“Throughout my boyhood, I thought that to be loved would have amounted to an injustice,” the author writes, in this Profile of himself, from 1970.
I cannot tell whether my first memories go back to the eastern or to the western bank of the muddy, slow-moving Rio de la Plata—to Montevideo, where we spent long, lazy holidays in the villa of my uncle Francisco Haedo, or to Buenos Aires. I was born there, in the very heart of that city, in 1899, on Tucumán Street, between Suipacha and Esmeralda, in a small, unassuming house belonging to my maternal grandparents.
My father was very intelligent and, like all intelligent men, very kind. Once, he told me that I should take a good look at soldiers, uniforms, barracks, flags, churches, priests, and butcher shops, since all these things were about to disappear, and I could tell my children that I had actually seen them. The prophecy has not yet come true, unfortunately. My father was such a modest man that he would have liked being invisible.
At home, both English and Spanish were commonly used. If I were asked to name the chief event in my Ilife, I should say my father’s library. In fact, I sometimes think I have never strayed outside that library. I can still picture it. It was in a room of its own, with glass-fronted shelves, and must have contained several thousand volumes.
I take no pleasure whatever in recalling my early school days. To begin with, I did not start school until I was nine. This was because my father, as an anarchist, distrusted all enterprises run by the state. As I wore spectacles and dressed in an Eton collar and tie, I was jeered at and bullied by most of my schoolmates, who were amateur hooligans. I cannot remember the name of the school but recall that it was on Thames Street.
We lived in a flat on the southern, or old, side of town. I still know Geneva far better than I know Buenos Aires, which is easily explained by the fact that in Geneva no two street corners are alike, and one quickly learns the differences. Every day, I walked along that green and icy river, the Rhone, which runs through the very heart of the city, spanned by seven quite different-looking bridges. The Swiss are rather proud and standoffish.
We remained in Switzerland until 1919. After three or four years in Geneva, we spent a year in Lugano. I had my bachelor’s degree by then, and it was now understood that I should devote myself to writing. I wanted to show my manuscripts to my father, but he told me that he didn’t believe in advice and that I must work my way all by myself through trial and error. I had been writing sonnets in English and in French.
Every Saturday I would go to the Café Colonial, where we met at midnight, and the conversation lasted until daybreak. Sometimes there were as many as twenty or thirty of us. The group despised all Spanish local color—and bullfights. They admired American jazz, and were more interested in being Europeans than Spaniards. Cansinos would propose a subject—the Metaphor, Free Verse, the Traditional Forms of Poetry, Narrative Poetry, the Adjective, the Verb.
In Spain, I wrote two books. One was a series of essays called, I now wonder why, “Los naipes del tahur” . They were literary and political essays , written under the influence of Pío Baroja. Their aim was to be bitter and relentless, but they were, as a matter of fact, quite tame. I went in for using such words as “fools,” “harlots,” “lars.” Failing to find a publisher, I destroyed the manuscript on my return to Buenos Aires.
Perhaps the major event of my return was Macedonio Fernández. Of all the people I have met in my life—and I have met some quite remarkable men—no one has ever made so deep and so lasting an impression on me as Macedonio. A tiny figure in a black bowler hat, he was waiting for us on the Dársena Norte when we landed, and I came to inherit his friendship from my father. Both men had been born in 1874.
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