Note on the Author (1993)
(by the author)
He was born in Tolosa. Neither in Buenos Aires nor in Montevideo. Not even in La Plata. Tolosa. And not the one in France, which at least would have been something. No. Tolosa, province of Buenos Aires, Republic of Argentina. In a word: Tolosita, tiniest of Tolosas.
He made his way through lower school with the distinction of never learning to write: his grades in Writing were always his lowest. Perhaps for that reason the headmasters chose him, on graduating, to give the speech at the ceremony. (Or perhaps because they knew that that year, 1944, as the old school had been torn down and the new building hadn’t yet been built, there would be no graduation ceremony.) His consolation, which later in life he would turn into an art, was not having to finish the speech he’d begun.
He didn’t make his way through high school so much as take a baby step. Between the strikes, the University sit-ins, the confrontations with the police, the perpetual suspension of classes and the truncated school years, his baccalaureate was a sort of prolonged political Bacchanal. In Botany, they never got beyond the cell, and in History, despite all the roads leading there, they never made it to Rome.
If on leaving lower school, he had left behind a building in ruins, on leaving high school he left behind—despite never learning Botany—a flowering garden. But he didn’t deserve the credit. In the 50s, Argentine pedagogy flowered, and among all the flowers it was a certain kind of shrub[1] that reigned supreme.
He made his way through the shrubs and butterflies of the University-Garden the way he made his way everywhere—that is, never getting anywhere.
He didn’t become a physicist, like his father wanted; nor a doctor, like his mother wanted; nor an engineer, like his sister did; nor a lawyer nor a professor nor a notary nor an accountant nor a surveyor, not even an instructor of Argentine gardening. Nothing.
What did he do in the meantime?
Dream.
And what did he dream?
That he’d grow wings and fly.
And when he didn’t dream, he played.
What did he play?
He played chess and music, at theater and literature, at being an adult and being a kid, at being old and young, he played at whatever he could. And, sometimes, he played at marriage. (A game which must have been entertaining for him because he’s already on his third[2].)
Between his games and his excursions, he made visits to teaching and at translation. One day, following a flickering shadow he thought to be a butterfly, he got himself into the Institute of Modern Languages. He got out without his butterfly, but with a little sign that some prankster hung on his neck: National Public Translator.
On another excursion, following who knows what, he got distracted and lost and wound up in New York. There he continued his excursions, through the corridors and offices and, above all else, the garden of the United Nations. He made one getaway after another to NYU and Columbia, but there he didn’t find either flowers or butterflies. Only, at Columbia, some incredibly tall linden trees which, forced to grow in search of light by the even taller surroundings buildings which had robbed them of it, reached the sky and offered their shade and their smell solely to the clouds.
His career at the U.N. wasn’t so much a race to the top as a jaunt to the side: he preferred the fresh air of the garden to the sunlight on the higher floors, the shade of the cherry trees to the carpeted offices.
The early 90s witnessed the End of the Evil Empire, the End of History and the end of his jaunt at the U.N. When the hour of his departure came, there was again no farewell speech. Though by then he had learned to write (simple things, of course), after forty years of translating (and a hundred years at the U.N.), after chewing and chewing the thoughts of others in order to regurgitate them immediately in a language also belonging to others, he wound up dry and empty inside, with neither voice nor ideas of his own nor anything to say. Fortunately, they were all so busy celebrating the new world order of this orderless world, enforcing the disavowal of armed conflict with armed conflict and waging war in order to prevent war, that he took advantage and made his way out the way he’d made his way in: without anyone noticing.
In conclusion, less than for what he was or did, the life of the author is defined more by what he is not and did not do:
He is not named Enrique nor Palumbo nor Loyarte[4], as some believe.
He is not Uruguayan, as the Argentines believe, nor Porteño, as the Uruguayans[5] believe.
He did not become a gardener.
He did not catch butterflies or the shadows of butterflies.
He did not grow wings.
He does not go (as much as he runs or tries to fly) anywhere: he just passes through.
He never finished almost anything he started and the little he finished would have been better off not having been started.
He never finished playing or dreaming.
Which is the only thing he does now: when he does not dream, he plays. He plays at dreaming or he dreams he’s dreaming, or he plays at playing.
[1] During Perón’s presidency, the government intervened in the universities, firing most of the professors and replacing them with friends of the Peronist party who, with little or no pedagogical training, were known by the name “ceibo flower professors.” The ceibo is our national shrub.
[2] This was in 1993. Now, in 2022, I am on my fourth and my longest. My wife, Mirta Bauzá, is also from La Plata (though not, it must be noted, Tolosa). She is the daughter of Eduardo Salvador Bauzá, my sister Alba’s first boyfriend.
[3] My father, Enrique Loedel Palumbo, a physicist, had written a very popular textbook known as the Physics of Loyarte Loedel in collaboration with Ramón G. Loyarte, at that point the dean of the University of La Plata. As a result, some believed that I must be named Loyarte.
[4] Both my parents were Uruguayan.