https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
Published by Ricardo and Isabel Nirenberg since 1998
I still have to tell the end of my 1961 adventure as a math teacher at the high school for señoritas in Bariloche. The principal was a man in his forties who would tell me about the celestial history of his tender heart, touched now by this and now by that one of my young pupils, the sixteen- and seventeen-years-old girls I was trying — in vain — to persuade that the phrase “a round body” is not an adequate definition of “cylinder.” I was hardly able to identify the girls the principal had fallen in love with; in my mind they formed a corps, a bellicose sorority that, unless fully intimidated by a final zero in math, would drown in derision and disorder me and all my spheres, cylinders, and cones.
I had my reasons to be wary of what the local Andean girls could do to “round bodies.” One morning I was walking on the sidewalk of a by-street when I see coming in the opposite direction a couple of young women; as they approached, they drew apart, letting me pass between them, reached for my crotch and grabbed my balls. I was taken aback, stupefied as if Eichmann, or Mengele, or Priebke, all refugee SS criminals who were said to live in Bariloche under false names about that time, had crossed my path. Paranoid? Perhaps. In any case, I warned my pupils that breaches of discipline in the classroom would not entail being sent to the principal’s office — I knew they scoffed at that — but would bring a final zero in math, hence a postponement for at the very least six months of their graduation from high school.
In the end, they all passed. They had all been well behaved. At the graduation party, however, they went wild. They sang in my honor to the strains of the “Marchinha do Caracol”, a Brazilian carnival march from the early 1950s whose original lyrics went more or less like this: “Francamente pra viver nessa agonia, eu preferia ter nascido caracol”. (Frankly, rather than live through this agony, I would have preferred to be born as a snail). Instead, they sang, “Ay Ricardo, qué malo que es usted...” (Ah Ricardo, how cruel you are...) and veered to “Ay, Ricardo, qué churro que es usted, con esos ojos negros y el porte de francés...” (Ah Ricardo, how good-looking you are, with those dark eyes and the French look...)
The French look bit, most likely, was because they had caught wind that I had a French girlfriend, Sabine. Or it could have been because I usually wore a beret, which the girls proceeded to steal and to pass around. Eventually I recovered the beret, but it no longer fit my head, which had meanwhile noticeably swelled. And that’s the long and the short of it.
The return to Buenos Aires was more difficult than I had imagined. The noise of the city, hot and humid in December, and the noise at home, where Mother’s voice resounded so as to make the chandelier crystals and the chinaware vibrate. A single Spanish word, bochorno, means both sultry, suffocating weather and the suffocation of shame and disgrace: the first thing I learned was that, for shame, much had changed among my friends at Exactas, and I was forced to make some painful choices.
First, Horacio Porta’s horror story. He had slept with Corita Sadosky. Well, it would have been surprising if he hadn’t, for as I told before, she was keen on collecting young males showing scientific prowess, and Horacio was ever ready, not one who had to be coaxed. Corita moved on — could anyone imagine that Horacio would satisfy all her sexual and intellectual needs? She took to bed another bright young male, actually three or four years younger than Horacio, and still a student. Horacio found out, and taking it as a personal insult, resolved to wreak vengeance. He secured the help of Néstor Rivière as his half witness, half squire: from Néstor I heard the whole story. They summoned the young student to the office we assistant faculty shared at the flat the math department was renting in those days on Avenida de Mayo. Once there, Horacio asked Néstor for a glove, wrote on the blackboard with a piece of chalk: POR COGERTE A CORITA (For fucking Corita), and sucker-punched the poor fellow, who fell to the floor, unconscious.
When I returned from Patagonia, I found that I was expected to take sides, either for the Sadoskys, who were a powerful political force at Exactas, or for Horacio Porta, who had been expelled as a result of his punch and the damage he had inflicted to the younger guy. Horacio had to take an assistant's job at the University of La Plata, some forty miles South of Buenos Aires by train. No one could justify his behavior. One could see in it traces of knight-errantry and Quixotism — but a sucker punch? Hitting a weaker guy without asking him first to turn around and defend himself? Also, Corita was known to be as fickle as the Duke of Mantua unfairly accused all women of being. Still, when I came back from Bariloche, there was no doubt in my mind about which side to take: Porta was my friend. Since December of 1961 neither Corita nor her parents talked to me again.
