It is January in Buenos Aires. It is hot and humid. The city smells of boiling asphalt, leaded gasoline and sweat. A young, upper-class woman, bored by the sterility and lack of imagination of the people around her, leaves the physical shell of her body among the so-called friends and starts playing mind games. She searches for words with one or two vowels, then she looks for those that have certain consonant patterns that could take her mind elsewhere, she invents palindromes and anagrams. She (or maybe someone bearing her name) cannot explain it with a language known to her, but it is clear that a magic password is awaiting her somewhere in between the cracks of the symbolic systems used daily in order to communicate with those around us. The language usually brings us food when we are still unable to feed by ourselves and our bodies are incoherent enough to translate desire into fiction. Later, speaking brings other kinds of understanding as well as confusion in that same city where the bored, upper-class woman was once born. She entered the world unblemished by that kind of language.
Then, she was fictionalized by Julio Cortazar and given a name, Alina Reyes. Not to be confused with anyone else, she thrived in her distinction from others. She, a person bored with the January heat and piano recitals. Now, she is putting her name on the line and "Es la reina y...", "She's a queen and..."? Where can that signature take her? Are identities fully encrypted in names? "Es la reina y...." The three elliptic dots signify the absence of meaning, the absence of its very possibility. Reyes, echoes the ultimate paternal sign, of course, she is a queen, so what? Could her sign of exquisite uniqueness, the proper, one and only name, belong to someone else? In the very name of Alina Reyes, the woman searches for the other by breaking the walls of the symbolic order engraved on her body at baptism. Unable to repress the desire to know the other, she spins her out of her own proper name.
The other, distant one, does not share the language of her city. Nor her hemisphere, class or nation. She is beaten, she is cold and she is wet. Her city is called Budapest and in January its pavements are covered with grayish remnants of snow that can never survive for more than a day, giving way to slush, slippery and unfriendly to the feet. Days are short and barely distinguishable from the nights. Dark clouds (they are always dark even when they look white) cover the city skies for weeks and months, unshaken by the icy Pannonian winds. A long time ago, so long ago that people no longer even try to imagine that time, those winds were bringing the smell of the sea. Its blue salty waves have found other beaches to caress. Now, the people of Budapest pass each other on the streets without seeing or being seen. They carry the burden of the past on their shoulders. Being is heavier there, it is almost unbearable.
"Es la reina y....", the possibility of writing your own destiny always attracted you. The need for otherness marked you many summers before that hot January night when you wrote in your diary: "At times I know that she's cold, that she suffers, that they beat her. I can only hate her so much, detest the hands that throw her to the ground and her as well, her even more because they beat her, because I am I and they beat her." (18) Yes, you could imagine her, every day with more details, but could you find her through the echoes of your own name? "But I don't know the name of the square, it is a little as though one had really walked into a plaza in Budapest and was lost because one did not know its name; if there's no name, how can there be a plaza?"(22)
You have your name, but the signs of that other language are different, its sounds carry no meaning for you, they are spoken for the ear of the other. You can no longer negate her. And yet, you now know that you can write that city, cold unwelcoming city in which you feel like a beggar.
"Last night again I sensed her suffering. I know that they're beating me there again. I can't avoid knowing it, but enough chronicle. If I had limited myself to setting this down regularly just as a whim, as alleviation... It was worse, a desire to understand in reading it over; to find keys in each word set to paper after those nights. Like when I thought of the plaza, the torn river and the noises and afterwards...But I am not writing that, I'll never, ever, write that." (25) And after denying it, you go on writing with the signs of your own name, giving in completely: "Es la reina y..., searching for the flesh to cover the bear bones of meaning, searching for the right word, translating.
And then you give up the exclusiveness of your father's name. You get married to that funny Argentine, Luis María Aráoz and have your honeymoon in Budapest. Not Rio, Paris or London, nothing you can imagine would do it, you, Alina Reyes de Aráoz go to Budapest, cold and unwelcoming both in its strangeness and foreignness, and you search for the other, the distant one, la lejana, you "give in to the desire," (23) not quite sure what that means, because the desire is not translated yet, nor fixed, the desire is contained in those three little dots "es la reina y...". What will the name bring to your desire? What will the sounds of the other language do to you? Does she, the distant one, reside in those sounds?
You, Alina Reyes de Aráoz, a twenty-seven year old bride, are finally in Budapest. It is April and the remnants of the snow that was never white are on the pavement. The uncanny symmetry of your birth place brings you to the bridge of her home town. Or is it the other way around: this is your birth place but not the home town? Or, soon to become home town? You recognize the river that only a few months ago, when your mind wondered in search of the meaning of those three mysterious dots during the piano recital, reminded you of "spoiled mayonnaise trashing against the abutments, furiously as possible, noisy and lashing." (24)
Your ears recall the "grinding of the ice". The cold wetness in your expensive argentine leather shoes tells you that you are in the right place. The bridge is desolate and you recognize her in the "ragged woman with black straight hair" (26). You know what to do, you finally understand the meaning of the three elliptic dots, you walk toward the woman and embrace her.
