Antonio Di Benedetto
trans. by Esther Allen
Obscure Connections: Two Early Works by Antonio Di Benedetto
At the age of 21, Antonio Di Benedetto (1922–1986) began publishing in the magazines and newspapers of his hometown of Mendoza, capital of the province of the same name, an area of farms and vineyards situated at the base of the Andes in the far west of Argentina. The first piece he signed came out in a small magazine named Millcayac after one of the region’s extinct indigenous languages, known only from a 16th-century Jesuit treatise on its grammar and vocabulary.
That first effort, an arch commentary on local zoo animals, may not seem to portend a serious career in journalism. Yet less than a month later he was sending back dispatches from an earthquake in the town of San Juan, about a hundred miles distant, an earthquake that killed thousands and remains the worst natural disaster in Argentine history. (Colonel Juan Perón met his future wife, Evita, at a Buenos Aires charity event to raise funds for the victims.) Di Benedetto would continue working as a journalist for more than thirty years, covering local and international politics and culture, especially cinema. On March 24, 1976, for reasons that remain mysterious, he was arrested and imprisoned in the immediate aftermath of a military coup. He was taken directly from his desk in the offices of Los Andes, the foremost local daily, of which he was deputy editor.
What his earliest piece does portend is an obsession with obscure connections between human and animal—transactions, paradoxes, and metamorphoses that bring the work of Franz Kafka to mind, and that would be central to Di Benedetto’s first book, a short fiction collection titled Mundo Animal [Animal World], published a decade later in 1953. Three years later, he published the novel Zama, widely regarded as one of the greatest works of 20th-century Latin American literature, and the basis for a recent film by Lucrecia Martel.
Below is a translation of that first piece of journalism, paired with one of Mundo Animal’s brief, fantastical meditations. Though the first presents itself as journalism and the second as fiction, the two pieces together make it clear that Di Benedetto was not a literary novelist obliged to earn his living with a day job in journalism, but an artist of singular vision whose voice and perspective infused everything he wrote, regardless of the rubric under which it was published.
—Esther Allen
The Majority of the Animals in Our Zoo Are Native to Mendoza
Tasty is the mouthful munched in freedom. Tell that to the goats (why opt for a less vulgar animal?) who once fed on the wild grasses of the Harz, where the mountains put their muscles to the test with every strenuous bound they had to make to reach their pasture—the very goats that today graze on simulated patches of wild mountainside which are really just corrals or cages in disguise that humans have built at the foot of a small hill. I refer, of course, to the Harz goats on view in the Mendoza Zoological Garden.
The problem of freedom . . . Let’s leave it aside altogether where animals who once enjoyed freedom and have lost it are concerned, whether they ended up caged in a zoo, as irrational performers in a circus, or used for scientific research or some other purpose. Instead, let’s consider the problem as regards those animals who were born, shall we say, behind bars.
Those animals who’ve never known what it is to chew a mouthful in freedom—what element of freedom do they carry within themselves? Surely they can smell it, perceive its color. Freedom is in the air, in the bird that alights to sing on the branch that casts its shade over the cage. . . .
Here in the Mendoza Zoo the question is easy to study, for there is abundant material: numerous animals born into captivity.
My poor child! Yours is a sad destiny!
At this point, we can offer the reader the simple, interesting news that in our zoo, the majority of the animals are native to Mendoza.
This is rather flattering to our land: lions, seals, antelopes, wild boars, and bears, all born and living here!
It’s only flattering to a certain point, though, for among all those who first see the light in our land, very few survive. And it’s none too flattering at all that we don’t offer them much: a cage.
No doubt the mother—mama lion, mama leopard—must sigh bitterly when she sees her newborn emerging, must say, “My poor child! Yours is a sad destiny! You were born into the ‘sepulcher of the living,’ as Dostoyevsky would say. Better for you never to have been born at all; better for you to be dead.”
And heavy tears will run down mama leopard’s face.
Is this mother’s conduct justified?Perhaps that’s why it happened—the thing that happened years ago with the lioness and her cubs and which people made so much of.
Let’s recall the story: One May 25 a dozen or so years back, Mendoza’s first lion cubs were born in our zoo, when it was still located in the small space facing the traffic circle. Or, to be more precise, these were the first African lion cubs to be born in Mendoza.
But the mother in her younger days knew what it was to roam the jungles of the dark continent, and she—no doubt after speaking anguished words with citations from Dostoyevsky—tried to kill her tender babies. The result was tragic: one death.
But a zookeeper rapidly intervened (oh mankind! always meddling in the private lives of animals), a Japanese zookeeper, to be precise, who kept the mama lion from completing the terrible task she had begun.
Is the mama lion’s action justified? The answer is up to my readers, who now know the facts and can discern for themselves.