On that nefarious day of the sucker punch, Néstor nicknamed Horacio El demente (the demented one). Some months later, Horacio, Max Dickman (who would soon move to France and whose name is now given, I believe, to some special probability distributions), and I were looking for a fellow mathematician, Osvaldo Capri, at the vast municipal madhouse on Calle Vieytes. As it turned out, Capri was not in that madhouse, but we had occasion to witness a wrenching scene, a woman and her mother trying to confine the woman’s husband, who kept vehemently denying he was crazy. As we were leaving, Horacio confessed he had been all the while in fear that Capri was a pretext, and that we were going to have him confined.
A month later, I sustained a deeper and more severe wound. I will use the pseudonym Adrian Lipski for a man who is now a nuclear physicist, a friend of mine and of my sister's who played a significant role in the events of January 1962. He lived with his mother; his father lived in a separate apartment across the hall from them. This separate yet contiguous arrangement was central to Adrian’s personality. Lipski senior was a manufacturer of battery plates and Adrian was expected to be associated to the factory and devote part of his time to it. The Lipski side of the family, so far as I know, stayed in Argentina: one of Adrian’s cousins lived, and perhaps still does, near Bariloche. The distaff side of the family was centered on Jacques K., a Ukrainian Jew who had installed a very successful art and antiques gallery in Paris. Adrian’s mother was one of Jacques’ sisters; Adrian’s erotic imagination was from the beginning oriented in the Parisian direction, so much so that his first wife, whom he married in the mid 1960s, was the stepdaughter of his oncle Jacques, a gentile girl with a French family name à particule. That marriage, however, did not last.
Back to January 1962. For the first time after many years of scarcity and stifling summers in the big city, my parents had rented a house in Miramar, on the Atlantic coast, and invited Sabine and Adrian to stay with us. To invite Sabine was not so strange, for she and I were planning to get married, but what could have been their motive for including Adrian? I can conceive of no other than trying to match him with my sister. There were reasons to believe that this was feasible: Adrian, an only child, often expressed his concern for my sister by saying what a tough fate was hers, having a brother like me. Years later, in Paris, I would grill Adrian about those days in Miramar: he would mumble something vaguely suggesting that Sabine had tried to seduce him but that of course he would not consent to such a thing — “soiling his own nest” was the expression he used — which persuaded me that the truth was the opposite, that Adrian had been attracted to Sabine, a girl well aligned with his erotic needle.
Whatever the reality of Adrian’s state of mind was, here comes the denouement. One morning, my mother appeared while we the young ones were preparing for the beach and suddenly, out of the blue, started screaming at Sabine, calling her nasty names, from whore to hypocrite. I cannot recall exactly what my mother screamed, nor if and how the others immediately reacted, for I became paralyzed, as had happened to me at sudden surges of horror — when Father was sitting on the armchair listening to my piano playing and Mother suddenly appeared and grabbed him by the hair, screaming about some condoms — or when my old French teacher tripped, fell down the stairs and was lying on the living room floor. The first thing I remember after recovering my senses is walking with Father on the street leading to the beach, asking him what the reasons might have been behind Mother’s outburst, begging him to intervene and smooth things up; he was not forthcoming; worse still: he was tight lipped. On the bus that took us back to Buenos Aires, Sabine wondered about my sister: “And to think that we used to help each other with our hair...”
All our plans as well as our love life were put on hold: Sabine needed a breather. For me, the following months were drab by day and dismal by night: I have to make inordinate efforts to recall them. The money I had earned teaching math in Bariloche had to be spent fast, otherwise inflation would consume it: I bought a small car, a Renault Dauphine made in Argentina. The details of the purchase as well as how I learned to drive — was I taught by my father, or did I attend a driving school? How did I get my license? — are, I’m afraid, forever lost: Dauphine had replaced Sabine, and whatever clear and distinct ideas came to my mind pertained exclusively to mathematics. My sexual activities were either masturbatory or one-night stands.
