No se culpe a nadie

A work ("No one is to blame") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

The cold always complicates matters; in summer we are all so close to the world, skin to skin.  But now at half past six his wife is waiting for him in a store to pick out a wedding gift.  It's already late and he notices that the air is cool.  I have to put on that blue sweater, he thinks, something that might go well with a grey suit, autumn is all about putting on and taking off sweaters, locking oneself up, running away.  He whistles a tango perfunctorily as he moves away from the open window, then looks for a sweater in the wardrobe and begins to put it on in front of the mirror.  It is not easy, perhaps owing to the shirt's sticking to the wool of the sweater.  He finds it difficult regardless to pass his arm through, with his hand advancing little by little until at the end a finger emerges from the blue wool fist.  And yet, in the twilight, the finger has the appearance of having been shriveled up and placed towards the inside, with one black nail ending in a point. 

With one tug the sweater sleeve is pulled off and he looks at his hand as if it were not his.  But now that it's out of the sweater the hand again looks like it always has, and he lets it fall from the end of his lazy arm as it occurs to him that it would be better to pass the other arm through the other sleeve to see whether it would be simpler that way.  It seemed like it would not because hardly has the wool of the sweater gotten stuck to the shirt again, owing still to the operation as well as to his habit of beginning with the other, difficult sleeve, when he starts to whistle again so as to distract himself, feeling that the arm is barely advancing and that, without some kind of complementary manoeuvre, he would never get out of here.  Perhaps it would be best to do everything at the same time: throw back his head to catch it at the height of the sweater's collar just as he places his free arm in the other sleeve, straightening the sleeve and pulling at it at the same time with his neck and both arms. 

It seems absurd to carry on whistling in the sudden blue darkness enveloping him, and it begins to feel hot.  His face, still part of his head, ought to stay out; but his forehead and his whole face remain covered and his arms are barely halfway through the sleeves.  No matter how hard he pulls, nothing comes out, and he realizes that perhaps he made a mistake owing to the ironic anger with which he resumed the task, and that he was stupid enough to have placed his head in one of the sleeves and a hand through the collar of the sweater.  If this were so his hand would have to come out easily; yet he still pulls with all his might and cannot advance either one of his hands.  On the contrary, it seemed like his head is about to make its way out because the blue wool is pressing against his nose and mouth with almost irritating force, suffocating him more than he could have ever imagined and obliging him to breathe deeply while the wool gets moist against his mouth (it will probably fade and end up staining his face in blue).           

Fortunately at this very moment his right hand appears in the air of the outside cold; at least one of them is out although the other continues to be imprisoned in the sleeve.  Perhaps his right hand was indeed caught in the collar of the sweater, and for this reason what he believed to be the collar is pressing down on his face thus, suffocating him more and more each time, whereas his hand was able to come out easily.  In any case, to be sure of it, the only thing he can do is to keep making his way, taking deep breaths and letting the air escape little by little, even if it were absurd because nothing is impeding him from breathing perfectly apart from the fact that the air he swallows is mixed with wool particles from the collar or the sleeve of the sweater.  Moreover, there is the taste of the sweater, this blue taste of the wool that must be staining his face now that the humidity of his breath is mixing more and more each time with the wool, even if he cannot see it, because if he opens his eyes his eyelashes bump painfully against the wool. 

He is certain that his wet mouth is being enveloped in blue, then his nostrils, then his cheeks.  All this fills him with dread and he wants to stop putting on the sweater right then and there, without taking into account that it must be late and that his wife might be waiting impatiently for him in front of the shop doors.  He tells himself that the most sensible thing is to concentrate his attention on his right hand because this hand outside of the sweater is in contact with the cold air of the room, a signal that he has only a little way to go and can help himself by going up the back until, in that classic movement so helpful to putting on any sweater by energetically pulling down, it clutches the lower edge of the sweater.  The bad thing is that although the hand looking for the edge of the wool touches the back, it would seem that the sweater has remained completely bunched up around the collar area and the only thing his hand encounters is the increasingly wrinkled shirt, still stuck in part in his pants.  Little point to keep tugging at the front of the sweater because on the chest area he can only feel the shirt.  The sweater must have barely gotten over the two shoulders and here may be rolled up and tense as if the shoulders were too narrow for this sweater, which proves without any doubt that he really did make a mistake and place a hand in the collar and the other hand in a sleeve.  As such, the distance between the collar and one of the sleeves is exactly half of the distance between one sleeve and the other, and this explains why he may have his head a bit tilted to the left, the side where his hand is still prisoner in the sleeve, if this is in fact the sleeve; and, in contrast, his right hand, which is already out, moves with full freedom in the air even if it may not be able to get the sweater down which is still rolled up on top of his body.

