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Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

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A History of Tears: A Testimonial

Alan Pauls

To cite this Article Pauls, Alan(2007) 'A History of Tears: A Testimonial', Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 40:

2, 282 286

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08905760701627851

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905760701627851

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Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 75, Vol. 40, No. 2, 2007, 282
286

A History of Tears: A Testimonial

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Alan Pauls
Translated by Jessica Ernst Powell

Alan Pauls (b. 1959, Buenos Aires) is author of the novels El pudor del
pornografo (1984; The Shame of the Pornographer), El coloquio (1990; The
Conversation), Wasabi (1994), and El pasado (2003; The Past, 2007).
Pauls is currently a book and movie critic for the Argentine publications
Pagina/12 and Pagina/30. He is also a translator and has worked on scripts
for television and film. The following piece is from Historia del llanto: un
testimonio (2007; A History of Tears: A Testimonial).
At an age when most children are desperate to talk, he can spend hours
listening. He is four years old, or so hes been told. To the astonishment of
his grandparents and his mother, gathered together in the living room on
Ortega y Gasset, the three-bedroom apartment from which his father
disappeared eight months ago, as far as he can remember with no
explanation whatsoever, taking with him his smell of tobacco, his pocket
watch, and his collection of monogrammed shirts from the Castrillon
clothier, and to which he now returns almost every Saturday morning,
without a doubt less punctually than his mother would like, in order to
press the button on the intercom and demand, no matter who answers, in
that exasperated tone of voice that he would later learn to recognize as the
hallmark of the state of his relationships with women after having
children with them, Send him down at once!, he races across the room,
dressed in the pathetic Superman suit that they have just given him, and,
with his arms extended in front of him, in a comic simulation of flight, a
duck in a cast, a mummy or a sleepwalker, smashes straight through the
glass door to the balcony. A second later he comes to, as if waking from a
fainting spell. He finds himself standing among the potted plants, slightly
flushed and trembling. He looks at his hands and sees, as if drawn there,
two or three threads of blood running across his palms.
Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas ISSN 0890-5762 print/ISSN 1743-0666 online # 2007 Alan Pauls.
Translation # 2007 Americas Society, Inc.
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/08905760701627851

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A History of Tears

283

It is not the steely constitution of the superhero he emulates that has

saved him, as one might think at first glance and as will be repeated later
in the stories that will continue to breathe life into this exploit, the most
visible, if not the only one in a childhood otherwise spent, from the
beginning, in not calling attention to himself, in showing a preference for
solitary activities, reading, drawing, the early television of that era,
indications of a so-called interior world which supposedly defines certain
rare children, and which in him is considerably better developed than in
the majority of children his age, a fact which liberates everyone else,
especially the adults with whom he lives, from the labor of looking after
him, and doubtlessly explains the care they take not to interrupt him.
What has saved him, he thinks, is his own sensitivity, although he keeps
his explanation secret, as though he feared that to reveal it, aside from
contradicting the official version, about which he couldnt care less, could
neutralize the magical effect it was meant to explain. This sensitivity, he
hasnt yet begun to understand it as a privilege, as do his relatives and,
above all, his father, by far the one who makes the most out of it, but
rather as a congenital attribute, as anomalous and, to his way of seeing
things, as natural, as his ability to draw with both hands, a skill that, often
celebrated by the family and their friends, has no familial history and will
soon be lost again. Because when it comes to Superman, absolute hero,
monument, always, whose adventures engross him to the point that, as
though myopic, he practically glues the pages of the magazine to his
eyeballs, although less in order to read, since he doesnt yet know how,
than to allow himself to be blinded by the stain of colors and shapes, it is
not the heroics that fascinate him but rather the moments of weakness,
very rare, to be sure, and perhaps for this reason more intense than those
moments in which the superhero, in full mastery of his superpowers,
intercepts in mid-air the piece of mountainside that someone has dropped
on a line of climbers, for example, or constructs, in a matter of seconds, a
dyke to halt a devastating torrent of water, or, flying low to the ground,
rescues the baby carriage threatening to collide with an out-of-control
moving van.
He distinguishes between two types of weakness. One, which he values,
but only so far, derives from a moral dilemma. Superman must choose
between two predicaments: stop the tornado threatening to destroy an
entire city or prevent a blind beggar from stumbling and falling into a
ditch. The disproportion of the two dangers, obvious to anyone, is
irrelevant for Superman, even condemnable from a moral point of view,
and it is precisely because of this, the intransigence that leads him to
confer them with equal value, that he is left in a place of weakness and
more vulnerable than ever to an enemy attack. The other is an original,
physical weakness, and it is the only one that forces him, at the age of four,
to think of the unthinkable par excellence, the possibility that the Man of
Steel could die. Absolutely essential for this to occur is the intervention of