Chichi was a high-heeled babe, a student at Exactas who lived in Calle Beauchef. I may have already said it: like many men, I keep a soft spot in my prostate for high heels, in my case a consequence, I think, of the sore spot in my scalp from Mom’s high-heeled slipper. I remember sitting in the Dauphine with Chichi one evening, and my surprise when she placed her hand on my crotch, my subsequent surprise, once at the motel, at the view of her soiled panties, and my final surprise when post coitum she cynically commented that “this splurge of passion may have unwanted results.” But if I remember that at all it is only because Néstor Rivière, with his unique talent at inventing nicknames, started calling me El Chiche Nirenberg: all the other one-night stands oblivion has covered with its pious mantle. Scum and dross. Without redemption by the angelic feminine, das heilige Weibliche, I am and ever was but a tenebrous wretch.
When I came back from Bariloche I had told my mother about the high-school graduation party where the girls stole my beret and sang the head-swelling song. This might have called back to her memory the song she and her classmates had sung at their own graduation from elementary school — which was all the schooling Mom had — and now she was singing it in the kitchen, while she was preparing breaded cutlets:
No llore, no gima la santa maestra:
No todo en el mundo del todo se va.
(Don’t cry and don’t whine, you saintly teacher:
Not everything in the world goes entirely away.)
It is not the first time I had heard Mom sing that song; it belongs to my earliest memories. It’s called “Adiós a la Maestra” (Adieu to the teacher) and the author of the lyrics is a tacky Argentine poetaster who assumed the moniker Almafuerte (strong souled). He died in 1917, when Mom was five. I hear Mom sing her song and I think — No todo en el mundo del todo se va — See! Mom was saying more than she was aware of, since despite her best and brutal efforts, Sabine hadn’t gone away: not yet, not by a long shot. After a few months of separation and, on my side, of sad, unsatisfying sex, Sabine and I were back together.
* * *
The three young mathematicians Héctor Osvaldo Fattorini, Horacio Alberto Porta and Néstor Marcelo Rivière were at that time (during the late 1950s and early 1960s) my closest friends, my three musketeers: I was of course D’Artagnan to my own mind. Our adventures were of intellectual amazement rather than of martial bravery: with all due respect for Baldassare Castiglione and for Cervantes, who argued long ago for the superiority of arms over letters, I like to maintain with Aristotle that intellectual amazement (to thaumazein) is the spring and origin of everything that’s good in us.
Just as clothing stores have cabins where one can try a skirt or a pair of pants, back then, in Buenos Aires, the record stores had cabins where one could listen to a record before deciding to buy it. In one of those cabins Héctor Fattorini and I listened to Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 14 opus 131 for the first time. In the first movement, Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo, we discovered, or rather caught an auditory glimpse of the rapturous experiences packed in each of Beethoven’s adagi molto espressivi. In amazement we left the cabin, and the memory of our amazement and of our common musical experience contributed its harmony to build our friendship. The same had happened to me at age twelve with Rodolfo Mattarollo, as I have told before: we had built a friendship based on music, which could not withstand the stark opposition that divided us when it came to religion, ethics, and politics. Musical affinities seem to be quite independent from those, while literary affinities — one’s favorite books — are usually strongly linked to them.
I had the opportunity to put those hypotheses to the test when in 1961 Sabine invited me and my three friends to her home for a chat with her father. Monsieur F., as I’ll call him, was a man of considerable literary skill: he had translated García Lorca’s Romancero gitano into French, no mean task, and he partly owned a prestigious bookstore in downtown Buenos Aires. On the other hand, he had absorbed the essentials of French civilization, one of which, perhaps the main one, is a drive to rank. Anatole France, whose novels were my delight in my late teens, wrote an essay on the language of La Fontaine (Le Génie latin, “La Langue de la Fontaine”) in which he asserts: “Je crois que le premier peuple du monde est celui qui a la meilleure syntaxe”. (I believe that the first nation in the world is the one that has the best syntax.) I wish he had explained how he ranks syntaxes — and nations. And you may remember from the previous chapter my encounter with Jean Dieudonné in Bariloche, when he assured me that Alexandre Grothendieck was the greatest mathematician alive: I find it hard to imagine an American mathematician pronouncing those words — “the greatest mathematician alive.” But a French intello must rank his impressionist painters, his baroque architects and contemporary scientists, his syntaxes, his moralists, and even when there is only a je-ne-sais-quoi or a presque rien between two items, he must try and choose the superior one — he must rank.
