tawdry elegance, the triumphant bacchanal of the Social World of Conspicuous Consumption, shameless, crowing, and vulgarer than any crowd I have seen on Broadway or in Chicago. It would have been agonizing at the best of times, but it was more so when one thought of the students, the self-condemned secular monastics of the Sorbonne.
The next day the students had a great parade on the Boulevard Montparnasse and it seemed like a farewell. I walked away from it down the Rue de Rennes and saw an extraordinary sight. In the hot sun, the whole road seemed covered with snow. Actually it was torn-up newspapers. I asked a bystander what had happened. “Nothing,” she said, “except that France is mad.” The students had seenannouncements in
France Soir
of the end of the strikes, the end of their movement, and they had scattered hundreds of copies of the newspaper, in fury, all over the road. Oddly enough, with all the fighting and the barricades, it was the first sign I had seen of real anger.
If it were possible to speak to them, I would like to say two things. The first is that however much the university needs a revolution, and the society needs a revolution, it would be disastrous for them not to keep the two revolutions apart in their minds and their acts. For the university, even if it does not conform to their wishes, is an arsenal from which they can draw the arms which can change society. To say, “I won’t have a university until society has a revolution,” is as though Karl Marx were to say “I won’t go the reading room of the British Museum until it has a revolution.”
The second thing is that although the young today do have reasons for distrusting the older generation, anything that is worth doing involves their having to get old. What they are now is not so important as what they will be ten years from now. And if ten years from now they have become their own idea of what it is to be old, then what they are fighting for now will have come to nothing.
—July 11, 1968
3
The Corpse at the Iron Gate
V.S. Naipaul
The worst was yet to come when V.S. Naipaul cast his acid eye on Argentina. The “dirty war,” the “disappearances,” the strutting butchers in uniform, the unmarked Ford Falcons prowling the streets for kidnap and torture victims, all this would be described by Naipaul in a later essay
.
The year 1972 was the time of General Alejandro Agustín Lanusse Gelly, the thirty-eighth president of the Argentine Republic. A military junta, to be sure, that tortured its opponents. But the general was also prepared to talk to the revolutionary guerrillas in the hills, who were just as ready to torture or kill in their armed struggle. Meanwhile, the waiting was for the return of Eva Perón, the corpse of the holy redeemer
.
Argentina, then, was a country that had lost its way, or perhaps had never even known which way it wished to go, perfect territory for a specialist in lost places, given to violent fantasies, half in love with death
.
—I.B
.
Buenos Aires, April–June 1972
OUTLINE IT LIKE a story by Borges.
The dictator is overthrown and more than half the people rejoice. The dictator had filled the jails and emptied the treasury. Like many dictators, he hadn’t begun badly. He had wanted to make his country great. But he wasn’t himself a great man; and perhaps the country couldn’t be made great. Seventeen years pass. The country is still without great men; the treasury is still empty; and the people are on the verge of despair. They begin to remember that the dictator had a vision of the country’s greatness, and that he was a strong man; they begin to remember that he had given much to the poor. The dictator is in exile. The people begin to agitate for his return. The dictator is now very old. But the people also remember the dictator’s wife. She loved the poor and hated the rich, and she was young and beautiful. So she has remained, because she died young, in the middle of the
The next day the students had a great parade on the Boulevard Montparnasse and it seemed like a farewell. I walked away from it down the Rue de Rennes and saw an extraordinary sight. In the hot sun, the whole road seemed covered with snow. Actually it was torn-up newspapers. I asked a bystander what had happened. “Nothing,” she said, “except that France is mad.” The students had seenannouncements in
France Soir
of the end of the strikes, the end of their movement, and they had scattered hundreds of copies of the newspaper, in fury, all over the road. Oddly enough, with all the fighting and the barricades, it was the first sign I had seen of real anger.
If it were possible to speak to them, I would like to say two things. The first is that however much the university needs a revolution, and the society needs a revolution, it would be disastrous for them not to keep the two revolutions apart in their minds and their acts. For the university, even if it does not conform to their wishes, is an arsenal from which they can draw the arms which can change society. To say, “I won’t have a university until society has a revolution,” is as though Karl Marx were to say “I won’t go the reading room of the British Museum until it has a revolution.”
The second thing is that although the young today do have reasons for distrusting the older generation, anything that is worth doing involves their having to get old. What they are now is not so important as what they will be ten years from now. And if ten years from now they have become their own idea of what it is to be old, then what they are fighting for now will have come to nothing.
—July 11, 1968
3
The Corpse at the Iron Gate
V.S. Naipaul
The worst was yet to come when V.S. Naipaul cast his acid eye on Argentina. The “dirty war,” the “disappearances,” the strutting butchers in uniform, the unmarked Ford Falcons prowling the streets for kidnap and torture victims, all this would be described by Naipaul in a later essay
.
The year 1972 was the time of General Alejandro Agustín Lanusse Gelly, the thirty-eighth president of the Argentine Republic. A military junta, to be sure, that tortured its opponents. But the general was also prepared to talk to the revolutionary guerrillas in the hills, who were just as ready to torture or kill in their armed struggle. Meanwhile, the waiting was for the return of Eva Perón, the corpse of the holy redeemer
.
Argentina, then, was a country that had lost its way, or perhaps had never even known which way it wished to go, perfect territory for a specialist in lost places, given to violent fantasies, half in love with death
.
—I.B
.
Buenos Aires, April–June 1972
OUTLINE IT LIKE a story by Borges.
The dictator is overthrown and more than half the people rejoice. The dictator had filled the jails and emptied the treasury. Like many dictators, he hadn’t begun badly. He had wanted to make his country great. But he wasn’t himself a great man; and perhaps the country couldn’t be made great. Seventeen years pass. The country is still without great men; the treasury is still empty; and the people are on the verge of despair. They begin to remember that the dictator had a vision of the country’s greatness, and that he was a strong man; they begin to remember that he had given much to the poor. The dictator is in exile. The people begin to agitate for his return. The dictator is now very old. But the people also remember the dictator’s wife. She loved the poor and hated the rich, and she was young and beautiful. So she has remained, because she died young, in the middle of the
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