Byobu Read online

  Winner of the Alas Prize

  for Lifetime Achievement (2019)

  Winner of the Cervantes Prize

  for Lifetime Achievement (2018)

  Winner of the Guadalajara

  Book Festival Prize for Literature (2018)

  Winner of the Max Jacob Prize (2017)

  Winner of the Federico García Lorca

  International Poetry Prize (2016)

  Winner of the Reina Sofía Prize

  for Latin American Poetry (2015)

  Winner of the Alfonso Reyes Prize

  for Lifetime Achievement (2014)

  Winner of the Octavio Paz International Prize

  for Poetry and Essay (2009)

  ‘In Byobu, the veteran Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale gives us a holy fool for the twenty-first century. The responses of her childish everyman to the contemporary life she’s constructed for him are puzzled yet direct, wry yet fresh. A series of exquisitely rendered vignettes see him struggle, existentially alone, to make sense of park life, insomnia, or a conference roundtable. But behind the humour and pathos rumbles the entire western philosophical tradition. This complex late masterpiece, published when Vitale was 95, offers plenty of questions but – of course – no answers.’

  Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL

  ‘An alchemical abecedary in which the ever-insubordinate imagination of Ida Vitale fashions delicate miniatures, origami animals, to a rebellious horology set by tourbillon. The eye as instrument coalesces words into a double play: classical forms and experimentation, contradictio in adiecto, the paradox of language paints the colored screen, biombo, byobú, between ourselves and the mystery. Odilon Redon, Queneau and Calvino meet Voltaire in the hands of master watchmaker Vitale who whispers: linear time is but an illusion.’

  Valerie Miles

  ‘[Ida’s] language is one of the most esteemed and recognized in modern poetry in Spanish. It is at the same time intellectual and popular, universal and personal, transparent and profound’.

  Sergio Ramírez

  ‘Byobu offers a journey both mysterious and epiphanic. Signposted by exquisite vocabulary and writing that is not simple, where each word possesses its own weight and music.’

  Babelia

  ‘Ida Vitale is a woman of almost legendary courage. Due to her long and intense life, she has become an exceptional witness of Latin America and its literature.’

  Salient Women

  ‘Vitale’s writing succeeds like few others in encountering that harmonious figure (…) hidden and woven between the hurtful protrusions of reality, among the amorphous noise of chaos.’

  El País

  ‘Vitale’s prose – a mixture of diary, memoir and reflection – weaves a conversation with patience and good humour, dazzles with its power of associative description and offers itself for continuous rereading.’

  José María Espinasa

  ‘Vitale has been one of the most enlightened citizens of the universal republic of letters for the past three-quarters of a century (…). Her work offers a moral prompt with a smile that never ceases to speak to us.’

  Aurelio Major

  BYOBU

  Ida Vitale

  BYOBU

  Translated by

  Sean Manning

  Contents

  A Story

  Life Is Not a Straight Line

  Very Platonic Love

  Byobu, Barely Corpuscle

  Terrestrial Labors

  Knots

  Viscachas, Camels, Polonii

  On Anodyne Things

  Annoyances That Disturb Byobu

  Summer

  The Sensitive Toad

  Among Senses and Neutrinos

  Epiphanies

  Against the Argive Way

  The Race

  The Inhabitant

  Anguish

  Useless Knowledge

  Byobu Assailed by Imperious Egotism

  Dangerous Misunderstandings

  Dot the I’s

  Social Topics or on Humor as an Abscess

  Byobu and the Yamabushi

  Cerro

  Oral Frustrations

  Crossroads

  Unforgiveable Distraction

  Internal Coherence

  Deaf Indiscretions

  Seasons

  Byobu and the Acceleration of History

  Laziness

  Byobu and the Traffic Light

  Original Thoughts

  For Juan Sánchez Peláez,

  Alejandro Rossi and

  Lorenzo García Vega,

  Alastor of Playa Albina

  Pago mi impuesto al sainete sublunar.

  Ramón López Velarde

  En cas de danger, plaisante.

  Henri Michaux

  A Story

  There is a story. No one knows exactly when it began. Those who might be associated with it are, in fact, unaware that the story exists. It has no name to identify it, and it is unclear whether it has one protagonist or two. It could be A’s story that B does not acknowledge, or vice versa. It could also be that neither of them knows the story exists and that it involves them. It is very likely that one will die without ever realizing that he is the story’s true protagonist, and that the other has usurped his role. In any event, a story’s existence, even if not well defined or well assigned, even if only in its formative stage, just barely latent, emits vague but urgent emanations. Byobu, who suspects its dark existence, feels compelled to scrutinize, like a philatelist, the edges of its possible arrival. He would do well not to underestimate its flexible, disordered density: at any moment it can achieve directed speed and plunge its asphyxiating paralysis down upon him. There are many who dream of the adventure that each day should hatch for them. But when it emerges, they find some flaw, even horrifying signs of leprosy, with the appearance they had imagined attractive. And they ignore it, though they never forget its unanswered call. And the story remains free, unoccupied, like a lightning bolt no lightning rod has grounded. Byobu knows he is more exposed than most. So he’s vigilant, watching suspiciously the stories that roam free, with no A or B who will have them.