A t his table, we learned from Monsieur F. who were the three greatest among twentieth-century prose writers in the European languages: Joyce, Kafka, and Proust. Nothing at all surprising or unexpected about that ranking, although I wouldn’t have chosen Joyce: I would have preferred bilingual Beckett. We spurned our host’s judgment as stale and his ranking as rank. Horacio Porta and I agreed that Proust can be boringly slow and that, especially by night, we rather read the horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Néstor Rivière put in a word for the crazy pataphysics of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu roi, and we recalled that one evening we almost perished from laughter watching Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. All of which was quite amusing. But when Héctor Fattorini declared that his favorite authors were our compatriots Hugo Wast and Manuel Gálvez, two pro-Axis antisemites, both then still alive, I felt my heart sink and I thought — Oh no, here I go again! An avalanche of bitter memories — Mattarollo’s Catholicism that veered into Jacobinism and his Nietzschean-Guevarian Hombre Nuevo, then Adolfo Urruty with his dad, the Nazi Argentine army colonel, plus other male friendship disappointments I haven’t mentioned either because I deemed them not significant enough or because we haven’t arrived at their proper place in this narrative.
That was not all. At the time of our dinner chez Monsieur F., we had all been reading a best-selling book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer. There was much to impugn in it, insufficient knowledge of German history to begin with, but Héctor censured the book on the following crazy ground: it gave the USSR too much credit for the defeat of Hitler. What had happened was easy to see: Héctor was about to marry Natalia, a licentiate in math from Exactas like us if a little older, a devote Uniate Catholic born in Ukraine. Yet, in spite of those proclivities that I found perverse, Héctor had an influence on both Horacio’s destiny and my own: in August 1962 Héctor departed for New York, to get his Ph.D. in math at NYU. During the following year Horacio and I were in regular communication with him. In August of 1963 Horacio and I flew to New York to join Héctor and get our Ph.Ds. in math at NYU. That day at the airport Horacio, whose mother was employed by a Buenos Aires bookshop, gave me for my birthday a copy of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. As for Néstor Rivière, he went to Chicago for his doctorate and spent the rest of his short life in the Midwest.
Each of us four, as well as Lázaro “Coco” Recht and Ángel “Pucho” Larotonda, stamped our letters with a rubber-seal, The Unit Circle. A circle showing a radius with the number 1 on top to indicate the length of said radius: an elementary math diagram that also suggested the unity of our circle of friends or, if you wish, the exclusionary force of our self-regard. Yet once he got his doctorate at NYU and started his long academic career at UCLA, Fattorini became estranged; in some later chapter I may remember to narrate his behavior when I got married to Isabel Lida early in 1964, and his hostile attitude toward her, even though he was one of my best men at our wedding (the other was Horacio Porta). When I think of Fattorini now, the estranged mousquetaire, who comes to mind is Aramis in the final words of Dumas’ Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, D’Artagnan saying as he dies — “Athos, Porthos, me voici! Aramis, adieu pour toujours,” or perhaps the less elegant variant, “Athos, Porthos, au revoir ! – Aramis, à jamais adieu !”
* * *
A few months after we four mousquetaires held that literary colloquium chez Monsieur F. early in 1961, a book appeared that might have modified our opinions had we read it previously: Jorge Luis Borges’ Antología Personal. (Borges published other versions of Antología Personal; this is about the 1961 edition.) I still have it here on my shelves — and to tell by the many marginal marks, it made a strongly positive impression on my younger self. Now, more than sixty years later, I reread it with a fastidious eye. In the Prologue Borges declares that he wants to be judged, whether approved or condemned, solely on the basis of this book; then, with barely a pause, he crucifies Benedetto Croce because in his Breviario di Estetica (1913) the Neapolitan sage defined art as expression, a definition Borges finds ultimately responsible for the worst literature of his time (he likely meant the first half of the twentieth century).
