The Diver

Translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude


A note from the translator:

Marcelo Cohen was one of the most extraordinary writers you could hope to come across – no one else wrote anything like him, and that’s probably one of the reasons he’s not better known outside of Argentina, although his fans at home and overseas are devoted, and rightfully so. Those of us lucky enough to know him in person would always come away from an encounter struck by his kindness and generosity of spirit, and it was only when you’d turned the corner that you’d come to realize that you’d also just been talking to one of the most intelligent and intellectually curious people you’re ever likely to meet. One of the reasons Marcelo’s work wasn’t widely translated (the only novel to date in English is Melodrome, published by Giramondo in 2018 and well translated by Chris Andrews) is its mind-blowing conceptual density. For the last few decades of his life, he dedicated most of his fiction to the Panoramic Delta, an alternative archipelago universe in which every island has its own history, customs, and language, where people plug into the panconscience (which we’d recognize now as being a telepathic version of a social network although it first appeared in his work at least a decade before Facebook or MySpace), cohabit with ramshackle cyborgs and ride in flycars. But the turns of the intellectual screw never stopped there ... his most recent books have been collections of stories set in the Delta, although they’re not really stories at all but detailed descriptions of fictional films made on different islands across the archipelago, related to us by an unidentified viewer. "The Diver" is one of these. It sounds daunting, and because the subject here is the work of a (fictional) conceptual artist we’re really getting into high-falutin’ territory. I can’t offer you a comprehensive guide because, frankly, I’m just not smart enough, but a good way in, as always in Marcelo’s work, is to linger on some of the extraordinary imagery or his more striking phrases and paragraphs – there are few more rewarding literary experiences out there.

- Kit Maude

The Diver

A documentary film about the life and work of a peerless artist

By Jeno Riadinek
Bruck Island

A black umbrella flies along an avenue, then it stops for a moment, but just as the woman running after it reaches for the handle, it hops off again with a flutter. Cars swerve around it, their exhausts puffing. A few heavy drops build into a shower. In the other direction tumbles a green umbrella, chased by a man in an invalid’s robe. The two umbrellas clash, their spinning is interrupted and in the confusion their handles interlock. They stop so suddenly that their respective owners overshoot them and fall over with a thud. The umbrellas get untangled. Cars headed in both directions brake with a squeal but skid over the wet asphalt, headed for the prone pair. Horns honk. People shout. The umbrellas rise into the air, slowly enough at first for the woman to catch the handle of the green one and the man the black one, and they’re both lifted up a moment before the cars reach the spot where they’d been a moment ago. The wind blows harder. As the rain swirls, the umbrellas gain momentum, dragging the man and woman with them. Ooohs, Aaahs, shouts of warning. This is happening in Vila Kagnel, the capital of Bruck Island, at five one June afternoon, in the 12th starc of the cycle, which is to say thirty starcs ago. This explains why the audience is more enthralled than shocked; not many have seen an umbrella since they were replaced by other devices, although the incident would bring them back into fashion. Meanwhile, the reprieved pair rise higher, wondering whether or not to let go. The man manages to grab hold of a second-floor balcony railing and swing himself over the parapet. Next, he drags in the woman by the waist, but no one applauds the feat. Just then, we hear over a police radio that a bomb detector has gone off a few blocks away, wailing like a tragic diva in the middle of the Kektón Café, and a stampede breaks out in several different directions at once as people rush to get away. Three minutes later, the crowd is stunned by a terrifying burst of flames: someone has thrown an incendiary bottle against a flymousine parked on the terrace of the Stréfan Building. Almost simultaneously, also in the city center, six guys in dark sunglasses burst into the closed quickloan sector of a branch of the Recodo Bank, force open the cristalein office door with a stiletto dagger, overpower the lackluster human guard, taking his vibratron, deactivate the sensors and alarms embedded in the cyborgs, almost as though they knew the codes, and overcome the stunned human staff. They demand that they open the maximum security safe and, after shoving 2,690,000 panoramics in tarbits and saltcoins into travel bags, go back out onto the street and immediately split up. They haven’t fired a shot or even so much as twisted an arm. None of the bystanders, distracted by events elsewhere, realizes that a robbery has taken place until the police Taluses arrive.