The translation is over. Only you are aware of the horror written by a silent scream. But now, you are no longer in those expensive Argentine shoes that the smiling man fitted for you on the corner of Arenales and Ayacucho. Your gaze, now wet with tears, and your shoulders, now bearing the heaviness of a Central European being, allow you to feel the meaning of the three little dots. Still unable to find the right word, but with the knowledge that translating the other is an act of power.
I read Cortázar's story about Alina Reyes many years ago in Belgrade. In Serbian too. It did not sound strange in the Slavic language of my birth. I still remember the coldness of my own feet as I was gasping for the end of the page in order to find out what happened to Alina. What I don't remember is whether I wanted to uncover another crack in Cortázar's language and go along with the other Alina, the one who was to be divorced in two months, the one who was going to Buenos Aires of my dreams, the one who had those great black leather shoes on her feet. Or maybe it was the other Alina I was interested in? The one who came from Buenos Aires and who embraced the other, distant one, the Alina whose diary seduced me to feel the familiar chilling damp in the midst of my Belgrade room. Now, some twenty years later, after discovering Cortázar's story published in 1951 (Bestiario) and learning that home town does not have to be the birth place, I know that I was once seduced by the idea of cultural translatability.
How much of each other's otherness each of the two Alinas carried along after the encounter on the Budapest bridge? To ask the question in this way implies the assumption that there are still two Alinas who recognized themselves in the other, embraced that other and continued their respective lives. They both searched for the alterity until finally locating it in the no place, in the a-topia of the bridge that connects the two sides of the river. So, there are two Alinas trying to escape the trap of history of their nations, to transcend the allegiance to their cultural traditions. Haunted by the premonition of the other through a series of strange and foreign cultural memories, they finally make the leap and exchange their identities.
I often imagine what happened to the two Alinas later.
Did they remember their old selves after the embrace on the bridge? Or was the moment of the encounter erased by the instant forgetting of the other, as Cortázar's narrative became a story of alienation and unbridgeble differences, a story about the powerful alien other that can lure us to a strange place by turning our imagination into reality. Is it possible that by meeting this global other we lose the locality of our cultures?
Scary metempsychosis! The other Alina, the one marching towards new life in Buenos Aires in her soft black leather shoes doesn't look back. The, until recently, Hungarian Alina, beaten by certain Rod or Erod, seems to be a clear winner. She always knew what she wanted, she was powerful and determined and that is why she divorced Luis María de Aráoz two months after returning to Buenos Aires. In that sense, Cortázar's cultural fable is both about the impossibility of suppressing desire and the human agency and a tendency of every individual culture to impose its hegemony. There is only one possible winner who gets it all. The annihilated other loses identity and ceases to exist.
Or, could it be that Cortázar's story is a fantasy about the inclusion of alterity, integration of the ways of the other and about the ever-shifting boundaries of the self. The other can be translated and the border can be crossed without the loss of identity.
The omniscient narrative voice left Alina whose diary I was reading in the cold April air with the horror written on her face and the memory of the past that did not belong to her any longer. I, from the comfort of my warm room, and the power that postmodern ethos gave to the reader, imagined her traveling on a train to Belgrade. Crossing one more border was a challenge for new Alina, but not an impossibility. After all, Belgrade was the place to be in the late seventies and April was the month when spring would magically wake-up all the linden trees. Alina fell in love with Belgrade. There was something uncannily familiar in this city: it smelled like Buenos Aires and yet all about it was strangely different. And just like Buenos Aires, it was the narcissistically self-proclaimed center of the country that that had its "other" interior provinces.
Alina, who always loved letters and who now more then ever believed in their power of crossing cultural borders, decided to study Spanish and Latin American literature. She learned that the uncanny familiarity had to do with the off-centerdness of her new home town. There were so many "Easts" besides the so-called Eastern Europe, the Middle one, and the Far one, and only one stable and seemingly eternal West. There are so many distances when they are measured from the one stable center. The same center from which the identity emanated towards Alina's birth-place of reversed seasons and Christmas parties in the summer heat on the beach. She did not feel nostalgia for it in this country where Christmas was hardly talked about and where the biggest party of the year was New Years Eve. There was no other for this all-embracing, plural Alina living in the a-topia of fiction.
But then, in this day and age when the magic word seems to be "global", both the one and the other could imagine yet another possible destiny for the Alinas. They both go home. One to Buenos Aires, the other to Budapest, or Belgrade or (fill in a blank). The January in Buenos Aires is not as devastatingly hot as before, and the January in Budapest is not snowy either. Fig trees are now growing in Belgrade. The Alinas walk into their respective rooms, turn on the TV as the same M-TV images blast from the screen. During the commercial break, each one of them takes her own national edition of the Cosmopolitan and dozes off as her fingers brush the glossy image of Ricky Martin.
Ksenija Bilbija
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, October, 1999