padilla, and every page that I reread makes me imagine you in that storm-tossed Buenos Aires, freighted with omens, where your innocence triumphed. Here Padilla gets it wrong again, thought Amalfitano, because even though the translation was for a Buenos Aires publishing house, he had done it while he was living in Mexico City. If I had translated Arcimboldi in Buenos Aires, he thought, I would be dead now.

Of course, continued Padilla, he, too, had succumbed to the fashion for Arcimboldi and in a week he’d devoured the three novels in Spanish translation, plus another three in the original French that he’d found at the Librería Apollinaire on Calle Córcega, plus the controversial novella or long short story Riquer, which he’d read in Juli Montaner’s Catalan translation and which seemed to him a kind of long-winded Borges. In Barcelona there are those who say, said Padilla, that Arcimboldi is the perfect blend of Thomas Bernhard and Stevenson (old R.L., you heard me right), but he placed him somewhere nearer the unlikely intersection of Aloysius Bertrand and Perec and (brace yourself) Gide and the Robbe-Grillet of Project for a Revolution in New York. In any case, French to the hilt. Finally, he said that he was starting to get sick of the flocks of Arcimboldi exegetes, whom he equated with donkeys, animals he had always pitied though he hadn’t seen one in the flesh until he was nineteen, in Gracia, the property of some Gypsies who moved like metropolitan shepherds from the grazing lands of one Barcelona neighborhood to another with the donkey, a monkey, and a barrel organ. Despite Buñuel and Dalí, I always loved Platero, it must be because we faggots get a kick out of all that Andalusian shit, he wrote, and these lines wounded Amalfitano deeply.

As he saw it, Padilla was a poet, an intellectual, a fighter, a gay free spirit who dispensed his favors liberally, an engaging companion, but never a faggot, a term he associated with cowardice and enforced loneliness. But it was true, he thought then, he and Padilla were faggots, and that was all there was to it, period.

With sadness, Amalfitano realized that he in fact wasn’t an authority on the work of Arcimboldi, though he had been the first to translate him into Spanish, more than seventeen years ago, when almost no one had heard of him. I should have kept translating him, he said to himself, and not wasted my time on Osman Lins, the concrete poets, and my atrocious Portuguese, but I struck out there too. And yet Padilla, Amalfitano realized, had overlooked something in his long letter (as had probably all the other Arcimboldians of Barcelona), a crucial feature of the French writer’s work: even if all his stories, no matter their style (and in this regard Arcimboldi was eclectic and seemed to subscribe to the maxim of De Kooning: style is a fraud), were mysteries, they were only solved through flight, or sometimes through bloodshed (real or imaginary) followed by endless flight, as if Arcimboldi’s characters, once the book had come to an end, literally leapt from the last page and kept fleeing.

Padilla’s letter ended with two pieces of news: his breakup with his SEAT boyfriend, and the imminent — though why it was so imminent he didn’t say — end to his job as a proofreader. If I keep proofreading, he said, I won’t enjoy reading anymore, and that’s the end, isn’t it? About The God of Homosexuals he had little or a lot to say, depending: it’s a waltz.

In his reply, which was as long as Padilla’s letter, Amalfitano entangled himself in a series of disquisitions on Arcimboldi that had little to do with what he really wanted to get across: the state of his soul. Don’t leave your proofreading job, he said in the postcript, I imagine you with no money in Barcelona and it scares me. Keep proofreading and keep writing.