Caterva: The Summing Up.

When I first learned about Juan Filloy’s novel Caterva, I was intrigued, and now that I’ve finished it I’m glad I tackled it, even though for quite a while it looks like it’s a road to nowhere, just a jovial group picaresque. Paul Pickering describes it well in the TLS review quoted in that LH post (and available in full here):

As the book opens, a ragbag of magnificent drifters appears under a road bridge: “Not clustered in a heap like stones and boulders that just come rolling randomly along… but rather washed there by virtue of a secret current”. The wind blows like “a swarm of flies” and the glowering clouds “smell of sex”. There are seven drifters in total, a number that occurs throughout Filloy’s work, it being the number of letters in Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel that had a profound influence on Caterva with its bittersweet encyclopedic comedy and epic sweep. But this book is more uncompromising than Joyce’s novel, more akin to the gallows humour of Samuel Beckett.

These vagabonds travel under assumed names: Aparicio, “spectre”, is a veteran of the Uruguayan civil war; Dijunto, “dead man”, is a Spanish dirt farmer; Abd-ul “Katanga” ben-Hixem, “dung beetle”, is an exile from the Armenian massacres; Fortunato is from Prague; Longines is a Swiss cryptographer; Lon Chaney a Parisian jack-of-all-trades; and Viejo Amor an increasingly embarrassing Italian satyr. There is a tremendous energy to the vicious humour but also a lightness of touch as the rebel, left-wing band travel in box cars across the stark, forbidding Pampas, accused of giving money to striking miners, letting off bombs and incompetently fomenting revolution. They set out as “purposeful beggars” on “an ideal tour for the sake of others”. But Filloy is more concerned with his characters’ farcical inner lives than their political ones. On one level, the efforts of the gang to make good are a satire on Argentina and the South American condition: both travel great distances to arrive at the same place.

Spiky dialogue pinballs back and forth, sometimes obscene, sometimes philosophical. “There ought to be something like a poste restante for the soul! Places where the emotions of mysterious metapsychic correspondents can be rescued from oblivion or silence”, says Katanga, a “nudist by nature” who does exercises that “mimicked the beauty of the Muslim liturgy”. Occasionally, they are seduced by the scenery: “The pleasure produced by nature left them speechless. They turned their heads in slow, lingering delight. They drank it in. Perfumes of spearmint and peppermint. Warm exhalations from the nearby cliffs”.

There are a multitude of demented sub-plots on the journey, swirling around matters as disparate as the newly invented Swiss Army knife and a Nazi intrigue that involves the British Entomological Society and a very strange code–but these are not the point. It is the impossible solidarity of individuals that is important, as seen at Fortunato’s wake, which echoes a hospital drinking scene in Ulysses.

That should give you an idea of whether this is your sort of thing; if it is, I recommend you give it a try. I’ll add some passages of particular LH interest; first, a bit on cursing:

Longines spoke several different languages, but he preferred to keep quiet in all of them.

When the truck got stuck, slipping in the muddy ditch, he clenched his teeth, fiercely. And he swallowed saliva. Obscenities always being the first words learned, if he were someone else, he would have cursed in German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Esperanto.

Esperanto — now, that’s dedication! Now, a parody of Dante:

The instant a chubby little Italian blonde opened her mouth Viejo Amor fell under the spell of her rough, tubercular voice, with touches of falsetto that made her Cocoliche accent comical. Just to confuse her, he feigned a bit of resistance. But when her bloodless hands caressed the curls of his beard, when his compatriot languidly grazed his erotic nerve, arrivederci: Viejo Amor stood straight up at attention!

Triumphant, she began to recite for him a parody of the Third Canto of the Inferno:

Per me si va nel luogo desiato
Che in general bordello bien chiamato
Per me si va tra la perduta gente.

Che di puttane ahn nome nel presente
Per me si va nell eterno amore
Dove si fotte sempre in tutte le ore…

I am the path to the place of corruption
So well known as the house of prostitution
Through me pass those with lives shattered.

If they call us whores nowadays, no matter
I am the path to love’ eternal bower
Where it’s nonstop fucking, hour after hour…

The odd thing here is that “ahn,” which is present in the original Spanish edition as well (Google Books); my medieval Italian isn’t good enough to be sure what it’s meant for (al?), and I don’t know whether the error (if it is an error) is attributable to author or whore.

There’s an example of the kind of Italian/Spanish mix I mentioned here:

Now taking their leave, the settler commented:

“Ma por qué non diqueron qu’eranno paisano? In veche, avria achutato. Alora non posso.”

“Sará in altra volta.”

“E boeno: de pasar non ha pasato niente. Addio.”

Triumphant, thanks to the proffered explanations, the Italian woman fixed her gaze on Aparicio. And sputtered:

“Grandíssimo belinún: non somo caraco, sabe? You great big stupid little prick: we not jackets, got it?”

There’s an eloquent passage about a pharmacist named Don Baudilio Pérez, mocked for his pomposity:

Katanga was the only one who felt sorry for him. Unnecessary pity, certainly; it was the pharmacist who abandoned the forum after his frustrated lecture, with the all the noble bearing of a wounded rhetorician.

“In Colombia and in Ecuador, I’ve met many of his stripe, infected with Gongoran psychosis. Great savants of our linguistic patrimony who understand precious little about the imperatives of the hour. Men who fail to understand that language is a living thing, not merely cold erudition. Men who speak Spanish with such a chaste, pure style that one is obliged to translate it … into modern, everyday language.”

