Kundera’s description of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring, ’68:
“A system was born (with no advance planning, almost by chance) that was truly unprecedented: the economy 100 percent nationalized, agriculture in the hands of cooperatives, nobody too rich, nobody too poor, schools and medicine for free, but also: the end of the secret police’s power, the end of political persecutions, the freedom to write without censorship, and consequently the blooming of literature, art, thought, journals. I cannot tell what the prospects might have been for the future of this system; in the geopolitical situation of the time, certainly not great; but in a different geopolitical situation?”
— Milan Kundera, Encounter, Trans. Linda Asher, (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2009). Original work published as Une Rencontre, 2009.
Alejandro Zambra writes, “I think that the story can’t end like that, with Camilo Sr. crying for his dead son, his son who was practically a stranger to him. But that’s how it ends.”
This is from the same work, in which the writer calls the present a suspiciously stable place.
From the same place, “thinking about … the future, which wasn’t my favorite subject … we had imagined a life full of flying cars and happy teleportations, or maybe something less spectacular but still radically different from the soulless and repressive world we lived in.”
And: “she drew a too-thick line around her eyes, as if fencing them in, as if she wanted to keep them from jumping out of her skull and escaping.” But: this last sentence is beyond the page I read up to, the page I mean to return to when I at last pick up this book, Documents, again, page 61. For now I’m putting it on display.
The topic for the display is Carlos Ruiz Zafón, 25 September 1964 – 19 June 2020, RIP, and the friends he didn’t know he had.
I am writing this on the 5th anniversary of Fr Craig Larkin’s death. I wrote this piece for him. Fr Costello in his homily said about Craig, “He generated life wherever he went.” (The homily was delivered at Craig’s Requiem Mass.) I get the feeling Ruiz Zafón would approve if these words were to be applied to him.
Zambra and Ruiz Zafón–both writers who are not overly literary: Zafón the classic story-teller; Zambra the conversational writer, Valeria Luiselli talked about as being like a late-night phonecall, the relaxed voice of night-time intimacy.
…
I remember being in the South of France, chez la famille Chaigne, at a time when Catholics talked about tours of the Holy Land.
In fact, they didn’t just talk about it. We had slideshows. And included in the tour of the Holy Land were shots of the pyramids. It was not so unlike the episode in Brideshead Revisited of Mr Samgrass with Sebastian always out of shot, showing his slides. And when I say we, I mean the family at Aix, on the occasion of a visiting South American priest. Was he Argentinian? He was from a meat-eating country and I remember M. Chaigne taking charge of the gigot, the leg of lamb, whereas previous to the visit it had always been Madame to whom the territory of the kitchen belonged.
He pierced the leg of lamb with a small knife and stuffed it with slivers of garlic and rosemary and doused it with olive oil. He had the oven as hot as it would go so the house filled with smoke, searing the lamb, cindering the rosemary spines, then reduced to a moderate temperature, cooking it for only as long as the flesh would remain pink, and sitting it for as long as it was cooked to absorb the blood. It was a performance.
It had nothing on the priest’s. In what had been a household as spartan as a seminary–where young seminarians were routinely housed: a crucifix hung above the bed in my cell of a room–the wines flowed, through and beyond the lavish meal, then M. produced cigars, which, if I rightly recall, I was offered as well, from the humidor.
No, it was Colombia: the Colombian priest had come directly upon reaching France from his tour of the Holy Land, with his slides, to the maison Chaigne. A lowlying white stucco villa with terracotta Roman tiles.
M. Chaigne had cooked the meal for our special guest and even the errant daughter and prodigal son were present. I detected from the son some animosity towards the daughter. It seemed she had greater lee-way around the town than he. And with the priest present it was an excellent opportunity to land some sarcasm-cloaked blows to her reputation as a cyclist and trampolinist. If I recall, she accepted from her father the offer of a fat Cuban cigar. And he cut the end without comment but with teeth clenched. And she glowered at her brother from behind the volumes of smoke she emitted that we would today call a fat vape.
What I most remember is the unwonted profligacy of the household. That I had up until the evening of the tour of the Holy Land slideshow and the appetites that everyone in the household was for once permitted to admit at the excuse of the presence of the Colombian priest and his own Gargantuan capacities for wine and food and hilarity, that I had only known the family’s austerities, and the barely concealed distaste for me M. displayed. He had his own coffee bowl for the morning. And Mme. would entertain no distraction to his morning rule, of reading the newspaper in its entirety, without interruption.
And it wasn’t fair of the son as far as I could see, given his own flouting of his father’s, and mother’s, Catholic-church-approved codes, to lambaste his sister for hers. I recall admiring Mlle. Chaigne that night, practically the only time I saw her, particularly for seeming to have escaped the family’s rigidity. She lounged, smoking a cigar.
She left before the slideshow; her boyfriend picked her up. I was even more impressed with him, then more impressed with her again. The boyfriend roared in on his motorbike. Her brother’s crew all rode vespas. She brought him in to introduce him to the visiting Colombian priest, representative of God. She was cool, and, it seemed as though M. already had met him and approved, because he was offered a glass of red wine from a bottle from the cellar. M. was disappearing regularly throughout the evening, returning with another label to pass under the gaze of the Colombian priest, who nodded, drained what he had, and held out his glass.
The boyfriend was on the verge of accepting when Mlle. took his arm before he had a chance to get out of his leathers. I remember the opportunity given M. to make the offer: she was absent for a second, coming back in a black leather jacket.
I thought, Who is this priest, turning everything I had been led to expect from this family around? I loved him for it. I wondered if he was not just a priest but someone higher up. A bishop? But surely even a bishop if he came from Colombia would not have been treated this well? An Anti-Pope?
He laughed as hugely as he ate and drank. He laughed when I said where I was from and he said we were near neighbours. And it was probably his approval that got me M.’s, who was suddenly proud to have me in his house. Who refilled my glass, offered me a Cuban.
The next day everything returned to normal.
The slideshow was indescribable, just like Mr Samgrass’s. I missed Mlle. Chaigne. She would have been like Julia but there was no Sebastian to ask after.
I am recalled to it by a line in Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep comparing the gables of Durston Manor receding behind the young priest Fairfax to the pyramids, because, at that time, I was surprised a tour of the Holy Land should take in Egypt; but of course: then escape from the strictures of Pharaoh, parting seas, exodus.
…
It wasn’t the connection of priests, although there is a connection, to what I was intending to say–rabbitholes, Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s Secret Passages in a Hillside Town–which was about hypocrisy.
As usual, now I haven’t said it.
It is remarkable in an era of networked moral censure, the too-much bruited #metoo-ness of it, that the networks, the providers of it, the platforms, are free from censure, are neutral, are technologies. Progress.
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