The Insufferable Gaucho

Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey

Although it may not warrant an eminent place in the annals of literary mystery, the curious case of Álvaro Rousselot is worthy of attention, for a few minutes at least.

Keen readers of mid-twentieth-century Argentine literature, who do exist, albeit not in great numbers, will no doubt remember that Rousselot was a skilled narrator and an abundant inventor of original plots, a sound stylist in literary Spanish, but not averse to the use of Buenos Aires slang or lunfardo, when the story required it (as was often the case), though never in a mannered way, at least not for those of us who count ourselves among his faithful readers.

The action of that sinister and eminently sardonic character Time has, however, prompted a reconsideration of Rousselot’s apparent simplicity. Perhaps he was complicated. By which I mean much more complicated than we had imagined. But there is an alternative explanation: perhaps he was simply another victim of chance.

Such cases are not unusual among lovers of literature. In fact, they are not unusual among lovers of anything. In the end we all fall victim to the object of our adoration, perhaps because passion runs its course more swiftly than other human emotions, perhaps as a result of excessive familiarity with the object of desire.

In any case, Rousselot loved literature as much as any Argentine writer of his generation, or of the preceding and following generations, which is to say that his love was somewhat disillusioned. What I mean is that he was not especially different from the others, his peers — he knew the same torments and moments of joy — yet nothing even remotely similar happened to any of them.

At this point it could be objected, quite reasonably, that the others were destined for hells or singularities of their own. Angela Caputo, for example, killed herself in an unimaginable manner: no one who had read her poems, with their ambivalently childish atmosphere, could have predicted such an atrocious death, stage-managed down to the finest detail to maximize the terrifying effect. Or Sánchez Brady, whose texts were hermetic and whose life was cut short by the military regime in the seventies, when he had passed the age of fifty and lost interest in literature and the world in general.

Paradoxical deaths and destinies, yet they do not eclipse the case of Rousselot, the enigma that imperceptibly enveloped his life, the sense that his work, his writing, stood near or on the edge or the brink of something he knew almost nothing about.

His story can be recounted simply, perhaps because, in the final analysis, it is a simple story. In 1950, at the age of thirty, Rousselot published his first book, a novel about daily life in a remote Patagonian penitentiary, under the rather laconic title Solitude. Not surprisingly, the book relates numerous confessions about past lives and fleeting moments of happiness; it also relates numerous acts of violence. Halfway through, it becomes apparent that most of the characters are dead. With only thirty pages left to go, it is suddenly obvious that they are all dead, except for one, but the identity of that single living character is never revealed. The book was not much of a success in Buenos Aires, selling less than a thousand copies, but, thanks to some friends, Rousselot had the pleasure of seeing a well-respected publisher bring out a French edition in 1954. Solitude became Nights on the Pampas in the land of Victor Hugo, where it made little impact, except on two critics, one of whom reviewed it warmly, while the other was perhaps excessively enthusiastic; then it vanished into the limbo of remote shelves and overloaded tables in secondhand bookstores.

At the end of 1957, however, a film entitled Lost Voices was released; it was directed by a Frenchman named Guy Morini, and for anyone who had read Solitude, it was clearly a clever adaptation of Rousselot’s book. Morini’s film began and ended altogether differently, but its stem or middle section corresponded exactly to the novel. It would, I think, be impossible to recapture Rousselot’s feeling of stunned amazement in the dark, half-empty Buenos Aires cinema where he first saw the Frenchman’s film. Naturally, he considered himself a victim of plagiarism. As the days went by, other explanations occurred to him, but he kept coming back to the idea that his work had been plagiarized. Of the friends who were informed and went to see the film, half were in favor of suing the production company, while the others were inclined to think, more or less resignedly, that these things happen — think of Brahms. By that time, Rousselot had already published a second novel, The Archives of the Calle Peru, a detective story, with a plot that revolved around the appearance of three bodies in three different places in Buenos Aires: the first two victims had been killed by the third, the victim in turn of an unknown assailant.

