Reading and Blizzards
by Peter LaSalle
The way I read the book that remains for me Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, The Autumn of the Patriarch, was odd enough.
Maybe a bit criminal, too. And I’ll get to that.
I was back in Boston. I was on semester break during a one-year job as a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at a brand-new campus smack on the orange, prickly-pear-dotted sands of West Texas, almost at the New Mexico border. To be honest, I might have been as surprised as anybody when, close to terminally unemployed, I answered an ad and they hired me on the basis of just a few short stories published in quarterlies then—but I wasn’t complaining. I thoroughly appreciated the very warm weather under the huge Texas sky all that fall. Nevertheless, it somehow felt good to be in New England again, where I was from.
The temperature couldn’t have been much above a dozen degrees when I landed at Logan at night, and a major snowstorm was reportedly on the way. I was soon set up in a great little apartment on Beacon Hill. It was sort of a box-shape turret with plenty of old greenhouse-style windows. Apparently, the whole thing had been built years before as an addition atop the roof of the apartment house proper, a rather staid redbrick edifice there on Lime Street with its cobbles and antique iron streetlamps; the neighborhood, story-book quaint, was a nest of similar stubby side streets and anything but West Texas. Off to spend Christmas with his girlfriend in London, a young stock broker buddy of mine had generously insisted that I use his place while he was away.
It was 1976.
The next day, the radio talked more about the storm heading toward the city. I hooked up for lunch with pals from college over in Cambridge.
There was my old roommate who was in grad school for architecture now and a Radcliffe girl who had taken English courses with me at Harvard. (We used to always sit together in English 115, a required full year of Chaucer for undergrad lit majors—the course entailed in-class, line-by-line textual analysis, which the loopy old professor in a worn-thin Brooks suit somehow managed to make fun, acting out in impromptu charades on the lecture hall’s stage the derivations of various Middle English words and such). But what proved to be most important was heading off to spend the rest of the afternoon at the Harvard Book Store in Harvard Square. A couple of years before, I had met a guy my age at a summer writers’ workshop who worked there, a fellow hopeful fiction writer. It was one of those deals where the two of us had so much in common in literary taste and aspiration that just talking about books together, right from the start, was special, something we both always looked forward to.
Back then, the Harvard Book Store—a pretty sizable operation, and not to be confused with the university’s store, the Coop—had the reputation of hiring a lot of young writers. I suppose there was talk that afternoon about my big adventure of living in Texas for the year, but mostly the discussion turned to books, and what we had read recently, what we wanted to read soon. Probably because it did employ so many aspiring writers, the management seemingly didn’t mind that somebody like my friend spent well over an hour with me doing just that—talking in the aisles and goofing off, only occasionally making a token effort to shelve some volumes from a box or help a customer wandering around to find something. The big sooty MBTA buses outside on Massachusetts Avenue crept by in the cold; bundled-up people hurried this way and that along the sidewalk—and in the store we continued to talk.
At the display table for new fiction, my friend eventually was shoving a copy of a book into my grip, passing it to me with all the conviction of a quarterback making sure his fullback had the hand-off, solid and secure. The hardbound book had a glossy dust jacket with a patterning of lush jungle ferns, green on green, and it was the long-awaited new novel by the dazzling Colombian, who hadn’t yet quite won the Nobel Prize, but—as anybody who knew anything about literature realized—at some point certainly would.
“I just read it, and it knocked me out,” my friend said. “Take it, man.”
“What?”
First full-time academic job as a bona fide assistant professor or not, it was a given that I remained borderline broke, with most of a very modest salary going to paying off bills and the like. I could buy paperbacks and second-hand fare, but hardbounds on my budget were usually beyond mere luxury; actually, I was most often solidly in that contingent of citizens who had gotten used to constantly rushing out to put a “hold” on a recent acquisition at the local library after reading a review. Or maybe I explained to my friend that I was traveling gym-bag light—I had to take the train down to Providence in a couple of days to see my parents for Christmas, then return to Boston to fly out of Logan, and the extra bulk of another book while traveling, especially a hardbound one, could be a problem. He didn’t let me pass it back to him. Was he proposing that I shoplift the thing?
“Take it,” he repeated.
Bespectacled, portly in a scholarly way, he smiled.
And he said it was one of the perks of his employment and a main reason why he kept the job, so he could read all the latest stuff he wanted, on an unofficial borrowing basis; he assured me that everybody did it at the store. He then went up to the front sales counter and got a bag, telling me—as I zipped up my bulky parka at the door, tucked in my looping scarf—to make sure, of course, I was careful with the book. I have to admit it felt somewhat strange (risky? illegal?) for me, a non-employee, to be walking out with it like that, absolutely sans sales receipt.
The next day or so was more or less otherworldly, if that makes any sense.