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one of the two so-called evil rocks, the green kryptonite, which weakens
but doesnt kill him, and the red, the only one capable of annihilating
him, both of which come from his native planet, reminders of a
vulnerability that the human world, perhaps less exacting, compels him
to forget. If anything baffles him it is this Man of Steel who, in not even
touching the evil minerals but merely by being exposed to their radiation,
feels faint, droops his eyelids, and, forced to stop in the act whatever he is
doing, drops one knee to the ground, then the other, his shoulders
conquered by an intolerable weight, and ends up dragging his blue and
red body along like a dying man. It is this which, as though extending the
lethal effect of the rock beyond the page, also affects the boy, wounding
him in the never so aptly named solar plexus, in his heart of hearts, with a
force and depth that no feat of heroics, extraordinary as it might be, could
ever claim.
If anything is truly exceptional, it is pain. Only one thing in the world
can cause it, and that thing, much more than all of the providential acts
for which Superman is revered, is what he soon begins to fear, to await, to
foresee with his heart in his throat every time he returns from the news
stand, walking without stopping, and, at risk of being swept away, as has
happened more than once, he opens the newly purchased magazine and
loses himself in the reading. [ . . .] The pain is what is exceptional, and for
this reason he cannot bear it. He divides the episodes into two
incomparable categories, those in which the fatal rocks intervene and
those in which they do not. He rejects the latter, relegating them to his
bottom dresser drawer, there to gather dust with the magazines, toys, and
books left behind as he matures, things that he now detests and that much
later, when he feels well beyond their orbit of influence, he exhumes with
enchantment and adoration, testimonies of the nave idiot that he no
longer is, but who now cannot help but to endear him. If they were to ask
what affects him so much, what, exactly, he feels when he sees the
luminous halo of the rocks nearing the Man of Steels body, tingeing him
for an instant in red or in green, and why he trembles so when Superman,
faltering as if he were bleeding to death, ends up stretched out on the
floor, his external appearance exactly the same as before, when he defied
gravity and bested the speed of light and nothing in the world could hurt
him, and is nevertheless weak, completely at the mercy of his enemies, he
wouldnt know what to say. He has nothing to say. He is a boy of few
words.
What he does know is that the phenomenon is very similar to the heat
he feels growing from within his fingertips on Sundays at dusk, when his
father says goodbye to him at the door of the apartment building on
Ortega y Gasset after having spent the day together at Embrujo, Sunset,
New Olivos, or any of the semi-public swimming pools where, with the
onset of the first heat of the year, mid-October, beginning of November at
the latest, they spend their weekend outings. They arrive around eleven,

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eleven-thirty in the morning, when the few people who are there, mostly
single women of the same age as his father, so suntanned that one would
wager they lived in a perennial summer, in some type of parallel tropical
state of which the pool is the capital, and a few men, also alone, also in
bathing suits, faces shielded by sunglasses that they remove only to offer a
fleeting glimpse of the violet halos around their eyes, products of Saturday
night, and then, to smear their eyelids with creams, lotions, and oils
which, to this day, he doesnt know for certain if they are meant to prevent
sunburn or promote it, still havent taken up all the best spots in the
solarium, on the lawn, at the bar, on the chaise lounges.
Upon arrival, always the same sense of pride: he feels that no one at the
pool is as young as his father, due not so much to questions of age, about
which, given his own age, hed be the first to declare his incompetence, as
to the mask of sordidness that lack of sleep, the ravages of alcohol and
tobacco, and sexual libertinism have stamped on all the rest of them,
lending them an air shared only by members of the same vicious race, a
furtive family. As soon as they arrive, his father stakes out a spot on the
lawn, spreading out his towel like a boundary marker, always following
the direction of the wind so that the towel isnt marred by undesired
creases, and disappears into the changing room. He, who always wears his
bathing suit underneath his pants, in accordance with a habit he instated
early on, and which he maintains at all costs, despite the discomfort that
turns the taxi ride from Ortega y Gasset to the pool into a true
martyrdom, removes his clothes with his heels nailed defiantly to
the towel, an act that ratifies the possession of the territory around
which he will orbit for the rest of the day, and, as though he needed to do
something to avoid suffocating on the pride he feels at his fathers
youthfulness, he runs and dives head first into the water. He never knows
if the water is cold or if, like him, like the day itself, even like the summer,
which really is just getting started, it is simply too young, but he dives in
seeking the bottom at full speed, moving his arms and legs so they dont
freeze, touches the open mouth of the octopus painted on the tiles of the
pool floor, and propels himself toward the opposite end of the pool, where
he emerges a few seconds later with his hair completely flattened, his
eyelids squeezed shut, and his lungs near to bursting.
It is possible he doesnt realize it then, but, if upon making it to the
pools edge he were to look at the fingertips with which he had touched
the octopuss mouth, he would recognize the vertical lines which, much
later, with the repeated friction caused by his routine of identical
activities, rough diving board, dive, expedition to the jaws of the octopus,
rest by the side of the pool, search for coins, key chains, and even
waterproof watches that his father throws one after the other into the pool
in order to train him in the art of underwater exploration, et cetera, and
aggravated by the prolonged exposure to the water, turn into soft reddish
marks that he calls scratches and later into a generalized redness, without

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defined outlines, and cause him to think for the umpteenth time that his
fingers are on fire, that instead of fingers he has matches made of flesh.
After six or seven hours in the pool, his skin has thinned in such a way as
to be nearly transparent, so much so that it is hard for him to decide,
when he looks at his fingers in the failing afternoon light, if the intense red
that he sees is the color of the blood that boils inside his fingertips or if it
is only the effect of the suns rays that make it flare up, passing easily
through the weakened membrane. This same burning, this same thinning
of the membrane that ought to separate the interior from the exterior,
is what he feels when Superman, in the pages of a newly purchased
magazine, succumbs to the criminal resplendence of the evil rocks. [ . . .]
The pain is not instantaneous. It takes its time. What he recognizes as
burning during the skin-and-pool episodes is merely the way in which the
Man of Steels agony, as played out in the little boxes on the page,
resonates in him. Such is his closeness with the superhero, so brutal the
erasing of the line that ought to separate them, that he would swear
the mixture of burning, vulnerability, and anguish that he feels lodged in
the center of his solar plexus comes directly from the brilliance of the
kryptonite pictured in the magazine. Once, in fact, he goes so far as to
turn off the lamp on his bedside table to see if the evil rocks would
continue to glimmer in the darkness.