I think that Borges was unfair to Croce. Had the learned Argentine writer forgotten that two hundred years earlier, at the very beginning of his Scienza nuova of 1725, Giambattista Vico already characterized the pagan gods as expressions of human passions? Isaiah Berlin, in his book on Vico, Herder, and Hamann (1976), takes the role of self-expression apud Vico to be co-extensive with all human creations. Would Borges have charged the earlier Neapolitan sage, who was, by the way, Croce’s tutelary spirit, with being ultimately responsible for the worst literature of his 18th century? I wonder, as I think of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In any case, Borges goes on to confess that there was a time when he yearned for expression, but that time is now gone: his gods — his muses? — he concludes, allow him only “the allusion or the mention.” Which doesn’t make him despondent; to the contrary, he seems satisfied, otherwise he wouldn’t have picked his quarrel with Croce.
Strange sort of satisfaction. Usually when I hear the words “expression” or “expressive,” Beethoven comes to mind and the sublime, rapturous experiences associated with passages notated adagi molto espressivo, for example in the first movement of his String Quartet opus 131, or in the fifth movement of his opus 130. Yet even Beethoven had his lapses into the insipid, into that which Borges calls “allusion” and “mention,” as we can hear in his “Wellington’s Victory” opus 91, with allusions to cannon shots and mentions of martial marches such as “Rule Britannia” and “Marlborough s’en va-t’en guerre” — in Spanish, “Mambrú se fue a la guerra.” Was Beethoven satisfied with that opus? Hard to believe, but I hear that it brought him more money than was usual for his compositions.
But back to Croce: art as expression! Favete linguis, Ser Benedetto, what vulgarity! Listen instead to allusion, listen to mention — allusion from Latin ludere, to play, here applied to a language game, a playful wink which sends us straight to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: that’s what I call refinement! And mention from Latin mēns (mind) from the root *men- (to think): what can be more thoughtful! Expression, instead, is a vulgar profanity we ought to shun.
Excuse me: I let myself go; I need a breather. My mind reeled at an invasion of scattered old memories belonging to the populous tribe of Latin exprimere: the citrus juice glass reamers and squeezers of my childhood — naranja exprimida, spremuta d’arancia — the iron screw press to extract or press out juice from raw or rare beef, which is what I was fed as a toddler — my mother’s manual breast reliever with its rubber bulb that slept in a deep corner inside her dressing table — my mother’s face looming like a full moon above me when she seated me on the potty and puckering her face urged me to express, to expulse my poop (she detested having to clean me and my diapers). From later in my life, the espresso coffee machine at the Mathematics Institute in Pisa — the many espressi stretti o ristretti I drank while there — and from a still later time, the decaffeinated espresso my wife orders whenever we dine at a restaurant.
Neither expression nor impression: only allusion or mention has been allowed him. Reading this now, much as I admire Borges’ many qualities, especially his metaphysical imagination, I can’t but find this Prologue sullied by coquettish sophistries. Is it because here he is here writing about himself and his own art, and when a poet does that, it is advisable to eschew all modesty, which will necessarily sound false, and imitate Horace when he brags, “Exegi monumentum aere perennius”? Perhaps.
Anyhow, the puzzle of what Borges might mean by expression, Crocean or otherwise, becomes more intractable when from his vast mnemonic repertoire he offers two examples of expression in literature. Borges chooses verses which he oddly interprets as “a precise reproduction of a mental process” (“versos que con precisión reproducen un proceso mental”) — as if, other than by means of a precise quotation or repetition it was possible to reproduce a mental state. But what am I saying? No, not even by means of a precise poetic quotation — a line at the beginning of a poem does not reproduce or represent the same mental process when it is repeated at the end of the poem: assuredly Borges knew that. The Arietta at the beginning of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations does not produce the same effect on the attentive mind as when it is repeated, note by note, at the very end. I would go as far as to argue that there is no such thing as a precise reproduction of a mental process or a mental state, not even inside a single person’s mind.
