Читать книгу Fate - Jorge Consiglio - Страница 5

Author's Note

The key question is: fate or chance? Life presents itself as a series of events, and we will never know if we are fulfilling a pre-established path or if fortuitousness – the accidental in the strictest sense of the word – is the decisive factor. When tragedy strikes, there is always someone who is spared by some tiny detail. As a result, triviality takes on monumental dimensions. A few years ago, there was an accident in the main railway station in Buenos Aires: the brakes failed on a suburban train and fifty-one people died. I heard the account of a woman who missed the train because she slept in. And of someone else who hadn’t caught it because he lost a contact lens on his way to work. Their lives were saved. It’s that simple: they saved their lives. Fate or chance? Science addresses the question through variables and proportions: what is the probability that a given event will actually occur? As we know, quantifying the world brings peace to the soul. But mathematical arguments never satisfy anyone.

Beyond all the precautions taken, beyond everything we do to protect ourselves in society, beyond personal defence mechanisms, every human being stands face-to-face with the unknown. This is the distinctive and most genuine characteristic of our species. This idea lies at the core of Fate. There are four characters: a taxidermist, a meteorologist, a musician and a child. Their paths cross. They move through a city that seems to force them to take decisions: speed, in this day and age, is a value. The characters deploy infinite tenderness, yet at the same time appear implacable, as if on the very brink of themselves. They are in constant motion. They catch glimpses of beauty and love, and these inklings justify them somehow, spurring them to act. All four unknowingly make their way into the eye of a hurricane. Each of them, with both desperation and enchantment, advances towards a personal understanding of the future.

The plot of Fate is simple, the prose straightforward. Yet beneath this simplicity, a turbulent ocean swells. In this novel, each action is what it is – and is also something else. Or more precisely, each action is many things at once. Each sentence (the English translation is impeccable and captures every nuance of the original) reverberates, seeks to expand and transform itself into both a proposition and an enigma. When I wrote the book, one of the things I was mulling over was how to capture the intimacy of poetry. I mean the imagery: the meshing of meanings evoked by the opacity of language. That was my idea. I had other intentions, too: I imagined, for example, that the characters would find themselves in a state of solitude, would be defined by it – yet would also fight tirelessly to make that modest leap of exceptionality and intensity.

I wrote Fate over the course of a single scorching summer. Not a soul was left in Buenos Aires. I spent the evenings, the air conditioning on full blast, watching 1950s noir films, and discovered The Third Man by Carol Reed. I became fascinated by it and watched it three times over. In one scene, the two main characters, played by Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, are talking inside a Ferris wheel cabin as it climbs into the sky. They say terrible things to each other. Welles is pitiless. I found a certain essence in this dialogue, a particular quality I sought to reproduce in the text. I don’t mean the specific content of the conversation, but rather an atmosphere. I started writing with this detail in mind: in the sequence I discovered the sound that would allow the story to take form. In other words, the scene helped me finish devising the plot. This element may not even be visible on the surface, but it remains the most significant aspect of the text. The image of Cotten and Welles, arguing at the top of the wheel, gave me the tone that I imagined as the ideal acoustics of my story.

Without question, writing is a blind endeavour. Yet sometimes, when luck is on our side, we chance on signs that are enormously useful in orienting us amid this nebulous universe of possibilities.

Jorge Consiglio

Buenos Aires, November 2019