This second novel was not what one might have expected from the author of Solitude, but the critics received it well, although it is perhaps the least successful of Rousselot’s works. When Morini’s film came out in Buenos Aires, The Archives of the Calle Peru had already been kicking around the city’s bookshops for almost a year, and Rousselot had married Maria Eugenia Carrasco, a young woman who moved in the capital’s literary circles, and he had recently taken a job with the law firm Zimmerman & Gurruchaga.

Rousselot’s life was orderly: he got up at six in the morning and wrote or tried to write until eight, at which time he interrupted his commerce with the muses, took a shower and rushed off to the office, where he arrived at around ten to nine. He spent most mornings in court or going through files. At two in the afternoon, he returned home, had lunch with his wife, and then went back to the office for the afternoon. At seven, he would have a drink with some of his legal colleagues, and by eight, at the latest, he was back home, where Mrs. Rousselot, as she now was, had his dinner ready, after which Rousselot would read, while María Eugenia listened to the radio. On Saturdays and Sundays he wrote for a little longer, and went out at night, unaccompanied by his wife, to see his literary friends.

The release of Lost Voices brought him a degree of notoriety beyond his circle of associates. His best friend at the law firm, who was not particularly interested in literature, advised him to sue Morini for breach of copyright. Having thought it over carefully, Rousselot decided not to do anything. After The Archives of the Calle Peru, he published a slim volume of stories, and then, almost immediately, his third novel, Life of a Newlywed, in which, as the title suggests, he recounted a man’s first months of married life, and how, as the days go by, the man comes to realize that he has made a terrible mistake: not only is the woman he thought he knew a stranger, she is also a kind of monster who threatens his mental balance and even his physical safety. And yet the guy loves her (or rather discovers that he is physically attracted to her in a way that he hadn’t been before), so he holds on for as long as he can before fleeing.

The book was, obviously, meant to be humorous, and was taken as such by the reading public, to the surprise of Rousselot and his publisher. It had to be reprinted after three months, and within a year more than fifteen thousand copies had been sold. From one day to the next, Rousselot’s name soared from comfortable semi-obscurity to provisional stardom. He took it in stride. With the windfall earnings, he treated himself, his wife, and his sister-in-law to a vacation in Punta del Este, which he spent surreptitiously reading In Search of Lost Time, a book he had always pretended to have read. While Maria Eugenia and her sister lolled about on the seashore, he strove to redeem that lie, but above all to fill the gap left by his ignorance of France’s most celebrated novelist.

He would have been better off reading the Cabbalists. Seven months after his vacation in Punta del Este, before Life of a Newlywed had come out in French, Morini’s new film, The Shape of the Day, opened in Buenos Aires. It was exactly like Life of a Newlywed but better, that is, revised and considerably extended, much as Morini had done with Lost Voices, compressing the novel’s plot into the central part of the film, while the beginning and the end served as commentaries on the main story (or ways into and out of it, or digressions leading nowhere, or simply — and here lay the charm of the procedure — delicately filmed scenes from the lives of the minor characters).

This time, Rousselot was extremely aggrieved. His case against Morini was the talk of the Argentinean literary world for a week or so. And yet, when everyone presumed that he would take swift legal action for breach of copyright, he decided, to the dismay of those who had expected him to adopt a stronger and more decisive stance, that he would do nothing. Few could really understand his reaction. He did not protest, or appeal to the honor and integrity of the artist. After his initial surprise and indignation, Rousselot simply opted not to act, at least not legally. He waited. Something inside him, which could perhaps, without too great a risk of error, be called the writer’s spirit, trapped him in a limbo of apparent passivity, and began to harden or change him, or prepare him for future surprises.

In other respects his life as a writer and as a man had already changed as much as he could reasonably have hoped, or more: his books were well reviewed and widely read, they even supplemented his income, and his family life was suddenly enriched by the news that María Eugenia was going to be a mother. When Morini’s third film came to Buenos Aires, Rousselot stayed home for a week, resisting the temptation to rush to the cinema like a man possessed. He also instructed his friends not to tell him the plot. At first he thought he would not go to see the film. But after a week it was too much for him, and one night, having kissed his baby son and entrusted him to the nanny’s care as if he were leaving for a war and would never return, he stepped out, resignedly, arm in arm with his wife, and went to the cinema.