The viewer thinks that all this must have been filmed by an accomplice or a team of journos who got a tip-off. Then a message on screen informs us that for the next five weeks the only clue to the identity of the robbers was a description of a nearby bicycle ridden by a man in dark sunglasses wearing a backpack. Bank customers hound the board of directors, news presenters dubiously relay the Board’s assurances that they’ll meet their obligations. Uproar, incoherent moralizing, fear for the future, unimpressive protests and petulance. But at midday on the Monday of the sixth week, the artist Lékshtar Vánik-Thion shows up at the battered bank branch with nine collaborators and three lawyers. A group of journos he’s invited is already waiting. Lékshtar, no longer young but not old either, is elegant, melancholy, with greying hair like an elban with a sprinkling of masonry dust. He is a respected but hardly famous artist. He says that his team just wanted to show that fantasy, accidents, greed, work, abuse, excitement, collapse, brutishness, elegance, pride and shame can happen so fast as to be almost simultaneous and so it’s ridiculous to dwell on what hasn’t yet happened, and even more so on what is happening. He hopes that his art has helped to remind the community of Bruck Island how unpredictable life can be. He says that art begets patience, and that that should be sufficient to provoke wonder, but also pain. He thus implies that the whole operation was just that: a work of art in the aesthetic vein that Lékshtar has invented and dubbed Prepared Immediacy. The public divides into admirers, the scandalized, and the unimpressed, who form the majority. According to the magazinio Resonances, it’s akin to a scorpion sting applied to jolt society out of its increasing complacency. The judicial system is unmoved, prosecutors find justification to begin criminal proceedings. Lékshtar manages to lend the process the air of a vulgar action drama. But when they come to arrest him, the news breaks that the Látroz Foundation of Gala Island has given Inconceivable, by the Prepared Immediacy Collective, first prize out of twenty-three entries from across the Delta in a competition for meaningful film productions. The Foundation praises the work not just for its impact and the intensity with which it was executed but for the complexity of the background structure, the varied skills of the extras and the exhaustive planning, from the artificial tornado that blew the umbrellas around to the construction of a bomb that made a huge flash but no concussive wave, not to mention the care taken to avoid injury: it is a paragon of hard work and educational amorality. Several critics wonder aloud who that education is aimed at, but it’s a serious question they ask of themselves and the audience, adding that, in fact, art that makes an impression is the kind that asks questions and leaves them floating in the air. Lékshtar says that inspiration is almost everything and the rest is responsibility. The phrase could have made people think but it just goes down in history and history soon sets about burying it. Lékshtar does not seek or grant interviews. Prepared Immediacy is a very artificial form of art that destroys mediation, Lékshtar’s creed forbids him from instructing the public or patronizing it with detailed explanations. Even so, later on he will explain that his art is never explorative; he knows what he’s doing perfectly well right from the beginning. But, well, he keeps it to himself. To a degree he buries himself too, an approach that seems to anticipate new wonders from Prepared Immediacy. Not immediate repercussions. Lékshtar makes several artworks that are somewhat facetious or very cryptic, like the one of a septuagenarian woman who, in full view of everyone on Paseo del Bullicio in Vila Kagnel, zooms down a hill on a decrepit bicycle, zigging and zagging with a disgruntled but fluffy, wide-eyed cat in the basket, and then attempts to brake at the bottom but instead crashes into a patch of aldrinos, sending the cat flying onto an elban branch, at which the old woman starts crying out for the police to come help her get it down. A journo sympathetic to Lékshtar’s collective helps her to her feet, checks her multitude of scratches and asks why she’s not wearing a helmet. The woman’s answer is breathless: Helmets are for fairies. The public doesn’t seem to mind the denigrating, out of date term, perhaps because it’s so anachronistic. The old woman’s piece isn’t successful enough to justify more than a couple more performances. Some of Lékshtar’s early paintings have been bought by collections, but now the only thing he can sell to museums is the dented bike. And yet, across the city, almost in spite of itself, the atmosphere grows rarified, there is a shamefaced air of expectancy. One or two supporters hand out leaflets, an old promotional strategy, that without passing