Caregiving quickly becomes controversial
Since we’re on the subject, let’s go on with the story, which had some fascinating aftermaths—and those were the part that yielded so much to talk about.
The Japanese zookeeper rescued the three surviving cubs from the cage, separating them from the mother.
It was perfectly clear that returning the cubs to her would be fatal. It was unthinkable that these Mendoza natives be left to die; a plan for their care had to be devised.
Then a human woman, no less, volunteered to nurse them. She was the wife of one of the guards, Doña Justina de Munives. Housed in a special cage, the lion cubs received nourishment several times a day from Doña Justina. She took them in her arms, one by one, as if they were babies, and gave them her milk.
It didn’t take long for the disadvantages of this procedure to become apparent, though solutions presented themselves, as well. The first problem was that the cubs, as they nursed, scratched the lady badly with their powerful claws. Thereafter, Doña Justina was equipped with a vest made of the toughest leather—which had to be replaced almost weekly because the cubs ripped each new one apart. Soon enough the milk Doña Justina could provide was no longer sufficient; the little animals were growing fast and demanded abundant nourishment. It became necessary to resort to the valuable services of a bitch.
How admirable the delicacy of those three little brutes: to nurse without doing damage with their teeth!
At this point, newspapers and magazines, both local and from the federal capital, began covering the story in pages of abundant text and explanatory illustrations.
Without fail, some journalists began reasoning along the lines of, “How is it possible for a woman to give her own milk to three animals when thousands of children are starving to death?”
The ensuing controversy looked to be endless and naturally inspired a great deal of interest.
For our part, we’ll end our discussion of the case by noting that of the three lion cubs, only one survived. The other two soon died, despite all the effort and care devoted to them. The one that lived was a female, eventually and very rightly christened Justina.
The bear knows, without benefit of an academy
Another striking fact is that one of the Mendoza-born animals in our zoo is a bear. More specifically, a she-bear, a black she-bear. She’s young but has already grown a great deal. She’s nice, and her movements are so calm and slow you might gather from them alone that she’s from Mendoza. Though obviously all bears are like that.
Everyone knows how bears’ awkward yet rhythmical gesticulations have been and are still put to use. The public is well aware of the phenomenon of the dancing bear.
But you should also know how their exploiters arrange to make them dance—or rather, to make them appear to dance. They put the bear on a hot metal plate, with its hind paws well protected. To keep its naked front paws from getting burned, the bear raises them off the ground and thereby learns to stand on two feet. If the bear simply moves, playing any type of music in the background creates the appearance that it’s dancing.
Nowadays a dancing bear has no appeal, but a century or so ago dancing bears were beloved artists who wandered the streets like gypsy fortunetellers.
At the beginning of the past century, several European cities boasted of academies where bears were taught tricks. In Yaroslavl (Russia) there was, on one occasion, a bear uprising, no doubt against some teacher who’d rapped their knuckles once too often. The bears tore apart all the academy’s rooms and fled into the fields.
Our young Mendoza she-bear knows these things only from the stories her elders tell; she leads a very opaque life.
The most important trick she knows—which she learned without benefit of any academy—consists of sitting back on her hind paws and using her forepaws to beg visitors to throw peanuts at her. She’s a glutton for peanuts. She’s also very gentle and goodhearted; her greatest aspiration would be to rob jars of honey from cupboards—as in bedtime stories—to entertain children.
With respect to the matter of honey, we will note that bears are very fond of honey and that hunters take advantage of that by putting out honey mixed with liquor for them. It gets them drunk, at which point they can be captured without risk or effort.
The righteous animal that punishes lying
We were saying that our she-bear knows about the bear academies from what her elders have told her. Please don’t imagine that her knowledge of her species’ past accomplishments is limited to that one fact.
For example, she is not unaware of the history of Spain, which tells us that Her Catholic Majesty Queen Isabel was once almost devoured by hungry bears. This happened on an occasion when the queen, in fulfilment of a vow, was on her way to the shrine of San Isidro, which at that time was surrounded by a great forest. As she was crossing the forest, she was attacked.
Our she-bear has also learned about the dominion those of her kind once exercised over the people of Kamchatka (Siberia), who believed that bears understood their language and were righteous beings who punished lying. The people addressed their pleas and prayers to the bears, respected them, and treated them very well.
—published in Millcayac, December 10, 1943
Element of Mystery
The ladies say I’m ordinary but nice. They say that, but what they don’t say is that they’d like to have my eyes, or the proportions of my eyes, at least. Perhaps they chose me for this work because they saw I had so much in the way of eyes. They’ve put out mousetraps and mouse-catchers. The mouse-catchers are us, the cats. A newspaper said a mouse was seen running down the length of an aisle in a movie theater. Since this particular movie theater is small, it is under my exclusive charge, with the relatively useless collaboration of some spring-loaded mousetraps.