“Well, you’ve got that right … on the button,” said the landlady. “Don Baudilio does all he can to complicate what’s simple. You’ll never hear him ask: Give me half a pound of cheese, but instead: Secure for me in a paper and twine package eight ounces of lactic condensation. He’ll never tell you that he’s the chief pharmacist, but rather: I offer solace and consolation to those poor souls racked with grievous ailments … Yesterday, he threw me off by asking for a Medusan floorcloth.”

“Medusan floorcloth?”

“Yes, gentlemen: ‘me-du-san floor-cloth’. A bunch of nonsense which means, quite simply: a string mop …”

Their laughter cleared the way for Dijunto:

“I’m Spanish; we speak the same language, but I’ll confess that I can’t stand paisanos like him. One of them came to General Pico boasting of his family lineage. He’d bought a large estate next to the farm I leased. He came by recommendation from the Argentine Ambassador in Madrid. He began directing the settlement in that area. And that’s when the real pain started. It was a total disaster. His workers didn’t last. He mistreated them because they didn’t understand him. How were they going to understand him? He used words like ‘cob’ instead of ‘horse’; ‘declivity’ for ‘gully’; ‘offshoots’ for ‘branches’; ‘beast of burden’ for ‘mule’; ‘drip irrigation system’ for a ‘tree well’ … just fine if the workers were all teachers … But they didn’t even understand his insults! One winter afternoon he started threatening this guy from Piedmont: Eh, poltroon, to your toil and travail! Enough solar soldering there, you mealworm!”

“Translate.”

“Lets go, lazy, get to work. Enough sunbathing, you greedy loafer… ! The best part was that the kid just laughed. And then all hell broke loose because he was so furious. It goes without saying that the kid got a good walloping … The only solution he could come up with was to hire a criollo overseer, one of those foul-tempered assholes, the kind that get their point across without even talking…”

There’s a use of butterfly drawings as code that would have delighted Nabokov:

It was a heavy bombardment of unnerving shocks. The first struck as Longines revealed the faint sketch of the fortress at Porto Alegre, inscribed within the body of the Anaea suprema. The second, marked out in the wings of Cyrestis thyodamas—the famous common map butterfly—the tacit cartography of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina which bordered the Misiones Province of Argentina. The third, a strategic map of Sao Paulo, threaded through the beautiful patterns of the gran amazona: Argynnis childreni. The fourth, within a splendid example of Callithea sapphira, the location and strength of federal troops echeloned from Uruguay to San Borja, on the Brazilian side; and from Monte Caseros to Concepcién de la Sierra, on the Argentine side. The fifth, as revealed in the eight white spots of each lower sector of the Catagramma cynosura, the planned location for the site of Las Posadas. The sixth, the bridges and streets of the city of Blumenau, in Santa Catarina state, which he made out within the drawing of the Zeonia sylphina butterfly. The seventh was hidden within the absolutely diaphanous wings of the wondrous cristalina de menandro, its subtle nervures tracing out the hydrography of Rio Grande do Sul with its fordable streams. The eighth, lines of small forts and military outposts along the Uruguayan border, carefully disguised in the drawing of the Catagramma cajetani. The ninth, he showed him encrusted in the beautiful polychrome of the Agrias amydon boliviensi, the principal schools, factories, and broadcasting stations infiltrated by Nazis as centers for espionage. The tenth, on the same page, two butterflies typical of Argentina: the Colias lesbia and the Danaus gilippus, their modest designs concealing names of chief officials, instructors, and school teachers scattered throughout the region. The eleventh, the best roads and trails through the state of Parana, blended into in the white striations slicing through the dusky brown of Papilio philolaus. The twelfth, transcribed in the dead nervures of the common Danaus erippus, the convergent routes in the outlying areas of Sao Paulo. The thirteenth, the cadmium spots that embellish the Dismorphia fortunata sketched out, according to Longines, the probable airfields of the expeditionary forces. The fourteenth, by his appraisal, the number and importance of pro-Hitler legions among the settlers, disguised in the grizzly-brown stripes which cross the Papilio epidaus fenochionis.

And finally, just for Dmitry Pruss, an encomium on the tango:

When the dance finished, the radio announcer took over:

Dear listeners:

Tonight we are offering a concert of tangos chosen from the traditional repertoire.

By the time Jean Richepin had made his memorable defense of the tango in Paris, and the many rhythmical contortions of its cuts and breaks swept through the cabarets of the City of Light, our national dance, par droit de conquéte, had already taken the world by storm.

Waltzes, mazurkas, schottisches, lancers, and other dances were eclipsed by the tortured indolence of its movements and its plaintive, sensual harmonies.

As a dance, the tango enjoys a perfect relationship to its music, and carries in its rhythms a sweet, decadent melody. It lacks the brutal brio of the maxixe, or the dizziness of the waltz. A deep tenderness of longing, a weariness from pleasures enjoyed, a profound sadness of dead love, all vibrate through its notes in a soft exquisite amalgam.

I thought we had discussed the maxixe at some point, but all I can find is this from Alex K. in 2020:

When Darius Milhaud served at the French embassy in Rio in 1917-18, he didn’t just buy the sheet music for various “maxixes and tangos” but would also go listen to Ernesto Nazareth play his pieces at the Odeon movie theater. The trick was to figure out certain rhythmical subtleties, “ce petit rien si typiquement brésilien.”

At any rate, now I know where Cortázar came from!