Ironically, it occurs to him that if there were a seat nearby he would be able to relax and breathe better until he's put on the sweater completely.  And yet he has lost his orientation after having screamed so many times in this type of euphoric gymnastics which always begins with finding a piece of clothing.  It has something of a concealed dance step about it, irreproachable because it reflects a utilitarian aim not some guilty choreographic tendencies.  Basically the true solution would be to remove the sweater, provided that he has not been able to put it on, and verify the correct passageway in the sleeves for each hand and in the collar for his head.  Yet the right hand keeps coming and going messily as if it were already ridiculous to give up at this advanced stage, and as if at any time it would comply and rise to the height of his head and he would pull upwards without understanding in time that the sweater has stuck to his face with that humid rubber-like quality from his breath mixed with the blue of the wool, and when his hand is drawn upwards he feels pain as if his ears were being ripped off and his eyelashes yanked out. 

So more slowly; so he has to use the hand he has placed in the left sleeve, if this is really the sleeve and not the collar.  And in so doing help his left hand with his right hand so that it can pass through the sleeve or retreat and get out, although it is almost impossible to coordinate the movements of the two hands, as if his left hand were a rat trapped in a cage and another rat on the outside wanted to help it escape.  Unless, instead of helping it, it were biting it because all of a sudden the imprisoned hand hurts and the other hand is pressing down with all its might in this endeavor, which must be his hand and which hurts, hurts to the point that he gives up trying to remove the sweater, preferring to make one last effort to get his head out of the collar and the left rat out of the cage.  And he tries to do so struggling with his whole body, throwing it forward and back, turning around in the middle of the room, if this is indeed the middle of the room because now he comes to think that the window has been left open and that it is dangerous to keep turning around blindly.  He chooses to stop even though his right hand keeps coming and going without engaging the sweater, even though his left hand hurts more and more every time as if his fingers were bitten off or burnt.  Nevertheless, it is this hand that obeys him, contracting little by little the lacerated fingers so that he manages to seize through the sleeve the edge of the sweater rolled up on the shoulder and pulls downwards almost without any force.  It hurts too much and his right hand, in any case, would need to help instead of rising or falling uselessly towards his legs, instead of nibbling at his thigh as it is doing, scratching and nibbling through the clothing without being able to stop itself from doing so because all his willpower is contained in his left hand.  Perhaps he has fallen to his knees and is sitting there as if hung from his left hand which is drawn from the sweater one more time. 

And suddenly it is cold in his eyebrows and his forehead, in his eyes.  Absurdly, he does not want to open his eyes but he knows that he has gotten out, this cold material, this is delicious in the free air.  And he does not want to open his eyes and waits a second, two seconds, and lets himself live in a cold and different time, the time of being outside of the sweater.  He is on his knees and it is lovely to be as such until, little by little, he opens his eyes free of the blue drool of wool inside, he opens his eyes and sees five suspended black nails aimed at his eyes, vibrating in the air before jumping against his eyes, and he has the time to lower his eyelids and throw himself back, covering himself with his left hand, which is his hand, which is everything he has to defend himself from inside the sleeve, so that he can pull the collar of the sweater upwards and so that the blue drool can envelop his face anew while he straightens himself to flee elsewhere.  So as to arrive at last somewhere else without a hand and without a sweater, somewhere where there may be only a fragrant air that surrounds and accompanies and caresses him and twelve stories.

Goethe, "Unschuld"

A work ("Innocence") by this German man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Most lovely virtue of a soul         
And purest font of tenderness, 
More rare than Pamela in bliss,              
And Byron's visions oft extolled!              
If then another fire burns hot,       
And weakens more your gentle light, 
Felt but by him who knows you not,
For he who knows shall feel but night.

O Goddess in this paradise,                
You ere lived here with us as one.      
And still you drift as meadows rise
Each morning with the shining sun.
But only poets sage and meek
Will see you garbed in foggy twists.
Then Phoebus comes to chase the mist,
And there amidst the clouds you'll yield. 

oldog születésnapot kíván Moszkva, Péter! remélem, minden rendben van!