Indeed, even when we talk of repetition, as in Kierkegaard, or in Proust, or in Borges himself, the word can never mean “the precise reproduction of a (previous) mental process.” Recall Proust tripping over an uneven paving stone in the Guermantes courtyard: he experiences the feeling of repetition and traces it back to standing on the uneven floor of the baptistery of Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. But the mental process chez Proust at the Guermantes palace is definitely not the same as his mental process when he was in Venice, since the latter did not include the feeling of repetition and the happiness it provides suggesting that one’s life is indelibly written in the Book of Eternal Being, that one matters in the cosmos, or as Borges himself would put it in his later sonnet “Everness” (1963): “Sólo una cosa no hay. Es el olvido.” (Only one thing is not. Oblivion)
My insistence on criticizing Borges’ “precise reproduction of a mental process” is motivated not only by what he writes about Croce and “expression” in his sophistical Prologue, but also by his deeply flawed piece included in the Personal Anthology, “New Refutation of Time” (“Nueva refutación del tiempo”, p. 48). I’m not done with the Prologue yet, but I will come back to it after I express, expel, or get the “Refutation” off my chest. In the first and longest part of that essay Borges considers in some detail the contributions of his philosophic predecessors — Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume, Schopenhauer, Gustav Spiller, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, George Bernard Shaw — I lose count. In the second and more substantial part Borges narrates a Wanderung experience culminating on the margins of his native barrio, Palermo, not far from the Maldonado stream which before my time was the source of frequent flooding. In 1939 the stream was finally channeled underground and disappeared from view, but that was after Borges’ wandering adventure.
The wanderer stands before an idyllic scene: the serene evening, the street of Pampean, elemental mud and the low houses raised steeply above the mud to avoid the floods; the fig tree raising its foliage above the wall, the honeysuckle climbing on it, a pink adobe wall that rather than reflecting the moonlight seems to shine with a soft glow of its own. Standing there the wanderer thinks: this is the same scene as thirty years ago, the same as in eighteen-hundred and eighty something... And he concludes that the scene in front of him is not merely similar to what it was thirty years ago; it is not “merely a repetition”; no, it is the same.
So far so good. No problem granting that those two scenes, whose dates are thirty years apart, are one and the same. The error lies in what Borges deduces from that sameness: that time — subjective time — is a delusion, that the sameness of those two moments and those two scenes is enough to disintegrate the flow of time, crushed by that sameness. In truth, however, the sameness need not be crushing at all. If P and Q are points in time and, as it turns out, they are the same, that does not imply that all the points between P and Q are crushed or stop existing: it only means that time goes through P, then keeps flowing in a loop that goes again through P = Q. Subjective time can go through any number of loops and loops within those loops. Loopy? Perhaps, but not as crazy as deciding that time hasn’t gone by for me or you.
The source of Borges’ error lies, I think, in prejudices prevalent among logicians and natural scientists. The former tend to follow the dictum of Lord Russell — “To realize the unimportance of time is the gate to wisdom” — and the latter, for the most part, take time to be a smooth line, a one-dimensional smooth manifold, to use the mathematical lingo. The loopy, subjective time I have sketched above is in the same lingo called a one-dimensional manifold with singularities, and if fate grants me some more life and leisure, I might devote them to showing how those subjective time singularities add up to our own singularity as human beings. Enough about Borges’ attempt at refuting time; now let’s go back to the sophistical Prologue of his Personal Anthology, where he proceeds to give two literary examples of expression or, as he says enigmatically, verses that are “a precise reproduction of a mental process.”
One example is the final lines of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Passing of Arthur” in his Idylls of the King. Borges pretends that the final lines but one, beginning with “... and saw / Straining his eyes beneath an arched hand” and ending with “... and go / From less to less and vanish into light,” are such a reproduction of a mental process — in whose mind? In the mind of one of the Knights of the Round Table, Sir Bedivere, who witnesses King Arthur’s passing. Now how can Borges say that Tennyson’s reproduction of Sir Bedivere’s mental process is precise? Does he rather mean detailed? Or inspired? Or does he have a way, unknown to us, of determining what the Knights of the Round Table had in mind?
For his other example of precision Borges means to quote from Paul Valéry’s most famous poem, « Le Cimetière marin »:
« Comme le fruit se fond en jouissance,
Comme en délice il change son absence
Dans une bouche où sa forme se meurt, ... »
Unfortunately, Borges writes: « Comme le fruit se fond en puissance... » instead of « Comme le fruit se fond en jouissance... » So much for precision and precise reproduction of mental processes.