Morini’s film was called The Vanished Woman, and had nothing in common with any of Rousselot’s works, or with either of Morini’s previous films. As they left the cinema, María Eugenia said she thought it was bad and boring. Alvaro Rousselot kept his opinion to himself, but he agreed. A few months later, he published his next novel, the longest yet (206 pages), entitled The Juggler’s Family, in which he departed from the style that had characterized his work up till then, with its elements of fantasy and crime fiction, and experimented with what, at a stretch, could be called the choral or polyphonic novel. It wasn’t a form that came naturally to him, and seemed rather forced, but the book was redeemed by other features: the decency and simplicity of the characters, a naturalism that elegantly avoided the clichés of the naturalist novel, and the stories themselves, which were slight and resolute, joyful and pointless, and captured the indomitable Argentine spirit.

The Juggler’s Family was, without doubt, Rousselot’s greatest success, the book that brought all the others back into print, and his triumph was consummated by the Municipal Literary Award, presented at a ceremony in the course of which he was described as one of the five rising stars among the nation’s younger writers. But that is another story. It is common knowledge that the rising stars of any literary world are like flowers that bloom and fade in a day; and whether the day is literal and brief or stretches out over ten or twenty years, it must eventually come to an end.

The French, who distrust our municipal literary awards on principle, were slow to translate and publish The Juggler’s Family. By then, fashions in Latin American fiction had shifted north to more tropical climes. When the novel came out in Paris, Morini had already made his fourth and fifth films, a conventional but engaging French detective story and a turkey about a supposedly amusing family vacation in Saint-Tropez.

Both films were released in Argentina, and Rousselot was relieved to discover that neither bore the slightest resemblance to anything he had written. It was as if Morini had distanced himself from Rousselot, or, under pressure from creditors and swept up in the whirlwind of the movie business, had neglected the relationship. After relief came sadness. For a few days Rousselot was even preoccupied by the thought that he had lost his best reader, the reader for whom he had really been writing, the only one who was capable of fully responding to his work. He tried to get in touch with his translators, but they were busy with other books and other authors, and replied to his letters with polite and evasive phrases. One of them had never seen any of Morini’s films. The other had seen one of the films in question but hadn’t translated the corresponding book (or even read it, to judge from his letter).

When Rousselot asked his publishers in Paris if Morini might have had access to the manuscript of Life of a Newlywed before its publication, they weren’t even surprised. They replied indifferently that many people had access to a manuscript at various stages prior to printing. Feeling embarrassed, Rousselot decided to stop annoying people with his letters and suspend his investigations until such time as he could finally go to Paris himself. A year later he was invited to a literary festival in Frankfurt.

The Argentine delegation was sizable and the journey was pleasant. Rousselot got to know two old Buenos Aires writers whom he considered his masters. He tried to help them in any way he could, offering to render the sort of little services one might expect from a secretary or a valet rather than a colleague. This behavior was condemned by a writer of his own generation, who called him obsequious and servile, but Rousselot was happy and paid no attention. The stay in Frankfurt was enjoyable, in spite of the weather, and Rousselot spent all his time with the pair of old writers.

The atmosphere of slightly artificial happiness was, in fact, largely Rousselot’s own creation. He knew that when the festival was over, he would go on to Paris, while the others would return to Buenos Aires or take a short vacation somewhere in Europe. When the day of departure came and he went to the airport to see off the members of the delegation who were returning to Argentina, his eyes filled with tears. One of the old writers noticed and told him not to worry, they would see each other again soon, and the door of his house in Buenos Aires would always be open. But Rousselot couldn’t understand what anyone was saying to him. He was on the brink of tears because he was afraid of being left on his own, and, above all, afraid of going to Paris and confronting the mystery awaiting him there.