I’ve grown accustomed to this life by now and can say it’s a good life. Naturally it has its difficulties. Some might envy me the warmth I enjoy in here during the winter, for example. They forget that the heating is only on during the shows. The nights, my friends, are as pitiless here as they are in a farmworker’s shack. Of course it isn’t during the night that I endure the cold; at night I can always escape out onto the rooftop—colder still, yes, but overflowing with love. It’s the mornings that are unbearable, or that would be unbearable if that weren’t when they serve me the only meal of the day.
—
This good life, simple and clear, despite having to operate in darkness—of the night and for the projection of the movies—is not that simple, nor is it turning out to be very clear to me. I learn: from movies and from conversations, I learn. In strictest truth—though some might say it’s not so, that it’s only my vanity—when I receive knowledge I feel as if the thing thus incorporated into me were there already inside me, and listening to it, seeing it, does nothing but make me notice that I already have it. Every acquisition strikes me as a discovery of something already mine. For me, culture is like the re- turn of borrowed property. I perceive that the culture was already necessary and innate to me.
From that comes the fact that, without establishing comparisons, I find myself, with certainty and pleasure, on a superior plane of life. I know myself capable of great things, and first among them, reflection.
During a matinée with lots of empty seats a mother tells her child not to play with me because I might hurt him. These imbecilic words don’t enter a void inside me, nor do they arouse any rancor. They fill me with ideas, born quickly one after the other like a sequence of sparklers. I think that, as the boy told his mother in response, I won’t do anything to him if he only plays with me. Which means I am inoffensive. But I wouldn’t be if he treated me some other way, nor am I inoffensive to mice. Mice, though they think they’re behaving well and, furthermore, even if they do behave well, even if the only bad thing they ever did was to play with me, which isn’t bad at all, would still be my victims in any case, and there is no solution whatsoever for that. There may also be cats for children. Cats bigger than they are who would kill them even if the children behaved well and only wanted to play with the cats. If that were the case, I believe there would be fewer unhappy humans. The same result could arise from humans causing less unhappiness to each other. The mice don’t harm each other; they only harm humans. The humans would be unpardonable if not for the fact that although they harm each other, they also do good to each other.
I can reflect, and can do much more than that. In a documentary about Rome, I saw a mural on the theme of a Christian martyr who was forced to swallow molten lead. I wanted to make a sculpture that would represent not the martyr in his entirety but the lead, just as it was in his body after it grew cold, and also, above the torturous lead, the eyes of the sacrificed man. I would do it, perhaps I will do it, but I haven’t yet resolved the question of how to suspend the eyes in the air.
I can do so much; I feel gifted to do so much. . . . And here’s what I find most difficult to resolve: I seem to myself to have been trained to do that. Just as before, with the possession of knowledge, there is in me something like the precedent of numerous accomplishments, and not small ones either, but huge. I could almost affirm, I do affirm, that certain works of art that move through the world are mine, mine, absolutely created by me.
I have made, for example, under another name, of course, one of the most indisputably great films ever shown in this movie theatre. This film generates acclaim and admiration wherever there are cinemas across the world, and though the interest this generation has in it will never be exhausted, there re- main in reserve, for the continuous enthusiasm of successive generations, all the copies archived in cinematheques. Meanwhile, as has been the case for some time now and always will be the case in the future, my film is watched, studied, discussed, and in the end unanimously praised in film clubs. Works of film history dedicate chapters to it and reproduce shots from its finest scenes, though all of its scenes are its finest. The greatest praise goes to the film’s screenwriter and director, and the screenwriter and director are me, though everyone remains unaware of that truth. When, in far-off centuries, someone tries to physically locate the screenwriter and director who made the famous film, that person will run up against a disconcerting problem: behind the assumed name lies anonymity. With that disconcertion will come a state of enthrallment, of intrigue and plot.
I can feel it right now, feel already, the delight of an incognito on the verge of becoming revelation that will never be revealed. And in the very knowledge that it will never be revealed lies the hope that it will be revealed. I’m like a calm lake, basking voluptuously in inoffensive mystery. Even I don’t know what name I used to sign the screenplay and present myself as the director, and I don’t know which film it is, either, or where my sublime, my most felicitous cinematic work might be.
—from Mundo Animal (1953)
Antonio Di Benedetto (1922–1986) published his first story collection, Animal World, in 1952. His five novels include Zama (1956), The Silencer (1964), and The Suicides (1969). In 1976, during the military dictatorship of General Videla, di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured. Released one year later, he went into exile in Spain where he published Absurd (1978). He returned home in 1984.
Esther Allen (estherallen.com) received the National Translation Award for her translation of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama (NYRB, 2016). She teaches at CUNY and was a 2018–2019 Guggenheim Fellow. Her work has appeared in the New York Review Daily, the Paris Review, Words Without Borders, Bomb, LitHub, the New Yorker, and elsewhere.