The Write Thing

I have recently seen a wonderful movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, soon to open in Buenos Aires. The script is based on a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald which you can actually access online.

The story essentially poses the question of aging backwards. The protagonist, Benjamin Button, looks like an 80-year-old in a baby’s body when he first sees the light of day, and then grows young. Life happens in the meantime, and shows its complexity through it all, even with the benefit of youth instead of old age as part of progress. Who has not ever imagined what it would feel like to be a 20-year old in the mind of a 50-year old, combining experience gained with suffering with the supple structure of a vigorous body that responds to everything with a lot more energy? I know what it feels like to be 20, but I don’t know what it feels like to be 50 yet. Perhaps I can only idealize such an adventurous combination. However, after seeing the movie, I still do not think it is too different from the normal order in which we age. In other words, life’s complexity is the same no matter in what direction you grow.

As a closing statement for this post, I cannot but remember one of the key lines for me, spoken by Benjamin as he goes through the suffering of being different, or maybe simply of choosing.

You can go mad as a mad dog at the way things went; you can curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.

That is the way, Benjamin. As I write this, only a few days away from getting onto another plane leading me places, with adventure hopefully waiting for me at different ports, I can look back and smile. I am learning to let go…

Plath. There is Plath hovering around me these days. I have come from a long journey, and my body feels the fatigue of life in a vacuum with wings that takes people places. But there is Plath… and the world, in its slow-pacing death and inevitable pulse of being, takes on a new dimension. On reading her, words heave with full resonance and flailing dissonance. Her tempo, her prose so in tune with the wholeness of life as the protagonist disembodies herself that the text becomes palpable, a skin with thousands of layers that fall down in slow motion. She is nude before New York, a world in itself.

A stiff breeze lifted the hair from my head. At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.
It was my last night.
I grasped the bundle I carried and pulled at the pale tail. A strapless elasticized slip which, in the course of wear, had lost its elasticity, slumped into my hand. I waved it, like a flat of truce, once, twice…The breeze caught it, and I let it go.
A white flake floated out into the night, and began its slow descent. I wondered on what street and rooftop it would come to rest.
I tugged at the bundle again.
The wind made an effort, but failed, and a batlike shadow sank toward the roof garden of the penthouse opposite.
Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray sraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

I am my own funeral, and the author of my own rebirth. I have fed my soul to the places where I have loved and been loved.

I am my own woman. The next step is life.

That was the campaign launched in 1930 to publicize Garbo’s first talkie. It is of public knowledge that the advent of sound in movies could either boost a career or destroy it. Sunset Boulevard, starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden, is a fictional example of the latter. However, in Garbo’s case, her glory was even enhanced by the dark, husky and deep manly voice that filled the theaters worldwide…including the one in Buenos Aires where a young Borges nervously awaited until the first magical words “Give me a viskey” were pronounced. He sighed with relief. The diva he admired the most had made it.

When I learned this anecdote, retold in a documentary I recently translated, I could not help but thinking that, had I lived in those days, I would have shared Borges’s stress over Garbo’s voice. I would have been seduced by the glacial woman as I have been since I first saw her. The difference would have been in our timing. It would have taken place as her career progressed, not after it no longer existed. For me, today, to think of another voice but the one I have always heard is impossible. Borges, on the contrary, was able to imagine what she would sound like. A possibility for him was just a belated impossibility for me.

If we think that an actor’s voice could mean the end of a career back in Garbo’s time, today the situation is totally different. Jennifer (or is it Meg) Tilly’s high-pitched nasal tone would have been received thumbs down — Woody Allen did some justice in that sense with one of the sisters in Bullets over Broadway, but still voices do not matter as much today. The world changes, it is true. However, some magical creatures remain as enchanting, vibrant, and avant-garde as they have always been. Garbo is an example of this. She defies time and conventions — and would have Mercedes De Acosta pay for it. Her (wo)manly essence made both men and women fall under her feet, and set the foundations for Mylène Farmer’s career (another member of the family? I wonder). Today, the magic lives on.
Djupa andetag…Garbo talks!