The first thing he did, as soon as he had settled into a little hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, was to call the translator of Solitude (Nights on the Pampas), unsuccessfully. The phone rang, but no one picked up, and when Rousselot went to the publisher’s offices, they had no idea where the translator might be. To tell the truth, they had no idea who Rousselot was either, although he pointed out that they had published two of his books, Nights on the Pampas and Life of a Newlywed. Finally, a guy who must have been about fifty, and whose role in the company Rousselot never managed to ascertain, identified the visitor, and, abruptly changing the topic, proceeded to inform him, in an absurdly serious tone, that the sales of his books had been very poor.

Rousselot then visited the publishers of The Juggler’s Family (which Morini, it seemed, had never read) and made a half-hearted attempt to obtain the address of the translator they had employed, hoping that he would be able to put him in touch with the translators of Nights on the Pampas and Life of a Newlywed. This second publishing house was significantly smaller and seemed to be run by just two people: the woman who received Rousselot, whom he guessed was a secretary, and the publisher, a young guy, who greeted him with a smile and a hug, and insisted on speaking Spanish, although it was soon clear that his grasp of the language was tenuous. When asked why he wanted to speak with the translator of The Juggler’s Family, Rousselot was at a loss for words, because he had just realized how absurd it was to think that any of his translators would be able to lead him to Morini. Nevertheless, encouraged by the publisher’s warm welcome (and his readiness to listen, since he didn’t seem to have anything better to do that morning), Rousselot decided to tell him the whole Morini story, from A to Z.

When he had finished, the publisher lit a cigarette, and paced up and down the office for a long time in silence, from one wall to the other and back, a distance of barely three yards. Rousselot waited, becoming increasingly nervous. Finally the publisher stopped in front of a glass-fronted bookcase full of manuscripts and asked Rousselot if it was his first time in Paris. Rather taken aback, Rousselot admitted that it was. Parisians are cannibals, said the publisher. Rousselot hastened to point out that he was not intending to take any kind of legal action against Morini; he only wanted to meet him and perhaps ask him how he’d come up with the plots of the two films in which he, Rousselot, had, so to speak, a particular interest. The publisher burst into uproarious laughter. It’s all about money here, he said, ever since Camus. Rousselot looked at him, bewildered. He didn’t know whether the publisher meant that idealism had died with Camus, and money was now the prime concern, or that Camus had established the law of supply and demand among artists and intellectuals.

I’m not interested in money, said Rousselot quietly. Nor am I, my poor friend, said the publisher, and look where it’s got me.

They parted with the understanding that Rousselot would call the publisher and arrange to have dinner one night. He spent the rest of the day sightseeing. He went to the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower; he ate in a restaurant in the Latin Quarter, and visited a couple of secondhand bookshops. That night, from his hotel, he called an Argentine writer he had known back in Buenos Aires and who now lived in Paris. They weren’t exactly friends, but Rousselot admired his work and had been instrumental in getting a number of his pieces published in a Buenos Aires magazine.

The Argentine writer was called Riquelme and he was happy to hear from Rousselot. Rousselot wanted to arrange to meet up some time during the week, perhaps for lunch or dinner, but Riquelme wouldn’t hear of it and asked him where he was calling from. Rousselot told him the name of his hotel and mentioned that he was thinking of going to bed. Riquelme said, Don’t even think of getting into your pajamas, I’ll be right there; it’s my treat tonight. Rousselot was overwhelmed, powerless to resist. He hadn’t seen Riquelme for years, and, waiting in the hotel lobby, tried to remember what he looked like. He had blond hair and a round, broad, face with a ruddy complexion; he was short. It had been a while since Rousselot had read any of his work.