  Life Is Not a Straight Line

  Byobu gets up early. Not too early, but since there is no pressing work for him to get done, the start of his day always feels excessively matinal. What to have for breakfast? Juice, tea, yogurt, cereal? He simplifies his options, though not without some anxiety: cereal and coffee. Coffee? At the same time, he looks for a CD, but once the music starts, he realizes it’s not what he’s in the mood to listen to at the moment. He swaps it out twice before finishing his breakfast. He needs to buy some groceries. He chooses a particular supermarket, but it’s the least ideal of them all. There he’ll find sugar but not the tea and vinegar he prefers. He also has a letter that needs sending. To do that, he will have to go a different way. Which is more urgent then? He’ll settle this doubt while he showers. However, between whether or not to wash his hair and after some enticing idea crosses his mind, he forgets what it was he wanted to have settled by the end of his shower. Then, as he’s getting dressed, he hesitates between wearing a certain pair of trousers or committing them to the dirty laundry.

  By this time of the morning Byobu is exhausted, maybe an effect of the hot steam. He should read a bit to rest. This raises the problem of which book to choose, since his habitual indecisiveness means he always has several at different stages of completion. A book of short stories sits waiting near the armchair where he has plopped himself down. This does not spare him a decision. Which of the stories? The chosen author is either of the kind
– fortunately now few and far between – who takes pleasure in making the reader’s life difficult, or an obliger who does not want to upset any of his potential admirers: the protagonist of the finally chosen story must side with the boy who is working with him or opt for the company that has hired them both, whose demands are in conflict with his political beliefs; but the ending is ambiguous. The author assumes that whoever follows him through the twists of his invention is sure of their own ideas and will turn to them to give their ending to the story.

  This is, of course, not the case with Byobu, who now feels the burden of an additional doubt added to those already muddling up his head. But he decides to stick to his original plan and leave the house. He manages to do so. The moment he reaches the street, he feels a moist droplet hit his nose. Could it have come from a sparrow in mid-flight? Is the neighbor on the top floor carelessly watering his plants? There are clouds. Is a downpour approaching? Three possibilities presenting a new choice he must make immediately. Turn around? If he wants to continue, he’ll need to take an umbrella.

  Suddenly, he remembers that a friend had planned to call him. It would be rude if he were not there to answer. How has the morning gotten away from him like this? He’ll have to go back either to wait for the call or to get the umbrella. Maybe this is hopeless: the phone will ring, and the conversation will draw out, as courtesy often obliges. And with that, it will be time for lunch. And also, probably, time for the rain to precipitate, if that’s what it has in mind, at which point the entire morning’s chain of options will dissolve, because while Byobu can easily accept being the victim of an unexpected rainfall, he never goes out once it has already become a palpable event.

  Very Platonic Love

  He loves the sun. He cannot live without the sun. He runs from it. He knows that on the opposite sidewalk, in front of the overwhelmingly white house and for the time left until fall comes to save him from the disintegration summer wields, there is an oasis beneath the evergreen oak. Parcels of rooks, despite their seemingly impervious blackness, can suddenly endure no more. Crystallized, they fracture, leaving the green matter to its fate, matter classified under various names less perishable than itself. Successive mirages sparkle and fade, breaking up the variable distances along the path that Byobu would surely have decided to take had he not been forced to pause under the cover of sweet shade, spying on the sun from there, feeling overwhelmed by it, not knowing how to live without it.

  Byobu, Barely Corpuscle

  Horns, voices, strange vibrations are heard, the air arrives laden with similarities. ‘What’s going on?’ asks Byobu. ‘Nothing,’ they answer. ‘What could be going on?’ ‘What would you like to be going on?’ Byobu decreases the receptivity of his hearing, so as not to be less. He’s left asking himself how to be more, how to be more.

  Terrestrial Labors

  Everything important lies below the surface, suspects Byobu. This is why he digs, he digs wherever an open space presents itself, wherever he can reach a patch of ground without trees, without houses, without a shell. He loves the soil, that moist soil underneath, black and loamy, which he rids of its tiny pebbles – placed into a pile – and minute premature bulbs. His enthusiasm takes him to the earthworm, which springs from the darkness, a vibratile thread from the fragrant humus, a contortionist twisting gratuitously in disagreement with the light, aggravating its drama. It tumefies in fear, a part of it pales, another part purples while Byobu watches, impassively watches the livid organism.

  He doesn’t care so much for this phony caterpillar that will never produce a butterfly. Suddenly, swash, he splits it in two. Two earthworms do more work than one, they govern more tunnels, aerate more clumps, better accomplishing their function. With this Byobu, for today, also feels more air inside his meticulous consciousness.

  Knots

  Byobu concludes that he must begin by ending. End mediating amid disasters, attempting to temper his trepidations for trolley cars whose trajectories ignore him. He should cease all disastrous tepid transactions. Lay limbos aside. Ignore everything initiated by the iniquitous. Close, close, close: dark clouds approach, the iron bars sing, bedizened, vertically inscribing the repeated landscape. It all converges to create the cage, to which Byobu must accustom himself if he doesn’t begin precisely by ending. He’s learned that the habit of looking straight ahead, like walking straight ahead, lays snares. And for each snare there is never just one hand readied and waiting to pull. He imagines a theory of full stops. But as we all know, many sequential full stops make an ellipsis. Should he then anticipate a definitive eclipse of his slipping horizon? Knots, periods, snares, decreasing magnitudes, disasters.