judgment, share a little information about Lékshtar’s youth: poor parents crushed by a fango landslide in their home in La Ciudadelita, the rescue of a child stricken dumb by shock, adoption by a couple of wealthy architects, who give him their surname, love and a good education, adolescent rebellion against social injustice on the one hand and the unreasonable demands of his adoptive parents on the other. Between one thing and another, the young Lékshtar Vánik-Thion finds a middle way: ironic skepticism, and the pleasures of a life lived through the assimilation of death, apparently summed up by a motto carved into a tree: “Don’t worry, it all ends badly anyway.” Lékshtar bluntly retorts that none of this is true, but not many people believe him: they prefer to have a story. Regarding the hillside performance, a student essay notes that when the old woman crashes into the undergrowth, the cat flies higher than its weight would allow, much higher, as though the soul of the old woman were practicing for when she dies. Lékshtar goes to the foot of the hill to address a group of journos, saying that he might be wrong but there’s nothing in a corpse that can rise into the air, just gas. Corpses decompose until they merge into the earth and the air; it’s ecstasy, unique, a majestic awakening of which we can have no knowledge. With that, the mood of Bruck Island warms up a little, as though society as a whole had begun to wonder what life really consists of. Another artistic act by Lékshtar sees him saturate the air of Vila Takhard with a thick fog that disperses for a time before thickening again and leaving the population immersed in a constant haze. The voice over for the biopic suggests that during this period Lékshtar made bad works on purpose. Maybe because he has decided to return to public life from out of mediocrity, like someone shining a blinding light upon a group of tourists who think they're lost in the shadows. Maybe because for the project he has in mind he needs to experience averageness, the pain of averageness and obscurity. His great challenge, one senses, is to capitalize on the already insufferable doubts being cast by experts about the value of his work in the form of the unconditional admiration of posers. When he believes that political circles are beginning to fantasize about asking him to make a contribution, he enters into the communal archive of aesthetic projects at the Consistory of Vila Kagnel an outline for a concept entitled What We Are. It's a proposal for “the collective design of good endings.” Mayor Marekshma himself announces that the city has decided to finance a work of art that will touch all those who dare to be touched and have a tangible effect on communal life. It’s obvious that he has no idea what it is, so he just reads out a paragraph from the introduction which states that What We Are is “at most a project for the perfection of the species and at least an exercise in reconfiguring each person’s perception of themselves and others.” Works begin. The first step is to create a database of volunteers ready to spend their afterlife in an expanded cemetery. The artwork consists of a way of burying human beings and helping to get the living accustomed to the idea that they’re going to die one day. Many starcs ago, a wave of disgust with excessive funeral pageantry and proud agnosticism led to the elimination of cemeteries on Bruck Island, which also had the unforeseen consequence of freeing up a lot of useful space. Since then, mourners have brought home a little clodoperlonate coffer if they want to keep a portion of the ashes of the deceased and, if not, they just throw them into the air like confetti. Now the Immediacy Collective starts handing out fliers: eradicating the cemeteries was an act of pragmatic lucidity but today lucidity doesn’t matter so much as the truth. The ground is cleared for Bruck Island’s first secular graveyard: there will be no trees, monuments, flower beds, herbaceous borders or paths: it will be one large ochre clay expanse covered in ruins so old they’re now little more than gravel; a landscape of barren, intimidating beauty. Each volunteer has agreed that upon their death their naked body shall be coated in a layer of durolas to keep it stiff because they’re going to be stuck head first into the earth up to their shoulders and will need to stay upright until the part of the body left exposed to the elements is wrapped by a more or less cylinder-shaped mass of columbrio. Columbrio is a material that Lékshtar has developed from resins, ylons and peanut shells, quite crystalline, malleable and insulating, which solidifies quickly but not immediately and doesn’t stay solid for very long. Columbrio deteriorates, in fact it’s friable, and disintegrates in the end. So, thanks to the dedicated efforts of the Immediacy Collective, the help of the local government in moving the bodies to the