When Riquelme finally appeared, Rousselot hardly recognized him: he seemed taller, not so blond, and he was wearing glasses. The night was rich in confessions and revelations. Rousselot told his friend what he had told his French publisher that morning, and Riquelme told Rousselot that he was writing the great Argentine novel of the twentieth century. He had passed the 800-page mark, and hoped to finish it in less than three years. Although Rousselot prudently refrained from asking about the plot, Riquelme explained several sections of his book in detail. They visited various bars and clubs. At some point during the night, Rousselot realized that both he and Riquelme were behaving like adolescents. At first this embarrassed him, but then he surrendered to the situation, happy to know that his hotel was there at the end of the night, his hotel room and the word “hotel,” which in that instant seemed a miraculous (that is to say instantaneous) incarnation of risk and freedom.

He drank a lot. On waking, he discovered a woman beside him. The woman’s name was Simone and she was a prostitute. They had breakfast together in a café near the hotel. Simone like to talk, so Rousselot discovered that she didn’t have a pimp, because a pimp will always rip you off, that she had just turned twenty-eight, and that she liked watching movies. Since he wasn’t interested in the world of Parisian pimps and Simone’s age didn’t seem a fruitful topic of conversation, they started talking about movies. She liked French cinema, and before long they got onto Morini. His first films were very good, in Simone’s opinion. Rousselot could have kissed her when she said that.

At two in the afternoon they returned to the hotel and didn’t re-emerge until dinner time. It would probably be true to say that Rousselot had never felt so good in his life. He wanted to write, and eat, and go out dancing with Simone, and wander aimlessly through the streets of the Left Bank. In fact, he felt so good that during the meal, shortly before they ordered dessert, he explained the reason for his trip to Paris. To Rousselot’s surprise, Simone was not at all surprised by the revelation that he was a writer or that Morini had plagiarized or copied his work, or freely adapted two of his novels to make his two best films.

Things like that do happen, was her laconic response, and even stranger things. Then, point blank, she asked him if he was married. The answer was implicit in the question, and with a resigned gesture Rousselot showed her the gold ring constricting his finger in that moment as it never had before. And do you have children? asked Simone. A little boy, said Rousselot with a tenderness engendered by the mental image of his offspring. And he added, He looks just like me. Then Simone asked him to keep her company on the way home. In the taxi, neither of them said a word; both looked out of their windows at the unpredictable spills of bright and dark, which made the City of Light seem like a medieval Russian city, or at least like the images of such cities that Soviet directors used to offer for public consumption every now and then in their films. Finally the taxi pulled up in front of a four-story building and Simone invited him to come in. Rousselot wondered whether he should, and then he remembered that he hadn’t paid her. Shamefaced, he got out of the taxi without worrying about how he would get back to his hotel (there didn’t seem to be many taxis in that neighborhood). Before going into the building, he held out a bunch of uncounted bills, which Simone put into her handbag, without counting them either.

The building didn’t have an elevator. By the time they reached the fourth floor, Rousselot was out of breath. In the dimly lit living room an old woman was drinking a whitish-colored liqueur. In response to a sign from Simone, Rousselot sat down next to the old woman, who produced a glass and filled it with that appalling liquid, while Simone vanished through one of the doors, then reappeared after a while and summoned him with a gesture. What now? thought Rousselot.

The room was small; it contained a bed in which a child was sleeping. My son, said Simone. He’s lovely, said Rousselot. And he was a pretty child, but perhaps that was only because he was sleeping. He had blond hair, which was rather too long, and resembled his mother, although Rousselot noted that there was already something thoroughly manly about his childish features. When he went back to the living room, Simone was paying the old woman, who then took her leave of Madame, and even wished her visitor an effusive good night, calling him Sir. Rousselot was thinking that the day had been eventful enough and that it was time to leave when Simone said he could spend the night with her, if he liked. But you can’t sleep in my bed, she said; she didn’t want her son to see her in bed with a stranger. So they made love in Simone’s room, and then Rousselot went out into the living room, lay down on the couch and fell asleep.