***
The gardens of those early sixties, blossoming with eros and arithmos, where friendship and mathematics walked hand in hand. The three-centuries old building of Exactas on Calle Perú, part of that block which used to be known as “the block of lights” — the lights of the Enlightenment — was abandoned and Exactas moved to the newly built Ciudad Universitaria in the northeastern corner of the city, on the margin of the Río de la Plata. Those new buildings were not attractive to the eye: their architects must have been under the influence, for there were windows that opened to the inside so as to rest on the floor. Still, for the first time in its history the math department had enough space, enough offices to accommodate all the professors and even us teaching assistants. And it would be ungracious to forget that about a hundred yards from the building entrance, on the Avenida Costanera, we could have lunch at los carritos, the carts or mobile restaurants, where one could order delicacies all the way from beef barbecues to candied pumpkin.
The classrooms were larger but darker than those in my dear old Perú 222: I have a photo of my young self lecturing at one of them. I remember the office I shared with Coco Recht and Pucho Larotonda as much more luminous; there, among many other mathematical subjects, we jointly studied Lipman Bers’ NYU Notes on Algebraic Topology — the Bers who was to be my PhD thesis advisor only a few years later. I remember with affection the guy who worked in the math department cleaning the premises and bringing coffee to the offices. His name was Scola, very apposite for one who works at a school like Exactas, yet inapt for one who had very little leisure or free time (Greek skholē). Anyhow, that name now brings back to my mind what I wrote near the beginning of this chapter about trying to visit a fellow mathematician at the madhouse.
There I was only telling half the truth: shame and guilt prevented me from telling the full and awful truth, that we, my friends Horacio Porta, Max Dickman, and I, had sent Osvaldo Capri to the madhouse. Capri seemed to us the perfect subject for a prank: extremely shy, a loner fully absorbed in his volume of Courant and Hilbert Methods of Mathematical Physics and in his Ford 1948 Sedan, and apparently gullible enough. We got a sheet of paper with the math department letterhead and typed a letter informing Capri that he was hereby dismissed from his position as Jefe de Trabajos Prácticos; we faked a signature, put the sheet in an envelope and gave it to Scola to deliver. Scola found Capri in the parking lot, about to get into his Ford, and did as we had instructed him to do. The next thing, we heard that Capri had had a breakdown and was presently at a mental hospital — we weren’t told where.
We found his whereabouts after a long search. It was a private clinic, we didn’t see Capri but we grabbed the occasion to confess our misdeed to the doctor in charge. We were ready to sing, like Peter in J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, “Erbarme dich, mein Gott!” To our surprise, however, the doctor did not assign importance to our infamous prank — perhaps he took pity on us? No, he said, Osvaldo Capri suffered a mental collapse not because of a prank but from excessive masturbation.
In Argentina, that masturbation causes mental deficits in males was, or perhaps still is, a widespread belief. If Juan says something really stupid, Carlos may reply — ¿Qué sos? ¿Pajero? (What are you? A wanker?). The peril of idiocy loomed over guilt-ridden teenagers, a guilt that was stoked by Catholic priests in their young flock and assumed alike by non-Catholic fathers worried by the sexual proclivities of their boys. Adrian Lipski, my friend the nuclear physicist, was a case in point. We were in our early twenties when his father summoned me to the plush hotel where he was spending his summer vacation in Mar del Plata to inquire about his son’s sexual habits, worried that those were solitary since he had no girlfriends. I assured him, of course, that there was nothing to worry about. Jorge Luis Borges is a more famous and more disastrous case: he was a teenager in Geneva when his father arranged for him an encounter with a prostitute, after which the sensitive boy remained sexually impotent for life. His sexual impotence and shame, I cannot help conjecturing, had something to do with his rejection of the Neapolitan esthetics of expression and his pretended preference for “allusion and mention.”
Returning to Capri, he recovered from the collapse and continued his mathematical career, yet committed suicide when he was still young. His case is not unique. Among my male friends and acquaintances from Exactas — Héctor Piroski and Juan Carlos Merlo, young men brimming with promise each in his way — or among my relatives, my cousin Alberto Brodesky, a Maecenas of musicians and painters: they all chose death over life when in their thirties. I wonder if the Argentine male’s well-absorbed sexual shame played some role in that choice.
Ricardo Nirenberg is an editor of Offcourse