so-called factory, and the enthusiasm of Bruckers for making a mass contribution to a social artwork that will draw attention to their island, along with the pace at which people die, in a few months the plain has become a forest of transparent cylinders of different heights whose core consists of dead bodies with their heads buried and the rest in plain sight down to the soles of their feet, wonderfully preserved: this is what we are from the point of view of eternity. But, needless to say, we’re not eternal, Lékshtar informs the journos, offering one sole hint to interpreting the artwork: Before, when someone was determined never to leave their chosen space for any reason, they’d say over my dead body. Well, here, we’ll only leave as dust. Weeks later, as new cylinders are added every week, these pseudo graves begin to show signs of wear. Sometimes, the cylinder crumbles from the top: sometimes all at once. They shed chips, scales, chunks of columbrio. And when a part of the body is exposed to the elements the organic matter dutifully begins to decompose. It’s not uniform, running from the feet to the torso and the buried skull, because sometimes a capricious bolt of lightning might char a thigh or a gust of wind tear away a leg and in general the chemical interaction with the air occurs more quickly in the places where the coating has gone completely. The decomposition happens at random. But not its stages. Once fermented, gases build up in each body, which bloats and expands until liquid feces and mucus begin to leak out of the anus and the skin splits where it’s tautest, especially around the abdomen. Insects lay parasitic eggs in the flesh, necrophage larvae are born and start to consume the soft tissue, giving off a potent, fetid smell and dripping trails of liquid that flow into the ground and fertilize it. Once they’ve done their job, with nothing left to eat, the worms disappear and the body is nothing but strips of desiccated flesh, hard cartilage and bones. So, seen all together, the graveyard becomes a slow-burning, livid landscape of different colors: violet, purple, green and greyish white, swelling and dripping limbs mixed with skeletons that in some cases have been entirely stripped of their flesh and in turn might come apart or collapse entirely from their hips, like decapitated relics, given over to the process that will one day turn them into dust. Carrion birds flock around some of the bodies like ink stains. Lékshtar goes to the graveyard in person to distribute a series of devices to keep them away. Un-self-aware beasts shouldn’t get in the way of the Consistory’s offering to the people of Bruck, the spectacle of the elastic but constant rhythm, the detail and perfection with which life expands and seems to annihilate us when in fact we are just being reabsorbed ... into what? The silent, unconditional totality of the things that exist: so says a philosopher the film presents respectfully as an empty head. The Prepared Immediacy group has managed to prevent Mayor Marekshma from opening the graveyard with a ceremony but they can’t stop him saying in interviews that the artwork exists so that every citizen can learn about death, beginning with the authorities themselves. Then Lékshtar shows up there again. The vast multitude of cylinders, with the exception of the most recent, looking like lolly pops nibbled at in different places, leaving human flesh exposed to the air in varying states of decomposition. The newer cylinders and their still intact bodies add a little sparkle. Identities grow blurred; the graves are not marked. There’s nothing to identify, Lékshtar is rumored to have said; death is impersonal, you just die. And also: One must sink further into the earth with every word. Suddenly, he seems a little less laconic, he grows more visible, and so the public discovers that in fact Lékshtar is a shy man, more of a restless explorer than an arrogant provocateur. Almost every one of his recorded statements begins with a disclaimer. I might be wrong, but this place isn’t here so that no one feels excluded, it’s to welcome everyone. Maybe it’s me, but here no one gets hurt, no one will feel hated, everyone must dream their most vivid dream without fear. Lékshtar walks between bodies like an apprentice ghost who has accidentally stumbled into daylight. Anyone who wants can come at night too, he murmurs once. These are his last recorded words. At the foot of some of what were once lovely protective cylinders, the soil nourished by bodies produces patches of grass. The blades poke up through the gravel. Brucker mourners have taken Lékshtar’s suggestion to heart. They visit the graveyard at night too. And not just then. On rainy days, in the middle of autumnal squalls of fanguisca, when the sun scorches skin and daisies alike, in their thousands but each in their own world, not so much thinking about the fate that awaits them, or striving