He spent the next day en famille, so to speak. The little boy’s name was Marc; Rousselot found him to be very bright (as well as speaking better French than he did). The novelist spared no expense: they had breakfast in the center of Paris, went to a park, had lunch in a restaurant on the Rue de Verneuil, which he had been told about in Buenos Aires, then they went rowing on a lake, and finally they visited a supermarket where Simone bought all the ingredients for a proper French meal. They took taxis everywhere. As they waited for ice-creams on a café terrace on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, Rousselot recognized a pair of famous writers. He admired them from a distance. Simone asked him if he knew them. He said no, but he was a passionate reader of their books. Then go and ask them for an autograph, she said.

At first it seemed a perfectly reasonable idea, the natural thing to do, but at the last moment Rousselot decided that he didn’t have the right to annoy anyone, least of all people he’d always admired. That night he slept in Simone’s bed; they covered each other’s mouths to stop their moans waking the child, and made love for hours, violently at times, as if loving each other were the only thing they knew how to do. The next day he returned to his hotel before the child woke up.

His suitcase had not been put out in the street as he had feared, and no one was surprised to see him appear out of nowhere, like a ghost. At reception there were two messages from Riquelme. The first was to say he had found out how to locate Morini. The second was to ask if Rousselot was still interested in meeting him.

He showered, shaved, brushed his teeth (a horrifying experience), put on clean clothes and called Riquelme. They talked for a long time. Riquelme told him that a friend of his, a Spanish journalist, knew another journalist, a Frenchman, who was a freelance movie, theater and music critic. The French journalist had been a friend of Morini’s and still had his telephone number. When the Spaniard had asked for the number, the Frenchman had given it to him without a second thought. Then Riquelme and the Spanish journalist had called Morini’s number without getting their hopes up, and were amazed when the woman who answered told them that they had indeed reached the director’s residence.

Now all they had to do was set up a meeting (at which Riquelme and the Spanish journalist wanted to be present) on some pretext — anything, for example an interview for an Argentinean newspaper. . with a surprise ending. What do you mean a surprise ending? shouted Rousselot. That’s when the bogus journalist reveals his true identity and confronts the plagiarist, Riquelme replied.

That night, as Rousselot was taking photographs more or less at random on the banks of the Seine, a bum came up and asked him for some change. Rousselot offered him a bill if he would consent to be photographed. The bum agreed, and for a while they walked along together in silence, stopping every now and then to allow the Argentine writer to move off to an appropriate distance and take a photo. On the third occasion the bum suggested a pose, which Rousselot accepted without demur. The writer took eight photos in all: the bum on his knees with his arms stretched out to the sides, and in other poses, such as pretending to sleep on a bench, thoughtfully watching the river flow by, or smiling and waving his hand. When the photo session was over, Rousselot gave him two bills and all the coins in his pocket, and then the pair of them stood there together, as if there were something more to be said but neither of them dared say it. Where are you from? the bum asked. Buenos Aires, Argentina, replied Rousselot. What a coincidence, said the bum in Spanish, I’m Argentine too. Rousselot was not at all surprised by this revelation. The bum began to hum a tango, then told him that in Europe, where he’d been living for more than fifteen years, he had found happiness and even some wisdom now and then. Rousselot realized that the bum had started using the familiar form of address, which he hadn’t done when they were speaking in French. Even his voice, the tone of his voice, seemed to have changed. Rousselot felt a deep sadness overwhelming him, as if he knew that, come the end of the day, he would have to look into an abyss. The bum noticed and asked him what he was worried about.

Nothing, a girl, said Rousselot, trying to adopt the same tone as his compatriot. Then he said a rather hurried good-bye and, as he was climbing the stairs, he heard the bum’s voice telling him that death was the only sure thing. My name is Enzo Cherubini and I’m telling you, death is the only sure thing there is. When Rousselot turned around, the bum was walking off in the opposite direction.

That night he called Simone but she wasn’t home. He talked for a while with the old woman who looked after the child, then hung up. At ten, Riquelme came visiting. Reluctant to go out, Rousselot said he felt feverish and nauseous, but his excuses were futile. Sadly, he came to the realization that Paris had transformed his colleague into a force of nature it was futile to resist. That night they dined in a little restaurant with a charcoal grill in the Rue Racine, where they were joined by the Spanish journalist, named Paco Morral, who liked to imitate the Buenos Aires accent, very badly, and believed that Spanish cinema was far better than French cinema, much denser, an opinion shared by Riquelme.