The Speckled Band

Many years ago I remember discussing this story with a friend of mine who had read these tales in her native Russian.  Now if you are familiar with the development of post-Soviet literature, you may be aware of the inundation of mysteries, old and new, that have seized control of the market and become the topic of much popular debate (Russians tend to read quite a bit, hence the enormousness of the demand).  And the reason for this manic spree might involve the suppression of any type of ambiguities during the seventy-odd years of Soviet dominion.  In fact, when trolling around the library stacks at this German university, I came across a book that documented “the Soviet detective novel", a topic mindboggling both in its uniformity and its basic premise.  The perpetrators, to no one’s surprise, were always capitalists; the crimes they committed always clear displays of greed and selfishness that could only be remedied by the intervention of the public’s defenders, be they the Soviet police force or other cooperative agencies striving to stir equality among men.  Absent from these adventures, of course, was precisely what makes a mystery whir: suspense and ambiguity.  But these were not terms for the class struggle.  So let us return to a much more palatable time and regime for mysteries, late Victorian London, and that bizarre murder in a locked room.

As in so many Holmes tales, the two detectives are lounging about their Baker street quarters when a guest arrives, this time a young woman by the name of Helen Stoner.  She is the stepdaughter of Dr. Grimsley Roylott, “the last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in England,” and a woman living in a constant state of terror.  She will soon be married, an event that will allow her to inherit a vast annual stipend from her mother’s will.  But fear of impending doom interrupts her sleep.  It was but two years ago, she says, that her twin sister Julia reached the eve of her wedding before meeting with a most unfortunate accident.  That fatal night, Julia asked her sister:

‘Tell me, Helen,’ said she, ‘have you ever heard anyone whistle in the dead of night?’   ‘Never,’ said I.   ‘I suppose that you could not possibly whistle, yourself, in your sleep?’   ‘Certainly not.  But why?’   ‘Because during the last few nights I have always, at about three in the morning, heard a low, clear whistle … I cannot tell where it came from – perhaps from the next room, perhaps from the lawn.’

That night, there was a “wild scream.”  Helen rushed to the scene to find Julia had unlocked her door and was writhing, delirious, her only words being “Oh, my God! Helen!  It was the band!  The speckled band!”  She died shortly thereafter and yet there were no signs of wrongdoing. For all intents and purposes, she “died of pure fear.”  From the further description, we surmise that Dr. Roylott, once imprisoned in India for beating his butler to death, will have something to do with the murder.  Yet his method cannot be known without full vantage of the plot.  Suspecting his stepdaughter may have tried to betray his murderous intentions Roylott makes an appearance in Central London to ward off potential meddling from two of literature’s greatest meddlers, and twists an iron poker into a warning sign and display of his gargantuan physical strength.

None of this fazes Holmes, of course.   Soon thereafter, the duo decides to take action and visit the massive estate of Stoke Moran on whose grounds “a cheetah and a baboon roam freely … feared by the villagers almost as much as their master.”  After a dark and endless night amidst the gypsies and exotic animals that pledge no allegiance to anyone, including the enormous brute of a doctor, the truth is revealed – and it is not one to help your sleep one bit.  The Speckled Band has always been one of the most popular of the Holmes tales, owing in no small part to the exoticness of the explanation provided.  It is, however, precisely this explanation that is called into question in an article by a scientist specializing in the field, which persons unfamiliar with the arc of The Speckled Band will not want to read if they value suspense and ambiguity.  Then again, there are a lot of Soviet mysteries you might enjoy.

The Green Man

You may hear in casual and rather unfortunate parlance that the discerning reader does not read for pleasure, which is somewhat akin to claiming that the gourmet is too busy to enjoy his food because he is enumerating its ingredients on a napkin.  Yet what distinguishes a good reader from all others is the type of pleasure reading permits, a pleasure that, while having something to do with the act itself, has much more to do with the transport of the soul and mind to another realm in which every word may blossom fully like a lotus.  That is not to say, however, that he is a lotus-eater.  He may certainly be; but what he must be is willing to read a text for its aesthetic value, which may be very generally understood as the successful alliance of its style and moral rectitude.  A great work will necessarily have to exhibit excellence in both; a good work may have one of the two towering over the other like a castle and its adjoining chapel (or perhaps a cathedral and the neighboring museum); a poor work, which sadly has an inordinate amount of adherents, will either have both elements in ineffectual doses, or only one (or none) of the two.  This plain rule makes a list of commandments in their brackish dullness as unappealing as a purplish, pretty poem of no relation whatsoever to a real human condition or occurrence.  And if there is one eternally appealing characteristic of man, it is his ambition to become something greater than he already is – which brings us quite nicely to this story.  