to accept that fate, but to practice emotional solidarity with those involved in a natural process that will befall them too, even if they don’t know when. Anguish. Unprecedented concentration. Resignation initiatives. A degree of national pride in anticipating a great change. All these sentiments encourage citizens to start bringing their children. The old, evocative image of father and son walking hand in hand re-emerges. Mothers calmed by the crushing silence and stink tousle their daughters’ hair distractedly. We see a festering torso full of larvae reflected in the eyes of a five-year-old kid, the boy’s chest swells in and out but the emotion expressed in his eyes is more subdued. Then the whole family walks further into the graveyard. Some families make plans with others to make the trip. Others bring a picnic tea, as though they were going to visit elderly relatives, and leave offerings, bowls of cherries, or jars of elixirine, maybe for the dead to eat when no one’s looking, even when there’s nothing left of their loved one. These aren’t gloomy outings, although no one laughs. The camaraderie seems to be based in everyone keeping their fears at bay and accepting responsibility. It doesn’t take long for the custom to take root, but even when firmly established, it continues to gradually evolve. Some time later, although it doesn’t charge admittance, the graveyard is given the status of a museum. People go to look at the cylinders and the bodies, to appreciate and judge them, to nourish their intellect, as a formative ritual, and to have a close-up experience with a corpse, which is disgusting but intense. It is this intensity that attracts visitors from across the Delta. The film claims, without giving figures, that during its glory days the artwork, or museum, What We Are brought in more income from tourism than the Feirola Carrousels on Vercot Island. But the glory days don’t last long. As tends to happen to museums whose exhibits never change, its attraction began to fade. Less quickly, the number of cylinder applicants also began to diminish. After a while the graveyard solidifies into a kind of institution with the sort of administrative apparatus, customary fug, and unchanging everyday atmosphere that breeds indifference. This is the phase during which the rumor spreads that Lékshtar has committed suicide. The news doesn’t cause a great commotion, it’s as though the discreet space that Lékshtar has opened up in the guts of Brucker culture was just the right size to digest the incident. Most startling is that he killed himself before the graveyard went into freefall. The Immediacy Collective makes a strategic announcement describing how he did it. It was another artistic act, part of the movement led by Lékshtar, whose purpose was to scrape the scales of philosophy away from the truth. In Balmandheba Ravine, where divers leap into Rubí Bay from an outcrop fifty bars high, Lékshtar poured thirty gallons of solidifier into a small bog, let it do its work, climbed onto the rock and jumped in headfirst with his arms pinned to his sides. His collaborators quickly wrapped his body in a columbrio cylinder. No preliminary sketches, notes for the work, or photovivs of the act exist. We’ll never know whether Lékshtar was killed by the impact or suffocated. None of those who make the pilgrimage to the instantaneous tomb, or who go for professional reasons, recognizes Lékshtar in the bones whitening in an oval of firm bog. A chronicler writes that the faint smell of decomposing flesh mingles with the scent of Lékshtar’s obstinance. Another writes that spending time in a place where someone made their final work with their own body causes indigestion of the soul. Such phrases stir up a new wave of interest in the graveyard. Signatures are gathered, column inches written, the Consistory is given a chance to say that although it sometimes takes a while they always end up listening to the people. A group of anonymous artists makes the monument. It’s a tall, somber sculpture, ponderous and schematic with hidden workings, of Lékshtar’s body, determinedly mid-dive, at the moment that the head entered the fast-hardening bog. There aren’t enough bodies in the graveyard anymore for the sculpture to feel surrounded. It stood in an empty wilderness. Today it’s hard to imagine that Recreation Park, with its hills, meadows, thickets of mamelias, shelta forests, and beaches on the northern shore, was once a sterile plain, let alone one full of graves. The only thing that remains is the statue of Lékshtar. It’s in a little wood. Everyone knows it as Lékshtar’s statue. No one knows what it represents, or what it’s doing there but it’s hard to miss. There aren’t any other statues in the city. People call it “The Diver.” He must be the only diver in history who didn’t leap with their arms stretched out. It’s very popular. A meeting point for friends and dating couples.