The meal went on and on, and Rousselot began to feel ill. When he returned to his hotel at four in the morning, he was running a fever and began to vomit. He woke shortly before midday with the feeling that he had lived in Paris for many years. He went through the pockets of his jacket looking for the cell phone that he had managed to extract from Riquelme, and called Morini. A woman, the one who had previously spoken to Riquelme, he supposed, picked up the receiver and told him that Monsieur Morini had left that morning to spend a few days with his parents. Rousselot’s first thought was that she was lying, or that before his hurried departure, the director had lied to her. He said he was an Argentine journalist who wanted to interview Morini for a well-known magazine with a big circulation, widely read all over Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico. The only problem, he alleged, was that he had limited time, since he had to fly home in a couple of days. Humbly he asked for the address of Morini’s parents. He didn’t have to insist. The woman listened politely, then gave him the name of a village in Normandy, followed by a street and a number.

Rousselot thanked her, then called Simone. No one was home. Suddenly he realized that he didn’t even know what day it was. He thought of asking one of the hotel staff but felt embarrassed. He called Riquelme. A hoarse voice answered on the other end of the line. Rousselot asked him about the village where Morini’s parents lived: did he know where it was? Who’s Morini? asked Riquelme. Rousselot had to remind him and explain part of the story again. No idea, said Riquelme, and hung up. After feeling annoyed for a while, Rousselot told himself it was better that way, if Riquelme lost interest in the whole business. Then he packed his suitcase and went to the train station.

The trip to Normandy gave him time to go back over what he had done since arriving in Paris. An absolute zero lit up in his mind, then delicately disappeared forever. The train stopped in Rouen. Other Argentines, and Rousselot himself in other circumstances, would have set off at once to explore the town, like bloodhounds following the scent of Flaubert. But he didn’t even leave the station; he waited twenty minutes for the train to Caen, thinking of Simone, who personified the grace of French women, and of Riquelme and his odd journalist friend: in the end, both of them were more interested in rummaging through their own failures than in discovering someone else’s story, however singular it might be, and perhaps that wasn’t so unusual. People are only interested in themselves, he concluded gravely.

From Caen, he took a taxi to Le Hamel. He was surprised to find that the address he had been given in Paris corresponded to a hotel. The hotel had four stories and was not without a certain charm, but it was shut until the beginning of the season. For half an hour Rousselot walked around in the vicinity, wondering if the woman who lived with Morini had sent him on a wild goose chase, until eventually he began to feel tired and headed for the port. In a bar he was told that he’d be very lucky to find a hotel open in Le Hamel. The patron, a cadaverously pale guy with red hair, suggested he go to Arromanches, unless he wanted to sleep in one of the auberges that stayed open all year round. Rousselot thanked him and went looking for a taxi.

He booked into the best hotel he could find in Arromanches, a pile made of brick, stone and wood, which creaked in the gusting wind. Tonight I will dream of Proust, he thought. Then he called Simone’s place and talked to the old lady who looked after her child. Madame won’t be home until after four; she has an orgy tonight, said the woman. A what? asked Rousselot. The woman repeated the sentence. My God, thought Rousselot, and hung up without saying good-bye. To make things worse, that night he didn’t dream of Proust but of Buenos Aires, where thousands of Riquelmes had taken up residence in the Argentine PEN Club, all armed with tickets to Paris, all shouting, all cursing a name, the name of someone or something, but Rousselot couldn’t hear it properly; it was like a tongue-twister or a password they were trying to keep secret although it was gnawing their insides away.