Our initial actor is a young man by the name of Harold Harker.  We have all known a Harold Harker or two in our day.  And somehow perhaps, he knows he seems like much more of a story-book character than a real person, precisely because he is so incredibly real.  As our story opens, Mr. Harker is as always his busy, amateurish self:

He was not carelessly knocking a ball about, but rather practising particular strokes with a sort of microscopic fury; like a neat and tidy whirlwind.  He had learned many games quickly, but he had a disposition to learn them a little more quickly than they can be learnt.  He was rather prone to be a victim of those remarkable invitations by which a man may learn the Violin in Six Lessons – or acquire a perfect French accent by a Correspondence Course.  He lived in the breezy atmosphere of such hopeful advertisement and adventure.  He was at present the private secretary of Admiral Sir Michael Craven, who owned the big house behind the park abutting on the links. He was ambitious, and had no intention of continuing indefinitely to be private secretary to anybody.  But he was also reasonable; and he knew that the best way of ceasing to be a secretary was to be a good secretary.  Consequently he was a very good secretary.

How one can at once excel at one's job and think of nothing more than abandoning it remains a question for every silently resentful servant biding his time, a common affliction among those with unbridled ambition and very bridled talent.  As the story progresses, Harker will seem less important until one key conversation towards the end that is summarized rather than provided in the text.  But he is monumentally important for our introductory purposes because from his lofty perch, he espies his master Admiral Craven scurrying up the bottom of the hill "wearing that almost extravagant full-dress uniform which naval officers never do wear if they can possibly help it."  In his wake comes an even more extraordinary sight, and for a rare moment Mr. Harker believes he has just seen a pirate, also in some fancy-dress outfit appropriate for buccaneers and their confederates, and in the possession of a cutlass which is drawn just as the lumbering pair drift out of eyeshot. 

He sees no more, of course, because this story is supposed to be a mystery necessitating a detective, not a dilettante twit like Mr. Harker.  And the next time he does in fact behold his employer, it is as the latter is being lifted, quite dead, from a green pool of slime.  The location of this pool?  Not far from a "shabby fisherman's tavern" that just so happens to be the title of this review.  While leaving a daughter on this earth, the Admiral, bless his stilled heart, left no mortal foes (he was, we are told, the type of person who has no enemies, which also means he was the type of person who has no friends).  That lovely daughter of his, however, is another story.  We are told she is "dark and dreamy," which makes her sound like a pirate ship trapped in human form; we are also told that she is prone to startling fits of laughter that invariably prove infectious.  Even the simplest minds raised on pink romance and blue skies could imagine that to complete this character, whose name is quite strangely Olive, she would need a suitor or two minding her hems.  Those suitors will be provided – you may know one of them already – as well as the supporting cast that tends to turn up in these kinds of stories: a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman and a singularly small and innocuous-looking priest by the name of Brown.  And the policeman's belief in our priest's powers – apparently in contrast to what he thinks about every other man of the cloth – allows for the easy transfer of authority that will make a molehill out of our mystery.

It is still strange to me, having read all the Father Brown stories at least three of four times, that I must be reminded that our miniature sleuth is exclusively garbed in a Roman cassock of thirty-three buttons, not the modest frock of this order, but this is purely owing to my faulty associations.  There is much to be loved in Chesterton: everything he wrote had his magic touch, his unswerving passion for art and wisdom and salvation, which makes his unmatchable wit even more impressive.  Nevertheless, to most his reputation has survived only thanks to a small Catholic priest and his brilliant perception of human nature.  And in every story Chesterton takes a detective writer's premise – a simple act, as all acts of violence are unfortunately simple – and paints an impressionist masterpiece.  Since he confines himself to a dozen or so pages each time, the deception must draw from the reader's moral ballast.  The deception?  Very much so.  The Green Man is perhaps not the best of his stories, but its structure embodies the tricks that a man of genius plays on his readers when he has an uncomplicated point to convey but no intention to bore them and, much more importantly, himself.  That is why, as  far as green human-sized creatures are concerned, you may also want to consider that old adage about the sword and the pen.

Mister Foe

It is more than mildly appropriate that we begin this film in a tree house.  Our hero, you see, is little more than a fledgling (opening credits suggest a trouble-making fledgling) who prefers the camouflaged seclusion of the treetops to the red earth and the hum of man.  These heights also grant him a pesky hobby, namely spying on everything and everyone around him with his fantastic binoculars.  Despite this ostensibly scientific leaning, our bird is subject to the flights of fancy of the most delusional of poets, which makes what he sees as problematic as his methods of observation.