  Viscachas, Camels, Polonii

  Land unknowingly in tatters, it boasts claws and only scratches pretexts, with its routine assortment of sophistries. Find peace, Byobu tells himself, less bitterness or we’ll all end up slaves in the nation’s galleys. No es sordo el mar, la erudición engaña. Who says the coup de grâce won’t come from sandy shores? Bringing camels to that place of damaged dunes would be an opportunity to introduce humor, some vital impulsiveness into the monotony that has forever governed our plains. The Amazons roamed the rainforest pruning the mystery from their breasts. Here the dunes on the public beaches lose theirs, leveled by the merciless motorized vehicles, like in Cape Polonius. Isn’t its name punishment enough? In this disoriented oriental country no one has once blushed at having cast in bronze, amid green space more deserving of other honors, Viejo Vizcacha, that ignoble character from Martín Fierro where nobility is typically praised, enthroning or ensaddling – there he is seated upon his trappings – his shameless and unscrupulous ingenuity. Whoever baptized the beautiful cape, innocent for so long, could he have intended to distinguish himself by commemorating, in this case patronymically, the sad character in whom Shakespeare encapsulated courtly suffering? Byobu, who thought he would find serenity by looking out at the sea, sighs. How coherent it all is: the election, the electors, the silence. ‘The rest’, as Álvaro Cunqueiro said with slight disdain, ‘is music by Borodin.’

  Meanwhile, regardless of how much sun shines down upon us, we walk among scotias.

  On Anodyne Things

  Because of Byobu’s knack for stopping to look at minuscule things lacking in importance, things with no need for anyone’s attention, one might deduce that his eyesight is not so good. He can’t recall when he stopped before his first chrysanthemum, but he’ll gladly go on about butcher’s broom. When given the chance, he takes his time describing it. He reveals the absurdity of such a choice by detailing how that plant, pacific like most others, is an evergreen shrub with dark leaves, stark and oval, whose only particularity is a barely visible white speck – in actuality several tiny petals surrounding an insignificant black dot – that it could easily do without, positioned at the center of its leaves like a flower.

  Was it its two-faced name that surprised him or that something so dull could bloom? Or that a flower could be so anodyne? What’s certain is that, like a vice, he treasured his knowledge of butcher’s broom, uncommon in gardens since people generally have more flamboyant and more substantiated admirations. However, invention remedied the saplessness for which nature had settled: one day in a fancy shop Byobu came across dried butcher’s broom branches disguised beneath an attractive orangish red color, more decorative this way than those dead roses forced to serve until their last breath, fashioned into a pineapple with the nostalgia for their former smell.

  Also around that period, he pursued, throughout the vegetation at hand, a few scruples of caterpillars, easily mistaken for tiny twigs (or slender splinters of bark). From them he learned of mimesis and then forgot about it until Auerbach.

  Often, distracted by some minutia captivating him at a particular moment, he misses fragments of conversations that later turn out to be important. He doesn’t understand, or maybe he does, when others detail his deafness to him, so obvious to them all. He’s
comforted by the thought that he’s able to hear both the faint modulation of an oboe or violin through the racket of an orchestra and the gentle call of a lonesome bird in a distant tree. It’s true he’s ashamed when he doesn’t know which species sings this song.

  Annoyances That Disturb Byobu

  A hair in one eye or both, or in his mouth.

  Sitting down on cushions moved from their usual position.

  Realizing as he’s falling asleep that a closet door, or any door, is not properly closed; glimpsing small chinks in the curtains letting in a glimmer that at sunrise will become light; hearing the tick-tock of a clock or water dripping; feeling wrinkles in his pillowcase or in the sheet, or the sheet against his toes if his toenails have recently been clipped.

  If he’s reading before bed, having to stop in the middle of a paragraph or just before finishing a chapter or a book.

  Though less common, this has also happened: waking up shortly after falling asleep (well past midnight) to the rhythmical pounding of a ball against his wall. In this case the matter of annoyance projects a pseudopod: forced to imagine the life of the annoying creature capable of producing this noise, its stolid serial appearance, the night’s desolation driving it to occupy itself with such an unprogressive exercise, Byobu gathers his wits and begins to conceive an intelligent ball who, bored to death, escapes the direction in which it has been propelled, opens or passes through the door and races down the hallway bouncing toward some stairwell or great abyss before leaping in hopes of dragging the sleepless athlete down behind it.

  Byobu discovered once and for all the severe annoyance entailed by the existence of individuals who never pronounce fully sincere words. This can happen to the best of us. Clearly these bettered souls, with greater skill than those whose decide to go au naturel, can reach extreme degrees of insincerity. Even with their silence. It’s odd that many assume this silence to be sincere and not hiding traps. They confuse them with the silences in music.