The next morning, at breakfast, he was stunned to discover that he had no money left. Le Hamel was three or four kilometers from Arromanches; he decided to walk. To lift his spirits, he told himself that on D-Day the English soldiers had landed on those beaches. But his spirits remained as low as could be, and although he had thought it might take half an hour, in the end it took him more than twice that time to reach Le Hamel. On the way he started doing sums, remembering how much money he had brought with him to Europe, how much he’d had left when he arrived in Paris, how much he had spent on meals, on Simone (quite a lot, he thought, melancholically), on Riquelme, on taxis (they’ve been ripping me off the whole time!), and wondering whether he could have been robbed at some point without realizing. The only people who could have done that, he concluded gallantly, were the Spanish journalist and Riquelme. And the idea didn’t seem preposterous in those surroundings where so many lives had been lost.

He observed Morini’s hotel from the beach. By that stage, anyone else would have given up. For anyone else, circling around that hotel would have been as good as admitting to idiocy, or to a sort of degradation that Rousselot thought of as Parisian, or cinematic, or even literary, although for him the word “literary” retained all its original luster, or some of it, at least. In his situation, anyone else would have been calling the Argentine embassy, inventing a credible lie and borrowing some money to pay for the hotel. But, instead of gritting his teeth and making the phone calls, Rousselot rang the hotel’s doorbell and was not surprised to hear the voice of an old woman who, leaning out of one of the windows on the second floor, asked him what he wanted and was not surprised by his reply: I need to see your son. Then the old woman disappeared, and Rousselot waited by the door for what seemed like an eternity.

He kept checking his pulse and touching his forehead to see if he had a fever. When the door finally opened, he saw a lean, rather swarthy face, with large bags under the eyes; it was, he judged, the face of a degenerate, and it was vaguely familiar. Morini invited him in. My parents, he said, have been working as caretakers of this hotel for more than thirty years. They sat down in the lobby, where the armchairs were protected from dust by enormous sheets embroidered with the hotel’s monogram. On one wall Rousselot saw an oil painting of the beaches of Le Hamel, with bathers in belle époque costumes, while opposite, a collection of portraits of famous guests (or so he supposed) observed them from a zone infiltrated by mist. He shivered. I am Alvaro Rousselot, he said, the author of Solitude—I mean, the author of Nights on the Pampas.

It took a few seconds for Morini to react, but then he leaped to his feet, let out a cry of terror, and disappeared down a corridor. Such a spectacular response was the last thing Rousselot had been expecting. He remained seated, lit a cigarette (the ash dropped progressively onto the carpet), and thought sadly of Simone and her son, and a café in Paris that served the best croissants he had ever tasted in his life. Then he stood up and started calling Morini. Guy, he called, rather hesitantly, Guy, Guy, Guy.

Rousselot found him in an attic where the hotel’s cleaning equipment was piled. Morini had opened the window and seemed to be hypnotized by the garden that surrounded the building, and by the neighboring garden, which belonged to a private residence, and was visible, in part, through dark lattice-work. Rousselot walked over and patted him on the back. Morini seemed smaller and more fragile than before. For a while they both stood there looking at one garden, then the other. Then Rousselot wrote the address of his hotel in Paris and the address of the hotel where he was currently staying on a piece of paper and slipped it into the director’s trouser pocket. He felt he had committed a reprehensible act, executed a reprehensible gesture, but then, as he was walking back to Arromanches, everything he had done in Paris, every gesture and action, seemed reprehensible, futile, senseless, and even ridiculous. I should kill myself, he thought as he walked along the seashore.

Back in Arromanches, he did what any sensible man would have done as soon as he realized that his money had run out. He rang Simone, explained the situation, and asked her for a loan. The first thing Simone said was that she didn’t want a pimp, to which Rousselot replied that he was asking for a loan, and that he was planning to repay it with thirty-percent interest, but then they both started laughing and Simone told him not to do anything, just stay put in the hotel, and in a few hours, as soon as she could borrow a car from one of her friends, she’d come and get him. She also called him chéri a few times, to which he responded by using the word chérie, which had never seemed so tender. For the rest of the day Rousselot felt that he really was an Argentine writer, something he had begun to doubt over the previous days, or perhaps the previous years, partly because he was unsure of himself, but also because he was unsure about the possibility of an Argentine literature.