The avian adolescent in question is Hallam Foe (Jamie Bell).  Hallam is the kind of shy, slovenly, and generally innocuous seventeen-year-old who is so frustrated with the shape of his existence that what normally plagues boys his age – the pursuit and conquest of the opposite sex – seems like an endnote to a lengthy tome of troubles.  Unlike most voyeurs, however, he does not display much envy or erotic interest in what he sees.  When he confesses this oddity later in the film, the careful viewer will not only believe him, he will also not see any other interpretation possible.  Teenage boys may indeed turn to peeping and vicarious pleasures to avoid the potential humiliation of the whole hunt, but for all his guerilla tactics Hallam is no hunter.  That is to say, he cannot know what he is missing if he has absolutely no notion of what he is supposed to have.  Hallam stares at the world and its gyrations like some of us stare at the firmament – in anticipation of a sign, any sign.  Perhaps Bell's pouty restraint and charm render him credible as both a stalker and an innocent bystander; but the tenor in his repeated peeping sessions is correct, if charged with eroticism for everyone except him.  He does watch women in various stages of dishabille, as well as a coupling or two, and yet remains more fascinated with the energy and purpose than beset by some juvenile itch.  It is important, therefore, to understand the film on its own untwisted terms: a well-heeled Scottish lad who has recently lost his mother devotes a large portion of his free hours to the observation of happier people with causes and concerns.     

Actually, maybe not quite that happy.  But there are causes and concerns galore.  His mother drowned two years ago in a loch beside Chanby house, a wonderfully Scottish manor currently inhabited by Hallam, his older sister Lucy (Lucy Holt), their architect father Julius (Ciarán Hinds), and their father's dishy second wife Verity (Claire Forlani).  In the breathtaking first twenty minutes, Hallam will foil one of Lucy's sexcapades in the woods, examine a jolly boat with a hammer, break into the local police station, call his stepmother a gold-digging prostitute, gaze at a wall-sized photograph of his mother in his tree house, accuse his stepmother of murder to his father, find his sister waxing his stepmother's legs, then, in an inevitability as subtle as an avalanche, have unbridled sexual intercourse in that same tree house with that same stepmother under that same wall-sized photograph.  Most reviews of the film, of course, smugly mention complexes and other psychobabble that can be culled from the back covers of a teetering stack of woeful slabs – but I think readers of these pages know that this type of nonsense is best reserved for limited and unimaginative minds.  Hallam's main personality trait is the pain of having a parent leave his life without his knowing much about her and, more importantly, without her having seen him fulfill his potential as a human being.  He does not quite know how she died; the police report indicates (in perfect concordance with Julius's statements) that Anne Sarah Foe had 900 ml of prescription-level soporifics in her system when she drowned.  It seems absurd to him that a married, well-off, and lovely mother of two would abandon our world without the slightest cry for help.  Yet, sadly enough, we former teenagers know much more about life and its machinations, and know which suppositions at the beginning of the film are improbable and which are more than a bit likely.  That Verity – truth itself – would avail herself of his diaries then seduce him to use both events as a means of blackmailing him out of the house is highly probable.  What is not really probable is what Hallam finds in Edinburgh as a humble but enthusiastic dishwasher – but we shall conclude our revelations right there.          

The originality in Mister Foe is in its insistence to see what Hallam sees at almost all times, without ever insinuating that his illness – if that is really the right word – has clouded his judgment amidst dangerous heights.  Thus, apart from a few, sporadic moments we never leave Hallam's world.  Doors are always conveniently ajar; windows, trees, and roofs mere seats in other people's theaters.  Even when some very racy events occur on the other side of the pane, so to speak, this remains a premise to which the viewer readily assents because Hallam is much more victim than creep (pace one character's later comment).  If this were a Spanish or Italian production, our lonesome bird would have surely long devolved into a homicidal maniac.  Since we wander about the overly civilized moors of Scotland where refined masters such as MacBeth and Hogg once prowled, however, we know that the plot may get bloody, but it will inevitably remain understated and subtle.  We get visceral close-ups of what Hallam will remember of this troubling period: a lovely young woman's batting lid when she makes an unpleasant admission, and then his lid in response, and then hers again; an ATM screen boldly prophesying "Today you may withdraw nil"; the only book title ever legible during the film, "Easy Lock Pickings"; and a supply of dirty dishes so unending that we can almost taste the grease.  There are also a couple of revelations about Anne Foe, whose only known profession apart from mother is artist.  What sort of artist?  Her maiden name, we learn, was Munro, which recurs to a minor figure of English literature and, given the plot of Mister Foe, one brief work in particular.  And who would that girl by the open window be?  We have yet to mention Kate (Sophia Myles), the third in a triptych of scrumptious women, and her exact role, but some mysteries must be maintained until the curtain rises.  Suffice it to say that when and how Hallam encounters her must be attributed to some force between destiny and dementia.  O Hallam, thou shalt not be the fool of loss.