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paralyzed by horror. When I say “paralyzed,” I mean it literally,
not as a criticism. I’m thinking of the way some small boys freeze when suddenly
confronted by an unforeseen horror, unable even to shut their eyes. I’m thinking
of the way some girls have been known to die from a heart attack before the
rapist has finished with them. Some literary artists are like those boys and
girls. And that’s how Naipaul was in my story, in spite of himself. He kept his
eyes open and maintained his customary lucidity. He had what the Spanish call
bad milk
, a kind of spleen that immunized him against appeals to
vulgar sentimentality. But in his nights of wandering around Buenos Aires, he,
or his antennae, also picked up the static of hell. The problem was that he
didn’t know how to extract the messages from that noise, a predicament that
certain writers, certain literary artists, find particularly unsettling.
Naipaul’s vision of Argentina could hardly have been less flattering. As the
days went by, he came to find not only the city but the country as a whole
insufferably aggravating. His uneasy feeling about the place seemed to be
intensified by every visit, every new acquaintance he made. If I remember
rightly, in my story Naipaul had arranged to meet Bioy Casares at a tennis club.
Bioy didn’t play any more, but he still went there to drink vermouth and chat
with his friends and sit in the sun. The writer and his friends at the tennis
club struck Naipaul as monuments to feeblemindedness, living illustrations of
how a whole country could sink into imbecility. His meetings with journalists
and politicians and union leaders left him with the same impression. After those
exhausting days, Naipaul dreamed of Buenos Aires and the pampas, of Argentina as
a whole, and his dreams invariably turned into nightmares. Argentineans are not
especially popular in the rest of Latin America, but I can assure you that no
Latin American has written a critique as devastating as Naipaul’s. Not even a
Chilean. Once, in a conversation with Rodrigo Fresán, I asked him what he
thought of Naipaul’s essay. Fresán, whose knowledge of literature in English is
encyclopedic, barely remembered it, even though Naipaul is one of his favorite
authors. But to get back to the story: Naipaul listens and notes down his
impressions but mostly he walks around Buenos Aires. And suddenly, without
giving the reader any sort of warning, he starts talking about sodomy. Sodomy as
an Argentinean custom. Not just among homosexuals — in fact, now that I come
think of it, I can’t remember Naipaul mentioning homosexuality at all. He is
talking about heterosexual relationships. You can imagine Naipaul,
inconspicuously positioned in a bar (or a corner store — why not, since we’re
imagining), listening to the conversations of journalists, who start off by
talking about politics, how the country has merrily set its course toward the
abyss, and then, to cheer themselves up, they move on to amorous encounters,
sexual conquests and lovers. All of their faceless lovers have at some point,
Naipaul reminds himself, been sodomized. I took her up the ass, he writes. It’s
an act that in Europe, he reflects, would be regarded as shameful, or at least
passed over in silence, but in the bars of Buenos Aires it’s something to brag
about, a sign of virility, of ultimate possession, since if you haven’t fucked
your lover or your girlfriend or your wife up the ass, you haven’t really taken
possession of her. And just as Naipaul is appalled by violence and
thoughtlessness in politics, the sexual custom of “taking her up the ass,” which
he sees as a kind of violation, fills him ineluctably with disgust and contempt:
a contempt of Argentineans that intensifies as the article proceeds. No one, it
seems, is exempt from this pernicious custom. Well, no, there is one person
quoted in the essay who rejects sodomy, though not with Naipaul’s vehemence. The
others, to a greater