The snow began falling just about the time that I started on the novel back in the apartment on Beacon Hill late that afternoon. Dressed, I read stretched out on the made bed in the small oblong bedroom, which had rows of those drafty windows on a full three sides—still, it was altogether comfortable, the silver-painted steam-heat radiators clankingly doing their job well. The first flakes at the end of the gray day were large and fluttering, like moths, but before long they were finer, fell more steadily as the wind picked up; it swirled the accumulating white in boomerang patterns beyond the glass, out there on the flat tar rooftop of the few-story building that was cluttered with chimneys and vents, even a couple of old plastic lawn chairs surely from the summer before. But for all intents in purposes that had nothing to do with where I was, because I was enjoying nearly an out-of-body experience. It’s one of the obvious essential powers of fiction, the idea of which still never fails to have the whammy on me—how simple black ink-marks on a white pulp page can magic-carpet you from wherever you think you are to wherever, while reading, you really are.
And I was even farther away than West Texas. Or, I wasn’t even within the usually accepted parameters of time and space as I read, savoring every word of Autumn of the Patriarch’s lush, lyrical language. The novel tells of the dictator who lives to an indefinite age, “somewhere between 107 and 232 years old.” His subjects become almost a Greek chorus, via the expert use of the first-person-plural “we” for narration; they view him in what might be considered a revelatory dream light, and for them the old man looms as an omnipresent and powerful father figure, mythical indeed. They’re also repeatedly finding him finally dead in his crumbling palace in the imaginary country that is an ultimate composite of all Latin American lands that once had dictatorships—though, in fact, he never seems to actually die, as perhaps the whole presence of any dictator never fully expires for anybody who has lived through the utter unreality of a that kind of a regime.
I kept reading.
I must have gone through about seventy-five pages before tugging on my parka again, to go down the flights of stairs and out into the blanketed, and all but deserted, streets. I had already discovered a little diner a couple of blocks away. Sitting on a swivel stool at the formica counter, I had a late dinner of fried liver and onions, with lumpy mashed potatoes and stewed butternut squash on the side, everything piping hot and set on a thick crockery plate. I still remember that meal to this day, and it was perfect on the night of such a blizzard. However, other than that I remember little else, except for heading right back to the wonderfully warm apartment and returning immediately to the aging dictator’s world. I maybe made some instant coffee, very careful not to spill anything on the book. I maybe stretched out on the bed some more, dressed, while the accumulation deepened and an occasional plow truck would take another growling pass through the street below, the wide blade sparking blue when nicking the pavement. I kept reading, surely looking at the snow all around me once in a while—man, was it ever coming down—then back to the page. If I didn’t finish the book that night, before washing up in the tiny bathroom and then dozing off, I certainly did finish its few hundred pages the next morning, when at around ten or so the gray skies outside the windows lifted. By the time I closed the cover at noon, I was near blinded by the sunshine suddenly glaring off so much white up there.
That novel was—and is—something else, all right.
˜
In the last half-dozen or so years, I’ve been doing something.
Much older, needless to say, but continuing to pride myself on knowing how to travel supremely light, I pack a small bag and go off on my own for a couple of weeks to some place faraway where a document of literature that I love is set. I want to see if anything different happens while rereading “on the premises,” so to speak. I’ve read Borges’s stories in Buenos Aires, and Flaubert’s meditation on ancient Carthage, Salammbô, in Tunisia, and those two towering examples of the 1920′s Surrealist novel—Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant and André Breton’s Nadja—in Paris. And, believe me, it’s fine to be with a book right in the setting of the literature itself, taking long walks to explore the specific locales of some of the scenes as well. But I don’t think I’ve ever had a reading experience quite like that of reading The Autumn of the Patriarch in Boston that December.
The next afternoon, with a foot having fallen, the streets were plowed, the subway running. I returned the book to the Harvard Book Store and my literary buddy there, who carefully replaced it on the stack on the display table. I guess we exchanged enthusiasms. I guess we talked about how this new novel, amazingly, could be even better than One Hundred Years of Solitude, also laughed together about a rather funny fact concerning the masterful English translations of the author’s work done by Gregory Rabassa—García Márquez himself apparently had once commented that, to be honest, he liked them a whole lot more than his own original Spanish versions! I caught the train down to Providence that evening, visited family for Christmas, and I flew back by Braniff a week later to what proved to be an unseasonably hot Midland-Odessa. There, oil-well pumps bobbed in the desert and I began the second semester of my visiting appointment, which consisted of both teaching the bright, eager Texas students in a couple of freewheeling writing seminars and playing a hell of lot of golf on the kind of infamous Lone Star public courses—rock-hard and bone-dry—where you’re forewarned by attendants to always be careful of “rattlers.” There was also my crazy dating of a girl with a Western twang who I met a local nightspot that could definitely qualify as a honky-tonk—really pretty, she had an uncanny resemblance to the young Elvis Presley, a whole other story in itself.
And I still think about—probably dream about—how the snow swirled around the rattling old windows on Lime Street during the storm, how the silver radiators kept clanking and happily hissing. And whenever I try to explain to somebody the feeling of being caught up in a book that, yes, can’t be put down, I tell them about the time in Boston long ago, very high up in a little apartment on Beacon Hill. I go on about being there amidst rooftops and above most everything else, surrounded by all that blowing snow and with a novel that was, in a way, “stolen” from a bookstore for a while, as the true secrets of literature are perhaps always stolen for a while, too.
Talk about backing into a more than perfect metaphor for what all good reading certainly is.
Such a wondrous blizzard of words.
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